Elegy for an Airport Psyche

Here is the steel wing of Pegasus, upon which we ride like demigods in suits of silken skin, for what child is not born with the dream of flying? In our chariots we move across the landscape of the sky, backlit against the sun, as though birds, free from material ties to the earth below. And yet we are humans, incapable of leaving behind that from which we long to be liberated. It can be seen in the eyes of the men, women, and children at the dock, for what is an airport if not a metaphor for one’s psyche? And what do we carry in our luggage if not the past, the present, the things that make us who we are? This truly is our baggage, both physical and emotional. In our harbors we see the effects of the weight on our shoulders, the scars of the represented burden. We associate external signatures with specific readings, and so with the emotion of the fellow man: a smile and he is happy, a frown and he is mad… all evidently universal, yet all inescapably arbitrary. It is all, in the end, semiotics. And so can one’s level of happiness be judged based upon this external etching? It is here that we turn to theory, to the idea that literal baggage is representative of personal baggage, and the more of it one carries with him/her, the less happy he will be. For who on this planet is not Sisyphus, forever condemned to struggle against the weight of his own unique stone?

SAN JOSÉ INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

TERMINAL C, BAGGAGE CLAIM

02/04/01 2:30pm – 3:45pm

It is impossible to judge how much of one’s enjoyment of the journey is influenced by the amount of baggage he carries with him, that is unless we were to observe the journey in its entirety. This is not feasible, and so we look not to the embarkation, nor to the flight, but to the return, to the inevitable reunion of man and baggage.

In Terminal C the international flights come and go, thereby providing a greater variety of subjects than its towering sister, Terminal A, through which American Southwest passengers pass as though bipedal blood cells in some enormous vein.

I arrived at 2:30pm, and seated myself discreetly upon a seat against the side wall at a 45 degree angle to the primary baggage carousel. Here I found fewer people than I may have expected, the first group travelers from Alaska perhaps returning from weekend sojourns.

In the beginning, more than overt examples in support of my hypothesis could be seen either moderate examples waiting to be read subjectively or overt exceptions to my prediction. In one case, a trio of women[1] with a great abundance of baggage (five enormous bags — each with wheels, and each enthroned atop its own wheeled craft of steel, giving it the wheel-within-a-wheel appearance of that mysterious providential object of which Ezekiel spoke) were very happy, as one of them had, eavesdropping informed me, just been married. This level of extreme happiness faded, however, when the newlywed and one of the other two made an exodus to retrieve their car. The third was left to tend to the baggage on her own. So perhaps here the idea of marriage represented the beginning of a new liberation for this bride, a reprieve from the baggage she had carried with her.

The woman left by herself did not smile, for who smiles when alone unless he finds himself momentarily freed from the burden of personal baggage here represented by the presence of these five monstrous vessels? Semiotics would seem to tell us she was not happy then, but how can we be sure? Can the internal be assessed by observation of the external? Can a book be judged by its cover? Does not every man have a thousand faces? Do we not all hold inside ourselves a menagerie of people, each emerging at his own moment to a specific occasion? And who among us then is not a schizophrenic?

This idea of having to carry the burden by oneself seemed to cut a wide swath. People in groups of three or more, say, a family, or visibly intimate couples seemed happier than those alone. Could it have been the presence of someone walking with you, sharing the weight? Most who walked alone seemed visibly exhausted, worn out, in need of rest.

We speak here of performances, particularly as Thomas R. Lindlof defines it: “In performing, people engage in symbolic actions with respect to things that are meaningful to them.” (14) We are all, indeed, pushing our own stones up the mountain. Indeed I did see around me support for my case. The more baggage one carried, the less happy he appeared to be. Here a stern-faced hockey player hoisted an elephantine sack slung skillfully over his shoulder. Did he carry with him his equipment, or his regret? His gear, or his joy? Knee pads or pathos?

If this is essentially our personal baggage, its content consisting of the experiential, monolithic weight of our past and our present, does it not also contain the seeds of what may be? The untainted potentiality of the future? Does not one’s handling of his past determine the nature of his present? And can the same not be said of the present and the future? Did not the Buddha himself say, “What we are is what we have done, what we will be is what we do now”? Moreover, what did the Buddha advocate if not the extinction of ties to the material? If ever there was a man freed from his baggage, was it not the Buddha?

The actors in this scene encircled the carousel as though pagan monks approaching their altar. What was this unspoken metaphor with which they sought reunification?

I stood, and walked away.

6:50pm – 7:30pm

Now the baggage claim was packed.

And it was the wait now that seemed to be getting to people, the wait for their bags, their things. And this was fascinating, for if the incident with the newlywed was a demonstration of happiness at the liberation from one’s baggage, here I saw unhappiness at the delay of one’s reunion with it.

What does this mean for us? We seek freedom from our baggage, from our emotional weight, reprieve from that unspoken, metaphorical semiology represented by material things. And yet we simultaneously seek the possession of these very same material representations. And what is this if not capitalism? Is it perhaps the very nature of the human condition that we must seek to possess the cause of our unhappiness?

I had returned to this place in the evening with the thought in my head that perhaps a person would at this point be wiped out, and therefore more anxious to arrive at his destination, to walk through the door to his home. And so would this influence his agitation in the arena? Would he be Sisyphus or would he be Daniel in the pit of lions?

Here now I saw, yes, scowls on the faces of those lugging heavy bags, exhausted sighs from the lungs and lips of large groups of world weary wanderers, and the sign now that the surrounding crowd seemingly sucked strength.

While the presence of a companion to share the load had seemed a blessing to those here this afternoon, now the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of strangers seemed to serve only to antagonize. The unknown “other,” himself experiencing his own metaphorical baggage crisis, was apparently perceived as a threat. The crowd created tension, and I perceived this in relation to my previous observation in more spacious waters. Context created meaning.

As the crowd dissipated, the mood lightened, and the external behavior of the people around me was divisible into the tired, the impatient, and those in Zen-like calm.

These are people, I thought to myself, physically and emotionally influenced by the metaphors with which they interact. And what is this, I ask you, but the definition of religion? For what is God but an abstraction, a metaphor? And what is the Tao but another three-letter word for the very same abstraction?

Here, in the harbor, I had found the seeds of the answers I had sought. My hypothesis had been supported, and yet there was very little means by which to validate that it had been supported for the reasons around which it had been based. I had not spoken to anyone. I had not confirmed through interaction with my subjects the concept on which I found myself ruminating. Who was I but a poet attempting science? And who were they but moving images subject to my own culturally and experientially influenced perception? I had not turned the lens to myself. And upon this final reflection, what did I find? Was it more a matter of the content of the baggage, or the sheer number of bags one carried that determined his performance? I carried with me to the scene only one bag, and yet it contained within it the textbook of the class in which I am doing badly. And this is in itself far too literal a reading.

There are too many loose ends. But then an abstraction cannot flourish if too specifically defined or explained. It requires those loose threads to set spark to the imagination. We seek liberation from our baggage, and yet simultaneously seek to possess it. And so, I ask, do we possess our baggage, or does our baggage possess us? What is an airport if not a metaphor for one’s psyche? And what is this essay if not a lamentation?

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[1] In spite of my desire for variety of subjects, ethnicity is here omitted as the focus of this observation was to judge, based upon the idea of physical baggage as representative of emotional baggage, the happiness of people at the airport.