Time Lived, Without Its Flow

by Denise Riley

  Occasioned by the unexpected death, your enormous shift away from your old grasp of time is far removed from your predictable meditations on the fragility of life, from your wistful philosophizing, or from your crushed expectations. Your altered temporality is not to do with any kind of taking thought. It is prior to that, and supremely indifferent to lament and to cogitation alike. Instead it feels foundational: to do with a change in the entire structure of cognition. An unanticipated and irrevocable vanishing smashes through your habitual cognitive assumption that objects and people will continue to exist, to reappear. The person who says, ‘I keep expecting to hear his key in the door any moment,’ isn’t merely falling back on a well-worn trope. She’s issuing a factual report. Once so ferociously shaken up, cognition can’t readily regroup its forces to reassemble with its old anticipation intact. The entire stance inside which you’d previously lived is changed. Not by any disfiguring melancholia on your part, or even by simple reflective sadness – but by an upheaval of that pre-conscious topography through which your old apprehension of the world had once quietly moved. So those who lose a child will go out with the lost one into their timelessness. Into ‘timeless time’. This experience, as I reflected, must be the time of the dead. Or it’s as near as you can get to entering into that time, or that non-time.

  ‘So to speak’ comes the quick qualification here. Your own changed perception of time, so hard to describe aloud convincingly, is echoed in the stumbling ordinary language about the being of the dead. The very grammar of discussing a death falters in its conviction – in the same breath that the focus of talk, the formerly living person, himself disintegrates. Even the plainest ‘He died’ is a strange sentence, since there’s no longer a human subject to sustain that ‘he’. And what of the phrase ‘his body’, once there’s no surviving ‘he’ to animate it? Lydia Davis has a lovely piece on this, a darkly light and plaintive speculation that she calls ‘Grammar Questions’:

  When he is dead, everything to do with him will be in the past tense. Or rather, the sentence “He is dead” will be in the present tense, and also questions such as “Where are they taking him?” or “Where is he now?”

  But then I won’t know if the words he and him are correct, in the present tense. Is he, once he is dead, still “he”, and if so, for how long is he still “he”?4

  It’s as if any death causes the collapse of the simplest referring syntax. As if the grammatical subject of the sentence and the human subject have been felled together by the one blow. Yet at the same time, the continuing possibilities for discussing the no longer existing person induce a curious linguistic quasi-resurrection.5 Perhaps language, at least, possesses a belief in spirit. No wonder that the puzzles of lost animation, and reanimation, become a driving preoccupation for those left alive. Those gibbering souls of Orphic myth might suggest that the scattering of the anima is also a syntactical taking flight, while even the most secular mind may find it hard to conceive of a death without a continuation, some variant of a released soul. And this has its linguistic reasons. No subject can easily be conceived as extinguished, because language itself doesn’t want to allow that thought; its trajectory is always to lean forward into life, to push it along, to propel the dead onward among the living.

  Such daily curios of expression as ‘she’s died’ are readily shuffled along with. They’re pragmatic. Far more linguistically intractable, though, is the effort to show the condition of stopped time. Again you’ll try to convey your discovery that everyday acts of telling and describing assume the speaker’s awareness of passing time with each use of an implicit ‘next’. But once there’s no longer any element of sequence, because that usual intuition of flowing time has been halted, narration itself can’t proceed. Any attempt at descriptive writing soon reaches an impasse, for it could normally have relied, tacitly, on its own unfolding. Not so now. A life of no time can’t be recounted. Your very condition militates against narrative.

  Maybe only the cinema could show it. Not by means of any cinematic plot, certainly, but through the camerawork itself.6 Still, here we are on the printed page, with what there is to hand.

  *

  Looping around, I repeat myself, yet am compelled to keep trying to say it: to live on after a death, yet to live without inhabiting any temporal tense yourself, presents you with serious problems of what’s describable. This may explain the paucity of accounts of arrested time. To struggle to narrate becomes not only an unenticing prospect, but structurally impossible. Not because, as other people might reasonably assume, you are ‘too shocked’ to wish to write a word, or because you are ‘in denial’ – but because, as the movement of time halts for you, so do all those customary ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ that underpin narration. A sentence slopes forward into its own future, as had your former intuition of a mobile time. But now your newly stopped time is stripped of that direction. Or rather, the whole notion of directedness has gone.

  It was only when a familiar intuition of sequence eventually and spontaneously restored itself, having ‘taken its time’ over the passage of about three years, that I could begin to sort out my fragmented notes, and to start on these paragraphs.

  *

  While many philosophies of time have argued, for instance, over how atomized instants of perception may be felt as a unified streaming, this other feeling of ‘timelessness’ seems not to be mentioned. This lacuna must be due to the fact that the experience of a-temporality systematically undercuts its own articulation. Here it can’t speak itself, because the usual articulations of syntax, in its continuities, are snapped. Perhaps this is why so very little seems to have been published about the effects of a child’s sudden death on the experienced time of those left living.7 While through the usual memorial outlets, most published expressions of sentiment tend to be highly convention-bound. Neither this descriptive silence nor this sweetened overlay is surprising, if you think of the impassable structural barriers to telling. When, thrown into your freshly timeless condition, you can no longer have the least anticipation of your own future or take any interest in it, so implausible does its arrival seem, your usual language of narrating is curtailed in the same blow. Your very will to tell your violently novel state of timelessness is sapped, because you sense that your most determined efforts can’t reach others; you come to feel that syntax itself is set against you here, because it must rely on conventional temporality to function at all.

  If your time as a child had once thrown you into language, now you discover that narrative language had sustained you across time. Its ‘thens’ and ‘nexts’ had once unfolded themselves placidly. But now that time has abruptly gone away from you, your language of telling has left with it. For now an unsuspected scenario has enfolded you in its blinding illumination. You are time. You are saturated with it, rather than standing apart from it as a previously completed being who was free to move in it.8 In your old unremarked inclination towards the future, there was something that had also shaped your apprehension of yourself. As in Merleau-Ponty’s observation, ‘It is of the essence of time to be not only actual time, or time which flows, but also time which is aware of itself, for the explosion or dehiscence of the present towards a future is the archetype of the relationship of self to self, and it traces out an interiority or an ipseity’.9 So it would follow that both time and your own being, in their mutual implication, had formerly leant out and forward to the world. Your interior ‘revelation of self to self’ was also ‘the hollow in which time is formed.’10

  Then – to follow the spirit and the logic of these reflections – whatever happens once you’re thrown entirely outside of time’s motion and you find yourself abruptly divorced from this mutual implication? Do you now say that you have stopped? Admittedly something still goes on; you walk about, you sleep a bit, you do your best to work, you get older. Yet in essence you have stopped. You’re held in a crystalline suspension. Your impression of your own interiority has utterly drained away, and you are pure
skin stretched tightly out over vacancy. You abide.11

  Nevertheless your search for any evidence of fellow feeling is restless, almost comically so. You’re paralysed and not, as far as you know, temporarily (for this condition feels eternal) but temporally. And yet some longing drives you onward to comb through any writing that might carry the reassurance that this cessation of your time is both well known and fully recorded. At times of great tension, we may well find ourselves hunting for some published resonances in literature of what we’ve come to feel. I realize that this might quickly be condemned as a sentimental search for ‘identification’, for the cosiness of finding one’s own situation mirrored in print. Still, I think we can save it from that withering assessment. Instead we might reconsider the possibility of a literature of consolation, what that could be or what it might do.

  Wherever is the literature – for it must exist, it’s needed – that deals closely with this strange arresting of time? Certainly there’s a seventeenth-century poetry of temporal distortion. Impossible, here, to embark on a survey. But to light on just one fine example, the elegist Henry King writes of how, after his young wife’s death, his time slowed and its sequences went into reverse.

  [. . .] For thee, loved clay,

  I languish out, not live, the day,

  Using no other exercise

  But what I practise with mine eyes;

  By which wet glasses I find out

  How lazily time creeps about

  To one that mourns; this, only this,

  My exercise and business is.

  So I compute the weary hours

  With sighs dissolved into showers.

  Nor wonder if my time go thus

  Backward and most preposterous.12

  However, this much we have heard of, or we already know as the sad distortion of the mourner’s time. Whereas Wordsworth’s heavily analysed quatrains of 1798 seem in their very construction to enact that temporal fall from mobility into stillness:

  A slumber did my spirit seal;

  I had no human fears:

  She seemed a thing that could not feel

  The touch of earthly years.

  No motion has she now, no force:

  She neither hears nor sees,

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

  With rocks and stones and trees.

  Between these two stanzas, there’s a silent heavy crash of altered time. Now the natural historical past has snapped into a timeless present tense. And the second stanza also happens to carry the feeling of the one who lives on, but as if also lacking motion and force, in an uninflected present.

  I’ll leap on like a grasshopper in search of a rare but steadying blade of grass: for the radical stasis of time, one decisive note is Emily Dickinson’s, in about 1864. This had first struck me in my notes above. Here’s the piece in full:

  I felt a cleaving in my mind

  As if my brain had split;

  I tried to match it, seam by seam,

  But could not make them fit.

  The thought behind I strove to join

  Unto the thought before,

  But sequence raveled out of sound

  Like balls upon a floor.13

  An earlier version of this poem had the line ‘But sequence raveled out of reach’. The initial choice of ‘reach’ was easier and more obvious than the intense resonances of the noun ‘sound’ on which Emily Dickinson finally settled. (She didn’t need to use ‘sound’ for the purposes of rhyming, since it falls at the end of a line that’s structurally unrhymed within the quatrain. So ‘sound’ was her unconstrained revision, picked purely for its meaning.) Her eventual adoption of ‘sequence raveled out of sound’ implies that sound is the natural ally or shelter of the sequential or consecutive. There’s an obvious association of sounds and sequences; with a passage of music or simply a scale, one note implies the coming of a next.14 A first sound will lean towards a second sound, anticipating and promising it, even if to say so relies on retrospect. Even the harshest concatenation of discordant notes is still a sequence, in the sense of a succession pulled together on the ear.

  But in Dickinson’s poem her ‘sequence’ has been abstracted, so that now it is standing as a noun, a thing. And this new thing has scrambled itself clean away from sound, has gone shooting off across the floor like dropped balls of knitting wool. So far so good: sound, embodied as a vessel that would usually hold sequence, is divorced from it.

  Yet without making unduly heavy weather of Emily Dickinson’s eventual selection of this counter-intuitive ‘sound’, we could reflect a bit further. Sound is sustained on the ear by its repetition, and by the expectation that another sound will follow on. But now we hear that ‘Sequence raveled out of sound’. What, though, would sound itself become, if the possibility of succession were to abandon it? This wholesale scrambling or ‘raveling’ of sequence in Dickinson’s poem seems to imply something radical for temporal as well as for aural cognition. If sequence were truly to fall apart from sound, then the hearer could no longer expect any future unrolling, or could discern any principle of successive sounding. Each element of sound and sequence would, through this split, be rendered unintelligible in and by its new separateness. And their dissociation would sever our whole intuition of normally experienced time, which relies on extension, anticipation, and consequence. The separation of sound from sequence would chip away at consecutive thinking, and so at the whole principle of induction. And this is exactly what can happen in the aftermath of a sudden death. Or at least I found it to be so.

  Dickinson’s poem asserts that an associative chain may snap and scatter all its elements. If, in conjunction with this, we take Hegel’s idea of sound as apt to grip and secure you by means of its sequences of notes, then such a break in continuity could bring about a corresponding change to your being. (Which indeed is what you sense happening, once you arrive in stopped time.) If, as he proposes, your perceptions of a train of vanishing sounds are germane to your self-sensing, then a disruption of your grasp of their sequence would alter your own presence to yourself. Again, this is what can happen in the wake of a sudden death. No longer are you unconsciously sustained by that pulsating instant-upon-instant intuition of yourself in time, which buoys you up; and which does so, even as each successive tick of the present will naturally obliterate the preceding one.

  The self itself, declares Hegel, belongs to time, and coincides with time as it moves to and fro between its self-immediacy and its self-separation. Time is the being of the self. So much so that sound’s own time, including its vanishing succession of myriad instants, ‘sets the self in motion’.15 You are, in effect, founded and sustained in the sequence of rhythm. So to be abruptly inside the experience of a-temporality, which must be without any sounding rhythm and without any confident expectation of futurity, would mean that you lived a kind of prolonged suspension. That condition is what’s being shown in Emily Dickinson’s poem as ‘sequence raveled out of sound’ – and discovering her taut description comes as a relief.

  Could we find anything more to consider about the possibility of a ‘literature of consolation’ – or is that almost a repugnant thought? Perhaps it’s a question of a way of starting again, but a recommencing which doesn’t entail an imagined restoration or a smoothing-over of what is lost. When someone close to you has died suddenly and unexpectedly, it’s likely that at least one benign person will tell you to re-read Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. But less prescriptive, and more sympathetic, than that essay is the older Freud’s remark in his letter to a friend, written after the death of his daughter Sophie: ‘Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute, no matter what may fill the gap; even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be [. . .] it is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.’16

  So
the gap will still remain detectable. It hangs on, as ‘something else’. It’s noticeable precisely as a filled gap, where the act of replacing keeps prominent. Which is as good as it gets. Here I’ll make what may sound like a strange leap – to suggest that the same kind of ‘preservation through replacement’ happens in rhymed or metrical verse, and its paused and then resumed internal time: you stop, you repeat, you continue, you repeat but differently, you stop, you go ahead. Much like a version of Samuel Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Or his ‘something is taking its course’. But a variant: ‘something is being carried on’. The familiar but then the differing, in the next breath. Which is exactly what happens both in rhyme, and in your own gradual ‘reanimation’, so to speak, after you’ve been very near to a death. Nothing has changed, and yet it all has. You are returned after your brush with another’s death, a brush that seemed to have stopped you, too – and you’ve been returned differently. You return, knowing more.

  It’s true to the nature of a return, including your own return from your proximity to another’s death, that often it won’t be an arrival at the same place. And you yourself will not be the same. But something, nevertheless, stays: recognition as re-cognition; to know again, but because of the interval, to know a bit differently. Not through a replacement or a restoration of the lost object or word, for any new rhyme must embody a slight shift yet preserve the trace of the original, holding an outline of a gap that, even after it has been ‘filled in’, remains in a listening ear. Rhyme and rhythm keep their forms in, and through, echo’s work; this reiterating sonic alteration isn’t any melancholic shortcoming but part of the architecture of the poem. Like Freud’s letter: ‘no matter what may fill the gap; even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be.’