Lighthouses are fascinating aren’t they? It really felt as if we had lost something when they all went automatic and the lighthouse keepers disappeared. Well, maybe there are still lighthouse keepers who look after the lighthouses but they don’t live in them any more. Putting aside the questions about what kind of life that was lighthouses make me think about the significance of light.
I mean, lighthouses were never intended to be giant torches lighting up the night sea so a sailor could see where he was going! They are warnings. They say “Beware! There are dangerous waters around here!” They also acted as navigation points. My maternal grandfather was born on the island of South Ronaldsay, in a little croft. From his house he could see nine lighthouses at night. I remember trying to count them when I visited there as a young boy.
In a very real sense the purpose of the light from the lighthouse was to convey information. This is something very human. I think of us as vibrant, living creatures embedded in constant flows of materials, energy and information. The materials bit is perhaps the most obvious. We ingest and inspire molecules from the environment, process them inside our bodies then expel them back into the environment. What we can’t see are the energy flows, but we are aware of some of them because we have sensory cells to pick them up. We see light, we hear sound, we feel heat and cold…and so on.
Information is something of yet a third quality. It wouldn’t exist without our bodies and brains to process the other two flows. So when we see the light of the lighthouse we don’t just see light, we interpret it. It tells us something.
In the case of the light from the lighthouse this is still quite a utilitarian phenomenon. We USE the it to guide us, or to orientate ourselves. But we interpret everything, and we surely don’t reduce all information to the level of utility.
This is moonlight on water.
On this particular night (a 14th of July) there was a full moon so the intensity of the light was great. You could actually see objects illuminated by it. But that wasn’t its attraction.
Moonlight on water is beautiful to us. It’s romantic, perhaps. It’s inspiring, even. Maybe it makes us think of Venus, the Goddess of love and beauty. Maybe it stirs our memories and our imagination to inspire certain emotions. Looking at the moonlight can induce feeling.
Moonlight, it seems to me, isn’t primarily a practical light. It’s purpose, if I could call it that, is more to inspire reflection. And that’s especially interesting, isn’t it? Because moonlight IS reflected light.
Do you see what happened here? I started with a light which I claimed was primarily practical, then went on to consider a light which was primarily inspirational. But if you go back and read the beginning of this piece again, you’ll see that much of what I wrote about the lighthouses came from my memory and my imagination. It inspired wonder. It generated feelings.
Nothing is really so binary in real life, is it?
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