PEOPLE WHO KNOW my writing will agree that I have a persistent and tender relationship with the phenomenon of time paradox. Time travel in my universe, especially my fictional one, never involves heavy machinery but is just there, as natural to the soul as dancing to the butterflies. It’s just part of life.
The power of literature depends on it.
It is just that the word for it needed to be discovered. And once discovered, of course it means that it always had been there.
The following small real-life incident (not an accident!) illustrates that. Last weekend a friend from the northern part of our island finally managed to visit me in my house. She brought a very close friend of her, who was visiting her at that time. So we were in for a delightful three-women meeting.
It was a hot summer day. The meeting took place in my cool kitchen around the large wooden table, loaded with all the abundance of a good Cretan meal. They arrived and marveled at the stone house, and its multiple entries and exits. The close friend exclaimed that there was an almost childlike vibe in the place, inviting to play hide-and-seek.
We didn’t. For it was really too hot that day to do the counting, running, hiding and seeking.
It was nice sharing the feeling of richness, not coming from bank accounts, property and investments but from the place and the encounter itself. The food was simmering in the oven. Plain cold water was shared. We enjoyed the richness of encounter. Then my Cretan friend put a paper bag on the table and asked me to open it. And there was the gift.
“A Calabash!” she said. “ Ceramic, that is. Look at the texture! I saw it, and felt: this is for your house. It symbolizes abundance, among other things.”
I took it in my hand. I felt the structure, the gentle weight, its roundness and placed it on the table among the three of us.
”Abundance, yes… “ I started and we exchanged a look. That was enough.
”Well, you know me.” I added slowly, “Speaking of abundance and a symbol of it, you know? See, for the past year we have been wondering and marveling about it, where in heaven’s name all that abundance came from! It’s a bit paradoxical…” I added with deliberate mock hesitation, “but see, symbols connected with benevolent wishes… they work in all directions of course, including backwards in time! Ah, thank you. Now I know where it came from.”
The three of us burst out laughing.
A symbol can act as an agent, a promise, or a conclusion. The calabash does not think of course, nor is it emitting little secret Abundance-O-Matic Beams, Mediterranean Grade Medium Strength.
There has been no craftsperson charging the device before selling it with Cretan Certified A-waves, a power one only acquires either by
a. coming from a rural lineage of certain areas of the Psiloritis going back at least three hundred years or
b. shortening the process by living solitary among the goats in the mountains for ten years.
The only agents are craftsmanship, affection, friendship—and love.
The ultimate paradox is that the very love that brought the present to my table as a symbol of abundance is the expression of the very abundance the gift represents.
It’s both really.
1. the artefact is just a gift and all magic dissolves.
2. the artefact is part of the deepest magic there is: a symbol that carries and confirms what is there and thus becomes almost sacramental.
Either way; it is neither at the beginning, promising something nor at the end, celebrating something but in the middle. It’s without beginning or end, like round hollow shapes are, all of them. It’s a sacred form.
And yes.
Like the womb, it’s a time-traveling device.
One that doesn’t need a battery.
Nina Rosewood