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Title: PILOT

Author: Danika Stegeman LeMay

Premise: I/YOU/WE crash land on an island, fall into chaos, cling onto love, pine for escape, come to terms with YOUR/MY/OUR predicament, sail through occasional references to the TV show LOST.

Publisher: Spork Press

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A book surrounded by LOST, using it but not about it.

Suffocating it?

Bleaching out the plot, beautifying the remainder?

Maybe.

Here’s the second page, after the plane crash, before the drama begins:

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You’re being worthless.

I’m staring at bodies.

Does that change anything?

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First [and key] point, which I probably won’t be able to answer:

What does LOST represent in this work?

Possibilities:

1] A group of characters that is literally lost, adrift.

2] A popular TV show that galvanised people who are [still] so lost that they spend most of their free time over-analysing vacuous TV shows/the spectacle.

3] Just a TV show with a title that contrasts with the authority-conceit of pilot [kind of]

4] The first puzzle box show that didn’t know how to off itself and could’ve posed questions indefinitely if other shows hadn’t come along to replace it.

5] A metaphor for the current human experience as felt by those with eyes, brain and a spluttering pineal gland.

One could fit, and all could fit.

But to me, with jagged memory of a show I never watched/only saw clips of, I’d go with the puzzle box aspect cos whenever LOST pops up online this is what gets criticised. Not island life, but the byzantine plot. Which puts in my head the idea of constantly, mindlessly asking And Then What questions just to string AN audience along on a journey that ultimately means nothing as the final feeling experienced will either be rage or disappointment, and both are unsustainable on an intellectual level unless you’ve learned how to caress the thing/reduce it to a state of wispy affiliate.

Were they in purgatory all that time?

No one will care.

Until a new audience cares twenty years later.

And then doesn’t care.

Cos WITCHER season 18 is out.

Or, worse, a LOST remake.

And they won’t really care about that either. How could they?

They weren’t there.

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To Danika [the author], what does LOST mean/represent?

The metaphor of the mysterious island/unstable environment? An acceptance of it? The loss of individual control?

Loss in general?

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Is this loss?

The community is formed and at a safe distance from each other. Not there all the time. Pried open. Going to be okay in a landscape that isn’t home, doesn’t even try to be. Except when YOU/I/WE occasionally allow it to.

A living-present, constantly shifting externally and internally?

Maybe.

I don’t know.

There is really no A to B in this thing, it’s fully absorbed in and into the island state, just contradiction on top of contradiction on top of contradiction on top of contradiction on top of

I could go on. I hate pedants. I want to write contradiction again. Maybe I should give up, re-try electronica.

Nothing follows on from its predecessor the way you are trained to expect and maybe this is common in experimental lit but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever get tired of it. And I haven’t seen it that often. Not done four times in the same sentence. To be honest, I don’t read much anymore. I have a lot of books. Can’t stand the sight of them. Apart from the sci-fi ones. I never touch those.

Is this loss of some kind?

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Counter-force to loss is potential.

The maelstrom of it.

Contradictions like hydrogen atoms, stacked together beautifully. Jarringly. Awkwardly. As poetics demands.

The term pilot implies both an element of control and, in script terms, the start beginning of something. The start beginning of something that statistically has a high chance of being cancelled before exiting the womb. The start beginning of something that has the possibility of moving in all directions that can be conceived of in the human brain. Or the Hollywood brain [inside narrowing walls]. The start beginning of something that will inevitably become the place where the most losses are located. The start beginning of something that, if successful, will be neutralised on some level, clipped into a story that the writers wanted to tell, with an A plot, B plot, broad themes, broad arcs, easily delineated character motivations, action beats etc.

See, the smoke monster is actually the raw Id of Raytheon and the tail end of the plane represents a state of-…

The other implication is control, or stable authority.

A pilot flies the plane, mostly on auto, but is ostensibly in control. Unless something malfunctions or a wing explodes. Then YOU/I/WE are at the mercy of the sky. Unless there’s somewhere to land then YOU/I/WE are in control again. Hand on stick. Bit sweaty, but still in control.

PILOT and the TV show start with a plane crash.

At least the TV show in my head does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it starts at the airport. Or the characters waking up on the beach. I don’t know.

But PILOT definitely starts that way.

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Still-moving engine vs shredded spine vs nerves coming together vs spilling out.

You sort of fall on me.

Pilot.

Don’t know what happens to the pilot in LOST but they’re omnipresent in this. Assuming they don’t morph into something else. Which would be a useful enhancement of their control, now that the plane’s gone. Not that they have any control during the text. No one does. Sometimes the narrator.

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It’s funny

all those pilots that never made it. The aborted ones. The majority of which never made it cos they were shit. Yet they were written originally, specifically, in the hope of getting picked up as a full show, which must’ve led the writers, through force or anxiety, to fall back on the obvious just to ensure it got picked up and, in the process of doing that, ended up making it shit. Or, in spiritual rebellion, made it too weird to greenlight. But if those aborted shows had been picked up, they could’ve gone anywhere. Been anything. And after seven seasons they wouldn’t have been anything. Just something that people remember from time to time. Cos it’s just TV filler at the end of it. But at the beginning it’s a nascent universe. Full of potential. A theoretical STAR TREK. A more likely-to-occur BSG. Waiting to be written, and when written, drained. Unable to phase into elevated myth cos that era is gone now, and it’s not weird enough anyway.

Ideally

from a potentialistic viewpoint

you’d look to get cancelled halfway through season 1, not with the predictable schematic that something like FIREFLY had laid out, but with risks and regression and schism-psyche over the rule that each character has at least one backstory element attached to make them a character and

actually

a real potentialist would do the pilot and stop there, and then refuse to let it air afterwards.

I think I may have written this already, somewhere above.

In a more concise form.

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I’ve done some more research on LOST and, according to wiki, Vincent Price was originally earmarked to play the bald know-it-all, but they had to scrap that plan when he died ten years earlier.

Also, they wanted Tanya Roberts for the Kate role.

Marc Singer for Hurley.

Brian Salzburg as

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At some point in LOST the island either goes back or forward in time and some of the characters escape.

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At some point the YOU/I/WE gets a piece of metal in YOUR/MY/OUR chest which is trying to tell us that YOU/I/WE are stuck in this place, stuck to the plane, so YOU/I/WE might as well make some madness out of it.

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I love you. Who are you?

Let’s stoke the fire. Get off my beach.

This was a terrible accident. I’ve made a brand new monster here.

You did it. It’s all my fault.

Who are you? I love you.

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There’s how you think you’d act if you were stuck on a beach in Hawaii with actors who probably wouldn’t do much after this and then there’s the reality of the actual manic state that you are currently already in.

Translated to a beach on Hawaii.

On an island persistently throwing a giant spanner into the guts of its own unfinished works.

Is it a relationship YOU/I/WE are in?

Is that the metaphor?

Doesn’t matter.

Just flow from each contradiction to the next, see YOURSELF/MYSELF/OURSELVES in there somewhere.

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I really really want to know what this all means. But that could be beyond me. Do I have the energy or brain to pull it apart word by word? What if I do that and still don’t understand?

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_ate?

Nate?

Fate?

Kate?

I think there was a character called Kate but I’m not sure.

Was there a black horse in the TV show, in the jungle?

What does a black horse represent mythically?

Happy death?

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Hey Danika

I’ve finished my third read-through and have decided to believe that you maybe didn’t intend this to mean anything. That there was no guiding hand, no

attempt to craft sclerotic supple island metaphor. It was written from your gut, in the trance-void-state and edited only for typos, some of which you left in

cos you thought they might work better that way. After reading it back, you probably sensed a relationship theme, I love you, why do I love you,

stop following me, some pilot you turned out to be. Then phased that into a deeper-buried I mechanism type thing. The hurricane swirl inside your own

head. Am I right?

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Luckily, you don’t need to know much about LOST the TV show to get something from PILOT.

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Just the basics of the plot, the island plane crash premise.

Nothing else, really.

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Constantly shifting states on constantly shifting terrain.

Re-territorialisation for 0.2 seconds then De- again.

It seemed like irony in the desert island setting until I did more digging and found out the island was a structure, could move forward and backward in time.

So not irony after all.

More like a natural state of chaos within larger-form chaos.

Light a fire. Run into the dark.

Maybe ironic in other ways that are beyond me.

Ironic that they become comfortable within the constant shifting?

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In BLAKE’S 7, the characters knew it was a lost cause, that they would eventually die if they continued to function in contradiction to the [not STAR TREK type] Federation, and they continued anyway cos it was both hopeless and exhilarating

that kind of chaos constant community cut-throat dynamism abyss

and Avon

no matter how many times he threatened to take the Liberator and leave, the poor Zapata stan always found a way to stay, one scene doughty, another sociopathic, another flamboyant, another glib, and then death [implied].

YOU/I/WE become the island, at last. Subsumed or the subsumer, doesn’t matter which. It has all the beautiful/ugly contradictions we need, and the environment to continue creating more indefinitely. No need to admit rescue. Even after it has come.

Is this an accurate reading of the text?

Don’t YOU/I/WE die at the end [together]?

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Years ago, I watched LOST HIGHWAY for the first time and thought what the fuck is this, how did he get here?

I watched NOSFERATU and thought, which one is God, which one is Judas?

I thought I watched the TURIN HORSE, but probably didn’t.

I read MANHATTAN TRANSFER, about thirty pages of it.

Tried Beckett, Burroughs, CRITTERS 2: the novelisation, Breton, Acker.

I watched some Korean thing that was just pulsating black holes one after the other next to an old man’s face and

there’s a practice to this

an endurance that

I keep having to remind myself of.

Don’t try to understand it.

Feel it.

Especially if you don’t know what’s going on.

That’s what I did with PILOT. And SPELUNKER. And SORCERERER. And RYAN’S BABE. And my own work that I hadn’t read for a few years.

And it’s worked pretty well so far.

Try it.

Do it your own way.

Write something.

Bleed.

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Thinking of it now, this does remind me of SPELUNKER.

In some way.

An environment of esoteric nature, chaotic non-design, architecture beyond comprehension, confusion in the narrator, contradictory states and declarations, a sense of ecstasy-stroke-terror, hubs beyond the main complex etc.

Differences?

PILOT cuddles up to mania throughout, SPELUNKER kind of goes there at the end but apart from that remains detached/scientific.

From what I remember.

SPELUNKER was months ago now.

PILOT is still here.

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Lynch?

Cronenberg?

De Gea?

Who?

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Just received a note from the author [Danika], potentially explaining the intent behind PILOT:

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Holy shit. I am an island and you are an island and we are the bright light of shipwreck (just some Oppen shit). I am a little manic. Is there an outside AND an inside? Is anybody going to fucking save me?? If I just keep walking, where will I end up? In a goddamn circle, that’s where. I mean this to mean nothing. I mean this to mean everything. Did you know, LOST was originally called LIST? You should’ve. Hurley did.

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PILOT [sadly] seems to be unavailable via Spork Press, but [happily] you can still get a copy from the author herself over at big cartel.