WRITING
ESCAPE FROM ESCAPE
The airliner as the new church.
We live in an age of the virtual and of substitution where reality is subsumed beneath the smothering duvet of the insubstantial. Television and the internet are slowly replacing the pub (which in turn replaced the ale house) as a refuge from reality, and they are fast becoming the common escape from our daily lives. Lives which seem entrenched in the fears through which governments attempt to mediate them. Yet this refuge comes almost always in the guise of an escape to nowhere. An escape to nowhere because, unlike the experience of reading a book, we are dictated to by its producers and web designers with such manipulative completeness that we are unable to form our own views. (A tricky generalisation from which Dennis Potter, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and their like are excluded). But it means that we now need a further escape, an escape from escape as it were.
So, our everyday existence, where reality is increasingly difficult to pin down, is bounded by the ill-conceived whims of governments, television producers and web designers and it is one from which we feel bound to make this further escape. To escape from the TV reality show which is all about the unreal or the surreal, to escape from politics, now no more than another branch of show business. The vision of the politician as chat show host gesticulating mindlessly as he lounges in his chair is only frightening because it is too near the truth. And if this seems too much like the rantings of a grumpy old man (television-speak which has become the acceptable norm) there is nothing wrong with, indeed there is much to be said for, a bit of creative grumpyism. Yes, we are stuck with all this and, although we long all year for escape, there is no real way out. We are stuck with it and its ghastly details. Details like having to put up with world leaders who have all been to that school of deportment which teaches you to walk like a hybrid between a cowboy and a monkey. Who have all been to that school of oratory that teaches the importance of the platitude cleverly presented in an unassailable form. The one practical way out for us is, of course, the airliner. Airliner. Now there’s a misnomer if ever there was one. Airbus is more honest and we have to give credit to Monsieur Forgeard and his pals at Airbus Industrie for their honesty in nomenclature. Our grandparents escaped (though, arguably, they had less need to) to religion and the church, whose fabric was solid, dependable, permanent.
Airbus, Boeing and the rest of them have taken the place of the guilds of craftsmen and their carpenters and stonemasons who made the cathedrals and churches through which our grandparents escaped towards their Paradise. The masons’ tracing floors at York Minster and Wells have become the computer screens at Broughton and Hamburg and the chisels on the stones and the augers in the oak are replaced by the clinical lamination of aluminium and fatigue-resistant fibres. The aircraft makers have provided us with the means to a new paradise whose promise is hoped for in the recycled air of those spaces bounded by these new and insubstantial materials.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Thomas Cook’s radical approach to travel promotion which was the ancestor of today’s mass tourism coincided with the beginning of the trend away from church worship. At the same time the often religious-based iconographies of pre-Raphaelitism and neo-medievalism were giving way to fin de siècle secular carelessness. Throughout the following century as tourism grew and church attendance diminished we might have argued that sightseeing was becoming a substitute for religious worship. Travel brochures and guide books were the new devotional texts and where once the triptych or a copy of the psalms accompanied the wanderer now it was Baedecker, which, with proper study, could show you the way to paradise. The paradise of the holiday of a lifetime. And the word ‘paradise’ became an overused and abused word. Xenophon wrote of the parks of the Persian kings as paradise, the early Christians thought of earthly paradise as the garden of Eden, (set somewhere within the sublime landscape of Armenia, hardly yet, thank God, a holiday resort), and heavenly paradise as the abode of God. How tragically distant are these from those white hotels on a southern shore that look like broken teeth in a boxer’s lower jaw. The Paradise Hotel; paradise island; paradise by the sea; claim your share of paradise. These are the phrases that thrill us now, that fill us with mindless awe and expectation. The laughter of the bronzed bikini babe has turned the idea of paradise into a theme park whose only theme is hedonism — the idea that all actions and endeavour must lead to pleasure.
Our grandparents would look to reach their Paradise by sitting on hard pews among the cold columns of an old and steamy church. We, being cleverer but less wise than they, allow ourselves to be processed into the thin-walled tube of the airliner along with our own personal dreams of some hedonistic state to come. And, once we are in that thin-walled tube, we find ourselves on seats as uncomfortable as oak pews, but smaller. Rows of them. And in between the rows? The aisle of course. An ecclesiastical word if ever there was one.
Where once Tennyson's snowy-banded, dilettante, delicate-handed priest intoned, we now have a Virgin, scarlet-clad, severe. But her gestures as she demonstrates the safety procedures she learned at (neo-theological?) college are as priestly as the raising of the chalice and, moreover, behind her is the hidden flight deck, a sort of sacred place of mystery, an altar perhaps. After her demonstration is over there will be a biscuit, cellophane-wrapped and bland. What else can this be but the communion host? And, if we travel club class, there will be wine. In the past the nobility had the better pews: nothing much changes. The wine is supposed to make the experience of flying (why is everything today an 'experience'?) more pleasurable. It doesn't help much. Few of us enjoy the flight as few of our forbears enjoyed the chilly church service but, like evensong or matins, it is soon over and we tolerate it. It is, after all, the only practical way to achieve the brochure’s promise of paradise and we feel better when it’s done and, coming down the steps and embracing the warming sun we smile our nervous thanks at the scarlet Virgin, somehow now more Magdalen than minister, as, in another age, we thanked the priest for his wise words as we took deep breaths of the pure air on the path between the lichenous headstones.
It is a truism that when we arrive at the brochure's paradise of broken teeth on a southern shore we find that we have simply exchanged one set of stresses for another. A truism that we seem conveniently to ignore or, perhaps the tour operator’s brainwashing, like the earlier church teaching, works to deaden our brain cells and prevent imaginative questioning. We can only hope that the old Paradise is as stress-free as the fiction writers and photographers of the devotional text of the travel brochure would wish us to believe of the new one. But of course we may not arrive at the new one. The old one may come first. Chief among the fears with which governments mediate our lives is the fear of terrorism (interestingly, or ironically, a word which George W. continues to pronounce as 'tourism'). Terrorism. The great fear really. Islamic terrorists. Religious fundamentalists who will proudly, heroically, destroy the thin walls, the small seats as uncomfortable as pews, the scarlet Virgin, the chalice, the communion host, the wine. The faithful. Is it only co-incidental that such fundamentalists target an icon of western culture which also carries with it so many surrogate iconographies of Christianity? Probably it is, but it is an intriguing idea. And where have we heard all this before? Was Henry VIII a religious fundamentalist? Of course he was, no more, no less than George W. and Osama themselves.
Yes, we have been here before. The dispersal of the sixteenth-century monastic plate and its jewellery, the treasures from its libraries, the lead from its roofs, the hanging of the Abbot of Glastonbury at his own gateway. We have been here before but the wreckage of an airliner will never take on the romantic vision of Fountains Abbey. The new airborne church was never designed for permanence and it possesses only one proper form. The form of its completeness. This is the real difference between the real church and the virtual one. The one is substantial even in decay, the other, like all things virtual, is unable to be any thing other than its insubstantial self.
PS
The idea of the journey to paradise (or eternal damnation) is, of course, not new. Even old Charon, the boatman of the Styx, was probably not the first. It is such an obvious and useful concept and occurs again and again. Traditional, especially negro, American songs are full of these journeys. But the journey is, as far as I know, never made by car. It is on foot (We are climbing Jacob's ladder), by boat (Michael row the boat ashore), or by train. The train seems to be the most popular form, presumably because the rhythm of the train is so well suited to the exuberant beat of the gospel song. As far as I know the aeroplane, while not an uncommon metaphor in blues, does not appear significantly (or at all?) in gospel music.
The airliner as the new church.
We live in an age of the virtual and of substitution where reality is subsumed beneath the smothering duvet of the insubstantial. Television and the internet are slowly replacing the pub (which in turn replaced the ale house) as a refuge from reality, and they are fast becoming the common escape from our daily lives. Lives which seem entrenched in the fears through which governments attempt to mediate them. Yet this refuge comes almost always in the guise of an escape to nowhere. An escape to nowhere because, unlike the experience of reading a book, we are dictated to by its producers and web designers with such manipulative completeness that we are unable to form our own views. (A tricky generalisation from which Dennis Potter, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and their like are excluded). But it means that we now need a further escape, an escape from escape as it were.
So, our everyday existence, where reality is increasingly difficult to pin down, is bounded by the ill-conceived whims of governments, television producers and web designers and it is one from which we feel bound to make this further escape. To escape from the TV reality show which is all about the unreal or the surreal, to escape from politics, now no more than another branch of show business. The vision of the politician as chat show host gesticulating mindlessly as he lounges in his chair is only frightening because it is too near the truth. And if this seems too much like the rantings of a grumpy old man (television-speak which has become the acceptable norm) there is nothing wrong with, indeed there is much to be said for, a bit of creative grumpyism. Yes, we are stuck with all this and, although we long all year for escape, there is no real way out. We are stuck with it and its ghastly details. Details like having to put up with world leaders who have all been to that school of deportment which teaches you to walk like a hybrid between a cowboy and a monkey. Who have all been to that school of oratory that teaches the importance of the platitude cleverly presented in an unassailable form. The one practical way out for us is, of course, the airliner. Airliner. Now there’s a misnomer if ever there was one. Airbus is more honest and we have to give credit to Monsieur Forgeard and his pals at Airbus Industrie for their honesty in nomenclature. Our grandparents escaped (though, arguably, they had less need to) to religion and the church, whose fabric was solid, dependable, permanent.
Airbus, Boeing and the rest of them have taken the place of the guilds of craftsmen and their carpenters and stonemasons who made the cathedrals and churches through which our grandparents escaped towards their Paradise. The masons’ tracing floors at York Minster and Wells have become the computer screens at Broughton and Hamburg and the chisels on the stones and the augers in the oak are replaced by the clinical lamination of aluminium and fatigue-resistant fibres. The aircraft makers have provided us with the means to a new paradise whose promise is hoped for in the recycled air of those spaces bounded by these new and insubstantial materials.
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century Thomas Cook’s radical approach to travel promotion which was the ancestor of today’s mass tourism coincided with the beginning of the trend away from church worship. At the same time the often religious-based iconographies of pre-Raphaelitism and neo-medievalism were giving way to fin de siècle secular carelessness. Throughout the following century as tourism grew and church attendance diminished we might have argued that sightseeing was becoming a substitute for religious worship. Travel brochures and guide books were the new devotional texts and where once the triptych or a copy of the psalms accompanied the wanderer now it was Baedecker, which, with proper study, could show you the way to paradise. The paradise of the holiday of a lifetime. And the word ‘paradise’ became an overused and abused word. Xenophon wrote of the parks of the Persian kings as paradise, the early Christians thought of earthly paradise as the garden of Eden, (set somewhere within the sublime landscape of Armenia, hardly yet, thank God, a holiday resort), and heavenly paradise as the abode of God. How tragically distant are these from those white hotels on a southern shore that look like broken teeth in a boxer’s lower jaw. The Paradise Hotel; paradise island; paradise by the sea; claim your share of paradise. These are the phrases that thrill us now, that fill us with mindless awe and expectation. The laughter of the bronzed bikini babe has turned the idea of paradise into a theme park whose only theme is hedonism — the idea that all actions and endeavour must lead to pleasure.
Our grandparents would look to reach their Paradise by sitting on hard pews among the cold columns of an old and steamy church. We, being cleverer but less wise than they, allow ourselves to be processed into the thin-walled tube of the airliner along with our own personal dreams of some hedonistic state to come. And, once we are in that thin-walled tube, we find ourselves on seats as uncomfortable as oak pews, but smaller. Rows of them. And in between the rows? The aisle of course. An ecclesiastical word if ever there was one.
Where once Tennyson's snowy-banded, dilettante, delicate-handed priest intoned, we now have a Virgin, scarlet-clad, severe. But her gestures as she demonstrates the safety procedures she learned at (neo-theological?) college are as priestly as the raising of the chalice and, moreover, behind her is the hidden flight deck, a sort of sacred place of mystery, an altar perhaps. After her demonstration is over there will be a biscuit, cellophane-wrapped and bland. What else can this be but the communion host? And, if we travel club class, there will be wine. In the past the nobility had the better pews: nothing much changes. The wine is supposed to make the experience of flying (why is everything today an 'experience'?) more pleasurable. It doesn't help much. Few of us enjoy the flight as few of our forbears enjoyed the chilly church service but, like evensong or matins, it is soon over and we tolerate it. It is, after all, the only practical way to achieve the brochure’s promise of paradise and we feel better when it’s done and, coming down the steps and embracing the warming sun we smile our nervous thanks at the scarlet Virgin, somehow now more Magdalen than minister, as, in another age, we thanked the priest for his wise words as we took deep breaths of the pure air on the path between the lichenous headstones.
It is a truism that when we arrive at the brochure's paradise of broken teeth on a southern shore we find that we have simply exchanged one set of stresses for another. A truism that we seem conveniently to ignore or, perhaps the tour operator’s brainwashing, like the earlier church teaching, works to deaden our brain cells and prevent imaginative questioning. We can only hope that the old Paradise is as stress-free as the fiction writers and photographers of the devotional text of the travel brochure would wish us to believe of the new one. But of course we may not arrive at the new one. The old one may come first. Chief among the fears with which governments mediate our lives is the fear of terrorism (interestingly, or ironically, a word which George W. continues to pronounce as 'tourism'). Terrorism. The great fear really. Islamic terrorists. Religious fundamentalists who will proudly, heroically, destroy the thin walls, the small seats as uncomfortable as pews, the scarlet Virgin, the chalice, the communion host, the wine. The faithful. Is it only co-incidental that such fundamentalists target an icon of western culture which also carries with it so many surrogate iconographies of Christianity? Probably it is, but it is an intriguing idea. And where have we heard all this before? Was Henry VIII a religious fundamentalist? Of course he was, no more, no less than George W. and Osama themselves.
Yes, we have been here before. The dispersal of the sixteenth-century monastic plate and its jewellery, the treasures from its libraries, the lead from its roofs, the hanging of the Abbot of Glastonbury at his own gateway. We have been here before but the wreckage of an airliner will never take on the romantic vision of Fountains Abbey. The new airborne church was never designed for permanence and it possesses only one proper form. The form of its completeness. This is the real difference between the real church and the virtual one. The one is substantial even in decay, the other, like all things virtual, is unable to be any thing other than its insubstantial self.
PS
The idea of the journey to paradise (or eternal damnation) is, of course, not new. Even old Charon, the boatman of the Styx, was probably not the first. It is such an obvious and useful concept and occurs again and again. Traditional, especially negro, American songs are full of these journeys. But the journey is, as far as I know, never made by car. It is on foot (We are climbing Jacob's ladder), by boat (Michael row the boat ashore), or by train. The train seems to be the most popular form, presumably because the rhythm of the train is so well suited to the exuberant beat of the gospel song. As far as I know the aeroplane, while not an uncommon metaphor in blues, does not appear significantly (or at all?) in gospel music.
