Time Lived, Without Its Flow

by Denise Riley

This essay reflects on how perceptions of time may be altered after the sudden death of a child, and why inhabiting this sharply new temporality stops one’s habitual modes of telling. Neither tearful memoir nor testament of hope, the essay charts a vivid experience of such a suspended time and discovers an unsuspected intimacy between time and language. Although a life inside this ‘arrested’ time resists being described, it is neither exceptional or pathological; to outlive one’s child is historically common enough. But, because of this felt suspension of the usual flow of time which enables narration, it leaves few literary traces.

Genres: Nonfiction, Poetry, Memoir, Grief, Essays, Philosophy, Biography

78 pages, Paperback

First published February 10, 2012

About the author

Denise Riley (born 1948) is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s.

Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, "identity", and philosophy of language, are recognised as an important contribution to feminism and contemporary philosophy. She was Professor of Literature with Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and is currently A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She was formerly Writer in Residence at Tate Gallery London, and has held fellowships at Brown University and at Birkbeck, University of London. Among her poetry publications is Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair (1996). She lives in London.

Reviews

[Camilla Holm · Rating 5 out of 5]

After the tragic and shocking death of my young son, I found this little book and I keep it on the table beside my bed, so that I can reach for it when I need it. Nowhere else have I found any read that I can relate to as closely as this.
The best and most important parts for me, are the personal "notes" that the author makes during the first three years after her sudden loss of a son.

[Marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

el mensaje contenido en todas estas palabras te transforma. sólo puedo decir que me siento muy agradecida por haberlo leído porque he encontrado en él compañía, consuelo, y comprensión

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

What Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” does for sickness, this does for bereavement. Specifically, Riley, whose son Jake died suddenly of a heart condition, examines how the experience of time changes during grief. “I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life,” she opens. In short vignettes written from two weeks to three years after her son’s death, she reflects on how her thinking and feelings have morphed over time. She never rests with an easy answer when a mystery will do instead. “What if” questions and “as if” imaginings proliferate. Poetry – she has also written an exquisite book of poems, Say Something Back, responding to the loss of Jake – has a role to play in the acceptance of this new reality: “rhyme may do its minute work of holding time together.”

Max Porter provides a fulsome introduction to this expanded version of Riley’s essay, which first appeared in 2012. Time Lived, without Its Flow meant a lot more to him than it did to me; I preferred Riley’s poetic take on the same events. Still, this is sure to be a comfort for the bereaved.

Some favorite passages:

“I’ll try to incorporate J’s best qualities of easy friendliness, warmth, and stoicism, and I shall carry him on in that way. Which is the only kind of resurrection of the dead that I know about.”

“I don’t experience him as in the least dead, but simply as ‘away’. Even if he’ll be away for my remaining lifetime. My best hope’s to have a hallucination of his presence when I’m dying myself.”

[La Central · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ante El tiempo vivido sin su fluir, nos encontramos con un ensayo de carácter filosófico nada sencillo, nada dulce, pero profundamente transformador, como apuntala en su prólogo el escritor británico Max Porter: “tras leer las últimas páginas, había salido bastante cambiado de la experiencia; me sentí agradecido”.

Las palabras de su autora, Denise Riley, se funden en el dolor visceral fruto de la súbita pérdida de su hijo, y en la reflexión pausada y cognitiva en la que Riley se sumerge al saberse deambulando por un tiempo no lineal, tan cercano a la temporalidad del mundo de los vivos como de los que se van y desaparecen, dejando tras de si una sensación carnal de ser fuera de un tiempo no mundano, lejos de cualquier modo verbal conocido que nombre su estado de parálisis pura. ¿Cómo podría seguir el fluir el tiempo cuando sientes que dentro de ti, un tiempo íntimo se ha congelado?

Afanándose en enterrarse el corazón, la escritora nos habla desde el abismo que hay entre la vida y la muerte, y encarna el tiempo del duelo, un tiempo alterado de la vida, al que se le han dedicado demasiados pocos textos para ser una vivencia tan universal. Y ella, Denise Riley lo hace de una forma hermosa, sin caer en el melodrama, desde la sinceridad de su propia experiencia, dolorosa y luminosa." Andrea Vásquez

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Whenever I need to mention to someone that ‘my son died’ it still sounds to me like a self-dramatising lie. Tasteless. Or it’s an act of disloyalty to him. For I don’t experience him as in the least dead, but simply as ‘away.’ Even if he’ll be away for my remaining lifetime. My best hope’s to have a hallucination of his presence when I’m dying myself. Perhaps only through forgetting the dead could it become possible to allow them to become dead. To finally be dead. And that could only follow — but only after Time had taken the initiative here by itself–from consigning them to a Time that had decided to resume its old flow. Of its own accord. When or if this may ever happen, I can’t know. And can’t want it. Time ‘is’ the person. You’re soaked through with it. This enormous lurch into arrested time isn’t some philosophical brooding about life’s fragility. It’s not the same ‘I’ who lives in her altered sense of no-time, but a reshaped person. And I don’t know how she’ll turn out. If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed by the fact of your child’s death. That you can’t edit.”

Stunning, heartbreaking, wondrous. These adjectives seem not nearly enough, which perhaps makes them exactly well suited to describe this beautiful achievement from the never-not-brilliant Denise Riley. I can’t believe what a masterpiece of grief work it is.

[But_i_thought_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a phenomenally well written and moving account of grief (and the experience of a-temporality in the context of grief) penned by poet Denise Riley in response to the sudden death of her son.

Let me direct your attention to Max Porter's review of this book which does it far better justice than I could.

[Luna Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entre el libro de ideas, la memoria y la poesía. No es exactamente el libro de un duelo, sino más bien el análisis del paso del tiempo durante un estado de duelo. Lo mejor, sin duda, el epílogo, además de los poemas finales, que son dolorosísimos a la vez que tiernos.

[Jesús Santana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libros sobre el dolor y la pérdida de un ser querido hay muchos, siempre menciono “Te me moriste” de José Luis Peixoto como uno de los más duros y hermosos que he leído. Recientemente leí “Si la muerte te quita algo, devuélvelo” de Naja Marie Carl editado por Sexto Piso, una obra que ronda entre el ensayo poético y lo que significa el luto, el no entender o aceptar lo que ha sucedido. Anoche he leído de un tirón y tomando notas “El tiempo vivido, sin su fluir” de Denise Riley, poeta y filósofa británica, otro libro que se suma a la larga bibliografía sobre este tema.

Riley toca el luto y el duelo desde una visión filosófica y existencial, en especial lo que significa el paso del tiempo para los que se quedan sin ese ser querido, en el caso de ser un hijo, su hijo quien fallece. El proceso de avanzar en ese campo minado que es la falta de ese ser tan importante para una madre siendo analizado con notas que fue tomando a medida que avanzaban los días y de cómo física, mental y psicológicamente es un proceso que no se puede dejas atrás. Proceso atemporal de la persona para la que las horas o días parecieran estáticos y a la vez un avance más vacío y doloroso. Como de igual manera es imposible hablar de él en pasado y sigue siendo un presente para los que sobreviven a esta ausencia, en especial cuando es una muerte inesperada. Utilizando ejemplos poéticos y literarios de Henry King, Wordsworth, Don De Lillo, Fanny Howe o Emily Dickinson muestra como un pasado histórico de golpe inesperado se convierte en un presente estático. El cambio del pasado ahora es en un callejón oscuro para el futuro, esa versión fallida de seguir adelante del que tanto hablan todos a quien sufre ese adiós.

“El tiempo vivido, sin s fluir” se editó originalmente en el año 2012 en un tiraje muy limitado, es en 2019 por la importancia filosófica del texto que se decide recuperar y presentar de nuevo con un epilogo de la autora y el poema de nombre “A dos voces”. En una estupenda traducción de Núria Molines quien recientemente también tradujo la dolorosa “Elegía para Sita” de Kate Millett, ambos editados por Alpha Decay.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

This is Denise's memoir-essay-mourning diary following the death of her son. It's all the air in the room. Broadly, the thesis (I don't want to call it that?), or a part of what she's looking to articulate is the experience of living in another time, in mourning, beyond-mourning. Time is arrested, without its flow. Throughout she's impressively practical, drawing attention to the strange gap in writing from parents about the deaths of their children, compared to the relative wealth of writing about dead parents & partners. She's above and beyond, I've not the justice for it

[laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

what can we do with such solitary experiences of violently new and hitherto unsuspected states of temporal perception?

denise riley’s mastery of language absolutely knocks me over with awe – a real sense of measure that makes you realise, oh yeah, written language is a communication device, and more relevant than writing being pretty is writing being precise. i will slightly shamefully admit i was expecting this to be a Grief Book & was taken totally by surprise by its still, ‘de-dramatizing’ prose. it’s not a Grief Book at all (i’m side-eyeing the marketing team that has clearly gone for that angle.) it’s a document of a profoundly un-documentable state of being – ‘this curious sense of being pulled right out of time, as if beached in a clear light’, after a sudden death one is very close to.

i think my favourite thing about riley’s prose is the way she prods at the limits of what can be conveyed by language while never being hampered by those limits at all. she doesn’t write about death so much as about what happens to life when death touches it, & she continually draws the conclusion that our received understanding of the world, filtered so thoroughly through language, is what makes death unintelligible, a form of ‘cognitive violence’. over & over, she acknowledges the paradoxes of attempting to describe a state of temporal arrest when language, so rigidly structured around the onward motion of time, slips off that state completely. but she does it anyway, in a way that makes it seem easy, & in a way that makes it clear she’s describing a state that’s violently physical & untouched by intellect or reason. can’t get my head around the enormity of that accomplishment, actually.

which is also why it feels a little silly trying to do any writing about this book at all, when the experience of reading was very physical, very un-cerebral, painful but less so than i’d thought, and slightly breathless throughout.

(also contains a line which i have been thinking about every single day from march 2020, no exaggeration. 'you can’t, it seems, take the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity.' wish i was less intimately aware of that.)

[Apurva Nagpal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time Lived, Without it’s Flow is a deeply personal and moving memoir/essay by Denise Riley, which she started by penning down her thoughts after her son’s sudden death.

She mentions in the book that she isn’t writing about or talking “death” but how the loss of a loved one takes us away from the liner flow of the passing time. You live or rather learn to live, hoping for their return but aware that the hollow they’ve left can never be filled.

I found the book both raw with emotions and tender, beautifully written! There’s nothing you can compare to or even bring close to the inconsolable loss of a child and Denise Riley’s account puts together her minutes, days, months and years of arrested time in less than 100 pages.
For anyone having lost a loved one and trying to find a literary companion, this is the one to go for!

I highly recommend this and give it 4/5.

[Montse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta pequeña maravilla, de apenas 96 páginas, explica ese tiempo extraño, incomprensible y doloroso que sigue a la pérdida de un hijo. Ese detenerse el tiempo y por tanto la vida de los que se quedan. La extrañeza porque el que se ha ido no vuelve, como si hubiera partido a un largo viaje, la ausencia de llamadas. El dolor de la pérdida expresado como el cese del fluir del tiempo.

[jL · Rating 5 out of 5]

El ensayo más bonito y preciso que he leído en toda mi vida.

[Renita D'Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Poignant. Thought-provoking.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has irreversibly changed the way I think about poetry and how I understand living in/experiencing time. I wholeheartedly agree with Max Porter’s suggestion that ‘From such a stunningly compelling analysis, for each of us, a way of being in the broken clock of the world might emerge’.
Riley speculates on ‘the possibility of a literature of consolation’, and this is exactly what she offers through this delicate laying bare the incomprehensibility of grief. The final section—in which Riley takes apart the structure of poetry through an interpretation of our experience of living and recollecting—abruptly altered my appreciation of writing. The idea that rhyme echoes the slippage of memory in the process of recalling and replacing, but never removing the ‘gap’ filled by the replacement, shunted my whole perspective on life and language. Having loved Riley’s meditations on motherhood in Marxism for Infants, this essay felt to me like a beautifully tragic return to the same themes through a completely altered perspective. This shift perfectly illustrates the shift that Riley describes—the utter dislocation of maternal time, space and identity after the death of the child. She is just brilliant.

Max: ‘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’’

‘I’ll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life’

‘Any written or spoken sentence would naturally lean forward towards its development and conclusion, unlike my own paralysed time’

‘What follows is what I set down at the time at infrequent intervals, in the order that I lived it’

‘So intricate and singular a living thing can’t just vanish from the surface of life: that would run counter to all your cumulative experience’

‘a strong impression that I’ve been torn off, brittle as any dry autumn leaf, liable to be blown into the tracks in the underground station, or to crumble as someone brushes by me in this public world where people rush about loudly, with their astonishing confidence. Each one of them a candidate for sudden death, and so helplessly vulnerable [...] Later everyone on the street seems to rattle together like dead leaves in heaps’

‘I work to earth my heart’

‘This state is physically raw [...] It thuds into you. Inexorable carnal knowledge’

‘If writing had once been a modest work of shaping and correcting, now all your small mastery has been smashed’

‘At times of great tension, we may well find ourselves hunting for some published resonances in literature of what we’ve come to feel [...] the possibility of a literature of consolation’

‘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’

‘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’

‘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’

‘rhyme may do its minute work of holding time together, making a chain of varied sound-stitches across time’

‘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’

‘All this whirring on the page in the name of taking thought—and still the stubborn dead don’t return to put it straight’

[Sara Figueras · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solo pienso en todas aquellas emociones de la autora que no encontraron palabras para ser trasladadas al papel. Qué doloroso y qué tierno a la vez. No tanto un acto de consuelo como un acto de amor en su mayor expresión.

[danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't know how to review this book so i'll just leave some of my favourite bits here:

"there's no specific noun for a parent of a dead child; nothing like the terms for other losses such as 'orphan' or 'widower'. no single word exists, either, for an 'adult child' - an awkward phrase which could suggest a large floppy-limbed doll. for such a historically common condition as outliving your own child, the vocabulary is curiously thin. the same phrases recur. for instance, many kindly onlookers will instinctively make use of this formula: 'i can't imagine what you are feeling.' there's a paradox in this remark, for it's an expression of sympathy, yet in the same breath it's a disavowal of the possibility of empathy. undoubtedly it's very well meant, if (understandably) fear-filled. people's intentions are good; a respect for the severity of what they suppose you're enduring, and so a wish not to claim to grasp it. still i'd like them to try to imagine; it's not so difficult. even if it's inevitable, or at any rate unsurprising, that those with dead children are regarded with concealed horror, they don't need to be further shepherded into the inhuman remote realms of the 'unimaginable'."

"i work to earth my heart."

"his sudden death has dropped like a guillotine blade to slice through my old expectation that my days would stream onwards into my coming life. instead i continue to sense daily life as paper-thin. as it is. but this cut through any usual feeling of chronology leaves a great blankness ahead."

"all my furious study and speculation is the uselessness of thought trying to rewind time, to master what cannot be mastered. and this thought does nothing to stop it."

"in your imagination, you will endlessly witness the instant of your child's dying. but the accompanying struggle to realistically assess your degree of responsibility for the death needn't entail your 'masochism'. it seems vital to not flinch from the former, while not sliding into the latter. and to get that distinction clear, just for yourself, will demand a forensic labour. to take responsibility; the word means, to weigh things up. that testing the weight doesn't have to be a labour of guilt. does it?"

"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.'

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 inferiority has utterly drained away, and you are pure skin stretched tightly out over vacancy. you abide."

"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 realise 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."

[Roger Irish · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very short book, written after the sudden death of the author's son. She is a poet and a philosopher and, as you might imagine, consequently this is no ordinary book about death. In fact, it's an extraordinary book. Further, it's not exactly about death. I'll let the author explain: "I'll not be writing about death, but about an altered condition of life."

This is not a sentimental book - at times it is quite stark, but it is a sharply-drawn, concise, account of the impact of the loss of a loved one on those left behind.

The book is broadly in two parts: the first part written following the death, at two weeks, then one month, then five months, and so on, up until three years after. The second part, the Postscript, written "some years later", is less raw, perhaps less direct, certainly more thoughtful; the product of the author's poetical and philosophical sensibilities.

As I watch my wife imperceptibly slip closer to death, the changes to the perception of time of which the author speaks, are all too apparent.

"The plainest simplest horror from which the mind flinches away: never to see that person again."

Though I have read the book, it is too much to take in, on first reading. I shall keep it close by, and return to it, frequently, as unravelling time demands.

If this book has some relevance to you, then read it, it will change your thinking.

"I work to earth my heart."

[Bryony Doran · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such an amazing and courageous piece of writing. It asks the unimaginable: How would you, could you cope if you lost a child? I think it was such a generous act on Denise Riley's account to share what she went through and I hope the writing of it helped her as much as it must have helped people who read it. I didn't know if I would be strong enough to read it but I was and I am glad I did. I gave my original copy away to someone who had lost a son but then I felt bereft that it was no longer on my shelves so I bought another copy

[Ivan Raykov · Rating 5 out of 5]

If there were a hierarchy of Loss, loosing your child must be the the most profound and inexplicable one. This short but incredibly illuminating and honest book takes you through the labyrinth of grief. It is unique in its explanation of the change in time-perceptions that occur in our brains when confronted with this Loss. What makes this book precious is its blunt, heart-braking explanation on how the author copes with her "arrested time".
This is some of the bravest writing I've ever read.

[nam · Rating 5 out of 5]

surreal that i read this the exact same time last year

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creo que jamás he visto a nadie expresarse tan bien y desarrollar así conceptos tan abstractos y tan subjetivamente subjetivos. Es súper doloroso pero también abrumadoramente bonito.

El terror más puro y descarnado que hay tras el concepto de dejar de existir, muy diferente del concepto de morir. La imposibilidad de separar nuestra identidad de su temporalidad. La capacidad de la literatura de consolar. Lo bonito que es encontrar lo que sentimos y vivimos escrito en palabras de otras. Y cientos de cosas más que no sé cómo es posible que quepan en un texto tan cortito.

También nos damos cuenta de que continuaremos inconsolables y que nunca encontraremos con qué rellenar adecuadamente el hueco. Así debe ser. Es el único modo de perpetuar los amores a los que no deseamos renunciar.

[Ilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the unimaginable loss of losing a child.
It’s mostly about being unmoored in time, feeling disconnected from the months, seasons, years. It’s extemporaneous notes of a mother dealing with something that shouldn’t be.

This is a book about feeling deeply unmoored from your life, from a sense of belonging, from feeling like you have a right to do fun things, smile, enjoy your life.

I liked the etymological notes. That there are words for being an orphan, being a widow/widower, but there’s no word for being a living parent of a dead child.

And how people say “I can’t imagine what you’re going to through,” but it’s really more like they don’t want to. Their eyes and whole being skims over and repels thinking about it.

Good book. You read.

(Found this as a recommended from an unlikely source - an inspiration for Ministry of Time, which was a lightweight Scifi tinged bureaucratic time travel romance.)

[Ihes · Rating 4 out of 5]

"El tiempo es la persona, estás empapado de él. Una manera de vivir en el reloj roto del mundo. La curiosa sensación de que te hayan extraído del tiempo, como si te hubieras quedado clavada bajo un foco de luz. La ingenua blancura yerma donde una vida se detuvo. Nada poético, nada que ver con el radiante blanco de la eternidad, puro no-ser, intensamente monocromo. Me afano en enterrarme el corazón. Ahora el tiempo es una meseta. Tampoco piensas que una vida dejará su eco flotando en el aire, como un rastro de música; nada tan dulcemente melancólico. No hay tiempo, en absoluto. No hay tiempo. Nada ha cambiado, y todo ha cambiado".

[Aishani]

Most people probably picked this up when they were grieving a loss. Then you get hit by the author’s unflinching, self-aware examination of her own deep, deep loss. I cannot possibly rate this. It’s very well written and precise. It’s a heavy read, both because of the nature of the loss (it was written as a companion piece for a poetry book about the death of her adult son) and the philosophical content.

I hope I never have an occasion in my life where I “need” to read this again. That being said, what a great little book.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Riley’s notes on grief as she gropes her way around what it means to still be alive after her son’s death, what has changed and how little remains the same. Riley subverts the trite conventions of grief as she grasps and gasps at meaning, her sense and concept of time becomes a-temporal. Indeed the language to adequately convey this change of state simply doesn’t exist. But Riley does try, try, try again.

Max Porter’s introduction is valuable, accurately describing the work as ‘an essay about the bring of grief’. He also picks out the same line that stood out to me (and is on the cover): ‘I work to earth my heart.’

Complex and inexplicable.

[daniella ❦ · Rating 2 out of 5]

i don't think im built to read prose like this

[Mar +9 · Rating 4 out of 5]

És un llibre molt delicat, com un sospir a cau d'orella que alhora transmet molt de mal, un bisturí sobre la pèrdua d'un fill i com et deixa en un estat de no-vida, no-temps, no-res.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second read completely holds up to how I remember it. Brilliant book.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to do Denise Riley’s essay/ memoir ‘Time Lived, Without Its Flow’ justice in a short review like this. Riley s a poet and philosopher and writes about the tragic loss of her son. The essay is linked to one of Riley’s poems ‘A Part Song’ which I read a number of times while reading her essay. She describes how her experience of time has changed since the death of her child. Time has not stopped, but it has lost its temporal flow. ‘Time Lived Without Its Flow’ opens with notes made by Riley at different times after the death of her son. This is followed by a postscript in which she reflects on her experience. She reflects on how everything has changed for her, time, language and her work as a writer. While this is a work of grief, it mostly reflects on life rather than on death. ‘Time Lived, Without is Flow’ is beautifully written and thoughtfully put together. A balance is created by the personal notes of the author and the postscript that follows. The introduction to this book is written by Max Porter, the autor of ‘Grief is the Thing With Feathers’. For people who loved this novel, I would definitely recommend Riley’s essay. Both works look for a way to reflect the experience of grief rather than just try to put it into words. Thank you to Picador for sending me a copy of this book.