I have a decidedly mixed relationship with categories, genres, and indeed the entire notion of taxonomy. This unease has been brought home in the last few weeks as I’ve tinkered with this blog. Categories essentially allow readers to find posts on a given subject with ease, without having to wade through the entire archive of a blog (or anything else, for that matter). This is clearly a desirable thing in many ways, but it brings with it a number of problems.

If one is writing on a technical subject I suspect these problems are alleviated a fair bit. There is an existing taxonomy of discussion areas that can be applied to blog posts. Were I writing about web design, I might have categories for ‘CSS‘, ‘XHTML‘, ‘PHP‘, ‘design principles’, ‘Photoshop’, ‘web standards’, ‘typography’ and so on.

However, when one is essentially putting one’s personal reflections into words, things become decidedly more difficult. Initially I dabbled with very descriptive categories: ‘books’, ‘music’, ‘writing’ and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this as such, but I found them proscriptive, limiting; they stopped me from just writing, I kept having to think about fitting my thoughts into a strict little box. Of course, I could simply have posted them in multiple categories, but I have an aversion to messiness; in the end I decided to go with the vague (and vaguely pretentious) sections of ‘creation & contemplation’ and ‘media & culture’.

The first will contain posts about the nature of creative action, and the state of being a creator. Unhelpful labels like ‘creation’ don’t really latch on very well to their supposed referents, but the upside of this is that they’re suitably expansive, allowing me to cover a wide area of ground. Writing, art, design, carpentry and building Lego models all fit equally well within the definition. The second category is a corollary of the first, being about the creativity and creations of other people, its uses and misuses, and my relationship to it; the name was shamelessly stolen from v-2.

Loose groupings of vaguely interrelated posts suit me better than the alternatives, at least assuming that I’m having categories at all. I did ponder abandoning them altogether, and I suppose I might revisit that decision in the future, but for the moment I think that three or four rough areas will serve well enough, and help people find posts similar in their focus.

I’ve always found it very easy to be interested in things. The enormity of human knowledge has always been both addictive and repulsive to me; while I’m forever immersing myself in information, it can also induce despair. When notions of one’s own value become tied to what one knows (as they can so easily for people of an intellectual disposition in our culture who perhaps don’t value themselves enough), it can be paralysing. When perfection is always out of reach, why bother doing anything at all?

This is perhaps the source of my unease about taxonomy. The more one studies the division of understanding—and the world—into sections, categories, groupings, areas of study, the more one realises just how much of it there is, and how hopeless the task of assimilating it is.

There is only one course of action open to those of us with natures that leave us vulnerable to this kind of worry, but it’s not easy. Training oneself not to care, to shut down one’s information-absorption faculties long enough to actually get something done, takes time and effort and will never be wholly successful. Despite this, I suspect it’s the only solution open to us, since we have finite lives and an infinity to explore. As I grow older I find that much of life consists of shrugging one’s shoulders about all the things we can’t change, taking a deep breath, and trying to work on the things we can.