On Sacred Time, by Dr Dani Kirby

Welcome and thank you all for coming out tonight to the opening of Sarah White’s show ‘Patience’. I’m deeply honoured to have been asked to offer some introductory remarks. Rather than offer a summary or guide to the show, though, I thought I’d instead provide something of an intersecting frame through which to view these works: specifically the idea of sacred time and its relation to the interiority of patience.

Patience became a very familiar part of life over Covid, both its cultivation and its lack. There was the patience of waiting for lock downs to end, and the patience needed to endure them. Those offensively regular 15 minute slices of life spent waiting for clear test results created a shockingly precise punctuation into the endless now of days repeated: where the same walls, the same people, and the same glimpses afforded by windows gave little-to-no indication of time passing. Worlds became smaller, with a narrowing of scope that constrained experience and refined it to what seemed the smallest point possible.

Such constraint also provided other benefits though: detail, minutiae became more complex languages we suddenly had the time, the patience, to read. There were possibilities afforded by being forced to reside, endlessly, repetitively, in those same places, with those same people, looking out through those same windows. Which brings me to the idea of sacred time. 

At core, sacred time is non-linear and cyclic, an eternal dynamic now that sits outside and above our everyday mundane experience. Writ large, sacred time is the space of the gods: think the Hindu Yuga or the eternal feast of Valhalla. It’s a longer, more sustained deep time. More intimately, it’s also the time in which folklore tells tales of hunters disappearing into forests for a year, only to return having only experienced but 1 day passing. It’s the time we try and reach through ritual: formal structures of practice enable transition into the realm of the divine or, sometimes, manifest the divine within the world. Sacred time becomes a lodestone, pulling us into its orbit and capturing us for the unknowable length of an eternal now: we cannot escape and, sometimes, don’t even want to.

Circles, and cycles, contain worlds. Repetition: Constraint: Variation: Creation. For many of us, Covid forced us to endure a kind of inverse of sacred time: atomised experience, it turned out, was not merely mundane but downright profane. But simultaneously, in that interiority we had the space to contemplate world and self in a different relation. The infinite variety of the view from the window was enabled precisely because it was within the same frame: repetition, of view, of self reveals emergent forms.

7 June, 2024

For more writing, music and projects from Dani Kirby, visit encyclical.com.au