Processing Lost

So, the wife and I are going through the Lost series once again for the heck of it. And I'm trying to process afresh, given the whole text is laid out now, and you can identify the main thrust, sift for inconsistencies, divine some meaning perhaps, and, dare I say, interpret? I happened to be finishing up Seminary studies when Lost came out and much was made in casual conversation of its Christian bent at the time. Of course, whatever religious group you're a part of can take a text and pull out the strand relevant to that particular belief system and then pretend that one strand is the text's main purpose. (so Christians can interpret the Matrix as a aparable of salvation and a Buddhist can interpret it as a parable of enlightenment and an atheist can interpret it autobiographically, etc.) I suppose we all want to see our beliefs represented and reflected back to us in some ways. People want validation. Does this narrow and obscure our interpretive capacities sometimes? Indeed.
So I'm trying to hold that in tension with my reading of Lost here. Mind you, I haven't done the extensive research others have, and am considering delving into the "Finding Lost" series to trace some of the threads, but off the top of my head:
First, let's situate Lost in the TV landscape of the time. In the 2000s there arose a kind of two-tiered system in television, with "high concept" shows increasingly popular on cable channels like HBO (later, Showtime and AMC following suit) and formulaic re-tread on most of the networks. Lost broke new ground in a lot of ways. It's episodic story, it's time jumps for backstory and texture, its ecumenical inclusiveness (most popular shows don't have extended bits in Korean with subtitles), the intriigue, the cliffhangers, the (never ending) question marks. The show was innovative. And yet, while it bears close reading, reflection, and discussion, and touches on some important themes, the show still lacks a certain oomph taken in its entirety, and commands perhaps undue attention as a cultural artefact overall. (Side note: one of the results of the blurring of the boundaries of high and low culture is that they are now measured against each other, and, in most cases, the "low culture" loses out. Most decent novels, or even films, hold together better, are more profound, more poignant than this show, maybe because ultimately, Lost wasn't coherent, or, where it was coherent, it wasn't that profound). I mean, there's an entire Lostpedia devoted to unraveling some of these ongoing mysteries, books on the Gospel according to Lost, Lost and philosophy, etc. And I'm certainly not going to cover much ground in one blog entry, and sure, the show is a brain teaser. But how much more is it?
During the first few seasons, people could still have different theories about what was going on on the island. Some theorized the passengers had all died and the island was a kind of purgatory, others they had gone back in time, another dimension, what have you. The writers played with the ambiguity and played with some of the genre conventions afforded by the pseudo sci-fi elements in the story. But most desert island crash stories are asking the question, how is society best organized to function in a healthy way? Also the question asked in the Odyssey, by the way...which brings us to one of the shows mainstays. Allusion. Lost is awash in religious, pop cultural, and mythological allusion from beginning to end, such as the double allusion of Desmond Hume (sceptical Enlightenment philosopher), who for some still unexplained reason bumps into Jack in a Season 1 flashback scene, leading us to believe the show is going to be about the mysterious connections of its main characters in their lives before the crash (this is pseudo-resolved in season six, but not satisfactorily)...this is another misdirection device the show uses to keep the viewers on their feet: lead toward a certain expectation, then undermine it. This has the double effect of leaving the viewer coming back for more, but never leaving satisfied. Hume sails around the world in a boat, crash landing on the island. His lover back home is named Penny, short for Penelope. Here, we add a second layer of allusion, to Homer's Odyssey. In this sense, the show seems to be about allusiveness itself. About intertextuality. This also relates to its Unitarian Universalist afterlife sequence in the Series Finale. Different angles. Same truth (?) Another convention of the show is the withholding of significant information at crucial moments when someone has to make an important decision. "Trust me. You don't want to push that button." "Bush that button!" This back and forth without explanation or background or simple explanations that could help a character make significant decisions in the show are often withheld. Other plot points are introduced, and are seemingly important, then never touched on (Still not sure why Jacob's cabin moves around, why Christian Shepherd and Claire were in it when Locke gets there, for example, why Walt kept showing up mumbling gibberish backwards, why Aaron wasn't supposed to go back to the island, why the numbers were significant, and then they weren't, why Eko's brother's plane crash landed on an invisible, unfindable, moveable island just a little before he did, why Richard Alpert had perfect faith in Jacob for centuries and then all of a sudden doesn't at the very end, why Ben has an implied vast network of connection, wealth, and influence, which he got...how? and then he ends up accepting being Hurley's #2...etc.)
The island itself is never explored or mapped out, leaving it endlessly open to redefinition, addition, expansion. New temples, boats, light houses, cabins, encampments abound constantly. This is useful from a writer's perspective. The space is unmapped and therefore provides inexhaustible terrain. this maintains a sense of wildness and mystery that doesn't exist off the island, in the age of google earth.
Other allusions that beg interpretation, Locke, Bentham, Hawking, Rousseau, Farraday. Either enlightenment philosophers or scientists. Proponents of the rational. The viewer is at first tempted to interpret the character in light of their allusive name, but, beyond loose parallels, this is an unrewarding exercise. Mostly, this serves to set up a discursive field of ideological interplay, including what appears to be the central theme the show is going to explore, represented by Locke and Shepherd early on: science vs. faith. Only, the categories are all mixed up. Dr. Shepherd, son of "Christian," is the man of science. And Locke, allusively son of "the Enlightenment" (and a con-man) is the man of faith...although, ultimately that faith gets him killed, which kind of undermines all his steps of faith along the way...although he is also clearly framed as a Christ figure in the episode where he dies, leading to all the others returning to the island and "saving the day"...although he doesn't have any rebirth or resurrection back on the island, only the sacrifice, and then the evil smoke monster which at first seemed to be a morally testing angel of death, but really is the disembodied spirit of an evil immortal "Esau" character, takes on his shape, allowing him to potentially escape, so...is Locke a sap or a savior? The show doesn't tell us.
In the characters of Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Charlie, and Eko, the story also seemed to set up a fall-redemption theme it would continiously milk. The characters sinned in their past life, but has a chance for redemption on the island. But each time a character experiences some kind of redemption, it's somehow undermined later. Eko turns evil again. Sayid turns evil in the end. Charlie dies. Sawyer goes back and forth, ultimately becoming the shows Han Solo, the likeable rogue. The categories are messed up. The expecation undermined. From a literary perspective, this gives the show some moral complexity. It's good story-telling, ostensibly. But the seeming lack of design and coherence, the inconsistency, undermine this. The moral rules that apply in one season of the show (do something bad, get killed later) don't apply in later seasons. From a religious perspective, maybe a Buddhist notion of impermanence is implied. It is futile to look for coherence in a world of illusion. Something like that.
What the show boils down to in the end, seemingly, is "we have to stick together, or we're gonna die alone." The island becomes a simple allegory of contemporary life with all the ballyhooed complexity serving mostly as sleight of hand, as distraction, as detritus. The parallel to contemporary life runs something like this: With multiple threats looming, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, global warming, economic collapse, we need to stick together. There is nationalistic, religious, ideological plurality on the island, reflecting the plurality of worldviews in our world today. There are finite resources, tough decisions, and ambigious symbols, just like in real life(!) Some want to solve the problems with reason, some with faith, some with violence, some with manipulation and coercion. French, American, Australian, Iraqi, Southern, Christian, Atheist, Buddhist, self, or Other...we all have to pull together, guys. It's not cool to manipulate and kill each other. Namaste! We should have compassion and sacrifice, guys. Love conquers all, guys. (Not always caritas, or profound compassion. Romantic love will save you, too.) Ultimately, that seems to be the shows message, although it takes three Christ figures: Locke, Jacob, and Jack, to hammer this home. Don't choose evil, choose good. Although, in the end (as Linkin Park has so profoundly put it) it doesn't even matter. We all end up holding hands in a Unitarian Unversalist church walking toward the light. Doesn't this kind of undermine the "character is destiny" idea that lends meaning to a character's arc? I'm on the edge of my seat as Juliet sacrifices herself, Locke gets murdered, Jin sacrifices himself, Jack sacrifices himself, even while Ana Lucia, Eko, Rousseau, Alex, Carl, Charlie, Daniel, Michael, Shannon, and Boone, even the Others all die pretty much needlessly, but in the end, we all end up in the same place, as long as we awaken to the fact that, at one point or other, we hooked up with a member of the opposite sex, as long as we realized we've been loved. So, for me, the show sets up dichotomies it doesn't resolve, then oversimplifies notions of good and evil in the final season, undermining its own moral complexities, and does so in an extremely convoluted way. Entertaining? Sure. But a plot that justs twists and twists and never really untwists is a bit frustrating. The show set out quite promising, and could have, I think, been both profound and satisfying, but finally, ended up falling short, ended up being, of all things, brain candy, with an illusory depth. Although, as one hour escapist fare, it still beats 95% of what's been broadcast on television for about the last decade. But it had the chance to be transcendent. It wasn't. Too bad.
...Addendum:
Watching Season Six reminds me how the whole series is finally framed. It's essentially a bet between the two brothers. Jacob and...evil smoke monster guy...Esau? Something like that. Cain? Whatever. Evil guy, or not evil, but rather, cynical guy thinks humanity is inherently bent toward corruption and self-destruction. Jacob, dresses in white, the optimistic guy, thinks they can be saved, or at least they can figure out how to "live together." Something about living in harmony together, so he brings successive groups to the island to try and prove his point. It never works. But he calls it "progress." So the tropes of the series, faith vs. reason, destiny vs. free will, death, all the social philosophers and religious names, coping with uncertainty, boil down to a vision of history as a succession of social experiments. The series posits some kind of light or moral order at the center of existence, enshrined and protected on the island, and into which the cast members wander off at the back of the church in the finale. There is some suggestion here of benevolent spirit, of having to "let go" to become one with that spirit, which is what season six is all about. Slightly self-contradictory in that you have to let go of your illusions about life and physicality, but reclaim your connection or "attachment" to romantic relationships for the awakening to occur. Love leads to self-sacrifice, the overcoming of the ego, which leads to ability to "let go." Something like that. But love is here narrowly defined as "romantic love," or, if not exclusively, then at least this is foregrounded. I suppose this is necessary to engage a Western audience used to processing that way. Again, it's an odd mixture to enjoy a series so much and yet feel its convoluted plot and some of its foofie underlying ideology take it down a notch or two. Just sayin.

More Tidbits from Levertov

following my earlier comments on shifting the metaphorical landscape of reading from mining (linearity) to sowing (cyclical), I came across this quote in Levertov's "New and Selected essays" on the work of the poet:

"The poet is a farmer, one who tends the land of language and imagination and its creatures, who makes things grow, poem-things, story-things, not out of nowhere but out of the ground on which he walks." (46)

This of course shifts the action from receptive (reaping) to active (sowing, tending, growing), but, well, you know. She goes on...

"[The poet] is an antagonist - but to what? To the hostility of the environment, which, however, contains the elements that will nourish his crops. And in what sense? In the sense of the struggle to compose - not to impose order but to compose the passive elements into a harvest, to grow not tares, but wheat." (47)

given my own sense of moral vertigo, this speaks a kind of comfort, that tilling this soil potentially provides a moral strengthening, both against internal winter, and externally against injustice.

More goodies:
"When we fail to take into account contexts in examining works of literature, we are reflecting a similar failure prevalent in other spheres of life - a kind of parochialism which addresses symptoms not causes, or isolates a single cause from its interrelation with other causes. We can see this in medicine, in education, in the way social problems are addressed, and most of all in the way ecological disasters result from the disregard of the complex interdependence of all things." (66)

Where this hits most frustratingly home for me is in at least weekly meetings in which some aspect or other of low student achievement is ascribed to one oversimplified cause.

In reflecting on her tendency to read poetry that is rooted in the natural world, specifically that of her chosen home the Pacific Northwest (more on a realization this brought about later) and poetry that gives some evidence of spiritual wrestling, she writes:

"The fact that poems such as these (both those of homage to nature and of doubt and faith) are being written and are being read, and that there is indeed, in so many writers and readers, that "deep spiritual longing" Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both reader and writer, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world - criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to receive." (21)

Reminded me of the pedantic eisegesis I saw so much at Fuller (where most of it didn't even bother to be pedantic, I guess...too concerned with relevance) and in academic texts in general. Maybe we took the postmodern idea that "what you see depends on where you stand" a little too far, in that we're stuck with our predetermined ideas borrowed from whatever scholar we've hitched our wagon to (de Man, Baudrillard, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, whoever) will be found in whatever text we examine, keeping us caught in tautological semantic prisons with a bit of arrogance thrown in for good measure (who the hell else understands Hegel but me?). Nowhere is it more evident that we've become disconnected from nature. Well, I guess there's downtown LA...but even there we have a few trees. Naw, academia takes the cake on this one, where nature exists as an a abstract postulate, trafficked as sign and open to constructivist illusions.

The subtle body

Reading back through some essays by Denise Levertov, I'm struck by the similarity between her treatment of the "organic form" of a poem (more on that in a second) and the Rudolf Steiner/Goethean science notion of the subtle body underlying living things. There may be some connection with Native American spiritualities and Romantic intuitions as well. If I could make a feeble attempt at explaining, cutting a middle way between essentialism - that is, we perceive the world as it is, things have inherent substance that is perceivable, and constructivism, things aren't much there at all, the world is a big silver screen onto which our minds actively project objects, people, etc. This way of seeing and perceiving has developed over time (Barfield) and has not always been exactly as it is now, and has something to do with the link between language and consciousness. Enter the subtle body, a kind of spiritual underbody. This may be the underlying aspect of a given oject (does it have to be "alive" to have a subtle body? That is plant, mineral, animal? I don't know) which interacts with our minds, co-creating the perception, mingling with underlying reality to create that which we perceive in everyday life. So, too, Levertov claims, there is a poem beneath the poem, an "organic form," which she defines thusly:

"a method of apperception, i.e. of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories. Such poetry is exploratory."

She traces this in some poems by William carlos Williams, recognizing underlying patterns in meter and sound, calling it a kind of "pulse" of the poem. I like this idea that poetry mirrors creation (poeisis) in this way. The physical artifact or poem has an underlying, spiritual form manifest in the object or poem itself. I'm putting this in dialogue with the idea put forth in the Morton lectures and elsewhere about a "materialist theory of reading" that is, information is energy, to read a poem, to give it voice is to release that energy in soundwaves, to release its body and texture. I'm wondering also if ideas themselves have substance, energy, materiality, or if ideas or words on the page are merely potential energy, so to speak, and only have materiality when spoken aloud. Speaking with a friend steeped in mystical traditions, he mentioned the idea of the subtle body, and that one theory of ancient medicine is that, rather than some antiquated trial and error, ancient shamans could see the subtle bodies of certain plants in trancelike states (after, say, a vision quest) and could identify their healing properties in that vision state, idetifying which were curative and which were poisonous. What does this mean for my own poems? Do they have underlying pattern, how do I become more sensitized to it? I'm sort of a hack at this point when it comes to mechanics and might say of my work what Levertov says of Williams, that at time he he "gives inadequate attention to detail, fails to follow all the way through, as if he were in too much haste to get on to the next matter." I find poetry a way of getting closer to the ground, potentially of sifting through minerals, of touching reality on the ground floor, whereas most of the time we hover in some middle distance, some toposphere, where the terms we traffic in are vague and general. A good poem gives evidence of spiritual expansiveness, of an enlargened consciousness. The problem is it takes time, patience, and sensitivity. It takes work. It takes a state of awareness that culture is at pains to quash. Soooo, fight the good fight?

Reclaiming Poetry

Is not as easy at it sounds. For one, there's all that reading to do. Kidding. I'll paraphrase Northrop Frye here and talk about the difference between the reader and the critic. The reader has a host of favorite pieces of literature he likes for various reasons, they resonate on some level. The critic concerns himself with literature like a scientist. I assume this means going about the business of organizing the canon into some sort of coherent shape, making distinctions based on impersonal analysis. What Eliot might call "taking in the tradition." I'm struggling here and I might need someone to throw me a life preserver. Sometime last year I made the firm decision to dive back into poetry, having dabbled for some time awaiting acceptance into one program or other, and writing an unfinished novel. Inspired by Christian Wiman's "Ambition and Survival" I read up on different critics first. This serves two purposes: first, to get the topography of poetry. This is either explicitly stated or implied by poet-critics left and right. You learn Bishop was friends with Lowell. You learn Lowell had issues. You learn Denise Levertov chooses Williams over Eliot. You learn Pound had issues. You learn Derek Walcott writes damn fine essays. You learn Yeats was a freak, but a fascinating one. You learn about the 20th century straw man called "free verse" everyone has strong opinions about. I read criticism from Levertov, Di Piero, Pound, Heaney, CK Williams. I read Lowell, Frost, Auden, Milton, 20th century collections. Like the magic eye, some of the picture is beginning to fill in. I recently picked up a collection of Joseph Brodsky, looked back into Milozs, expanding beyond the American voice. And yet, few of the poems I've read stick with me as transformative experiences. Admittedly, I read quickly, and haven't made a ton of space for close examination, for depth. Among the poetry I've read this year, a few poems from the magazine Poetry stick out to me. This is due, in part, to the range of quality and voice, so decent poems stick out. But while I felt I was supposed to enjoy Auden, wanted to enjoy Pound, for tone and voice, for calculated flippancy, I connected with the poems of Phillip Larkin. For subtlety of gesture, for sensitivity to family and the confusion of displacement and a kind of humble grandiosity I enjoyed Li-Young Lee. For their unapologetically masculine timbres, I enjoyed Ted Hughes and William Logan, respectively. I did not analyze any of the poems here, so I'm not speaking, as perhaps I ought, of style or form, but of the overall impact of the poem, with content perhaps foregrounded. This probably says more about me than about some abstracted "problem with poetry," and bears some reflection, but I thought it interesting that after roughly a year, I feel like life is too short to spend a great deal of it "familiarizing oneself with the canon" or some such. What punches you in the stomach? Worry about the whys and wherefores later. Read that. Don't flinch.

Timothy Morton. Cause. Effect.

So, my roommate Wall and I have been listening to itunesU lectures by professor of English Timothy Morton from UC Davis (by way of Oxford) and discussing his treatment of the Romantics. Definitely worthwhile, but we're having different experiences. for Wall, Morton is helping to collapse dualisms (the old Western subject-object dualism has plagued Wall for much of his natural born life, methinks) through his discussion of nature, biology, dark ecology, "ecology without nature," etc. Listen to the lectures for more on this (although for me, the class is a bit overmuch "Romanticism as an occasion for Mortonism," a common pitfall in academia). But for me, there's a simultaneous sense of refreshing thought, intellectual stimulation and the sense of displeasure by that arises by contrast with, what to call it, mundane mind? The network of TV, household chores, small talk, errands, a sense of trivialized work, and resource allocation of the everyday is rendered so utterly banal by comparison, that all things that distract from, call it transcendent mind, are cast in a negative light, unnecessary hindrances to purity of thought, to precision of expression. I am left enlightened, but slightly more arrogant and dissatisfied by the lectures, coarsened, not softened. There are layers to this, no doubt. One is the fact that this man is much smarter than me, manages to have a wife and child and a professorship and combine a vast knowledge of lierature and science, whereas I struggle to teach High School honors English adequately (it's own set of challenges, of course), was unable to get accepted to respected PhD programs in the field, and don't even have a child, yet am hard pressed to carve out a space to grow intellectually. Acceptance of one's current station without allusion is one of my current spiritual hurdles and this is throwing a wrench in the gears. I continue to listen to the lectures, selectively. One such selection came last week, as I was wrapping up Chopin's "The Awakening" with my 11th graders and trying to articulate "feminist criticism" in teenagese. In preparing for the day, I noticed the similarity between Chopin's realist writing and Morton's description of Jane Austen, from whom Chopin obviously learned a thing or two. Indirect speech, point of view, and focalization to use Morton's terminology, referencing "structural narratology." Essentially, there is ambiguity about the shift from description to speech, moving back and forth fluidly, allowing access to the interiority of the characters, because the speech is indirect and its unclear if something is spoken or only thought by a character. The speech is implied. He goes on to say this is the proper focus of literary criticism. i turned this over in my head for a few days and decided that here is where we part ways. He wonders why we should focus on some made up characters when we might just as well write about someone we went out for coffee with. He's essentially trivializing literary criticism that focuses on character and action in favor of linguistic and rhetorical analysis. And while I'm interested in both, it is for different reasons. I'm interested in the focalization technique as a writer, but as a reader, I'm more interested in what's going on with the characters in the story. Why is this more important than someone I went to coffee with? Because my coffee date exists in a fluid space of life, not an intentionally structured narrative to enact some sort of social criticism or other. There's structure, there's authorial intent, however ambiguous or elusive. Call me a Bakhtinian, but there's a speaker and a listener, not just a text existing in and for itself, with techniques to be analyzed in and for themselves. To use an analogy from my Saturday morning activities, this would be like giving the "making of" features of Lord of the Rings, the rigging, the costumes, the set design, the CGI, primacy over the story, which is, after all, what all those pieces are in service of. I'm not entirely sure what camp this puts me in, or if I'm even adequately understanding Morton enough to mount and intelligible counterargument, but there it is.