Democratic Activity of the Early 21st Century

Typing text to fill the box which becomes the body of this post, I am implicit in the very topic I intend to critique. A difficulty arises on the one hand but on the other, this is the most natural and easy action. It's demanded of most of us each day - either on a full keyboard or shrunk down to the palm-sized displays we've adapted for any occasion. A mistake in our typing? Delete and vanish goes the record. No carbon copies, no ink cartridges or correction tape. We need not even print these texts on paper. The text field is where we "write" in this century's public domain, but it might not truly be where we speak and listen to one another.

I remember the first time I used a computer to access, at that time, our emerging Internet. It was 4th grade, 1995. After learning the QWERTY order, going through a few short typing lessons and exercises, we were ready to log on to the World Wide Web in our new, subsidized Macintosh computer lab. After visiting Yahoo! and putting a few search items in, we were given free rein to visit a website of our choice. On account of gift subscriptions to National Geographic and Nintendo Power that both advertised their websites only these two came to mind. I chose the latter, and along with the classmates in my row, each of our computer screens soon had an image of the controller for the newly announced home gaming console - the Nintendo 64.

 The first image I ever printed from a web source

It was so alien, so cool and automatically the #1 item on all of our Christmas lists for next year. 

The Internet became something to me, something that I could use for my own satisfaction, as more and more households in America purchased their PCs. I recall attending a sleepover a couple years later which consisted of drinking liters of Coca-Cola well into the night and playing Nintendo's Goldeneye 007 for the N64 - the multiplayer's game-of-choice. During breaks (sugar crashes), we'd switch from TV to computer screen and enter into that other shoot 'em up game - the chat room. Before instant messaging, you'd join these nebulous digital spaces with one of two juvenile goals: try to entertain a dialogic fantasy with some unknown user identified as your gender of choice, or gradually get into venomous trash-talking with an anonymous opponent. Either way, your blood was pumping again. Now 20 years later, observations indicate that this use and abuse are all we really know "here."

If the Internet has any history to speak of, it isn't archived away but alive in the shared experiences of virtual stages of engagement by a public wherein they encounter each other but not grasp one another. I'm not ruling out all possibilities of communication - there is evidence that there can be mutual understanding across the fiber-optics. Goodreads is one small stage of 30 million users with a focused frame of concern. It could be argued that authors and readers have never been in closer contact with each other. Priding itself on its sense of a well-read (and behaved) community, there is even allowance for "Goodreads librarians" to aid in the editing and managing of book entries as Wikipedia's volunteers. But does a more localized and concentrated "activity" make for a more evolved and less brutish experience? Their top 50 reviews of all-time in the world can be viewed here, and the standards by which the staff of Goodreads measures the acceptability of such reviews can be looked over here. Compare and contrast, reader, and try to stand the commentary and meme heavy pages.

In our physical world, we speak somewhere. In the ring, the forum, the bull pit, the coffee shop, there is a sonic reference, spatial characteristics, multiple sensory impressions, etc. Dialogue is also an aspect of the visceral. You can reach out and touch the arm of your interlocutor - in fact, this might make all the difference. This has bearing on our delivery, degree of intensity, quality of dialogue and numerous more subtle factors we are hardly aware of influencing us. Who of us has not encountered the difficulty of rendering the inflection particular to sarcasm for a small joke and been completely misread? Verbal bashing often ensues.

Miranda July's most recent short film/advertisement for both an app & clothing line turns the virtual distance that can be a misreading on its head: technology is instead a medium for the conveyance of intimacy at any time, as the messenger can be both a sender and the nearby stranger willing to deliver. There and not there: It is the most strange and fantastic conceit with bearing on what we believe our Internet activity to be and do for us.

In this world "here" we speak both everywhere and nowhere. The humanist-rhetoric myself and my generation have amazingly borne ourselves through have always been in favor of humans having technological experiences, having them be pleasurable, and turning our critical eye elsewhere. We look to message boards, comments sections or walls as placeholders for democratic opportunity and rather await the next moment's announcement from the favored champion of the Futurists' god of speed. Convenience bridges continents and cultures, but also addles us with banners and superfluity. And evermore, that same frothy anger that we witnessed in the chat rooms of our youth is ever slogged against the shores of all this democratic "activity", piling up and obstructing our vision of anything else but ourselves.

My workstation desktop, framed with an ancient reminder

To Gain A Clearer Perception of Humanity, Part I

"The intent here is to gain a clearer perception of humanity - where we've been, where we're going, the pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question - Why?"

- Dr. Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd in the 1989 Robert Zemeckis film Back to the Future Part II

My brother and I continually watched the trilogy of films featuring Doc Brown's DeLorean time machine and Marty McFly's escapades as we grew up together. Why? Well, it was full of action, well written, had a very cool premise and when there was nothing else to watch on TV, the VHS tapes were at the ready. My brother's favorite film was Part II and for me, it was the concluding Part III. I didn't care for the way the future looked (which was 2015, in reality, next year) and the revisiting of the first film was a little confusing, and, I thought spoiled some of the original. I wanted a whole new adventure, and I got that in Part III.

However, after revisiting the series with a newly purchased Blu-ray set (courtesy of Mr. Matt Ross), the above line from the second film really stood out to me. I don't recall what I thought about it exactly if anything, but reading it once more I see Doc Brown's aim and goal for his creation: and it is a philosophical, not a scientific endeavor alone. Lloyd always played him as severe, technically minded. But by the third film, Brown shows his romantic nature and by his actions expresses his true intent behind the brilliant invention. The time machine was built not to study space-time, but to try to understand the nature of our being.

How to study Existence

Working backwards, from ourselves to the Universe at large, one could at very least attempt to approach such a huge topic as being or existence (the study of which is called ontology) via our local group, to this galaxy, solar system, planet - to a continent of the globe, in a certain nation, at a certain time; countless folk have sought to know as much about the history of a period as one could, devoting an entire scholarly life to say, "the aesthetics of the Victorian era." We do not have a DeLorean time machine at our disposal, so, how would one begin such a study? We must first be considerate about the method of study, so that its beginning leads us to question the practice of history: this practice would stem from a philosophy of history. But what is a philosophy, and what are its origins? We continue to trace backward...

Essentially, philosophy is a system of thought. Let's ask the seemingly self-evident - what are thoughts? Today, thoughts are regarded as having their origin in the brain. Neuroscience continually announces discoveries that show chemical reactions and cerebral activity while observing conscious and unconscious behavior. To surmount that all thought is brain-based brings all knowledge back to the material itself - all knowledge and all being.

Today, the philosophy of science is likely to disprove that valued and particular vehicle (materialism, not a DeLorean) which we ride toward Truth as a philosophy sufficient enough in and of itself. It is the charioteer at the reigns of modern-day science. However, if thought is a product of the neurological processes alone, this is where the time machine of our Mind ends its journey. Better place some hope in matter itself then, and since we are only the product of genes and the planet is dying, get this material to another one. Will 'push off then!' be the rallying cry of the coming generations? It would lack all hope and spirit, however much our boundaries into space are pushed in the name of 'destiny'.

Materialism, the Ideology

Let's take a well-known outspoken voice about the above, the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and director of the Hayden Planetarium here in New York, Neil deGrasse-Tyson. Tyson views philosophy as a product-less pursuit, suggesting it is an impediment to progress and not an academic study worthy of the young. His friend Massimo Pigliucci, a man of balance between the humanities and the sciences, has held a recent conversation with Tyson about these statements. Follow the link to his article from the Huffington Post - it is a telling example of the sort of difficult public debate about the use of academic studies.

For Tyson, it's a matter of wasted "brainpower," and for Pigliucci, it's about exploring "conceptual space," the invisible, the unaccountable, and yet, the present and experienced phenomenon, i.e. of consciousness. Some scientists are engaged in exploring these borderlines that polarize the public opinions of both science and philosophy (see Rupert Sheldrake's banned TED talk). Others have chosen their sides and are defenders of the flag of Reason because that is their territory and it needs expanding to support their convictions (and garner public and private funding).

Don't forget to read the comments section below either of these pages.

Why such conflict? Science has been incredibly successful as its discoveries have been rapidly applied to our lives in the form of technology, medicine, and the manipulation of Nature. Unfortunately, science as an honest inquiry into the nature of reality, cannot teach us how to use the tools it helps to create while we continue to investigate with its methodology. This requires a vaster range of human abilities than reason alone, and studies as impartial as the original science behind the capitalizing of technologies.

It is part of the struggle of historians to account for all the factors of personality and culture that make an age what it is - how do we account for our present situation, let alone Victorian aesthetics? If we do not reflect or even criticize with a formal philosophy to gauge the value of a predominant worldview, we render the immaterial virtues null (temperance, prudence, courage, justice, etc.) which have been taught to exist eternally, whatever period. Corporeally, we transform Nature and then that transformation changes us in our own, fixed image. We forget where we were and only look toward where we are going from now. Where is our neutral territory, our contemplation? Perhaps only with a philosophy that aids our reason and tempers our awareness, which gains help from "other" sources unknown to us. Dare I even say, from the metaphysical.

Essential being

In the end, Doc Brown and Marty McFly are left each to their own fate: one recognizes his weakness toward personal offense and chooses against drag racing toward a wreck with a Rolls Royce. The other embraces his feelings of love and the need to strengthen this most transcendent human emotion in the face of death by saving his beloved Clara. Science is the vehicle for discovering components of humanity's essential being and philosophy is the fuel.

To free ourselves of the materialistic hold on the sciences would be a much greater accomplishment in the early part of this century than even our latest discoveries in physics. If Heraclitus was correct in his wise statement that "opposites cooperate: The most beautiful harmonies come from being in opposition. All things repel each other," than we have no object to quarrel over but belief in the impediments of our own beliefs. Destroy your time vehicle if it cannot do but divide you.


End of Part I

(Never) A Final Word Part 2

Hello again. My last post took into consideration the circumstantial factors that went into bringing LOST to light. It also considered the personal experience of watching the show by this writer, who shared it with other viewers over the last 3 seasons. I continue my main proposal that by re-watching the series actively, one gains a new layer of interpretation and earns a critical re-appraisal of the show's structure, form and even fashions a skeleton key of sorts for all it's unanswered questions! Well, perhaps it won't go that far...

This post is dedicated to Alex K., who is looking for answers.

XVI. LOST as a novel-film that approaches/attempts to walk the seam between literature and the cinematic arts in the early 21st century

I began to compose notes once I started my second viewing of the series. I was motivated by the intensity of the reactions to the ending, because it was big. That was the question I needed to answer - why these equal extremes of disdainful hate and passionate praise? I was not so much left with a feeling of being cheated or having had been lead into a corner with Cuse and Lindelof's writing - indeed, as a student of literature I saw themes and familiar story lines that have graced pages under the nose of humanity for centuries. This was what was so perplexing: with decades of television at our fingertips and centuries of texts with recurrent relationships and forms of stories from numerous cultures available, what kept fans from seeing LOST in a disinterested way? It would certainly help lower one's blood pressure and give oneself an opportunity to develop some objectivity in hindsight.

This is when I made some lists. Being a fan of lists, I had no trouble utilizing one for the books. Every season there was a finite amount of books shown on the show. When a book appeared it was framed, the camera lingered, or a character even directly spoke about it and/or touched it. Our first example is Kate picking up a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on the beach among clothes. Sawyer emerges from his morning dip in the nude and proclaims "It's about bunnies!" I rather like his exclamation, because it's deceptive. Sawyer's still a hick, a character self-conscious of the appearance he has to the other survivors (as a way of keeping advantage & distance) but he's a reader too. This appearance of Book #1 is in the first episode we get of his flashbacks, episode 8, "Confidence Man," the title itself which can be taken as a literary reference to Herman Melville's novel of the same name. On the other hand, Sawyer's "commentary" on Watership Down could be a young man or woman's take on the entire book after it was assigned to read in school and they hadn't even opened the cover page by the time the book report was due. A different person, an attentive viewer, might ask about connections between the episode and the novel, that is, if one had indeed read the book or is in fact reading the book alongside the show. Very demanding, yes?

Books insinuate themselves throughout the series. Some books are only the titles of episodes, such as above, as with "Exodus","A Tale of Two Cities" and "The Little Prince." My list however was not comprised of those books, but of books handled by characters in frame. Some correspondences stood out: Dostoevsky is the only author on the list twice with The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground; Joseph Heller's Catch 22 is the only book to have appeared in an episode in which the book is also the episode's title; and Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle and Lancelot by Walker Percy are the only books to reappear together and with the original person who handled them: our reader, Sawyer.

There's something more to a facile list of books appearing on LOST. Each book has its own theme, narrative and many other structures which comprise its form. Each episode, each season and the whole series also has these very same things but to a higher degree of complexity and inter-relation. Plenty of shows don't even bother with displaying the reader and his relationship with books, but this is central to all literate human activity, and essential even to watching television. With television or screen narratives usurping a greater part of the attention that was once placed on the page, LOST's goal or moral modus operandi seems to be in hindsight to strike a visual balance between page/screen. One could argue further that the entire series is nothing more than an attempt at pushing viewers back upon themselves in some honest self-reflection. No wonder Sawyer's favorite television show is Little House on the Prairie.

LOST's writing was very successful in combining multiple genres to the delight and dismay of the public. It encompasses and pursues plot lines as a murder mystery, a science/fiction story, a tale of horror & suspense, an adventure, a psychological drama, even includes a buddy cop scenario, a hospital soap, a comedy, multiple romances and a few drug trips for good measure. All common forms of narrative over the past several hundred years of public reading since Gutenberg's printing press are covered. This range and multitude is staggering. The writers paced it out among characters for six seasons and that's quite an accomplishment with relatively few new inclusions. In doing so LOST becomes thinned out, strained and stretched too far on many occasions, and the ratings history reflect these changes. But I cannot find an example in television (perhaps only in Chris Carter's The X-Files or Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation) that approaches and attempts to walk this seam of literature and the cinematic arts in our present time as LOST does. To put it plainly, nothing on TV has tried to sum up our collective story making history as the web spun by LOST. In order to avoid any network or fandom disappointment, we might not see one again for awhile. The most successful television shows are formulaic, predictable, take few risks, make few changes in cast and character, depicting a continuity of setting, situation and style. Mutable forms are shunned or end up surrounded by "cult" followings, as this show has with those fans it hasn't lost and most likely will with new viewers in decades to come.

XXIII. LOST as a mythic-religious epic made of the eternally repeating archetypes that have been with humanity since before art, history or literature

I paused again after seeing the series a third time. I was caught up in taking notes and found myself needing to put them down to immerse myself in the feelings displayed by characters and my feelings of their inter-relationships. There was so much struggle, such stubbornness, a lot of humor, sadness beyond sadness, joys shot out of cannons like fireworks, injustice and cruelty - and those unanswered questions. To be sincere, my utmost unresolved mystery is the nature of the Horace/Jacob cabin. But when I just stayed with the show, really tried to put myself in the position of the characters, I had experiences that were transcendent of my own subjectivity. Great literature does this and the greatest stories have remained with us in the form of epic narratives. But to be one's own witness to this process with audial and visual stimuli is something one does not receive from pages, but from film and television. It is more likened to rituals and dances of older cultures. The imagination cannot paint the picture which words suggest, because that relationship is not present. On the screen before our eyes, it's all provided for. The imagination is thereby rendered inactive or non-participant in forming an impression. The responsibility of the creators becomes fundamentally important again.

Jerry Mander is correct in stating that the rigidity of television does not allow for it to be a democratic instrument in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. The bandwidth is very narrow, and the Internet is really not much broader. Mander's concern is from a socially determined point of view. He believes that the content is a reduction and the constant slogans, advertising and programs have liquified any quality down to a nearly innutritious pulp. This then informs the way a person acts and behaves in the world. Can television provide something directly to and for a human being that does not make them more susceptible to such autocratic control? These concerns are still valid because the medium has not changed much at all (just picture quality, which is a factor of quantity, of pixels) and we're seemingly none the wiser despite Mad Men and any insight that show offers on the mechanics of advertising.

What could be valuable today is a television show which is self-referential about this potentially harmful influence. If it were to do this, the writers would need to cast a much wider net over their source material and likewise expose their viewers to a higher degree of philosophical and ethical problems which would also be present in the show. Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Berkeley, Bentham - the names are there and the true owners of these signifiers were writers and thinkers orbiting the social transformation of the Enlightenment. It was one of the first things I picked up on when I began the show and if any freshman in a liberal arts college was also watching the first season, she would too.

So what do we do with this? It's a cud to chew on for the first few seasons and then we start getting this Jacob character, Richard Alpert, Hawking, Faraday, Lewis, Dogen. More names and more associations - now spiritual, now scientific. The names do two things for us: they give us a real world anchor in whatever region the show's narrative structure has moved into and paradoxically pushes us out of the show and into discussion when the show's episode has ended. This works on the viewer much like the literary references. Even before literature was written down and disseminated by symbols, the issues which are brought up because of the names and the ideas surrounding them were passed down in oral traditions which graced or continue to grace all cultures the world over as mythology. As a commentary on how our society continues to think about and act out the results of our current linear events, LOST succeeds in isolating the main arguments: fate, destiny, free will, determinism, sacrifice, forgiveness, remembrance of the dead, and self-awareness. The last is distinctly Eastern in its origins, and ever since we see a bagua with the word "DHARMA" inside of it at the Swan Station, the correlations and differences between our world's two dominant hemispheres of civilization are also brought together.

The stories are always the same: the lovers whose love is unrequited; the genius whose downfall is his own ingenuity; the outcast whose true place is in the center of all activity - these archetypes play out the philosophical and ethical quandaries which have plagued and continue to plague the whole of history. Reconciliation of the opposites and establishing growth instead of degradation are the oldest narratives these archetypes play/live within. Jacob and his brother's roles are that of the narrative maker (the tapestry) and the game player (the Senet board). All the initial problems are shown as clear as that island light in "Across the Sea." At the end of the series LOST makes room for the utmost expression: that of the principal of renewal (or grace) which responds to the causes (or gravity) of the creation of the universe. Renewal and return to the source lies in the seedbed of all religious and mythic teachings. Giving of one's Self without seeking reward is the surest path toward this renewal (Jack) and doing so until one's physical death means putting your Self in the shoes of the Other (Hurley). Transcendence is the only true end which justifies the means of one's experience - all else is folly, as Joseph Campbell and the early 20th century mythologists taught (who do not go unaccounted for as an influence upon the writers c.f. the special features of S6 on DVD or Blu-ray). Take particular notice how many times the word "experience" is uttered in Season 6 and by whom. The game only ends once, but it is played by and through many.

What a massive undertaking of a storyline crafted in a post-9/11, war-plagued and severely dialogue-deprived world at the end of the first decade of the 21st century! What happens when we take into our hearts and cogitate with our minds the implications of such a narrative with such a deep focus? The way we live our lives may even be impacted by such force and resonance with this strange substance LOST leaves behind. It might even be the kind of television that need not be eliminated. Wait - can such a story be eliminated? Rituals, dances and rites of initiation tell the story of origins and actually inscribe these on flesh or in the memory - as if one inhabits but for a moment, that real space where all live eternally.

End of Part II

(Never) A Final Word

To post a brief interlude from my current train of thought on education and the question of reading our Western tradition in light of the present, I give you Part 1 of an article bridging quite a unique gap between today and March of 2011. It was then that I wrote this article highlighting the differences and strange similarities between the forms in the narrative structure of Rene Daumal's Mount Analogue and the television show created by J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, and Damon Lindelof (the latter who then continued to spearhead the show's direction with Carlton Cuse). This new post culminates after years of study and note-taking during re-watches of LOST that concerned friends & loved ones who sat down with me have witnessed. May their care for my mental well-being be either rightfully justified or pleasantly relieved by my writing below.

IV. The numbers

I'm finishing up my fourth time watching LOST in toto. The number four is a number of beginning. 4 lines create a square, 4 appendages of the human being, and 4 is the first numeral in the sequence synonymous with the series, which I've discovered is painted in white on a shutter off 2nd Avenue and 14th St last night in the East Village. It was strange, amusing and also telling, "pushing" me on in a way to write this article. Here is a photo of the sequence:

As viewers we come to know each candidate for Jacob's position was allotted a number. Four is John Locke's number. As the episodes of the final season become increasingly intense, full of steadily rising risks, attacks & counter-attacks, revealing plot advances made both on the island and in "the City of Angels," one simultaneously comes to the end and the beginning. As Jin states to Sawyer in Season 6, "that thing is not John Locke," and one character's end has dovetailed into another's (re)birth when Ajira Flight 316 doesn't make it to Guam. 

Locke is number 4. A square without one of its lines is a triangle, or 3. Flight 815 and Flight 316 are uniquely different. Eloise Hawking said to Jack in Season 5 that if the conditions weren't exactly reproduced for their return to the island, the outcome would be "unpredictable." We see that only one number of the sequence is represented in the flight designation - it is off or lopsided. 3 is not 4, and "the Man in Black" is not Locke. The above is an example of critical interpretation which shows through the writing Locke's replacement before the MiB's masquerade is revealed at the end of the season.

Not every answer which is given by the writers either outright, subtly with "easter eggs" or in the minute details of dialogue, can be divined this way. Much was discovered by the writers themselves as they wrote. This completely disagrees with what some might call a binding contract between the creators and the viewers to be omniscient in their roles, but there it is in the link from an interview with Cuse and Lindelof in 2008. A lot more has to be reasoned and turned over on one's own or with others in open discussion, as one would in a college course or in a voluntary book club. The record of the enjoyment fans took away with them while they spoke to each other as the show was airing remains on The Fuselage, on the special features of the DVDs & Blu-Ray copies, and on assorted pages of the Internet.

However, when our own experience shows that there is a lie in the statement that democratic conversation over the Internet is one of its inherent virtues, we cannot be fooled. As I mention in my post from 2011, the dividing line between fans as to the resolution of the series is a wide and deep gulf. My proposal below suggests a different avenue to understanding what happened (or happens) in the experience of watching this landmark television series. If you have left those discussion boards far behind, know that I don't intend on sending you back to them - they are almost totally inactive anyhow!

VIII. Active watching

I propose here that to appreciate the structure and form of LOST, one must at least make it through 4 active watchings. If it is of any merit to devote the 348 hours (or two solid weeks of one's life) by watching the series four times over, it can't be done passively, or, without one's attention upon the way the show is over the way the show could have been. This is not to say that it can always be watched actively. Viewing the series 4 times ensures that the character arcs and plots are known in detail, key dialogue exchanges are known word for word and the function of each season which displays the form of the series is known to the intellect itself, i.e. without having to refer to Lostpedia via Google, etc.

Some details can and will be forgotten - these details are where we take into consideration the lack of a finer energy or power of the story to impress itself upon us. These are places where we can make a critical statement about the quality of the writing. However, each watching can and would ideally give a person enough time and opportunity to enjoy the series, give the series its proper attention, work through their own subjective biases and allow for finer points of focus to come to light, so that what is valuable about the show can shine for itself. One watches and listens and changes one's own faculty of those senses - each time, a new paradigm in a sound that went unnoticed or a scene that finally made some sense in its relationship to the whole. 

The nature of the construction of the series, with its discontinuous narrative and abrupt sea changes, demands that one must pay attention. Otherwise, you're bemused, confused, frustrated and rationalizing your own feelings upon the construction. Why this and not this!?!? LOST wasn't farted out of one person - it was breathed into life from the mouths and minds of a writing staff that pulled from a myriad of sources and influences, both autobiographical (i.e. experiential) and via their own critical readings of other texts, shows, histories, etc. The strong fan base that grew and changed also spoke directly to the writers and influenced the very shape of the show. Even if you didn't participate in that collective voice, you can still benefit from creating your own inner commentary on LOST. An outline of each proposed viewing with a possible focus for your active watching could look like this:

XV. LOST as an ABC television series airing from 2004-2010 in a primetime slot

Taken into consideration, LOST came onto television during a tough time for its network and in a changing landscape for shows running on regular networks. The success of HBO, Showtime and other cable networks to raise unprecedented viewer ratings and collect many a statue at award ceremonies had ABC (the number 4 network at the time) pining for renewal. The unlikely story seems to be covered recently by another more succinct writer than myself, Alan Sepinwall, in his new book The Revolution Was Televised. An excerpt from his book on LOST's inception and first season can be read here. Damon Lindelof's mental and emotional instability as he took on the brunt of the responsibility for the show should be noted, as the title of the article suggests.

As for my own approach to the show, the first three seasons on DVD were brought before me by Matthew Thomas Ross of Portland, Oregon's Neighborhood Films in 2007. The fourth season was about to premiere and I had just entered a period of concentrated, intentional absence from university. I was reading books I wanted to read, writing poetry rather than papers, walking in the forest, enjoying every sip of tea, and letting what came to me attain my acceptance. And so, having not been involved in watching a television show regularly in quite some time, I was interested by Matt's description of the show and tentatively took up my first viewing. I have Matt to thank for every time I watch, feel, think or write about LOST. After the end of Season 1, I was completely engaged and wished to commit to the other two seasons before the first episode of Season 4. It was a marathon: 3 seasons in 2 weeks.

Thenceforward, having avoided the hoopla of time-slot changes by ABC (but not the Writer's Strike to come) I took a seat with Matt and other fellow Losties each night a new episode was aired. We all nursed theories over the "mysteries" of the show. I followed the details and thin threads as close as anyone could, and read much more into them than was probably there. What shined brightest though were the characterizations and the evolutions of the exercise (or withholding) of emotions, thoughts and will power on the island. Even unto this day where the last episode awaits my lady and I, who has yet to see "The End" either to her satisfaction or disappointment, it's the characters and their relationships that cause stirrings from my heart to well-up and out of me in the form of laughter, anger - or tears. Imagining, empathizing with, or responding to their situations of love, fear, betrayal, surprise, are all activities that require no critical acumen or learned insight to appreciate. This is the basis of all further appreciation, and I return to it comfortably after either championing the series or voicing my misgivings.

End of Part I

Lingua Anglica

Language both is and is not ours. The anthropologically-rooted linguistic theories that language "appeared" in order for our species to convey information basic to their survival covers but that utility of survival itself and goes no length to offer a reason for its creative functions (the topic of this post). 

On a daily basis we encounter numerous examples which expose this theory as a fallacy. The radical differentiation of languages, even within themselves in their many dialects, regionalisms, and recent sub-divisions (made possible by the ever-touted technical innovations for communication) such as media newspeak and hyper-subjective textspeak, seem to prove the opposite. Indeed, a language's ability to harbor and synthesize the introduction of neologisms, colloquial slang and vocabulary from other languages, shows that the language one speaks is an ever growing and, arguably, debilitating tool for the lone benefit of communication. 

This is not an isolated occurrence of the modern era (See The English Language, 1985, Oxford University Press by Robert Burchfield, former chief editor of the OED). Being an English speaker in America, and with English being the language I have in mind while writing this post, the metaphor of great loads of English ivy climbing over trees and landscape as a rampant, ever encroaching and choking invasive species is, I should say, "spot on." Communication via language easily becomes entangled by the nature of its lively structure and we compensate with bodily movements, furrows of brow, smiles and frowns, laughter, and all the other sounds and gestures (culturally unique but also universally ingenious) to supplement the entrenched activity we learn to do -  from our first word to our last breath.

And so, why do we speak if it is not to communicate well? Perhaps we speak to understand it in its negative sense - not speaking. We cannot know what it is to be mute or silent in meditation without first knowing what our utterances perform, and their complications. And it is a complicated performance. Robert Graves, though long since debunked by the semantic and syntactical science of Linguistics, theorized that there had to have been an Ursprach or primary poetic language from which all languages share a root and from which poetry was born. This is a very beautiful and Platonic idea, or "Form." Language at its purest and most undifferentiated is the very source of the human expression we call poiesis. This is why we speak - to bring utterance to the composed - to sing. As I just stated, this does not accord itself with our modern notion of where language comes from and why it appeared. For the poets and the philosophers however, this couldn't be closer to the truth deduced by reason and reflection upon the nature of language and human nature itself, those conjoined twins of Babel.

Graves can still be shown to be relevant, as anthropologists and the archaeologists consistently find that the first utterances we have on record in most, if not all, major cultures are their oral traditions codified. Oral history did not become unreliable, but written language pushed the spoken word into an unknown territory, and the poetry we most often read there is of conflict. See Beowulf, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics, the Mahabharata. East and West (and assuredly North and South) have at the root of the history of their languages the struggle between the force of words-in-mouth vs. the power of words-in-scribed. The struggles occurred at pivotal times where their language was undergoing mutations, both internally and externally, and masses of people moved beyond cataclysms and climate changes and encountered, or warred with, then assimilated and birthed new people and new(/old) tongues. And so, one can read that our first stories, no matter our sedentary heritage (as more nomadic tongues than settled ones remain "on the lip" and haven't dropped to the page) are stories of emergence, change and recapitulation in "new" Forms.

It seems that we need to speak as a way of continuing our humanity, of existing as beings of our degree in the chain of life on this planet.

I can't help but tangent my building argument by way of mentioning a subjective experience. When I encounter most casual conversationalists and mention my degree in English, their opinion rolls around from a condescending/sympathetic nicety directed towards me, to an utterance about the nature of the English language itself: "English is a poor/decaying language." "It's taking/taken over the world." "Our language is so messy - it's just a mishmash of other languages."

All of the above opinions are taken from real life.

What is so bemusing to this student of English is the equality of all three opinions. They all hold that English is somehow deficient and differ only in the stated cause - either from the low quality of its use, its past as the voice of British Imperialists or the continuing history of its morphology. What is not surprising but unique about these opinions is that the flip-side of their negative connotations denotes some positive ones. The use of poor English is the sign of a language changing. Whether or not in a future time this can be called "decay" isn't an aesthetic question. The linguists would say, to quote an old professor, that laziness is just as much, if not more, a factor for morphological change than successive ages of increasing elaboration & eloquence. The proliferation of English speakers due primarily to the latest and greatest sea-goers of the world, who happened to speak English (it could've been the Portuguese or the Dutch or the Spanish, but history has it as the British), cannot be a remotely useful argument to brand English in itself as a language of oppression. 

Lastly, every other language English has come into contact with has had an influence on the English we spoke in either the 15th century or the one we speak now. This is especially true, as the exception and the rule, in North America. No other diaspora on this planet has record of such quantities of tongues and peoples and cultural traditions being "mixed up" together in such a manner as it was in the 19th & 20th centuries here. And yet, I can understand a text written in Elizabethan prose with only minor attention to close readings or exegesis of peculiar vocabulary and syntax. How did this oppressive/tolerant and equally dynamic/lazy language ever survive? Precisely because of these attributes, and not because of their negative or supposedly unmerited reasons. A lesson in objectivity for our relativistic and subjective contemporary education.

If poetry is to survive as a creative form, it will be because of its merits in using the language it is composed of to its utmost and beyond. Read James Joyce's Ulysses or Ezra Pound's Cantos to get a sense of the boundary/boundlessness between the ursprach Graves speaks of, the languages English has inherited from, and the language of the modern era until the late 20th century. Our great poets of the 21st century will exhibit their likeness and compel our definitions of what English is to break upon itself, as a seedling breaks its own containment. The new plant shall sing.

Meet Geoffrey Hil, People

The first through third lectures of Oxford University's 44th Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill, are available to any poet, critic, student, independent writer, casual audiophile, etc. on Keble College's website. We are all granted a 21st-century event of contemporary literary history & criticism in-the-making; of unequaled importance at the current time. This Englishman, a poet of 80 years whose practice of the craft and thorough readings of the great works written in the English language, shine forth, and he is speaking to us about us by them.. The fourth lecture will be delivered at the end of this month and available, if the previous release patterns indicate future ones, a month afterwards - about New Year's Eve, 2012.

Begin with the "Inaugural Lecture," which Hill delivered in standing-room only attendance despite his being afflicted with laryngitis. There will be a total of 16 lectures during his professorship. If your care for the very substance of language, that its use and the poetics of its use are intertwined with the very way in which our actions do and do not reflect each other, or if you are interested in listening as a challenge, a way of struggling with your misperceptions and graduating from the college of your own America - then download, download, download, upload, headphones, playlist, play.

Of This Ice Age

When the books are no longer profitable, and the great human chrysalis is over, my pen will fall, covered by hourglass sand. This same sand will fill our Television and halt the works of disaster which had until then infinitely displayed themselves. History's diarists relax their hands! A beached whale shall mate with the shipwreck of a flood myth. Turning over a leaf both new and old our seasons will divide and be two-fold. Snows melting in summer sun and grasses iced by the winter voice shall shout and shine together. This beautiful clashing, this sublime terror. Buried nunataks towering above the hidden Lake Vostok - both will be revealed. Some events are difficult to imagine. Outside of the memory bank their value is obscured. In that region of death, a forbidden zone of cinemas, we'll discover a mass jutting out of the sand. The weavers shall coat with their tongues its dark grit. From buzzing to bleeping, language will sing what our senses lost feeling of. Hearing these songs may keep us alive enough to give some words, some music, of worth.
To another, someone other, than ourselves.



-G.D. Burns

Centuries of Myth

Isengard