'Lost' - A Visitor's Guide to the Cosmology of Childhood

(TW: This Started out as an Idle Series of Thoughts, but it goes to Dark Places)

Prologue: It's a Good Life

    'It's a Good Life' is best known as an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' first aired in 1961 and based on a short story by Jerome Bixby. It is extremely well-regarded and considered one of the all-time best of  the classic episodes.

Bill Mumy as Anthony Fremont

    In the episode, a small child named Anthony Fremont (Bill Mumy) who possesses godlike powers, uses them to hold his family and the other inhabitants of a small town hostage to his whims. Anyone who disobeys him, or even thinks bad thoughts, is punished. The most well-remembered of these punishments is being "wished to the cornfield" where the person ends up trapped in a vast endless cornfield until (if) Anthony sees fit to permit them to return.

    But I'm getting ahead of myself... let's go back to the beginning.

Part One: Worlds Within Worlds

    The concept of other worlds existing alongside our own and accessible via fantastical rituals, artefacts or locations is extremely common. Variations on this concept have existed for centuries in mythology, folklore, allegory and fantastical fictions. These can take many forms, from mythic Underworlds, Otherworlds and Afterlives, whimsical fancies like Little Nemo's Slumberland, The Magic Faraway Tree, Neverland or The Big Rock Candy Mountain, realms of fantastical adventure like Treasure Island, Barsoom, Middle Earth and Gotham City or the current Hollywood fascination with Multiverses.

'Everything Everywhere All At Once' (2022)

    Not only has humanity been creating otherworlds for almost its entire history, so to do we as individuals create otherworlds. As infants with no concept of object permanence, adults will often attempt to amuse and mystify us by demonstrating their magical ability to appear and disappear at will. At first, we are alarmed and confused when we see that Mummy has vanished, but before long, we will be comforted and delighted by her sudden and inexplicable return.

    'Away', then, becomes the first magical world that we can begin to conceive of. It is a mysterious, frequently frightening realm created by our limited mobility, senses and ability to understand or conceptualize a world beyond ourselves. As we grow older, however, we gain mobility, an awareness of our surroundings and an ability to begin to negotiate and investigate them. We start to develop a sense of 'There' that takes away some of the inherent magic of 'Away', even as 'Away' is replaced by similar but distinctive concepts like 'Once Upon A Time', 'Before you were born', 'In the Olden Days' or 'A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away'. Sometimes, these places will even have names like 'China', a land seemingly (and improbably) entirely inhabited by starving children, but in our minds, we know what you really mean. You mean 'Away'. We know about 'Away'. By now, we're largely comfortable with 'Away'.

    We're far less comfortable with 'Lost'. 'Lost' is a world that is married to uncomfortable feelings - everything from mild discomfort or inconvenience to abject terror. 

    Oops. Went back to the beginning beginning. Ah well, it's got us where we wanted to get to eventually, so we might as well just keep going from here.

Part Two: Let's Get Lost

    Okay, so now that we've figured out were we're supposed to be, let's get Lost. 

    All sorts of stuff ends up in 'Lost'. Favourite articles of clothing ("Well, where was it when you last saw it?"), missing homework ("I swear I packed it!"), even time ("I was supposed to be home an hour ago!"). It's kind of like 'Away', but we're too old for that trick. When something goes 'Away', we now possess the equipment to recall its existence and navigate reality enough to get to where it is. 

    'Away' goes from being a magical place to a mundane part of life. Your bag's not 'Away', it's in your room. That bottle of juice you were saving for later isn't 'Away', it's in the fridge, in the kitchen. Once you can go to 'Away' it doesn't feel like such a big deal. Hell, you can even put stuff 'Away' yourself, even if it just means shoving them under your bed or in the closet or hiding it under your desk so the teacher doesn't confiscate it. You might even stop believing in 'Away' altogether - "You didn't put those biscuits away. They're right there, in the jar!" Once we have that control over 'Away' it stops being magic.

    But 'Lost' is different. 'Lost' is a version of 'Away' we can't control. We can go to 'Away' and look there for the thing we lost, but we never, EVER want to go to 'Lost'. That place is terrifying. 'Lost' can even kill you if you stay there long enough or find yourself in the wrong parts of it.

    The fear of 'Lost' is so primordial that, as adults, we try and pretend it doesn't exist anymore. We tell ourselves lies like "It has to be somewhere", we build arcane devices like compasses, maps and GPS systems to ward it off and keep us from accidentally ending up there. We'll even make jokes about pens, lighters and odd socks to try and lift the curse of it.
    If we're going somewhere there's even a possibility we might end up there, we'll pack extensive survival kits containing ritual tools, garments, guidebooks and supplies to try to keep us alive. People write instructional manuals about what to do if you find yourself there. Our ancestors knew this terror when they first drew up their maps and tried to imagine the most terrifying thing they could imagine. Then they'd mark their maps "Here Be Dragons".
    Because even the thought of running into a dragon is better than the idea of winding up in 'Lost'.

Part Three: Lost in Translation

    The final effect of this is that we push our terror of 'Lost' back into the most primordial part of our brains, just like shoving things 'Away' under your bed, or in your closet. It makes us feel like we control 'Lost', just like we do 'Away'. Finding out otherwise can be traumatic, but you're not living with that fear just below the surface in your day-to-day life. 

    It might even grow fuzzy, obscure and indistinct enough for us to turn it into entertainment. So we amuse ourselves thinking about Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, Ambrose Bierce, D.B. Cooper, the Settlement at Roanoke, the incident at the Dyatlov Pass, the Mary Celeste, the Bermuda Triangle, Jack the Ripper. We might even make up stories like 'Hansel and Gretel', The Blair Witch Project', 'Theseus and the Minotaur', 'Wolf Creek', 'Sindbad the Sailor', 'The Backrooms'... we fill out mythology with tales of being 'Lost in Space', 'Lost in La Mancha' or 'Lost in Vegas'. Of  a 'Lost Weekend', 'Lost Boys', 'The Lost Room', 'The Lost World', 'The Land of the Lost' or even just... 'Lost'.

(L-R: Amelia Earhart, The Roanoke Colony, The Dyatlov Pass Incident, D.B. Cooper)

    We draw imaginary maps of 'Lost' so that we can just skirt the edges of that primordial child horror. Enough to give us a thrill without plunging us back into it.

    But these maps are just half-remembered artists' renditions of the Real Place. What if we tried to transform the raw sensation of 'Lost' into a fictional otherworld? 

Part Four: A Child's Map of 'Lost'

    From the comfortable distance of my adult perspective, let's imagine 'Lost' as a place. What's its geography, its landscape, its features? If we were to draw a landscape of 'Lost' what would it look like?

    Lost is simultaneously vast and claustrophobic. It has no end and yet, your movement and senses are hemmed in all around you by things you can't see past or over. There is an inherent and uncomfortable sense of wrongness. Our minds recoil from the paradox that we are simultaneously surrounded by things AND alone. The main reason for this contradiction is that things are unfamiliar and alarming. There are multitudes of them but their strangeness offers you no comfort or respite and, while they mean you no harm in and of themselves, they are a source of fear for what they might  be concealing. 

    As a child, you are a small being in a world which was not designed for you. It can be hard to see things that are above your line of sight, and most of the things around you - people, trees, buildings, houses, tower over you, blocking your line of sight. Beyond and above, there are signs of wide open spaces where you could see freely if only you weren't trapped down here. But you are. And down here, you're surrounded by legs and tree trunks and walls, and doors, restricting which way you could travel. 

    But there are no directions in 'Lost'. The only one that counts is 'towards something familiar or helpful or comfortable', but with no directions, you can't tell if you're even travelling in the right direction, or if you should be travelling at all. Maybe you're travelling towards something dangerous or terrifying. Maybe even as you're looking for something familiar, helpful and comfortable, you're travelling away from the familiar helpful and comfortable. You don't know where you are and can't see where you're going. And even though there are so very many things all around you, they all just seem to end up kind of smooshed together into a single thing... tree trunks become a forest, people become a crowd of strangers, walls become cities. 

    

Part Five: Old, Familiar Places

    One of the common sayings about being lost is that you'll probably end up crossing your own path. One of the few features in the featureless landscape is "that thing we passed hours ago". It's the sign that reminds you of the futility of your struggle.

    And in that spirit, we return by roundabout paths, to the Cornfield. Rod Serling (and Jerome Bixby before him) knew what they were doing. "Wished away to the Cornfield" has become a part of our cultural lexicon and there's a reason for that because it's as perfect an analogue for the sensation of 'Lost' as Serling and Bixby's audiences could summon. It's familiar, mundane and natural, an ordinary part of the real world, but there is something of the otherworld about it. 

    The way it hems you in and towers over you. The way it all congeals into a singular mass of sameness. Its combination of vastness and claustrophobia, familiarity and danger, those old contradictions that pluck at your nerves. In other places, it might be fields of wheat, sugar cane or bamboo, but it's all just a gateway between our world and the terrifying otherworld of 'Lost'. 

Epilogue: Going Round In Circles

    In 1973, George A. Romero, creator of 'Night of the Living Dead' was tasked by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania to create an educational film on elder abuse. The resulting film was shown only once before being shelved, and was presumed lost until a copy was discovered in 2017.

    That film is 'The Amusement Park'. It's one of the most harrowing depictions of the realm of 'Lost' ever committed to celluloid and concerns an old man, looking forward to spending a pleasant day at an Amusement Park who finds himself alone and confused in a nightmarish world of uncanny sensory overload, unpleasant, strange and abusive people and utterly disconcerting and terrifying events. In the end, he returns to his bleak, Spartan residence and tries to warn his younger self not to go, but to no avail.

Modern Poster for 'The Amusement Park's re-release

    At the films end, he addresses the audience, giving information on support systems, methods and organizations. Then, at the end, he signs off saying, "I'll see you in the park... someday."