Posts Tagged ‘ Essays ’

SpinTunes 5 Judging Wrap-Up

August 18, 2012
By

Except for a few loose ends (like announcing the winner) that are in others’ hands, SpinTunes 5 is pretty much done, at least for me as a judge. It’s been interesting, challenging and worthwhile. Thanks to Spin for inviting me.

My experience judging hasn’t changed my mind about any of my previous recommendations for SpinTunes. I feel them all more strongly than ever. Now that I’ve been a judge, I’ve got some added perspectives. Here are some reasons to be a judge and advice if you do, new recommendations, and finally some regrets.

To Judge Or Not To Judge

Not that I think it should be mandatory, but I think any SpinTunes regulars ought to judge at some point, like putting your time in on jury duty to serve your community.

There are downsides. You can’t enter songs unless you’re willing to wait until the contest is over to do only shadows. It takes time — a whole lot if you want to do a really good job. You open yourself up to criticism and can’t expect to please everyone every time, just the same as you do when you put your artistic work out into the world. Some of the behind-the-scenes discussions among judges and admins can be challenging and even unpleasantly counterproductive.

Still, the community benefits from judges with songwriting experience in general and SpinTunes experience in particular. Reviews and opinions can still vary among judges, but experience makes them more informed, and I think that makes for more worthwhile reviews. This can not only improve the integrity of contest results. It also gives you the opportunity to contribute to other artists, and in the end that may be the most important result of participating in SpinTunes as either an entrant or a judge.

I think you can end up a better artist yourself, too. To articulate your opinions — and make them public — forces you to think more about your perspective, your aesthetic, your knowledge — and to stand by all of it. That awareness seem only likely to strengthen your own future work.

If you do judge, here’s some advice:

  • Be open-minded and collaborative in behind-the-scenes discussions and have no expectations of them. It’s Spin’s show, and what he says goes. It’s not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship. And of course you’ll also probably disagree at times with the other judges. Just put your two cents in but then let them fall where they may.
  • Even so, put those two cents in as if you weren’t going to just let them fall. If there’s something you want to try to influence — challenge choices or descriptions, qualification decisions, etc. — speak up, sooner rather than later, and don’t wait for someone else to bring up the topic. Everyone is busy, time is always limited, things fall to the wayside, and if you don’t speak up you might find there’s suddenly not enough opportunity to try to make a difference about something important before decisions are made and put out to the world.
  • Be as objective about your subjectivity as you can. Judging is inherently subjective, but try not to let arbitrary whims play into your reviews. Have an approach and stick with it, and take each entry as much as possible only on the terms of the specific challenge and, beyond that, its own terms. There’s no good reason for any other personal biases, musical or otherwise, to come into play.
  • Be confident about who you are and what you like and know before you review, and try hard to only write things you’ll be willing to stand by…
  • … but also be willing to admit when you were off base, uninformed, etc. (See below for me doing a bit of that.)
  • Avoid too much discussion about your reviews and the contest in general. It’s too easy to either stand by your reviews too stubbornly or not enough. Write them well then try to let them speak for themselves. Then let it go.

Qualification, Challenges and Shadows

Qualification is a yes/no, black/white issue. A song ends up qualified or not, and it can be disqualified because of things related to a particular challenge or because of more general rules. In fact, the only two SpinTunes 5 DQs happened because of the general rule about entries needing to have lyrics. No DQ came from any failure to meet something unique to a challenge this time.

Judging how well a song meets a challenge is as qualitative and subjective as judging any other aspect of a song, and it’s often subject to many different factors. Music style and lyrical content both came into play for Round 2′s “pump up” songs. Number of characters, scope of story, dramatization and various other characteristics came into play for Round 3′s mini-operas. Something could seem black on one of these factors while the others remain white, or they can all just seem shades of gray.

Shadows are songs that aren’t vying in formal competition. Until now, you’re labeled a shadow if you simply choose to be one, or if you try to make a qualifying entry but miss the deadline. Either way, judges don’t have to review shadows, but if they do, it’s always up to them whether to rank them amongst the qualifying entries or not rank them at all.

As an entrant or as a judge, whether dealing with a true shadow, a deadline victim shadow, or an entry that DQs for another reason, I’d still be interested in feedback for those submissions, including comparison to the other songs in the round.

It definitely makes sense for shadows and DQs to be lumped at the bottom in round totals, since that’s what determines who moves on. But just because that’s needed for that purpose, there’s no reason judges need to lump those songs at the bottom of their own reviews. Some judges strew shadows among their rankings, and this is understood to be no problem. Yet when I posed treating DQs the same, I was told that anything other than pushing them all the way to the bottom made no sense and didn’t even seem possible to do.

Now, I did rank this contest’s two DQs lowest in my rankings, but that was total coincidence, not a foregone conclusion. When there’s so much else to every song, I can easily imagine giving a medium or even a fairly high score and rank to a song that gets DQ’d — even a song that I myself would vote to DQ. Whatever black-and-white factor justified the DQ, I’d score it low in that category, and all the other categories would remain up for grabs, to be looked at in themselves. It’s an advantage of the kind of scoring system I use that works to contestants’ advantage in lots of ways, keeping any one factor from weighing too heavily in an arbitrary or biased way, whether the judge is conscious of doing so or not. Those same benefits would extend to DQ reviews just as they would to shadow reviews.

As long as judges are allowed to rank however they want, no SpinTunes rules changes would be needed. I’d simply recommend that judges not automatically move shadows and DQs to the bottoms of their lists. The question of moving on is simply separate from the question of what a judge thinks of a round’s entries. Shadow and DQ’d entrants are likely to appreciate and learn from seeing where they fall compared to everyone else. Those songs can be factored out for the official combined rankings, as they were with my reviews, which turned out to be not only possible but easy to do, just as has happened in the past when various judges have ranked shadows.

One extra minor point. It’s one thing to shadow a challenge weeks or months or years after a challenge occurs. You know you’re just shadowing, so there’s no point considering you a deadline victim. But if you intended to qualify and failed because you missed the deadline and still turned in your entry, it might be more appropriate to think of that entry as a DQ for breaking a rule of the challenge just like anyone who breaks any other general or challenge-specific rule is a DQ. Shadow would be a label reserved for those who intended to shadow from the start. In the end, it’s mostly semantics, especially if judges can treat shadows and DQs equally in their reviews, which they can.

One extra major point: Judging freedom currently allows for some judges to prize the challenge highest above all else while others may only consider it to inform a DQ decision and then entirely ignore it in their reviews. I find this distressing for a challenge-based contest and would hope for some judging guidelines to be put into place — whether through a scoring system or otherwise — to smooth out at least some of the most significant potential inconsistencies across judges, like this one.

The Best Challenges

An extra reason why a scoring system is a good thing: It can tell us which rounds overall produced the best songs. The simple rankings can’t say a single thing about that.

Obviously all judges’ scores would be figured in, but since no two have used the same system so far, let’s just take as an example whatever we can see if we look at some averages from my SpinTunes 5 scores. Probably most meaningful, apples to apples, would be:

Final round qualified entrants’ scores from each round:

  • Round 1: 40.1
  • Round 2: 43.8
  • Round 3: 42.5
  • Round 4: 38.7

Top four qualified entrants from each round (i.e., no shadows):

  • Round 1: 48.6
  • Round 2: 45.4
  • Round 3: 42.6
  • Round 4: 38.7

Top nine entrants from each round, including shadows, since nine was the smallest number of total entries for any round (Round 3):

  • Round 1: 45.6
  • Round 2: 42.9
  • Round 3: 38.5
  • Round 4: 42.5

Except for Round 1 on the first list and Round 4 on the first list (and that was due only to an abundance of solid Round 4 shadows), on every list the overall song quality happened to go down steadily with each passing round. Did entrants get burned out as time went on? Was there something inherent about the types of challenges that made each one produce “worse” songs than the previous one? Are “better” contestants being weeded out too soon because eliminations can knock out otherwise strong contestants when they make a flukey misstep, so maybe a different contest scheme would work better? Any of these things could explain the trend.

Then look at how the final round qualifiers’ scores compared to the top four qualifiers for each round. Of course, they’re the same for Round 4, and they’re almost identical for Round 3 because my choices lined up closely to the overall round results, and Round 3 would also have matched perfectly if we were looking at average scores across all judges. So these two rounds don’t communicate anything. But look at the other two rounds, where the Round 4 contestants consistently underperformed the top entries. This also could suggest that “better” contestants got weeded out earlier on. Or it could suggest that some people are sporadic stars who do well but not consistently enough to see things through to the end. The truth may lie somewhere in between.

Independent of the overall clear downward trend over the course of the contest, would average scores help point the way toward picking better challenges, or perhaps at least picking a better order for the challenges so that the contest feels like it gains momentum with each passing round? Is anyone even interested in picking challenges based on the types that are likely to actually produce the best and most enjoyable songs, or are there other reasons for picking certain challenges?

It’s all food for thought. With a consistent scoring system used across judges, there’s at least the option of thinking about this stuff. Without it, this all goes completely unnoticed.

(For me, at least, it’s nice to see some quantitative evidence for something that I’ve just abstractly felt in the past, which is that, except for the inherent interest of the competition logistics themselves, things often seem to get generally less exciting as the contest goes on. The challenges may sound interesting, but listening to the songs doesn’t necessarily, and then things often end somewhat anticlimactically. I guess I may not be imagining all of that.)

Judging the Judges

It might be valuable if there was a way for judges to get feedback about their judging. No need to devolve into some endless spiral of then judging the judges of the judges, etc. And I’m not talking about the occasional comments on blogs or Facebook like “You totally misunderstood my song, jerk,” or “Gee, you have such great taste since you liked my song so much!” I mean something a bit more detached and general, like the judging itself is supposed to be.

This could lead to stronger judging as part of future SpinTunes contests. Spin already asks entrants for feedback about the judges. Maybe there’s a way to get some of that information published anonymously, and maybe without even naming the particular judges commented on. A pool of information, about things that generally did and didn’t work from judges, could help inform how future judges approach their reviews.

Didn’t someone, back in SpinTunes 1, do some number-crunching to see how each of the judges’ rankings compared to the overall rankings? You could then see which judge was most “right” (meaning closest to the overall consensus) and which ones were farther off. It would be interesting to see that for every SpinTunes contest/round, and then to notice how those judges approached things. Judges certainly don’t need to be of one mind every time, but it would likely benefit the contest if judges judged in a way that tended to be in the ballpark of what the contest results tend to be. It would probably mean that much stronger feedback to help artists grow as well.

Regrets

As much as I tried to articulate myself well, I saw a number of places where, in hindsight, I realize I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. Some of it’s just like writing a song. Leonard da Vinci said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” You can keep adding, subtracting, changing, but at some point you just have to stop, let it go, call it “done,” and move on. Beyond that, though, there are a couple of things I feel I was unfair about. One I could have helped, the other I couldn’t (nobody could), but I’d like to mention them both.

Emperor Gum’s “Pygmalion” in Round 1: The free-flowing looseness of the composition and song structure made me feel a bit lost even with the words. I scored Challenge and Lyric Content both as Fair. In hindsight, reconsidering the lyrics more directly on their own, I think it was really quite nice, enough for a Good in both categories and possibly even an Excellent for Lyric Content, jumping it up to 14th or 15th place in my rankings. My own scoring system, separating qualities out into categories, was supposed to help me see just this sort of thing, to help me evaluate each element on its own terms without influence from the rest. The score jump wouldn’t have made a difference in the overall results, which still would have caused elimination. But I feel it wasn’t fair to Emperor Gum that I failed at my own attempt to keep the different aspects of a song from interfering with each other’s value. Maybe this happened for other songs and other rounds, too, and I’m still unaware of it. It does go to show how presentation really does affect perception, even when someone is actively trying to avoid being affected.

Living with a song, and Felix Frost’s work in particular: I was often somewhat critical about Felix Frost’s work. I wasn’t the only one, and I think I had good reason most of the time. At the same time, maybe it’s just the kind of work that’s harder to come across well in just a couple of listens. For better or worse (and sometimes it really can be either), it’s a lot easier to have a positive first impression with something accessible and catchy and easy to make sense of. More complex pieces, or otherwise unusual pieces, or even those that just use styles and motifs that you may generally not be a fan of, may take more familiarity, living with them a while, in order to develop deeper appreciation. I’m not saying I’d definitely fall in love with Frost’s work if I listened many more times, but I’m fairly sure that I’d at least develop some amount of better appreciation of it with more familiarity, and beyond that I might actually like it more as well. The same could go for many other songs from many other entrants, especially (for me, at least) those that have a compositional looseness that can be hard to latch onto with limited exposure. You have to wonder, how would we judge a whole round differently if we had to listen to all the songs a few times a week for several months before writing our reviews? I’m not saying we should do that, but it’s a worthwhile question, about an issue that maybe inherently works against entries with certain qualities. Nothing to be done. And I feel bad about it. But I feel good being aware of the situation.

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Some Thoughts To Help With the SpinTunes #5 Mini-Opera Challenge

July 22, 2012
By

Spin+judges didn’t get to fully talk through the mini-opera challenge before it was posted. I don’t blame anyone. We’re all busy people. But I’m concerned that the challenge post as it stands may mislead some entrants. I speak for nobody but myself, and maybe it’s not something a judge should do in this situation, but I’d rather do something now to help entrants get moving on a good track than stay silent and risk that we all end up with something less than the best possible crop of mini-operas we can get for this round. So I’d like to share some thoughts on what I believe a mini-opera is and how those thoughts will come into play at least in my own judging. I’ll give some additional examples, too. Again, I speak only for myself, and all entrants can take or leave everything I say as you wish.

An opera is a dramatic work. That doesn’t means it’s “interesting or emotional” as opposed to “boring.” That means it tells a story through characters communicating and taking action. I’m looking for that kind of story. “Written in the Wind” may be from a musical and have two characters interacting with each other, but “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and half the radio-hit duets you can think of have two characters interacting with each other. “Come Talk To Me” may have been “dramatized” in the “Secret World” concert film with a telephone prop, but it’s a solo song from a solo album and the other “character” is really just singing background vocals. It’s theatrical, it’s “dramatic,” but it’s not a dramatic work. None of these songs tell a story. I think a mini-opera, like a full opera, should tell a story, so that someone who heard your entry could tell the story to someone who didn’t hear it, just as if it were a novel or a movie or a TV episode, etc.

I will probably vote to disqualify any entry that doesn’t tell a clear story, and I’d hope that all judges would feel the same for this challenge.

An opera tells a whole story. Like I said in a comment on Dr. Lindyke’s blog, Mini-Me wasn’t just a lung or liver following Dr. Evil around, just a part of a person. A mini-opera, to me at least, is not an excerpt from an opera. It’s a small opera. It should tell a whole story. A whole story can be told in a few seconds. A mini-opera can certainly be pulled off at a length appropriate to the amount of time given for a SpinTunes round. Give us an excerpt that doesn’t stand on its own and the challenge maybe may just as well have been to write a number from a musical. That’s not the challenge. The challenge is a mini-opera.

I will probably vote to disqualify any entry that doesn’t tell a complete story, and I’d hope that all judges would feel the same for this challenge.

An opera is made up of multiple songs or song-like pieces. Get mini enough, down to a few seconds, and this would be impossible to do effectively. At a few minutes, though, it’s totally doable, and I think it would be really nice to have a mini-opera keep this characteristic of a full opera. At some level, it’s possible that a single song’s separate sections (verse, chorus, bridge, etc.) might accomplish this, but possibly not.

I don’t know that I’d vote to disqualify any entry that had only one “movement,” but I might, depending on what it does (and doesn’t) accomplish with that one movement. All other things being equal, I’d definitely score a multiple-movement entry higher than a one-movement entry.

In light of all this, here are some examples that I think would best serve entrants to consider:

“Paradise By the Dashboard Light” by Meat Loaf — It has multiple characters (in multiple time periods, even), they’re singing, getting a complete story across, in multiple movements. And it was written to be listened to as a recording. Except for the spoken-word baseball broadcast, there’s probably not a better example for you to consider.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” — Also a good example, for nearly all the same reasons as the Meat Loaf song, especially if you consider the song’s Wikipedia outline. (It’s almost a one-person opera, which is a possibility I’d personally like to have left open, since there are lots of one-person dramatic works, and I don’t see why it couldn’t have been possible here, but I can live with a two-character minimum.)

“Marvin at the Psychiatrist (A 3-Part Mini-Opera)” from the musical “March of the Falsettos,” and “Wire & Glass – Six Songs from a Mini-Opera” by The Who, from the album “Endless Wire” and the musical “The Boy Who Heard Music” — In both cases, it’s true they’re from larger works, but they were also both intended to stand somewhat on their own, and both self-describe as mini-operas.

Lost, Found: Finally

May 23, 2011
By

If You Don’t Have Something Nice To Say…

On May 23, 2010, Lost signed off with The End. Finally, the finale, after years of mystery. A few days later, one of my local libraries hosted a discussion. Someone there told of how she thought the last season’s Sideways world was real, the result of the series’ characters having successfully changed history by thwarting the Oceanic plane crash that began the series and changed their lives. Then it was my turn. After I shared my take on the final episode, this other person said she could not stay. She got up and left.

I hadn’t started watching the series until after the fourth season ended, catching up on the entire series-to-date in about a month. After that, I decided to blog episode by episode. With so much ground to cover once again and a fairly busy life, time wasn’t on my side, and I gave up on it indefinitely. Toward the end of the series, I wrote a few more posts and intended to write about the finale, in the service of at least getting to some of my bigger ideas.

Between the finale itself and various things show-runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse said over the years, in particular in a New York Times article run 10 days before the finale aired, I felt that most of the real substance of my take on the show was, well, substantiated. With so much else written about the show and the finale, in particular the great coverage by Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen, I felt that there wasn’t much to be said, or understood, that hadn’t already been taken care of. So why should I say anything at all? Plus, pressed for time from other things, I let some time slip by and grew to feel that it might be pointless for me to write anything.

Several weeks after the episode aired, a friend asked for my take. When I gave it, he felt my thoughts would be worth sharing, that there was no “too late” for a show that would probably be discussed for years. I didn’t get to it right away. Now it appears it was just as well that I waited for this anniversary, because since that first airing I’ve gained some additional support and perspective on my thoughts about the series and its finale, and from a very relevant source, which I’ll get to later. So now, finally, the finale post.

Heaven on Earth

Flashback, whooosh, to the library.

Someone is giving her reasons for thinking the Sideways world real, the plane crash timeline averted. She acknowledges that all are dead by the end of the Sideways story and poses that each characters’ moment of illumination is their moment of death. I don’t remember other details, only that there were holes in her reasoning. After pointing some of them out, I got to have a turn saying what I thought.

When I first posed my MacGuffin Theory nearly two years before the finale, I said that the truth about the island was not likely to ever be fully revealed and was in any case beside the point. Rather, as I said, “In the end, I think the point is to revel in the mystery, to participate in it, and thereby to learn to do the same for the mystery of our own lives… It’s a mystery that is answered somewhere along the way, by every individual who is inspired by the show to engage in the questions of their own lives and seek harmony.”

Now, having the seen the finale, I naturally think about it in this light. What I said at the library was along the following lines.

What good, I wondered, would the show possibly be doing anyone if it were to present a story about people who went back in time and found a way to stop undesired events from happening? What would that offer us? We can’t go back to right what we later perceive to be wrong turns in our lives. The series had all along been, in effect, about this very conundrum, grappling with how flawed characters could break from their past and find redemption. Surely, I felt, the answer the show would provide to this question would have to be consistent, rather than in conflict, with the truth that real people simply cannot go back. Anything else would render the show fundamentally useless beyond escapist entertainment. This seemed impossible for a show as rich as Lost.

Even before the finale aired, the writers said that the ending would be open to interpretation. Any number of things could be somewhat open. But Sideways world as a real and alternative history, when it ends the way it ends? Its various moments of illuminating remembrance as the characters’ respective moments of death? Locke and Jack touch after the surgery, Locke is illuminated but Jack is not. Can this mean that Locke is dead while Jack lives on? What in that situation would cause Locke to die, and how could a dead Locke still be there interacting with a still living Jack? Same goes for any character’s illumination and the others around them at the time.

Before the finale, I’d predicted that, rather than actually being sideways from the island timeline, the Sideways world was instead a followup to it. In some sense, I was right. Sideways world showed what happened to everyone after their deaths in the real world, including but not limited to all the events of the series’ main timeline. Is it Heaven? This seems entirely unlikely. The Sideways story is one of characters literally not having yet gone into the light, a light they can only even approach after coming to an important realization, so that they are “in the dark,” so to speak, even after their realization, and all the moreso beforehand. Sideways seems to be some kind of purgatory, a place where souls must stay until they are ready to move on. We will only even see some of the characters, not all, reach that point of readiness. But what is it that actually gets them ready to move on?

The Sideways world took the form of a sort of wishful thinking on the part of everyone, but a wishful thinking in which nobody was inclined to make terribly big wishes. The suggestion is clear. They hope beyond hope to erase the past because they think their lives will be so much better. The past, though, includes events prior to those that led to the Oceanic crash. That crash was never the sole cause of pain for any of these characters. In the absence of the crash, some things are a bit better for some characters, some things merely different. Life is not a grand paradise but the usual grab-bag of good and bad. Troubles remain, and characters must grope their way past those troubles to small victories.

Take Jack, for example. He still had a fairly poor relationship with his father, Christian. It led him to have a strained relationship with his own son David. The sins of the father (Christian) became the sins of the son (Jack), who himself was now the father. The old pattern was in danger of perpetuation. In the end, though, he found a way to get on a positive track. David pursues his own authenticity, even if he must do it in secret. When Jack learns the truth, he wants to encourage rather than stop David, and David realizes he need not keep things secret. Better than things went with Christian? Certainly. Still, some fairly modest wishful thinking when it comes down to it. But such modest good things are perhaps all any of us really need when it comes down to it.

The enlightenments led each character to realize the truth of their Sideways wishful thinking, to realize that it was only wishful thinking after all, that none of it had ever happened, that everything from the main timeline, every last bit of it, is what really happened, including their own death. In those moments of realization, they could finally acknowledge, I’m dead, and so be it. Death isn’t horror, it’s nothing to fear. Fearing it all along is what had me so messed up, what had me messing up others. I had some bad experiences long ago when I wasn’t ready to cope with them, and from then on I’d lived my life informed by those experiences, doing all I could to avoid ever having to remember the fear I felt when they were occurring, no matter how much pain I’d bring to myself and others as a result. Now I can face that it all happened, embracing the totality of my past, the good, the bad, the things I couldn’t help, and my own role in the things I could have helped but didn’t. I can finally be content and stop wishing that the past was different. The past is all there, it’s all real, and I can be at peace with it, even my own death. I don’t need the past to have turned out differently.

Those enlightenments could only come through connection with another, with someone who proved a fateful force for them in the “real world,” in their actual lives. These characters needed each other to get beyond who they thought they were, because they obviously were unable to do so on their own. Had they been, they would have done it already.

In the real timeline, then, all there was to do was take the present moment as a new opportunity to change gears and let go of whatever was preserving an undesirable status quo. That would seldom mean completely abandoning who one believed oneself to be. More likely, it would mean a new perspective, carrying certain things forward but in new ways to achieve new results.

This is just what Jack seems to have done. Fixing everything had always been based on some dysfunctional agenda he had, one that would never satisfy him. With the island, he had to completely let go of that agenda and give himself over to the island. The island that was far more supernatural than his Man of Science ever would have liked. The island that for a long time he wanted nothing more than to leave, only then to want nothing more than to get back, only then to question why he bothered. The island that clearly had its own agenda.

In the end, Jack did let go of his agenda, but he didn’t let go of his capacities. He applied his strengths toward a new agenda. What better is there to do than take the best of the past and carry it forward into the future, but a new future that isn’t burdened by the worst of the past? Jack may have “repeated the same pattern” by remaining a fixer, but he did it in a completely new way. He broke the Hypocratic oath by finishing off the Man in Black in order to contribute to a larger healing. He completed that larger healing through his culminating fixes, his climactic doctoring — rescuing the near-dead Desmond, and replacing the island’s stone plug just as if suturing an open wound. Soon after, having fulfilled his purpose and become the hero, the one who genuinely saved everyone in the way that counted most, he dies, and he does so with peace of mind.

But if Jack dies in the main timeline with such fulfillment, why in the Sideways world is his still conflicted, resistant to learning the truth and moving on? Well, it’s one thing to come to accept what is and what you don’t feel you could ever have changed. It’s another thing entirely to come to a similar realization even after having had the opportunity to change things. The Sideways world story is there for the audience, to reinforce the point about acceptance and embracing life in this absolutely crucial way. It tells us not only that it’s possible to accept things as they have already turned out but that there is no point in doing otherwise, that there is no point in wishing for things to have turned out differently. Yes, wish all you like, but if you want change, the only place it will come from is where you are. That is the only place you can move forward from. This is what Jack had to do in the wishful thinking Sideways world just the same as he had to in the main timeline.

Lindelof and Cuse no more propose redemption after death than they propose going back in time to alter the course of events. They don’t want us to think redemption is possible only by going back in time, as the characters hoped to do through their Jughead plan, or only in death, as the Sideways world was revealed to be in the end. What they propose is, in effect, Heaven on Earth, the possibility of a life lived without the burden of terrors past, even if those terrors actually happened. They propose that one cannot deny one’s past but that it is possible to keep it in the past, where it actually is, instead of dragging it continually into every new present moment. You can come to a point, as you live your life, where you can stop fearing death. Indeed you must, because only then can you actually live your life.

Truth in Fiction

I didn’t say all of this in exactly this way to that person at the library talk, but this is more or less what I said. And as soon as I did, she excused herself and left.

Was I judgmental, offensive? Was I self-righteous in poking holes in her reasoning and supporting my own stance? She seemed to think so. More likely, I imagine something else. It will at first sound judgmental, but I mean it in just the opposite way. I say this from a place of compassion. More likely, she herself had things in her own life that she wished she could have changed and was not yet ready to accept their unchangeability in order to move on from them.

I say this as someone who knows all too well how this can be true. I’ve worked hard for some time to face such things for myself, and who knows how much I may still have left to face for myself. It’s likely true of most of us and most everyone we know. Some people simply have a harder time than others facing such things, and some people simply have a harder time than others even acknowledging that there may be anything to face in the first place. Again, this itself was depicted in the show, with not all the characters capable of readying themselves for a Sideways world illumination.

These are not just issues for individuals, either, as I’ve come to understand far more deeply as a result of something that Lost itself led me to.

Months after the finale, I was watching the extras on the final season’s DVD set. One was called “A Hero’s Journey,” exploring how several of the characters played out the archetypal hero’s story, particularly as it has been described by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I’d been a Campbell fan but had only scratched the surface with his work years ago. This Lost featurette combined with a number of other things on my mind over these last years to inspire me to study Campbell more. I’ve read quite a lot of his work over the last several months.

One of Campbell’s key points is that mythology is of central value to people, providing symbols and metaphors that are supposed to guide people and societies spiritually and psychologically by putting us in touch with the insoluble mystery of existence itself. Since we are part of that existence, we ourselves are part of that mystery along with everything else. In this sense there is little distinction between ourselves and others, even non-human or non-living others, and in this sense there is little distinction between life and death. The great mystery of existence transcends all of it.

Campbell also continually discusses how much ill comes from failing to understand mythology’s purpose. Some people write myth off by equating it with lie and falsehood. Others concretize their myths, believing them to be historically or cosmologically true. In either case, people fail to recognize myth’s identity as metaphor and its purpose as pointing toward spiritual and psychological truths. In either case, people end up failing to connect with any experience of spiritual awe or psychological health. As a result, instead of abiding in our common humanity, those who misinterpret myth as either history or lie end up just fostering enmity, willing to dehumanize and even to kill and die for their “truths.”

And here I was arguing about the primacy of the meaning of Lost over the theories about the island, suggesting that people who spent so much time engaged in debating the “truth” of the series were actually missing the point. My MacGuffin theory was, all along, a mythological theory, the theory that Lost was intended to function as mythology, to point its viewers toward profound mysteries and truths that could make a difference in their lives, just as mythology has always intended to do. Instead, ironically, so many fans reveled in the “mysteries” of the series, but only as mysteries to be solved, puzzles to be completed, various solutions competing until one might prove itself to be “the one.” Just like so many religions, philosophies and ideologies have done throughout the history of civilization.

Why would they do so, missing out on the real mystery that the show tried to put them in touch with, the core that lies deep inside each and every one of them? Because that core is not all that is inside. Something happens to us, and we become afraid. The fear stands in the way between us, between our conscious minds, and that core. When those things happen to us, we cannot cope with that fear, so something yet else stands in the way, protecting our conscious minds from the fear. It was useful to protect us for a time, but the protection ends up outliving its usefulness. What was true is no longer true, but we hold onto it as if it were — a concretized myth. Then there is flaw, neurosis, dysfunction. The layers within recognize what is offered by something like Lost, the possibility of reconnecting, to something beyond the fear, to what the myth is actually pointing to. Those inner layers cannot give up their interest in such a thing. They keep us watching. But the protector continues to mediate, reinterpreting our interest for the conscious mind, deflecting it away from ourselves, from the core, making it about the entertainment, the puzzle.

When I picked up again talking about Lost toward the end of its run, I wondered if the show was going to disappoint me as other works of art had, promising something profound but then betraying itself. I don’t think it did. It boded well that Lindelof and Cuse decided to bring the show to an end on their terms, at a specific time, rather than let it go on indefinitely on the basis of ratings. When they ended it their way, it brought things to a mythologically satisfying close.

Unfortunately, even when artists get it right, it’s still up to audiences to get it at all. Obviously, all too often, audiences are fairly likely to miss the point. Just as all too many people in all corners of the world have, throughout history, failed to get the point of their own mythologies.

Maybe that person’s walking out on me at the library demoralized me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t bother to write about the finale in its immediate aftermath. Maybe what I had to say was worth saying after all, but maybe I didn’t like that such things all too often fall on deaf ears. So why bother saying anything? Here’s why. Because not saying anything definitely can’t accomplish a thing. Saying something at least has a chance, however small.

Quotes

I could talk more about any number of details from the finale in terms of analyzing the text of the story, but I just don’t think there’s much point. This would all just be the trees, and it’s the forest that’s important here. I think I’ve said enough about that myself, so I’d like to start to wrap this up by including some things that Lindelof and Cuse themselves said in the New York Times article I mentioned earlier, all pretty a propos to everything I’ve been saying here:

LINDELOF: If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. When the show is firing on all pistons, that’s the kind of storytelling that we’re doing.

I think we’ve always said that the characters of “Lost” are deeply flawed, but when you look at their flashback stories, they’re all victims. Kate was a victim before she killed her stepfather. Sawyer’s parents killed themselves as he was hiding under the bed. Jack’s dad was a drunk who berated him as a child. Sayid was manipulated by the American government into torturing somebody else. John Locke had his kidney stolen. This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I’m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I’m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.

CUSE: It’s far more about the character relationships that resonate. The thing is that people talk a lot about the mythology of “Lost,” but we probably spent 85 percent of our time in the writers’ room talking about the characters, and I think that’s why the show was a broad audience show as opposed to a genre show. While the mythology was important, first and foremost the show was about the characters. I think that a lot of people care much more about what’s going to happen to Kate. Is she going to end up with Jack, is she going to end up with Sawyer? That’s why we feel like a lot of shows that have tried to imitate “Lost” make the fundamental mistake of having the characters just focus on the mythology. If you watch certain shows like that, you’ll see all the characters are talking about is, “What’s that dinosaur in my bathtub?”

LINDELOF: The thing about that episode is it’s very simple storytelling, but very, very complicated storytelling at the same time. The simple part is that this episode is called “The Constant,” and the whole point of it is, is that there is somebody else out there that is your other half. And again, it plugged into, in this very sort of obvious way, this theme that we were discussing earlier, which is: Nobody can do it alone. Desmond was unhooked or lost, he was a castaway bopping around through time, and his only possible salvation was finding the woman that he loved and telling her so and saying, “I need you to rescue me because I’m lost.” This fundamentally tapped into every single theme of the show. You’re basically saying emotion trumps mythology.

Of course, what Lindelof means in that last sentence is that the transcendent connotation that myth as metaphor points to, myth as something fostering of spiritual and psychological growth, trumps concretized mythology, trumps the literal denotation that the myth seems to be about on the surface, which is of course not mythology at all.

Finally, to really put a bow on this, another quote, this time from the lyrics to a rather famous song. I can only hope that more and more of us wretches make an effort to save ourselves and others by finding a bit of Amazing Grace:

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Lost, Found: Last Tuesday

May 19, 2010
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Last night, the final new Tuesday episode aired. As much as it moved things forward and set up the finale, I don’t have much to say other than this:

  • I remain pretty convinced of the general direction I posed the show taking in last week’s post and the post from the week before.
  • For a show so much about history repeating itself, and usually to people’s detriment, the ending can only be satisfying if “the curse is broken” — i.e., if in the end nobody remains “trapped” on the island, whether as protector or Smoke-Monster-prisoner or otherwise. If anyone stays on the island at the end, it must be because they truly want to be there.
  • Perhaps the very fact of the finale taking place on a Sunday instead of a Tuesday supports my perspective. A change is taking place. The old patterns are coming to an end. Indeed, the series ends on a traditional day of rest — a day for as many characters as possible to find a resolution to their age-old conflicts.

Also, the four remaining lostaways — Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley — not only include, as I noted last week, one of the key conflicted pairs of the series, i.e., Jack vs. Sawyer. They are the very same four who were captured by the Others several seasons ago. And back then, Hurley was “set free” to carry a message to the remaining lostaways, leaving a love triangle captured. That love triangle has become more complicated since then, but there may be an interesting parallel between Jack/Sawyer/Kate and Jacob/Man-in-Black/”Mother.”

Jack and Jacob practically share a name and now they do have the island protector role in common.

The Man in Black has in common with Sawyer a stereotypical “bad guy” persona that is both caused by and tempered for the audience by past traumatic events. There is further the apparent namelessness of the Man in Black paralleling Sawyer’s having over time adopted many different names through his work as a con man.

Kate and the “Mother” share the killing of another inspired by some notion of higher good, and, of course, they find themselves the apex of a strange triangle relationship with the two conflicted males they most deeply relate to.

With Jack having already taken on the protector role and this larger set of parallels between these triangles of characters, I can’t help but wonder just how much else may repeat itself. I’d already suggested last week the possibility of Sawyer’s future as a Smoke Monster. Could Kate’s life be in danger, too?

With the importance of the old cycles becoming broken, I believe we will be in for either another repetition of “curses” followed by a breaking of the curse, or, perhaps preferable, a near-repetition of past pattern, averted in favor of something new to break the pattern without the need for a further repetition.

We shall see.

Lost, Found: Light at the End of the Tunnel

May 12, 2010
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Good and Evil and In Between

The third from the last episode, and we start to see, literally and figuratively, a light at the end of the tunnel. And I believe more than ever in what I’ve said about Lost providing a complicated, atypical look at “good” vs. “evil.”

A Woman kills the twins’ Mother, apologizing to her right before smashing her face. She raises the kids as her own and lies to them about their origins, telling them they are from the island, that there is no place else in the world, that there are no other people in the world. Later, she’ll smash her “son’s” head with an apology as well, to prevent him from leaving the island, even though she needs only one successor to protect the island. She then kills all of the people in the Man in Black’s settlement after learning of their plans to leave the island.

The Man in Black sees his dead Mother — sees a truth Jacob cannot. He hears what she has to say and wants to honor it. If the other people on the island are his people, he wants to be with them instead of the Woman who killed his mother and lied to him all along. If the island is not his home, he doesn’t want to stay, he wants to find a way to leave. When the Woman subverts his goal, he kills her — an act that doesn’t really help him, but one that is understandable as something other than unadulterated evil.

As for Jacob, he smashes his brother’s face in when his brother wants to go live with the other people (the “Others,” in contrast to the Woman, even though later there will be “Others” serving Jacob himself). Instead of facing the truth, he chooses to stay with the Woman and her lies. When the Woman wants to pass the torch onto him and have him replace her as protector of the island, he does not want the job. He seems insecure and frightened. When he accepts, she says they are now the same — he is now the same as the Woman who has done all the not-so-nice things she has done. Later, when the Man in Black has killed the Woman, Jacob once again smashes his brother’s face in, and punishes him by sending him into the light in the tunnel, the place the Woman described as “Life, death, rebirth. It’s the source, the heart of the island,” right before telling him to never go down there, since a fate worse than death awaits. The fate worse than death is what Jacob wishes upon his brother.

Who is good and who is evil here? It would be too strong to say that the Woman and Jacob are “really” evil and the Man in Black really “good,” but it is equally misguided to pose it the other way around.

The Man in Black merely wants to face the truth about himself and find his way home. The Woman and Jacob are willing to lie, hurt, even kill, all in the service of a story the Woman tells about the source of the island, despite Jacob (and we, the audience) having no real idea whether the story has credence, or how she knows what she says she knows.

It seems that all these characters have elements of what we think of as “good” and of what we think of as “evil.” In other words, they are people, and the fact that they have conflicts merely means they haven’t figured out how to get what they all want collaboratively.

Procreation, Longevity and Power

The episode begins with a birth, of twins. We know that there are issues on the island with fertility, with pregnant women losing their babies. Claire was able to give birth on the island — because of the Others’ medicine, and/or because she was far enough along when she arrived. The twins’ Mother obviously received no such medicine, so her giving birth on the island can only be the result of either the fertility issue not having begun yet or of her having been far enough along.

In any case, consider that the island is known simultaneously as a place where fertility is problematic and where immortality is possible to some extent. Jacob and the Man in Black seem to live forever, even though they may have weaknesses that can cause their death. Richard receives the gift of immortality from Jacob. Even Locke’s having his paralysis cured seems to be of a piece with these phenomena. The island seems to be something of a Fountain of Youth, a place where health, vigor and longevity can be cultivated.

In the mid-1990s, I came up with an idea for a screenplay about Ponce de Leon and his quest for the Fountain of Youth. Some scientists in the modern day conducting experiments in the Bermuda Triangle would somehow discover that their actions have caused an old ship to appear, and on that ship would be Ponce de Leon. He would be grateful for having been freed from the triangle so he could resume his quest for the Fountain of Youth in Florida. Eventually, the story would make clear that the Bermuda Triangle was itself the Fountain of Youth, and that the only way to take advantage of it would be to relegate oneself to it’s parallel-universe-like existence in the middle of the ocean, a place where “real life” simply cannot be lived, since “real life” includes death.

On Lost, the island is, in addition to having these properties of longevity and health, also a place where fertility is an issue. Just as in the story I’d come up with years ago, perhaps wishing to live forever is an ultimately selfish thing that can only be done in a place cut off from the reality of the rest of the world, a place where the normal cycles of life, of generations, cease. The island’s troubles with procreation may be a necessary condition of the presence of longevity/immortality. To be cut off on the island and living forever, one can easily imagine people going mad and wanting to leave, to get back to “life” as it really is. In some sense, the island’s brand of immortality could be tantamount to death itself, a denial of life as it is.

Indeed, what to make of the Woman thanking the Man in Black as her final words, despite him having just killed her? Could she have felt trapped in a too-long life on the island herself? Is this why she killed the Mother and took the babies, grooming them to succeed her — simply to find her own escape? Perhaps she came to know that apparent immortality is more than it’s cracked up to be, and perhaps she needed a loophole to have herself killed, just as the Man in Black sought a loophole, getting someone else to kill Jacob on his behalf. Collateral damage may be necessary to escape the immortality of the island.

In contrast, what do we know of life as it really is, off the island? From most characters’ backstories, we know that they’ve got issues. Problems they struggle with. Violence and heartache and confusion and tragedy. And also good things, too. It’s a mixed bag — just as the Woman, Jacob and the Man in Black appear to be. And, crucially, this is true not only in the original timeline but also in Sideways world. Whatever created Sideways world, it did not “make everything better” in any simplistic sense, as the lostaways had hoped would happen as a result of blowing up Jughead.

Perhaps this all adds up to the very simple message that life must be lived, with its ups and downs, for better and for worse, including the fact of its ending in death, and that any attempt to do otherwise is bound to lead to undesired results.

This is not a lesson learned only through experiences with the island — it is seen even in characters’ regular lives separate from their island experiences. Christian drives his son too hard with expectation. Jack is a compulsive fixer. Anthony Cooper conned people to ensure his own “ups.” Kate killed for the sake of her and her mom’s “ups.” Jin is willing to obey the whims of Mr. Paik for a shot at a decent life. The list could go on and on. At least so far in the story, essentially everyone has failed to find redemption, and this failure appears to be to the very extent that they fail to confront the things deep in their past that have saddled them with a too-strong desire to strive for ups and a too-weak ability to accept life’s downs. If only they could embrace both sides — the ups and downs, the “good” and the “evil” — and let go of the striving, the attachment to only the pleasant at the expense of the unpleasant, then maybe they’d actually get more of what they want.

Long ago, when first writing here about Lost, I talked about the show as a critique of civilization. Civilization is, most basically, a social structure in which power is unevenly distributed, with some having much and most having little. Now consider the island and the light hiding beneath/inside it. It is a place where a special kind of power has been consolidated, with much of the rest of the world lacking it. Originally I’d thought the island to stand in distinction to civilization. While in some ways it clearly does, in its own way it also now seems to just be one more place where the same old things play out.

In civilization off the island — and in various civilization-inspired social structures on the island — the unequal distribution of power leaves many people wanting, searching, striving to find more “ups” to make up for their experience of too many “downs,” while also giving a few people more “ups” than they deserve and leaving them exceedingly protective of their status against the masses who aren’t so lucky.

On the island, the light is a power that is warned against, to be left alone. Somehow on the island, extreme longevity — a surfeit of “ups” — is made possible, surely through something having to do with that light. And yet direct contact with the light can release a Smoke Monster — the inevitable extremity of “downs” that must go hand in hand with ever bigger “ups.” That, too, is true of civilization, where psychological, social and ecological ills increase right alongside — and often because of — the so-called “advances” of civilization.

Jacob described the island to Richard as the cork which keeps evil from being released out into the world. But we already see plenty of evil in the world, and we are starting to get enough information to doubt just how unassailably good and right Jacob may be. Further, if the island needed protection prior to the Man in Black becoming the Smoke Monster, then the Smoke Monster can’t be the evil being corked up.

Was there another monster, which gave the Woman her knowledge of what happens when someone goes into the light? Perhaps it was the Woman herself. Trapped by accident on the island, she stumbles upon the light cave. Drawn in by its beauty, she finds her fate worse than death: she is granted immortality and turned into a Smoke Monster. Unlike the Man in Black, she has no desire to go home — that is not something that must go along with being a Smoke Monster. She perhaps understands the nature of the island’s power and realizes that, rather than it needing protection from people, people may need protection from the island. She resolves to stay, but time grows long, and she wants to be freed from the endless prison of her life. Perhaps this explains why she steals the babies, how she can grant them their own near-immortality, and why she needs a loophole and thanks the Man in Black for killing her. That we never see her turn into a Smoke Monster in last night’s episode may be incidental, since we know the Man in Black only takes that form in particular circumstances. But even if she can grant immortality without Smoke-Monsterhood, wouldn’t she just be setting others up for the same too-long-life? Yes — hence the need for Jacob to find a successor — and the Man in Black’s own long-held frustrations.

Is there some way in which that light itself could somehow be evil as opposed to good, the evil needing to be corked up? Of course, we’ve witnessed two “disasters” on the island, under the hatch at two separate times, where massive explosions caused that Dharma station’s pocket of energy to be released — and in neither case was the world destroyed, as some said it would be in those circumstances. If the light is life and death and rebirth, then it surely must be good and evil wrapped together — pure power, not yet applied. Perhaps, then, rather than seeing the island’s light energy as either something to exploit — as perhaps Widmore and the Dharma Initiative might — or as something to protect — as the Woman and Jacob would — it should instead be understood as something to be released, once and for all, and thereby dissipated. Power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely — therefore enormous sources of power in some sense “should” be dissipated, to reduce the potential for corruption and therefore to bring more balance to the world.

Releasing the island’s energy, then, could be what causes the island to end up at the bottom of the ocean, neutralized, as we saw at the beginning of the final season. Metaphorically, it would show the way for people elsewhere, out in the “real” world, in whatever timeline, to lead better lives. Release power, the need to control. Let power be distributed to all rather than bottled up in small pockets where it can become volatile, corruptible, dangerous. Accept that we all live and we all will die — no immortality for us. Accept that we must do well by future generations — fertility for us, backed up with good parenting, unlike what we’ve seen so often throughout the series and especially in this episode by the Woman. Raise our kids so that they will know from the start that they should do their best but within the context of accepting both good and bad in their lives. Struggle to free ourselves from the resistance we’ve come to have about this very acceptance, so that we will be able to do all these things for ourselves, our kids and others, instead of striving for more and more control and power. Through all this, through this balance, there can be redemption — for the characters in the show, and for anyone who chooses this path.

The End of the Tunnel

I’ve so far avoided making any concrete predictions about the plot. So far, mostly abstract analysis and suggestions about the basic shape of things to come — about the show becoming much more nuanced in its depiction of good and evil and vaguely what a resolution of that dichotomy may look like as opposed to one side simply winning somehow. With last night’s episode having seemed to corroborate my perspective to some extent, and with so little of the series left, this may be a good time to pose some more concrete possibilities.

With Jacob having been killed, the conflict between “good” and “evil” seems difficult to resolve. With his project of finding a successor, though, that becomes more viable. Will a lostaway step in and duel with the Smoke Monster? In light of the nuanced handling of good and evil, this seems doubtful, or at least not genuinely climactic. Perhaps other oppositions will come into play. Most notable seem to be Jack’s man of science vs. Locke’s man of faith, and Jack’s “selfless leader” vs. Sawyer’s “island unto himself.” The former, though, has shown Locke’s faith to have made him a sucker, leading to his death and the ascension of UnLocke, while Jack has himself seemed to give up some of his compulsion while embracing the less “scientific” truths of the island — not quite a resolution, but certainly that conflict is not what it was. As for Jack vs. Sawyer, likewise, Jack spent a fair amount of time very concerned about himself getting off the island, and it only led to the massive guilt he experienced during the flash-forwards, while Sawyer did a lot of growing up during that same time. Jack and Sawyer, though, do remain among the few remaining lostaways/candidates.

In the end, could two lostaways, Jack and Sawyer or otherwise, end up replacing both Jacob and the Man in Black? Perhaps on some level this could happen willingly, mutually, without real conflict, both replacements somehow believing in a need to serve those roles and stay on the island. Perhaps there would not be willingness, no more than Jacob and the Man in Black had themselves shown. However it goes, the show has proved time and again what it’s willing to do to characters we care about — kill them, maim them, torture them. And we have seen that the Smoke Monster we’ve come to know and hate was, as UnLocke had said, once just a man, and not only that but a man who just wanted to be loved and find his way home. Don’t put it past the show’s creators to turn someone we really like into another Smoke Monster.

Given that the island ends up on the ocean floor at some point, I’d guess we’re in for a followup to Jack’s Jughead plan, something to bring closure to “getting a fresh start.” The series, so much about free will vs. determinism, so much about our inability to change the past, seems poised to affirm our ability to affect our future, to change. Juliet had said that the Jughead plan worked — and we have seen the Sideways world which may prove that it did. But we have obviously not seen enough to know the real relationship between the original timeline and Sideways world. The Sideways experiences of Desmond, Charlie, Hurley and Libby suggest it is not mere conjecture, a storytelling “what if,” but something real. Perhaps, and especially if there has been any taking over the roles of protector and Smoke Monster, someone may deliberately cause the destruction of the island. Once and for all, its energy could be released, bringing to an end the dichotomy of protector vs. Smoke Monster, leaving the original timeline behind to somehow cause the Sideways timeline.

The slight hints we have in the Sideways world timeline that things are maybe working out a little bit better for people may be all we get. Jack having a son and making an effort. Kate seeming to be on her way to another chance with a more understanding law enforcement officer holding her custody. Hurley’s success with money and with Libby. Claire and Jack finding family in each other. Locke getting Helen and accepting his limitations. Ben having sacrificed an administrative career for the sake of the success of the “daughter” he mistreated in the original timeline. Jin and Sun finding their way together. And so on. Here in the Sideways world, life is still a mixed bag, full of ups and downs. Sideways world underscores how this cannot be avoided. Accepting this leads not to some trite, pat, happily-after-ever good-triumphs-over-evil ending but, instead, to small, one day at a time improvements. Therein would lie the hope that, whatever else may not be working out in Sideways world, change may be possible. The glimpses the Sideways characters are getting of the original timeline may end up being no more than a reason for them to appreciate what they now have, the proof that any path would be a mixed bag and that there is far more a point in just doing one’s best rather than in always wondering, with regret, “what if.”

Obviously these aren’t totally concrete, specific predictions. Obviously much remains to be addressed — the origins of the temple, statue and lighthouse; the role of Desmond’s parallel-worlds mission; countless other things, many of which are sure never to be fully resolved because they just aren’t core to the main throughline of the story. In any case, these are least some suggestive notions about what may lie ahead.

Lost, Found: That Sinking Feeling

May 5, 2010
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Yes, I haven’t written about Lost for ages. Yes, I’ve procrastinated across the better part of the entire series in what was intended to be episode by episode commentary. Yes, this isn’t an episode-specific commentary. Yes, I realize nobody probably even reads this or cares much about my take on the show. But here are a few words, summing up why I thought I might have had an original take, why it may have been genuinely important if I was right, how the way things are heading toward an end may seem to go against the perspective I’d had in mind, how the show can’t really be ultimately satisfying except as pure entertainment if I’m wrong — and how it still may be possible that my take my be correct.

At the end of last night’s episode, The Candidate, in the preview for next week’s episode, we saw clips from earlier in the series. Locke explaining backgammon as a battle between black and white. Jacob (in white) and the Man in Black on the beach, the latter declaring how badly he wanted to see the former dead. And if that weren’t enough, there was even a title card in the preview, declaring a battle between Good and Evil in white letters on a black background. And today, The Candidate was described by Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff “Doc” Jensen as providing definitive clarity about a key issue. He says there “can no longer be any doubt about this: The Locke-ness Monster is pure evil.” It certainly seems that way, but in this show, things are often not what they seem. And here’s why I think the same may be true here.

Throughout its run, Lost has transcended the simplicity of black/white, of good/evil. The entire history of the show is filled with nuance, confusion, choices. Even though some characters may seem to be more at the extremes, more obviously “good” or “bad,” it’s hard to say of practically any character that they have been all good or all evil. If the show has seemed to be about anything, it’s the quest for redemption, with practically every character living in the gray areas, having their own past demons, their own transgressions, their own mistakes. All seek to somehow find a way to be free of those things and move into a new phase of life. And yet many of those past “evils” were wrapped up with “good” — Jack’s compulsion to fix and heal, Kate’s wanting to protect her mother, the list goes on and on. We simply cannot say that the characters’ redemption is about leaving evil behind to find good. The matter is always far more complex and real than that.

And so we’re supposed to believe that the Man in Black is just plain evil, and he will unleash terror on the world, and Jacob is just plain good, and he and his successor must somehow manage to keep evil all bottled up on the island, away from the world? When the world is already as filled with illness and damage as it is — evident in the very backstories of each of the characters, above and beyond our own everyday knowledge of the world — how can we possibly buy such a simplistic scenario?

Even if the Man in Black is a psychopath/sociopath, symbolically in the story, that’s just an extreme of immature selfishness. Yet there is in some sense just about as much immaturity in believing that the only thing to do in response to selfishness is to keep it bottled up. Children are naturally narcissistic, and they can grow up to become otherwise. Not when parents let kids run wild, nor when parents squash their impulses — those approaches just ensure that they “grow up” to stay as childish and selfish as they ever were, in one way or other, with demons they’ll have to wrestle with from that point forward, seeking redemption even if they don’t realize it, and yet not knowing how to find it. Kids become otherwise, they actually become mature, when parents help give those kids what they need so that they can get through the naturally more selfish early years and learn to become whole people who know how to balance their own needs with those of others. Selfishness indulged, properly and at the right time, allows a transcendence of selfishness. Nothing else can — especially not forcing selflessness and “maturity” upon someone not ready for those things.

The ambiguity of good/bad, indeed, has been one of the key themes of the show all along. It is there in the ways we’ve learned about each character. In the ways each character has interacted with those around them. In the ways those characters have seen how their choices didn’t always turn out to be wise. In the ways those characters have learned and changed. In the different and changing feelings characters had about being on — or off — the island. And, crucially, in the different feelings and life experiences the characters have in Sideways world as compared to the original timeline.

Significantly, it is also there in the nature of, and relationships different characters have with, “The Others.” The Others claim to be with Jacob, and so are opposed to the Man in Black. Yet Widmore seems opposed to both. Even without figuring in the lostaways, there is clearly a triangle here — and therefore a refutation of the simplistic division of good vs. evil. The lostaways find themselves at odds with all parts of this triangle at various times, though the only part of it they seriously entertain destroying is the weakest. Not the supernaturally powerful Man in Black, nor the financially powerful corporate titan Widmore, but the people who run about the island in rags and barefeet. And those very “others” are the ones willing to share the island, while almost everyone else at one point or other — not only Widmore and the Man in Black, but the Dharma Initiative and even the lostaways themselves — wished the others gone, banished, exterminated.

Who is the better or worse here, the good and the bad? Wouldn’t those who want to pursue harmony and co-existence deserve to be called good in comparison to those who would rather have the island world to themselves? Isn’t this the very difference just mentioned, between kids who grow up self-absorbed as opposed to those who truly grow up and know how to seek balance and harmony? Indeed, more than once we hear some “other” who seems suspect declare, “We’re the good guys.” Who are we to believe?

The inclination to extermination is just the extreme of selfishness, the inevitable conclusion of selfishness. And it is itself entangled with the very reasons certain groups define themselves in contrast to “others.” Defining people as “others” (as the lostaways do), as “hostiles” (as the Dharma Initiative do), as enemy, is a sign of dichotomous thinking. Self vs. other, us vs. them. “We” are always fully human, while “they” are always less so. We are subject, they are object, and they deserve less than us, perhaps even death. It doesn’t matter if they die, they aren’t us, they aren’t people, we owe them nothing. Perhaps we even feel they need to die, or at least to have less, in order for us to be who we are. It is, in terms of game theory, competitive, win-lose thinking — for us to win, they must lose, and vice versa. Again, narcissism is normal in early stages of human development, and even for mature people, this kind of thinking can have its place. But as a general approach to living in the world, it is wanting — evident from the strife we see on all levels through our own world, obsessed as it is with this kind of thinking.

From the start, though, the series has posed that only those who live together will not die alone. It has posed the opposite of dichotomous thinking. It has posed the cooperative, the win-win. This is the maturity toward which all the characters struggle. Some resist it consciously, others seek it actively, but seldom is anyone successful at reaching it or staying with it. Without this thinking, everyone resorts to seeing themselves as good and the other bad. Only with this thinking, only with an attempt to find harmony, can good and bad be transcended, and can we embrace the fact that things aren’t as black and white as we might have thought. This is the redemption the characters seek.

And yet there’s UnLocke, apparently having hatched a plan to have the lostaways collectively off themselves so he can leave the island — not with them as he claimed, not giving them their heart’s desire as he promised, but obviously with some other outcome. The destruction of the world, as Jacob and Richard suggest? Not clear. But what is clear is that he was lying to them about his plan to get off the island and has certainly proved to be something other than the beneficent entity he tried to make them believe he was.

Is the show becoming simplistic all of a sudden, and have I been wrong all along? This has happened to me before, thinking a piece of entertainment might be capable of showing the way toward a real understanding of harmony, beyond the pat contrivances of good and evil. But they somehow seem to betray themselves. Star Wars. Titanic. The Candidate, with the obvious heartbreak of the death of the Kwons and the back-from-the-dark-side Sayid, and the revelation of the nefarious plan of UnLocke, all presented through the sunken submarine, has given me a bit of that sinking feeling again.

However, I still believe there is much evidence on “my” side, and so I continue to hold out hope that something better, something more interesting, is in store for the series’ final hours. Crucially, we haven’t yet been given any idea what the show, the characters, actually mean by the terms “good” and “evil.” From the simplistic us vs. them frame, from a standpoint of win-lose, good and evil become immature and completely relativistic labels, where what’s good for us is evil for them, and vice versa. But growing up our notions and seeing our way to win-win, we don’t have to discard these opposites entirely. We can come to think of them in new way.

On one level, what’s “evil” is dualistic, oppositional thinking itself, and what’s “good” is holistic thinking, thinking that acknowledges the variety of our experience and attempts as much as possible to accommodate as many as possible, thinking that even allows for competitive, win-lose thinking when it’s warranted. From this standpoint, white and black stand together on the evil side, with a rainbow opposing them.

On another level, good and evil can simply be the pleasant and unpleasant things that happen to us, the desired and the undesired, the ups and the down, in which case it’s important to embrace them all as normal aspects of life. It is trying to only have the good in this sense, failing to embrace the bad, that often leads to there being more bad and less good. On the other hand, accepting them both for the opportunities they provide is precisely what allows us to create a bit more good all the time. Here, in some sense, white and black and all else stand together, worthy of embrace, with nothing left as truly evil — the only real evil is denying part of our experience, trying to separate one or more colors from the rest.

Both of these perspectives stand in contrast to a totalitarian view of good and bad as enemies which must duke it out until only one color, white or black, can triumph. And so it may turn out that the Man in Black is evil after all, as Doc Jensen suggests, but that may turn out to mean something different from what anyone expects.

This is where I believed the show was pointing. It seemed a sophisticated deconstruction of our typical notions of good and evil, and it therefore seemed to be heading to a surprising ending, one that might even be jarring or disturbing for those who may themselves be too wrapped up in dichotomous thinking. Such a conclusion could only lead the nuances from earlier in the series toward an unexpected, far-from-trite resolution. And that resolution would have the potential to have a positive impact on the many who watch the show. It would have the potential to actually transform.

It’s not over ’til it’s over. It’s still possible that the show could hand us this very kind of conclusion, a mature and transformative one. Even still, it seems somewhat likely to me. After all, with the story plotted out so far ahead of time and kept such a secret, with so much mystery and subtlety along the way, and with the show’s creators sticking to their guns to end the show both when and how they wanted, completely according to their terms, and repeatedly stating that they have no idea just how satisfied audiences will be, does it seem possible or reasonable that the grand finale could involve a cliche like white beats black? Given the amount of evil clearly already in the world even with the Man in Black already bottled up on the island, how could keeping him there be a satisfying triumph of good over evil?

If a simplistic ending is what ends up happening, though, then Lost will find a spot on the crowded list of entertainments that I’ve enjoyed and will always hold a fondness for but which nevertheless disappointed in the end because they failed to achieve the greater promise I saw in them. If that happens, then I suppose I’ll be pretty glad I didn’t bother spending all that time writing an episode by episode commentary after all. We shall see.

Lost, Found: Raised By Another

October 2, 2008
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Claire dreams of her baby’s disappearance. In the dream, Locke says, “It was your respnsibility but you gave him away, Claire. Everyone pays the price now.” She goes through the crib, only to get blood on her hands. This episode will soon tell us that she wanted to put the baby up for adoption. Is the message that there is blood on the hands of anyone who doesn’t effectively nurture their children, and that such parenting has a broad impact, far beyond just the child?

Charlie overlty offers to be Clarie’s friend, noting how difficult the island experience must be for her, especially since she’s pregnant. If she needs someone to talk to, he’s here. Is he hitting on her, or trying to make a genuine connection, or both? It seems to be the first time that someone on the island is so overly offering to establish a profound connection — and yet this directness itself seems a barrier given that such connections usually best occur organically.

Flashback: A psychic sees something in Claire and refuses to do the reading, sending her away. How certain is prediction, and how does it relate to the series’ theme of not being able to change the past yet staying open to changing the future?

Claire wakes in fight, screaming: “He was tring to hurt my baby!” Much later on we’ll find out about the vaccine and the disease that kills the island’s pregnant women. In fear, not knowing what’s going on, Claire’s assumptions get the best of her here. And yet, what else could she think? When those trying to help don’t make their intentions clear, is it so unreasonable to fear them?

In response to Claire’s attack, Hurley decides to take a census, hoping that if they start “laying down the law” that perhaps people will think twice about such offenses. Is he reproducing civilization here, or just attempting to truly get know his community?

Charlie says he’ll be there all night to protect Claire. But she then flashes back to Thomas, very concerned about their situation, how there are always plans and responsibilities, and worried that it will be even worse when the baby comes. She says, “You can’t just change your mind,” but he leaves her. Thomas wasn’t there for her after he’d promised he would be — can she believe Charlie will be?

Jack is concerned that Claire’s experience was a nightmare. Charlie gets very defensive, “It’s not all in her head.” Soon after, Claire is offended at the same suggestion from Jack: “You think I’m making this up?” She is so put off she leaves the valley camp. The assumption is that if it’s in your head, it doesn’t matter. More to the point would be the fact that, if it’s in your head as opposed to a threat from outside, it certainly matters but must be handled quite differently. Jack doesn’t say it doesn’t matter, but neither do his sedatives offer a way of handling things effectively beyond the short-term — so often the case with the medical model.

Flashback again to the psychic. He seems in pain, horror. “This is important… It is crucial that you yourself raise this child… This child parented by anyone, anyone other than you… Danger surrounds this baby. Your nature, your spirit, your goodness must be an influence… There is no happy life, not for this child, not without you. You mustn’t allow another to raise your baby.” In response, Claire becomes very agitated, thanks him for his time and leaves. She is in denial about this. Is it a very special circumstance this particular person is in denial about, or is this about the responsibility of parenting in general? How many parents “run away” from the prospect of getting in touch with their true selves in order to provide unconditional nurture to their children?

To Hurley’s census-taking, Boone says, “Maybe we’re just not cool with you setting up your own little Patriot Act.” Yet moments later, directly seeking the manifest from Sawyer, he prompts Sawyer to say, “You sure know how to butter a man up, Stay Puft.” Hurley responds: “It’s a gift.” They both seem to be joking, and yet Hurley was effective in getting what he wanted without Sawyer’s usual negotiations. Hurley does seem to have some talent for communication, connection, cooperation — all of which suggest that the census is a bit more innocent than Boone’s accusation suggests.

When Claire experiences severe pains, Charlie runs to get Jack but finds Ethan first and tells Ethan to get Jack. Charlie comes back to Claire, who complains of the pain. With the Ethan connection, we can’t help but imagine, in hindsight, if she is, indeed, going through the island’s pregnancy-related disease.

Flashback: She’s puzzled at the psychic’s suggestion of giving the baby to a couple in Los Angeles when all he’s done is warn her against having anyone else raise the baby. He says, “This is what must happen… It has to be this flight.” Claire believes he was full of it, but Charlie helps her see that perhaps he was not: “All he wanted was that no-one else raise your baby. Maybe he knew.” That is, maybe he foresaw the plane crash, knew he couldn’t tell her about it, yet knew he had to ensure she got on the plane. If it was foreseen, though, did he have to try so hard? Would she have ended up on the plane without his involvement? When even the psychic felt the need to intervene, the suggestion is that the future is malleable. It’s as if he saw not one future but possible futures and became proactive in generating the preferred outcome.

Charlie reassures Claire, “I told you I’d take care of you… I won’t let anything happen to you.” But his promises will go unkept . Should he make such claims just to make her feel better in the moment?

Sayid comes back to the caves. He reports that he found the woman on the island, that “We’re not alone.” Soon after, Hurley informs Jack of a problem: one person in the group doesn’t appear on the manifest. He wasn’t on the plane with them. We now know the survivors are even less alone — and that Rousseau may not be as crazy as she seemed.

Ethan shows up with Claire and Charlie. “Ethan, where’s Jack?” But they just stare at each other. Ethan has not gone to get Jack. He was not on the plane, he was on the island before them, and he has some other purpose here. We certainly are meant to think his purpose sinister. Is it? Can we find the gray area where the survivors’ feelings of threat are understandable, yet without completely demonizing Ethan and the Others? Not for now.

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Lost, Found: Solitary

September 22, 2008
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The survivors can travel with each other, they can bond with others, and they can do so all the more effectively through and after their journeys, but each individual journey is a solitary one.

Sayid finds the cable to the ocean. What is it? A first thought might be some connection to the outside world, reasonable considering the evidence of both human presence and sufficiently contemporary technology on the island. Later, we’ll find out it’s something a little more insular to the island, more appropriate given what we’ve already learned about the island not “wanting” to be seen.

Hurley is sensitive to everyone being tense. He wishes there was something to do. Jack says they’re staying alive, and keeping everyone alive is his main concern. He’s playing into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, noting the fundamental importance of physical needs. But when is it “ok” to move up the pyramid, to move on and go for something beyond mere physical survival? Coming from a civilization so generally bereft of real but intangible satisfactions, it’s easy to understand why the survivors might have an exaggerated focus on physical survival.

Sayid is tortured by his captor. Payback for his torture of Sawyer? Flashback to him torturing someone else — the current torture seems payback for far more than Sawyer.

Walt asks Locke to take him hunting, Michael interrupts, saying it’s not going to happen. Michael is not ready for Walt to follow his own path, even refusing to let Walt be accompanied by someone who seems far more capable of handling danger than Michael himself. Does Michael have an inferiority complex with respect to Locke, or just the usual authoritarian leanings he’s already shown as a parent?

Sayid sees his captor’s name on a jacket — Rousseau, the same name as the philosopher famous for the concept of the noble savage. Is his captor noble? Is she savage? Neither? She refers to “You and the others like you.” It is the series’ first reference to “the others.” The otherness she imagines is bound up with the fear she feels for them. She, though, is mistaken, since Sayid is not one of “the others” she means. She moments later learns his name from the envelope she finds in his bag. There is significance in how they’ve learned each other’s names: by observing what is in front of each of them, outside of themselves, Sayid and Rousseau can learn more about each other than they can by starting with the assumptions and fears they hold inside. They learn names, and become people in each other’s eyes, real people, not dehumanized “others.”

In flashback, Nadia tells Sayid, “You always were older than your years.” Usually considered a compliment. But consider parentification, i.e., when young people assume adult roles before they are developmentally ready. This leads to unhealthy development, and in many ways prevents full development and maturation — the role is taken on without actually being an adult about it, and development can get stuck. Should anyone want to be older than their years? Shouldn’t everyone want to feel and act however many years they actually are? Is it possible that the very fact that people may feel older or younger than they are, may wish they were younger or older, is itself an indicator of immaturity?

Rousseau: “Tell me more about Nadia.” Sayid: “Alex. Who is he?” They each want to learn more, about each other, through knowledge of people important in their lives, paralleling their learning of each other’s names.

One moment, Rousseau is shouting, “Lies.” The next, “I’m so sorry” about Nadia being dead. Her emotional state is incredibly unstable. Is this what the island does to people who’ve been there some time? If we believe there is something meaningful to people’s journeys on the island, then we have to believe that Rousseau, full of fear of “the others” and so unstable even after all this time, has egregiously failed to understand the nature of her own presence on the island. Anyone who goes to her for information and understanding may possibly be misled — and to the extent that they become misled by her, we’ll need to question their own judgment, since they might be the kind of people who may also fail to understand their own life on the island.

When shown Hurley’s golf course, Michael says, “All the stuff we’ve got to deal with, this is what you’ve been wasting your time on?” Hurley: “If we’re stuck here, then just surviving is not gonna cut it…. Fun. Otherwise we’re gonna go crazy waiting for the next bad thing to happen.” Michael, not surprising given his parenting, immediately reacts like Jack, concerned about safety, but Hurley recognizes that there is more to life. Indeed, Hurley recognizes what so many others fail to: that they have been surviving, that there is such a thing as having physical needs sufficiently met, and that this is exactly when it’s not only desirable but crucial to expand one’s life experience into other kinds of satisfaction. Perhaps there is an indication here of some key ability of Hurley’s, the thing he can most contribute to the group. Indeed, it seems truly significant that this leap be made by “the fat guy,” someone who we might imagine would be the most focused on physical needs. The fact that he, of all people, is so motivated to transcend physical needs indicates that the focus others have on these needs may truly be excessive.

Sayid offers to fix Rousseau’s music box, she becomes untrusting, drugs him. We soon discover it was a sedative: “It was the only safe way for me to move you.” She wonders why he’d offer to fix it after all she’s done to hurt him. He will still do it, just wants to know her first name — it is Danielle. How did she come to be on the island? Another crash — a ship. She believes “the others” were the “carriers.” Of what? A disease? Is that what “killed them all”? She tells of whispers in the jungle. Rousseau: “You think I’m insane.” Sayid: “I think you’ve been alone for too long.” Even if she is right about the whispers, the disease, she is still the kind of person who will drug someone to keep herself safe, the kind of person who doesn’t understand why someone else would fix her music box after she’d hurt them. Rousseau has been in solitary on the island and seems no longer capable of connecting. To the extent that anyone is unable to connect, they are likely in their own kind of solitary, a prisoner of their own thoughts, even if they may be continually surrounded by people.

Kate to Sawyer; “One outcast to another? I’d think about making more of an effort.” She is telling him that he doesn’t have to keep himself in a solitary of his own making, that that is the path to being considered an outcast, an “other.” This exchange sheds light on the overall importance of the “others” having been brought up for the first time in an episode entitled “Solitary” — they are reflections of each other. To keep others as “other,” one must put oneself in solitary — and the same holds even for a group, putting itself in solitary, in opposition to all outside, all that then becomes other, enemy. Kate shows us that this can happen in even innocuous ways compared to whatever Rousseau has experienced.

Sayid fixes the music box. “You see? Some things can be fixed.” Indeed, Sayid is right, some things can be fixed — but not all things, and it’s crucial to know what can be fixed and what needs to abandoned in favor of something better. Danielle’s happiness and gratitude give way to fear again when a roar is heard above. She hopes it’s a bear. Sayid wonders if it is the monster, and Danielle says, “There’s no such thing as monsters.” Having been on the island longer, she has learned things that Sayid doesn’t know yet. Curious, though, that she should say this, since someone like her so concerned about “others” seems very much to lean on demonizing people, making other people out to be monsters. If she could get outside her own fear, she might realize that her own statement may be even more true than she knows.

Jack: “I haven’t been sleeping because I want everyone to feel safe, he builds a golf course, everyone feels safe.” He realizes that, though his focus was important, it was extreme. Focus too much on physical safety, and one can easily come to feel unsafe even though one is more than safe. At that point, it truly takes something else to come to feel safe, something emotional, intangible. It isn’t the golf course that did it, it’s the playing on the golf course, the experience, the fun of it. Jack is starting to see this now.

Walt tells Michael, “You left me alone at the caves.” Michael apologizes. The one time he’s apologetic is when he’s totally physically abandoned Walt. It takes that kind of extreme abandonment for Michael to realize that he’s wronged Walt. He doesn’t see the countless less obvious ways he may cause Walt to feel abandoned. All of this, appropriately, parallels Hurley’s great insight — that physical needs are important, but too much focus on them must come at the expense of emotional needs. For Michael, physical abandonment is the only “real” abandonment.

Locke is alone hunting. Solitary. Doesn’t seem to need the fun of golf. Walt comes to find him. Locke is concerned if Michael knows he’s there. Walt wants to learn how to throw the knife into a tree. It seems as if the fun of golf just isn’t fun for Walt. Walt needs something else, and he wants to find it here, learning new things with Locke. The suggestion is that there are levels of fun, enjoyment, satisfaction. Locke has transcended what golf can do, but most the others have not yet. Walt’s interest in Locke, then, suggests that Walt is young enough to not yet have been “spoiled” in some way, that only through some kind of accident — like the accident of authoritarian parenting — would he find himself thinking that golf would be a step up in satisfaction. Walt’s interest in Locke is significant because it seems an expression of Walt’s need to stay on his own path, a path he perhaps had gotten off but now has a chance, far earlier than most, to try to get back on again. Will he be allowed, or will he be denied? Does denial of one’s path mean being thrust into a mental solitary, and staying on one’s path mean freedom from such a prison?

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A Path and a Practice: Using Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as a Guide to an Awakened Spiritual Life

September 13, 2008
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A Path and a Practice: Using Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching as a Guide to an Awakened Spiritual Life
A Path and a Practice: Using Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as a Guide to an Awakened Spiritual Life
By William Martin



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The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents

September 13, 2008
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The Parent's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents
The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents
By William Martin



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