Jacob learns to tell a story

Having a difficult time putting my thoughts down here without being too expansive so forgive some of the shorthand and lack of explanation.  Fire away about anything that needs further detail.

An early idea I had about some of the characters on the show was that they seemed to divide more along the lines of Men of Fact vs. Men of Fiction more than Man of Science/Man of Faith.  I put Jack and Sayid in the Fact camp, and Locke, Sawyer and Desmond into the Fiction one.  Though I think Locke especially moved from one to the other and none of these designations really remain fixed.  In fact trying to name something in an absolute way so that it never becomes anything other than that designation is one of the problems of the Fact camp.  This is one of the ways in which Jack tries to “fix” things.  It is what Sayid does when he tortures—tries to control things as they are through absolute truth or knowledge.  Sawyer’s a good example of the opposing force there—he tries to change reality through story telling (con-artistry). 

In “Across the Sea”—Jacob’s brother was the storyteller.  He was able to lie, able to see more than one level of reality, able to invent—his wheel was a “making up of the rules” about how things on the island worked.  In a sense he was making up the story of how he was going to get off the island.

You could even see this in a shared feature that the storytellers have had—Locke, Desmond, Sawyer have all been shown sitting on the beach looking out to sea as Jacob’s brother did in this episode.  Sawyer gets headaches from being farsighted.  Interesting that Jack is just starting to do the far-sighted thing this season (remember when he tried to get Rose to stop sitting on the beach and looking out to sea in S1?)

This power to create reality we’ve seen hinted at in various ways—the “magic box” for instance.  Charlie making up his list of greatest hits—one of which, learning to swim, changes his reality so that he knows how to swim.  I wondered when the O6 left the island whether one thing that had happened is that Jack had created a reality in which Kate had money and no longer needed to be on the run.  Or whether their lie was in fact killing everyone on the island off.

Mythologically one representation of this power is the power of creation in the Christian idea of the “Word”—and I think it is this power that we see in the golden light coming from the cave in “Across the Sea” (ATS from now on).  Note that the birth/female imagery of the cave was fairly apparent and reinforced my idea that Desmond will be central to returning things to where they need to be.  He is symbolically connected to the Man of the World card which often incorporates the Yoni symbol to show the birth of a new world—often the figure is not so much a man as a hermaphrodite—and this would be an interesting inversion of what just took place in ATS.  Not birth, but death.  Not the female giving birth to the son, but the son killing the mother.  Male/Female separated in death, and the force of light—the creative force, separated into the smoke monster, and the purplish light. 

That’s what I think happened with the birth of Smokie—the “Word”—the power of creation (life, death, rebirth) is out of balance.  What it’s been separated into I think can be gotten at in one way through the allusions in the name “Horace Goodspeed.”

When I wrote about the episode Cabin Fever, I pointed to the name Goodspeed as a version of “God speed.”  And then I was saying that “God’s speed” could be another name for Einstein’s designation “spacetime.”  According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—when one knows the location of a particle (it’s spatial component) one cannot know it’s speed, to know the speed (it’s temporal component) one cannot know where it is.  So human beings are in a kind of constant process of exchange between elements of space (what something is—its being) and time (what things are becoming).  “God’s speed” or spacetime encompasses both.  For God (or gods) Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead.  Particles are both particles and waves.

Horace’s first name—Horace, the Latin poet—named the concept of “the golden mean.”  So what I think was in the cave was the perfect balance (or mean) between being and becoming or space/time.

Though humans cannot have “God’s speed”—what they have instead which mediates between being/becoming is story.  But humans have a tendency to over emphasize one of these over the other.  With my students for instance—a lot of them are uncomfortable with the idea that a story could mean more than one thing.  They want it to “be” one thing.  On the other hand, once I tell them that meaning is not fixed—some of them want to take that to the extreme that they can randomly come up with some interpretation—the story could become anything they want.  In one—they want the world outside to determine what something is.  As readers then they would only be discovering the story’s identity which exists without any influence from them.  On the other hand, they would be acting as if they were the stories creator—an overemphasis on their own subjective view which doesn’t take into account the author, or the common symbolism in stories, etc.  These views are analogous to what I’ve described as the Fact and Fiction camps above.

Another way to look at the extremes is thinking about naming.  A name is not the same as the thing it names—it stands for it.  So already once something is named, you’ve entered the world of fiction/stories.  You are pretending some connection between a word and a thing.  Jacob’s brother never gets named—he is the world, the material or corporeal—without the word.  But at the other extreme as the Smoke Monster, he (it?) is many named—Christian, Locke, Emily Linus, Richard’s wife (not the one Hurley spoke to—but the one who first appeared to Richard)… which points to the loss of our individuality in “becoming” – what we transform into with death.  (A comic and lesser version of this loss of identity in many names is Sawyer’s habit of nicknaming.  There’s also the fact that many of the male characters have names that are version of each other’s identities.  Jack is a surgeon.  “Jarrah” means a cutter—which can also translate as surgeon.  A “Sawyer” is also someone who cuts things (a sawbones—a surgeon).  John-James-Jack-Jacob.  And Desmond incorporating so many aspects of the male characters in his various vocations (man of the cloth/faith, soldier, went to med school…)

This is also what I was describing in the “Some Like it Hoth” episode as the extremes of Perfection (as in the perfect closed circle of trust that Horace imagines in which nothing needs explanation—everything is transparent) and Entropy.  Perfection is being without becoming.  Entropy is becoming moving toward nonexistence.

Or another good way to look at the extremes and how to balance between the two can be seen in the eps “Everybody Hates Hugo” and “Live Together, Die Alone.” In EHH—Hugo swings between two extremes in how to deal with food.  One is absolute control—this is the “being” extreme—the need to protect from the chaos of change.  The other is to blow everything up—protect from change by destroying everything.  The balance is to give up control and allow everyone to partake—to exchange with each other.  The story emerges from collective exchange—so it neither is mandated and absolute (one meaning), nor is it anything one wants it to be but emerges out of a process between various creators  (all of us being writers, readers, and symbol makers).

In LTDA—the story “Turn of the Screw” is alluded to.  In that story the governess kills the charges she is supposed to care for in her attempt to determine absolutely whether or not they are seeing ghosts or are delusional.  Locke in this episode is like the governess.  He goes from absolute faith (the dark side of faith) without question—dogmatic or fundamentalist faith to complete skepticism which leads him to want to destroy.  Desmond is led neither by blind faith or complete skepticism but by love—relationship—out of which he turns the key.  His turning of the key distributes the light instead of keeping it controlled or blowing it up—analogous to what Hugo does with the food.

In the end I think this is the kind of story Jacob is learning to tell—not one in which he is the special one or chosen one, but one in which he distributes storytelling power to all—that bit of light inside all of us.

The problem in the way the guardianship of the light has been thought of—even before the birth of Smokie—is that in trying to protect it from humans because they are greedy for more and want it all to themselves (to become gods) the guardian herself began to act as God, becoming the very thing she feared.  We see these forces of being/becoming in the Mother in ATS.  She acts as midwife—change/becoming.  But fears change—the outside world—the Other—so kills the biological mother.  She will pass on the guardianship to one of the boys (change) and sees the unnamed brother as her replacement because he has the power of storytelling—he can lie—he is special.  But it is just this specialness—the ability to see more than one reality at once, rather than to be fixed in one, that allows him to see his biological mother, leading to his allegiance becoming unfixed.  Again, to protect—the mother must kill, for which she is in turn killed.  And then Jacob does something worse to his brother than death—he fixes him immortally in place as “being”--as the security system which denies change/progress.

What the mother attempts to do is to purge the island of the sins of humans by destroying them.  We see this repeated over and over as what smokie comes to represent.  It’s prefigured in Locke’s “Godfather” pose with the orange in his mouth or alluded to in Keamey’s profession in the alternate reality.  Protection through violence—but the protector is also the threat.

The other kind of protection--the other kind of godfatherliness is that offered by baptism.  And this again is akin to the sharing of food, or the turning of the key—a communal redemption.

I think what I need to insert here is why it is that storytelling is what Jacob needs to do to find redemption.  How does it fit with what happened with the birth of Smokie—which is also Jacob’s fall—his original sin.  The Mother told him both that going into the light was a fate worse than death and that humans were always greedy for more than the bit of light they had inside themselves.  When he threw his brother in—he created just what I described as happening to the Mother.  In being the guardian, she took upon herself the right to judge who lived or died.  She defined/judged who people are—without any hope of change, progress, etc.  Jacob turned his brother into that same force.  That force is freed from the balancing force of change/becoming/creation—and the golden light that we saw in this episode becomes the more familiar purple light that we saw in the implosion or in some of the Dharma experiments.  Interesting that golden light or sunlight is a mixture of the spectrum of light—the purple light more like one extreme of the spectrum—more pure.  But that’s the problem—purity/perfection is out of balance.  So we have Being/Becoming not in a process of creating—of storytelling, but unhooked from each other.  On the one hand—people unable to become—to move from one state to another (the whispers, those who can’t move on, Smokie appearing as the dead)—all these things associated with Smokie  On the other—teleportation and time travel—things unfixed in time and space—the effect of the purple light.  And then the effect of that on people’s minds—the nose bleeds, insanity, death.

So how is Jacob going to bring things back into balance?  First I think it’s important to realize that in the creation of the alternative world (with the explosion of Jughead)—the group of Losties who are now in 2010 on the island should not exist at all.  If the bomb goes off—there is no island and they are the people we see in the alternative world—and in fact could not have gone back to the past.  If the bomb did not go off then they would have remained in and died in the past. 

When we first saw the two realities this season, I noticed that in the 2010 island world there was an emphasis on character—Kate up a tree and we (viewers) seeing the world from her subjective pov.  The other world was event focused (long pan from the plane to the submerged island).  So we now have a world of “being”—the event world, and a world of “becoming” (character choice determined).  In the world of being—who people are in terms of their intent/choice seems to matter very little.  In many ways—the alternative world is a more extreme version of the world they went back to in S4.  Character change/development doesn’t matter.  Sayid was a killer and remains one.  The world is static.  Note—the important exception at this point is Desmond who is going around making things happen.  A good example is Locke—trapped by his own guilt into paralysis.  Notice the exchange Jack and Locke have about this in the hospital in which neither one seems capable of making the first move.  This is a world in which they are “safe” but in which there is no progress.  This is in fact what I think happens when the island (cork) was removed and the darkness allowed out into the world. 

But things are beginning to progress in that world as they become aware of the possibilities of life/love in their other selves.  And important that they are willing to give up life (protection) for love (relationship—becoming).  I think this is how the story may be able to be created.  In the past, we’ve seen that fear of death has propelled the characters back into the paralysis of absolutes and fixity.  The way Sayid uses language is a good way to look at that in miniature.  Torturing is a way to get at some absolute truth through control.  He then uses communication differently when he translates with Shannon—translation as a communal exchange of language rather than a way to make language yield one absolute meaning.  But the problem with becoming is that it is uncontrolled, and one outcome of becoming—of time passing—is death.  So he loses Shannon to death and then immediately returns to torture (with Ben).   

I think what we are seeing now is that in our original world the characters are finding that there are things greater than death and that are worth sacrificing themselves for.  And this awareness will pass onto the versions of themselves in the alternative world allowing them to have some of that light in themselves—the light of becoming—of life, death, rebirth—rather than holding tightly to things as they are.

Postscript on narrative form: the kind of story we saw in ATS is a revenge narrative.  In that kind of story a life is exchanged for a life.  It’s a closed circle where nothing changes.  Or a tautology.  The kind of story which is emerging now at the end of Lost is more akin to the kind of story of sacrifice that Jesus makes—a person dies not because they deserve to, not because they have to pay for a life they took—but because there is something greater than the exchange of life for life.  Going beyond a formula of exchange—that which is given freely and not earned—forgiveness, grace, salvation—these go beyond the closed circle—It’s Jacob’s loophole :-) )