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9.11. The Goddess as Time and Change
Koch associates Maha-Kali with Time in a significant leitmotif which he adopts from
the Bhagavad Gita, though, since ‘time’ in Sanskrit is not kali, but kala, it seems he might be
employing a bit of poetic license. This provides a clue about the depth of Koch’s involvement
with the nuances of Hindu mythology, however, for an uncommon variant of Kali’s name, and
the word for black or blue-marine, is indeed Kala. In addition, the pre-Aryan, Jainist tradition
defines kala, one of the six constituent elements of the cosmos, as ‘time; that which makes
change possible’ (Zimmer, 1969, 271), paralleling Koch’s association of time with the divine
feminine, whose universal role is to assure the viability of change.
Koch offers another metaphor of Kali as a second of the six basic cosmic elements to
explain her role in providing a possibility of change in a universe which is seen, in reality, as
made up of identical, eternal, and therefore unchanging ‘life-monads’. O’Brien asks Sunder
what Kali looks like. Sunder answers, ‘From a distance she’s blue-black. But up close they
say she has no colour—like water’ (ASW, 72). This water image refers to the cosmic
component of dharma (a completely separate concept from the better-known dharma which
refers to the divine moral order or to rightful action within that cosmic order), which in the
Jainist ontology is ‘the medium through which movement is possible. Dharma is compared to
water, through and by which fish are able to move’ (Zimmer, 1969, 271). Without dharma, as
without the divine feminine, there could be no change—thus neither beginning nor end—in the
universe.
This seems to be the key to Madame Claudine Phan’s poem in Highways to a War
which says that ‘For the fish, it’s a question of being alive— They don’t worry about the depth
of the water’ (HW, 184). Water is equated with change, and one can reject change no more
than a fish can reject water, including that change which embodies evil’s conquest over good at
the end of time. It might be possible that a failure of the intervention of man’s free will as the
instrument of the ultimate creative force of the universe would mean the annihilation of that
other dharma, the right cosmic order. Still, that dharma ironically prescribes the establishment
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