the uncanny funny of flight attendants

Music: Lucinda Williams: Blessed (2011)

I thought to remember to tell you something in the airport bathroom---and it's not what you think.

I have a talent for finding a special something, like a truffle snorting pig, but that something is not necessarily good or (apparently) rare. That something, of course, is the unyielding, hands-free sink fixture. It never fails that on every trip, after I have doused my open hands with soap, the most proximate faucet simply will not give. I can always find the cold, dry airport udder.

Cold. Dry. Airport. Udder. I have happened upon a new album title for Radiohead. Better than plastic trees or Limb Royalty. Udder, boys. It's the udder.

Like you, I also have a talent for finding shopping buggies with wobbly wheels and, of course, I own a clothes dryer that has a secret portal for single sock interdimensional transport. I suspect this portal is something like the mausoleum time-warp in Phantasm, in which the Tall Man, with the aid of little people in Satan-worshipping robes, ships off corpses to feed the masses of little-people in Satan-worshipping robes starving for the dead, cold flesh of humans somewhere in an alternative dimension. Except my dryer's portal sends single socks to the interdimensional lands of "Under the Bed or Couch." It's a strange place populated by peanuts and pennies, too.

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I'm on an airplane. Therefore, I am important. Volito Ergo Assholus.

Sometimes I wish you were with me, so your hand was closer and I could maybe hold it in the event of an unwelcome reminder of my mortality.

I have been thinking a lot about vulnerability, not just mine, you know, but vulnerability in general as the default state of subjection. It was Nate's paper, I guess, which I heard on Friday. He said violence was inevitable, and that it represented the extreme of the vulnerable, the force of an actant pushing up vulnerability to the point you could swallow your own, like a substance (or an eruption); in violence, you are made to eat your vulnerability, you know, take it in when you know you don't want to. And in our imaginary, the popular one, violence is so closely associated with planes and that routine, ritual humiliation of disrobing to get through and get on.

I dislike the turbulence of plane riding very much; it is a kind of unwelcome violence too. But for the kindness of strangers also feeding on their own vulnerabilities, flying would be a form of virtual self-immolation.

Not too long ago, a young and handsome flight attendant, I’d guess in his late twenties (and surprisingly straight-acting) hailed our attention for the safety demonstration. Short, dark, spiked hair, clean-shaven, silver wedding ring. He mouthed the canned recording of a tinny female voice explaining the floatation properties of our seat-cushions. He exaggerated; his furrow was feverish as he raised his eyebrows to the cadence of the canned voice.

(Here he comes now smiling and kidding with passengers, pushing the only excitement on a plane I care for: the beverage cart.)

The miming was funny at first. Then, it became slightly disturbing. Then, because he didn't laugh and was intent on a dead-pan delivery, by the time he mimed and mouthed taking care of yourself before children in the event of oxygen loss, it (not he, but "it") got downright uncanny---as if our steward were an animatronic extra at Disney World and we were about to pass him by in a boat on blue water.

What accounts for the uncanny funny of the flight attendant, of course, is the still-conscious memory of flying out of State College and the death-defying turbulence of 10,000 feet. I was sitting next to a terrorism counter-intelligence agent (a fascinating fellow traveler headed for St. Louis), a very nice and smart guy with a tattoo of a dragon and a coy on his back, as well as the words "God, Family, Country, and Love" in Chinese characters. He showed me these on his iPhone instead of taking off his shirt (which would have been weird on a plane). When it was clear we were on an air bullet that rivaled the safety of Six Flags, sudden belly drops and subtle little whiplashes, I looked him in the face and said, "I'm sorry, we must medicate." I reached in my backpack produced two small bottles of Jack and offered him one. He laughed. The anxiety meds went down, patting the glottis with a sweet and burning kiss. It was almost fun, except anxiety was befogging the cabin with black vapors . . . . The turbulence lasted a good twenty minutes and I almost reached for the "motion discomfort bag" (which reminds me of the other end---perhaps a bad euphemism for that other euphemism, "sickness bag"). But about the moment I was ready to cry and share my internal discomfort with the external world, the ride was perturbed enough and achieved that comforting altitude of "chill."

What also accounts for the uncanny funny is the mismatch of body and speech: the voice seemingly exiting his lips is not homologically sound---it's also not a homological sound. The "vocalic body" conjured in the psyche by the female voice is some uptight white chick with pursed lips, a French manicure, and neatly cropped hair. But the body in front of me is from some Midwestern dude with a refreshing sense of humor.

But I also think the strange familiarity is more than that; it's the fiery chill of prophecy, which we humans have tended to associate with divinity. An oracle, for example, is the mouthpiece of God, animated by some divine message. The first automaton was God's prosaic or poetic puppet. Thea. Mania. . . . . Y'all!

One feature of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica that impressed me was the way in which the oracle spoke in the final season: gibberish. She didn't say "know thyself," but rather, just repeated seemingly affectless non-sense while floating in a fancy bathtub with tentacles going everywhere. The question one continued to ask as a spectator---just like we asked about the goodly doctor's sanity---was whether or not the gibberish contained a secret code, or if it was just, simply, phonetic (or phatic) excess. The whole show mined that tension between the accepted atheism of science fiction and the yearning for Big Daddy caused by the nihilism Nietzsche prophesied; if we dismiss the expertise of the global climatologist as, simply, "opinion," then whither authority? Or rather, I think Battlestar dared to rethink nihilism: in the demise of scientific authority---the failures of science represented here by falling-apart machines and cyber gone human---was that old-time authority making it's triumphant return?

Ugh. George W. Bush. You haunt. I really liked the idea of the multitude filling the void left by the Shrinkage of the Sovereign in the cold, ever-expanding wading pool of Empire. But really, the Big Dick Ain't Dead. Case in point: castration of the sky-screwing hemi-peni of capital didn't evoke the cry, but Jack Nicolson: "You want a sovereign? I got your sovereign right heeeeeeeeerrrrrreeeee . . . . "

But I digress (as blart). So, I want to say the steward's uncanny performance at the beginning of this flight was not just a function of the mismatch, but a tacit realization he is animated by symbolic excess. (In the corner of my left eye, I spy the man in the seat next to me is trying to read this . . . I can tell he is flummoxed; not the CIA guy, this time, as I'm on flight number two.) After all, part of the safety speech parody spoke to the widely shared realization such scripted preparedness was actually more of a prod for the good behavior that follows illusions of safety than the much more unlikely scenario that certain death was not really certain "in the event" of an emergency. That is to say, the miming was increasingly creepy because the control connoted by his humor was, in effect, an admission of human vulnerability, or the frailty of our living bodies and the ways in which self-sameness is a product of a language that gives us agency. Our sense of agency is not, in other words, our own.

Boredom leads to unexpected insights, and all too often these are both horrible and life altering. I know I'm not the only one who thinks, sitting on a plane, "what if this thing (think?) crashes? Who is going to take care of my dog? Who will get my music collection? Oh god: someone will probably go through the drawer next to the bed . . . ."

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I attended the n-teenth "Burke Lecture" at the Pennsylvania State University by a political scientist this weekend. His lecture was very, very good. He rightly suggested that political scientists were so caught up in the rational choice model of (electoral) judgment that they were having trouble contending with emotions, and in particular, the emotion of anger. He very carefully spelled out what he understood as the role of anger in the history of rhetoric. He situated the counterpoint of anger in "trust." He ended his talk by arguing for the due consideration the reasons or causes behind political anger, and that we should not automatically write-off the anger of the Tea Partiers because, in the end, their anger could be productive and was based on legitimate concerns.

This was a provocative talk. It was, I repeat, very well done. And, of course, many people had questions. Some folks worried about how some anger was more legitimate than other anger (e.g., black anger was deemed primitive and inadmissible, while white anger is justified, etc.). My question was why he chose the counterpoint of "trust" instead of love? I reasoned that the conception of trust was inextricably wed to contract-Arian thinking, which was tied to the "interests-based" logic of political science that he said he was trying to get away from. I didn't elaborate too much, because what I had in mind was Derrida's critique of the social contract, and how political trust was always the consequence or product of excluding some third party (women, slaves, etc.). It seemed to me, nevertheless, that "trust" snuck the interest-based norm back in the back door.

His response was predictable, but reasonable. He said he did not want to go to "love" because of its many unwieldy connotations. (Of course, I wrote an essay on this, which I promptly sent him after the talk, because everyone wants recognition from Yale.) He noted he thought the question was a deep one. He also said that, from a pragmatic standpoint, because using the word "love" would cue certain connotations, he worried love might function as a kind of salve or drug, letting people off the hook from doing the hard work of understanding someone's (political) anger. And understanding anger, he argued, is what he wants to argue for.

I thought he tended to slide from description to prescription when convenient, and it was curious to me this was the move made when posed with a question about love. Lots to say here.

Regardless, I was impressed with this answer because I hadn't thought about the ways in which the language of love tempts the lazy. That's true. But his answer also seemed to me to provide yet another reason for taking-up the study of love; how is it that love has become divorced from any conception of labor or work? The easy answer, of course, is that equivocation is to blame, the shear barrenness of our affective vocabulary---like an airport bathroom faucet that refuses to yield water. Udder paucity, with soap---the signature of clean intention---on one's hands.

Still: what if we took the phrase "labor of love" to mean differently? What if we just collapsed the nouns here, and simply asserted that love is a form of labor? Not repose, but something opposite? After all, this scholar was asserting that anger bespoke a form of cognition worthy of consideration? Why isn't love worthy of the same? Why is it permissible to consider anger as labor and love as something akin to rest or repose?

I cannot get away from the utility of thinking about love as Lacan seems to do, of understanding love as the name for a certain form of recognition. What else is anger but a demand for love? Trust is a consequence, or better, it's a subsequence to the illusion of some kind of recognition. To assert that "trust" is a kind of quilting point in the field of anger necessarily leaves someone out or behind.

I'm listening to Lucinda Williams' new album as I write this; the first song is something like resigned anger; but every song after it is about it's counterpart or negation. It's love, not trust. Both are about faith, but one of those things doesn't exclude.

Or maybe it does. That may be my hang-up . . . my problem.

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I am still thinking about what Nate said about vulnerability in the fecund conference Jeremy put together on the topic of "violence."

This flight is nearing the status of descent. I'm ready to come down, but I know reflection will give way to the pragmatic and the car radio and learning how to give my freshly diagnosed diabetic cat an insulin shot before I court the Sandman. I know what next week holds, and blogging is not in its future. Synth pop, perhaps, but not blogging . . . .

In a couple of weeks I'll be rereading Levinas and reengaging the ethics of hospitality. Derrida, actually, has framed Levinas for me more than Levinas himself, and I'm thinking about recent life events in relation to hospitality, so-called "boundaries," and the problem of judgment. I won't rehearse that stuff here, except to say that hospitality, when you shift the scene of "home" to the body itself---our eyes and ears and mouths and vaginas and anuses becoming the doors to the wor(l)d---interpersonal encounter becomes a curious scene of invitation. The scene of justice becomes the orifice. It's temping to analogize the home invasion to rape, but, you know, the hole of absolute hospitality is really the ear: it has no door; there is, as it were, no possibility of forced entry. For the non-deaf, at least, the voice comes on in, ready or not.

"But, ear plugs can be doors," you say. Funny that: you can still feel sound, even when that door is all plugged up. Hearing is closer to touching than the eyes.

I know, though, yes yes. The eyes are always there, in the way, seeing things. Still, recognition is having been heard, not seen as we tend to assume. Or rather, recognition is the affirmation of having heard, since hearing happens. Which is to say, recognition is listening proper, an act of love as an assent toward meaning. The one-up here is phasic: working toward sight and lip reading, mOther responds to the cries and assigns meaning there, first. Uncoordinated facial figurations have nothing on the piercing cry of a babe cutting teeth.

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I landed, and I'm writing this an hour later from the in-flight ruminations. I want to tell you how my travels ended, and then try to make it to bed. I'm anxious to "see" what I dream tonight, if perhaps my inner staging will pick up where it left off yesterday morning: I wrote a play in Russian language about sailing and the radio, but when performing my part got lost in the speaking script (all the backdrop of Russian early music, choral).

After landing in Aus-Vegas, we sat on the tarmac for a half-hour before the plane could pull into gate 3. After the delay, I sat at the baggage return for another forty minutes. My bag was the next to last to come down the shoot, all the passengers on my flight having claimed their bags and left. As my bag was about to tumble onto the carousel, a zipper got lodged in the conveyor, the small gap between the revolving metal scales of the carousel and the conveyor belt of the spit-shoot. Standing on the ledge, I could not get the luggage to budge. I had to find an attendant, have her shut off the carousel (to the sound of annoying and loud alarms), and both of us yanked and rolled and jiggled my luggage until it came loose---without the zipper.

As I lugged the embattled bag to the parking-lot shuttle-stop, I reasoned it was time to buy a new bag. When I got home, I figured I would have to open the bag with a pair of pliers. But when I got here, I thought my dirty clothes, and the pliers maneuver, could wait until the morning. It's not the kind of package opening one longs for at midnight.

For the moment, I figured posting on the blog and a cigar would be the better way to yank this Monday open. Hello Monday. I will work in you today. But now, goodnight.