(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.

Mount Analogue and LOST

Initial observations:

If a light is shining within an island's interior forest, and water is found flowing towards it, not outward to the ocean, and if that water then flows down into a well-like cavern, and if in this cavern a light which emanates, formed from a balance of that water flowing into a pool upon a subterranean fire abated by a stone pillar plug - If this is the setting of the final act in a story, what is one to make of the significance drawn between these progressive perennial forms? Island, forest, light, water, cave, inner fire, stone pillar...

These forms are perennial because of their collection around the human consciousness. We've created of their repetitious presence in human life a chain of mythologies, stories which indicate behaviors or qualities that each form embodies. Furthermore, the links are not static but interacting, moving within and without, as active and reciprocating analogies - movements that can be observed even in life events. The question of their meaning and value, whether these associations are worth investing our attentions or are superfluous and untrue, rests upon their context, the narrative in which they exist. Regarding the chain above, their context is the final episode of a six-season long television show which has attempted to synthesize classic historical and modern mythologies together.

But since May of 2010, the diametrically opposed reactions to the series finale of ABC's LOST have had no neutral place in which to reconcile. My subjective experience in this show's wake has been amongst discussions that begin or end with impassioned reactions or strict logic. Trapped between two sides, fans are arguing while overhead in this gray sky, there is no bowed array of seven colors that reveal a diversity of interpretations. From what this writer and contemplative has read of the articles and their public commentaries which follow, coins have fallen either heads down or tails down across the nation and overseas. Reviews from blogger-theorists who followed the LOST narrative's "ending" range from the detailed yet oblique 'Doc' Jensen to the blunt iron-fisted thumbs down of Fishbiscuitland.

An hypothesis as to "why" is set forth:

Poetry may be, as we find in cultural shards left from ancient civilizations, the creative principle remaining in spoken language. These imaginative visions of objectively observed functions in Nature, or mythologies, were first written in the form of poetry to be performed, recited and passed down. To transmit not only imaginations, but informations, orally and visually by way of what academics call their remnants "epic narrative." Now, forms of poetry can be studied to reveal the frequencies behind which their functions then impress upon our Being certain understandings about relationships between the human being, our Earth and the web of connection known as Universe. To read this real knowledge is, amongst many other things, a lost art (pun most seriously intended).

It is my contention that LOST attempted to weave the traditions of ancient epics with that most recent experimentation in myth making - the modern novel. These elements were then synthesized through the storytelling medium of our contemporary moment: film lenses & television, attempting to translate no less than 3,500+ years of story environments, archetypes, and their analogical relationships. It was quite an attempt! But in what language did the audience respond? It seems from these oppositional reactions to have been computer age binary code, the fans upon the finale beeping out either a solitary "1" or "0." As I've mentioned, the ability to read poetry, to understand what is read, is lost, or at least abstracted to be nonsense. And yet some feel its contours intuitively...

Now, an experimental text:

The last line of a poem titled "Memorabilia" by the French visionary Rene Daumal reads: "Remember, O poor memory of mine, the two sides of the coin - and its metal which is one." The poem reminds me of these discussions of LOST which seemingly never consider the coin at hand. The metal is our perception, that faculty of consciousness without which we are at a loss in the cosmos of our place, space and time. Daumal wishes to remember what is so easily forgotten when we hold onto the one without the other, as with the materialists who deny any spiritual qualities of reality or the fundamentalists who accept these spiritual qualities at the expense of the physical.

Daumal worked closely with G.I. Gurdjieff's newly emigrated circle in mid-20th century France. Gurdjieff was a self-proclaimed Greek-Armenian "teacher of dance" but truly was an incredible instructor of the human being to re-consider everything about their sense of reality and place in the world. Under the auspices of work with this teacher, Daumal produced a short unfinished novel eventually published in 1952, 8 years after his passing. What remains sits on select bookstores' "metaphysics" or "occult" shelves as Mount Analogue - A Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventure in Mountain Climbing.

My thanks go out to a close friend in the spirit of inquiry finally encouraging my purchase of this book. Upon reading the unfinished remnant, I found the beginning of a remarkable narrative which was analogous to perceptions in the television show I had been following for the past three years. It will be a few more blog posts down the line to develop my theory of reading LOST outlined above, but for now, here is my first attempt at a coin balancing act.

Limiting the area of investigation

The first of my perceptive analogies is from the theory given in Chapter Two "Which is That Of Suppositions" as to why the existence of the tallest mountain in the world has remained off of any maps; also, how could one reach this veiled place and where? Father Sogol (Logos), the organizer of the expedition, speaks of the astronomers Eddington and Crommelin and their experiment during a solar eclipse on March 30th 1919 proving Einstein's theory of the curvature of space-time. For any reader not familiar with Einstein and this experiment, the short but essential books The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett or Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time will elucidate this principle 20th century contribution of scientific thought clearly and concisely. Also one of many literary connections in LOST, Hawking's book appears in Episode 7 of Season 3, "Not In Portland."

The mountain 'Analogue' (which is also an island) bends the fabric of space-time as a star would, and sailing towards it one would sail around it except by an effort to intuit or attract.  This is a particular quality of the island of LOST - it is either entered or exited by individual will through a doorway of the slightest degree (a bearing of 32.5) or one is "brought" to the island by the hands of fate (personified by the character Jacob). To enter, Father Sogol deduces that one must travel from the West "both for a symbolic reason and because of the wind," just as Oceanic Flight 815 entered the island's sphere of influence flying from Australia to America. These analogous elements in the narrative of the book and the television show almost prompt me to consider, from a poetical point of view, if the island/mountain are not the same symbol, or at least part of the same metaphorical root.

Arriving by the impossible

The sojourners eventually sail a yacht named The Impossible to the deduced area on the globe where the mountain exists. The dynamic Scottish character Desmond Hume of LOST reaches the island by yacht as well, through that door of fate rather than by intention of will (or do these energies meet?). The yacht of Mount Analogue is drawn through a degree of entrance after the crew has traded their impatient expectations for the exchange of legends and mythology. At sundown, they are collectively "sucked" as by a vacuum-like action past the veil around the unknown. To give an analogical significance to both islands, of the television show and of the book, Daumal's article writer in the first chapter describes the mountain as "the way by which man can raise himself to the divine, and by which the divine reveals itself to man." 

Another character with a loaded name, Ivan Lapse, in the chapter before their arrival by yacht, "Which Is That of The Crossing," quotes the 19th century French writer Victor Hugo, "that the view of the world from high peaks does such violence to our visual habits that the natural takes the appearance of the supernatural," and I would say by this law of analogy, the supernatural the appearance of the natural. I'd rather not describe the rest of Daumal's story, because it would ruin your personal enjoyment, and if you haven't seen LOST (watched/read the series all through) then your sense of what I'm speaking about must be akin to tasting a stale saltine you wondered was crisp.

Flying Mother Nature's silver seed 

The suffusion of both the image or symbol and the material thing itself create a bond unbreakable in our consciousness. And yet, if we are not aware of the bond, becoming negligent of our responsibility to give our lives a meaning, a responsibility for existing, confusion is spun over this illusory disconnect. In both book and show, mythologies are shared and arranged in such a way as to convey information to the reader. Often enough, we're not conscious of the movements (though we see things move) or of the arrangement (which we assume is arbitrary) but we have to seek the seams, find the seeds which both destruct and create.

The belief that our universe is not harmonious, "chaotic" even, is affirmed by the abuse of reading images from grand mechanical optics like the Hubble Space Telescope and events like the 1994 "violent" break-up of Comet Shoemaker Levy-9 by the gravitational pull of Jupiter. In part, it is the wonder we remain in over the aesthetic pleasure of viewing the Crab Nebula which keep our senses walled away from integrating the event of its supernova in 1054 A.D., witnessed and recorded the world over, to its actual significance to life on Earth. A narrative that is able to sew up super/natural into a reconciliation agrees the medium with the message. The coin, the mountain, the island - the material must truly exist - without these experience becomes a poor memory. The only means by which we may inherit knowledge for this modern world is by remembering ourselves and pushing through its fabric with a needle of poetry, the thread of a narrative about us. And we could do with a few patient instructors as well...