Thoughts on the Lost Finale

Hello everyone! It's 12:08am on Monday, May 24th and I'm getting ready to go to bed after watching the series finale of Lost on ABC. I decided to post up a quick response to the end of this show, as well as a tribute to the show in general. The finale was great; not fantastic and not without fault, but neither was the rest of this show and I believe that the writers were able to capture the most vital aspects of the show in the last 2 and 1/2 hours. The finale was epic and encompassing and left you filled with wonder and awe (truly satisfactory substitutes for curiosity and knowledge). I was very impressed with this show in general. Although I only watched it for the first time a year and a half ago (and have been desperately clawing through DVD box sets and Hulu updates to get caught up ever since), I feel that a major part of my life has been shaped and influenced, however indirectly, by the sorts of questions and concepts this show forced me to confront. The acting was brilliant, the sets were brilliant, and above all else, the music was beautiful.

If you have avoided Lost because you feel that it is not your genre of choice, I urge you to watch a few episodes and experience the wide diversity of themes the show touches upon. If you have avoided Lost because you hate broadcast television and prefer the quiet, intellectual prowess of cable shows like Dexter, I would urge you to give Lost a try; you may be pleasantly surprised to find that it has comprehensively and consistently escaped the majority of stereotypical cliches that harangue network television programming. And if you have avoided Lost because you feel it is too complicated, I urge you to get a Netflix account or dust off your BitTorrent tracker of choice because once you start watching this show, it is very hard to stop. Luckily, I feel that the writers have provided an ending that satisfies and delights. Watch this show!

Good night,
Andrew

The Work Bench

Hello,

I've opened up a new blog (don't worry, NOT a replacement blog), that I hope will serve as a place for me to chronicle all my DIY projects this summer. Please head on over there and give it a look!

The Work Bench

Best,
Andrew

Thoughts on Poetry

This post was originally titled "The Meaning of Poetry"; I just stumbled upon a blog that was filled with some pretty inspiring material. I knew it was inspiring because it forced me to think about what was being said outside of the context of myself. What I'm trying to say is, I stopped thinking about myself for a few minutes to read this blog. Afterwards, I started thinking about myself again, but for a few brief minutes I didn't. I don't like to think that my narcissism is at the pathological level -- I mean, I don't think it actually is, but I don't like to think about it either. The budding anthropologist, the evolutionary biologist within me says the following: Narcissism is vital to survival. Narcissism is simply the term humans invented when, upon looking backwards from their long journey of altruistic progress, were shocked to see that no matter how far they traveled from their primitive pasts, still had their roots firmly grounded in a reality sharply defined by the laws of nature. Eat or be eaten. We hate that, don't we? We have to. We don't like to think of ourselves as animals? This is where my thinking used to stop. I loved to think of us as animals. It would explain so much of the way my parents used to act when the doors were close and they didn't think we could hear them yelling at each other. It would explain the basic pleasure I used to derive from stealing food from my brother. Maybe the only reason I stopped was subconsciously I realized he had grown big enough to break my bones, to punish me for interfering with his own survival processes. This is where my thinking used to stop.

But now I can't help but reflect that we ARE different. We care about each other and we building gigantic monuments to commemorate the heroic actions of members of our community who travel thousands of miles away to get blown up by a mine -- defending too many people for us to explain. Definitely us, thought, right? At the end of the day, we can't think about the fact that our society has grown too fast for our sense of community to keep up.

On this train of thought, contemplating the defining characteristics of mankind, I started thinking about poetry. Our brains our firing constantly. Even comatose, disabled, vegetated people lying in beds in forgotten hospital rooms have brains that are constantly active. Synapse to synapse; microscopic lightning strikes. These storms brew and subside and boil and roar softly and loudly. Occasionally they force open the floodgates of our mind and we speak what we think and suddenly we have performed magic. Our bodies have transmitted electrical currents in one organ into sound waves in another and through this action we have increased the size of our population to 7 billion people. Our population is approaching the magnitude and complexity of our own brains.

What is poetry but the venting of excess thoughts. Some people say poetry tells a story. I say, the only story that is told through poetry is the singly story of human existence: we communicate our inner-most thoughts, opaque and diffuse reflections of the mechanized action of our brains, in the hopes that one word in a thousand words will be heard by someone else and change the way that person thinks. Poetry is not beautiful or simple or elegant. Not in its true form. It's merely a precision, targeted attack of thoughts. It the breath-taking cloud that occurs when a sonic-boom surrounds an ICBM.

I had originally titled this post "The Meaning of Poetry", but I decided to rename it "Thoughts on Poetry" for two primary reasons: 1) To fit the internal organizational vernacular that is consistent throughout this Titanic blog. 2) To show that, at the end of the day, I don't really know the meaning of anything.