O, Lost

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. – Thomas Wolfe, “Look Homeward, Angel”

***

If the word has not already been coined, I’ll do the honors.

This year, I unequivocally became a Lostophile, that is, a person with a deep affinity for the philosophical nuisances of the television series, “Lost.” Granted, the TV show went off the air in 2010, but I only came to The Island, so to speak, this past fall (October 2011) when I began watching the series from start to finish on Netflix.

OK, that’s not quite accurate. My initial engagement with the show was so intense that I watched the first three seasons, started right back at Season One and then watched the whole way through. I recently finished Season Six a couple weeks ago.

Spoilers: Don’t read beyond this point if you haven’t seen the show and plan to watch.

For anyone not familiar with the plot — that’s probably not many at this point — here’s a brief rundown. Oceanic Flight 815 crashes onto an island that viewers learn has some mysterious properties. We follow the main characters as they come to learn about The Island’s unusual forces and attempt to find a way off The Island. While the main island plot is taking place, viewers see flashbacks of the survivors’ lives, including Jack, Kate, Sawyer, John Locke, Hurley, Jin and Sun, Charlie and others, at certain points before they boarded the plane. Generally speaking, most of their lives were falling apart before boarding the plane (John, for instance, had been pushed out of a window and had become paralyzed in real life) and Jack’s wife had left him. Their presence on The Island is seen, in ways that aren’t quite clear, as a means or method by which the characters have the chance for a second start or a rebirth. In the most obviously example, John, regained the ability to walk after the plane crashed. A testament, again, to The Island’s unusual properties … maybe.

While viewers are learning about their sundry pasts, the characters in present day on The Island are dealing with the entity they call The Monster, which is a cloud or stream of black smoke, a polar bear, another group of people called the Others, the appearance of Jack’s dead father on The Island (wearing the same tennis shoes in which he was laid in the coffin) and other mysterious elements. Season Three deals with the growing conflict between the crash survivors and the others. In Season Four, we begin flashing forward to scenes after the “Oceanic Six” were rescued and returned to America, where they tried to resume their normal lives without much success. Jack eventually realizes that he was actually meant to remain on The Island, and the Oceanic Six eventually return. In the plane as they pass over about the same spot as before, they crash again, and by fate … or whatever … all of them survive the second crash. Because of high levels of elctromagneticism, which we learned caused the first crash (a consequence of another important character, Desmond Hume, who is named for David Hume, failing to enter the numbers, 4 8 15 16 23 42, into a computer as commanded), some characters returning to the island land in 1977 and some landed in 2007, or three years after the initial crash. Also because of electromagnetic events on the island, some characters of the original clash were sporadically hurled through time until finally landing in 1974. They worked with the Dharma Initiative for three years before uniting with some of the other characters from the second trip The Island. Juliet eventually sets off a nuclear bomb, which in theory was supposed to prevent the original crash from happening in the first place.

In Season Six, viewers follow the original survivors who have now landed in present day on The Island, while a flash sideways plot line shows them interacting as things should have been in in a more perfect world, presumably in the after life. In addition, viewers are also presented with the apparent struggle between two deities (brothers) who control the island, Jacob and the Man in Black. Jacob hand-picked the characters to come to The Island to serve as “candidates” to protect The Island. The original Hurley of the present day eventually became the protector, while Jack (an earlier protector) dies at the same place that he initially woke up from the original plane crash after a battle with the Man in Black. One of the last scenes we are left with is of his father’s white tennis shoes hanging from a tree, which were also seen in Season One, Episode One. The original survivors Kate, Sawyer and Claire, fly off the island from the second plane on which Kate and Sawyer returned. In one of the last scenes, Jack watches the plane cross the sky with a smile on his face as he dies.

I have only scratched the surface on how complicated this show became in the last three seasons. I think the writers possibly went a little overboard in introducing the deities into plot and trying to somehow explain the unexplainable. I would almost have been satisfied with the approach of the writers of the movie, Cloverfield (Reviewed here). The monster in that movie wasn’t explained. The audience was just left with the brute fact that it simply existed and writers didn’t bother with coming up with a wild explanation about aliens or other worlds.

Jacob and the Man in Black aside, the interesting element about Lost was the philosophical questions that were raised and the implications of following certain paths. Jack, for instance, was a man of science and facts at the beginning of the series and did not give much weight to fate or faith, while John was a man of belief and thought that he had a purpose on The Island that was bigger than himself. Sawyer, saying numerous times in the show, to paraphrase, “We have to look out for ourselves,” had a self-interested philosophy, while Desmond Hume in some ways mirrors David Hume:

In his posthumously published essay “On Suicide,” Hume firmly advocates that it is neither against the laws of God nor nature for people to end their own lives. This argues that people have complete freedom over their own bodies and what they do to/with them. Using the failsafe in the Swan, Desmond apparently takes this right upon himself in a way that David Hume did not consider – self-sacrifice.

Books have been written and whole college courses have been devoted to deciphering the philosophical implications of the show, so I won’t go into any more detail. Here is a rundown of the various philosophical references in the show and how they might relate to the characters.

The ultimate question about the show, in my estimation, and one that still rages today, is did the characters survive the crash in the first place? Did the entire show take place in the after life? Was it all a dream? The writers themselves have denied most of the theories, and the established view is still that the characters crashed and really did survive, but that the plot line of the last season did take place in a kind of limbo, and at the very end of the show, they “moved on” into heaven … or wherever. Christian Shephard in the final scene of the show explained that the characters had created “this place” so that they could find one another and remember that they had spent the most important parts of their lives together on The Island. Thus, when the original Jack died after the battle with the Man in Black, he really did die, and eventually, Kate, Sawyer and Claire died in real life after escaping The Island and joined Jack in the after life, ultimately reuniting in the church:

Of course, if we think about the actions on The Island taking place in reality, we then must assume that the deities that live there, Jacob and the Man in Black, are localized deities and also exist in reality. This isn’t much different than assuming that limbo or the after life exists, but there are some problems. While Jacob does come to the U.S. mainland to influence the lives of his “candidates,” he lives on The Island and seems to only care about protecting it. Jacob and the Man in Black are also mortal since they are both killed. Not very powerful deities. Since becoming a “protector” apparently doesn’t save one from death, how does this qualify the chosen candidate to protect The Island? Further, given the still images of the vacant island that were shown as the credits rolled after the last episode, I still think that a plausible case could be made that the characters did die upon the initial crash, and The Island is, indeed, hell (since midway through the series, viewers learned that the survivors were “picked” because they were flawed and were being given the chance for redemption). I don’t know that I believe this theory, I’m just saying that’s it’s an intriguing one to think about.

In any case, however lost the characters might have been within the framework of the show, the viewing experience almost defies definition. The show’s producers created a true Alfred Hitchcock-like sense of a complete separation from reality and hope. Once a person becomes that lost, in other words, they are really lost, with any number of unfound doors, always and forever, just out of reach.

A year-plus in the books

Welp, folks, I just renewed the registration on this domain for another year. I had a free credit somehow or another, so it didn’t cost anything, and as an added bonus, you get to see me babble for another year! I know you couldn’t be happier.

I was watching a Christopher Hitchens interview today from 2002 (I know, I apologize. I keep harping on this crass Englishman, but I’m fascinated with the guy.) Anyway, he was saying that at some point in his life, he came to realize that he was a born writer and that he really couldn’t imagine doing anything else. That the career of writing was really decided for him, not by him. And that struck me as something I could relate to.

To present a brief sketch of my background, I began college at Lander University in South Carolina with no clue at all what I wanted to do. At first, I believe I was a music major, when I realized that if I continued on down this path, I would grow up penniless. So, I moved to a more lucrative endeavor: computer programming. I could handle Pascal, the language, not his wager, fairly well. I performed decently in the introductory Pascal class, as I remember. But as I transferred to Clemson University, I came in contact with this fast-speaking, fast-moving, coffee-overdosed programming professor blathering something about the Java language (who obviously took the title of the language too seriously), objects and functions and infinite loops, and it was all quite frustrating. Today, I understand some of JavaScript, a Web programming language, but at the time, my anti-math mind was not grasping this fellow’s speedily-rehearsed lectures at all. So computer programming was out.

English was the last gasp. I did not know what I would do with an English major, even after graduating college. I just took the wise words of a professor of mine. He told me to just study what you enjoy. And I did enjoy that, at least. I was inspired by John Milton, Shelley, Keats, Emily Dickson, Bronte, and others, and later, Thomas Wolfe, Jack Miles, Stanley Fish, Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck and others. I had early aspirations of going on to becoming an English professor. This would, of course, require graduate school somewhere other than Clemson. And in order to stay closer to my family and friends, I declined that option and started working at a retail store in Clemson to make ends meet. But we’re getting bogged down. To make it short, a journalism instructor at Clemson University (S.C.) saw something in me, I suppose, and gave me a favorable recommendation, thus allowing me to get an interview with a local newspaper in Clayton, Ga.

My future aspirations would lead further than this blog and my current position. I would like to do some writing for a major magazine on the topic of either politics or religion or history … or perhaps, a well-read online publication, by way of a weekly or monthly column, if the opportunity ever presented itself.

But back to writing as a career. I think at some point in the latter part of 2007-08, I came to the realization that a writer is what I am, like Hitchens and others. I think before then, I was just trying to scratch by, have fun and the like. Although, I was attempting to write some (bad) poetry and fiction in high school, so the interest was there early on.

Today, I take a certain pleasure when I am in the company of fellow writers, like the editor at the paper for which I work. And I don’t mean pulp fiction writers who crank out 10 novels a day. Those folks aren’t writers; they are entertainers. I mean people who appreciate the language and have something meaingful to say through it, like Milton, Wolfe, Paine, Locke, Vonnegut and others.

At the expense of this getting too long and to catalog the renewal of the domain name and this site for another year, here are 15  of my favorite posts from the last year and four months, beginning in May 2008. Thanks for reading!

On Dobson’s ‘dissection’ of Obama’s June 2006 speech 

Why I assume a god (I ironic to the core, since more than one year later, I would make an opposite case.) 

2012 Olympics go intergalactic?

Comments on the presidential debate

 Zimbabwe: House of cards 

Debunking reincarnation

On Cruise, thetans, Hubbard and Xenu

Limbaugh, unhappiest, most miserable person alive? Perhaps

The newspaper crisis as I see it

 Unrevolutionary tea

On ‘Milk’ and homosexuality (Revised)

Glimmer of hope in Zimbabwe

Our forward-thinking Founders

Hare brains defeat reason in Iran

The God question: My testimony