Good evening. I would like to talk to you about faith. It is the only thing we have that transcends the material universe. It is the goal of life. Without faith we remain in a larva state perhaps never reaching imago.

This evening I will tell you the true story of how I became an alchemist. In order to fully appreciate one of the enigmatic wonders of the human world, I will need to take you along the path to discovery believing that the voyage is far more to the point than its destination. Along the path you will discover fundamental alchemy and how to apply it to the unbending, unforgiving modern world of melamine, rayon and padded shoulders. Modern genius has entered the body through a grand incision and ripped away at what it found there until sufficiently dislodging the vitals from there respective places, taking for example the liver and the kidneys and drying them in the sun, and taking whole sections of intestines and with the hospices of our communities through municipal funding renovating them into row condominiums each worth more than the Spanish Armada. It has also wrenched out art and science and seated them at opposite ends of the table.

As alchemists you will learn that science is art. It is said that if angels could only stop flapping their wings long enough to be spread over a glass slide they would belong to science, and that since they refuse, we must imagine them in oils and they belong to art. As alchemists you will discover the substratum to which angels in flight adhere.

My journey begins on January 1 1989 while executing an inventory of all of my photographic equipment and noting its condition. The first three items were three light meters beside which I noted that neither of the three corroborated the efficiency of the other two. As a photographer navigating the linear universe of causality the problem of conflicting realities is easily repaired by the application of a "calculatedly erroneous factor".

Calculatedly erroneous is a concept familiar to photographers, in which one is allowed to admit that an instrument of precision for which he has paid great sums of money is inaccurate, but which- through the application of a mathematical formula- can be reinterpreted to produce precise results. A calculatedly erroneous thermometer for example which is out five degrees relative to a normal terrestrial standard can be rendered precise by the modification of film speed, which produces what others may call overexposure and underdevelopment, but which the photographer calls the precise science of a personal system.

I bracketed an entire roll of film under several different light intensities and carefully noting all the pertinent information escorted the roll of film to the most reputable of laboratories. The results showed clearly that my light meter's response to light was nonlinear, much like the human eye; in fact, its response to light was almost circular, underexposing as much as two stops under low light conditions, responding predictably at mid-light range and overexposing 2 stops and high light intensities.

On February 3rd 1989 I accompanied my light meter to the service department. After extensive repairs were affected amounting to only the worth of the instrument itself I was allowed to pay cash and retrieve my meter.

It is here on March third that I begin my true initiation into the mystic order of alchemy. After performing the exact same test in the exact same manner to which I had subjected the meter just prior to the extensive repairs, I was mystified to discover that, despite its complex electronics and mechanics, the technicians had managed to rearrange its constitution such that it produced the exact same results as before the major repairs. I had begun in a deep, dark and humid chapter of my heart to believe in the existence of a parallel universe, the mirror reality of paradox and hyperbola where war criminals escape to, where cars drive backwards over battered children and animals give back birth through their mouths.

I returned to the service department with all of the official receipts of all transactions involving the exchange of monies and services and all the printed paragraphs of assurance in the event of... The technician was not available to come to the counter but instead I was encouraged to relay the adventure to an elderly woman who reminded me of my dead grandmother and of the very fragility of both mechanical instruments and of the very concept of scientific precision. Only the devil himself could have been impolite to this gently old woman who worked the gates at the heart of darkness.

Twenty three days later my light meter was returned to me with a message explaining that according to their most rigorous science my light meter had been verified at all exposure value ratings to perform within a tolerance of .1 foot/candles, and that if I (the customer) did not have among the inventory of things precise and scientific at my disposal such a thing as a "Light Box" it was certainly impossible for me to evaluate the performance of my meter at least according to the same criteria as those who did.

I recognized in that split instant that there were many games being played simultaneously, and that the rules for one did not necessarily govern the playing of another. I felt smart, much smarter than I had been only seconds before. I was becoming an alchemist. I began discovering at an accelerated rate the new truths of the alchemic order. That if the wind blows it blows from the west, that it is the same breeze that shuffles the feathers in Gabriel's back that carries the stench of death to the vulture. The alchemist would not say "The world is round". The alchemist says rather, "the world is made of a mad stuff that darts flirtatiously about. These skirtings from hither to thither I shall never comprehend, yet I can arrange the odds of my intercepting a blow now and again".

Yet in my story I am not as yet a full fledged alchemist. I am still a doubting novice with only one foot over the threshold into the realm of the sinister and unpinnable reality. Here on the thirty first of March 1989 I made the error of all non-believers, the epitome of desperate blind arrogance that of a captain on a sinking ship, who dips into the vest of his company supplied navy blue jacket and finds an ounce of nostalgic loyalty sufficient to commit the insane act of duty. I threw a fourth variable into the maelstrom of scientific vertigo. I borrowed another light meter.

On March six 1989 after a full day of scientific testing and cross referencing, in a last and desperate attempt to keep hold of a universe that had served me royally well up until the moment of my inventory of January 1989 I noted that neither of the four light meters corroborated or verified the efficiency of one or more of the other three at any exposure value. The following day I noted that neither of the four light meters produced in a exercise involving genuine film stock, and evaluated against an electronically exposed grey card, what one might even loosely refer to as a "properly exposed slide"

In the week immediately following the 31 of March 1989 I regained a firm hold on reality. That is, I won back my incapacity to sustain disbelief. All combinations of all the most fantastic imaginings of the heart in a white smock were executed and noted diligently. Batteries were inter-changed, a voltage regulator installed in the studio, each test was repeated a dozen times and the twelve resulting rolls sent each to different laboratory at opposite ends of the city. In fact so thorough was the science of my methodology, in counter references and recorded variables that the twelve tests returned to me from the twelve respective laboratories were perspicuously identical in their testimony against the last remaining sparks of sanity in a choking order that could no longer sustain the illusion of being.

I sat naked in the corner of a room that was very familiar to me, a comforting room with no furniture. I sat down against the wall and maintaining the largest area of white around the eyeballs that the muscles of my face would permit and fired and re-cocked my shutter most of the afternoon, an activity that bore a strange resemblance to solo Russian roulette. When I had sunk the equivalent of four thousand bullets into the grey matter at hand, my repeated action began to resound as a trance like rhythm in my brain. That was when I realized that although the shutter tension had been set to one fifteenth of a second, the sound that reached my ears as a result of having fired the camera corresponded roughly, and that is unscientifically, to full second. Further investigation revealed that the shutter settings per say had no bearing what so ever on the actual speed of the shutter which persisted at roughly a full second, despite the act of turning the shutter dial. Was it possible that something was wrong with my camera body? Could this be at the heart of my faltering universe? I was re-spun with new hope. I would have to do some more scientific testing!

I was of course completely unaware of the deeper meaning of the circumstances within which I found myself during the spring of 1989. If I had seen that I was initiating an apprenticeship with the order of alchemy I would surely have adopted a much more positive attitude to the anguish of irreverent erosion upon my psyche.

The service department informed me that several governors would have to be replaced and they assured me before the fact the repairs would not amount to much more than the value of the camera itself.

In my newly found humour by virtue of being reoriented in a world that had once been familiar to me, I remember joking about not knowing a governor that didn't need to be replaced, and by laughing I only meant that it was good to be home, a rum toddy by the fire, a peck on the cheek, that old carpet or ripped jeans, a world that made sense, when I stepped forward my body advanced.

On the first of April I received my camera back and performed the necessary tests upon the new governors that very evening. I lunged straight for one fifteenth of a second, held my breath and fired. The sound that reached my ears was certainly that of a focal plane shutter being released by a mechanical timing spring for a full second. The new governing body was apparently very much like the old one, only more expensive.

The most dependable way of distinguishing the universe of science and the universe of natural anarchy is consistency. Anarchy will never be able to repeat itself and science will. My shutter, set to one fifteenth of a second fired at one fifteenth of a second when I released it at the service department in an attempt to show the technician an incongruity in the theory that my camera was in perfect working order. It fired without exception at a full second in the privacy of my own home. The fact of the less than perfect working order of my camera body was unimportant beside my inability to prove it. They however were able to produce documents testifying to the procedural exactitude of their methods and the authenticity of their claim that my camera was in perfect working order.

That is when I became an alchemist.

I went immediately to the studio, loaded my camera and sat it down on a tripod. I began photographing an 18% reflected grey cards as I had before committing every smallest detail to memory. For an unknown reason at image number seven, resting briefly before continuing to the next frame I fell stupidly off my stool hitting my head directly on the floor and uttered a sound which can not be written phonetically but would be something like a half inflated basketball capable of speech.

Returning from the laboratory on the 2 of April 1989 with the test results of April one, I observed that image number seven was the only frame that constituted a perfect exposure. Referring to my notes I connected the event of my fall from the stool and the utterance of the sound with the success. Since April I have had many occasions to retest the connection which is now in my estimation absolute, between exposure and falling stupidly on my head while uttering a winded snort.

Please do not misunderstand me and begin falling stupidly off your stools at the viewfinder. You will each have to stay alert and ascertain the rules of the universe in which you circulate.

No wisdom is universal. Alchemy is always private. You will have no need of patents or manuals; the sole and complete objective of alchemy is Gold, the noblest state of the soul. It is firm ground in an avalanche, guidance in a faltering order. Knowing that you can never win at Black Jack, that the dealer is crooked and the cards are marked, alchemy simply loosens the bind that holds you to the table.

Good luck and God bless.

Jobe Peta Nipkin