thoughts on LOST

thoughts on LOST
Beckettt...(intentional missed spelling) used the name of an unseen person in Balzac's play "The Speculator" for his title character in Waiting for Godot. Godot never shows up. The Film "Rainmaker is a triangle with one part never seen, The father of Hoffman and Cruise's characters. His death and his testament propel the entire movie. Jacob did this in Lost. Faraday is another example. His plan propelled the series into another direction. He has been seen once, talked only to Hume in brief. There are of course two possibilities: Jacob = Faraday. In which case, the plot seems obvious. FLocke has got the wrong candidate. The right person is Hume. Sayid came back from the well redeemed. OR (my view), Faraday along with Ben are Jacob's main opponents. Their champions, particularly Hume, are there to defeat Jacob and MiB. I am not sure who Ben's champion is quite yet. He made not even need one. However, Ben knows how to play and to place "inside men".

Kant was no mystic; yet his philosophy underpins Fitche's "An attempt at a critique of all revelation". Reading the young Fitche's response to Kant's difficulties with Faith using Kant's own system is the first step to the creation of archetypes. Reading Alfred Russel WALLACE's words debunking evolution (his own theory as much as Darwin's), one gets the concept that science can run away from anthropology. That Whether We LIke or NOT, we stuck in a particular culture. This leads to a major division in opinion regarding David Hume. Hume says that men put things in order because to avoid doing so leads to CONFUSION. So we have watches, calenders, names for random grouping of stars, a taxonomy of the biosphere (that many call evolution). Novels (whether in print or video) do not have scientific endings or religious endings, they have cultural endings. Dickens among many others wrote episodes in monthly installments. Readers reactions altered what he wrote. Fitche in his first work, Wallace in his withdrawal from evolution, and Dickens in his response to his readers are all examples of culture forming our responses to art. If you have any doubt about this, take a look at Stephen Jay Gould's The Flamingo's Smile in which presents Wallace's very profound problem with evolution along side of Mark Twain's unique defense of Darwin. Again, Lost is a novel. Novels end with people. Tolstoy latched on a terrible history lesson to the end of War and Peace. He makes the same point much more vividly in the novel.

. You have put your finger on this last pulsating heart of Hegel's absolute. I have read this article which is a massive apologia for the inadequate "progress" of neurology. I am perhaps the only member of the group which I have christened "skeptical modified realism". As far as I tell from this presentation is that only one or three of these views could possibly be subjected to the Popper test: a theory is only scientific if I (or some other) can prove it false. Einstein proposed a question concerning his theory and others confirmed his prediction off the coast of Africa (Mercury, the bending of light, a very famous story that we need not retell here). This Italian author is surely the heir of Croce (the last defender of Hegel's concept of History) which is opposed by G. Vico These two southern Italians represent two distinctive views of civilization (Spengler, Toynbee, Frye need to get your attention as refutation of Hegel and Croce.) Finally, there is an Angelo-Saxon tradition that Penrose and the other English speaking authors have ignored. Starting from Francis Bacon's Four Idols (see Market place and Theatre) through Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of the Mind, precision in defining the terms "mind, consciousness, memory...." is lacking. Superb article, though it is, and truly excellent though it is, the article's author (as is her right) pushes aside a great hulking mass of metaphysics.

This is for you and anyone else with the guts to accept this rant. It is not my rant. It belongs to a certain Captain Ahab; more or less the words are I would strike at the sun (GOD) should it offend me. You need to go the Book of Job to hear God's reply to Job: "Were you with Me, when I laid the foundation of the world....when I created the monster of deep". Ahab answers with a toast to Satan and blasphemy. We now come to the end of Lost and why the original ending changed and the problem the producers made for themselves when they cast Michael Emerson (too good to toss off the show) and Cusack (too good an actor, too good a story to truncate). So we end up with the redeemed Ben in classroom preaching the gospel of the beast (Napoleon). Read the "prophetic" Edmund Burke (as in Juliet’s ex) Reflections on the Revolution in France. Ben Linus Napoleon is ready to challenge Widmore, Flocke, the devil, or God. There is the constant: Desmond. There is the drive shift (Charlie) and the Driver (who can get you girls or flight manifests), and the strange constant music of Chopin always. Faraday is ready to take God the Father's part of creator sending his John the Baptist or Messiah or Moses Hume. You pick your archetype for Hume's role. Widmore is shadow of Ahab, too soft. Then we have these two demons: both are acting as rebels against GOD, albeit divine in origin. The candidates are three: Ben, Faraday through Hume, and Jack. The position vacant is Deity. With Emerson, Cusick, and the strange creature that Davies portrays as if he is excluded from humanity (except for his moments with his red-haired chocolate lover), the producers have constructed a story that seems to be bigger than can be contained within DVDs and transcripts.