(no subject)

Rewatched Lost 4. So the sides are shaping up to be:

Charles Widmore, the jewelry shop lady, Matthew-from-The-Wire, Charlotte, Farraday, perhaps "R.G."

vs

Jacob and the dead people he impersonates, the monster, Ben, Richard & the Others, and now Sayid and Locke

Ears are pricked for any mention of an Esau, therefore, or of angels. Sun is falling in with Widmore, but perhaps only to betray him, as he's one of several people she could plausibly blame Jin's death on. The ludic talk in the first season, and in the fourth re. the killing of Ben's foster daughter ("He changed the rules"), and with touches in other places (Hurley's chess game with Eko), may suggest some ancient game is being played here, which might also make some sense of the otherwise completely stupid rule that Ben can never come back to the island after moving it. Maybe some Borgesian Lottery thing gone out of hand, brought to earth by aliens, or with earth even created for that purpose by older beings. A recurrent theme on the show is people being misled about the power of fate, then not acting in their own interests because of this. Guilt is related--both sides play on that too. You must do X to atone for Y; or, you're going to go on doing Z because you're a W kind of person, there's no fighting it. The supernatural forces at work can create magical effects of certain kinds, but seem to prefer not to, or are perhaps not consistently able to. Small amounts of magic or trickery are used to convince humans that the tenor of reality is a certain way. If that's how the game is played we're in a specific kind of Gnostic territory--like in the movie The Forgotten, or perhaps more along the lines of Crowley's The Deep.

Julie says the last time the show really got to her was the moment with Eko refusing guilt. I think I agree--I've been interested since but not enthralled. The bloom is gone and the trust is lost. I wonder why? Can one only be strung along so far? Or at some point does it become too obvious there's no controlling intelligence here, just a desperate panel of writers trying to make strained, retroactive sense & normality out of bold but determined-for-effect plot points? Or is it that even when the What of the mysteries isn't revealed, the how of them becomes overfamiliar? You're accosted in the street, told that the time is at hand, given a blackened nickel and a silver button and a tiny plastic monkey, urged to take three rights and wait until nightfall, and so on and so on and at some point it's not the exciting way things really could be all around you without you knowing but just a prank or a crazy person.

(no subject)

Another cemetery poem I hadn't known about:

At Lulworth Cove a Century Back, Hardy

Had I but lived a hundred years ago
I might have gone, as I have gone this year,
By Warmwell Cross on to a Cove I know,
And Time have placed his finger on me there:

"You see that man?" — I might have looked, and said,
"O yes: I see him. One that boat has brought
Which dropped down Channel round Saint Alban's Head.
So commonplace a youth calls not my thought."

"You see that man?" — "Why yes; I told you; yes:
Of an idling town-sort; thin; hair brown in hue;
And as the evening light scants less and less
He looks up at a star, as many do."

"You see that man?" — "Nay, leave me!" then I plead,
"I have fifteen miles to vamp across the lea,
And it grows dark, and I am weary-kneed:
I have said the third time; yes, that man I see!"

"Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair;
And no one notes him now but you and I:
A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,
And bend with reverence where his ashes lie."


The star was this one:


Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.