Conceptually, “Lost” has always been heir to the tradition of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” (which itself is heir to ancient sea adventures and Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”): travelers are stranded on a mysterious island with seemingly supernatural goings-on. As the series progressed, the character of Ben was introduced, and with his puppet-mastery seemed to parallel the magician/exile Prospero in Shakespeare’s play. Now with the latest installments, we have a direct reference with the Tempest station, and the increasing political complexities are in line with the intrigue of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan drama.

In “The Tempest,” Prospero had been the Duke of Milan, until his brother Antonio plotted with Alonso, the King of Naples, He was exiled with his daughter Miranda, but the supplies given to him by Gonzalo allowed him to survive on the island. Prospero freed the sprites imprisoned by the witch Sycorax, thus obtaining the servitude of the sprite Ariel. Sycorax’s son, the half man/half beast Caliban, was put in chains. When a ship with the players (Alonso, his brother Sebastian, his son Ferdinand, Gonzalo, Antonio) sails near the island, Prospero commands Ariel to conjure up and storm and an imaginary fire on the ship, which causes the people onboard to jump over the sides. They wash up on the island, and Ferdinand is separated from the rest. Ferdinand and Miranda meet each other and immediately fall in love. As the play ensues, Antonio tries to convince Sebastian to kill the king, and the castaways Stephano and Trinculo try to convince Caliban to kill Prospero. Power plays from off and on the island interlace.

Shakespeare borrowed from ancient sea adventures from the “Argonautica” to “The Aeneid.” [He would blend ancient tradition with contemporary stories of wonder in faraway lands and tales from the New World.] In such mythic works, harpies (who in ancient mythology were finally depicted as creatures who were half women/half birds) were sent by the gods to punish those who had angered them. In “The Tempest” near the play’s end, Ariel prepares a feast for the castaways and then shapeshifts into a harpy. However, rather than rip these characters to shreds, she tells them that they are evil men, which leads to their “redemption” and ultimately reconciliation with Prospero. Seeming to appear and disappear out of thin air – along with the disquieting whispers – Harper Stanhope of “The Other Woman” may be an allusion to the harpies. Intriguingly her personality and appearance have the qualities of contemporary usage as a bad-tempered or vindictive woman or as someone who preys on others. Certainly she has a score to settle with Juliet, who transgressed in having an affair with Harper’s husband.

An aside: Do we necessarily believe Ben, the puppet-master, when he professes his obsessive love of Juliet?

I can’t help but see the character Goodwin as another Enlightenment reference. This time it’s the political philosopher and novelist, William Godwin, father of intellectual anarchism and influence upon Romantic poets and writers. In his “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice” (1793), Godwin makes the case for government as a corrupting influence and proposes a utopian model based on the perfectability of man. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes: “Epitomising the optimism of events in France at the time he began writing, Godwin looked forward to a period in which the dominance of mind over matter would be so complete that mental perfectibility would take a physical form, allowing us to control illness and ageing and become immortal.” I chose to quote this online source, because it also seems curiously like a major thread of (or proposed theory to explain) “Lost.”

Godwin’s Enquiry is a response to Edmund Burke’s (yes, the same name of Juliette’s husband) “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790). Viewed as an argument for strong government and stability, Burke’s political philosophy is countered: “ Is it well that so large a part of the community should be kept in abject penury, rendered stupid with ignorance, and disgustful with vice, perpetuated in nakedness and hunger, goaded to the commission of crimes, and made victims to the merciless laws which the rich have instituted to oppress them? Is it sedition to enquire, whether this state of things may not be exchanged for a better?” In “The Other Woman,” the theme of governance and sedition is raised when Ben asks Locke if he has a revolution on his hands – in light of Locke’s inability to completely manifest an all-knowing supremacy.

Godwin is just as famous for fathering Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein” (seen by some as Gothic portrayal of her father in his zealous educational methods to create the ideal human being). Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft both spoke out against the institution of marriage but tied the knot when she became pregnant. Like the birthing mothers on the island, Wollstonecraft died after childbirth.

With all the formulae and diagrams in last night’s “Lost,” the mind might associate “The Constant” with the mathematical/scientific principle. What hit me over the head  was the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s problematizing of self and identity. Following on the heels of John Locke, who situated understanding in perceptions, Hume asks how we can ever assert that there is a constant that we can equate with self. We can only catch ourselves in the act of perceiving. In the section “Of Personal Identity” in his “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1738), Hume writes, “But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea.”

Continuing on, Hume draws upon the metaphor of a ship that over the years has been repaired so that no part of the ship is the original. [Here he draws upon the ship of Theseus, or Theseus’ paradox, cited by Plutarch.] When the change of part to whole happens gradually, we perceive resemblance and continuity – a constant:

“But whatever precaution we may use in introducing the changes gradually, and making them proportionable to the whole, it is certain, that where the changes are at last observed to become considerable, we make a scruple of ascribing identity to such different objects. There is, however, another artifice, by which we may induce the imagination to advance a step farther; and that is, by producing a reference of the parts to each other, and a combination to some common end or purpose. A ship, of which a considerable part has been changed by frequent reparations, is still considered as the same; nor does the difference of the materials hinder us from ascribing an identity to it. The common end, in which the parts conspire, is the same under all their variations, and affords an easy transition of the imagination from one situation of the body to another.”

Desmond David Hume arrived on the island on an ill-fated boat, and last evening another boat (freighter) factored in his saga. In the reference to time travel, Minkowski makes sure to say that it is consciousness (as opposed to the actual transportation of the physical body). I can’t help but think that the allusion to “Hume’s boat” is deliberate and situates the latest developments within an even more complex narrative (as opposed to a simple sci-fi tale).

In “Eggtown,” we hear Olivia Newton-John singing “Xanadu,” the theme song from the 1980 movie in which she stars. Intriguingly, the plot involves a character who appears at different places and times and remains the same age. In this instance, Newton-John plays an actual muse, who becomes the inspiration for different male characters, once in the big-band era and once in the disco days. [In the latter, the fellow happens to be an artist.] Another song in the same movie is “Suspended in Time.”

The title comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…”). The same literary reference was used in the 1960s by Ted Nelson for the first use of the word “hypertext” in his Xanadu Project (mirroring Dharma Initiative). In the pre-personal computer era, Nelson envisioned computers as a means of facilitating non-sequential writing. Included in his concept were “zippered lists,” which would involve the creation of compound documents, or “transclusions.” [His intent was connected to copyright and payments for use of creative materials.]. The collectivity of texts is referred to as “docuverse,” which is infinitely expandable. In 1974, he published his ideas in a book, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines,” consisting of two books put back-to-back. Viewed as the conceptual predecessor to the hypertextuality of the internet, Nelson still maintains the Xanadu Project and criticizes the actual workings of the internet. The very nature of “Lost,” of course, is a hypertext, in which references interlink. Plug the viewer response into the internet amplifies the show’s capacity for multiple vectors of association. As a dynamic, “Lost” isn’t a linear text filled with symbols that have deep meaning but a constantly reconfiguring network of nodes or clusters.

The reveal of Kate’s son as Aaron (supposedly Claire’s baby) calls for a re-examination of his biological parents. Claire is Jack’s half-sister. The father is Thomas, who some have pointed out bears a striking resemblance to Ben. I have read one theory that Thomas is the son of Ben and Ann, who somehow got off the island, and that Thomas may have actually been on the island. The latter notion is based on the similarity of his work to the painting in the Hatch (must find this website again). Given Jack’s inability to deal with the innocent child, some connection to Ben seems highly likely. As developed thus far, no other character causes such repulsion. But is Thomas the result of Ben’s seed? Or the result of his cloned DNA? [Which comes first? The chicken or the egg?] Let’s allow for even a third possibility: that Thomas is Ben himself in some sort of time loop/travel.. Another event that suggests the possibility of cloning or of time warps is the encounter of the young Ben with Richard Alpert, the future Other who will appear not to have aged.

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.

 At the end of the 17th century, John Locke put forth the idea that we are the product of experience, a radical idea at the time that quickly became a propelling thought of the Enlightenment. If we are the product of experience, then each of us has a unique self in which we become our narratives. So begins the literary category of the novel, in which the hero or heroine sets out in the world and with each adventure becomes a self. Locke’s idea is clearly seen in William Hogarth’s narrative series of prints, “The Rake’s Progress” (1737). Our hero is depicted in the first print as a callow young fellow with smooth, moon-faced features, or Locke’s tabula rasa. By the 8th and final print, he has descended into madness with the marks of his waywardness visible (or impressed) upon his features. The sequence of time is linear and forward-moving (“and then….”).

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.

Given that Lost is populated with characters who share names with key figures of the Enlightenment, such as Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, reference to The Economist may point to Adam Smith, whose historical influence casts him in the role of founder of economics. This 18^th-century Scotsman was a close friend of fellow countryman, David Hume, and both men concerned themselves with the basis of human morality. In “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759), Smith argues for our capacity through the imagination to feel sympathy: “The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”

Significantly, Smith goes on to provide an example based in the observation of torture: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers…By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” In the episode, Sayid is specifically identified by Jack as “a torturer.” Yet we see many instances in which he is capable of identifying with someone other (small “o.”), and he (once a member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, or RG — coincidentally the initials on the mysterious bracelet) lets down his guard, when his own self-interest might dictate very different actions. Indeed, the episode concludes with Ben’s reprimand that Sayid has let his sympathy interfere with abstract reason.

Continuing along with the Scottish connection, the most convincing visual comparison of Jacob is to Brother Campbell. The longer “do” covers the ears, or else we would have clear evidence in the actor Andrew Connolly’s distinctive ears. I can’t help but see Desmond’s features in the face that emerged in the window of Jacob’s cabin when Hurley peered inside [This “through the window” parallels Desmond’s panicked face as he watched Charlie’s last moments – though I don’t think there is a time/space warp going on.]. Brother Campbell, along with Mrs. Hawking (of the ouroborus pin), seem to have a still unexplained part to play in the narrative loops.