Lost: Madness and Clarity

One of my favourite writers of all time is Timothy Findley. I was crazy about CanLit (Canadian literature) when I was a student, and I was forever changed the first time I discovered Findley’s work through his masterpiece, The Wars. A gorgeous, gorgeous piece of writing about a boy’s experience as a soldier in the First World War and the mental toll it took on people, this book led me to the many, many other books Findley wrote. Findley was a lion of CanLit, a popular fave but also a critical and literary success. I’ll never forget the morning of June 22, 2002, when I grabbed the paper, unrolled it, and saw the giant picture of Findley on the front cover with his birth... and death... dates written across the top, and I leapt back as if the paper had electrocuted me. I’ve never had such a visceral reaction to a newspaper headline before, but I began crying. He’d died in France the day before after a fall, and I was devastated.

One of my favourite novels of Findley’s was 1993’s Headhunter, set in the very real mental hospital on Queen Street West in Toronto. That same year I was privileged enough to interview the man, who is affectionately known as “Tiff” (after his full initials, Timothy Irving Frederick Findley), when he had written a play, The Stillborn Lover, to be performed for the first time at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, where I was then living and going to school. I remember being so excited, and since I’d written numerous papers on his work, I’d read most of the interviews he’d conducted over the years, knew what questions he avoided (and was still determined to ask them anyway), and I knew his work inside and out. I was prepared.

I called him up, his partner Bill answered the phone, we chatted for a minute, and then he passed the phone over to Tiff. And what followed was an incredible hour-long phone call that went from interview to conversation. We talked about the play, about Headhunter, about his books (and there was one question I’d been trying to find an answer to for two years of paper-writing but he refused it in every interview I’d read, and when I asked it at the very end of the interview, he answered it without hesitation), and... about madness. It’s an ongoing theme in Findley’s writing: his main characters are mad, or the world around them is mad, or their family has gone mad. And he revealed that he’d had an aunt who suffered from a mental illness and he’d spent a lot of time around her, and where others would avoid her, he would talk with her endlessly. Through those conversations he discovered that this woman seemed to “see” things that no one else did... she had a sense of clarity about the world around her that cut through all the bullshit and just saw right to its core. She’d been one of the biggest influences on his writing, and he found he was often trying to work that sense of clarity through madness into many of his books based on the experiences he’d had with her.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because in the past week I’ve been thinking more about that long conversation I had with him and wondering if there could be a link with his ideas and Lost.

In the sideways world on Lost, the characters seem to need a jolt of some kind to see the original timeline, whether it’s being shot or kissed or holding hands or some burst of electromagnetism. But Libby didn’t need a jolt. Her madness gave her the clarity to see to the other world. There were no holding hands or kisses or getting slammed by a car or almost drowned... she just saw it, no jolt needed. I suggested on Chris Kelly’s site the other day that I wondered if Libby in the original timeline was in the mental institution because she could actually see the sideways world and thought she was completely mad. Is it possible someone from the original timeline had a sense of the other timeline?

Hurley has spent time in the mental institution but is really sensitive about it – we’ve seen many instances where he’s become incensed when someone has suggested he’s crazy – and he can speak to dead people. Just like Libby seeing the original timeline from the sideways world, he can see across the line of the dead. No one else can see them, just like no one else can see the sideways world except for Libby, suggesting that once again those who are mad have a clarity that allows them to see things other people simply can’t see.

Think of how many of the books that have been mentioned on the show and how many of them deal with madness... just about every character in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass worlds is entirely mad, and Lewis Carroll’s books are the most referenced ones on the show. If you look back through the show and think about every time a character mentions that someone else is crazy, usually immediately following that moment, the character who’s been called crazy has a moment of clarity. It’s definitely worth thinking about.

Oh, and to bring this all back around to me (which, those on my Facebook page will tell you, is definitely my modus operandi), after interviewing Findley I wrote that piece in the student newspaper at UWO, and the night it ran I went down to the premiere performance at the Grand Theatre. I went over to the press table to grab my packet (I was going to be writing a review for the next day’s paper) and the press woman got my name and said, “Oh! I have a message from you from Tiff.” Me = froze. “He said that of all of the stories on the show that he read today from all of the various papers, including the national newspaper, he wanted me to tell you that you were the only one who truly GOT it, and that he got that sense from you even when he spoke to you. He said he really loved your piece, and wanted me to tell you to keep up with the writing, and you will be successful at it someday.”

I barely remember that night’s performance, because all I could do was sit there in the audience in a blind haze, enveloped by the surreal notion that my favourite writer in the universe had just complimented MY writing. Wow. It was a moment I’ll never forget.