A Remembrance of Times Past

I was faced, yesterday, with a typical teenager question, one most will have heard at some stage, maybe even uttered themselves. What’s the point. What is the point of all that we do, all that we learn, every second of every day? Do we have a purpose, or a destiny written in, or by, the stars, by fate, by some Almighty entity hidden from view and only revealed to the True Believer? The question, though, came from my partner who, to be brutally honest, has not seen their own teenage years for several decades, and who was referring to my penchant for historical works and, in particular, updating a certain Mastodon channel on Masonic history. Why, they wanted to know, do I gain so much pleasure from doing something which will probably have no meaning at all in thirty years time, presupposing that anyone is interested today, never mind in the distant future.

I happened to be reading through the Southern California Research Lodge Papers at the time, ones which had evoked enough interest in their time to be reprinted in 1971. Although undated, I suspect that this file of talks and lectures was first issued in 1963, which makes it slightly younger than I am. But which also makes it six decades old, and issued at a time of Cold War, great uncertainty and political upheaval. The aftermath of the Second World War, the rebuilding of Europe still underway, and two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall began, on 13 August 1961. It is fair to say that, although some were cavorting through Carnaby Street without an apparent care in the world, many others had existential fear, especially following the Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States of America and the Cuban-Russian Alliance in October 1962. Regardless, the collection of papers was published in that decade, reprinted in the next, and still the question: what was the point?

The answer is not so that I could sit down and read through the thoughts of Masons six decades later, but that is part of the answer. The answer is probably also not because those Masons writing and presenting the papers expected fame and fortune as a result. It might well be that I am the only person to have opened this file and read their words in many years, especially since some of the historical facts, and certainly many of the interpretive opinions, have been updated, worked through, changed over and over since then. History is a subject where there is constant change as new information comes to light, literally from under our own feet in many cases. Philosophy, on the other hand, and many of the papers cover what we would call philosophical thinking – Speculative Freemasonry – has been chewed over so many times, with so many interpretations to more than enough questions, theories and temporary conclusions, it is hardly recognisable when compared to the original.

I also collect antique photography. Quite aside from my own efforts with a slightly more modern camera, far more of my time has been spent seeking out, cataloguing and publishing – for the delight of others – information on and images of photographs taken when our great grandparents were merely a twinkle in their parent’s eyes. The Nineteen-Twenties, when this style of photography began to disappear for all time, is barely within living memory, the eighteen-seventies certainly well out of it. Did, though, any of those individuals who sat in front of a massive studio camera, trying to keep still for up to three minutes at a time, dressed in their Sunday best, ever pause to wonder what the point was of having their photograph taken, of using this new technology? After all, as we know with hindsight, the glass negative was replaced by the film roll – far more compact, and accessible to anyone with a penchant for small black boxes and a steady hand – and the credit card sized images of individuals in their finest consigned to leather-bound photo albums, with specially cut out spaces for the images, useless in the now modern era.

And those countless happy couples, taking Polaroid images of one another, watching them develop before their very eyes, an innovation so startling that none could have foreseen it in 1870 and few, with their smart phones and instantly transmittable selfies, care to consider it now. Although: the Polaroid style of photography has made several comebacks, with much improvement according to some, and is still available in a similar form to this day. No one could have known it then, though, and the artistic efforts of David Hockney, which he apparently did not originally hold much hope for, would have been lost to us and all who enjoy such one-off experimental works.

My answer to this What is the Point question covers very little of this, though. I can hardly start quoting Hockney, or miscellaneous Californian Masonic figures from the past to justify my own pleasures, my own research. And I do not believe that I need to justify my own interests – they being legal and above board, hurting no one else, and not intended to overthrow the current government no matter what I might wish after a few good drams of whisky – as much as I do not require a justification from anyone else as to why they use Facebook, or buy things on Amazon when real face-to-face encounters and purchasing from small local businesses makes far more sense to the active mind. Instead I can point out that all those who had their photographs taken, back when it was new and considered a fad, didn’t plan that far into the future, but are still there. And people like Cher (born in May 1946), or Liza Minnelli (March 1946), who are the loves of my partner, and often appear on stage – in spirit if nothing else – during their (my partner’s) shows, would never have recorded their sings, made their shows, just so a lover of this style of musical art, decades later, might sing them again in their own show. And, really, does there need to be a point to anything we do, even to life itself, other than personal pleasure and fulfillment – and the advancement of mankind?