fear of flying
Outfit for Travel, Kubo Shunman. Met Collection.
My cohort-mate at dinner: Someone died on my flight once.
What?
Yeah, a man had a heart attack. Then the pilot comes on, and he’s saying We’re about to make an emergency landing in Utah, just hold on, sir.
Holy shit.
This is the worst thing someone I know has witnessed firsthand, but horror stories from air travel abound: not just from these pandemic years, but also the dentist who got bloodied as law enforcement dragged him off a United jet, the planes stuck on the tarmac for hours on end before federal regulation enforced stricter time limits, pets injured or killed in transit. And that’s not to mention the crashes, some of them unsolved mysteries.
As a child I watched a lot of Discovery Channel and learned about malfunctions like what happened on British Airways Flight 5390. In summer 1990, a window in the cockpit blew out while the plane was mid-air. It caused rapid depressurization and the pilot, Tim Lancaster, was sucked out of the window. Flight staff could just barely hold onto him by the leg, to keep his body (they assumed he was dead) from flying into the wing or engine and possibly causing an even greater catastrophe. They made an emergency landing, and Lancaster survived.
After the TV special on BA 5390, I began noticing the minuscule rivets between the panes of airplane windows — how so much rests on so little.
I’m actually really OK with flying, unlike between a quarter to half of Americans. (Survey methodologies differ. You’ll get a larger number if you ask who’s “uncomfortable” with flying than “afraid.”) Being on a plane is physically confining and nausea-inducing, but I haven’t vomited on one since I was six and coming back from New York — I still remember that veggie wrap in the green tortilla — and I’ve been through some armrest-clutching turbulence, but no oxygen masks dropping from the ceiling or emergency landings. Instead my fears are of predictable and temporary bothers: dry eyes, not being able to sleep, needing to clamber over the man in the aisle who just gestures impatiently outwards instead of getting up.
And then there’s this: I started forgetting where I was. Getting off planes, I would stumble into bright atria and long hallways subdivided by queue ropes, noisy with families and intercom announcements, and wonder what side of the world I was on. Maybe the desperate grasping was just a product of exhaustion, the toll of interrupted circadian rhythms and sleeping with my neck hunched over a tray table. Maybe the cause was the generic familiarity of airports, the way they blend together, the gray jet bridges and black leatherette gate seats.
There’s writing about “AirSpace,” globalization flattening the world, placelessness. (Here I borrow from the discipline of geography to use the words “place” and “space” distinctly — place as physical space with character, meaning, associated people and experiences, space purely as location.) I can handle the deja vu of the same logos, cars, clothes on mannequins, but the really strange thing for me is the smell: how an airport smells like an airport. Is it the fast food? Bare feet slapping against low-pile carpet in the security line? The shrink-wrapped bottles of perfume and whiskey gleaming in the blindingly bright duty-free shop?
It only lasts a few seconds, this reprisal of everything that can be mediated by currency, the unmooring that makes me immaterial as a ghost. Then I see a sign. Welcome to X. The lightbulb shot glasses: I Got Lit in City, State. (The first time I realized these weren’t specific to Hartford, Connecticut, I felt genuinely betrayed.) My brain rushes back.
The most unique airport I’ve visited, one where I couldn’t forget where I was, might’ve been in French Polynesia. We disembarked via stairs right onto the tarmac. Inside, a group of traditional singers wearing flower garlands serenaded us. I wonder about how tourism creates incentives to perform culture like this. In China there are Buddhist theme parks where paid staffers play monks. A sense of place made on the backs of actors.
Jamaica Kincaid writes in her book A Small Place a second-person narrative of tourism to the island of Antigua. The reader moves through the island as a tourist: someone whose implied foreignness, wealth, and whiteness moves them swiftly through customs, allows them to exoticize the disrepair of a bad road or an earthquake-damaged library, gives them a willful ignorance about the seamy underside of their vacation in a paradise on earth. Kincaid writes,
You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it. You must not wonder where your bathwater went when you pulled out the stopper. You must not wonder what happened when you brushed your teeth. Oh, it might all end up in the water you are thinking of taking a swim in; the contents of your lavatory might, just might, graze gently against your ankle as you wade carefree in the water, for you see, in Antigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal system. But the Caribbean Sea is very big and the Atlantic Ocean is even bigger; it would amaze even you to know the number of black slaves this ocean has swallowed up. When you sit down to eat your delicious meal, it's better that you don't know that most of what you are eating came off a plane from Miami. And before it got on a plane in Miami, who knows where it came from? A good guess is that it came from a place like Antigua first, where it was grown dirt-cheap, went to Miami, and came back. There is a world of something in this, but I can't go into it right now.
There is a world of something in this — capital flows, dependency, the reproduction of colonial relations — but also about place and its subjectivity, how people can occupy the same location yet be in different places. The local, the tourist. Kincaid writes, A tourist is an ugly human being.
Is the local always better? The geographer Doreen Massey writes in “A Global Sense of Place” that Marx’s “annihilation of space by time” has provoked antagonistic, reactionary, sometimes ethnocentric responses in communities that seek to hold onto their place-ness (Brexiteers in the UK come to mind). Another way to think about this might be through Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi’s writing in his 1945 book The Great Transformation. Polanyi wrote that the more the free market takes over, commodifying everything, the more social bonds are corroded. In response, societies self-protectively lash out against marketization, in a process he terms “the double movement.” (An aside: Polanyi has a broader and quite interesting argument about how “laissez-faire was planned; planning was not”; Nikil Saval’s piece in The Nation is a very readable introduction.)
I first read Polanyi in college around the same time as the ascendancy of Trump. The double movement of The Great Transformation is an optimistic one, in which people demand greater protections from the state — government as muzzle on the market’s snarling mouth. In reality, amidst the political vicissitudes of 2016, I started to think the double movement would not always be on my side. What if it looked like racists yelling about foreigners stealing their jobs? Or NIMBYs in city council meetings fighting the construction of new housing because of neighborhood character?
Massey provides an optimistic view in her paper — that a sense of place need not be “self-closing and defensive.” Thoughtful place-ness, to Massey, must recognize place doesn’t equal stasis and fixed essence, nor is it bounded by city limits. She exhorts the reader to develop a progressive sense of place, one that is situated globally, “linking that place to places beyond.” Amitav Ghosh does this in In an Antique Land, the book based on research he did in Egypt as an Anthropology doctoral student before his successful career as a novelist. The book intersperses his own travels and ethnography in Egypt with archival research on the richly syncretic Indian Ocean world of some seven hundred years before. He follows the thread of a Jewish trader named Ben Yiju who moved to the Malabar coast; obtained custody of an Indian slave girl, Ashu; then freed her and married her. Ashu’s footprint in the archive is scant, and Ghosh alludes to social censure as one possible reason Ben Yiju’s friends and family don’t mention her in their correspondence.
Yet, since Ben Yiju chose, despite the obvious alternative, to marry a woman born outside his faith, it can only have been because of another overriding and more important consideration. If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof.
Ghosh ends the book with a visit to a heavily-guarded tomb, where he struggles to explain his motivation for visiting to an Egyptian guard. The guard is perplexed why an Indian man who isn’t Jewish or Israeli wants to visit the tomb of a holy man. Ghosh writes,
There was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story…the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago.
Placeness doesn’t come from walls and wire fences. Maybe we bring it with us, the way our disposition changes when we walk into a room or land in a new place. The mad rush at touchdown I’ve seen in China and India where queuing is forgotten and it’s everyone standing up at once for the bags and flight attendants pleading, Sit down, sir, take your seat. Placeness is relational, and maybe if you have people to tether you you don’t need special architecture or garlanded singers or playacting monks.
My disorientation after landing is fleeting enough, outweighed by all that is good. I like being a passenger. I like not being in control, absolved of the conscience of my direction. For those hours in the sky I am blameless and free. I look out the window as the pilot’s voice comes over the PA, We’re beginning our initial descent. The lights twinkle into view. Dancing in my head visions of home, reunion, newness, strangers, cars and trains and ferries, miles to go before I sleep, everyone I’ve left behind and all I’ve yet to meet. How could I ever hate a plane, when it brings me back to you?
*article rec* have I been doing everything wrong? a question I ask myself regularly - today because of reading the article Stop Venting! It Doesn’t Work. Your mileage may vary.
*book and poem rec* just finished reading the book Spatializing Blackness by Rashad Shabazz for one of my classes. If you’re interested in geography, power, blackness in America, Chicago, urban planning, and how carceral confinement isn’t just limited to prisons, check it out! One of the things Shabazz writes about is how, within Chicago’s Black Belt, residents were crammed into tiny “kitchenette” apartments that lacked private restrooms and were often deplorably maintained. One of my classmates recommended this poem, “kitchenette building” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
could a dream send up through onion fumes / Its white and violet