Becausality & Origins (Knock on Wood)

  CAUSALITY (a bullet flapped it’s
            wings in Connecticut)
 
“We would not, none of us, be here today in
this particular configuration called Linguistics
Class (or Fiction, or Transcendental)  if it hadn’t
a been for  a bullet fired into an armpit at the end
of the 19^th century.  I could drive to  Connecticut,
get that bullet out of a desk from a summer house
overlooking Cream Hill Pond, bring it back and
pass it around. You could feel the slight heft of 
lead and realize: “If it weren’t for this bullet, I
wouldn’t Be HERE Now—none of us would.”
 
The bullet is a NECESSARY (and insufficient)
“cause” if you might have  any full intention or
desire to explain and account for your presence
now—even in reading this post. 
 
We live in arbitrary convention, inside our shared
because-ality, representing  WHOLES beyond the
capacity to track, let alone reduce and rationalize.
Scapegoats, really: convenient origins and start-up
in the beginnings  that are no more beginnings than
they are endings, big bangs, for the sake of argument.
 
Or  whimpers.  Got to start somewhere, yes? Put your
finger down, anywhere: inaugurate. make that the first
day of the rest of your life. It is. Speak up in class.
Start the universe of converse-action. Author authorizing
authority authoritatively.  Who says we’re not original?                         
Originators?  .
 
Rhizomatic, say, as opposed to Hierarchical   Representation.
 
      
          An all-at-once-ness; a simultaneity.
Pick a node, any node—large or small. Let it  be an
origin-point of preference. When you got married,
say, or fell in love, hit by a car, made a decision for 
10^th grade in the middle of 9^th grade confusion; the
first time a female tied a kerchief around a dog’s neck,
a butterfly  flapping it’s wings in Brazil, the successful
return of Apollo 13. 
 
Your node can stand for any EVENT, true?  Anything
can stand for anything and in this case we are playing
with because & affect, cause & effect, looking at a
node & appreciating the  plethora of necessary &
insufficient causality that might be said to
generate it.
  
Circumscribe. Take just this image, say, and let  it stand
for all the because-ation that contributed to that node
right in the  middle—or any of them, makes no never mind.
See how arbitrary our  accountability is. Are you following
me?  Caesarian  short-cuts and circumcisions so to speak:
convenient conventions make our sense of why.
 
              .
 
Here’s what we do.  We foreground the node (event, any
crucial time, let it be a starting point: an origin) and work
from there—divide and conquer, divide and conquer, divide
and conquer. generating a hierarchy. An explanation. An
interpretation. A model. A standing-for. A blame-ation.
A scapegoat  Becausality.
 
See what a scapegoat looks like schematized?
Carrying the burden of the whole.

 
Or this:
 

 
A tree diagram it’s called.  Many diverse
variations and uses. 
 
     I.E.      DERU  (firm, steadfast, endure)
                /        \
         tree          trust
                        /      \
                    truth   troth
               druid        dryad
 
  why we knock on wood for crying out      
                       loud