I totally appreciate OPs insights here. It can be so tempting to see things linearly. But obviously the real world is anything but. There's a curiously wicked theory out there by David Abrams that part of this seeming human predilection for linearity has occured somehow through neural conditioning involved with adopting systems of writing, compared to the crazy fractal ocean of sensory input that living in a real living landscape begets. The writing has a start. A finish. It progresses in a single visual direction, and what's more, the pieces themselves only represent reality. The letters themselves are completely different from the things they are describing. And they might be one of the first objects in human history that work like this...

Anyway, the book is called the Spell of the Sensuous, and it's dense af, but bursting with fascinating lines of inquiry.