The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Husband

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I last time traveled. I can only do this through love magic, which is a real thing in my Indigenous culture, and while it usually has nothing to do with time and trajectory, it does influence those things, on occasion. This love magic sits between my woman and me and it is adaptive and emergent, changing with the elliptical orbits of our relation, a dance and a journey that would require both map and calendar to chart accurately. Time and place are the same word in my culture, and all expressions of love are expressions of culture.

Maybe when you read this, she will have kicked me out and I will be embarrassed about my declarations of love in this essay, which will live on beyond my shattered dignity, a permanent public ledger of shame and grief. But that’s love magic for you—same as all magic, you can’t hold it and scale it for superpowers and domination or bend it to your will. It is not a resource you can extract and process with chemicals and labor, to add value to some bastard’s capital. Like time itself, you just flow with it until it’s finished with you.

Once you try to force or boss a being (either human or nonhuman), the spirit is gone from that relation. You can’t use magic or make magic; you can only swim with its currents, occasionally choosing which stream will take you. Such are the informatics of complex systems like land and sea and sky. People get excited about mycelia, but those are just the wires. Spirit is the signal.

Love magic cannot be used by secular humanity to spark much in the world beyond romance and joy and drama. But when I work with it in the space between Common Era linear time (which goes backwards before Jesus and forwards after him) and the whole cloth of time-place Lore, there are illusory loopholes to be found in the occluded mythologies of Judeo-Christian physics. If I log in to that gap where the first and second laws of thermodynamics meet, I can hack the illusion of entropy and throw spears at the arrow of time. That Ancient Greek entity known as Cupid knows what I’m talking about. He does it with a bow, but I do it with an axe, a knife, and a laptop.

Print is linear, but as a communication device it defies time, speaking across centuries, so I hack it that way, as I mentioned above (or to the right, if you’re reading this in Chinese). I carve my relational knowledge, story, and thought into a traditional object, every cut of the axe or scrape of the knife being an idea or place or relation in memory. Then I sit with that carving and upload a translation of selected excerpts from the wood or stone or bone, through my fingers and into the cloud, then from there people make physical copies. It’s a strange cloud that you can’t see, but you know it’s there from the effects it has on the world. Same rule for fourth magnitude stars and spirits.

[I am Jack’s complete lack of rigor, sliding an unverifiable claim in there behind two verifiable ones.]

My carvings are temporary objects, fluid embellishments like the oral Torah, but still grounded in the eternal Law of land, Lore, and intergenerational relations, which are rather like the written Torah in their precarious permanence. Time is a dynamic pluriverse in which my ancestors and descendants are continually present, and I am accountable to them all. But still, I am me, and in this moment I adapt and sing new paths through constantly shifting landscapes of meaning and creation.

[Yothu Yindi on the radio: Happiness is a real thing, it’s a real thing. High tide is coming in, the pigeon calls, the sharks are here.]

My existence is as temporary and precarious as the objects I make, but as enduring as my ever-present ancestors. It is only as permanent as my descendants are though, and I’m the one who balances them all in this moment, regenerating their reality during my brief shift here in the tangible (a bit like Jesus in the middle of his Roman calendar, but without the miracles and misogyny and tinkering of atomic clocks). Luckily, I don’t have to bear this burden on my own. Just like our carvings and other cultural tools, my family carries knowledge that will not die with us or within decaying digital systems, because that knowledge is held in our relations and will be transferred across generations.

I’ve carved a boomerang for this essay. “The boomerang” is a hyperobject in this world today, in as much as it is a concept whose dimensions in time and space are too massive for a human mind to perceive completely. Globally, it has entered many languages and cultures to signify that which returns to its owner, and it has even inspired a popular sport with international competitions. The one I’m making is very small, though. It is an anomalous artifact that exists in a multitude of superpositions.

[Indigo Girls sing: I used to search for reservations and native lands, before I realized everywhere I stand there have been tribal feet running wild as fire.]

This love-magic-time-traveling boomerang comes from a tree called a silky oak, which often has the same name as eels in Aboriginal languages. It has the same grain as eel meat, and it flowers in the peak fat season to let us know when to hunt those creatures, at a time-place when its full nutrition is made bioavailable by culinary pairing with other foods available in that season and bioregion.

[Noel Harrison chants: Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel.]

It’s been over a decade since I made one like this, but when I hold it, I’m still sitting with my dad learning how to shape them. My clan’s boomerangs are the least sexy of all the diverse aerodynamic throwing sticks on this continent, because they only entered our culture through trade relationships a few millennia ago. They are thick and round with a slight curve, mostly ceremonial objects used for dancing, and not the best weapon to hunt with. That’s why I haven’t made one for ages, because they are just not deadly enough for my taste. Nobody dances with these anymore, but I might just have a little boogie with it later. It has a nice swing though; it may be a good secondary weapon for close-quarter skirmishing when seasons and fields of violence come around, like they always do. Historically these things have not proven to be much good against bullets, though.

I had to get permissions from Wakka Wakka people to carve with the wood of this species. But this particular tree was planted far from its habitat, much like I was/am/will be in my diasporic existence. So I also had to ask Djadjawurrung people if I could work with this tree that had grown in the wrong place on their land, then was cut down in the wrong season. It is also still green as I burnish it with a whale bone, so it hasn’t seasoned properly yet and will probably crack and split over time, but that is part of the story of entropy encoded within it. It is out of time and out of place, yet still accountable to the laws of physics, which makes it not much good for anything unless you want to use it to hack the enlightenment through a loophole in western scientific lore, in order to facilitate time travel. It is liminal enough to perform this function, as it sits in such bad relation that it barely exists at all.

I keep my love magic in there, a few lines of esoteric code that I recently uploaded into the romance lore of the Enlightenment, that period of mass hysteria which birthed the physics of the arrow of time. The love lore I chose to facilitate this ceremony was a ritual performance called an opera, specifically Beethoven’s Fidelio. I rewrote the libretto for the performance, which was performed in a place of power, a sacred site for Enlightenment culture: the Sydney Opera House.

[I just had a phone call from home, from a close relative who was assaulted last night and had her neck broken. I will see her next month, if she survives the bleed in her brain, when I travel north for the funeral of another family member who was stabbed to death recently. I am out of my place and out of time here, so I wail for a few hours and then keep writing the words that keep my family fed and sheltered. I am a good provider because I am a high-functioning mourner with good neoliberal compartmentalization skills. I am a good worker.]

The final part of the libretto virus I wrote accompanies the big duet at the end of the love story, and I’ve interspersed it throughout this text to bind it all together. (Now you will probably go back and forth in the essay to read those lines as a whole, traveling out of time in sequence of print.) The square-bracketed sections of the code were chanted by a choir of over fifty singers. The libretto was a love letter to my woman, and this essay is my love letter to you, so you can learn how to time travel too, even if you are a middle-class settler who cringes when I say things like “my woman.” It is safe for me to share this psychotechnology because it cannot be weaponized—people of bad faith with extractive agendas of dominance and cruelty are incapable of love, and therefore incapable of time travel.

Ad antiquitatem, ad naturam, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, dicto simpliciter, ab anecdote. These are words in Latin whispered to me by the sibling of the love-magic-time-travel boomerang—a deadly weapon cut from the same eel-grained limb. It spawned a different text—a sixteen-thousand-word response to a dozen theologians from around the world who wrote chapters for a book with me, replying to each in turn with a chapter of my own. I sat with them for a week in the US and the book fell out of our conversations like a fresh, warm egg.

[We spent time with Amish folk there at that gathering of minds, and I still have some of their peanut butter in my kitchen. Sometimes I eat a spoonful of it and I am right back there at that long table, hazy but real as a Da Vinci painting, spinning yarns with geniuses who believe in ghosts and miracles.]

The focus of my responses was on identifying logical fallacies deployed in our discussions about faith and spirit. I made a symbol for each fallacy and carved thirteen of them into the wood. So the Latin phrases whispered to me by the big sibling boomerang are the traditional names of those fallacies. They are related to this story of time travel because the two boomerangs are related, and when I clap them together in a ritual rhythm, they give me warnings about what to avoid now and what may come later.

They tell me that I am still accountable and bound to protocols of cohesive logic, even though this is an experimental essay and I’m holding a boomerang that is only partially real. In the Indigenous wisdom industry I create content that adds value to somebody’s capital, and that’s how I survive. It is too easy to create shortcuts and spin fallacious arguments for people who eat paleo-woo like air. I could repeat the popular misconception that Aboriginal time is circular and that we have circular logic as a result, but that would be wrong story. That rubbish pays well, so I’m tempted to deploy it.

[I am three weeks in the future, at a hospital and a funeral, figuring out how to pay for it all. Three funerals and a wedding this year, and I could only afford to attend two of them.]

Circular logic is a fallacy. A is right because of B, and B is right because of A, an argument contained in its own sealed box like Schrödinger’s cat. We don’t do that. There are certainly cycles and orbits in our constructs of time and place and meaning, but those are the parts and not the whole. Aristotle recently identified a dozen logical fallacies, then the Romans invaded Greece and extracted his science, renaming every idea in Latin. This is the language of conquest the boomerang whispers to me now, warning me about the fallacies I am flirting with in this work and giving me the constraints I need.

I cannot appeal to tradition and antiquity—just because it’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s good for this time-place. I cannot appeal to cherry-picked nature analogies—just because it’s natural in one time-place doesn’t mean it’s true in all contexts. I cannot assume that because x precedes y in linear time, y is caused by x, because causation lives in complexity, not on a calendar. I cannot kill the exception to the rule—every time-place relation sits in a unique context and is never universal. I cannot generalize my stories to all time-places—anecdotal appeals can metastasize across an information landscape and tear it up like a multitude of feral pigs.

But there is no data without story, and no story without data. The statistics of a Nordic economy might suggest that they hold the secret to making capitalism thrive while keeping things green and fair, but that is a dataset that abides outside of time. In the whole cloth of history and the past’s constant presence in the tangible today, we might see that those Nords still collect nationalized oil revenues from South America, topping up their economy with contemporary vassal state relations lingering from a colonizing past. They outsource their extractive entropy to other places and times in order to keep things green at home. We see history rhyming from antiquity, into an emergent future of white grievance made catastrophically real, if we visit the migrant ghettos in this Scandinavian utopia.

[Beowulf cries: I swam in the blackness of night, hunting monsters out of the ocean, and killing them one by one; death was my errand and the fate they had earned.]

Pundits informed by fascist think tanks are just asking questions—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—about the correlation of Swedish rape cases increasing exponentially the same year that immigration from the Middle East was increased.

[The facts don’t care about your feelings! The data doesn’t lie!]

A lie is a truth removed from its time-place. That same year in Sweden there was a new policy implemented to record those statistics, counting the number of rapes, rather than the number of rapists. So thirty assaults by one bastard was marked as thirty, rather than one. In the context of the time-place there was nothing for white people around the world to panic about. Yet the moral panic increased then, is increasing now, and will continue to grow, along with the butcher’s bill from stochastic terrorism enacted by red-pilled ethno-nationalists worldwide.

Data points represent one point in time—or more accurately, out of time—existing only in a theoretical superposition in a cloud of potential meaning, ceteris paribus (all other things being equal—which they never are).

There are three stages of data processing to move through in the love-magic-time-travel ritual: data points, data connections, and data fields. At the first stage you might pay attention to a single node—such as the ants on your street, which are climbing the walls and fences, carrying eggs. At the second stage you make connections between multiple data points in this ant time-place: for example, swifts flying low to the ground as a warning signal and then heavy rains following soon after, which is why the ants are moving their babies to higher ground. At the third stage you note the positioning of ant nests along the flows where water goes in your suburb and the role these tiny multitudes play in shaping the waterways and keeping them clean. You will also see that the positioning of the highways and infrastructure blocks those flows, retaining stormwater and causing catastrophic “natural” disasters every few years. There are cycles in the timing of these events, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that all time is a single circle.

[Everything Everywhere All at Once]

Time can do everything the time traveler needs it to do, except remain static. That is a fantasy of far-right think tanks and policymakers, the notion that time can be frozen in a 1950s or even Old Testament era of morality and supremacy, that a mythical golden age can be retrieved and held in place forever. There is an entire porn genre devoted to time-stop fantasies, although this is exclusively imagined as a way to violate a woman’s bodily autonomy and avoid the boundaries of consent. Thank goodness those who are incapable of love are also incapable of magic and time travel, or we’d all be literally fucked.

There are wheels within wheels, regenerative and vast. Some feedback loops are closed, recycling energy and matter within systems. Others are open, exchanging with other systems in a mosaic of interdependencies and symbioses, a pluriverse in which one entity’s waste is another entity’s lunch. There are positive feedback loops that escalate hysteresis, and negative feedback loops that act as regulatory mechanisms to restore homeostasis. Faster and slower cycles dance together in complementary relation, and all require our custodial attentions.

[I am losing connection with this boomerang, so I must stop speaking from it now. In my mind I have started carving the next text in my life, which is a death spear, because love magic is hard to flow with when murderers and bad wizards plague your family like wasps. In this particular case, y follows x in causative relation.]

While hateful people can’t do love magic and time travel, they can certainly do sorcery. Black magics are illusions made real, wrong stories that burn the maps of creation, burn books, and burn lives. Black magic exists out of time and place, spinning wrong story faster than right story can turn it back around, and throwing all into entropic loops. Fascism, autocracy, and extraction spin illusions faster than we can counter them.

So we need to create liminal texts and ritual objects that can move in between, flowing with the esoteric codes and restorative tides of love magic and time travel, to offset the time-stop banditry of the world-eaters as they march in line behind oligarchs and plutocrats, spitting dark money, dark ops, and dark magic like bloody feathers.

I’m not a fan of print-based communication and literate constructs of time, but I tell you, in the moments where they start burning books, I am there with you to resist, my siblings, swaying with my boomerang [and my spear-to-come, bristling with jagged barbs of obsidian], dancing in the smoke and smashing heads. Love, like every other altered state, has its season and will come around again soon. But this is a different season and we have work to do.