Regular readers of this notebook will notice that the first two posts of the New Year went missing in the great Erase Your Blog extravaganza. And in the meantime I’ve been dithering about recreating them or just Moving On.
This is probably going to be the answer to that.
For my personal papers I used to keep just two file boxes, Chaos and Entropy, but I’ve recently thought of adding a third, Cosmos.
What, you may rightly ask, do I put in these? (And if you feel the need to scratch your head over my filing system, I urge you to pop over to Havi’s and read about how she does her filing by chakras.)
Chaos (derived from the Ancient Greek Χάος, Chaos) typically means a state lacking order or predictability. In ancient Greece, it meant the initial state of the universe… (the antithetical concept was cosmos). In modern English, it is used in classical studies with this original meaning; in mathematics and science to refer to a very specific kind of unpredictability; and informally to mean a state of confusion. In popular culture, the word can occur with all three meanings.
For the purposes of filing, things in the Chaos file are really messy but full of potential.
Things in Entropy, however, are things I’m keeping but which are at rest (perhaps even stagnant). If you are into physics you’ll notice that I’m not really using the word entropy in the sense that you would understand it in thermodynamics. Assume a more common use of the word, maybe something like this from Merriam-Webster:
2 a : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity b : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.
So, I guess the Entropy file is full of things I feel have dead-ended, which totally begs the question of why I keep them at all. But not everything can be incipient or full of beginnings. Some things are over. Hmm.
It used to be that what I was working now wasn’t filed — it was out, showing itself in all its in-progress glory. But at this point, I feel some sort of need to corral works-in-progress. And, really, they need much love and the most positive name possible so they keep active and alive. Hence, Cosmos:
Again, from Wikipedia:
In its most general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from a Greek term κόσμος meaning “order, orderly arrangement, ornaments,” and is the antithetical concept of chaos.
Of course, if the things in this category were really ordered, they’d be complete, too, so I’m stretching this metaphor a bit. But so much of creating writing, art, websites, whatever, is finding the right container, the right form, the right order, and it’s that quality I’m after when I think about these WIPs.
How do your organize your files?
