by Denise Riley
A poem may well be carried by oscillation, a to-and-fro, rather than by some forward-leaning chronological drive. It both sanctions and enacts an experience of time which is not linear. And your own time, in the immediate wake of someone’s unexpected death, isn’t linear. That might sound like a capricious comparison – between the workings of rhyme, and living through another’s death, where you were very close to that person. Where you loved that person. But my guess is that rhyme may do its minute work of holding time together; making a chain of varied sound-stitches across time, a link to represent that feeling of sequence which may have been lost when the writer’s or reader’s usual temporal ‘flow’ has been cut by another’s abrupt death.
Yet the sheer contingency of what in any particular language rhymes with what is never far away. There’s an obvious impersonality about rhyme (its sound resemblances aren’t resemblances of meaning – or not habitually); while rhyme, as well as rhythm, is in the same breath deeply personal in its indwelling in the mind’s ear. Like a marriage of the material and the ideal. Of the stuff of words and their thought. It’s a happy and a curious accident of the English language that the word ‘rhyme’ does itself rhyme with the word ‘time’. And indeed, that both of these rhyme with ‘chime’, which itself means – a sounding repetition. Time suffers severance and is potentially joined again by rhyme. But I’m not claiming a ‘therapeutics’ or a curative aspect for rhyme. It can’t mend the split between the usual forward movement of time and its stasis in the person caught at a standstill. Although memorial poems which are both strongly metrical and rhymed are what people seem ‘instinctively’ to turn to when in search of what to read at a funeral, there’s scarcely consolation for loss in a formally structured poem. Still, such a poem may, to use an old-fashioned word, work as an emblem. A sounding emblem.
Emblematic of what? Of a loss at the moment when it’s imperceptibly starting to shift; of the fact that there is change – you have been changed yourself, by your proximity to the death of an intimate – but also a return. This return is not to the same. As a rhyme is close but not identical, not an immaculate substitution but a recollection, while its sounding anticipates what’s to come. This pulsating alteration-in-recognition comes close to the experience of a stopped time which is now unobtrusively, hesitantly – even reluctantly – finding a first breath of its future.
In contemporary fiction, a state of changed cognition after an unexpected death, and a porous sense of your own edges, is – to my limited knowledge – rarely shown. But Don DeLillo, in his 2001 novel The Body Artist, offers a kind of ghost, an unsettled and unsettling male presence who seems to speak from some a-temporal realm. He is, in effect, an occasional mouthpiece for the heroine’s newly dead husband. She reflects on the condition of this disquieting visitor in her house:
Time is supposed to pass, she thought. But maybe he is living in another state. It is a kind of time that is simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, un-occurring, and he lacks the inborn ability to receive this condition. What ability? There is nothing he can do to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, happening – the world happens, it has to, we feel it – with names and dates and distinctions. His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible, perhaps, if only in his mind.17
This passage is an extraordinarily precise account of the feeling of a life that continues, but does so outside any perceived changing time. DeLillo’s suddenly widowed heroine, too, appears to have suffered an altered temporal sense of her own, since eventually – and what she reports here recalls Hegel’s meditations – she comes to want to find again ‘the flow of time in her body, to tell her who she was’.18
Yet this unpredictable point of your re-entry to a communicable social life and its familiar chronology will usher in its own great sadness. If it’s your ‘restoration’ to the usual world, it’s certainly not a restoration that you can celebrate. The cost of recovering your conventional apprehension of flowing time is intolerably high. The dead slip away, as we realize that we have unwillingly left them behind us in their timelessness. Much like Eurydice, who slid back from Orpheus’ grasp just as he was on the threshold of re-entering the upper world with her. You would not have wanted this second, now final, loss. (Still, your own wanting is neither here nor there; you have also learnt this.)
Some part of you may still remain in the underworld, so to speak. The loss of your child continues to undo the separate singularity of your body and to refashion your sense of its edges. Not as a female biology of cyclical repetition, but a very different phenomenon. This isn’t at all cyclical, and it’s not felt as purely interior to the singular body. Rather, it’s a historical time; the times of the child are contained and sheltered within your own. Fanny Howe’s poem has voiced the start of this process as a temporal-spatial disruption:
Each thing is sewn into time, then
Having a child
Is the most extreme caprice
A smashing of space19
Yet whether they envisage a doubled containing, or a crashing through the neatness of an earlier time into a new dimension, all such reflections raise some tentative notion of a ‘maternal temporality’. But could that be entertained in a way that wouldn’t sink it into an all-engulfing and bodily-based maternalism? Arguably there’s an understanding of the idea of a maternal temporality that wouldn’t make such grandiose universal claims, but instead would spring from a particular affective history. In effect, it’s a temporality of love – if the affection between the living and the now dead had been strong enough. (Or it might even be a temporality of hate – while we might assume that a history of indifference would leave little mark.)
This affective history will extend your usual scope of felt time well beyond your own skin. In the past you had sensed your living child’s time, including the physically interior time of its gestation as well as its early growing and independent life, as if it were internal to your own. You had aged in tandem with it. But now the time of the vanished child has been cut away from your impression of your interior time. As I’d noted, it’s as if, from a set of nested Russian wooden dolls, the innermost ones had fallen out.
Emily Dickinson described as a state of ‘dear retrospect’ that act of looking back over the course of another’s extinguished life, as if you shared it. This retrospect may well occur acutely after a child’s death. For your purchase on your own lifetime would always have included that child’s time as well as yours, however brief or however long its life. After its sudden disappearance, your temporal intuition becomes violently altered by the scooping away of that doubled sense of time that you’d lived in before, if without always being aware of it. Yet in this same moment of subtraction, the dead one, although now sheared away from your old conjoined temporality, now comes to re-inhabit your newly arrested time vividly, as an incorporated presence. In a shared a-temporality.
Although you’re now turned intently toward the death, as you must be, your sentiments are not remotely melancholic. In your new perception of time, there’s this fresh kind of ‘carrying forward’. Your previous history has been reshaped, as your being in time has now become demarcated differently yet again. Its boundaries are extended by and then after the death, as they had once been by and then after the birth. Half bitten away by the child’s disappearance, your time is nevertheless augmented – for the time of the dead is, from now on, freshly contained within your own.
How to think historically about all those myriad lived temporalities that find themselves increasingly resonant and densely layered, precisely because they’ve come to include the times of others? Any nominally single life, be it female or male, may in practice be thickened with the work of carrying and preserving the times of its dead, while it may also be holding the times of its still-living children. Such generational temporalities may sustain – or may erode – their bearers. As these several temporaliti
es are intermingled within each person, they’ll also run across and between people, so to speak, and they will become transpersonal. Multiplied, they can extend their legacies of apathy or of tranquil resignation; of despair or of furious energy; of bitterness or of a withdrawn indifference to the public world.
All this whirring on the page in the name of taking thought – and still the stubborn dead don’t return to put it straight. A suggestion, then, in response to the question of what may characterize the experience of a time suspended, but nevertheless lived, after the death of a child: perhaps it’s just this elaborate, dynamic, silent temporal abundance, even as this is also an abundance in loss. For such a maternal temporality owns its distinctive kinds of erosion, containment, paralysis, and augmentation in its overlapping of the living with the living, and of the living with the dead.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This essay was initially published by Capsule Editions, London, in 2012, and I’m very grateful to its editors, Edmund Hardy and James Wilkes, for supporting its first appearance.
I am thankful to Picador, and especially to Kish Widyaratna for her invaluable help.
Max Porter’s introduction is generous beyond words; I thank him wholeheartedly for it.
ENDNOTES
1 In his ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, c.1627.
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130–55.
3 J. Zihl, D. von Cramon, and N. Mai, ‘Selective disturbance of movement vision after bilateral brain damage’, Brain, 106 (1983), pp. 313–40.
4 Lydia Davis, ‘Grammar Questions’ in Varieties of Disturbance (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), pp. 527–9.
5 As debated by Bertrand Russell’s 1905 ‘theory of descriptions’, in which a bald King of France stars.
6 As in Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 film The Headless Woman, which includes shots inside the shut windows of a car, or in the 1960s and onwards, those very prolonged and steady panning takes in Straub–Huillet movies.
7 But see the work of Lenore C. Terr on children’s time perception, including her paper ‘Time and Trauma’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39 (1984), pp. 633–65.
8 See Merleau-Ponty: ‘To analyze time is not to follow out the consequences of a pre-established conception of subjectivity, it is to gain access, through time, to its concrete structure.’ Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 410.
9 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 426.
10 Ibid., p. 431.
11 Merleau-Ponty, again citing Heidegger, adds: ‘I am myself time, a time which “abides” and does not flow or change, which is what Kant says in various places.’ Phenomenology of Perception, p. 421.
12 Henry King, ‘The Exequy’, in Poems, Elegies, Paradoxes and Sonnets (London: J. G. for Richard Marriot, 1657).
13 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com/113/. [29/01/2019].
14 Helen Vendler comments on this in her Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 358–9.
15 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. by T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 2, p. 908.
16 S. Freud (1929) Letter to Binswanger. In Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960).
17 Don DeLillo, The Body Artist (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 77.
18 Ibid., p. 126.
19 From her book Emergence (Hastings: Reality Street Editions, 2010), p. 13.
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About the Author
Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her visiting positions have included A. D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. She is the author of Say Something Back and lives in London.
Also by Denise Riley
POETRY
Marxism for Infants
No Fee, with Wendy Mulford
Dry Air
Stair Spirit
Mop Mop Georgette
Selected Poems
Say Something Back
PROSE
War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother
‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of Women in History
The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony
Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect
First published 2012 by Capsule Editions
This revised edition first published 2019 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2019 by Picador
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ISBN 978-1-5290-1711-3
Copyright © Denise Riley 2012, 2019
Introduction copyright © Max Porter 2019
The right of Denise Riley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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