Spaced in Lost

As it teeters to the edge of its latest series - shrunk by the writers' strike- LOST needs addressing.

Here in the Heart of England we are fewer and further between than in shiny America, but I actually met several Losties during lunch at a conference last week. In Alton Towers, of all places, the most famous English theme park.

I put forward my idea that LOST is really more like a reality show or a sport event than a drama . The viewer engages with it under the misapprehension that this is almost an interactive experience. Clues, mysteries, puzzles proliferate and seduce.

But the series wilfully keeps useful information from you, partly by selecting scenes to tantalise and surprise but never to inform, and ,more importantly , by presenting the least curious set of protagonists ever to grace the square screen. My new chums at Alton Towers and I knew more about each other in 5 minutes that the LOST folk know their fellow-castaways after 90-something days on a desert island.

I have ranged the web looking for answers, but what I really want is more LOST. That's the engagement, both apparently interactive and uselessly passive.

The worst storyline of all will be the conclusion. I'm not saying they won't make it brilliant - it's just that it will be over and the end cannot be as good as the expectation, the confusion, the Black Smoke, the whispers and the elusive moral status of just about everybody involved.

Smashing the quadrant

OK - Moby Dick... The most extreme, glorious novel you could hope to read and that's even though you know where it's going..

And Captain Ahab, now there's a protagonist for you. Garralous, lyrical, spiteful and absurdly proud - and determined to grab hold of his story for himself.

Check out Chapter 118 - The Quadrant" . The Pequod is crusing in "that Japanese sea" - where summer days are "as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. "

Ahab goes to take a measurement with his quadrant, but even though he's got some rather snappy tinted lenses on the instrument, they aren't enough to prevent him working up a , wholly-in-character, complaint at the sun - an old foe :

“Thou seamark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am—but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!”

But then Ahab goes up a gear and after the unfortunate quadrant.

You might call it a quadrant-rant..

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! "

Is Ahab defending his old enemy the sun, although he put the same case to it only a moment ago? Actually, no, the quadrant stands accused not so much of insulting the sun but encouraging us to look up ..

"Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! "

And he begins to destroy the precursor of a sat-nav even though it hasn't made a squeak! Shades of Basil?

"Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”

Ahab doesn't want to know where he is - he doesn't want to be where he is. He needs to know where he will be, what's going to happen, how it's all going to end...

He's on story crack and magnificently so.

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For a very clever person's take on The Whale or Moby Dick, check out Jeremy Harding's article in the London Review of Books, where he tries out environmental readings of this tumultous book . I'm afraid he doesn't go for Ahab like I do, preferring the Ahab-as-George W. Bush model. But it's good stuff. And Delbanco's biography of Melville is a joy - read it in league with Melville's major works .

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Ahab and Melville are both patron saints - or patron martyrs? - of Loops of Tarry Gaskin. The hero who wants to take charge of his own story and the man who wrote a work of genius but never saw it appreciated.

The Dull Ache of Cricket

England have just finished playing their first 5 day "Test" match against New Zealand. They lost very badly. Even though I was two seasons and 13 hours away from it, lying in a late-winter bed, the result mattered absurdly.

Listening to cricket being played on the other side of the world as I fall in and out of slumber becomes a lose-lose (in)activity as the eleven players my hopes depend upon fail miserably and my broken night is marked by fuzzy disappointment.

Other sad men will recognize the syndrome. Why does it matter to us? None of us is playing in the match. We don't know the players personally.

Is sports addiction "an extreme emotional cathexis" as this po-faced consultant claims ?

A "cathexis" is the concentration of emotional energy upon some object/idea/event. Coined , I believe, by that chancer Freud (who really abused the story-thing). The Freud-wallahs seem to use it in conjunction with "narcissistic" and "libidinal".

Sadly for the sport-addicts, neither applies here. My support for a team or a player lacks narcissism - which ,now I consider it, flattens out the experience even further - and it really isn't libidinal.

When your team fails you do feel you've made a bad investment. You've concentrated that emotional energy in the wrong place. Unfortunately you know you'll continue to invest. Nothing you can do about it.

The live uncertainly of the story - that's what hooks us, the voyeurs who feel as if we are participating . We can hope , hope hard .

And we know we'll get resolution. There's just no role for us in deciding what that resolution might be. We simply witness it in a heightened state . Then we end up with disappointment more often than not. Flat, grey, rather pointless, and entirely insignificant...

We need to work on this one.

Story crack

Am I typical? I'm hooked on narratives. Helplessly hooked.

I'll list some of the current ones:

Clinton v Obama - can't get enough of it. Even though nothing ever really happens

The Archers - venerable British radio soap - as much a part of my life as brushing my teeth

New Zealand v England cricket - Test cricket in the middle of my GMT nights

Lost - series 4 - I want to be there all the time, whatever that time is

The Wine-Dark Sea - latest of Patrick O'Brian saga that I'm rereading on the side - if I could be on the Surprise with Maturin and Aubrey, or rather as Maturin and Aubrey, I could salve my thirst for Lost .

But I see all of this as a problem just as much as a series of entertainments - I use them as opiates to avoid living my own story, to replace the acts of writing/making my own stories (I'm a TV producer and writer manque, sadly enough), to escape it all in the best and worst ways.

I follow sports, soaps, novels, drama, news in search of denoument and when I get that sense of an ending it feels a bit worse, even if "we" won...

And I'm starting this blog as a cry for rescue .

I'm going to follow these tales, talk about my attempts to cure myself of some of them , try to tell rather than witness , ask for advice , contempt, elucidation , comfort...