[Ed. Note: for more recent thoughts on this theme after the series finale, see "More on Lost and Dante's Island Down Under".]
During seasons 1 and 2 of Carlton Cuse's and Damon Lindelof's Lost, I would put up the random post when a particular episode grabbed me, but it became clear after a while that the writers were operating at a level of complexity that made it futile, for me anyway, to try to grasp what they were trying to do. So I decided to go along for the ride and see where they wanted to take us. Well, we're in the final season, and there are six more hours to go, and because a clearer picture, more or less, is emerging, I'll be posting again about Lost as the series draws to a close.
The narrative has become extraordinarily convoluted, but I think in a good and interesting way. Nevertheless, it's hard to believe that in the six remaining hours all shall be made clear. We'll see. I'm more interested in the overarching narrative pattern than trying to parse out the show's many subthemes, and I think the pattern of that basic story is finally taking shape. And in future posts I might talk more about some of the subthemes that interest me, but today I just want to talk about what I think, at this juncture anyway, that basic narrative pattern is. I also want to think out loud a bit about what the possible significance of the series might be as a cultural event: I'd argue it's the most important and ambitious of several pop-cultural attempts to help us establish an imaginative beachhead in a postmodern, post-Einsteinian world. I'll get to that, but first let me ramble a bit by reflecting on some interesting connections I see between post-Newtonian Lost and Dante's Ptolemaic Divine Comedy:
In one post about the second-season episode "Psalm 23", I speculated that the Island was Purgatory, a hellish place, but one in which the dead still have choices and a future. I have not for a long time thought that the Lost survivors are dead in the Sixth-Sense sense, but the Island does still appear to be playing a purgatorial role. It's a threshold place, an in-between place, neither wholly belonging to the Newtonian, three-dimensional world, which for most of us still defines normal reality, nor belonging to the spiritual world--although spirits haunt it everywhere and have a special interest in what happens on the Island.
The people who come to the Island, whether they are aware of it or not, are playing a part in a larger struggle waged by two beings who are clearly spiritual or angelic entities of some kind, Jacob and his unnamed nemesis simply referred to by Cuse and Lindelof as the Man in Black. The latter from time to time makes an appearance as the serpentine Smoke Monster, and he seems to have a claim on those who come to the Island whom he judges to be dark-souled, more evil than good.
The Man in Black is the archetypal force of chaos and destruction, and his power in some way correlates with the electromagnetic energies of the Island. Electromagnetism is a kind of crossover phenomenon, like light, neither wholly wave nor particle, neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual. As light has always played a metaphoric role in telling us something about the radiance of truth, beauty, and goodness as transcendent realities, so does electromagnetism stand metaphorically for the forces of evil, for the forces of chaos and destruction. Electromagnetism is how the forces of evil roll.
Jacob, like the angel who stands at the gate of the Garden of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from re-entering, stands on the Island to prevent the Man in Black from leaving. He must do so to preserve the human project, which is an experiment in freedom. And while Jacob still survives on the Island he protects those whom he draws to the Island who still have the capacity to choose between Good and Evil. Once Ben kills Jacob, he still has a discarnate presence on the Island, but is unable to hold the Man in Black in check.
So it's as if the Island was a cork in a bottle holding back the churning forces of chaos, electromagnetic or otherwise, and once the cork is popped, chaos wins, the world is destroyed, the human experiment over. That seems to be the basic mythic narrative that the writers are working with, and now that God (or his representative) is dead, it's up to the free humans to keep the Man in Black in check because the Divine can't (or won't) do it. A basic theme explored on this blog is the idea that the widespread contemporary experience of the death of God, especially among the culture's most educated and elite, is a necessary precondition for humans to take responsibility for the future of the earth, which is, as I've been arguing here from the beginning, the goal of the human experiment.
We have emerged from the embedded consciousness of animist or shamanic peoples to a kind of free, but disconnnected (from nature and other people) and quite uncomfortable disembeddedness that is nevertheless a necessary precondition for the full maturation of human freedom. Connection is possible, but it is no longer a given; it must be chosen. Though we experience God as dead, he isn't. He's there, like Jacob, in the wings making suggestions, but they're suggestions that we are free to refuse. We are no longer puppets of the gods as, for instance, the Greeks thought of themselves. We are not fated, but control our own destiny, if we are willing to man up and accept the responsibility for it.
So in the Lost narrative everything is at stake. And let's be clear, for us in our non-fictional, non-mythic, prosaic, everyday world everything is at stake as well, and it all depends on the exercise of human freedom. We have to choose to avoid environmental cataclysm, and we have to choose to make choices about technological developments if we are not to risk a cataclysmic technological singularity.
In our "real" world, the forces of chaos have an unprecedented opportunity for a win in the next several decades. What we saw of the forces of chaos unleashed during World War II was a mere shot across the bow. And so if we're at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as it is in the Lost story, is the mystery of freedom. Evolution is in human hands--what will we humans do with the responsibility?
So the basic drama unfolding in the last season is about whether the humans find a way to keep the cork in place or whether they don't, whether chaos wins, or whether the experiment in human freedom continues. The mythic narrative raises a question for the human race: Now that the responsibility for the continuation of the human experiment in freedom has been surrendered by the Divine to humans, will the experiment continue, or will it end, either from cataclysm or by humans becoming something unhuman? It wouldn't surprise me if Cuse's and Lindelof's story ends not as Commedia but as Tragedia.
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Thus my segue into the Divine Comedy theme for this post. For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.
Calvary, in Jerusalem, and Christ's harrowing of hell after his crucifxion created the opening by which humans from the post-Adamic fallen world in the Northern hemisphere could find passage back to the South, through Hell and then beyond to climb the Purgatorial mountain, to its summit, Eden, which is the staging area for salvific release into the heavens. This is a journey Dante takes with Beatrice in the Paradiso cantos.
Dante passes through hell and then comes out in the south on the Island at the South Pole, and then he climbs the purgatorial mountain there to reach the original Garden of Eden. And from Eden he departs into the several levels of heaven defined by the planetary spheres, the fixed stars, and the realm that lies beyond the fixed stars where one encounters the Godhead in the Beatific Vision. This was Dante's journey in the flesh, and perhaps it's analogous, in its Purgatorial phase, to the journey the Lost survivors have made that have brought them to the Island.
In Dante's imagination of the earth, the southern hemisphere, the world down under, is the underworld, in the sense that it is under the top part of the world, but the top half is the realm of fallen consciousness, of Maya, illusion. In Christian terms, the northern hemisphere is a place of fallen exile, the place in which we're all metaphysically "lost." The underworld is for fallen consciousness a dream world, but from the perspective of those in the underworld, the northern hemisphere is the hallucination. The underworld is non-hallucinatory because there lies the path home. A journey into the underworld must be undertaken if one is to find his way home. He must pass through it to get back where he is to end his exile, to be no longer lost, to return to where it all began, where lies the real home and the ultimate destination for all those who by grace and choice undertake to become un-lost.
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Clearly Cuse and Lindelof are playing with this traditional cosmology, as they are, of course, using ideas from several other sources. This is for them a wildly syncretistic exercise, but all the more interesting for that. The Postmodern era is the Age of Syncretism--of all manner of creative fusions.
So the Island in the Lost narrative, in addition to being a cork, is a threshold, a place between here and there, and the writers do a very interesting job of creating a sense of displacement or dislocation that relates to the situation of these exiles: Is being on the Island really to be Lost, or is it to be found? Hasn't Jacob found them and brought them there? And it's clear that their longing for home in the Northern hemisphere is nostalgia for the hallucination, like the Israelites in the wilderness longing to return to Egypt. They are exiles, yes, but right where they need to be.
And since the detonation of the Jughead and the creation of the sideways reality, a new kind of alienation into a hallucinatory exile has been created. It is the obverse of the more conventional idea of exile, which is to be "neither/nor"; in its being "both/and". The more typical form of exile in at Ptolemaic or Newtonian universe is to be neither here nor there, to be between home and some future destination, either a future return to the original home or to find a new one. No two things can occupy the same space at the same time, but can one thing occupy two spaces at the same time, to be both here and there? The Lost writers seem are telling us that it is possible, but if so, what are the implications? And it's not a good thing to be so split.
A traditional pre-Einsteinian archetype for exile, for being "lost" is the biblical neither here nor there, to be neither in Egypt nor yet in Jerusalem, to be wandering futilely in a wilderness. But post-Jughead the survivors in the Lost story are now both here and there in two parallel realities at the same time--on the Island in the Southern hemisphere and in the sideways reality in the Northern hemisphere in which Oceanic 815 never crashes.
And while those on the Island (except Desmond apparently) have no awareness of their other lives in the Northern hemisphere, those in the northern world are all gradually awakening to their parallel existence on the Island. So this is the big question to be resolved in the next six hours: What is the relationship between the two parallel realities? How is it possible to live in two worlds with two separate narratives at the same time? Are they both equally real, or is one a kind of hallucination, and if so, which one is the hallucination? For me the answer is clear, but we'll see if that's where the writers go with it.
Because if the Dante paradigm gives us a clue, the northern hemisphere is the fallen world of illusion (and we're specifically talking about Los Angeles here to boot) and the southern hemisphere, or the underworld, the world down under, is the staging area for salvation. And if the writers are working with a Dante-esque logic, the people in the sideways timeline in the northern hemisphere are living in a hallucination from which they must wake up. They must return to the Island, and it appears they are in the process of figuring that out as the men, anyway, are having experiences that awaken them to the memory of their Beatrices, Claire for Charlie, Penny for Desmond, Libby for Hurley, and Helen for Locke. The memory of something emotionally real awakens them to their hallucinatory status in the sidways timeline. Very Dante-esque.
This logic would explain why it was wrong for the survivors to leave the Island in 2004, and why Farraday was wrong to set off the bomb that created the timeline in which Oceanic 815 never crashes. The sideways reality represents a regression, the comforting fleshpots of Egypt; the true path lies ahead on the Island. The Island is a wilderness staging area in which the survivors are learning that their old ways of thinking are obsolete; it's where, like the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, they are being prepared to move forward on to the next stage.
That's one way to think about what's happening here, but I'm usually wrong when it comes to guessing where the writers are going. What I've written here has been more of an exercise of my projecting what I want them to do with the story than it is likely what they will do with it. Nevertheless, I'm interested to see where they go. And I continue to hope that no matter where they go it won't wind up with some cheesy, non-explanation explanation for the two timelines and everything else. I'm eager to be surprised, but I'm half expecting to be disappointed as I was by Battlestar Galactica's finale. What a contrived, slapped-together hodgepodge.
***
Others have played with this idea of parallel universes or parallel realities--it's at the heart of the Narnia stories; it's in the Phillip Pullman trilogy, it's currently at the heart of Fox TV's Fringe, and there are apparently comic book stories that have explored the idea in the sixties. For me it's all fascinating stuff because these are all efforts to explore imaginatively the threshold between science and faith, between logos and mythos. In the three-dimensional Newtonian world which still plays a dominant role in organizing our imagination of the real, there is no legitimate place for mythos or for a mythological geography like Dante's northern and southern hemispheres of the earth.
In a post-Einsteinian world there is a place for it, and once the Newtonian model breaks down as our common sense imagination of the real, all kinds of mythopoetic possibilities become plausible. All these storytellers are attempting in a very preliminary way, to help us imagine what it might mean to live in a world in which the collective imagination of the real has caught up with the science in a post-Einsteinian world. That's at least a working hypothesis for me as I follow where these shows are going.
These are contemporary exercises very similar to Dante's in the prodigious imaginative world he created in his Divine Comedy. There are the facts as he knew them then and we know them now, but as Dante attempted to weave logos and mythos into a compelling synthetic narrative, it's not been possible to weave the two during the modern period, except as something considered unserious, as a flight of fancy, an entertainment. We don't have the cultural commonplaces that Dante had to make a more serious metaphysical symbolic story. We don't believe that symbols are real. But as Dante aspired to give us more than a fanciful entertainment, I suspect Cuse and Lindelof aspire to give us more as well. They want to stretch our imaginations so that we see the world not through the commonplace modern's habitual mindset, but to work at the fringe of that mindset, and in working there to let seep in what lies outside it to reshape or reconfigure how we imagine what is real as we move on to the next stage of cultural evolution.
These storytellers exploring ideas about parallel realities make no pretension to be telling us the way things literally are, but they are interesting and important insofar as their stories work for us as a kind of groping toward an alternative common-sense imagination we know needs to be substituted for our current inadequate imagination of the real. We know the world is not adequately explained or imagined in Newtonian terms, just as moderns understood that the world was not adequately explained or imagined by Ptolemy. But it takes a while for the common-sense imagination to catch up; it take a while for the mythos to catch up with the logos.
Because the more important thing that opens up to us with the demise of modern, three-dimensional reality is the scientifically validated idea that there is no longer any such thing as literal or one-dimensional truth. How many of us really accept that everything is interpretation, and that whatever interpretation we're currently working with is provisional mythos. Whatever we think of as "facts" are facts only insofar as they fit into an interpretive pattern, a pattern which has changed radically over the course of human history and will change again, because the facts we accept now as "factual" can be assimilated into a grander synthesis once new levels of facts and experience are uncovered. And high-level physics is pointing us to the "fact" that reality is multi-dimensional and multi-leveled.
Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension, so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.
What does it mean to have postmodern consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack.
So the question for me about Lost is whether years from now it will be judged to be merely a clever entertainment, or whether it will be seen as real Art in the sense described above, as an artifact which contributes to changing our common imagination of the real. I don't know. At the very least I think it performs the service alluded to above for helping us to establish an imaginative beachhead in a post-Einsteinian cosmos in which mythos and logos interweave. Whether in the long run it succeeds as something more than that remains to be seen. But because it starts with a respect for the multi-dimensionality of things, you have to admire its ambition and its ability to hold an audience for six years. It says something about who we are and what we're about.