Hey Orpheus, let's not look back now

So there went January and with it the inescapable retrospectives on what happened in the past year.

I suppose you enjoy the endless reels of who stood out in 2023 and who came to the end of their bucket list, tickled, ticked or unticked as the case may be. Not for me, I think. If you are a tech reviewer then do not spend your time thrashing out long stories about what modems plagued us 35 years ago or how naff old gadgets were. Not only did we know it at the time, we don’t much fancy reliving the memory.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus#/media/File:Nymphs_finding_the_Head_of_Orpheus.jpg
Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900) by John William Waterhouse

The human animal collects experience and, like other animals, adapt and learn. Not much life lessons in the days where we sat in our caves and things were warm, cosy and uneventful. We were happy but we did not appreciate it, you might say. No points for guessing that the memory of having forgotten to set a watchman to look out for the sabre toothed tiger will rightly stick with you for a long time. Regrettably we can re-play traumatic experiences, bad choices and harsh words on and on through our lives, probably drawing on natural selection having made this a safer bet for living to reproductive age than a more happy go lucky attitude. Against this backdrop of biology, it takes some stamina to continue to look forward and when you look back at least try to magnify the good experiences that the retrospectoscope has stored in much reduced size and granularity.

And then again, it has been said by many people in the past year that when people die, our memories of them can be re-set to younger, happier, better versions than the frailer older version of them who needed reminding about the simplest things in life and who failed to recognize their children and grandchildren. Worse though is the change in personality, when it happens. When my grandmother died aged 101 she had lived through years of extensive memory loss and dementia, but we did not really feel we had lost her because her personality was as it had always been. No memory to speak of but clearly the same person, not a dramatically changed persona.

Orpheus as you know, decided against clear instructions to look back and lost all. He could not help himself. Is there a clue in the name of his wife Eurydice, whose face he simply had to steal a quick look at? Unfortunately, the derivation of her name appears to be controversial - either Good Judgement or Infinite Space. Which one would we rather have it be, I wonder. Look back at Good Judgement and all hell breaks loose. As for Infinite Space, well look to Hamlet (Act II, scene 2) and see how that one turned out.

There is little to be gained from taking stock of 2023, is there? Far better to stock and prep for 2024. Being reminded of the bad things will happen without the need for actively planning it but there may be something to said for actively looking for good memories.

For some time I have taken the advice of the great and good of photography YouTube and printed some of my photos. Yes it is true that the printed version is tangible and won’t become outdated in format to the extent that I can no longer get a viewer for it. I rarely do this though - apart from very very rarely having something printed professionally for a gift (My stepfather’s treasured cocker spaniel for example), I only get photos printed once a year as an annual photobook of some thirty pages. Even this is painfully retrospective for my liking but I can hardly print photos in a way that does not look back in time one way or another, so there we are.

My initial shock to see that I had so few 2023 photographs soon reminded me that indeed this had been a year of death, illness and busy periods with little opportunity (or energy) to go out on photoshoots. I don’t photograph funerals and I try not to take photos of anyone on their death bed, though of course one photo of someone will always be the last one. Suffice it to say that I avoid looking to see which is the last one. The Spring and Summer of 2023 had more funerals of friends, family and pets than what I remember as truly joyful days. Obviously there were plenty of great days but they jump away into obscurity as biologically not scary enough to be worth retaining for training purposes. The second half of 2023 also didn’t hold a lot of photos, actually even fewer than the first half. Am I really on track to stop taking photos entirely? I don’t think so and I don’t plan to. Not many photos because I was off sick with non-serious but at times painful issues and minor surgery and so forth that certainly stopped me from doing the type of photography I enjoy most. Actually, glad to say that these issues are gone for now and I will head downstairs and recharge the camera batteries, having gone through my photo gear and sorted and tidied up. This is 2024 and our job is to get our stuff together and look forward, tell your brain to stop making that Orpheus move looking for past misdeed and mishaps to up your game. Capture the moment, stick it on the SD card and replenish your store of hard drives. Happy February.