Abstract Cartography

If Lucretius is correct in saying all that is is place then the problematic of the vanishing act, of disappearance, is more than unsettling. There's the gut punch of abandonment as the beloved turns to go, passing out of sight and into an indefinite future.

Airspace is a timetable, effectively linking together in the passenger's mind the impression of physical distance and the symbolic distance between terminals. This linkage indicates the same crazy delusion of universality and standardization that accompanies all mass production. In this case, the production of a voyage, in its standardization of time and space, is moulded into homogenous lists of different cities and different portals of arrival or departure. At what other period in history has such an audacious list been compiled? The timetable's power is juxtaposition, in the nonchalance with which we find far removed places mingling together there. How do we regard the image of distance? In short, the power of juxtaposition carves out the center like a pumpkin, discarding whatever human travail would have once connected two points on a globe, and gives it a new face.

But isn't this face of distance merely an ignis fatuus? Perhaps, but the means by which voyages are taken can be bought and sold, branded and packaged, customized and delivered, all at face value. The poster hedged in by pale shores is more or less the image of distance, not the wine-dark expanse far below. True, distances through airspace are hollow, the air that fills them as abstract as their entry on the timetable. But the contemporary relationship between New York and Tokyo is not simply that of an actual distance compressed into virtual distance by technology or clever advertising. The distance is the same, spanning the entirety of geographic imagination, but its relational status as a line between two particular pinpoints has been continually drawn and redrawn, it has produced new objective relationships entirely, cast as a horological affair rather than a chronotopic one. The labor of passage is displaced, handed off in a perverse relay of consequences. All along its flightpath it gathers up more intensive movements of resources and energy at whatever costs, removing the ugly innards of this system from view, leaving only clear text against a dark screen. And at the end of the day we can traverse between cities for a few hundred dollars. We enter a door in Dallas and exit a few hours later in Philadelphia, we cross time-zones, and nothing about the quality of traveling through the air hints at a reality apart from the words displayed at the terminal, the digital times switching at every turn, and the frenzy of moving bodies disappearing here and reappearing somewhere else.

I am reminded most of Italo Calvino's telling of a particular visit by Marco Polo to one of the cities in the Great Khan's empire:

If on arriving at Trude I had not read the city’s name written in big letters, I would have thought I was landing at the same airport from which I had taken off. The suburbs they drove me through were no different from the others, with the same little greenish and yellowish houses. Following the same signs we swung around the same flower beds in the same squares. The downtown streets displayed goods, packages, signs that had not changed at all. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but I already knew the hotel where I happened to be lodged; I had already heard and spoken my dialogues with the buyers and sellers of hardware; I had ended other days identically, looking through the same goblets at the same swaying navels.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave.

“You can resume your flight whenever you like,” they said to me, “but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.”