The Beginning of Time

 

Which beginning of time [the Creation] according to our Chronologie, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October in the year of the Julian Calendar, 710 [i.e. B.C. 4004]. 

The Annals of the World (1658), p.1

Archbishop James Usher 1581-1656

 

Yes, anything, even time itself

must start somewhere, somewhen –

a beginning at a point in time

is not an easy calculation

 

when nothing was and something is,

with so much yet to come.

All of which we now know well –

us who had our own beginnings.

 

 

Time began on the night before

the twenty third day of October

four thousand and four years BC.

Do not ask what may have occurred

 

in those earlier blackberry days.

October's a month of beginnings and ends.

The swallows have flown.  The fieldfares are here.

My sums are done.  Now to make a new start.

I spent some time – time again! – searching for an appropriate picture to precede this poem.  One of those dramatic Creation pictures, as in my children's bible, a calendar, some sort of timescale, or a portrait of a seventeenth century cleric?

All seemed wrong, until I opened the front cover of The Universal Chronologist and encountered this marbling – an abstract image open to all sorts of interpretations, somehow just right.

And here's the first page, showing Usher's chronology.

The Universal Chronologist was published in 1835, Usher's calculations still apparently accepted, although geologists before the eighteenth century was over were suggesting the world was much older. Darwin was about to return and to write outlining his ideas to his friend Lyell.

But standard thinking, belief, seemed to hold firm: there it is, or was – the world created in October 4004 BC.

All that arithmetic: who was born when, how long – and how long it often was! – they lived, the sheer precision of those numbers (the nineteen years it took to build the temple)...

Man needs to measure: we calculate, we seek precision, finding confidence, certainty and comfort in numbers generally speaking and certainly here for the Archbishop. 

For the most part. But not for me, this time.

Reeling from all this, and rolling that incredible (I use the word advisedly) 4004 round in my head, I landed up on all fours. As a result my poem found itself falling into four verses of four lines with four emphases.

For (no pun intended) here we are in October, the month in which time began according to the Archbishop's pronouncement, which happens to be the old eighth month, a double four, as in the digits of that momentous date of 4004.

More simply though, there are four seasons, with liminal October feeling like a threshold, a time of beginnings and ends. 

I'm not sure where the blackberries came from.