Flights

FROG AND BIRD

There are two points of view in the world: the frog’s perspective and bird’s eye view. Any point in between just leads to chaos.

Take the airport maps so beautifully drawn on airline brochures. Their meaning becomes clear only once one sees them from above, like the monumental Nazca Lines, created with flying creatures in mind – the modern airport in Sydney is shaped like an airplane, for example. A somewhat uninteresting, I find, concept – your plane landing on a plane. The way becomes the goal, and the instrument the result. The airport in Tokyo, on the other hand, in the shape of an enormous hieroglyphic, is perplexing. What sort of letter is it? We haven’t mastered the Japanese alphabet, we won’t know what our arrival means, with what word they greet us here. What do they stamp into our passport? A big question mark?

Similarly, Chinese airports bring to mind the local alphabet, you have to learn them, put them in order, create an anagram out of them – then perhaps they will reveal some unexpected wisdom of the journey. Or treat them like those sixty-four hexagrams from I Ching and then every landing will be a fortune. Hexagram 40. Xiè. Deliverance. Hexagram 36. Míng yí. Darkening of the Light. Hexagram 10. Lǚ. Treading. 17. Suí. Following. 24. Fù. Return. 30. Lí. Clinging.

But let’s give it a rest with this convoluted Eastern metaphysics, for which, apparently, we have a soft spot. Let us look at the airport in San Francisco, and now we have something familiar, something that inspires confidence, that makes us feel right at home: here we have a cross section of the spine. The round centre of the airport is the spinal cord, locked in a hard safe shell of individual ribs, and here, radiating out, the nerve roots from which depart the numbered gates, each complete with a sleeve leading to the plane.

And Frankfurt? That great air travel hub, that state within a state? What do you associate that with? Yes, yes, the spitting image of a chip, a computer chip, a razor-thin plate. Here there can be no doubts – they tell us what we are, dear travellers. We are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant, barely that part of it that permits the change from plus to minus, or maybe the other way around, and keeps everything in constant flux.