For the past decade, in the National Book Critics Circle Award winning Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences, and in the ongoing contest that book spawned on the Mcsweeneys.net website, Lawrence Weschler has been exploring the way images (but also poems, musical themes, etc.) set a context for the reception of subsequent instances. In this talk, Weschler considers a spectrum of such convergent effects, from apophenia (the tendency of humans to see patterns where none exist) through co-causation, fractalization, influence (forward and backward, direct and unconscious), homage, apprenticeship, allusion, quotation, appropriation, cryptonesia (verbatim appropriation without realizing you’re doing so), through outright plagiarism.