Sort it out.

Two of my favourite things are pop music and the Dewey Decimal Classification. I think I figured out why.

The human brain (and every other kind of brain, I assume) needs to organise all of the information it encounters in order to make sense of the world; things are sorted, classified, put into categories automatically. Categories like “animals I can eat,” as opposed to “animals that can eat me”; “people I trust with my car” versus “people who are douchebags who would probably drive my Camry into a stobie pole if I gave them the chance.” I can’t imagine how we could function if our brains didn’t do this. It’s part of why we do things like organising the photos in an album chronologically, sort CDs by artist, or put our cookbooks in a different place to comic books.
It’s one thing to organise a stack of CDs. It’s another thing altogether to organise all of the amassed knowledge, the sum total of all information, into a single, consistent order. Not only that, but to systematically organise all possible knowledge; all potential information. That’s what the DDC does. It’s the ultimate framework for classifying knowledge, taking what our brains do automatically (only on a smaller scale) to the furthest extreme. Think of anything you possibly can, and there’ll be a specific number for it, a precise location, in the DDC. And if there isn’t, then there’ll be a framework laid for creating that specific number. If you’ve used the DDC (and if you’ve ever borrowed a library book, chances are you have) then you’d probably imagine it as a system for organising books. That’s a handy way to think of it, though of course, the DDC can classify anything; just add “a book about” at the front of whatever it is you’re classifying, and you’ll see how. Let’s say you have, oh, I don’t know... a single pear, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat that needs classification? Well, think of a book about that single pear, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat; that pear/hat combo will have it’s place in Dewey. Maybe under 730 for sculptures; you could make it 730.9 for sculptures arranged by time and place, and add coded suffixes for its location and time of creation (730.994 for Australian sculpture, for example); you’d probably want to add suffixes for the materials. You might end up with something like 730.95209613 (which I made up, but you see what I’m getting at).
So, why is that interesting? Why do I give a crap? Well, the thing is, the world does not come organised. Things do not happen, appear, exist, or die in any kind of order. In the grand scheme of things, nothing is planned or intended. I mean, sure, on a small scale, I planned my dinner, and Gustav Eiffel planned that tower. But in the long run, was the Great Rift Valley planned or organised? Or the long sequence of chance events that led to the colonisation of India? Or the unimaginable diversity of human art? Nope, nope and nope. When we create and employ classification systems like the DDC, we’re enforcing an order that simply does not exist in any objective way. We’re creating boundaries and categories which only exist in our minds. Is a book on Archaeopteryx a “dinosaur book” or a “prehistoric birds” book? When I think about it, things like Dewey seem to go against the whole natural order (well, lack of order) of the world. It takes all of existence and tries to put it in order. It takes the greatest of accomplishments and reduces them to a number. Picture the Taj Mahal, then replace it with its position in a sequence: 726.809452. That’s kind of a fascinating thought.

My love of pop music is kind of the same. When I say “I love pop music,” I mean popular music in all its forms – Cyndi Lauper to Mos Def to Frank Zappa to The Mars Volta to Nick Drake – as distinct from classical, jazz, ragas and sufi music and so forth. I’ve realised that my unending love of pop has nothing to do with the way it sounds – after all, I love Aretha Franklin and The Ramones equally – but with the way it’s organised. Popular music, as distinct from pretty much any other kind of music, is almost always clearly organised into sets of songs with unique titles, arranged in a deliberate sequence on albums. Usually, the songs are three, four or five minutes long; the albums usually have a square design of cover art; usually a selection of songs from the albums are released individually as singles. While there are always exceptions and slight changes to the format (singles nowadays aren’t as important as they used to be), the adherence of pop music to that framework is pretty remarkable. Operas don’t work that way. Neither do devotional chants or improvisational jazz freakouts or Aboriginal oral histories told through song or any other kind of music, pretty much. For some reason, I just find music so much easier to enjoy and digest if it’s organised in the way pop music tends to be. It comes back to what I was saying at the beginning of this very long post; to make sense of the music I enjoy, it needs to be categorised in some way so that I can absorb it, digest it, and remember it, even if that categorisation simply means assigning a title and an artist to a piece of music. That, however boring and nerdy it sounds, is really what defines the music that I fall in love with and come back to, day after day, year after year.

Wow, this entire spiel makes me look like the world’s most boring dork. Oh well, so be it. Guess I’ll have to go find a Dewey number for boring dorks.