icarus had feathers & wax, but he didn’t have a smartphone.
…that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. …Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Theses on Feuerbach”
When did everyone start closing the window shades on airplanes? Somehow this is the new norm, as Henry Grabar and others have noticed. Up in the clouds, don’t look out, don’t see what is going on in the world, don’t appreciate that we are 30,000 feet in the air, above the clouds, or rising up through them, or descending back down to earth.
Encased in metal, deafened by the roar of the jet, life grows turbulent. So we turn to new portals. Away from human sensuousness to a different kind of worship. Better to scroll a fantasyland, stream a fiction, watch a different view, noise cancelled and focused, than to watch the sky roll by.
We try to smooth the ride. No distractions. Or is it only distraction? Better to attend to the digital device or the screen ahead than glimpse reality askance. The high-def display of pretend feels better the grainy plastic partition of actuality, it would seem.
We get from one destination to another, but what was in between? The view might be cloudy, but at least we could then see it was so. Now the plane goes up. It comes down. We ascend and descend. The journey happens. The attendant tells us we are in the air. We are above 10,000 feet. We are below it. The troposphere is ours for a time. The stratosphere is almost within reach. Yet most just want to avoid the situation. Ears still pop, but minds are elsewhere. We are in motion, to be sure, but who knows where we really are these days? We are not in the pilot’s seat, that’s for sure.
In the plane, perhaps people no longer wish to know where they are headed. They just want to get there. As if life never happened, uninterrupted. Look straight ahead and hope to stay alive. Remain in your seat with your seatbelt on. Don’t move about the cabin.
We seem to be in flight from flight. Nonetheless the pressure builds. The bumps intensify. The jet stream blows us about. Furious winds.
Perhaps we are too terrified to look as the world burns below, as the oceans heat up, as the clouds gater, as the fires threaten to reach right up and engulf our angel’s wings arcing across the heavens?
Icarus had feathers and wax, but he didn’t have a smartphone.