OK
So I haven't written anything for ages but now I'm inspired to share with no one in particular since, no one reads this anyway, but what the hell....
I did it. I watched the Final episode of Lost. Out of context and without seeing a whole bunch of episodes from season 6. I said I wouldn't. I said I would wait to buy the whole 6th season but I broke down.
Ya know what...
I loved it.
It was a masterpiece.
If you have seen it or taken a look at the incredible amount of reaction in the form of discussions and blogs, then you will get an idea of how divided people are about it and how many people are pretty unsure of what they have seen.
Here, for your perusal, is my take on the soon to be classic, Final episode of Lost:
To begin, let's talk about the major themes of Lost. To me clearly this show is about choice. The struggle between self-determination and fate or destiny. The struggle to discover what you are meant to do or be as opposed to what you choose to be. It's also about reason vs faith and how they interact and conflict with one another. Among several other themes that can be pointed out, overall I think the most prominent theme of Lost is life. As cliche' or vague as that may sound I think it is true. Life is messy, confusing, full of love, pain and discovery and every time you find an answer, what you have really discovered are just more questions.
Sound familiar...thought so.
If you have ever faced death you will find, among other things, two things to be true.
1. As the light fades you are going to the great beyond with loads of unanswered questions. There is plenty you will never know the answers to and that fact is ok.
2. As you lie there feeling death's cold fingers claw at you, while you may find yourself sorrowful over all the little things in life you enjoyed and will miss, your hobbies or work, your favorite places and activities etc.. you are going to be most concerned and pained by the separation of you and your emotional relationships- your friends, family, lovers, children, mentors, pets and parents.
This is the crux of human existence and what I believe defines us as a species. We are social creatures. We are defined and fulfilled by our relationships with other human beings, our love of other human beings as well as the many forms of love and passion we feel for so many aspects of life. It is what drives us and gives us the fuel of life to keep going. The most important thing in life for humans are-other humans.
That being said how does that drivel apply to LOST and the finale? Were you expecting answers? Definitions and cold hard proof? You've come to the wrong place with the wrong expectations my friends.
The message of LOST is the journey, not the destination. What really matters are the characters and their relationships to each other and to us. All the mysteries: What was the deal with Walt that made him so special, how did those Dharma people get there in the first place, what did those damn numbers really mean, was Vincent just a dog or some type of supernatural angelic metaphor, why wasn't Michael in the last episode..blah blah blah. All of that and a plethora more, is a backdrop to give context to the struggles and interactions of the characters. A crucible to burn them down to their raw emotions, personal truths and passionate essences. A tableau upon which we can draw and link our own emotion, pain and experience. Of course it must be entertaining so the events that these "every-men" find themselves in are a bit more fantastic than most people will experience but they are still challenges that we can relate to. Everyday provides new opportunities for common "heroism" in our mundane lives. Every choice we make further defines us and what we choose to be. This is the focus of Lost. The choices, ofttimes truly heroic, that these characters make in these extraordinary situations provides us with the emotional fetters that drag us along and make us want to be a part of their world and their lives because, in a very real sense, we already are. They are dealing with life and so are we.
The "why" of everything is not what matters. What matters is "how" the characters deal with the questions. It's not about whether we figure out life's big mysteries, it's how we live our lives dealing with not knowing and accepting the fact that we will never really know.
Lost does an excellent job of distilling the essence of life into a 6 season series. It captures the "mess" and confusion of life in a way that is compelling, evocative, frightening and incredibly touching. All the questions, answered and not, seem pretty metaphorical to me for the journey of discovery and the ultimate realization that the journey never, ever ends.
You cannot have your questions answered by someone else. You need to resolve the big mysteries for yourself. Lost is honest about that, as frustrating and painful as it may be, because it is absolutely necessary. If they just rattled off all the answers and tied up everything into a nice neat little package it would have been a horrendous fail. Life just doesn't work that way. To do that would be such a lie and thankfully, the writers and producers of the show realize this.
Another truism of life, so eloquently put by the Rolling Stones:
"You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes-you just might find... You get what you need."
Lost lives up to this by giving us just enough answers to provide context and make sense of the characters and their motivations and reactions. We need to understand Michael's obsessive and ultimately, self destructive love for Walt to understand and relate with why he does what he does. We do NOT need to know what's so special and magical about Walt to accomplish that. Thus there is an example of the many loose ends that your free to tie up anyway you like. Quite frankly it's much more fun, evocative and fulfilling that way. The writers have managed to tap the greatest source of raw artistic potential in the universe-the imagination of the spectator.
As a viewer I don't need answers to the questions spoon fed to me..I'll sort them out and draw my own conclusions, revelations, meanings and additional questions my self. I thank the show for respecting my intelligence enough to allow me to do that as well.
Any art draws its greatest power when it allows the spectator to take part in it. A good example are song lyrics. Have you ever heard a song that really resonated with you? Allowed you to draw correlations between your own experience and the lyrics and fill the song with a meaning and power very personal to you? I'm sure you have at least once. That music became yours in that sense. It transformed and became something much more powerful than the artist could have hoped for when you applied your own experience and interpretations and made it your own. Now what if the artist came along and defined that song for you..told you exactly what it meant..gave you the meaning behind every image and metaphor only to discover that it is something altogether different from what you had envisioned. How would you feel? Robbed and angry most likely. Something that was yours was just taken away from you in a sense. All the emotional links and ties you forged with that song have been shattered and although you may choose to ignore it, your experience with that music will most likely never be the same.
The above is an extreme case but it rings home my point. Lost is a different animal for everyone who watches it. It has so much room for the spectator to take ownership of it and inscribe their own meaning that to define it too far would be to betray the viewers and rob them of their enjoyment and the unique truths of Lost they have discovered on their own. If you wanted that definition, hungered for it and are angry that you didn't get it-your missing the point of the show.
That is why I feel the Finale was so phenomenally good and brilliantly done. We don't need to have all the questions answered, we need to know that the journey was worth it. That those things which are most universally precious to us were true and real and that not only have we become defined by them but empowered and set free. In the end it really is true: "All you need is love".
As we see all the characters reunited with those people that were most important in their lives , that they needed the most, in their own private purgatory after remembering each other and their lives spent both on and off the island, we are filled with hope that not only are our mundane struggles important and incredibly relevant, but that everything we have experienced on our journey, no matter how each of us have individually defined that journey, has been well worth it.
At the end of the show there was a great deal of things I was still pondering. Loose ends I was trying to tie together on my own..things that still didn't make sense to me. Despite all that I loved every minute of it. I loved it because it was the journey getting there that inspired me and emotionally rocked me and touched me in ways that no TV show ever had. Stop looking at everything going a hundred miles an hour, stop trying to define and categorize things, stop trying to take control because it's ultimately futile:
It's time to let it go. It's time to move on.
Religion really is a "smile on a dog".
Thanks for setting us straight Vincent. Hope your there to comfort me when I move to the other side.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Monday, March 9, 2009
"What the hell happened to America" ..or Good Morning
It seemed one day I awoke and this wasn't the America I knew and loved. Things changed but they didn't change overnight.
First thing that changed was my perspective. My happily semi-apathetic EMPLOYED existence was changed into a worried,anxious and pathetic UNEMPLOYED existence. How that happened will be a tale for another day. What's prominent about the fact that I became unemployed was the fact that once I was out of the rat race I had time to look around. I began to smell the flowers, look at the world around me in focus instead of a hurried blur and taste the food instead of just swallowing it. I began tasting everything before swallowing it.
That's when I realized that America had become one of the most frightening places on Earth with regard to it's potential for catastrophe.
Let’s start with religion….one of my all time favorite, super mobile and all around most durable and flexible collective human self destruct buttons.
America was founded initially by people fleeing religious persecution and seeking a place to mine new opportunities for a happy life. At least that’s how the popular legend goes as I’ve heard it. But what has really happened to those initial desires and intentions?
Well we have become what we ran away from. That line between church and state has been steadily blurring since the 1980’s and the Reagan Era. Evangelists and private agenda religious groups have far too much money and sway on politics. Many American policies have clauses or dependency policies based on fundamentalist thought. That’s part of why stem cell research was practically halted by the Bush administration. Our Foreign aid packages have religious specifications built into them. America has been pushing a silent crusade and using it’s wealth and influence to do it. What… did you think several other countries hate us for no reason whatsoever. Some of that anger is , unfortunately, justified. Hell, even Bush once said that his faith in God drives his foreign policy..(that’s not a quote so leave me alone about it). I’m sure Al Quaida and Iran’s government could say the same.
In our own way we are just as fanatical as they are. Did you know that millions of dollars were spent on a creationist museum in Kentucky. That has got to be the definition of wasted funds. Do you know how much good those millions could have done!! But no they go into “Theologically and Scientifically accurate” animatronics of humans living side by side with Dinosaurs. These people are trying to scientifically dispute Evolution and carbon dating as well as several other scientific theories, facts and evidence through literal interpretation of the Bible. Well there’s got to be the first sign of the end times right there. Maybe we should go back to bleeding with leeches to treat illnes as well while we’re at it.
I just watched the special edition of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. There are plenty of scenes where the fanatical Templar Order are shouting for blood ..screaming “God Wills It!!”..When I fall asleep watching that flick and I hear those lines I swear I wake up thinking someone went on a shooting spree in Utah.
That leads me to another point about America….there’s two of them. Probably has been for quite some time but my dull witted perception is only really coming to grips with this now. Middle America and southern America are COMPLETLEY Different places in many ways from the coasts. Racism justified by religion is still quite abundant round those parts. God fearing, gun toting murderers happily line up for Church every Sunday and dream of ways to asassinate Obama. Oh that’s not to say entire states are backwards but they have significant portions of their populations that are. It shocks the hell out of me to see people still scared to death of homosexuality..violently scared. I mean COME ON..GET OVER IT PEOPLE!!! I’m so sick of Bible waving morons that quote Bible passages that supposedly justify everything from excommunication of gay’s to outright culling. Did we learn nothing from Nazi Germany and the countless regimes of genocide that have followed.The Kmer Rouge(prolly spelled that wrong..well hey it’s a frickin blog not a history book) The insane ethnic cleansing in Romania, Serbia and Croatia, The current situation in Darfur..the list goes on. In our time the LIST STILL GOES ON!! It’s disgusting to say the least and you can’t tell me Religion isn’t used as a tool to justify such madness.
Which brings me back to religion…..did we go off topic?..anyway…. Any belief system based on Baseless and Groundless “Facts” leads to disaster. I think the true problem with organized religion is the fact that it makes people think they are right. If you define the “right” for someone you are also defining the “wrong”. This translates into good and evil. So religion gets people thinking that their denomination, belief set, Dogma..call it what you want is good and those who don’t follow their secular guidelines then become evil. This is usually based on books written by men..(yea men..make no mistake about that..Religion is an Artifact..MAN MADE..no Gods , higher powers or phenomenon are responsible for this crap..its all on us) thousands of years ago. Now these documents are not written like the constitution where they are meant to be adapted to our changing world and the needs of our people. They are scribed in stone and are immutable. Now if one of these immutable “how to live life for dummies” texts happens to say that homosexuality is evil..then that is meant to mean that…homosexuality is evil. So now we know, for a fact that homosexuals are evil because this ancient text said so. Now we do the worst thing you possibly can in this situation. We apply logic. Yep logic mixed with the illogical..matter and Anti matter out on a date…..words like military and intelligence getting married and forming unions which end lives. So if this ancient text says homosexuality is evil and that is taken to mean gays are evil then what do you do about evil…..What do you mean live and let live!!???…practice tolerance!!!??...why, you can’t turn your head to evil like that..it’s illogical..you have to stop the evil…smoke it out ,hunt it down and TERMINATE IT!!...yea kill the evil….!!. And if your common sense tells you that killing is wrong, if you get a little sqeamish about cutting these two 16 year old’s dicks off, stuffin em’ down their throats and setting their lynched bodies on fire to the tune of Cumbaya..why then just look to the good book you placed your faith in that brought about this madness in the first place..it’ll get ya through.
Now an argument can be made that religion is like any other “tool" and can be wielded both nobly and nefariously. Mother Theresa and Ghandi never lynched two gay 16 year olds did they. My aunt Josie was a devout catholic and never hurt a hair on anyone’s head. For every example of murder and oppression done in the name of some God there are examples to the opposite effect. So what does that mean? That religion like every other tool man uses for good or ill is MAN MADE. If it was truly divine and not made up and forged into a socio-political control structure by the ruling classes then none of this would happen would it.
We need to explain the unexplained and one of the key questions we can’t answer is why are we here and what are we supposed to do. That’s the basis of religion and faith. All those myths explaining the unexplainable..like creation. Giving the unknown a graspable context people could wrap their heads around..grounding them in a world of unknowns. People eventually realized the power of these stories and of human faith..now control steps in. Parables and metaphors step into these tales to teach moral lessons on behavior and what is acceptable within each culture. They began to form laws complete with punishment for their breaching. They became a means to power and control. Some were used for good and some for ill and still are. Know why muslims don’t eat pork? To sum up very briefly, in their part of the world no one knew how to properly prepare pork to keep trichinosis from killing everyone so they put a religious ban on it because it was dangerous. Now science has discovered these parasites and how to eliminate them so ya think they would say..”Yay..bacon!”..nope. it’s in an ancient holy text..it’s immutable…..science be damned.
Let’s face it and grow up people. We don’t have a word of some God to live by. We have our wits, our common sense and our meager intelligence and that’s about it. We need to finally come of age as a species and say ”Hey..we don’t know all the answers and we are finally mature enough to deal with that so let’s move the holy texts to the mythology section , admit everyone is equal and get on with life and rule out a veritable cornucopia of justifications to murder each other”. We better start using our brains for something other than figuring out Apple’s latest gadgets and learn to co exist and do it quick. The stakes are higher now as the world has grown much smaller.
If The English Church had access to Nuclear weapons during the Holy Crusades what do you think would have happened. You got it. “GOD WILLS IT”…….game over.
E
First thing that changed was my perspective. My happily semi-apathetic EMPLOYED existence was changed into a worried,anxious and pathetic UNEMPLOYED existence. How that happened will be a tale for another day. What's prominent about the fact that I became unemployed was the fact that once I was out of the rat race I had time to look around. I began to smell the flowers, look at the world around me in focus instead of a hurried blur and taste the food instead of just swallowing it. I began tasting everything before swallowing it.
That's when I realized that America had become one of the most frightening places on Earth with regard to it's potential for catastrophe.
Let’s start with religion….one of my all time favorite, super mobile and all around most durable and flexible collective human self destruct buttons.
America was founded initially by people fleeing religious persecution and seeking a place to mine new opportunities for a happy life. At least that’s how the popular legend goes as I’ve heard it. But what has really happened to those initial desires and intentions?
Well we have become what we ran away from. That line between church and state has been steadily blurring since the 1980’s and the Reagan Era. Evangelists and private agenda religious groups have far too much money and sway on politics. Many American policies have clauses or dependency policies based on fundamentalist thought. That’s part of why stem cell research was practically halted by the Bush administration. Our Foreign aid packages have religious specifications built into them. America has been pushing a silent crusade and using it’s wealth and influence to do it. What… did you think several other countries hate us for no reason whatsoever. Some of that anger is , unfortunately, justified. Hell, even Bush once said that his faith in God drives his foreign policy..(that’s not a quote so leave me alone about it). I’m sure Al Quaida and Iran’s government could say the same.
In our own way we are just as fanatical as they are. Did you know that millions of dollars were spent on a creationist museum in Kentucky. That has got to be the definition of wasted funds. Do you know how much good those millions could have done!! But no they go into “Theologically and Scientifically accurate” animatronics of humans living side by side with Dinosaurs. These people are trying to scientifically dispute Evolution and carbon dating as well as several other scientific theories, facts and evidence through literal interpretation of the Bible. Well there’s got to be the first sign of the end times right there. Maybe we should go back to bleeding with leeches to treat illnes as well while we’re at it.
I just watched the special edition of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. There are plenty of scenes where the fanatical Templar Order are shouting for blood ..screaming “God Wills It!!”..When I fall asleep watching that flick and I hear those lines I swear I wake up thinking someone went on a shooting spree in Utah.
That leads me to another point about America….there’s two of them. Probably has been for quite some time but my dull witted perception is only really coming to grips with this now. Middle America and southern America are COMPLETLEY Different places in many ways from the coasts. Racism justified by religion is still quite abundant round those parts. God fearing, gun toting murderers happily line up for Church every Sunday and dream of ways to asassinate Obama. Oh that’s not to say entire states are backwards but they have significant portions of their populations that are. It shocks the hell out of me to see people still scared to death of homosexuality..violently scared. I mean COME ON..GET OVER IT PEOPLE!!! I’m so sick of Bible waving morons that quote Bible passages that supposedly justify everything from excommunication of gay’s to outright culling. Did we learn nothing from Nazi Germany and the countless regimes of genocide that have followed.The Kmer Rouge(prolly spelled that wrong..well hey it’s a frickin blog not a history book) The insane ethnic cleansing in Romania, Serbia and Croatia, The current situation in Darfur..the list goes on. In our time the LIST STILL GOES ON!! It’s disgusting to say the least and you can’t tell me Religion isn’t used as a tool to justify such madness.
Which brings me back to religion…..did we go off topic?..anyway…. Any belief system based on Baseless and Groundless “Facts” leads to disaster. I think the true problem with organized religion is the fact that it makes people think they are right. If you define the “right” for someone you are also defining the “wrong”. This translates into good and evil. So religion gets people thinking that their denomination, belief set, Dogma..call it what you want is good and those who don’t follow their secular guidelines then become evil. This is usually based on books written by men..(yea men..make no mistake about that..Religion is an Artifact..MAN MADE..no Gods , higher powers or phenomenon are responsible for this crap..its all on us) thousands of years ago. Now these documents are not written like the constitution where they are meant to be adapted to our changing world and the needs of our people. They are scribed in stone and are immutable. Now if one of these immutable “how to live life for dummies” texts happens to say that homosexuality is evil..then that is meant to mean that…homosexuality is evil. So now we know, for a fact that homosexuals are evil because this ancient text said so. Now we do the worst thing you possibly can in this situation. We apply logic. Yep logic mixed with the illogical..matter and Anti matter out on a date…..words like military and intelligence getting married and forming unions which end lives. So if this ancient text says homosexuality is evil and that is taken to mean gays are evil then what do you do about evil…..What do you mean live and let live!!???…practice tolerance!!!??...why, you can’t turn your head to evil like that..it’s illogical..you have to stop the evil…smoke it out ,hunt it down and TERMINATE IT!!...yea kill the evil….!!. And if your common sense tells you that killing is wrong, if you get a little sqeamish about cutting these two 16 year old’s dicks off, stuffin em’ down their throats and setting their lynched bodies on fire to the tune of Cumbaya..why then just look to the good book you placed your faith in that brought about this madness in the first place..it’ll get ya through.
Now an argument can be made that religion is like any other “tool" and can be wielded both nobly and nefariously. Mother Theresa and Ghandi never lynched two gay 16 year olds did they. My aunt Josie was a devout catholic and never hurt a hair on anyone’s head. For every example of murder and oppression done in the name of some God there are examples to the opposite effect. So what does that mean? That religion like every other tool man uses for good or ill is MAN MADE. If it was truly divine and not made up and forged into a socio-political control structure by the ruling classes then none of this would happen would it.
We need to explain the unexplained and one of the key questions we can’t answer is why are we here and what are we supposed to do. That’s the basis of religion and faith. All those myths explaining the unexplainable..like creation. Giving the unknown a graspable context people could wrap their heads around..grounding them in a world of unknowns. People eventually realized the power of these stories and of human faith..now control steps in. Parables and metaphors step into these tales to teach moral lessons on behavior and what is acceptable within each culture. They began to form laws complete with punishment for their breaching. They became a means to power and control. Some were used for good and some for ill and still are. Know why muslims don’t eat pork? To sum up very briefly, in their part of the world no one knew how to properly prepare pork to keep trichinosis from killing everyone so they put a religious ban on it because it was dangerous. Now science has discovered these parasites and how to eliminate them so ya think they would say..”Yay..bacon!”..nope. it’s in an ancient holy text..it’s immutable…..science be damned.
Let’s face it and grow up people. We don’t have a word of some God to live by. We have our wits, our common sense and our meager intelligence and that’s about it. We need to finally come of age as a species and say ”Hey..we don’t know all the answers and we are finally mature enough to deal with that so let’s move the holy texts to the mythology section , admit everyone is equal and get on with life and rule out a veritable cornucopia of justifications to murder each other”. We better start using our brains for something other than figuring out Apple’s latest gadgets and learn to co exist and do it quick. The stakes are higher now as the world has grown much smaller.
If The English Church had access to Nuclear weapons during the Holy Crusades what do you think would have happened. You got it. “GOD WILLS IT”…….game over.
E
DISCLAIMER
These entries will follow no set schedule, order or in any way, shape or form have any intended sense of contrived cohesion. These will usually be rants about things that piss me off or concern me enough in some way that I need to write about it. That being said they may also be about any thing that tickles my fancy. These items could include fantasy or erotic fiction, jokes, tales about life in NY or what happened to me that day..movie reviews and just about anything. These topics will probably offend a whole lot of people since they will fly in the face of many American conventions. If controversy is an issue for you then leave me alone and go away.
Just as an example…I HATE RELIGION…just frickin hate it. That attitude is bound to come through here so if ya got an issue with that..go the hell away.
PS: Yea my spelling sucks so don't bother pointing that out..I know already. Spellcheck is my bitch.
Just as an example…I HATE RELIGION…just frickin hate it. That attitude is bound to come through here so if ya got an issue with that..go the hell away.
PS: Yea my spelling sucks so don't bother pointing that out..I know already. Spellcheck is my bitch.
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