Flying Abstraction Airlines

Maps are practically obsolete. For explorers, maps came in handy for charting a course through unknown lands and letting the traveler know where he was along the way. The map was a decoding device, a conceptual bridge that matched the mental “Where am I?” to the specific attributes of a physical landscape. It was also a way of creating a personal record of a journey—memory inscribed in rivers and mountain ranges. But these days, maps are passé.

I know maps are becoming obsolete because we’ve started framing them and hanging them on museum walls. And if there’s anything Marcel Duchamp taught us, it’s that as soon as you stick something in a museum, it becomes art. I myself have got a lovely piece sticky-gummed to the wall above my bed. It’s a big map of the Grand Canyon—a satellite photograph with roads and cities superimposed in enhanced colors. It would be completely useless as a navigational tool, but it’s really nice to look at. I guess it’s a cross between abstract and conceptual art.

But maps are just the beginning. The entire institution of travel is undergoing a rapid phase of abstraction. We are a generation that has never known what it means to reach a far off destination by passing through every point in between. Mass, rapid, modern transit means a loss of contact with the “in-between-ness” of places. Air travel is great because it lets us connect two distant places by just folding a map. And you’ll notice that if you fold correctly, what disappears into the crease is all the area in between. A’s and B’s on a map are points unconnected by real land but joined by imaginary dotted routes. Even on the T, subway stations are connected by line drawings in bright primary colors that resemble Mondrian paintings.

With the airplane, the real question is never “Where are you flying?” but “Which places are you avoiding by flying?” The real appeal of flight—apart from humanity’s mythical obsession with flying fantasies (remember Daedalus and Icarus?)—is not just efficiency. It’s the fact that airplanes allow us to jump over undesirable places. Coast to coast flight is implicitly about the Middleland, which we may get to know through the comforting familiarity of islands like Cincinnati or Atlanta. The Middleland is a vast sea populated by atolls, stopover oases in the middle of an untraversable desert. Its airports simply reproduce the array of gates, fast-food establishments and X-ray machines that we’d find in any airport. Every airport looks the same, and no matter where we have to stopover, we feel comfortable because it looks just like the place we’d like to be.

What I find weird about air travel is that I don’t actually have to do anything. Here’s what I know: I get on a plane, seat myself, experience some shaking and rumbling for about five hours, get off the plane and Poof! I’m in Los Angeles. Magic! Tactile sensation, immediate contact, synaesthetic pleasure: These are the artifacts of old-fashioned travel that have been replaced by the passivity of the “commuter.” Even if I bother to look out the window somewhere over South Dakota, the enormous visual distance between me and the ground turns the world below into a series of grids, geometrical shapes and snaking lines. The landscape is pretty, but it’s not real.

I mention all this because we’re all about to head off on planes for exciting spring breaks in exotic locales. And before we do, it’s important to remember that we don’t deserve airplanes. This is sort of a silly thing to say (I sure as hell didn’t ask for airplanes), but if we have any ambition of becoming travelers—not just tourists—then we should take it to heart. Airplanes are anti-travel devices. As soon as the question becomes “how fast can we get there?” you might as well not go at all. Travelers—the real ones—don’t know or care where they’re going, so long as they’re going. Tourists are travelers with a script. Sights to see, places to go, items to check off a cultural to-do list: The tourist has to accomplish these things as quickly as possible. Tourists are annoyed by discomfort and terrified by uncertainty. They carry Let’s Go guidebooks. A real traveler doesn’t use airplanes, and if he does, he damn well doesn’t buy a return ticket. Even if we reject out of hand the clichés that tell us, “Life’s a journey, not a destination,” doesn’t it still make sense that travel, of all things, should be about the journey?

One day, no doubt, we’ll have teleportation devices. Maybe they’ll look like telephone booths, or perhaps they’ll resemble the Orgasmatron from Woody Allen’s Sleeper. In any case, when they finally are invented, teleporters will be the final surrender of travel to the armies of abstraction. And then the hoards of lei-draped tourists boarding their Abstraction Airlines flight to Costa Rica will shout, “So much for the journey. All hail the destination!”

Christopher W. Snyder ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.