Finally!
It has been such a long and tedious way to the airport. Catching the milk train, transferring to the jam-packed subway, maybe a taxi? As the train has been too late for your own schedule to begin with. At last you arrive and finish the security check after a seemingly endless wait, befallen by a seemingly incurable headache, mashed between other anonymous sardines who nonetheless share your mandatory plight. You rush down to the airside gates, time’s flying with or without you! Then you gasp. You think you forgot something, maybe your scarf or anything replaceable, but alas, even those items cannot escape the obsessive feel of completeness the airport afflicts you with. The group in front of you already hushed around the next corner, you may never see them again. After turning back and in the heat of catching your plane, you have not yet come to realise this sudden, stifling, unusual silence, the lack of unintelligible banter, baby screams, and international voices crossing each other through the cordoned off, air-conditioned halls. Where is the ebullient holiday flare? You halt abruptly and catch a glimpse of the security channel.
Haven’t you just passed through? Has an agent not just second screened you and your belongings, because they’ve mistaken the protective nitrocellulose paper lacquer of an old Bob Shaw novel in your suitcase for a bomb? It looks all so deserted now. Devoid of life. You turn away, squinting your eyes, and continue to scour the empty gates for life.
This is not a negative account, merely a confirmation of how an environment designed to ‘host and cater’ for humans loses its human essence and exposes its machine heart and abiosis once the humans leave. Granted, all airports serve as one way hubs, therefore one might say that they do not have much room to improve anyway. They suck in humans on one end and unload them on the other. One ways are, needless to say, by default not as versatile as normal ways but in the grand scheme they offer a valuable share.
Airports are made to make you forget cogitation, in fact your entire identity, and focus solely on getting in and out while morphing with the crowd into a codified, catalogued blob. People often forget their worries in airports because they are so occupied with check ins, boarding deadlines, or simply with a crushingly unproductive haze while waiting their turn to the tin box. Once you’re in, all your sorrows fade into the sole priority of surviving international synchronisation. The airport is a non-place, probably the epitome of a non-place, or as Marc Augé calls them, French-ily, non-lieu (philosophical terms sound so much more sophisticated in French, don’t they?).
A place that has nothing to serve, except automaton-esque transaction. If you don’t abide by the rules, you’ll be held a prisoner. In fact, if you repeatedly missed your flights, you’d probably be stuck in here forever, buying Stephen King airport paperbacks or exotic perfume ‘for sale’ in the duty free shop, but still somehow paying double than usual. The identity of airports is that they have no intrinsic identity. It is a vortex simulation of ‘comfortable transit’, guiding you with signs, signals, and warnings. A mechanism of transit so wry that it has no anchor to point to comfort after all. Take, for instance, the 1965 introduced slogan by United Airlines. As you’re ‘flying the friendly skies’, you are forced to accept the premise that transit is comfortable, while you’re essentially being handled, managed, and processed like a pack of chilled meat (and it is indeed chilly at 37,000 feet in the air). Now, as Cary Grant aptly observed in the 1959 movie North by Northwest, quoting correspondingly, ‘there is no such thing as lies in marketing, there is only expedient exaggeration’, the United Airlines slogan too is an expedient exaggeration, even more so a rather trenchant parody of aviation’s character. Looking beyond the pithiness of its meaning, and the occasional experience of a good mannered coffee talk with the steward or stewardess as one pays a quadruple price aloft, which might negligibly corroborate the slogan’s idea, is it really to imply a warm, friendly relationship between airports or airlines and customers trying to get to their destinations as quickly as possible, ideally alive? This would be a friendship as shallow as it gets. In reality, both are taking part in a scripted procedure, trying to maintain a fickle of humanity under the reign of the friendly skies until the parties part again. Friendship also implies that both parties will see each other again at some point, which might be the case, though the reciprocity, which makes a relationship not only transactional and useful, or plain friendly, but gives it a long lasting meaning, will always stay amiss. At best, you have to fly the friendly skies forcefully, in good faith, and make the best of it.
One special hallmark of non-places is the sense and reality of constant regimentation. Non-places are by design unsocial, less so inviting, despite mainly handling throngs of humans.
Now you find yourself in some corridor between some gates, accompanied by a humid stench. The purified air feels dry and sterilising. It’s scratching your throat, nay, it’s scraping your whole self away. And there it is again, this stifling, unusual silence. Then, a static humming vibrates the commercial low pile carpet fibres. You can’t hear your steps, but you can hear your heart pounding stronger. You wonder what awaits you at the corner. Another one of those grey yet eerily colourless corridors? The architecture seems endless, much like the Backrooms (a modern internet phenomenon based on an endless array of windowless office rooms hidden between reality and the beyond).
But take heart! You are constantly supervised by cameras and guided by clean signs, both physically and in their imperious meaning. Just shut your brain down and follow them, as each of your steps is followed. Even if, hypothetically, no other passenger was there, you would feel solitudinarian without intimacy, purely by the airport’s mapping. You’re trapped with one way mirrors all around. Every element looks so generic, makes you lose locality. Non places are liminal, as you’re always on the edge of civilisation or ‘between places’. So, where are you? You’re not really here nor there. You‘re in a non-place.