Work Text:
Harry Potter and the Tamoshii no Kodama
By Chyna Rose
Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. R. and her affiliates.
Prologue/ In Theory 1
Beyond the veil, there is nothing. Not blackness, not void. Just nothing. Is it death? I do not know. I have never died. But the ghosts talk in the dark. About their lives, there potentials, their deaths. Is the difference between being dead and being a ghost simply forgetting that you died, waking up in the morning, and going on about your day?
This world is full of ghosts. They wander around the halls, smile at you from photographs, watch over you from paintings, and enchant you through the frozen moving pictures of television and the movies. They can find you where you least expect them. In the day, in the sun, in the church, the hospital, the middle of Heathrow airport. It does not matter. Ghosts are not bound by expectations.
The main tenet of time theory is that time is linier. Time progresses from the past, through the present, to the future. It has often been described as a river; unchangeable and flowing in only one direction. Occasionally there is a divergence; a small part of the river branches off and loops back to some point further up river. Thus we have time travel in its current form. A select few people slip into that off shoot of the river that is time, and go back to their past in order to do whatever it was that they needed to do in the past so that they can continue on to the future. Time travel as fate; the past that cannot be changed.
But is this true time travel? A person can visit a past they had not lived yet. Their future is in the chronological past. It is still linier. It is still linier because it was forged on the fundamental idea that time is linier. A second becomes a minute becomes an hour becomes a day becomes a week becomes a month becomes a season becomes a year becomes a decade becomes a century becomes a millennium becomes an era.
However, to achieve true time travel, a person must abandon completely this line of thinking. They must realize that time is not linier. The past and the future are just illusions. There is only the present, the now. The singular moment in time that dies and is reborn in the ticking of a clock. Once you realize that, you can travel to anytime. All time coexists in the now. Time is not linier. But it is also not circular. It just is.
Once you understand that, you understand that time does not in fact exist. If the now of, what to me is, a hundred years ago exists exactly when my now is – which is also coincidently the exact same now as the now that exists a hundred years from my now – then no time can exist. To me, only my now is valid. But my now cannot exist separate from other nows since now is the only time there is. I can perceive what can be called the past, and I can perceive what can be called the future, but they are simply abstract concepts that can never be obtained.
If time does not exist, then nothing can exist. Everything we think of as real is tied – however tenuously – to time. Just as it is always now, we are always here. Here is defined by where we physically are at any given moment. Place, like time, gets partitioned off in ever increasing increments. Here is a chair in a bedroom in a flat in a tenement on a street in a neighborhood in a township in a city in a country on a continent in a hemisphere on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a quadrant in a universe. Since here is everywhere but everywhere cannot by definition be here, place does not exist. There is just an unobtainable concept used to rationalize the here. An illusion.
Things, people, that which we label reality. If place and time do not exist, then those other things cannot exist. We base that thing called reality on the perceptions of the world around us. And if our most basic perceptions – that of time and place – do not in fact exist, then how can we prove that all other perceptions – or any perceptions for that matter – are valid. That is what causes problems with people diagnosed as being schizophrenic or autistic. Their perceptions of what is real is so outside what we consider the collective real that we do not really know what to do with them. So we medicate and institutionalize them in an effort to get them to conform to our collective reality. How can I say that their version of what is real is wrong, when I cannot verify that anything other than what I consider to be my self exists. And even then, I cannot verify that which is my self. There is nothing to compare my self to that says ‘that is my self, and that other thing is another self’.
Time does not exist. Place does not exist. Self does not exist. The reason that time travel – true time travel – is impossible is because once you gain the ability to do it, to make the here and now anytime and anywhere, there is no more you to actually do it. You, as you define your self, just fades into the never was and the never will be. You will not be forgotten because there was never a you to remember.
This world is full of ghosts. They just do not know that they are dead.