Time Lived, Without Its Flow by Denise Riley

Author:Denise Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Two years and ten months later:

No time at all. No time.

Three years after:

And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.

What follows is a postscript, drawing on them, about what I’ve had to learn about living in arrested time.

Postscript

What can we do with such solitary experiences of violently new and hitherto unsuspected states of temporal perception; what sense can we try to make of them? To show what I mean about ‘time lived but without its flow’, I’d have needed to do yet more reporting on the visceral state of being thrown outside time for a period of years. That state may sound unreal, implausible. Our customary intuitions of time strongly suggest that it would be both perceptually impossible and practically unliveable. Yet it’s surely a state that’s common enough, and is indeed manageable. Inside their senses of arrested time, millions must live today, and have lived. The deaths of their children are apt to induce profound dislocation in the experienced time of those left alive. They are thrown into ‘timeless time’. However, despite the fact that such human losses occur constantly, this ensuing state of a-temporality seems largely to escape recorded notice.

For to outlive a sudden death makes it evident that your ordinary time, which had once ‘flowed’, had never been much like a clear stream, or a fluid held in glass. That old kind of lived time was no simple medium, and nothing finely transcendent. It had always been thick. It must have been another aspect of ‘the flesh of the world’; active, changeable, and formative.2 Now, though, your distinct sensation of a newly halted time – or rather, of a non-time – has blown away that unremarked thickness, and instead has dropped you down in its own still landscape of brilliant clarity. Perhaps yours might be cited as a version of akinetopsia, that rare condition in which you mislay your perception of motion, like the patient who found pouring a cup of tea difficult ‘because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier’.3 Nevertheless you find that you survive perfectly well in this new non-time of sheer stasis. Rather than being just a temporal swerve, it’s more of a stepping-outside the entire sheltering sky of temporality itself – into a not unpleasant state of tremendous simplicity, of easy candour and bright emptiness.

You’ve slipped into a state of a-chronicity. From its serene perspective you realize, to your astonishment, that to dwell inside a time that had the property of ‘flowing’ was merely one of a range of possible temporal perceptions. For your time can pause, and you with it – though you’re left sharply alive within its stopping. Your apprehension of sequence itself is halted. Where you have no impression of any succession of events, there is no linkage between them, and no cause. Anything at all might follow on from any one instant. You are tensed for anything – or, equally, are poised for nothing. No plans can be entertained seriously, although you keep up an outward show of doing so.

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