music for airports

and of course.

having turned on brian eno's music for airports in the airport, like so many others probably have, I walk through the terminals of SFO. it is quiet and empty and not altogether lonely, just with the hum of people moving when they need to. there are restaurants one-thirds full, silent people sitting in barstools turning their beer glasses thoughtfully, a kid playing on the ground with his one toy car. movement altogether appropriate and deserved. everything in its place, so to speak.

just before this I am in a plane from seattle to san francisco, lifting off. underneath is a city's worth of houses, streets, and people, shaded orange with the sun-setting-sun. we pass over a used car lot, and instantly I catch an undulating glimmer on the expanse of windshields, side mirrors, chromed grills, shined roofs. here is an image: of flashing, then crashing waves, the image of a school of fish suddenly turning in mid-motion that catch on late-night tv, back when you still watched tv, of iridescent scales on a fish when it's lying comatose and almost-dead on a circular wooden block, ready.

going and flying and lifting off I get this sudden presentness again, the kind I always get in airplanes and in airports, where it is as if everything distills itself to the bare minimum of moment, very mute and unsaid. taking off your shoes at the security checkpoint is just that; taking off one's shoes. I toss a receipt into the trash and it's just that, a flick of the arm and air-resistance-deformed parabola that results. nothing else. the faint hum of some janitor's vacuum cleaner ten gates away. someone's shuffling their feet, checking the departures panel. a girl wearing blue converses sits next to the wall, charging her laptop and reading a book.

at night, in this heterotopia, this special zone of movement, change, where all the lines are being redrawn and people enter this giant machine to be changed, moved, shuttled, transformed, altered, spun around and pointed into different directions -- there is me, pointed, pointing. going somewhere, and that's it; I have this image of a section of the airport, and a series of faint orange arrows overlaid on the scene, this vast multitude of movement. if you look closely there's probably some pattern to be discerned from this all; there's the tour group, going to florida, there are zones of stagnant waiting, for those taking a red-eye (like I am), and there are eddies and swirls and flows.

again, back on this plane lifting off I feel g-forces pressing me gently into my seat like a nurturing hand, almost, and I can't help but think that it's so valuable to move, to be moving, to be going somewhere, to want to go somewhere. more than anything really the kind of movement I embody is desire; to desire, to want, to want to want. how much that is important becomes distilled in this moment all of a sudden, when the vertical motion of the arm of a russian office worker that stamps a visa stamp is directly related to a flight to russia, st. petersburg, on trains. I want to walk, move, be disoriented, not know things. to step outside my self.

the magical moment that occurs when reading a sci-fi novel or opening a map for the first time is the moment of learning, comprehension, buying-into-a-mental-language. I want that vertigo, which is the vertigo of jumping over a frontier and thus creating a new one. I want that. on this plane moving upwards and me, enjoying the sensation of being pressed into my seat precisely because it comes from acceleration and advance.

I sweep up the latent quiet energy that seeps out of the quietest hour on planes, the lazy terminal hours, and pack it away to counter the movement of new york, because sometimes there's stagnancy in always-moving-fast, and there's a startling rapidity in the force with which these airports make me want to go, go, go. all of a sudden I want, am a vector facing new york. I want, I want, and I want, and I want.