(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

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...