Airport Landing Experience
Who is in the cockpit?
Over the last couple of years, there is a state of existence that I experience with an increasing vividness. I call it the airport landing experience, but I don’t have to be at an airport to experience it.
It is as if I have arrived on the tarmac after a long journey across the Atlantic. While I was still airborne, the world was distant, etched with the distinct lines of fields and roads and the shores of lakes or of great ocean coastlines. But now that I am at ground level, the world has woken up. The world is no longer a docile and dormant map. There are vans and trucks zipping around. There are members of the ground crew waving their hands and gesticulating to each other. Luggage is being unloaded. Wait, there’s my suitcase!
The most important feature of the airport landing experience is that the goings-on of everyday life are happening beyond the little plane window and I am not a participant. Everyone out there is living life: working, worrying, caring for the young, caring for the elderly, canvassing for a political candidate, cleaning lint from between the couch cushions, driving a car, feeding chickens, plugging in a fan to cool down a room, emptying a colostomy bag, preparing chicken tikka masala, sitting down at a piano for a nervous recital, pressing grapes underneath their squishy little toes—and here I am, inside the airplane, fresh and pink, a cosseted little larva, and I am responsible for absolutely nothing. For many minutes, I am not even allowed to get to my feet. The aisle is full. During this mode of existence, the world and its goings-on are distant and unreachable. I cannot do anything, and even if I could, my actions would not make a difference. This state of affairs, rather than distressing me, makes me feel buoyant and free.
My own existence starts to seem miraculous. I have legs and now it is my turn to stand up. I have hands and I can grip things and feel their texture. I have skin and can sense the change in temperature as I eventually walk to the passenger bridge. I can wiggle my toes. I can order a mojito at the airport lounge. I can buy a new book. I can embrace someone I love. In this moment—that is to say, during an airport landing experience, which may or may not occur during an actual airport landing—I am more conscious than at any other time of being me. I must be me, because I am thinking these thoughts and experiencing these sensations and relishing the pleasure of having a body.
Nowadays, if you want to see someone who truly relishes having a body you have to watch an athlete or a professional dancer—or a toddler. Everyday experience increasingly asks that everyone authenticate their existence through the screen. The experience of our own bodies and of our own senses will not suffice. The testimony of our neighbours, if we even know our neighbours, will not suffice. Our personal histories—the acts we performed, the principles we attempted to uphold, the work we did—count for nothing. I have a Salesforce authenticator on my phone. I also have a Microsoft authenticator. I have two-factor authentication for an untold number of applications. Being shut out of any of them would be extremely disruptive to my ongoing daily work and to the general administration of my life.
Recently I initiated a background check with the Edmonton Police in order to be eligible for a local volunteer position. After thirty minutes of paperwork—and by paperwork I mean clicking and clicking at buttons to perform various internet functions—I received the message that Transunion had been unable to authenticate my identity. I was surprised because I have outwardly lived a very safe and boring life. I haven't filed for bankruptcy. I have had only two addresses since 2011. I have spent no extended period of time outside the country in over two decades. Nevertheless, to Transunion, my existence was unverifiable.
And yet, during an airplane landing experience, I am convinced all this time I am me. However, there are several things that I have neglected to mention, and when I think about these things, the nature of my experience changes decisively. I remember that I was allowed to board because I had all my travel documents, including a valid passport. This is to say that I have been authenticated. Subsequently I was allowed to relax and be myself—to forget about all my other responsibilities and obligations. After that first authentication, almost all my needs were seen to by others. I was fed. I was provided with clean air to breathe. This is no small blessing. Writing this from Edmonton during a heat wave that is only now subsiding, with a major wildfire crisis nearby—25,000 people evacuated from the national park 375 kilometres away—I know that access to breathable air can by no means be taken for granted.
As I’ve mentioned previously, when I say airplane landing experience, I am not being literal. I am talking about a condition in which I experience these thoughts and feelings, regardless of whether or not I have just landed at an airport. If I have not just landed at the airport, who is the pilot that makes this experience possible? Who creates this feeling of safety and trust, of wellbeing, of gratitude for the body that houses my feelings and thoughts and spirit?
Before very recently, having had a footing in the latter quarter of the 20th century and being a fortunate resident of first one prosperous western country (England) and then another (Canada), I lived my life under the impression that there were responsible adults in charge of world affairs—presidents, prime ministers, their ministers and secretaries, as well as senior bureaucrats and unseen advisors. But now, having examined the situation more closely, it turns out that this machine called society that we have invented is largely operating on auto-pilot. It’s not even a magnanimous or benign auto-pilot that wishes you well and wants you to arrive at your destination on time and intact. It’s an auto-pilot that is beset by glitches, with algorithms that produce unpredictable swoops and dips. The destination that was announced previously has now been changed over a dozen times. I no longer really trust any of the announcements coming from that ominous robotic voice of the PA system.
When I am experiencing the anxiety of having realized there is no human pilot in the cockpit, I remember the story, “When the Mice Failed to Arrive.” There is a lot more going on in this story than I can convey here. I am going to report some of the key incidents that are the most critical to me when I am reflecting on my airport landing experience. The story is told by a father who is looking back on his relationship with his son, who suffers from asthma. When still very young, the son asks the father two questions: first, why do I suffer from asthma when other children run around and play and breathe freely; second, when will I free from asthma forever?
The father answers that every man is given an equal amount of suffering in life, but that some men experience almost all their suffering in childhood. Some men grow up having hardly experienced any suffering at all. Yet these men become fearful, because they have no idea what suffering is. As men, they run and hide under the bed at the very first sign of danger. The father even dramatizes this explanation, running under a bed that doesn’t even have a mattress or bed clothes on it, just the wire springs—which, of course, would hardly provide any protection in the event of real danger. In answer to the second question, the father tells his son that he will be free of asthma in five years.
One day, the son tells his father about his day at school. His science teacher had, several weeks previously, told all the students about an order of mice that he had made, which would be arriving shortly for the purpose of a science experiment. In the experiment, the mice would be put in cages and allowed to breed. Each child in class would be responsible for feeding and caring for one of the cages of mice.
Yet (as the title of the story had forecast from the beginning) the mice failed to arrive. The science teacher leaves the classroom to make inquiries as to what has happened. The son and his classmates are instructed by the teacher to quietly study at their desks while he is away. But the children spend the time talking with their friends and watching the approach of a storm outside.
I think of this story because it contains multiple levels of authority—the father and his son, the science teacher and the children, as well as the father when he was himself just a boy, and breeding mice was one of his hobbies. The father-as-a-boy is obliged to give up his hobby because his family is moving to a new house. He must decide how to dispose of the mice. He must decide how the mice will spend their final days before he drowns them all. There is one male mouse that has not yet even seen another mouse, let alone had an opportunity to breed. The father-as-a-boy thinks of the various possible ways that the solitary mouse can live out his final days.
When I cast my mind back to the airport landing experience, I think of myself as having roughly the same relationship to God as the father has to the mice. This is not to say that I equate God to the father character, with the attendant terror that God is thinking of ways to amuse Himself with my life before He kills me. Rather, I think that the power differential between the father and the mouse is representative of the power differential between God and me—except I am exponentially more puny than the mouse in this equation. Yet we are in the realm of story here, which exists to make make sense of the incomprehensible.
I think of those stories that we have all been told, at one point in time or another, to make the world make sense, to make it seem safer, fairer and more predictable than it actually is. Some of these stories are the kind that a father might tell his child in order to bring comfort. Asthma is your share of suffering, but when you grow up, you will be stronger for it. You will only suffer for five more years. With mice, our words would fall on uncomprehending ears. We are like God to mice, or at least we think of ourselves that way. Sometimes we invent plausible narratives for our mice as we plan out the entertainment and suffering that we have in store for them.
If I think again of my airport landing experience, I can only return to my initial sense of comfort, safety and freedom, as well as the pleasure of having a body, under one condition. I cannot go searching in expectation of a human pilot. There is no human pilot. Nor can there be an auto-pilot that is the product of human invention. If humans are in any way in charge, we are doomed. If we are not in charge, we can finally be free.
NOTES
“When the Mice Failed to Arrive,” Gerald Murnane