Trains, Planes And Airports

In The Belly Of A Sleeping Whale

Photo by Shahzin Shajid on Unsplash

Western Europe. Spring 2024.

Stockholm to London.

Train. Plane. Train. Tube. Taxi. Hotel. Bar stool. Lift. Bed.

1.

The Arlanda Express from central Stockholm to Arlanda airport is prohibitively expensive, the perfect start to a modern journey, like buying a gateway drug toward full blown acceptance of corporate travel enslavement, the least dreadful experiences available only to those who can pay.

The air-conditioned carriage has tinted windows and wide woollen-weave seats that envelope passengers like an enormous catcher’s mitt. This highly engineered train devours the landscape at 200 kph in mesmerising silence, which leaves plenty of room for the voice in my head to be kidnapped by a band of excitable travellers obsessed with sharing holiday platitudes a few rows down.

There are small onboard screens displaying a continual loop of stock prices, international business news and clips of various ongoing wars. This gateway drug only indulges one vision of reality, where men and women dressed in regulation hair and tight suits scare off alternative possibilities with their impenetrable graphs and intimations of precarious instability.

Eventually the train delivers us into the bowels of the cathedral of corporate travel, The Airport, where we are whisked upwards on huge escalators toward an ever increasing dosage of power.

2.

In the cavernous entry sections we’re magically transformed from people to passengers as we funnel through the various corralling structures toward the no-man’s land of Departures.

The first requirement at The Airport is legitimation. Papers, show me your papers. Only those with up-to-date booklets confirming their “citizenship” are funnelled through to the next stage. Any fellow human without this pocket-sized permission is immediately incarcerated (likely reappearing later on the Arlanda Express onboard screens to attentively remind us all of the formalities and etiquette required by modern life).

Then comes the invasive conditioning stage where belts and shoes are removed, where plastic trays deliver laptops and luggage to uniformed representatives who unzip suitcases and dismantle any remaining sense of self determination and identity, as passengers are rammed against the truth of their increasing infantilisation and helplessness.

As we succeed through the various stages we eventually enter the Dream-Space of the corporate travel experience where authoritarianism and commerce merge into a glorious blend of shopping centre and prison. People, now fully transformed, begin behaving in ways they’d rarely indulge elsewhere. Large flagons of mega-vat lagers are consumed for breakfast as passengers race to unburden their newly discovered, unquenchable lust for sunglasses, perfumes and confectionery.

The Dream-Space is a celebration of the excessive and the unnecessary. Only things that would be immediately thrown from a lifeboat are on sale. Potent symbolic objects littered about, a never ending range of enticements. Luxury cars, affordable only to the vanishing few, are raffled off for a ticket-price that would replenish a food bank. But in the Dream-Space these tickets are enthusiastically lapped up with slavish acceptance; without these deserved luxuries who are you really? Perhaps nobody?

There are more hierarchies introduced at every opportunity - pay more and life is made easier, pay less and hindrances are thrown your path. There are Priority Channels opened to those who paid extra. Wifi for those who paid extra. A special lounge behind clouded glass panels for those who paid extra. There is nothing organic or instinctive here. Only certain behaviours are privileged. Everything else is designed out of existence.

In this highly structured and regulated environment, a subdued atmosphere of confusion and obedience grows as humans glaze over and adhere to internal logic of The Airport. As I sit and watch this brazen display, in perfect miniature, of the neoliberal hierarchies of power, class, race and gender, wrapped around a terrible vision of empowerment through wealth, the ever flickering board of destinations and gate numbers instructs me to head toward the next phase of my journey. The plane.

3.

The Escheresque geometry of the cabin creates a simultaneously large and tiny scene where repetition rules. Row after row of passengers crammed into light grey seats, splashed with blood red head rests, all facing the 1970’s style caravan curtain that barely separates the crew's galley from the cabin, a tiny stage drapery failing to hide the microwaves and toilets.

From backstage a cabin crew appears and proceeds to impatiently perform a mechanically theatrical display of reassurances that, in the event of plummeting into the North Sea, this flimsy inflatable yellow life-vest with flashing light will be just the equipment required in the freezing water.

The plane taxis toward the runway and then stops, turns, and waits like a dragster at the lights, before ferociously increasing velocity, until somehow, this ludicrously contrary contraption defies the will of nature and rises into the air like a sleeping blue whale levitating in a dream.

And then we are away, rising toward the heavens, as the paradoxical nature of flying embraces everything, even the Earth below. The beautiful organic shapes of the granite blue lakes rubbing shoulder to shoulder with straight lined agricultural plots which in turn are sliced though by never ending roads that partition the wild creatures into enormous blocks of isolation.

As we rise the true nature of the Earth’s, and my own, dizzying fragility are increasingly revealed. Vast lakes are reduced to puddles and the mighty forests merge into a hazy horizon as the plane hurtles through the -50 atmosphere, pumping recycled dry air into the pressurised living space. I gawp through the tiny window at the vague bend of the earth’s horizon and the thin atmosphere protecting this minuscule ball of life in the infinite vacuum of space, as I place my fate in the hands of a society of designers and mechanics and bankers and pilot training facilities and repair schedules and software management systems.

I order a Bloody Mary. It’s necessary.

As the sleeping whale finally breaches the clouds and bursts in the heavens, the earth now fully disappeared from consciousness, the corporate travel experience finally transforms me into a fully modern subject, lost in my own world, divorced from the reality of my fleet of complex dependencies, a tiny emperor transported through the troposphere nonchalantly sipping on a boozy drink for no better reason than I paid for it.

And then, a little cramped in my slightly broken economy seat, my body unable to fully express its sudden desire to stretch, the vodka dragging my head a few steps further from harsh reality, I realise that all this hard core materialism in action, this tube of flying aluminum and composites, has been created by soft biological agents, who themselves are programmed with values that exist only in the conscious realm. I’m flying in a theatre, conjured up out of absolutely nothing at all.

And, in a moment of almost overwhelming camaraderie, I glance around at my fellow modern subjects, their ears white-plugged, their eyes mini-screened, everyone indulging in a feeding frenzy of images and narratives, everyone interpreting the world around them through the never ending digital unplugging of reality, and I want to scream out that we don’t need to accept all this insanity of power just to travel about on our own planet, we don’t need to acquiesce to this circus of discrimination and injustice just to move freely as people. All this baloney is just a set of lies we’ve agreed on anyway, for crying out loud let’s try the truth, I want to scream, from my broken Seat F in a cramped Row 9.

But I don’t. Instead I order another drink and tilt my tired head toward the window and watch all the fluffy clouds as they sit waiting in the heavens. For what? I do not know.