"One Minute Before" (1960)

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888)

"Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose." "Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note." "And if he cut it fine enough?"

“What is going on with him? He is tampering with the flow of the world’s events and circumstances. That is what is going on with him. He is tampering with the nature of reality . . . ” — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny

Philip Henry Gosse was one of the more interesting English natural scientists of the nineteenth century. As a name, he is probably best known for having fallen under his son’s patricidal pen, since Gosse, father and son, are the familial agonists of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907). Gosse the son was a liar with a bad memory, and Gosse the father was a colorful combination of naturalist-of-genius, prolific popularizer of science, and full-throated evangelical Christian.

Gosse’s widest-reaching legacy is no doubt his coinage of the word aquarium, which kicked off the whole hobby of keeping aquariums in the nineteenth century, but his relevance to Lafferty lies in his nutty 1857 book, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. There, Gosse proposed a novel concept, what he called prochronism. He used the adjective prochronic to describe features that appear to be evidence of a long past, even if that past never occurred. If God created a world ex nihilio, it would necessarily include built-in signs of history, reasoned Gosse. There would be fossils, growth rings, and geological strata, and Adam would have had a navel. This contrasts with another kind of time after the creation point. Gosse called that diachronic time.

The notion of prochronic time is something Lafferty returns to fairly often. It appears in short stories. It is major theme in the Argo legend. It is very useful to have a name for this part of his project. For example, the Armageddon Operas of Enniscorthy Sweeny are prochronic productions: new pasts come into prochronic existence and diachronic inhabitants puzzle over the timeline. To give another example, Pilgrim's death jumps in Not To Mention Camels are jumps into prochronic timelines and his adventures are diachronic time mishaps. In Arrive at Easterwine, we read about geology and the amnesia gash as well as the “stroke of searing white light.”

In the unpublished, prenucleation story “One Minute Before,” readers meet Bob Biedermann and Jim Healey. The two men have known each other for a long time—or they haven’t—for the story takes place outside of time in what the story calls the instant.

The two men seem to be present at a 67th precinct committee dinner. Time has seemingly stopped. Biedermann says that "nobody moved, nobody breathed," while other attendees are frozen in positions of rising from the table or manhandling chairs:

It had been a little dinner, a meeting of some sort. It must have been. And some of them were still sitting; some had their hands on the table's edge to rise; some were half risen; and some were actually standing and seeming at the business of manhandling their chairs out of the way. Yet nobody moved, nobody breathed; and it was as if they had never done so.

He and Healey converse in a way that does not involve physical speech ("not talk out of the mouth"). Healey estimates the meeting has lasted ninety minutes through an "analysis of the accumulation of cigar and cigarette ash."

Healey, the philosophically minded of the two men, says that their current state is an interlude out of time that will leave no memory once it concludes. He compares the creation of the world to an artist painting a woman: a subject is depicted with a history and a room with furniture that does not have a diachronic causal chain:

When an artist paints a picture he makes a beginning, but he makes the beginning in the middle, as it were. If the picture is of a beautiful woman (and it should be) he begins with her as she is; normally he does not go back to show her birth . . . If she is in a room and that nominally furnished, he does not go back and show the manufacture of the furniture . . . Yet the room and the person or persons in it are complete with history and memories.

The men hash out the possibility that the universe was not made billions of years ago but was instead "made complete with its past history." That would include fossils and human memories. Healey even says that the Creator might save trouble by "setting the beginning very near the end."

The men then speculate that the beginning of the universe might be tapped in by a small gavel rather than a trumpet blast. At 9:58 CST on a Tuesday evening, this happens. The gavel taps, and the universe is "created in full stride with all its memories and vestiges and appurtenances." The creation point merges with the continuum, making the built-in past the real past. Following this event, the committee dinner ends, and we learn from Biedermann that Healey has forgotten the entire experience.

Despite this looking like a simple chestnut, or just the kind of thing boys in their first whiskerage, as Lafferty puts it, talk about, the metaphysical puzzles it creates are fairly deep (see the resource at the end of this post). Lafferty writes:

Well then, the great saurians need never have been; only the fossil memory of them need have been. Seven Troys did not rise and fall; only the record of them was made in the Earth when it was made. Ronsard never rimed; only his books were made all at one time when the world was made . . . and the mother who bore you was not born, nor were you. Debts never contracted for would still have to be paid, and the outcome of wars never fought would still determine the present and the future.

The first thing I would note is that the idea of prochronic time is off-limits for any number of (all?) sciences. Take two examples: geology, with its uniformitarian processes, or cosmology, with something like the cosmic background radiation. They are disciplines that must constitute themselves by excluding their possibility of prochronic time, but, as Bertrand Russell famously argued, it is not logically impossible that the world began ten minutes ago. Russell said it just wasn’t very interesting. Lafferty disagreed.

But why? This story helps answer that question. It is not really about what legitimizes knowledge of processes, prochronic or diachronic. It is about the huge issues of creation and eschatology, specifically how they relate to one another, two themes that Lafferty never tires of exploring.

Nowadays, my preferred way of understanding the “frozen interlude” experienced by Biedermann and Healey (as part Lafferty’s larger project) is through Origen. I would not argue that Lafferty has Origen on his mind here, but one can see that, when Lafferty thinks about these issues Origen’s influence is present. Lafferty’s own views cohere with Origen’s on eschatology, and his interest in metaphysical aeons is obviously derived from his reading of him. Like many influenced by Greek thought, Origen conceived of eternity as transcending time entirely. Lafferty, of course, agrees, as we see in every piece of fiction he writes that touches the topic, even when he is withdrawing its operation to make a point about it. This is where it gets a little weird. It picks up on Lafferty’s belief that the second coming and judgment happen at every person’s death, and it is related to his thought that everyone is already dead and his rejection of non-eschatological finalization. That is another way of saying that everyone is “already” (we break temporal language) in eternity.

Because our ultimate reality is an "always already there" participation in the heavenly court, as Origen puts it, the characters’ suspension inside of but somehow beyond prochronic time can be thought of as a glitch from the "shadow" of earthly life to their true, "hidden" identity as rational beings. Quoting Lamentations in First Principles, Origen argues that our temporal existence is a shadow of eternal reality; Lafferty found this idea productive for many of the more complicated stories he wrote, all of those being written after this first dip-in-the-water. Lafferty’s trick is to depict the 67th precinct meeting as a static, bloodless tableau. In this state, the two men are momentarily existing in that non-temporal "interlude" where eternity, which "surpasses every idea of a sense of time," becomes almost accessible.

Imagine a fence post. On one side is the prochronic; on the other is the diachronic. The entire scene is supported by and bound by eternity. When a rational being falls into time, it is caught in causal chains not of the rational being’s own making, which is the problem of the prochronic. One might say that problem with being born is not that sin, or the result of sin, brought one into the world, but that one had no say in the matter of being born. Now imagine you could have a conversation at that moment. That is “One Minute Before.”

At the story’s climax, the world is "created in full stride" at the strike of a gavel. This looks to me to parallel Origen’s eschatological view of creation. Here, creation is eschatological because divine creation is not a past historical event. It is the realization of God's unimpeded will that is only complete at the end of time when all rational beings voluntarily submit to Christ and God becomes "all in all." By timing the birth of the story cosmos to the end of the precinct meeting, Lafferty makes the END the meeting BEGINNING:

The gavel tapped. And the Universe was created in full stride with all its memories and vestiges and appurtenances; and at just the same time the 67th precinct committee dinner came to an end, never having begun. But the creation merged with its continuum, and its built-in past became its real past.

What would an Origenist reading of this look like? It literalizes the concept that “the end is always like the beginning.” The end of the meeting is the beginning of the world. The moulded (what Origen calls plassein) elements of the world (the ninety minutes of cigar ash and the furniture of built-in memories) are temporal dust. Creation (ktizein in Origen, also the root of ktistec) is the “unimpeded expression of God’s rational will” that only reaches completion when the eschatological “Amen” is sounded. The gavel tap acts as a strange “Amen,” here something like “Amen, the meeting is over.” Note how people are getting up before the gavel is banged. It is also the point at which the prochronic vestiges of the past are subsumed into a fully realized, apocalyptic reality, showing that people are fully created only when they arrive at their eternal end. Lafferty puts it clearly when he says the Creator could have saved himself a lot of time by setting creation close to the moment Gabriel blows his trumpet. In hindsight, given where Lafferty went as a writer, this simple early story foreshadows what happens when we reach his great experiments with time in the fully nucleated works, culminating in his greatest and ethically flawed masterpiece More Than Melchisedech when taken with it pendant texts. As I have said before, the main character in the Ghost Story is the person's relation to time.

One Minute Before Notes.pdf

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