Unicorns & the True Enemy

Actuarial tables, ancestral memories at the cinema, extraterrestrial small talk, and the blindest of the blind spots.

This is an essay about time. But time is hard to write about. So I’ll start with unicorns.

Alicorns and scary movies

When my daughter turned four, Unicorns re-entered my life. They’d always been around - on stickers, Trapper Keepers, weird dream sequences in Blade Runner, in that St. Patrick’s Day song where they’re eradicated from the earth for playing grab-ass while Noah’s trying to load up the station wagon.

My daughter’s unicorns were an upgrade of My Little Pony - small, candy-colored plastic horses with manes you can comb and braid from my childhood. They’d since been given horns, wings, and in sometimes both, a creature I learned was called an alicorn.

She’s almost ten now, and has mostly outgrown unicorns. But she loves horror movies, approaching them with the same bravado as roller coasters, judo, and social situations where she doesn’t know anyone. We’re three for four on grown-up scary movies in the theater - the first 20 minutes of Longlegs was too much for her. One rainy afternoon, I saw that the film Death of a Unicorn was playing nearby.

Death of a Unicorn (2025)

The movie features a wealthy and powerful family. The father is running out of time, resigned to his own death from an unspecified, incurable disease. The unicorn finds its way to their mansion, seemingly dead, after being run over by a craven but good-hearted estate planner and his daughter. The wealthy family discovers the unicorn and its miraculous properties. They start to carve the animal up, when it comes alive and escapes, with help from its parents. The family, no longer so noble and resigned, try to hunt it down. The unicorns slaughter the folks who deserve it and many of their employees, until a maiden - the daughter of the craven but good-hearted estate planner - soothes the murderous beasts by letting them rest their heads on her lap.

It was a funny, occasionally gory, good-enough movie. And it was the most time I’d spent around unicorns in a while.

In the film, shavings from the unicorn’s horn and the meat of the animal can cure disease, undo the ravages of age, and prolong human life, perhaps indefinitely. The daughter who finally ends the unicorns’ murderous rampage learns how to do so by examining a series of real medieval tapestries now housed in the Cloisters Museum, which depict a unicorn hunt.

The hunt

In the tapestries themselves, a well-equipped group of hunters and dogs chase down a unicorn, which they find beside a fountain. But after a bloody struggle, the hunters and their dogs can’t subdue it. Only a maiden can distract the unicorn long enough for it to be killed. The hunters bring back its corpse and hand it over to a pair of nobles. In the last of the seven tapestries, the unicorn, bloodied, is alive again, though in captivity, chained to a tree inside a pen.

Robin Hood’s Barn

My last real exposure to unicorns was in 2021 and 2022, when I had a freelance job helping to edit the life’s work of former Cooper Union professor and dean Arthur Hill Corwin, a book called Robin Hood’s Barn: A Study of Ice Age Culture (Seven East Publishing, 2023).

It’s a big, difficult book that sought to understand tens of thousands of years of art, myths, folktales, popular culture and aberrant behavior. The book is full of dragons, vampires and other fantastic figures.

For Corwin, the key lay in a prehistoric, multi-generational effort to understand and codify the cycles of time, and to pass along that understanding. It was an effort that spanned tens of thousands of years, and created a school of thought that survived sub-rosa despite the efforts of the dominant civilizations that have since come and gone.

He noted, as did Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, that one way that a complex set of ideas can persist and function in secret over a long period is in plain sight, through seemingly frivolous fairy tales, nursery rhymes and children’s play.

Time keeping

Our culture has a pantheon for expressing time, though we don’t call it a pantheon. The lowest of the creatures, and the one nearest to our experience, is the second, followed by the minute, hour, day, week, month and so on, up to the titanic figure of a millennium. Much beyond that, and the deities become too ungainly for our uses.

The system works well - as long as numeracy continues to transmit across generations. Corwin argues that this assumption wasn’t always so confidently held, with timespans instead expressed as figures common to the lives of the people who would use the system:

• 1 Month = The Virgin, The Maiden

• 1 Year = A Diamond, A Reindeer

• Leap year = Salmon

• 128th year, the skipped leap year = The Balancing Bull, A Dead Salmon

• 25,814 years, how long it takes the Earth’s axis to complete a 360-Degree “Wobble,” or one precession of the equinoxes = The Dragon, The Whale, The Elephant

• 169,419 years, how long it takes for the annual 0.051 of a second left over by the leap year and skipped leap years to equal a full day in the annual Calendar = An enormous, inverted, invisible, flying lamprey

One interpretation

What is the unicorn in the tapestry and the movie? It’s time - elusive, mysterious, valuable, beyond our ability to capture and control. To hunt it, even with trained dogs, is to be confounded. You need a maiden.

One important part of unicorn lore in the movie is that the unicorn lays its head on the maiden’s lap. This isn’t simply a paean to the gentle virtues of women - it’s a recollection of an early success at taming time. Before astronomy and mathematics, the monthly menstrual cycle of women was the first taming of time, the first occasion in which time could be placed into useful captivity. Those 28-day cycles fit into a 365-day year, with only one day left over. This is how the unicorn finally submitted, not to any hunt, but to the lap of a maiden.

The unicorn, though absent from the fossil record, appears in cave paintings and bone carvings going back tens of thousands of years. There’s a more common, Christian interpretation of the hunt in the tapestries, which doesn’t seem to satisfy the narrative quite as well.

Nope (2002)

By presenting an ambitious and comprehensive system for reading symbols, Robin Hood’s Barn also invites apophenia - a state of seeing connections, patterns, and meanings that aren’t necessarily intended. Like any alternate frame of reference, it can alter a reader’s equilibrium.

It was summer when I finished up my small part as an editor on the book. One afternoon, nearing some of the more difficult later passages about the large-scale calculations, when I went out to the theater to see Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022).

The movie involves a family-owned horse ranch whose latest generation is running out of time, going broke and in danger of having to sell the property. Their plan to save the ranch is to capture irrefutable video evidence a UFO and claim a $1 million prize.

The UFO in the film is something deadly - like a minor miscalculation to a calendar might have been in the Ice Ages - but seemingly invisible. It needed to be hunted out. The predatory UFO is an amorphous devouring monster in the sky, concealed as a cloud. But when it swoops down on our protagonists, we see its circular mouth, like that of a lamprey.

To me at that moment, the film was shocking, nearly scandalous. I walked out of the film slightly rattled. How could something seemingly so obscure appear so explicitly, at such great cost, in public?

Offstage

In football, if a player gets hurt, they’ll go to the locker room. They may return after a rubdown or a pain-killing injection. But all eyes remain on the field of play.

The unconscious is like the locker room. Star players hobble off and disappear into it while the game goes on. Who knows if grandma or Mickey Mouse or Theodore Roosevelt will come back? Sometimes they jog back onto the field. Sometimes they’re spotted in the stands, selling popcorn. Or it’s just someone who looks like them, or acts like them, in the parking lot.

The figures that recur the most often to the most people have a name - archetypes, Carl Jung called them. He also posited something called a collective unconscious wherein we’re all playing peek-a-boo with a shared cast of characters.

Could be. Even saying that there’s an unconscious seems like a hard thing to argue in these uptight times (see “Con Sen Sus,” this July), never mind that we have to share the thing. Seems like a copyright issue.

Jung warned about ignoring the unconscious, saying that the archetypes we fail to recognize will take advantage of those blind spots, and live through us.

Inherited memory

One problem with knowing or sharing ideas we haven’t been taught is where those ideas came from. But I’m of the opinion that we’re all told a lot more than is ever said. The physical around us rich with a thousand flavors, textures and varieties of time - human time, vegetable time, bacterial time, geological time, historical time. Imagination imagines, but also infers.

Memory can be transmitted in many ways. It can be the way that a surname sounds, the expression on the face of knick-knack on a shelf, or the tone of voice in which someone changes the subject.

We know there are secrets the world keeps from us, and many we keep from ourselves. These secrets have guardians, but the guardians always give something away.

The light switch

We’re all rational-ish people. We take medicine when we’re sick. We turn on the lights without uttering a prayer. If the world of the senses and the ones inferred from scientific experiment are truly all there is, most people would agree that would be enough for it to go on working exactly as it does.

But here we are, talking about unicorns again.

Inside a UFO

The unconscious, as home to the long-dead, the annoying coworker and the never-lived legends is a timeless place. There are a few others which sit outside of time, such as memory or culture.

In the primeval alien abduction, Barney and Betty Hill recalled being taken from their automobile on a state highway in New Hampshire in 1953. Under hypnosis, they reported that the aliens asked about Barney’s dentures, which Betty explained as being something humans often get as they age over time.

“What is time? What is age?” the aliens asked, giving a hint of where they may have originated.

Life expectancy

While timeless, the unconscious changes, simply because consciousness changes. Consciousness today is drastically different than it was a hundred fifty years ago, simply by dint of the widespread use of electricity.

One equally profound change is the notion of life expectancy, as calculated by insurance companies. Often, people will say that longer life expectancy is changing society and perhaps humanity itself. But I think the concept itself has an even more profound effect.

“Life expectancy” first gained currency among soldiers going into battle during the two world wars of the past century. But as used in life insurance, life expectancy has altered the way people envision reality itself.

Being backed by both math and money, these financial forecasts can read to people like a promise - along the lines of, “as a nonsmoking male with an in-range BMI, I should live to 79.” This is how conversations that stumble into mortality often gutter out.

When someone dies, we often use the life expectancy number in some quick math to see if a person’s gotten more or less of their fair share of years. The whole thing becomes a wager in which we all lose, but a lucky half of us do beat the point spread.

Another important distortion profound is that, with all the other killers tucked into a single statistical average, most murder charges now fall at the feet of a single defendant: Time. This isn’t necessarily true, but it is common consciousness, operating to common desires.

The blindest spot

Like a cloud, it’s hard to speak meaningfully or memorably about time. Like the UFO in Nope, time hides in plain sight. It repels comment. And like Jung warned, time acts out its personality through us.

We take our revenge on time in the highly emotional, national and personal condition of having too much or too little space. Too much space - people coveting larger houses, when they can only ever sit in one room at a time. Spacious homes imitate having more than enough time or more than enough forgiveness for you to continue sinning without consequence. Too much space - people lay new freeways or complain that air travel seems to take too long.

In airports and train stations, time reigns supreme, like - you can miss your scheduled departure, and your reason for being there. The architectural solution is to diffuse the panic by raising the ceilings and stretching the visible distances.

The borderline panic about time appears in relation to sex, but more often to money. Why else the persistent fear, even after all needs have been met? Why else the desperate hoarding among people whom we’re assured should know better?

Time? Space? Money? What are they? The authorities don’t know, and they certainly don't want to be reminded of that by the likes of you. Money’s an echo of time, which echoes that one… darn, you just missed him.

What we know

Time is a hunter, furtive and virtually invisible until the last instant. It plays by some rules we know, and others we can’t.

We are not immune - here together, using time to fight time. Is that swimming or just drowning forward?

This obsession with time may seem tedious. But how many implacable gods intent on your personal destruction do you get to grapple with so intimately? Not many.

Selected Bibliography

A cool old film about the unicorn tapestries

Robin Hood’s Barn: A Study of Ice Age Culture, by Arthur Hill Corwin

Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, by David J. Halperin

Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen

The Reign of the Anti-Santas - my potshot at the subject of time - Independent - Audible - Amazon - B&N

The first essay I wrote about Robin Hood’s Barn is here, the second is here, and the third here