Available Light

Here we are home again, and Hawaii is fading away into the background as I come to terms with exactly how much needs to be done in the Diocese and how little time there is to do it. Hawaii is a strange place, sitting between two worlds like nowhere else I've ever seen. It is very American, with freeways and Hershey bars and Macy's and light switches that work upside down and those odd, shallow, flat toilet pans which give you more information than you ever needed or wanted to know. It is also very Pacific with reefs and coconut palms and earth ovens and pois and a language whose relationship to Maori is obvious and intriguing. Of course we only saw a bit of it: Oahu, at one end of which sits the city of Honolulu. Honolulu is like Disneyland without the rides: a city built on vacations and therefore on escape and fantasy. At the other end of Oahu is a series of small towns with plain architecture and tiny, tired shopping centres and steep, stark, buttressed mountains and gorge...

Imagine a slide projector with no slide in the carrier shining its light onto a blank white screen. You would see on the screen pure white light. Then you put a slide into the carrier, and a picture appears. What you have done by shining the light through the slide is filter out most of the light. White light coming from the bulb contains every visible colour, but where the slide is blue, all the light is filtered out except the blue bits, where it is red, everything is excluded except the red light, and so forth. So a picture is created not by adding light but by taking light away. The pure white light when there is no slide in the projector shows no picture; but in another sense, it shows every possible picture: the light required to make any conceivable photograph is there in that pure white light. As Bernard Haisch says, in The God Theory , "the white light is thus the source of infinite possibility, and you create the desired image by intelligent subtraction, causing the rea...

What, with one thing and another the phone has been running a bit hot lately, so I used my day off to do a small job for the parish which would take me out of cell phone range: I towed a trailer up to Alexandra to collect a sliding door. The sun shone, the hills were golden brown and the air was diamond sharp. My little car performed approximately well and I listened to a CD of Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst, talking about paradox, the shadow and creative imagination. I have been reading Robert Johnson's books for a long time now; his little trilogy He , She and We are revelatory and his insights on the inner life have been sure guides. Now, 87, he has produced a CD set called The Golden World which condenses much of his great insight into 6 or so hours of conversation. Yesterday I listened for an hour as he spoke of paradox, the shadow and creative imagination. We live, he says, for most of our lives with paradox. We fall in love with people we can't form relationship...

Still from movie Thick Red Wine (c) 2006 Jack&Sons productions, Dunedin, New Zealand I can lay down the law to people, instruct them in things, coax teach and inform them, and the odds are they will have forgotten it all before the sun goes down. If I tell them a story they will remember it for weeks, months or maybe even a lifetime. Give them a list of propositions and their eyes glaze over. Tell them a story and their bodies go still and their faces light up. We respond to stories because our lives are narrative in nature: they have a beginning, move through a "plot" towards an ending. All reality in fact, can be thought of as narrative in structure; the history of anything is a story with a beginning a middle and and end, so a story is a familiar way for us to view the world; but there's more to it than that. The reasons for the compelling nature of narrative are many but centre on the way stories are structured. There are a number of things all stories have in co...