Art at the End of the World

I remember damage

Then escape

Then adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long time

On a Friday morning, in a competitive memory training group at the addiction centre, I was asked to provide a song that made me feel good. It could help with training our mind to be more generous to ourselves. Thinking of a recent difficult moment, the patient can listen to the music while actively trying to make themselves feel the hurt, then attempt to counteract it. My answer came quickly: Dr. Eleven by Dan Romer, from the tv-show Station Eleven. Explaining why was much harder. It’s a song that musically fits the exercise quite well. It starts slow, like a question, then an attempt at an answer, failing, trying again, then it swells and rises, rises, rises, till it explodes with hopeful solutions. But my love went beyond that. The notes meant more than their beauty, because I knew who they belonged to. They weren’t my notes; they were Jeevan’s, Kirsten’s, Miranda’s, Tyler’s. Fictional characters who had provided me the most emotionally cathartic experience of a story in years. Station Eleven is a masterful show about moving through grief and what art can do to serve that journey.

The show is a ten-episode adaptation of the similarly titled novel by Emily St. John Mandel. After a virus kills 99% of the planet’s population, people adapt to a new world. Kirsten is a member of the traveling symphony, a theatre group that performs Shakespeare plays at various settlements around Lake Michigan. She has a comic named “Station Eleven” of which only a few copies were printed and when she meets a prophet who spreads the comic’s text as visions to children born after the pandemic, she must find out who he is, what he wants and how he got the book. Explaining the plot any further is meaningless, because Station Eleven is a slow-burn that rewards you for being patient.

It only gives you the edges of people and their story in the first few episodes. Fragments of the past, of connections and falling outs, of love and death; always just enough to feel who someone is now, but never enough to understand. This may seem confusing at first, but soon enough, you realize that the creators have signposted in the perfect places. Once you reach the desired destination, and the fog clears, they give you all the answers, painful and joyous as they are, and you understand why you had to wait.

Those moments of clarity are incredibly vivid. In episode 7, Goodbye My Damaged Home, Kirsten, in a poison-induced dream, relives the events of the first three months of the pandemic as a bystander of her own life. She watches events unfold with the wisdom of twenty years and speaks to herself as a child. In the traumatic moment that defined her as an 8-year-old, the pain that she could never let go, her older self says, “This isn’t your fault. This is just what happened.” Dr Eleven plays in the last moments of this episode as young Kirsten leaves her home with her caretaker, Jeevan. It returns in the finale. It stuck with me. This is just what happened. It’s an anthem for growth and journey, for comfort and escape, one that warms my heart whenever I hear it. I remember damage. The show does too, but it doesn’t stay in it. It gives us a variety of journeys of escape.

Station Eleven asks us what the function of stories is supposed to be. Do we escape reality in the experience of creating or viewing them? Is it meant to “make the world make sense for a moment”, like the conductor says? Or does it add understanding to a current experience? To a life? Do we bring its lessons forward and let the story move and change for us? Yes. And no. It’s all of those things and none of those things. It’s a good friend you haven’t hugged in a twenty years. It’s the first person you meet after the world died. It’s a traveling troupe of misfits performing Shakespeare. It’s love and grief and hate and joy. At times, it means nothing. But there are moments where it finds you and it will mean absolutely everything.

But I’m safe now

I found it again

My home