TREE
* appearance is not history
* Present location is not complete provenance
* what appears locally can be intelligble only through a relation extending beyond the local
* appearance is not history * Present location is not complete provenance * what appears locally can be intelligble only through a relation extending beyond the local
What appears at the branch began elsewhere.
A tree makes visible a process that began before its present form.
Roots descend.
The trunk accumulates.
Branches extend.
Fruit appears.
What is produced at the edge depends upon relations extending through the whole structure.
ROOT → GROWTH → BRANCH → FRUIT
Much of what sustains the visible result remains out of sight.
FRUIT
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
— Matthew 7:16
Fruit makes something about the tree observable.
It does not disclose everything.
A single fruit is not the tree. Neither is one season the whole history of its growth.
But output is not unrelated to what produced it.
The fruit may reveal the tree without exhausting it.
This is why fruit travels so easily beyond the orchard. A result may be called the fruit of labor, attention, time, or circumstance because the underlying relation survives:
something has produced something else.
LINEAGE
Fruit may carry seed.
And Seed already carries a possibility that is not yet the tree.
SEED → TREE → FRUIT → SEED
The sequence can begin again without simply repeating itself.
The new tree is not the old tree.
Its continuity lies elsewhere: in a lineage carried through transformation.
What was output in one state may become possibility in another.
THE TREE
A tree may stand without bearing fruit.