Abstract
This publication is arresting for many reasons. Its theme is the arrest of time, and we are asked to imagine it even if we have not undergone the kind of loss that precipitates this experience. The fact that there is writing in the weeks after the loss of Denise Riley’s son is already cause for astonishment, just as its intermittent eruption over the period of three years is cause for concern. What happened in all that time when there was no writing? This text starts with those intermittent reflections on the atemporality of mourning the loss of her son, whose name is marked and protected by the abbreviated ‘J’. An essay follows which does not have as its main aim a reflection on death or even on the singular life of J, and which draws on the insights of the entries but also achieves a form in its own right. I am not sure how to describe this essay since it has a phenomenological focus – the experience of finding time arrested in the aftermath of the death of a child – but it is neither pure philosophy nor a collection of poems. Riley produces those on separate occasions, but here she brings forth poetic language, and an occasional reading of a poem, as well as philosophy, but usually couched in metaphor. In some ways, the essay stages a relation between poetic language and philosophy as it seeks to describe the ‘achronicity’ of time that seizes upon a life in a state of nearly ineffable loss. I write ‘nearly’ ineffable, because Riley seeks throughout to pull back from that conclusion, the one that would despair of the descriptive capacities of language to handle such an existential strike on the living. She writes: because to concede at the outset that it’s ‘indescribable’ would only isolate you further, when coming so close to your child’s death is already quite solitary enough; because it’s scarcely rare, for immeasurably vast numbers have known, and will continue to know, this sense of being removed from time, and so your efforts might well be familiar to everyone else who’s also struggled to speak about this vivid state (Riley, 2012: 16).
To the extent that Riley is asking whether language – her language, any language – can rise to this occasion, trying to find within her own language the potential to grasp and convey the depth of loss as it coincides with the loss of lived time. J’s life will not be exposed on the page, but we are nevertheless asked to register the repercussions of that loss in a text that wrestles with description, the poetic, the philosophical, the relation of sound to sequence, the strains on syntax as we know it.
The philosophical strain in this text emerges periodically, but seriously. It is momentarily Hegel, whose account of sense perception requires a sequence. Indexical terms such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ or even ‘here’ or ‘now’ work through repetition. They also take leave of the immediate space and time to which they refer at the moment that they indicate them because such terms can – and must – equally well refer to another instance of time and another space, but only at a later time. We come to understand and rely upon that indexical function through its repetition even as, oddly, it is never tied to the moment to which it points. Sense-making, though, depends upon that reiteration of the indexical; it orders the world in a series of spaces and times and relies upon sequential repetition to work. The identity of the object requires this kind of sequential understanding of its continuation through a series of reiterated spatial and temporal coordinates. For Hegel, there has to be a time in which sense-making is possible, but also the continuity of the thing, or an object (including eventually a living other). In the philosophical school of phenomenology derived from Husserl, especially his Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness ([1905] 2019), time informs the essential structures of consciousness that make possible the unified perception of an object. This unification takes place across successive moments as consciousness retains the past moments of the object and anticipates its future ones. The object unfolds successively as consciousness retains and anticipates its enduring form, so that it is equally true that the object discloses itself to consciousness as it is that consciousness in some sense builds its object. One might conclude that without the continuity of the object, the capacity for consciousness to live in time is challenged. When the object is a living other, a loved one, a son or a daughter, then the challenge is more acute, since the object is irreplaceable. To the extent that one’s own sense of time depended upon the enduring time of that other, the death of the other takes one out of time. The self lives or dwells in time, in its own duration, knowing that it may cease to live and become an objective fact for others. When it loses time, duration, it also loses whatever enduring self it may have.
A longer essay might relate this to the problem of death as the vanishing of object constancy, but for now let us note how this phenomenology of time-consciousness works in this remarkable essay by Denise Riley.
Husserl thought that the philosopher had to suspend everyday life in order to see the essential structures of consciousness in their relationship to objects (intentionality). He called this the ‘epoché’. Merleau-Ponty (1964) challenged this as a methodological necessity, arguing that it is within the conditions of life that we find ourselves exposed to the essential conditions of conscious experience. This happens when the duration we take for granted as the horizon of our knowing orientation exposes itself to be seen from within temporal experience itself. Death, as it were, can drive us into the epoché: ‘temporal dimensions […] bear each other out and ever confine themselves to making explicit what was implied in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion or thrust that is subjectivity itself’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 422).
In his chapter ‘Temporality’ in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty includes as an epigraph a citation from Heidegger’s Being and Time: ‘The sense of Dasein [human existence] is temporality’ (1964: 411). As Merleau-Ponty himself puts it, ‘[consciousness that] is the very action of temporalization—of flux, as Husserl has it—a self anticipatory … flow which never leaves itself’ (1964: 426). He is aware that his philosophical analysis depends here on metaphor, and that that can produce a problem: [W]e say that time passes or flows by [on dit que le temps passe ou s’écoule]. We speak of the course of time. The water that I see rolling by was made ready a few days ago in the mountains, with the melting of the glacier; it is now in front of me and makes its way into the sea into which it will finally discharge itself. If time is similar to a river, it flows [coule de passer] from the past towards the present and the future (Merleau-Ponty, 1964: 411).
In Merleau-Ponty, as in Riley, one approaches this sense through a series of figures, all of which approach the phenomenon that is difficult for language to render. There seems to be no way to describe the arrest of time’s flow without figures of some kind. Even the idea of an ‘arrest’, which carries over from the cardiac arrest and associates with acts of police power, is bound up with metaphoricity in a way that we perhaps already expect from ‘flow’. Further, the ontological formulation, introduced twice, and echoing Merleau-Ponty, is built in the course of the essay through a series of figural descriptions. The notion that time is the person, or, rather, that time ‘is’ the person, foregrounds the copula within scare quotes and calls attention to an unusual ontological conclusion. The poetic and the philosophical converge at points where this ontological conclusion is proffered. For instance, the arrest of time is described as a vanishing of life-giving fluid, perhaps embryonic: ‘the surrounding fluid of intuitive time is gone’. The figure and the concept work in tandem, though they do not readily collapse into one another. The relation between the two is strained by the persistent question: how can the experience of this loss be described in language, and how can it be offered to a reader? The point is not to push towards the realisation that it is all ineffable, though that word certainly has its place in the phenomenology of loss, of this loss. Rather, the language continues to strive towards greater precision, to the extent that that proves possible, given that ‘language does not want to allow the thought’ (Riley, 2012: 60). Language seems to depend upon this sense of time that has been ‘arrested’, so the quandary is quite serious. In pursuing the question of what is describable here, about the linguistic limits of what can be conveyed, the challenge proves to be both conceptual and figural. This loss levels a challenge to syntax, and to grasping what is being said, and so the reader must bear with syntactical wreckage that scrambles sequence. And yet, there emerges an opening onto a lived vexation that, for Riley, has a status that is prior to both elegiac lament and conceptual knowledge. This condition is approached from several directions, and no one pathway prevails. It is bound up with the writing about this ‘achronicity’ or this ‘crystalline suspension’ in which ‘one moment will not carry you to the next’. Indeed, it is unclear what, if anything, could carry you to the next moment. There is no forward motion, for that would be to depend, however implicitly, on a lived sense of futurity that has vacated whatever is left of a sense of life.
If time is the person, and time is arrested by the loss of a loved one bound up with who one is and how one lives in the world, the surviving person is also arrested or stopped but in the midst of something nominally called life. It would be perhaps too quick to invoke melancholia according to which the one who suffers the loss becomes a certain kind of loss herself. If in mourning the loss of the loved one impoverishes the world, in melancholia it is the surviving and abandoned one who experiences herself as impoverished. The early Freudian line would have us track the internal workings of a super-ego. But the Freud of The Ego and the Id, and the Freud appropriated by Derrida’s The Work of Mourning, would suggest, with Riley, that the lost one is incorporated into the survivor, literally altering the body of the one who now – or again – carries the child as a presence both lost and vital. As she writes, ‘It’s not the same “I” who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person’ (Riley, 2012: 50).
Riley will not tell us about her son, and rightly so: he is not ours to know or to speculate upon. And yet, she comes to reach towards a reader to reflect upon a condition that we may possibly share, or come to share, that of being stripped of the sensuous and temporal conditions of personhood within life itself. Wordsworth’s 1789 quatrain functions as a cipher in the midst of the essay, one aptly marked by Max Porter, who has written an extraordinary introduction to this volume: 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. (Wordsworth quoted by Riley, 2012 : 67))
The use of figurative language to bring the experience into communicability may be thought of as part of a literature of consolation. Figurative language recasts the ordinary syntax of life only to more acutely communicate an emotional reality. In the first chapter of her writing, she remarks, ‘In these first days I see how rapidly the surface of the world, like a sheet of water that’s briefly agitated, will close again silently and smoothly over a death’ (Riley, 2012: 19). That the surface of the world is seen as a sheet of water briefly agitated exposes something of the world’s shocking persistence in light of this death. And yet the world does persist, and that is also its own astonishment. Riley does not want her text to furnish something ‘poetic’, if by that we mean a beautiful piece of writing that somehow redeems the loss. And yet, there is no way of moving forward with language without the analogies, the figures, perverse turns of perception that also finally ally with philosophy and, specifically, ontology: At the death of your child, you see how the edge of the living world gives onto burning whiteness. This edge is clean as a strip of guillotined celluloid film. First came the intact negative full of blackened life in shaded patches, then abruptly, this milkiness. This candid whiteness, where a life stopped. Nothing ‘poetic’, not the white radiance of eternity – but sheer non-being, which is brilliantly plain (Riley, 2012: 20).