Copyright © 2013 Bob R Bogle
Dark in the room. Silent.
Unfamiliar surroundings.
Imagining flashes of ancient rifles in the dark night, sudden loud
cracking shots fired from who knows where.
Quantrill's pistol. Holes blown
in bodies. Violence. Betrayal.
No legislatures had yet voted to secede. Death.
Effects subtend causes. Remember metaphysics, my freshman year? A mistake.
The philosophical mind proscribes the clinically empiric. Concepts, physical things digested away in elemental
words. Abstracted abstractions. No causalogist, I. Con-sequentiality in time and con-tiguity in
space. Tangere, to touch. Necessity.
Sufficiency. A thermodynamic demiurge. Consequential sputtering sparking arc
weld flashing linkages between events effacing time's arrow, I argued. Progressively, emphatically squeeze down the
interval, a calculus of limits, and expunge time from consideration. Charlie in that class, too. Correlation does not necessarily imply
causation, he said, except in certain states where required by law. Quantum mechanics throws it all into doubt
anyway. All grows fuzzy. And the overwhelming human demand for
reductionism. Oversimplifying complexes
of contributing effects or events, hungry for that one critical final lasting
eternal keystone cause, almost always to confirm preexisting notions or buttress
an axiomatic moral framework. A host of
ingredients contribute to the mulligan stew.
Tired. I cant.
I just.
Is history causal? We assume.
If not a longitudinal, linked chain, can history exist? Sterile concept. Chaos otherwise. If a butterfly flutters its wings. History is a vast river system of causes and
none of them proximate, all of them necessary, none of them sufficient. All time immanent in a defined space. A loaf.
Bulk. That's history. Who we are, and why.
Sleep.
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