Text: Magic

from d., 02.01.10

This is the bookshelf that contains the books with the magic spells.

Just through the doorway is the white-and-silvery magician’s room, with its equipment for making things very clean, very hot and very cold.

The resident magician uses the spells written in the books to make soothing elixirs from pungent growing things, each one prepared in its own season.

We all help with the harvest. The Earth itself allows us to take some of its musty-smelling treasures, as long as we are gentle. The birds allow us to share some of their own food from high in the tall forest, if we are polite to them as we reach up to gather the precious items from the air. The dense jungle with its spreading vines, guarded by creeping creatures, is more challenging. We have perfected delicate negotiation techniques to persuade the hidden objects to show themselves.

The many-coloured fruits of our harvest are as small as your thumb-nail or as large as your head. They are smooth, shiny, rough, prickly, soft or feathery.

When each item has been scrubbed, peeled, or chopped, the magician peruses the bookshelf. Only she knows which spell is appropriate for each growing thing; whether to consult the books with the shiny pages or those with faded newsprint, or the extra-special tomes with stained handwritten papers.

She expertly interprets the secret codes such as the ancient ‘oz’ and ‘lb’, the informal ‘tabs’, ‘teasp’ and ‘cps’, and the modern but less alluring ‘g g g g’. Accurately translating the coded numbers is a necessary for the success of the spell, so, to help her concentrate, the magician sings to herself or listens to disembodied voices.

During the first extraction of the essences, the aromas emanating from the bubbling cauldrons create a rich, dream-like atmosphere. It is a hallucinatory haze that prevents us knowing the secret spell-casting phase. Only when the air clears do we see the final products - a neat row of variously coloured and textured potions in their sparkling, diamond-like hot containers or their white, frosty cold containers.

To preserve the magic spells, we must not sample any of these until the growing season has finished. At that time, they will taste pleasantly sweet, savoury, spicy, sour or salty.

We can hardly wait!

There are those who say these books speak of alchemy, and others who insist they only convey boring chemistry – but we who taste these potent elixirs truly believe that they help conjure magic!