A Woman and the Time

Time, Memory and Experience.

Detail of marble sculpture “Truth Unveiled by Time” by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian; 1598 – 1680)

“And time is a passionate sculptor of men”
— "Marina of the Rocks”, Odysseus Elytis

You may have heard it said or have read that in order to truly know a woman and who she is, you have to look at who she was and is through years. Without knowing her cycles, seasons, what she digested and integrated and what she decided to waste, it is impossible to “find her”. She will remain an eternal enigma. It is through looking at her within time that you can come to know what she chose (or did not choose) to “birth”and what was never externalised and so eternally remains a part of her “hidden soul”.

The woman’s connection to cycles and seasons is often written and spoken of. However, the time is more subtle as it is within the “emptiness” of time that cycles, aeons and everything else is formed. A woman exists in it but she is also the time’s creatrix — it is through her that the past is preserved and experience of it imprinted within the psyche, and it is also through her that the future is formed. When I say past, I do not mean “history” but past as an internal experience, as a subjective memory. The internal experience and awareness of past is what gives roots and stability — or calls to revisit and clean them up if they were rotten.

When a woman ceases to be the mistress of time, it is not that we have what one may call “the eternal now”—the penetration of Eternity into Time/Duration—,but what is experienced is more akin to timelessness. The timelessness leads to lack of experience and development. It is not random that the first Mahavidya one encounters in Hindu Tantrik traditions is Kali, who among other things, is connected to Time. Similarly, in the Kabbalah Tree, the Higher Mother is the Understanding/Binah, connected to Saturn, a planetary archetype associated with time. It is the Womb, the Circle, the Limiter, the Container of Time and Space within which experience takes place. The moment she “births” anything it becomes subjugated to time and the clock starts ticking — we are dead in the very the moment we are born and are born the moment we die. However, time is also constantly devouring itself — each new second devours the previous and through devouring time, time offers liberation from itself. This is the hidden Compassion and Mercy behind the often fierce and terrifying imagery associated with deities or archetypes relating to time.

Saturn as a Mother is also reflected in many cultures in which it is often the grandmother who is considered to be the “real mother”. Where I am originally from, the grandmother is often called and addressed with “majka”; it is considered a more formal, respectful way of addressing than the more casual and intimate “mama”, which is how one usually addresses the actual mother. Towards the grandmother, there is an attitude of reverence rather than sentimental closeness.

To be connected to time for a woman is crucial because connection to time is awareness of rhythms and when “the time has come”. A child cannot be born until “the moment has arrived” and neither can a person die until “the time is right”. To be connected to time and its rhythm is to know when to die and when to be born, when to begin and when to end, when it is the time to meet and when it is the time to part, when it is time for togetherness and when for separation. It is knowledge that some things simply must take time, and that no amount of effort or labour will bring any improvement. If a plant needs three weeks to grow and a dish thirty minutes to be ready, there is nothing you can do about it, you just have to wait for it to be complete and ready. This is the subtle connection between the Chronos, the duration/linear time and Kairos, the right time.

Men too, become lost when women lose their own connection to the time. Without it, men do not know where the next “gate” is and what gate should he (or even can) pass through. In short, he is left without his story. Initiation into a story or experience is simply an initiation into time — how often do our fairytales begin with once upon a time?

Related to this, I spoke with a friend the other day and I told her how so much of men’s sufferings come from the fact that men do not know when it is the time to die, to end, to go into a grave and when to raise from it and start again. Cycles exhaust them and the End of Time terrifies them. Perhaps, that is why, us women, like time, kill them — out of love.