LOST finale, I was blind but now I … ?

I read a story recently; maybe it was true story, maybe just a parable, I don’t know. It went something like this:

Once a man was walking in a park on a beautiful spring afternoon. Along the way, he was stopped by a group of blind women having a picnic. They heard him passing by and asked the man to take a photograph of them. He agreed. As the women huddled closely together and he snapped the photograph, he inwardly mused about the cryptic nature of a group of blind people wanting a photograph of themselves that they would never see. As he continued his walk, it occurred to him that as human beings we are fashioned in such a way that having shared experiences which ultimately rest beyond our human faculty to enjoy could ultimately be enjoyed through others. The photograph, that these women would never see, could be enjoyed by others who could see it -- and the enjoyment of those who saw it would be shared by those who lived and experienced the moment in a very different way.

I think LOST kind of fits that bill for me. I walk away from the show undecided if I am one of the blind women wanting to share an experience that I could never see directly, or if I am a holding a picture of something that I can see and trying to relay it to a group which has known it much differently than me.

That alone made the finale ‘worth it’ to me. I didn’t come away feeling ripped off and some have, most of my disappointments with the show emerged during the writers’ strike and all the plot problems that stemmed from it. Ultimately the ending brought a redeeming quality to the work itself and maybe that redemption, at least for the characters, was the point all along.

Interestingly enough LOST seemed to be geared toward the characters and not the fans from the start. I can appreciate that much about it; at least until the massive advertisement campaign started bleeding into my artistic appreciation of the show. So much of the cliff-hanger design was about neither the characters nor the fans – it existed to bait advertisers into spending more money to keep things rolling.

Cynicism aside, what the finale demonstrated was that all along the story of LOST existed for the characters and not the fans. We are each called into their story and emerging perhaps with little information, we’re left to our own individual imaginations as to the role we might play in it as existential beings.

It’s true that there are likely several dozen different theories about what happened. As a Christian, the old saying from John’s gospel, “No greater love has anyone than this: that they lay down their life for their friends” pretty much washed over the final scene. So did a line from T.S. Eliot – “My end is my beginning.”

Even so, Jack emerged from the tunnel of light in nearly the exact same place as the man in black. His body was contorted in a very similar fashion as the man in black. Could Jack be the island’s new smoke monster? Was Hurley’s selection as island guardian meant to guide Jack back? Is that why everyone else was waiting for him?

Or was it that Jack’s commitment to science and reason that kept him emerging into the afterlife much slower than his peers? Undoubtedly the issues of faith and redemption have been, and will now be codified, as the show’s primary themes.

It was through the theme of faith that everything else on the show will probably be forever interpreted. From the attempt of science to control religious faith (Dharma), to human self-righteousness manifested via the need to own religious faith (Ben), to the battle between good and evil to establish a foothold in religious faith (Jacob and the man in black), to the flirtation between this world and the next (Desmond), to ultimately crafting a human dialogue of purpose and meaning between two opposing ideologies (Jack and pre-monster Locke). The themes are there whether or not we choose to examine them as such.

LOST is a basic metaphor for our culture, of this I have little doubts. Volumes are going to be written about what it meant, and probably already have been, in that this is but one of thousands of blogs on the matter.

So five blind women having a picnic asked a stranger to photograph them… If you can understand the vicarious human nature of such a request, you’re close to becoming a candidate… and of course being a candidate, well, that’s a terrifying beauty all its own.

Earth is crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning


Meet you all on the other side,

DA