5/12/11- Lost Coda Quatre/px

[Note: A version without pictures was posted at 5:44pm CST, on 5/12/11. This version was posted at 6:08pm CST, on 5/12/11. Please see the 4/20/11, 4/26/11, and 5/3/11 postings for prior installments in these continuing Lost tales.]

LOST CODA QUATRE:

CATACOMBICAL ALEVril SPELUNKING,

MOVING THROUGH INTERPRETIVE SPACES, CASIMIR

EXPLORING MIRROR-MATTERED PARADIGMS, LOST

...lounging the crackling campfire, resplendent in mango-munching ooze-drizzled dreamcoat, Hurley sweeps sweet streams across a portly delta, shimmering wide-glistening rainbows from matte-muted muslin.... Ben casts a jaundiced eye, reeling in years of fear and envy and hate and inadequacy. Now he is finally in his element... Thanks be to the island, valising a sidewaysflybyright holding pattern, timeouting his old self, bardoing a brand new beginning.... No, it's not that complex at all... No Napoleonic aspirations, no Elba-islanded respite, simply a core-drilled grok for the walk and talk of Jacklike redemption.... Swept up in a Hurley-swirly fruited plane, Ben wonders how he will be able to make up for past sins and shortcomings... What monomythical transmigrational arc will the island forge to anneal him into a new redeemed being?

Creeping crepuscularity concedes, aurora-jungled din.... embering wisps of deadfire rouse a motley crew of spacetime sojourners... With no facile farscaped solution in sight, Ben breaches the language barrier, palming the elder smelter's yinyang stones, chap-cracked forefinger pointing first to the mirror-polished blackrock pebble, then to the ink-stained ALEVril vessel.... Puzzled glimmers blossom to a brokered bodhi as Ben brandishes the inverted amphora.... Aha! We need to find the kathodosian darkside Source, mirror-twinning the Light of Life cave....

Hmmm.... Why not just retrace their steps, uncorking quintessence ala anti-life-equationed eau de undead, spelunking the LOL cave.... quaking islandfall be damned? Ben recalls dark templar waters, sucking lightlife from Jarrah... and stain-watered theurgical telegraphs, calling Smokey from afar....

No, there is a far better way... find our way back through the SmokeyMIBed catacombs, tracing back to the foul ALEVril Source, headwatering down to the temple, fluid-driving one monster-mashing dinner bell....

If the spin-twin Vril-mediumed message is speaking to them clearly enough, then the Atlantean nested-bell device is hologramming a dialectic dual-drive dynamo, anchoring the island spacetime constant from here through an eternity of cyclical writings and rewritings of the existential narrative.... yes, the mindful, meaningful, mirror-mattered phenomenalized noumena so aptly embodied when Burke met bus.... Elder smelter creaks a craggy finger, tracing toward the far side of the island. Time is of the essence, as Ben's monomythical clock begins to tick.... But how to swiftly short the circuitous jungle-tangled route?

Hurley whirls into action with a brand-spanking old idea... Follow the black smoke road, follow the black smoke road.... We're off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Gog..... Hurley quickly regrets the idea he begets, as per Robert's (Unwritten) Rules of Order (12th ed.), since he dealt it he must now smelt it, and by unspoken acclamation Hugo is thusly cast as the bait for yon Smokey's trees-a-poppin,' Hurley bird-doggin' extravaganza.... That's the last time I bring up a great idea in a meeting...! Hurley sucks a gut and wonders if he'll fit down that rabbit hole access to Smokey's catacombs lacing through the island's dark, dank underbelly....

Now twenty-three minutes into the island's lush interior, Ben and elder pause to rest tired bones and dulled machetes against a jade-washed koa.... Hurley rolls into action, goading the dark island entity with egregiously insolent tauntings, tapping rich veins of polyester-leisure-suited nadirity.... "Hey Smokey! How'sa bout ja comin right here, right now for a healthy heapin' Hansa dose of banditos, eh?!?! Smokey and los fritos banditos... Dude, I gotta bag o' Dharma delight right here in my hand, back from the future! How 'bout you taco walking yer way over here, big boy?" Carefully opening the adult tear-proof bag to no avail, fritos rip-shred a rain of petrified carb curls across the blue-egged sky....

Grabbing the gauntlet with grudging acceptance, Smokey land-quakes a burted reply, reynolds-wrapping a dark cloudbank of foul over the verdant swardveldt... Hurley cues a clod-hopping reply, scrambling to safety shagged by large shivering, shooting timbers.... Broaching the gap, they alice the rabbit hole, sliding into Smokey's dark kathodosian wonderland of catacombical delights....

Brushing blackrocked-soot from a tattered sorrel tunic, the Atlantean smelter elder snakes his way through torn pockets to full retrieval... smooth-satined yinyang stones are lofted... with black twin clacking chimed confirmation against the cold-stoned, exotic-matter-infused wall.... They have succeeded in infiltrating Smokey's stygian subterranean transit system.... Now all they have to do is wend their way through circuitous cimmerian catacombs to that foul ALEVril headwaters, the mirror-Sourced font of dinge-clouded, life-sucking, polar-plasmatic, anti-baryonic flux....

Guided by a dark ebonous glow, the Yinstone blacklights their way through Smokey's gloom-filled burrows... Radiant inkshafts pulse telltale heartbeats... they are very, very near.... Gaping blackmaw opens, draining deep into islandcore abcesses, festering with carbuncular wetnesses, glandular secretions from the anti-monitored, mirror-spun hell.... Cleaving an oiled leather satchel, extracting a handful of grey-powdery substance, Ben paints a line in the sand barring Smokey's advance. Yes, they are very, very glad they remembered to bring some precious silty-smooth cremate of Jacob along for the duration of this monomythical ride to redemption.... Moving down through this sticky-stinking Casimir, they see a soft-glowing red light washing crimson-colored corridors... leading directly into....

Hey.... Hey, dudes... what's going on...? What in the name of Hell is this...? Hurley's thoughts rise to meet the others, then sliding into solemn shared awareness that they have spent all this time circling back underground to...... The hellish lair lying just beneath that runic stonecork, stoppering bottleversed evil, deep within the Vril-varnished recesses of the Light of LIfe cave...!

The trio looks up, reverse-angling the situation, realizing now that it is a flat circular event horizon portal enabling the lightside-darkside transit.... and it is a Whiterock-infused stonecork which succeeds in blocking this portal of wormholing ingress and egress among these mirror-mattered verses.... As long as the cork is in place, the chamber below the corked portal remains accessible to lightside beings.... ¹

Whirling around, they drink in the well-preserved, eerily-rouged portrait of a long-lost dark arts alchemical laboratory.... Oil-filled lamps, tallow-dripped candles, leather-stitched tomes, blown-glass beakers, cut-crystal cruets, and much, much more... all encircling a blackrocksteeled cauldron, ringed with ancient inscriptions, roiling with stench-bubbled ALEVril, lying directly beneath the shadow of that mirror-matter portal....

"Dudes, that Dungeons & Dragons portal must really ooze this black stuff all over the place when someone pops the cork, eh?!?!" Unspoken assent flows into pools of guilty pleasures as they survey the Dark Lord's lightside lair.... Smokey's hollow... a wicked wizard's warren... birthing nefarious plans for anti-monitored domination, spreading ALEful infections of doom, gloom, violence, poverty, corruption, murder, genocide, and much, much more.... Transforming his twin-spin brutha's lightside lands into a darkseid domain, remaking this plasmate-infused, baryon-based universe in his own smoke-filled, mirror-mattered image....

Teasing out a torn shirt corner, Ben overcomes dry-mouthed jitters to summon a foamy spittle, working around the cauldron rim to reveal a series of numerically-ordered surnames.... Hurley stops dead in his tracks... He's seen something like this before, up in the lighthouse with Jack, with 360 names assigned to the 360 degrees along the circumference.... Tracing an arc along the cauldron rim with his forefinger, Hurley moves from first to last surname... Here there are 66 names, in total:

1. Lucifer

2. Mahlat

3. Zenunim

4. Lilith

5. Naamah

6. Tepes

7. Ammut

8. Jarrah

9. Mordiggian

10. Hastur

11. Nero

12. Azazel

13. Hitler

14. Torquemada

15. Linus

16. Ford

17. Austen

18. Redjac

19. Vasilyevich

20. ad-Dajjal

21. Bathory

22. Kali

23. Alpert

24. Magog

25. Teeraal

26. Nix

27. Rakshasa

28. Veidt

29. Littleton

30. Mammon

31. Zedong

32. DeLarge

33. Kahn

34. Flagg

35. Abaddon

36. Glokta

37. de Sade

38. Baal

39. Horrabin

40. Faraday

41. Stalin

42. Shephard

43. Oni

44. Dandelo

45. Kurtz

46. Weston

47. Pol Pot

48. Garkain

49. Yurugu

50. Leopold

51. Hume

52. Morden

53. Lloyd

54. Alhazred

55. Scorpius

56. Burke

57. Aballah

58. Amin

59. Kwon

60. Apep

61. Caligula

62. Reyes

63. Utukku

64. Krona

65. Crowley

66. Locke

"Dude, our names are on there!! You're 15 and I'm 62..."

Ben draws a deep, long breath... exhales through clenched teeth... and rubs the rim where his name has been etched into the surface of this dark black cauldron, for who knows how long.... "Hugo, this must mean we've been on a Joseph Campbell karmic journey of temptation and redemption, all along... and I wonder just how many times we've been through this before, standing right here, right now, pondering our once and future paths...."

Swirling quickly up and out of the soul-sucking eddies of their deep, dark, introspective musings, Hurley and Ben jolt to stark presence sparked by sensory overload... Hyperkinetic gesticulations and stentorian soundscapes signal an elder Atlantean 'aha'.... He has found the legendary key unlocking the full power of the surname-rimmed cauldron.... An ancient human-skinned grimoire laced with rules and regulations, and vile incantations, for channeling the dark ALEVril power to ranges of ruinous raisons d'etre.....

Ben lances the overloaded field, holding the musty cracked tome close to cauldron's rim.... "Well Hugo, I'm no Daniel Jackson, but it doesn't take a certified achaeolinguist to screw in this lightbulb of insight.... Hmmm... Dead languages of the undead, and no punny Romero jokes, please... Remember how Jacob was able to visit the Candidates on the mainland? Well, according to this book, it looks like all we have to do in order to visit someone whose name is on the rim is to dip this black-ore-coated goat-horn thingy in the stinky bubbling fluid and rub the person's name on the rim... This should transport us directly to the person while they were alive and kicking other people on the mainlands of this island Earth.... Rubbing the horn thing on the person will bring us back to our present time in this chamber on the island...."

Hurley fidgets very uncomfortably in his juice-glazed dreamcoat... "Oh, so THAT'S all there is to it?! Man, and I thought I was through with all of this island mumbo-jumbo, Sixth Sense Shyamalan, crossing over with Jonathan Edward kinda stuff!" Sidewaysmode Ben breathes deeply once more, calming Hurleybird's ruffling feathers.... "Hugo, we can't walk away from this chance to redeem ourselves from past sins of commission and omission.... Now is the time to grab ahold of that one dark thread that will unravel Smokey's great grand master plan for annihilating our lightside existence, wiping out all the good stories and happy endings in the process, putting a final nail in the coffin of the world as we know it.... We need to find that thread and pull it, Hugo... I need to do it.. for all of those lives I've ruined and snuffed out through my own fear-driven, self-interested, hubristic gains...."

"Dude, that's quite a mouthful you just spewed.... Well, if my Number 2 is forcing me tag along on a quest that may scare the living number 2 out of me, then I guess I'm ok with that, as long as you don't get all Villagey on me and think that you're really in charge and I'm Number 6 and there's a nice shiny rocket with a hot nuclear warhead on it and the place is guarded by a roving weather balloon and...." Ben's outstretched hand stanches the tide of Hugo's sci-filled clucking.... "Hugo, would I EVER steer you wrong, now that I've seen the light of night and day in Jack's ascension, boarding that higher plane?"

...now for the task of figuring out which thread to pull... which person to visit... to help them unravel a looming darkside narrative culminating in an anti-Christical anti-monitored Dark Lord ascendancy here on Earth...? Ben leafs through the grimoire's index, pondering whether they should take the quick and obvious route to obviation: Teleporting back to the future, enacting that greatest and grandest of utilitarian dreams... saving the lives of untold millions through popping a cap in uncle Adolph.... Or they could simply go back to the very beginning of it all and hammer Lucifer himself.... But what would Minkowski do....? Yes, it's not as simple as it appears at first light of darkness. They must consider more complex consequences pond-rippling not only forward in time, but also backward and sideways to boot.... Hmmm.... Finding the right dark thread just might do the trick, helping them pull a full-gainer Joley in the process, rewriting the emerging narrative fully, reweaving this looming darkseided tapestry in lighter shades of goodness, in and across n-dimensional spacetime.... ²

Hurley playfully traces the cauldron's rim, wondering if it will glockingly vibrate like that fancy lead crystal he bought from the lottery winnings, shattered just like the rest of his cursed pre-island hopes and dreams.... Archaeoacoustic field-testing morphs into flashes before his eyes as Hurley sees the Omenous light... 666... The number of the Beast.... Maybe.... just maybe.... The one thread to pull at this point in spacetime is the 6th name on the list of 66.... Tepes.... Why does that name sound so familiar? Hmmmm.... Oh yeah, that nextdoor neighbor kid into those vampire movies.... Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler.... legendary source for Bram Stoker's fabled Count Dracula....

....holding the ALEVril-drenched goat horn in an unsteady black-gloved hand, Ben sheepishly touches the Tepes and rubs it back and forth.... Hugo's nearly cut off the circulation in his other hand, but pain is pushed out with a Teslaic tremor, as cracklingly crisp energy flows through their eyes, minds, bodies, and finally, their souls.... aching, throbbing, hangovered pain... thick foggy thought-pieces swirling disconnected, ephemeral.... now coming into resolution.... They....are....now... materialized to a small shuttered room in Tepes' palace back in 1456 A.D.... Time enough to toss a lightside yangstone into the pond, effects rippling outward and upward and forward and backward across Demiurgically-deriving, Sophiacally-emerging spacetime.... Just a small, slight tug on this one dark thread, butterflywinging a cascade of accretive actions and consequences, unraveling Smokey's grand mirror-mattered, master-planned story of doomination over us all....

....servants knocked out.... raggedy period-piece-perfect clothing donned... and now they are ready for the unweaving to begin.... Tepes sits regally on a gold encrusted throne, rougedly patinated with dark crimson spent blood, from who knows how many victims.... Hurley plays the jestered fool, courting disaster for sure, while Ben feints a faint, arcing upward a curved blade.... sinking home, slumping now, Tepes' color paints a canvas across the floor....

....Hurley and Ben have now pulled that fateful dark thread.... but was it the right one to unravel the looming narrative tapestry now weaving its dark ALEful way forward and backward through history, spreading its darkly zombified anti-spun aeonic energy, smothering rich vibrant hope with an army of darkness? Hmmm.... Hurley's penetrating gaze sears Ben's black-gloved hand, branding Ben back to reality....

"Dude, if we were able to bring Sayid back from this walking undead potion number 9 in the cauldron, man... we should be able to unManwich this creepy tales horror stuff, eh?! Color draining from hand to face, Ben cracks off a sharp retort...."You mean DUNWICH, Hugo! Never one for the details lying beneath the shadows of our fine literary heritage, et tu, Hugo?"

Clucking choice fowl words, blanketing over a cold-fogged breath, Hurley curses the rat-raggy, period-perfect accoutrements they were forced to don in order to guy unbardo this fractally-fanning, fateful fable of doom... Kicking the cooling corpse, Hurley reaches over to wrest the rougely-hemoglobinned ring from Vlad's knobby forefinger.... "No more stainmasterflash on the sham-wow carpet of life, buddy! How's that for hoisting the Impaler on his own Jean Luc Picard!"

Rising to greet Ben's stern-scowling stare, Hurley steadies himself for yet another verdant volley of verbal course corrections, but Ben is unveeringly sidewaysgracious this time around.... Oh Ben oh Ben oh Ben... that good ol' bad ol' karma chameleon... must be trying to suburb some credits in heaven again... Yeah, we'll see if pulling this red Vladish thread will unravel looming dark-matter dread, forward and backward and sideways through spacetime... unexplicating implicated, sieg-heiled marching orders in the process... unwriting an as-yet unwritten ALEful tapestry....

Scowl morphs to smirkish smile... and Ben embraces the warm, unspoken, esperly understanding field-generating between them... Will this suffice as their purgatorial penance, enabling them to take that final, fateful boarding pass to a higher plane, following in the footsteps of self-sacrificially-heroic Jack Shephard? Yes, this just may indeed do it... But now they must Jacob their way back from this shadowy mainland of 1456 A.D. demiurgically-derived Earthly 'reality', back to the past of the one Constant nodal spacetime nexus-- the island-- providing their last best hope for anchoring dreams across the universe in the cool, calm harbor of languid lightside delights....

....as palace guards race, Ben's apace, wielding the goat horn, touching Tepes' white face... there, no more.... they Jacob their way back to ancient islandpast, riding the wave of a pulsing pinklight rift, mooringly Zathrased via the enchanted tome's pleromaically-corded spacetime umbilucus.... Groggy islandfall swirling through ebbing pinklight embers.... They are finally back to the past, materializing squarely into that now-too-familiar grunge-crusted, ALEful subterranean grotto.... Oh no oh no oh no...!

Hurley birdwhirls cauldron's near, roiling ink-smear visions clear, smoking ringrim scripts reappear, sinking feelings rippling fear.... pulling the red Vlad thread has only served to change some of the names of the soon-to-be-uninnocent agents army of darknessing their way through a new red-drenched narrative.. names erased but now replaced... penance thwarted... boarding pass denied... deplaned, deplaned... deep-fried doo-dude... me oh my oh me oh my....

..... we pinkflashforward to the ALEful grunge-grotto's lightside counterpart, the positive terminal in this Vril-charged bardo battery... the Light of Life cave.... Fully immersed in reflective thoughtpools, Aaron mulls a myriadic melange of pregnant possibilities for new world orders.... Doffing spare hooded raiment, thought begets action birthing plotline convergence... Aaron gingerly lifts the runic whiterock stonecork, unpenting dark-bottled forces, shuddering the island, and with one fell-swooping storyarc, he reaches into the energized event horizon, grasping the otherversed hand of his long-lost, mirror-mattered, spin-twinned, MIB-manifested, Smokey long-lost brutha...

....and in that fleeting flashing moment, stark realization washes through Aaron as he unfirmly grips the reins of ultimate authorial conceit, unwriting the Earth and twin mirror-mattered universes out of existence.... Collapsing convergence spreads panickly as starstuff and soul planes dedifferentiate along exceedingly accelerating spacetime curves.... nexal nodes of aeonic energy sentience unsplinter, god-particling a bosonic unbardoing, fusing islands of mind into pangeaic paleocortical reactors... unbigbanging densification proceeds apace, with cogito ergo summed, as the many become one into none and the point becomes zeroed, efficiently dysoned into vacuum-voided nothingness....

....Mother Sophia...?

Is that you?

................Mother?

(gasp......)

..........Mom.... Where... are.... you?

(sniff....)

......Mama...?

..............Ma..........ma.....?

(sniff....)

Mamamamama....!!!!

....dedifferentiation curving,

hyperbolically unnerving......

(sniff....)

(sniff...)

Where ARE you...?!?!

...flowing tears overflowing rivers of regretful remorseful repentance......

...Aaron clutches SmokeyMIBbro close, pulling spin-twin particles proximate, crackling with explosive energy... still, he will not let loose his grip.......

Mama... Don't...leave...us.....here... ...all.......alone......in...the...dark....

(sniff....)

MAMA....!

ma......

....ma.........?

....far off in the distance of this undistanced void, SmokeyMIBbro spies a single shining silvery lock of hair piercing through the veiled void of their stark ebon starcrib.... Aaron's tears turn to joy as he recognizes the unseen face of his one true mother... goddess Sophia has returned to claim her spin-twinned offspring... one light... one dark... mirror-mattering each other, as siblings often do.... And yes, it is indeed good to be welcomed back up into the now-familiar plane of existence called..... HOME....

....but if only they knew...if only they knew.... tearful cosmic family reunion gives way to confusion fuguing fast into fusion as convergent dedifferention plagues wide-swathing paths through the vast pleromaic plane.... yes.... it...is... happening.... again....

....SophiAaronMIB fusing into oneness into noneness, plasmatic pleromaplane zeroed to the point of no return.... all baggage lost en route....

or so it may seem....

....and up in a higher plane, warm walls washed with soft aural delights frame a fulgent new picture of hope for us all.... the clock ticks midnight at the island oasis in the vast voidal desert of life.... and now husband and wife will take the ultimate coauthorial plunge... collapsed, unbigbanged pleroma bigbangs back into being, as coital union fertilizes pregnant new possibilities....

,,,,and 9.5 months later, to the day, in a white-sanitized small county hospital, a child is born unto them.... a miraculous new life sprung into being... crowning head filled with glory, laboring pained with peals.... finally birthcry has come....

Brushing broad brown swaths of sweat-soaked hair from her face, a proud and exhausted mother turns to the speechless, awestruck father... "Say hello to your firstborn son, Papa!" Father knows best not to speak in loud tones, leaning carefully over the soft-cradled head....

...."Um, well, hello, John... Hello, John Shephard!"

Shooting a fast furtive glance at his wife, proud papa doc Shephard rubs a lightly whiskered morning chin....

"Hmmm... Hon, I kinda like Jack better... Jack, yeah.... Jack Shephard... Hello, Jack Shephard...!" Mom nods in agreement... "You know, I swear he smiled when we loosened the lock on John and decided to go with Jack instead!"

.... a soft parade of heads peers through aquamarined curtains.... Extended family greetings flouresce in full filial glory.... Friends arrive too, witnessing a curious young head, bobbing for glimpses of this brand new baby boy...

"Honey, you remember Eloise and her son, Desmond, don't you?" Ms. Hawking burbles a babbling brocade of streaming apologies, as her husband is currently away on business in Korea. Christian Shephard aw schucks his way through the apologies, thanking Eloise and Des for taking the time to welcome young Jack into the world....

Glancing upward, Christian quickly assesses the situation, filing a mental note that Des looks like he will be quite a rebellious handful when he grows up, full of crackling energy and magnetic charm. Young Des approaches baby Jack, reaching upward to anoint this once and future candidate, planting a lectroidal sparkseed of anamnetic awareness, muttering precociously under a deep-drawn breath... "Good to see you in another lifetime, Brutha...!"

Christian strains to rewind Des' statement back into clarity, but that tape just won't play.... Turning to Eloise, he stands and delivers a great grizzly hug of affection. Pulling away, he notices the curiously circular shape of her broche, wondering if that really, really is intended as a graphically literal depiction of a serpent eating its own tail... Hmmm.... Some people have a truly warped sense of style, indeed! Christian can't help himself, asking about the broche... to which Eloise offers a familiarly cryptic reply.... "Oh this old thing.... Someone gave this to me AGES ago... As you know, everything that rises must converge...." With a quick wink of her eye, and a smiling goodbye, she resumes her rightful place, as the woman behind the curtain of their lives.....

What lies beneath the shadows of Jack's new life on this higher plane?

What turbulence and clear skies lie ahead in his flightpath?

....while far off in some dim islandpast, sweat-drenched from pulling a dark-threaded Vlad, Hurley whirls, ashen-faced.... "Oh Ben... Oh boy... What've we done now....? Dude, lookit the names around the cauldron....some of them... have....... changed........!"

What does this mean for the continuing Lost narrative? Heh-heh-heh....

Time will indeed tell....

Dr. Todd J. Hostager

P.S. ....In this Lost Coda quadtych, we see how a handful of sand-sifted future artifacts have transmuted from shadowy signs and symbols of indeterminate meaning into golden, glimmering, yet ghostly glimpses of what may lie beneath the shadows of pure Platonic forms.... From sensorially-rich, surface-tensionsioned substance-- working our way down the rabbit hole to wormholing warrens of virally-embedded Lost Easter eggs-- we are once again reminded of the richly complex, polysemic, intertextual bounty served to us weekly with each brand new Lost episode. Letting the interpretive cat out of the bag merely scratches the surface of our fever for resolving double-slitted indeterminacies prowling the island and pouncing through our everydaily lives. Schrodingerian simplicity segues into Chomskyan complexity, as we plunge ever so further into generatively grammatical interpretive spaces opened through the space of our paradigmed perceptions, Casimirically-mirroring realities presented to us on flat-paneled screens by Darlton and Company, exploring the vacuums of interpretive possibility we have defined and demarcated for our prime Derridaean play....

Yes, through beaming an unMasterPlanned, unGUTted³, loosely-coupled, indeterminately-generative textual tapestry into our homes for six straight years, TPTB insinuated a scintillating sandbox of sensory delights into our minds, infecting our psyches through subroutines layered deeply within an unfolding, emerging Lost narrative, unleashing an insidiously effective viral learning initiative across the entire globe.... Oh, brother, can you paradigm?

.... and Kuhnian cortical coitus channeled along all-too-predictable lines, filling self-created

cogito-Casimiric vacuum voids of interstitial interpretations, ranging from SHIPPERS searching bermudic waters of Lost love triangles to NERDS investigating hypercubical realms of esoteric scientific substrates, from MYSTIC DECONSTRUCTORS wrestling meanings from mythical underpinnings to ARTISTIC SEERS exploring new and creative possibilities for future Lost plotpaths, and more.... as fallen, finite creatures, we incompletely aspired-- week in, and week out-- to find that one, true, final, end-all-be-all, MasterPlanned, GUTted, puzzle-solved representation of What really, REALLY, lies beneath the surface of Darlton & Co's gift that keeps on giving to us all... 121 episodes of Lost....

Yes, in our true heart of hearts, we would all have to honestly admit falling prey at times to the electromagnetically-attractive allure of being prime Master Planner, GUTting the show, the universe, and all other Lost Bloggers extraordinaire.... showing our GUTs, as with no GUTs no glory, even GUTting others through admonishing us all to not fall into the GUTter.... And yes, the Lost Coda Nazi/Atlantean quadtrych is a perfect example of a recent GUTty cortical flare, manifesting a shared progressive imperative to achieving transcendence through fleeting glimpses of Godelian Godhood, thumbing our noses at the inherent incompleteness of our materialized, paradigm-bound, Demiurgically-derived existence as shadowy mirrors of Platonically-essenced reality from which we big-banged into being.... ⁴

Puzzle-solving, paradigm-wielding, data-reduction engines as such, mired in delusional grandeurs of our inherently incomplete short- and long-conned GUTtered graspings of reality, through prideful deprecations and seasoned reflections we blood-sweat-and-tear our way to bridge the Bardoical chasm from Pleromaic essence to Demiurgical derivation, successively approximating ourselves out of Fallen finitude with calculating cunningness, SAWYERing our way out of our inherent JACKness....

....and yes, of course this is true of this Nazi/Atlantean Lost Coda quadtych and of any and all Lost blogs paving authorial routes to Godelian Godhood, defining and filling interpretive voids separating what is from what appears to be so, from reality to our flawed and finite perceptions of that reality.... Beware, when 'brother can you paradigm' shifts to unreflective and uncreative parrot-time, and we iron-cage ourselves in black-vacuum-sealed perceptual prisons.....

Prime case in point... the species-wide tendency toward externalizing evil to others and to various Egregoric entities operating throughout the storied ages of humanity. Wrapped in the plastic of our buffered existential cocoons, we bathe in the comfortable flowing glow of vacuumed voids of space conveniently separating us from the evils that other men and women do.... From Enola Gayed perches, we ponder with glue-eyed fascination the depth of atrocities unleashed by the Hitler, Stalin, and a wide range of others throughout the ages. Dramatizing and glamorizing, reifying and depersonalizing, such all-too-common Wolf In The Foldish accounts of evil in the world invariably imply some dark externalized Egregoric entity at work, operating out there beyond the buffered envelop separating ourselves from the world.... Yes, as aspiring Godelian Gods, we like to have it both ways, retreating to the comforting cover of our 'otherness' when confronting the evil that men and women can do, while at other times working hard to overcome the inherent incompleteness of our flawed and finite perceptions defining this 'otherness', striving to produce full and final statements completely representing reality as we believe we know it...

But as Hurley pointed out so well in his trademark down-homespun-wisdom-way, the true path to enlightenment, reconciliation, and redemption has been lit by Gandhi and others through time immemorial.... We must ultimately confront the Devil within ourselves, the evil we may as men and women choose to do, wrestling with the SmokeyMIBness prowling LelandPalmerBoblike inside ourselves.... Yes, the indelibly etched image of fLocke and Jack fighting mano-a-mano in the series finale is an apt and telling commentary on our own conflicted and complex human natures... Just as the LOLVril lightside liquid courses through the veins of our very souls, nudging us to heroic acts of sacrifice in times of trial, we fight an ALEVril darkside virus seeking to corrupt and collapse us back from redemption, sucking the souls of others with us as we Fall through the neck of the bottle, from Bardo to verse...

Like Jack, we too can shake off our Sawyered, short-conned delusions of Godelian grandeur through recognizing our GUTted, Master-Planned, Paradigm-Lensed perceptions for what they really are.... Laudable, learningful, playful, calculating, enjoyable, inspiring, but inherently incomplete and flawed attempts by finite and Fallen materially-instantiated creatures to fully and finally bridge the vacuum-void of existence, from our shadowy speleological paradigm-bound perceptions to the Platonically essential reality of unsplintered pleromaic Unity.... The longest con of them all is when we as finite, flawed, and Fallen human beings perceive our inherently incomplete accounts of reality as end-all-be-all truth....

Shining moments of bridged 'otherness' periodically pierce the vacuum-voided existential veil, yielding fleeting glimpses of Source-realities lying beneath the surface of the shadowy flickerings waypointing our spelunker-allegoried lives... And Doc Jensen's account of Jack's path to redemption in his impressive series finale observations is one prominent case in point.... Along the way, Jack learns to embrace and transcend our shared tendency to Sawyerize our lives, short-conning ourselves that through sufficient cunning and cortical power, we can loop up and out of our inherent finitude, grasping at Godelian godhood through meta-analytical POVs framed within the very same finitude they are striving so hard to overcome....

While channeling our GUTty tendencies to improving our lives through new and improved paradigms-- modern medicine and more-- yields undeniable value for individuals and the species, the course of human history shows that we have yet to arrive at that final, full, complete accounting of 'out there' un-mirrored reality, and if the best we can do as a species is inch ever-so-closer to the Source without ever finally reaching it, then so be it, as the space between what is and what may be provides an infinitely large creative sandbox for collective cortical coitus... and throwing in a hint of Heisenbergian Uncertainty with a splash of Schrodingerian Indeterminacy, adding a cup of Chomskyan generative grammar and a quota of Quantum Uncertainty, brings no small amount of spicey spin to our everyday sense-making, meaning-mattered, future-tensed lives....

Like Jack we are working to wrestle our way out of the Locke-hold of inherent finitude and flaws, clawing our way into and out of the GUTter through thoughtful, creative representations of what really REALLY lies beneath the surface of the 'reality' undergirding our everyday lives, including the ostensible textual substances beamed into our homes each week, in 121 episodes spanning six years of stimulating and intoxicatingly viral learning.... Yes, our Lost blogs are inherently Bardoic, Sidewaysversic, ghost-shadowy shells of interpretive possibility birthed in the vacuum-voided space of our cortical creativity, that realm of possibility space which lies between: (a) the vast repository of sense-data loaded into the canon of 121 Lost episodes and (b) the perceptual and conceptual capabilities enabled by our sapient grey brains, the lenses we use to anchor a POV and mirror-bridge our way back across the interpretive space we have now opened for exploration, creating valuable meaning-maps along the way.... Yes, if the 121 episodes of Lost are the ISLAND of what-actually-happened-reality, then the myriad of available Lost net-threads and blogs are VALISed SIDEWAYSverses comprising shadowy representations of that reality, mirrored musings bearing an abundance of fruits feeding our starving souls in the shared journey through our everyday lives....

To be sure, Lost has shown us how embracing and leveraging the flawed finitude of Sidewaysversed-possibility-space provides a purgatorial playplace for working through the baggage of our issues through transcendent learningful reflections on, and enactments of, our new and improved selves.... And yes, this means that the complex orbital relationships among the Islands of reality and Sidewaysverses of redemptive possibility in our everyday lives are fundamentally HEURISTIC in nature.... Probing more deeply beneath the mirrored-surface, we see that in addition to helping us understand how systems counterposing a 'reality' with a 'representation of reality' can help to define and power a range of productive interpretive spaces for our creative play, viz., the vacuum void arising between the Casimiric, mirrored counterposition of a reality with a representation of said reality.... What is, and our perceptions of what may be... separated by a vast vacuum void of interpretive possibilities, mirroring Darlton's heuristic counterpositioning of Island reality and purgatorial Sidewaysverse in Season 6.

Thus we can see the irony that while the iron cage of our paradigm-fettered perception shackles us to the preconceived notions we bring to the table of our living, learning, and viewing experiences, the very fact of our limited, finite, flawed, fettered perception plays a central and necessary role in establishing a POV anchor point from which to reflect back upon a reality whose shadowy veil we may never be able to fully pierce....

And it is in the very act of looking back at reality from our flawed, paradigm-fettered anchor points that we open broad vistas of rich interpretive possibilities up for exploration, loosing the full power of our figure-grounded, bisociational, generatively-grammatical creative cortical play, powered by differences that make a difference to us, tapping the zero point energy of a vaccum void generated through acts of heuristic, Casimiric, reality-mirrorings realized through the looking glasses of our paradigmed perceptual lenses.....

Here are some additional examples of Heuristic redemptive learning available in a mirror-mattered-mode, leveraging the Casimir Effect in action, at perceptual and existential levels:

THE REALITY- REPRESENTATION OF THE REALITY-

The Island The Sidewaysverse

121 Lost TV Episodes Lost Blogs

The Universe Grand Unified Theories (GUTs)

What Is What Appears To Be

Platonic Forms Shadows In The Allegorical Cave

Pleromaic Unity Demiurgical Materializations

The Goddess Sophia Spin Twins: LOL/Aaron, ALE/SmokeyMIB

As noted above, the true power of this schema lies less in the dialectical counterpositionings of reality with paradigm-based, POV-anchored representations of reality, and more in terms of two key factors emerging from the dialectical interplay among these counterposed positions: (1) the establishment of an interpretive space between a reality and its mirror, providing a 'vacuum-voided' blank page or canvas on which to creatively generate new insights; and (2) creative power deriving from heuristic explorations of dialectical tensions between a reality and its mirror.

Jack's journey shows us how it is possible for each of us to transcend the fetters of our flawed, finite, Fallen humanity through embracing these very same limitations, refusing to short- and long-con ourselves that we are more godlike than we really, truly are. This is a tougher pill to swallow than it may first appear, and the toughness is best appreciated once one has fully ingested and digested one's flawed finitude.... Refusing to Sawyerize our lives is the first step.... Progressing further along Jack's path, we must also appreciate and enact a self-sacrificial heroism, going above and beyond the call of duty to help others who are in need, before (and sometimes even instead of) considering our own needs. We then receive and graciously accept the free-flowing thanks from all who have benefited from our selfless heroism. And lastly, as Doc Jensen so eloquently noted, like Jack we are finally able to let go of it all and, together with family and friends alike, we join together and board onto that warm-glowing higher plane of existence....

Eternally-driven to bridge the gap from representation to reality, we take no small measure of comfort in knowing our efforts are informed by the deep and liberating realization that there will be no final, end-all-be-all, Godelian godlike ultimate Lost interpretation, crowding out and negating all other Casimir-Effected, cortically-engineered, paradigm-lensed interpretive spaces.... Working from the same Source material reality captured in the 121 Lost episodes, we will continue to be amazed, amused, shocked and bemused by future Lost-blogged representations of that reality.... and we will most definitely be the better off for it!

Let us hope that the flow of new Lost insights will never be corked, and the mirror-mattered map-making continues to pond-ripple through the rest of our everyday lives, as we deliciously devour and digest the fresh dishes brought to our table, serving new morsels of insight to our puzzling palates.... Lost is ____________..... The island is ____________.... What new tantalizing tidbits are filling the blanks of these interpretive spaces on your plate, right now? And what new and exciting dishes will leap to the menu in the future?

Oh, brothers and sisters in Lost....can you paranewdigm?

Namaste

Dr. Todd J. Hostager

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ENDNOTES:

1. Here I am proposing that the portal granting passage from lightside to darkseid verses-- lying within the LOL cave and stoppered with a Whiterock-infused runic stonecork-- functions not unlike a stargate, with a LOLVril and ALEVril-infused, black and whiterock alternating, exotically-charged, mirror-mattered dialectic dynamo powering the mini-wormhole event horizon.... And like a stargate, when not activated, it is possible to traverse either side of the corked portal without ill effects, hence the existence of a darkside wizard warren lying just beneath the shadow of the rock-rimmed ring in the LOL cave. Pulling the whiterock stonecork from the lightside verse activates the crossverse portal; how the portal is activated from the darkside remains to be seen....

2. This is a quick and heartfelt shoutout homage to Lost Deconstructor extraordinaire, Joley Wood.... Lost aficionados will recall, with great affection, Joley's insightful examinations of the authorial adventures pursued by a flashforwarding Des and a time's-arrow-neck-pierced Charlie Pace, jungling their way through a series of attempts to rewrite Charlie's fateful, tragic-yet-redemptive lifestoryline.... Well done, indeed...!

3. GUT refers to Grand Unified Theory, bridging

back to the 3/4/10 HEMA Theory posting concerning real-world dynamics and players in the Lost Learning Game. For more information in this regard, please see:

http://losthematheory.com/gpksgmsk.aspx

4. Here Godelian Godhood refers to the urge to use the language and tools of an intrinsically-flawed and finite species-- Homo sapiens-- to metanalytically/metanarratively transcend this finite nature, generating inherently incomplete representations of reality as reflected in and filtered through the shadowy mirrors of our

perceptual apparati and conceptual paradigms.

Welcome to Lost HEMA Theory!

Heuristics-->Energy-->Material Applications