Airplane Ecstasy
Airplanes get me high. It’s a low-grade ecstasy but I think that it is actually ecstatic; my brain-states get shunted up into the next entropic register and a degree of unwinding sets in; I begin to forget who I am, even while airline-culture dehumanizes me—as I said, its low-grade.
I’ve never been afraid to fly. And yet probably the thought of spectacular death in a fiery crash is the base ingredient for this ecstatic state, plane crashes being so cinematic and commanding so much attention in the modern imagination. And likewise: planes being so flimsy—you can feel the vibrations of the rivets thrumming in your ass; it can feel as if the plane is going to get ripped apart at any moment. The speed is the thing. While you only notice this speed when landing or taking off, death is implicit in the terrific velocity of jet flight: if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in the worst possible manner. This is fossil fuel necromancy: velocities conjured from the decomposed material of our distant ancestors returned from the dead to kill the biosphere. Let us not forget that the jet plane was invented as an instrument of war. But as we all know there is no ecstasy without a little death.
Meanwhile I am trapped within a strange limbo. Though I have incredible anxiety amid packing and rushing to the airport, once I am through the hell of security a great sense of calm relief comes over me. I feel as if I have fled my life and that nothing matters. The daily story I had been telling myself, winding ever tighter and tighter up to the moment of departure, rapidly unwinds in the terminal. Once in the air I remember my life vaguely and from a great distance; sometimes it can feel as if my previous life does not exist; I shut my phone off; I decompress. Though I always make a list of things to do on the plane; I never do them. My only responsibility is to sit there in the pull and vibration of this metal airborne tube for x number of hours. I don’t watch movies and I don’t get bored. I do take naps, however, and the hypnogogic drift aids the ecstatic.
But while this ecstasy may happen wherever I sit on the plane, it is far more intense if I have a window seat. The Greeks describe a viewpoint that they call kataskopos: this is a privileged view only given to the gods, birds and mountaineers. I think they are describing a kind of ecstasy, if not vertigo, (which I suppose also to be ecstatic, if done in the right way. Do birds have vertigo?!?). Of course the Greeks could not imagine modern aeronautics. Astronauts suffer from the acute surplus of this viewpoint and experience an existential crisis; the world that they had once thought to be everything becomes small and perishable in the grip of all that dark empty space. At the level of the commercial aircraft the sublime has not yet tipped over into existential terror. The horizon remains at the same eye level. The disc of the earth expands, even while everything upon it shrinks. All large things become small: thunderstorms, entire cities, mountain ranges, whole coastal sea paths all shrink to a miniature diorama beneath the icy-bright neon glaze of the exosphere. In moments of lift-off this shrinking of reality is experienced as a kind of transformational magic; those on the plane are given a provisional and claustrophobic god-status; a beatific vision from above the heavenly cloudscape—but not without a great deal of bodily discomfort: sore knees and sore neck.
Moments of landing, however, are always more violent than I expect them to be; the stuff of the world grows large again, the terrible sway and crunch of the landing gear making contact with the earth resounds in the mind, the phone awakens with notifications, the plane taxies forever, and one emerges, small, rattled and merely human, into the vast and impersonal junk-space of the airport security apparatus.
