Wednesday, February 19, 2014

What We Talk About When We Talk About Airports

- Robert Montgomery


Sometimes, when I need to head back home from Amsterdam to Leiden at night, I opt for the connection that has me wait over at Schiphol airport (which is en route) instead of at the Amsterdam train station. I get out of the train there and walk around the desolated halls of the airport. The glass edifices, the ubiquitous chain stores - Starbuckses and Burger Kings, - and overpriced souvenir shops, but most of all, the people. When you walk into an airport during the day, there is the bustle of life being made. People are moving swiftly in the fast lane, are taking their life into their hands. It is hard to imagine someone taking an airplane as not for a moment making some headway within their own infinitesimally confined destiny. Departing from an airport is the start of something, even if you are a businessman who does it on the daily. There is an inevitable sense of purpose.

At night, there is none of that. People saunter. I see a man spend at least a minute getting the change together to buy a sandwich. When do you ever see that during office hours? The man queued up behind him does not mind, nor does the clerk. There is no time here, now. There is never any time in airports. Maybe this is because they are always brightly lit; you have to peer past the glass facade to discern the time of day. Of course, there is departure time, but this is a notion seemingly abstracted from the sanitised hallways of the airport. It is just a number hanging in the air that cannot be properly wedded to the place. Is that, perhaps, because airports themselves are not grounded in a place? This is curious, because air travel is so concerned with space, with moving, with going somewhere and arriving somewhere else. But you wouldn't know this judging from the airports. They are void of local flavor, they are naught but places of transaction. You pay to come and go.

“Down by the tracks,” sings (ex!-claims!) mewithoutyou's Aaron Weiss in their song Carousels, “Watching trains go by to remind me there are places that aren't here.” This is the flip side of that paradox, the spacelessness of airports. In its own absence, it embellishes all the places that you normally would not think of as places. The terminal is an interim. It is purgatory.

Nowhere is the appeal of the airport more concentrated than in the television screens that hang in rows from the terminal ceilings to announce the departure and arrival of flights, whose absence of aesthetic self-consciousness and whose workmanlike casing and pedestrian typefaces do nothing to disguise their emotional charge and imaginative allure. Tokyo, Amsterdam, Istanbul; Warsaw, Seattle Rio… The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one know our name. How pleasant to hold in mind through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon… that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere, for Baudelaire’s ‘anywhere! anywhere!’: Trieste, Zurich, Paris.

- Alain de Botton, On Travel


Perhaps they are even more than purgatory: heaven itself. So brightly lit. The stewardesses as angels, the pilot as God? You put your life in their hands, but statistically speaking - and I think outside of the scare times directly following terrorist events most people do feel this way - air travel is an extremely ritualistic and structured thing. It usually unfolds exactly as planned. Every flight is virtually the same. Ritualistic in a religious way almost. Perhaps we have to get a little religious in order to fend off the idea that we are defying gravity. For Don DeLillo, always looking for what best defines the modern age, airports are safe havens; they are places in which your children can grow up.

Planes and terminals are the safest of places for the very young and very old. They are looked after, smiled upon, admired for their resourcefulness and pluck. People ask friendly questions, offer them blankets and sweets.

"Every child ought to have the opportunity to travel thousands of miles alone, " Tweedy said, "for the sake of her self-esteem and independence of mind, with clothes and toiletries of her own choosing. The sooner we get them in the air, the better. Like swimming or ice skating. You have to start them young. It's one of the things I'm proudest to have accomplished with Bee. I sent her to Boston on Eastern when she was nine. I told Granny Browner not to meet her plane. Getting out of airports is every bit as important as the actual flight. Too many parents ignore this phase of a child's development. Bee is thoroughly bicoastal now. She flew her first jumbo at ten, changed planes at O'Hare, had a near miss in Los Angeles. Two weeks later she took the Concorde to London. Malcolm was waiting with a split of champagne."

Barring mechanical failures, turbulent weather and terrorist acts, Tweedy said, an aircraft traveling at the speed of sound may be the last refuge of gracious living and civilized manners known to man.

- Don DeLillo, White Noise

Aerotropolis

Perhaps airports should be a warning for us. Their calculated, structured, trusted ways might spread across the lands. This is the future as envisioned by John Kasarda, as chronicled in Aerotropolis by Greg Lindsay. He wants the airport to morph into a city, thus an aerotropolis, which he defines as a “self-contained factory town with assembly lines literally ending in the bellies of waiting planes.” Kasarda calls our modern age the Instant Age, characterized by on-demand services and instant gratification of every desire, or as Umberto Eco and later Thomas de Zengotita had it, by “the moreness of everything.” The aerotropolis seems in a sense like a relic, a belated attempt to better recreate the connected online world in the flesh. Many companies have already created such aerotropoli, their warehouses spawning a small airport and a little town of workers. Will Self, in his review of Lindsay's book, noted that “at the core of Kasarda's conception of the aerotropolis lies the notion that space - unlike time - is fungible.” This peculiar quality of the airport to be of undefined space and time, to be interchangeable, is why the airport is the chosen poison of these architects of the new world. To recreate the Internet in the physical world is to want Instant Everything; everything, everywhere, all the time. This denies local flavor, the idea that places have their own unique footprint, their own pros and cons, have something to offer other than transportable products and experiences.

Will Self has made it a sport of his to walk to and fro airports. Like the surrealists and situationists before him, who recognised the subversive power of walking in the Age of the Automobile, Self similarly acknowledges this in the Age of the Aeroplane, where the debit of displacement is even higher. “I find it uncanny to be in a world in which, as I write this very sentence, I will travel thirty or forty miles through the upper atmosphere,” he writes in Psychogeography. Rebecca Solnit, in her history of walking, Wanderlust, once wrote of her suspicion that “the mind works at three miles an hour”. In fairness, if the future pans out as posited in Aerotropolis, this will cease to matter: every place will look and feel the same, so no mind calisthenics will be necessary to keep up. Will Self finds one such vision of the future in Dubai. After he takes a two-day walk from its airport towards the city center - Dubai, as you might imagine, being a city that sits rather well with Kasarda and Lindsay - he dismisses the duo's utopia once and for all:

My response to this Xanadu - powered by jet fuel and misted by the evaporation of desalinated water - was to stop flying altogether: I no longer wished to pick up any airmiles that contributed to such a future. Perhaps if frenetic flyers like Kasarda and Lindsay ever dared attempt a sustained hike through the wastelands of the postmodern ugliness they enthuse about, they might take a different view. After trekking through Dubai you don't have to be a Platonist to conclude that anything that aesthetically revolting must be not simply amoral, but bad.

Will Self, The Frowniest Spot on Earth


The airport, especially at night, is a pleasant void, where the cropped-up emotions and frustrations of your life will drain away with every plane that takes off. But it is only pleasant because these emotions and frustrations are there in the first place. We should not allow the airport to expand amorphously to cover everything. If we do, we will lose more than we've bargained for.