Lost Marginalia

In writing the entry on Jacob Boehme, I googled his last name and was amused by also getting websites referring to a 1920s G.W.Pabst movie starring Louise Brooks based on a novel by Margarethe Boehme. So typical of this online database search mechanism to bring together such disparate elements.

In the wake of last night’s “Lost” airing, I browsed online to see what responses “Eggtown” provoked, and I was surprised to see the posting related to one minor detail, the book that Sawyer is reading. Word is that it is “The Invention of Morel” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a work of fiction that includes one man’s obsession with Louise Brooks, whose photograph is on the cover. Suddenly the name of the Boehme novel hit me – “Diary of a Lost Girl.”

In this instance, “lost” refers to “gone astray” in the sense of a “fallen woman” or “lost angel.” The plot and theme of this novel possesses some striking resemblances to Kate’s story and even the latest plot suggestion. An innocent 17^th-year-old girl, Thymian, loses her mother as a child and is impregnated by her father’s assistant. [The father himself rapes the housekeeper, who then kills herself.] To be brief, Thymian finds herself in a reformatory and gives the child to a midwife. When she escapes, she discovers that her child has died. She subsequently works in a brothel, but by the end she is able through marriage to regain her middle-class status. The novel and the film have been characterized as showing one girl’s pluck in the face of a corrupting patriarchy, and a subtheme is mother-daughter separations.

Rather than a specific clue, what is striking to me is the clustering of ideas within my search. A possible cultural allusion leads me to a 17^th-century theosophist, who happens to have the same name as a 20^th-century novelist. I find a reflection of both Boehmes and their works’ theme of lost in “Lost.” We keep looking for answers, but our pursuit (our mental and emotional engagement) is itself part of the show. Ultimately it doesn’t matter as much if the connection I make is a coincidence or intentional.

Last year when I saw that Jacob was wearing archaic garb, I looked for the most appropriate “Jacob” in our cultural past and hit upon Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), whose writings are an influential component of the Western esoteric tradition.  A 16^th-century shoemaker, Boehme had visions that revealed the world-as-becoming through a dynamic struggle between opposing forces: good and evil, light and dark. Rather than perfect or fixed, God is an unfolding that engendered a temporal world of division (with free will) in order to achieve a state of grace, a redeemed harmony; as Antoine Faivre writes in “Access to Western Esotericism”: “…a Supreme Being who ‘sees’ in his living mirror, in the Divine Wisdom or Sophia, the potential world.”

Importantly, Boehme, as with others in the hermetic tradition, considered the physical world to be composed of signs, thus placing emphasis on images, i.e. visual information. Faivre also points out the relationship of the words “image,” “imagination,” and “magnetism,” so that the imaginative faculty does not result in delusion but revelation: “..rather it is a kind of organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish a cognitive and visionary relationship with an intermediary world…” What an analogy for the imaginative enterprise that is “Lost,” a unique television series that never arrives at a set point but is constantly unraveling – that uses visual clues that bear repeated viewing. [Boehme’s writings influenced the original “Lost,” i.e. Milton’s “Paradise Lost."]

We have accepted that Season 4 of Lost includes flash-forwards, but are these future events necessarily determined? Remember the classic narrative device of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in which Scrooge sees Christmas Past and Christmas Future. With fear and trembling, he asks if this must be his fate, and he learns that changes in the present can alter the outcome. We have the spectral figure of Jacob (as in Jacob Marley) along with Ben (as in Ebeneezer), which doesn’t necessarily situate us in “A Christmas Carol” territory, but viewers might consider that the flash-forwards function differently than the flashbacks.