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“Psyche profiles said you would be amenable for coercion.”

Deputy Sheriff Eddie Colburn was matter-of-fact in his delivery, and his words were in accord with everything we understood of the man.  He trusted Anthony Cooper and lost a kidney, then his self-respect, and finally his ability to walk.  He trusted Benjamin Linus, and received in payment for his good faith a brutal strangulation by electric power cable.  “Amenable to coercion” was a polite way of stating the obvious:  John Locke was gullible.

He cried tears of frustration and disappointment, shouted and railed against Jack, against Ben, against the Island.  He had faith and courage, but at critical moments doubt and fear overwhelmed him.  When the world was against him, he planned and nearly executed his own demise.  He gave up.

Weakness.

In the ordinary world, John Locke was a nobody.  Not a single person, other than his most vociferous enemy, grieved his passing.  He was a noisy, ignorant, gullible fool.  But that was the reality of the ordinary world, the fragmented, incomplete reality of a world consumed with buying and selling, wealth and power, human creations over divine beings.

The attributes we consider weaknesses were John Locke’s strengths.  The world’s measure of John Locke was flawed, warped, inhuman and insane.  The Island’s measure of the man was true:  Gullibility meant trust; tears meant unwillingness to accept setbacks.  And his greatest failure, his inability to convince even one of the Six to return, proved instead to be his greatest strength.

LOST was about our humanity, and the story’s natural narrator was its strongest and most faithful voice:  Prince of the Island, Man of Faith, John Locke.

Things Known and Possessed

Richard Alpert had a deeper understanding of the Island than any single person before him, perhaps including even his boss, Jacob.  The Island’s leadership saw Richard as the person most suited for recruiting tasks:  locating and coercing Juliet Burke, and three times over a period of eighteen years gathering intelligence on a most remarkable boy:  John Locke of Tustin, California.

Richard placed six items in front of five-year-old Locke.  “Which of these things belong to you already?” Richard asked.  Locke claimed the bottle of sand, the compass, and the knife.  Richard didn’t like the choices.  He gathered the items into his bag, stood up suddenly, and left with few words.

Eleven years later, Richard attempted to entice Locke to a summer science camp.  The teenage Locke’s response was inevitable:  “I’m not a scientist.”  Richard was again disappointed in the young man he thought might one day become their leader.  Six years later, in 1977, Richard confided his doubts to Jack.

RICHARD: … John Locke… never seemed particularly special to me.
JACK: You said you had a question.
RICHARD: You know him? Locke?
JACK: [chuckles] Yeah. Yeah, I know him. And if I were you, I wouldn’t give up on him.

Richard took Jack’s words to heart.  Seeing John Locke again on the Island in late 2004, the ageless one confided to Locke his doubts about Ben Linus’ leadership, while at the same time giving his future leader a nudge toward realising his destiny.

RICHARD: … when word got back here that there was a man with a broken spine on the plane who could suddenly walk again, well, people here began to get very excited because that, that could only happen to someone who was extremely special. But Ben doesn’t want anyone to think you’re special, John.
LOCKE: And why are you telling me this?
RICHARD: Ben has been wasting our time with novelties, like fertility problems. We’re looking for someone to remind us that we’re here for more important reasons.
LOCKE: What do you want from me?
RICHARD: I want for you to find your purpose.

Richard had the first glimmers of an understanding that science “novelties” had nothing to do with the Island’s purpose, and work along those lines was pointless.  Good soldier that he was, he nevertheless spent long months preparing for Juliet Burke’s recruitment, creating out of nothing the shell company “Mittelos Bioscience” for that very purpose, and learning the languages of microbiology and biochemistry so his pitch would appear authentic.

He had his doubts.  He finally accepted Locke as leader, but never embraced his leadership.  Had the Island ever delivered a leader worthy of the title?  Charles Widmore and Benjamin Linus were dire enemies, but cut from the same self-centred cloth, neither of them truly suited for leadership.  Locke didn’t seem to be any more capable than the two miscreants before him who had accepted (or stolen?) the mantle of Leader.

We cannot blame Richard for his lack of vision.  No man of faith, Richard seemed to accept whole, without thought, Jacob’s warped view of the Island (for a broader discussion of this issue, please see http://www.sl-lost.com/2010/03/27/siempre-juntos-part-ii-cultural-inversions-in-lost-609-by-pearson-moore/).  This blind acceptance is not faith, for faith is never truly blind, but always grounded in critical judgment.  Richard did not exercise judgment, and he was therefore perfect in the role of consigliere.  With such an intellectual disposition Richard could never be leader, but his lack of vision also meant he was not adequate judge of the qualities that might be presented by a true leader.

Disorientation

The compass young John Locke picked up from among Richard’s objects is usually a symbol of orientation, of finding one’s way.  As with many common cultural artifacts, however, the significance of this symbol was shaken, inverted, and twisted into something entirely new for the purposes of our more complete understanding of LOST.

The history of the compass began in 1954, when Locke gave the compass to Richard as proof that he was from the future.  Seven years later, Richard showed the compass to five-year-old Locke.  Richard carried the compass until 2007, when he presented it to Locke, who conveyed it back to 1954 so it could be handed off to Richard.   Thus, the compass became the visible symbol of disorientation, of an endless time loop between 1954 and 2007.  Further magnifying the disorientation around this new symbol of etiological disorder,  as Lostpedia notes, “It is also something of a self-contained paradox, since the compass was never created.”

Plotting a meaningful timeline for LOST is virtually impossible.  As Rose said, “God only know when the hell we are now.”  Time paradoxes, inversions of cause and effect, and inversions of chronology were only the most obvious of LOST’s assault on social, cultural, and storytelling convention.  From the very beginning, LOST attacked our pre-conditioned views of reality.  The person we assumed the natural leader, Jack, instead proved to be reckless, destructive, and self-absorbed.  Peaches-and-cream Kate turned out to be a thief, a liar, and a murderer.  And Locke, the dangerous, possibly unhinged man with a suitcase full of knives, turned out to be the person most committed to the survivors’ safety and the continuity of life on the Island.

Locke’s name was in itself a part of the disorientation effort.  John Locke of the Island was named after the eighteenth-century English philosopher John Locke.  Locke, the philosopher, is best known as the major enlightenment proponent of empirical science as the pinnacle of human understanding.  LOST’s position, as articulated through the foundational speeches of the Ka-bar-wielding Prince of the Island, was that empirical science is the most baseless source of human knowledge, far surpassed by faith, which imparts true wisdom.

Faith Versus Science

Faith, properly executed, is collaborative, and must serve collaborative ends.  Science may be carried out by a single investigator or in collaborative teams, but it almost always serves the ends of those in power, those who would place their selfish interests above the basic needs of others, those who would gain control of the world and the people who inhabit it (for a more complete examination of this idea, please see “What the Island Is Not” and following sections in “Magnificence:  The Cultural Mythology of Lost” here:  http://www.sl-lost.com/2010/02/07/magnificence-the-cultural-mythology-of-lost-101-to-618/, and also “The Limits of Logic” and “Deception” here:  http://www.sl-lost.com/2010/02/14/impartial-risk-cultural-musings-on-the-resurrection-of-john-locke/).

Most of the world’s practicing scientists, myself included, work long hours to advance the agendas of corporate entities driven not by compassion, but by greed and thirst for power.  Even those who believe themselves exploring science as an end in itself, or as a means of human advancement, or as a tool of the Common Good, are the unwitting participants in the warped agendas of those in power.  My colleagues and I regularly speak of exploiting an idea or phenomenon, or working around patents.  Dr. Pierre Chang may have been a concerned and loving father, he may have believed he was pursuing science for the good of humankind.  But he was a corporate tool, a means to the Dharma Initiative’s final goal of controlling energy, time, and all of humanity.

Science is devoid of context and compassion.  It is passionless, and is all too easily corrupted.  In fact, as I pointed out in “Impartial Risk”, science and logic are more naturally the tools of deception and perversion than they are the “impartial” tools of altruism and empathy.  Humanity, at its core, is not based on science.  Humanity is based on trust, on faith, on collaboration and compassion.  As I noted in “Risk:  A Cultural Thesis for Lost”, “LOST tells us if we do not form bonds like those of Jack and Sayid, if we do not respect, if we do not have compassion, we will likely end up in Widmore’s camp, wearing the black uniform of Stuart Radzinsky, ready at a moment’s notice to enforce our desires over the needs, even over the lives of others.”

Things Believed and Shared

If one is to pursue of life in science, one must, with Father Roger Bacon (see last week’s essay, “Apologia Pro Vita Fidei”), assert that things believed through faith are more relevant and enduring  than things known through science.  Richard’s compass is  relevant and endures–even outside the constraints of time and place and chronology–because it is the symbol of Richard’s faith in Locke, and Locke’s faith in Richard, because it is something without beginning or end, because it is something shared.  One must assert, even on pain of death, the absolute value of Roger Bacon’s embrace of poverty, for it is through Franciscan poverty that true sharing, true compassion, true participation in the fullness of our humanity, becomes possible.

Such were the teachings of John Locke, even as a kindergartener.  Richard asked the wrong question.  He asked, “Which of these things belong to you already?”  He ought have asked instead, “Which of these items do you and I share, and which do you share with the Island?”  Locke, in his three choices, answered the question Richard should have known to ask.  The sand–for it was from the Island Locke loved and therefore shared;  the compass–for it was from Richard from Locke from Richard and therefore shared; and the knife, for it was through the Ka-bar and the Master Bowie that Locke hunted, protected the Candidates, and enforced Island law, and therefore shared.  None of the items “belonged” to Locke, any more than they belonged to Mr. Friendly or Dr. Halliwax.  The three items were not objects of knowledge, but articles of faith.  They were not possessions–not the accoutrements of acquisition–but rather symbols of shared ideals and actions.

Richard should have known.  The five-year-old Locke’s drawing of a man attacked by the Smoke Monster should have been sufficient evidence of direct connection with the Island.  Locke’s demeanour and the way he spoke of the Island should have signaled his true standing as Leader.  But we can forgive Richard.  He wasn’t on the beach with the survivors of Flight 815.  He didn’t get to hear the speeches that planted the seeds of Jack’s and Hurley’s ascension to leadership–the speeches of the Island’s best and truest teacher and prophet.

Teacher and Prophet

The words of John Locke resonated through LOST like those of no other character.  There is no better proof of this than the most heavily quoted fan-made Season Six trailers.  The creative directors at SL-Lost knew Locke was dead, but they believed his words most faithfully conveyed the full message of LOST, and they used them as narrative backdrop to a most amazing soundtrack and beautifully sequenced series of images:

Even at the end of the season, when it was clear to everyone (but not at all clear, for some reason, to Pearson Moore) that Locke would not return, at least not in physical form, TheBlackBox created this masterpiece of sound and imagery, choosing to make Locke Rising the final image of the trailer:

The interested LOST aficionado can revisit any of the excellent, earlier fan-made LOST trailers and again find Locke’s voice giving substance to our Island dreams.  This one was created by SL-Lost in the months before Season Five, and remains my favourite fan-made trailer:

But this one, also for Season Five from SL-Lost, is excellent, too:

The most famous speech is probably his first one, in the Pilot episode.

LOCKE: Backgammon is the oldest game in the world. Archeologists found sets when they excavated the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Five thousand years old. That’s older than Jesus Christ.
WALT: Did they have dice and stuff?
LOCKE: [nods] Mhhm. But theirs weren’t made of plastic. Their dice were made of bones. WALT: Cool.
LOCKE: Two players. Two sides. One is light … one is dark.

Locke was privy to the essentials of the Island’s 2000-year power struggle–even to the details of the board game that was the allegory of their life-and-death battle over the millennia.

Not long after that, in Episode Five, “White Rabbit”, Locke gave perhaps the central defining speech of the entire series:

I’m an ordinary man, Jack, meat and potatoes, I live in the real world. I’m not a big believer in magic. But this place is different. It’s special. The others don’t want to talk about it because it scares them. But we all know it. We all feel it…. what if everything that happened here, happened for a reason?

He goes on to say “I’ve looked into the eye of this island, and what I saw… was beautiful.”  We did not learn until Season Three, in “The Cost of Living”, that Locke “saw a very bright light.  It was beautiful.”  This was the revelation that occurred when Locke first confronted the Smoke Monster, and may be why he tried, over Jack and Kate’s objections, to be carried away by Smokey.  Even in this instance, Locke’s intuition was entirely correct, for as we now know, the Smoke Monster was prohibited from directly harming any of Jacob’s Candidates.  Locke, while he still lived, was Candidate #4, the first of Jacob’s Candidates at the time of the crash.  It is tempting now to believe that Locke was the first to be given a glimpse of the Light emanating from the Source.  In fact, such a vision of the Centre of the Island may be the only means of explaining Locke’s experience.

The second important speech was delivered at the end of Season One, during “Exodus”:

LOCKE: … Jack… you’re a man of science.
JACK: Yeah, and what does that make you?
LOCKE: Me, well, I’m a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident — that we, a group of strangers survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence — especially this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.
JACK: Brought here? And who brought us here, John?
LOCKE: The Island. The Island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you’ve seen that, I know you have. But the Island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.

Locke gave important instructions to Jack at the end of Season Four, minutes before he left on the helicopter that would take him off the Island and eventually to rescue by Penny’s team:

LOCKE: You’re gonna have to lie.
JACK: Excuse me?
LOCKE: If you have to go, then you have to lie about everything…everything that happened since we got to the island. It’s the only way to protect it.
JACK: (Sighs) It’s an island, John. No one needs to “protect” it.
LOCKE: It’s not an island. It’s a place where miracles happen. And–and–if you–if you don’t believe that, Jack, if you can’t believe that, just wait till you see what I’m about to do.
JACK: There’s no such thing as miracles.
LOCKE: Well…we’ll just have to see which one of us is right.

Even then, at the end of Season Four, Jack should have been able to distill from Locke’s words the powerful wisdom of protecting the Island.  He had witnessed first-hand the attempt by Widmore’s goons to take control of the Island and to kill everyone there.  He must have been able to surmise that Widmore’s intentions were anything but altruistic, and that he intended to subsume to his desires and quest for power the full force of the Island’s unearthly abilities.  But Jack was nearing the bottom of his journey to spiritual freedom, and not nearly in a position to take to heart any pearls of wisdom from Locke.  Was the disappearance of the Island enough of a shock to logic-bound Jack?  Whatever the reason, Jack did follow Locke’s instructions, informing the Six that they would have to lie.  Not yet a true believer, though, Jack replaced Locke’s reasoning with his own rationale:  they would have to lie, not to protect the Island, but to protect those who remained on the Island.

Doubts, Fears, Frustrations

Locke was consumed by the need to uncover the full meaning of the Island, to discover his true destiny in this place of miracles.  He communed with the Island as no one ever had.  No one–not Ben, not Richard, not even Jacob himself–was connected to the Island with the same titanic spiritual and emotional forces connecting Locke to this place.  The forces connected him to a raw power, to that “beautiful, bright light” that we now know was the Source.  But the Source was the origin of all life, all death, all rebirth.  It was unimaginable and untamed power, of the variety that cannot be harnessed or tapped for any purpose.

Until Desmond and Jack’s descent to the Light, Locke was the person in closest spiritual proximity to the awful forces of the Heart of the Island.  He enjoyed the full force of insight and intuition emanating from the Source, but he also suffered the full force of its awful and uncontrollable power.

He cried.  He cried often.  It was not unusual for Charlie or Jack or Boone to run into Locke in the jungle, crying bitterly into his arm or into the branch of a tree.  These were not the tears of some petty disappointment.  They were the tears of a man pulled to the painful raw edges of emotional existence, the laments of a man feeling not his own pain, but the pain of thousands, the pain of the Island itself.

His faith was deep, and therefore his doubts nearly consumed him.  The importance of doubt in a life of faith may not make sense to the lukewarm, to those who have not experienced the highs and lows of the spiritual journey.  The Dark Night of the Soul is a horrible, angst-ridden but entirely necessary component of the spiritual life, integral to any honest attempt to commune with the Creator.  Mother Teresa, soon to be Saint Teresa of Calcutta, was brutally honest in letters to her spiritual advisor, Fr. Michael Van Der Peet.  Daily, day after day, weeks and months turning into years and then into long, unrelieved decades of spiritual pain, Mother Teresa confided to Fr. Van Der Peet and to her journal that she doubted.  She doubted that Jesus listened and heard, doubted He was with her, doubted even the very existence of God.  David Van Biema of Time magazine wrote an excellent article on the subject (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html), and I encourage everyone to read this most enlightening essay.

Locke’s tears were not the tears of weakness, but the tears of one whose great strength was nevertheless no match for the awesome and terrible forces of creation, the forces of life and death and rebirth that made the Island the very centre of the earth.

But Locke’s pain always received a response of hope from the Island.  Sawyer and Locke, time traveling in Season Five, saw the brilliant column of white light pierce the darkness.  They both understood what it was.  It was the night Boone died.  The night Aaron was born.  The night of Locke’s deepest pain.

SAWYER: That light in the sky – it was from the Hatch, wasn’t it?
LOCKE: The night that Boone died … I went out there and started pounding on it as hard as I could. I was … confused … scared. Babbling like an idiot, asking, why was all this happening to me?
SAWYER: Did you get an answer?
LOCKE: Light came on, shot up into the sky. At the time, I thought it meant something. SAWYER: Did it?
LOCKE: No. It was just a light.
SAWYER: So why’d you turn us around then? Don’t you wanna go back there?
LOCKE: Why would I wanna do that?
SAWYER: So you could tell yourself to do things different, save yourself a world of pain. LOCKE: No, I needed that pain – to get to where I am now.

Locke recognised the necessity of that Dark Night to his journey.   The path to enlightenment is not easy.  We do not seek enlightenment because it is fun.  We seek it because it is difficult, because those things in life that are attained only through danger, adversity, and sacrifice, are the things of greatest value to our truest selves.

Even when Locke had reached the very end of his emotional capacities and in hopeless resignation sought his own death, the Island sent an angel to save him.  The suicide would not have worked, anyway.  Would Locke have become even more deeply depressed at his inability to take his own life?  Would he have recognised the futility of it all, and devoted himself instead to the Island’s well-being?  We cannot know the answer, since the angel who believed himself to be preventing Locke’s suicide (the suicide would never have succeeded, since Locke was still a Candidate), only minutes after talking Locke down wrapped a power cord around his neck and choked the life out of him.

O Happy Fault

Locke’s was the sacrifice truly demanded by the Island.  He was the spirit closest to the Island.  In many religious traditions, foremost among them Christianity, those closest to the Creator are the ones required to make the greatest sacrifice.  Jesus died a criminal’s death.  All of His apostles were executed by the most painful means available at the time.  Locke was attached to the Island unlike anyone else in history.  He would suffer the most emotionally and spiritually gut-wrenching journey of any of the Island’s servants.

Locke was the sacrifice demanded by the Island.  His death was the final push that Jack required, finally ending the good doctor’s drug-induced stupor and self-pity and redirecting him toward the final great service to the Island.

In the end, Locke’s doubts, fears, and frustrations, as much as his wisdom, strength, and intuition, proved to be the necessary elements in the redemption of Katherine Anne Austen, the salvation of Dr. Jack Shephard, and the preservation of Locke’s Constant, the Island.

Canton-Rainier

In Season Five Jack Shephard was portrayed as the Doubting Thomas, the disciple who required proof before he would believe the resurrection.  But resurrection was not the event we were asked to dwell on.  In Season Four and Season Five, a van labeled “Canton-Rainier Carpet Cleaning” became the focus of our attention.  Even before any of the episodes had aired, enterprising internet analysts found the surreptitiously obtained photographs of the van and tore apart the name.  Within hours we knew what “Canton-Rainier” meant:  It was an anagram for “Reincarnation”.  I expected resurrection, but the plan was much grander than anything I could imagine prior to the last episodes of Season Six.  Reincarnation means returning in a different physical form but containing the same essential spiritual substance.  Resurrection means spiritual continuity into a fully reanimated formerly dead body.  How could I have known that LOST would attempt a fusion of the two forms of rebirth?

SMOKEY: This remind you of anything, Jack?
JACK: What?
SMOKEY: Desmond…going down into a hole in the ground. If there was a button down there to push, we could fight about whether or not to push it. It’d be just like old times.
JACK: You’re not John Locke. You disrespect his memory by wearing his face, but you’re nothing like him. Turns out he was right about most everything. I just wish I could’ve told him that while he was still alive.

With these words Jack paid tribute to the man who, with his own blood, had paved the way for Jack’s redemptive salvation of the Island.  But Jack’s words were a sign of something much more significant taking place.

By the end of LOST, Jack’s thoughts were one with those of his master, John Locke.  The prophesy of Canton-Rainier came into full reality with the breathtaking  illumination of Jack Shephard.  Jack, falling to the very nadir of his spiritual journey at precisely the moment of Locke’s murder, became the happy recipient of all of Locke’s teachings, all his prophesies, all his intuitions.  Just as Boone died at precisely the moment of Aaron’s entry into the world, so too Locke’s death ushered into the world a new Jack Shephard.

John Locke died, but he was reincarnated into the soul of his former nemesis, now his closest disciple.  The dead soul of Jack Shephard was reanimated, resurrected by the spiritual force of will of the Island’s  most beloved son.

Regardless of the way in which we choose to contemplate The End, there is one truth upon which all of us I think might find common ground.  Locke’s spirit did not die at the conclusion of “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”.  Locke’s spirit guided Jack to the Source, just as Locke guided all of us, along every one of the 121 steps to The End.  “You were special, John,” Ben told the man he had murdered.  Long after all of them had died, Locke continued to affect Jack, Hurley, and Ben–everyone whose lives had been touched by this trusting soul, this man of faith.  Locke is the soul of LOST, and just as his spirit will never die, the Island will forever remain a place to contemplate, wonder at, a place of highest joys and deepest sorrows, where human weakness and doubt become unopposable strength and unwavering faith.  A place of things believed, things shared, things of our common culture and deepest humanity.

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Related posts:

1. Articles of Faith: The Culture of Trust in LOST 6.14 “The Candidate” by Pearson Moore
2. Humanitas Insulae: The Culture of LOST by Pearson Moore
3. Dying Light: Counter-Culture in LOST 6.15 “Across the Sea” by Pearson Moore

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