Journal tags: survival

I was doing some housekeeping on my website recently, tidying up some broken links, that kind of thing. I happened on the transcript and video for the talk I gave two years ago called “Sci-fi and Me.”

I really enjoyed preparing and giving that talk. It’s the kind of topic I’d love to speak/podcast about more.

Part of the structure of the talk involved me describing ten topics that might be encountered in the literature of science fiction. I describe the topic, mention some examples, and then choose one book as my pick for that topic.

For the topic of post-apocalypse stories, I chose Emily St. John Mandell’s Station Eleven. I love that book, and the equally excellent—though different—television series.

I’ve written in the past about why I love it:

Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

You’ve got a post-apocalyptic scenario where the pursuit of art helps giving meaning to life. That’s Station Eleven, but it also describes a film currently streaming on Netflix called Apocalypse Clown. Shakespeare’s been swapped for clowning, the apocalypse is set in Ireland, and the film is a comedy, but in a strange way, it tackles the same issue at the heart of Station Eleven: survival is insufficent.

I really enjoyed Apocalypse Clown, mostly down to Natalie Palamides’s scene-stealing performance. It very much slipped by under the radar, unlike the recent Netflix production Leave The World Behind

If you haven’t watched Leave The World Behind yet, stop reading please. Because I want to talk about the ending of the film.

SPOILERS

I never read the Rumaan Alam novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The mounting dread, the slow trickle of information, all good vibey stuff.

What I really liked was the way you can read the ending in two different ways.

On the large scale, we hear how everything that has unfolded is leading to the country tearing itself apart—something we see beginning to happen in the distance.

But on the smaller scale, we see people come together. When the final act was introduced as “The Last One” I thought we might be in for the typical trope of people turning on one another until there’s a final survivor. But instead we see people who have been mistrustful of one another come to help each other. It felt very true to the reality described in Rebecca Solnit’s excellent A Paradise Built In Hell.

The dichotomy between the large-scale pessimism and the smale-scale optimism rang true. It reminded me of The Situation. The COVID-19 pandemic was like a Rorscharch test that changed as you zoomed in and out:

I’ve noticed concentric circles of feelings tied to geography—positive in the centre, and very negative at the edges. What I mean is, if you look at what’s happening in your building and your street, it’s quite amazing how people are pulling together.

But once you look further than that, things turn increasingly sour. At the country level, incompetence and mismanagement seem to be the order of the day. And once you expand out to the whole world, who can blame you for feeling overwhelmed with despair?

But the world is made up of countries, and countries are made up of communities, and these communities are made up of people who are pulling together and helping one another.

Yesterday was Wednesday. Wednesday evening is when I play in an Irish trad session at The Jolly Brewer. It’s a highlight of my week.

Needless to say, there was no session yesterday. I’ll still keep playing tunes while we’re all socially distancing, but it’s not quite the same. I concur with this comment:

COVID-19 has really made me realize that we need to be grateful for the people and activities we take for granted. Things like going out for food, seeing friends, going to the gym, etc., are fun, but are not essential for (physical) survival.

It reminds of Brian Eno’s definition of art: art is anything we don’t have to do. It’s the same with social activities. We don’t have to go to concerts—we can listen to music at home. We don’t have to go the cinema—we can watch films at home. We don’t have to go to conferences—we can read books and blog posts at home. We don’t have to go out to restaurants—all our nutritional needs can be met at home.

But it’s not the same though, is it?

I think about the book Station Eleven a lot. The obvious reason why I’d be thinking about it is that it describes a deadly global pandemic. But that’s not it. Even before The Situation, Station Eleven was on my mind for helping provide clarity on the big questions of life; y’know, the “what’s it all about?” questions like “what’s the meaning of life?”

Part of the reason I think about Station Eleven is its refreshingly humanist take on a post-apocalyptic society. As I discussed on this podcast episode a few years back:

It’s interesting to see a push-back against the idea that if society is removed we are going to revert to life being nasty, brutish and short. Things aren’t good after this pandemic wipes out civilisation, but people are trying to put things back together and get along and rebuild.

Related to that, Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

I’m quite certain that one positive outcome of The Situation will be a new-found appreciation for activities we don’t have to do. I’m looking forward to sitting in a pub with a friend or two, or going to see a band, or a play or a film, and just thinking “this is nice.”