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[Campetin here: please give a warm Namaste to our new contributor Pearson Moore!]

The Wounds That Heal Us
A Cultural Analysis of Lost 601/602
By Pearson Moore

Some will never experience redemption, but everyone on the Island will suffer. And it is in their wounds, in the very fact of their suffering, that they will find healing.

LOST is, at a level I believe to have immense utility, an engrossing study in culture clash, actively engaging faculties of thought, reason, fear, and wonder. Over the coming weeks, as we bring closure to this adventure of six years, I hope to convey thoughts on culture, collaboration, and the creative human spirit, relating these in ways relevant to the turbulence and calm, anguish and thrills, and life and loss on the Island.

My name is Pearson Moore, and I am a culturalist. Not in the sense of pursuing a particular philosophical bent, but in the sense of possessing inordinate fascination with the social revelation of shared humanity. My training is in chemistry, languages, and religious studies, but my passion is the study of culture. Whether delving into North American history (Cartier’s Ring; see http://pearsonmoore.com/CartiersRing.aspx), exploring social science fiction (Trinity; see http://pearsonmoore.com/trinity.aspx), or jumping headlong into the full force of culture clash (my blog, http://pearsonmoore.blogspot.com), the intricacies of social relationship compel me. I offer no guarantees, no expertise, and though I am Jesuit-trained, I’m just about as smart as a bag of rocks. But if LOST is a journey of discovery, I am well suited to the task, for I have much to learn, and the path I tread meanders places unsurveyed.

LOST continues to confound my assumptions and expectations, no less this night of the Season Six Première than the night in September, 2004, when I first saw a startled, disoriented man open his eyes to green jungle and bright island sun. That man is Jack, but that man is me, and I suspect, in ways that matter most, that man is all of us.

The Wounds of LOST

The story of LOST is the story of wounded people. In the pilot episode six years ago, Jack is physically wounded. In tonight’s première, Jack again is physically wounded. But after so many years we know Jack. We see in his searching eyes this night in the white airliner cabin the same discomfort, we feel in him the same sense of disorientation we know he experienced on Jacob’s Island this very day, but in a time and place far removed. And because we know Jack, we know the gash across his side six years ago and the pinprick at his neck tonight are only faint signs of his true pain, which is the wretched suffering inside his conflicted soul. Six years ago the pain had its centre in his relationship with Christian. Tonight, the source of his pain is below the wings of the aircraft, beneath the clouds, a thousand metres below the waves, at the floor of the ocean. However much he may have forgotten or does not yet know, we feel with him the same need to get back to that place, to that now submerged fragment of the statue of Tawaret. If there is to be redemption for Jack, it is on that submerged island, in the shadow of the crumbling statue, for this is the abode of Ille qui nos omnes servabit. What is the true extent of Jack’s turmoil? Does he feel complete loss, utter hopelessness? The man who told Jack all he needed was “a little push” is consumed in flames, just as the Island he was sworn to protect is consumed in the waves, subsumed to the sea. Jack is cut off, defenceless, no chance of redemption. No hope. His wounds will never heal.

I have no access to the writer’s room in Los Angeles, and I don’t read the spoilers. And even though I have soaked in every episode at least twice and read attentively the learned counsels of Doc Jensen and Vozzek69 and can recite confidently the major theories centred around the various permutations of the Valenzetti Equation, I cannot predict with even a modest degree of assurance whether Jack will, in the end, reconcile with his father, find redemption, or even experience a glimmer of spiritual peace. But I will assert what I believe to be inevitable: Jack will realise his full destiny, and he will accomplish this on the Island. He will not do it alone. And he will not do it in spite of injuries to body, mind, and soul. He will do it because of his wounds.

The Wounded Healer

Jack Shephard follows a well-established tradition in his coming capacity as wounded healer and shepherd of souls. In 1972, a forty-year-old Dutch spiritual shepherd, Henri Nouwen, wrote The Wounded Healer. Nouwen’s thesis: Those who wish to heal must carry deep inside themselves the unhealed wounds of their own suffering. There is no balm for the wounded healer. But in accepting the full intensity of her deepest pain, the shepherd becomes the most effective healer of those in her care.

Jack has not yet shown us the extent to which he has become spiritual disciple to the martyred John Locke, but the signs of coming transformation are thick in the air pressing in on the decimated Swan Hatch, and even thicker in the oppressive re-circulated atmosphere of the Oceanic Boeing Triple-Seven Cruiser. Jack has found no comfort in the New 2004, and he has no solace in whatever time and place he inhabits now that unlimited nuclear force has collided at the Swan with infinite electromagnetic force. If he is to experience redemption, he will have to follow a path back to the Island. He may be made physically and emotionally whole along the way. He may find in Kate not only a comrade in arms but a spiritual soul mate. But these elements do not constitute the objective of his quest. Kate by now becomes almost an unpleasant distraction from the work consuming his thoughts and ever increasing volumes of emotional energy. Even the invocation of the “not a very strong drink,” in the topsy-turvy New 2004, is feeble and far from the centre of Jack’s very preoccupied mind. When Cindy gives Jack a single bottle rather than two, we realise he would have been equally happy with no booze. His focus is stronger now. The submerged island calls. His response will be unyielding and irrevocable.

Jack is the Wounded Healer. No longer the “fixer,” Jack’s pain is transforming him into a doctor whose only comfort is found in the care of others. Jack will use every resource of training and spiritual transformation to heal those in greatest need.

Who or what will Jack heal? Any meaningful response will be based at least partially on speculation, and probably ought to be considered outside the scope of a brief commentary on single episodes. Nevertheless, some plausible ideas come to mind, and I intend to offer my take on this question before next Tuesday.

Faraday’s Boulder

“Did Juliet detonate the plutonium core?”

The question is irrelevant. By ingenious sleight of hand, Darlton asked us to centre our thoughts over the last several months on the devising of scenarios that might result from the detonation of a thermonuclear device. After the first fifteen minutes of Lost 601 we discover the folly of our assumptions. The plutonium core may have exploded, or imploded, or it may have reacted in ways unknown to science. The technical explanation is moot. The question we should have been asking is this:

“What is the result of the diametric opposition of irresistible force against irresistible force?”

The uncharred ruins of the Swan Hatch present us with a fresh exposition of the Irresistible Force Paradox, usually expressed along these lines:

“What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?”

The Island contains no immovable objects–anyone having even casual acquaintance with the FDW knows just how easily even the largest objects can be moved–across entire oceans! But the Island contains several irresistible (limitless) forces: Electromagnetism (Swan Station), “Energy” (Orchid Station), and since 1954, essentially irresistible nuclear energy (Jughead, in the tunnels under Dharmaville).

Daniel Faraday’s reckless charge into the midst of his mother’s camp was the necessary unpredictable action forcing the destruction of the timeloop. Not because Faraday had to die, but because Eloise had to have the completed notebook. With it, she was able to guide her son to the formulation and execution of his boulder-in-the-stream concept of spacetime diversion. Faraday worked carefully, designing a plan of such accurate detail that even untrained followers were able to continue the deed after his death.

Essentially infinite electromagnetic energy from beneath the Swan spewed toward the surface just as Juliet detonated the nuclear device and–something unprecedented occurred. If an explosion occurred, it was unlike anything recorded in the laboratory notebooks of the wildest experimenters in nuclear physics or quantum particle studies. The quality of the explosion is not at issue, however. The true outcome–the outcome that has definitive bearing on our story–is displacement in spacetime.

And here, I think, is the genesis of the new narrative technique mentioned in lusty anticipation by writers and actors over the last several months. Somehow Faraday’s Boulder has created two independent streams. Suddenly spacetime contains two adult versions of Jack, two adult versions of Hurley, two adult versions of Kate, of Sawyer, of Claire, of Aaron–two active, intensely engaged sets of key actors–all of them touched by Jacob–all of them torn from ordinary destiny by flight through a contorted vortex over a submerged island, all of them ripped from linear time by the throes of a thermonuclear/electromagnetic storm of cosmological proportions.

The independent streams will not long endure. Spacetime will again find its natural path. But Faraday’s Boulder has given Jacob, or his successor, or the MIB, or the Island, a place in spacetime to bring final resolution to the nineteenth century debate on the beach. “It always ends the same,” the MIB argued. This time around, at least for this short period, the MIB is wrong. The channel is split. Spacetime is torn asunder. The agents of change have been liberated from the confines of linear action, thought, and time. And they’re not one, but many. They’re not many, but many sets. They’re not many sets, but entire legions of sets. “A war is coming,” Widmore said. With two identical sets of fiercely committed players, two groups of Others, hundreds guarding the Temple from the MIB, and several more groups converging on the Island, it will be a war like no other.

The Black Swan

The protagonists in my novels are women. Perhaps I allowed a bit too much of Garrison Keillor into the unconscious development of character arcs, but I have found deep preference in my writing for the deployment of emotionally and spiritually strong women. So all my women are strong, though I can’t say, with Garrison, that all the men are good looking, or that every one of the children is above average. But my women are strong, and they are unquestionably above average.

The earliest thrill in LOST, for me, was witnessing the protagonist of my then just-completed novel, Trinity, given flesh in the form of actress Evangeline Lilly. She was strong in the first season and a half. The writers’ decision to shackle her to the conventional role of love interest to two men I came to consider the greatest weakness in an otherwise exceptionally well-told story. So I was thrilled again tonight to see her eye blink open and watch her muscle her way down from the branches of her tree. Action Austen is back. It’s been a long wait. But the new fire in her eyes, the purpose in her stride, the strength in her limbs tells me the wait served its purpose. The worlds around both Kates writhe about in stormy flux. But Kate has strength now, to rise above, to stand firm. I very much look forward to seeing this new Kate.

Kate escapes the shackles that bind her to conventional subservience. She is the Black Swan, the agent who lives and moves and has her being far outside the constraints of any box, far beyond the statistical bell curves considered to encompass the normal range of human possibility, the person of unimagined magnitude who dominates the space and time around her.

She is not the only Black Swan.

The most dramatic example of the Black Swan became apparent only seconds from the end of the episode, at the bubbling orange waters of the healing spring, when a man in curly black hair and black shirt rose from the dead. Or so everyone but Miles thought. Sayid was never dead, of course, though the Temple Master so claimed. Dead to his former self, perhaps, or dead in some other equally metaphysical manner, but the rusty waters of the spring gave Sayid new life, a fact even Miles seems not to have understood.

We know Sayid is on the Temple Master’s list. So too, Hurley, Jack, Kate. I’m guessing Sawyer was “invited” to the party at the Temple only because of Jacob’s note inside the wooden Ankh, and Sawyer’s prominent position on that most important written invitation from the Island’s chief protector. Is Aaron recorded as the sixth name on Jacob’s final list? Or do Sun and Jin displace him, since they received Jacob’s touch?

“I think they’re protecting us,” Kate says to Sawyer. Certainly. They are among the Six, Jacob’s chosen. They are the heroes, the Black Swans who will subdue the ill winds and vile smoke that come to pierce the Temple walls and strangle the Island.

Of all the Black Swans, Hurley tonight was most magnificent. He once ran away from any sign of trouble. Now he confronts dangers near and situations bleak.

“Can you fix Sayid, Jack?”
“No.”
“Then you’re gonna have to let me do it.”

This is no mere matter of a man having found cojones. Hurley has always been a Black Swan, in his connection with the numbers, in his ability to speak with Jacob, Charlie, Mr. Eko, and Ana Lucia long after their deaths.

But in the growing realisation of his value to the Numbers–to the Six–to Jacob’s final hope–Hurley unites these independent actors, the bold hired guns of Jacob’s final posse, into something grander than perhaps even Jacob himself could have imagined. Hurley mobilises them, gives them a common goal: the Temple. He begins to mold the cowboys into what they are destined to become.

Michael Emerson, narrating in the seconds before the beginning of the première, told us destiny could be overcome by human free will. But that is only part of the story, and a small part, of itself not nearly sufficient to anything approaching a satisfying exposition of a single story six years in the telling. The full measure of the story began tonight with the strong words of a big man with an even bigger heart. “We need to go to the Temple,” Hurley told them. They would go there together, work together to save Sayid, help each other to bring about Jacob’s will.

There are Black Swans. There are Heroes. But the series is not called Heroes–and I am mighty thankful, indeed. In the end, this is not a story about cowboys. They are Six, not one. Every name on that final list is essential, for as the Temple Master said, if even Sayid dies, the world will become a most dangerous place for all of them. “We have to learn to live together, or we’re going to die alone,” Jack the Fixer told us six years ago. His words have even greater value now, in these bleak hours and minutes before the arrival of the MIB, in whatever fearful or grotesque manifestation he chooses to project. Jack is much better equipped for the fight now. And he can call upon Hurley’s new-found strength of character, Sawyer’s righteous anger, Kate’s renewed inner purpose, and the born-again strength of a man once thought dead. He and the Temple Master will need all of this and more to fulfill their mutual destiny.

The ash is spread, the walls reinforced, weapons gathered, forces assembled. The rockets scream the call to arms to defenders far and wide. Who will answer the call?

Culture

“They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”

The Man in Black has it right. The evident truth of his words finds perfect reflection in every event since the landing of the Black Rock. Even Richard Alpert’s release from the chains aboard the slaver is in some way a proof of the validity of his logically-defensible disgust with the human race. Jacob rails against the wisdom of MIB, but can the blond-haired man cite even a single instance in which the exercise of free will has enabled anything akin to the “progress” he considers inherent in struggle?

The Others consider themselves disciples of this man and his hope in progress. “We’re the Good Guys, Michael.” And yet they kill without a second thought the foreign soldiers of 1954. Thirty years later they murder an entire village of scientists and hippie throw-backs, dumping their gassed bodies into open graves, congratulating themselves for the next twenty years for the courage to carry out their righteous “purge.” And in September, 2004, when three hundred human souls fall out of the sky, the Others are ready again, not to greet, assist, engage, and befriend, but to assess weakness, exploit frailty, and in the end, wipe them out in the most orderly manner possible.

Even the Others, those who claim closest discipleship with the Man of Progress, prove in every one of their actions, relentlessly through history, the truth of the Man in Black’s assessment of human nature.

Can any one of Jacob’s six knights claim to have progressed away from destruction and corruption?

This grand story does not juxtapose good and evil. The thesis does not centre around the inherent value of freedom of action. We will not be asked to assess the relative merits of free will and predestination. Something much more fundamental is at stake than anything as superficial as “the struggle between good and evil.” We all wish to believe we are good, that we lead wholesome lives, that we do what is right for ourselves. Everyone on the Island has the same view. But something much more fundamental has so far evaded discussion. It is this something that will now provide the focus for the next fifteen weeks.

The word ever since Season One has been the same: Destiny. Neither Jacob nor the Man in Black, nor any of their followers throughout the centuries has posed the question in its intended form.

The immediate question is easy: Why were we brought to this island?

What is our destiny?

There can be no thought of replacing Jacob. Many believe the leitmotif of the Doubting Thomas in Season Five must require at some point in Season Six a grand resurrection. I share this view. And though Sayid was not truly dead before his rebirth, nevertheless his demi-resurrection I think is yet another harbinger of the miraculous event to come. Locke was far too important to be hanged in a flea-infested hotel in Los Angeles. Too essential to the story to be dismissed as “weak.” I think it quite likely we will see a New Locke at some point. But he will not be Jacob. Even if at some point we see again a teenage Emily Locke dancing around her room listening to 45s, this time in the embrace not of Anthony Cooper, but rather in the gentle hands of the Man in White–even if the revelation of Locke’s true father is made in this most unambiguous way–I believe Locke nevertheless will have to rise to a higher destiny than mere replacement of his father as Protector of the Island.

Neither, I think, can anyone seriously believe the final outcome of Faraday’s Boulder must necessarily involve the destruction of the Man in Black. Everyone on the Island, whether she is an Other, fell from the sky on Oceanic 815, or arrived in chains on the Black Rock, carries the Man in Black’s hatred and disgust in her own heart. All of us who have traveled the Island these many years carry that same fear and loathing in our souls as well. With Sayid, sprawled outside the blue Dharma van, waiting for death to arrive, we feel the full force of the tortures we have inflicted on enemies, on strangers, on those we love.

What is our destiny?

In the end, I believe Jacob’s knights will settle on the question to be posed. Some of them probably will not live to see the question answered. Jack, the Wounded Healer, seems the most likely candidate for final martyrdom in the cause of human destiny.

The question has been posed since the pilot episode six years ago. I believe the question posits a rugged and informed optimism, grounded in the full reality of human capacities for enduring goodness and cheerful communion between people of divergent background and outlook. In the end, the Six will answer the question. And though they may be burying their leader when they arrive with the conclusive response, they will be able to answer in the affirmative his great question: We will not die alone, Jack. We will live together.

Next week I will pose what I believe to be the Great Question: the thesis of Lost.

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