I wouldn’t dare summarize this extraordinary book, or claim any definitive understanding of it. I can only tell you a bit about how I came to read it, and what it did for me.
I had written a short novel about grief. One of its central conceits was that two siblings who had lost a parent would speak in one voice, for each other, against each other, in a state of play. A language game of ever-mourning. For them, time was unfixed. Their childhoods, their growing into teenagers then adults, their notional futures as parents and as dead men themselves, this was all present in the nowness of their storytelling.
These children were an autobiographical device. I had been trying to find a way of writing about what it is like to lose a parent. About growing up in cahoots with my time-travelling co-conspirator (my brother) along our illusory and twisting lateral axis, backwards and make-believe-forwards, about what seemed like a distinct way we had of seeing other people, granted to us by the absence. To us it seemed like we had our own time and our own sight, defined by what we shared. And I had wanted to write about that, in attempt to better grasp it.
I had been to interview the poet Alice Oswald. Afterwards, she read my novel and wrote to me. She said she had identified in the book some truth, as regards grief:
‘I’m not really a fiction reader so the first thing I look for in any writing is its truth . . . I’m interested in the being of grief not the feeling of grief.’
She asked if I had read Denise Riley’s essay on a-temporality, on mourning and time. I hadn’t. All I knew of it was that it related to the astonishing poem ‘A Part Song’, which had appeared in the London Review of Books in 2012.
‘A Part Song’ was a piece one doesn’t forget reading. It is a long poem about maternal grief. It is about elegy, but rages against the elegiac mode, and takes its reader on an extraordinary journey. It is profoundly tender, and breathtakingly candid.
A few weeks later Time Lived, Without Its Flow arrived.
I found that it was an essay about the being of grief. Its subject therefore is not death, but arrested time. Riley’s project is to describe and interrogate ‘that acute sensation of being cut off from any temporal flow after the sudden death of your child.’
It is an essay about minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years.
It is also an essay which gathers into itself the poetry, philosophy and being grief of others.
After reading it, I sat for some time with the small book in my hands marvelling that so few pages could have such an impact, could contain so much. I felt sure that I had emerged from the final pages quite changed, and I was grateful. A reader is changed by any text, but here the alteration felt fundamental. I felt I might never read poetry the same way again, and I felt I finally had some clarity about what happens to us who are still here when someone is suddenly gone. I can think of only a handful of works of art which have had such an instantaneous and welcome impact upon me. Truthfully, I might have thrown my own book in the bin had it not already gone to the printers.
Later, I discovered that Time Lived, Without Its Flow is one of those books that has been handed from reader to reader like a secret. And indeed in those first moments after reading I was already listing future readers in my mind. People with whom I’d discussed some of the themes Riley touches on. People whose strong reactions to other very dramatic analyses of grief suggested they might welcome this altogether more candid, pointedly undramatic approach. This rigour and what it generates in the feeling reader.
Many people have told me that they were looking for something – as the poet who doesn’t read much fiction was looking for truth – and that they found it in this essay. I feel the same. Simply put, I was looking for a literary account of bereavement which did more than recreate or reshuffle existing (at best inadequate or boring, at worst idiotic or hopelessly sentimental) ways of writing about grief. I was looking for non-fiction burnished to the point of poetic intensity. I was looking for writing that carried in the very texture of its lines the remade relationship between a person gone and a person remaining. Not about grief, but fashioned of it and for it.
I was looking for a single line as good as this:
‘I work to earth my heart.’
The overwhelming characteristic of this essay is brilliant exactitude. It has such an absence of writerly mannerism or manipulation that one feels one is being looked in the eye and must not turn away. There is no game as there sometimes is when the essay form is used as a gymnastic floor display of a writer’s talents or bibliography. There is just a person getting on with the job she has set herself and never once flinching or hiding behind any authorial scenery. It has the focused clarity of a recitation. The essay shares its process with us, and invites us to experience time with it, but it is also quite private. It is profoundly powerful without so much as a whiff of melodrama. As with Riley’s poems, one needs to read certain lines over and over because of the sheer quality and complexity of the thinking within. Like her poems, there is a gorgeous no-nonsense technical virtuosity while dealing with strange and painful things. Like her poems she arrives at achingly beautiful conclusions without ever employing familiar, kitsch, or syrupy emotive strategies.
Reflecting on the ‘paucity of accounts’ of the arrested time she is experiencing, Riley asks: ‘Wherever is the literature – for it must exist, it’s needed – that deals closely with this strange arresting of time?’
My pulse quickened when I read this. This had been my question too. My obsessive question. And her asking is so deftly personal, and so clear, it reminds me (this can’t be coincidence, or a wishful trick of tonal transference) of my mum. And of my grandmother. It is a way of speaking that is part and parcel of maternal authority and experience. It both subtly contains and moves past a vocabulary of pain in the same quick gesture. It’s the brisk sureness of ‘it must exist’ combined with the open-hearted simplicity of how much it is ‘needed’. How unusual to state so calmly in a critical context what is needed. It struck me as deliciously un-English (as jouissance is, as analysis is?). And it struck me as absolutely correct. ‘Yes!’ I felt like screaming, ‘See? We need it!’ How startling and unusual is Riley’s singular manner of essayism, which balances desire and theoretical rigour so generatively. It’s deep mastery. And then there’s her answer, which is to go on and make it. A literature of consolation. To create what doesn’t exist. Through and with poetry, because it is poetry that best deals with the ‘serious problems of what’s describable’.
Here in this book you hold in your hands are some of the best pages I’ve ever read on what poems are, on the ‘literature of consolation, what that could be or what it might do’.
Underlined by pencil in my copy, Riley writes of a Wordsworth quatrain: ‘Between these stanzas there’s a heavy crash of altered time.’
What a gorgeous thing. Up and into my own emotional universe comes this 220-year-old poem, fresh and brand new. Heaved up and set to walking by the rhythm and energy of Riley’s use of it. She unlocks and shows us the poem in the way Helen Vendler might unlock a line of Dickinson, or T. J. Clark might show us how a Giotto works. It is the scalpel-fine touch of a literary surgeon. And that Riley has turned this sharp tool on herself, on the writer in the world reckoning with classical agony the no-return of her son, means that this is literary criticism as love, and I have always hoped such a thing might exist, just as the poet hoped truth in fiction might exist. And Riley shows us how, in what ways, tentatively or objectively, this must be a maternal project. A continuation of the relationship she had with a living son. She shows us that the ‘time of the dead is, from now on, contained within your own.’ Her son’s time is her own. What a wonderful idea. What a vital corrective to banal narratives of ‘moving on’, this radically un-deathly conception of an altered life. What a promise this might be to the living, that we will contain their time within our own once they are gone. ‘Time is the person’, she writes. How much brighter, wilder and more essential this feels as a formation than any ‘blandly containing’ concept of mourning.
I was profoundly moved when I read these pages. In contemplating Riley’s hesitant portrait of a maternal temporality, I wondered if I might begin to grope my way towards a paternal or fraternal way of holding the still living and the dead together, enduringly related. Sharing time. I understood that this might not necessarily be an esoteric or rarefied thing, or even a literary thing, but a straightforward, domestic thing. A manifestation of care. I could see a way to think it through. Riley’s essay is a permission giver. Each reader runs off with it, like Tom into the garden after the clock has struck thirteen. Ghost siblings, parents, friends, grandparents, the distant lives of others. The grief of groups, of nation states. From such a stunningly compelling analysis, for each of us, a way of being in the broken clock of the world might emerge. In times of spasmodic political upheaval, or extremism of opinion on national matters, I always think of Riley’s transpersonal ‘generational temporalities’. In Riley’s delicate formation we might mourn better. We might speak to each other and make sense of things better if we know better how we are living with the dead.
This is not a sweet book, or an easy book, but I consider it to be a radically kind book.
At the start of ‘A Part Song’, Riley asks: ‘You principle of song, what are you for now . . .’
I have sat with this book, and with Riley’s poems, and I have felt the critical sometimes angry dead read with me, and I have thought slantwise and differently about myself and them, and others, and seen light in areas I had wanted to be flooded dark. And I have rejoiced and rushed to share the song with others. That is what it’s for.
Max Porter, 2019