The
question of whether volcanoes are Luddites is relative. A student of mine was
fond of pointing out that in her native country of Peru, earthquakes are part
of life’s routine and are not seen as emergencies or catastrophes at all.
The
spectacle in the recent Icelandic eruption and subsequent airline logjam is in
the sheer numbers: the 100,000+ flights cancelled and all those plans deferred
for so many days. The Western world has had some time to think about itself in
relation to systemic air travel and, as others in this thread have proposed,
our thoughts have turned not to nature, but instead to technology. I am moved
by the assertion in the previous post that flight
supports affect -- that people travel because they love each other. I agree
with the statement that “technologies of flight make us more human, not less,”
but want to qualify this idea by proposing that technologies that extend the
length of our walking stride exponentially to hurtle us over continents in
hours make us intensely different kinds of humans, who in turn long for
different kinds of love.
We
are Haraway’s cyborgs with techno-emotional altimeters more sensitively
calibrated each time our pair of silver wings flashes over the Atlantic. When
we are on the ground, we nestle closer airports so that our hearts and gauges
flutter when the shadows of winged machines trace across the landscape and our
peripheral vision. In modern life, then, it is commonplace to always taxi. The
potentiality of taking off to some other place makes each here and now
contingent, each dwelling arrangement, and each person we go in to greet as we
deposit our carry-on beside the door both a global neighbor and a stranger. We
are always going places and all places, in turn, are visited.
I want
to be provocative here and invoke poet, Gary Snyder, who once said “the most
radical thing we can do is stay home.” Home for the altimeter augmented could
be the last frontier. For the moment, and in this volcano induced travel
hiatus, I propose that we entertain the idea of loving something right nearby,
a place or person that we reach on our own two feet. What kind of humans might
we glimpse across the terminal if not just one, but all the people languishing
in Heathrow and across Europe thought about this at once? But wait, I think
that was just an announcement to begin boarding zone 1...
