About Airports

There isn’t really any joke here. I wrote an essay, about something I like and have some thoughts on. So, there you go. Some more substantial stuff on its way in the near future. 

One thing that I sort of just of just glazed over, relegating it to a parenthetical for conciseness’ sake, is the relation between the cool, alien comfort of that ‘liminal’ feeling and how it relates to memory, nostalgia, and capitalism. There’s an undeniable sense of ghostliness in the most potent of liminal imagery, a sense of defunctness that seems intuitively tied, at least in my mind, to the necessary progress-march of capitalism. In a perfectly socialist state, would there still be these sorts of abandoned structures? Well, maybe. Hopefully, they might find some practical use for them. But more relevant, would our experience of nostalgia be the same? Socialism in future-forward; capitalism is grow, or be left behind. Sure, there’s nothing inherently capitalist about an indoor pool, illuminated by overhead lights at night-time. But does our experience of capitalism instill within us a sense of intimate loss and yearning that would be unfelt by a socialism-raised individual? Would they not look upon the same image, and instead feel, I don’t know, more of a sense of here-and-now familiarity? Even if the pool was, in fact, several years out of use? I guess I don’t know for sure, and it even sounds a little crazy to say— hence, why I hedged in calling liminality a product, necessarily of capitalism. Still, I can’t help but shake the feeling that there’s some connection there, at least much of the time. 

‘Purposelessness’… that’s what it is. Ah, I’ve cracked it, just now, just as I’m sitting here writing this. Purposelessness. What a lonely feeling it is. That’s where that cool, quiet, alien twinge of melancholy comes from, in all these liminal spaces. Purposelessness. It’s taken for granted in capitalism as a fact of life, a fact of creation, the endpoint for all institutions that fail to cut the mustard. Just lie there, then, and live and die simultaneously, quietly, as the world grows around you. There it is, that’s that the liminal je ne sais quoi. We’re all so intimately familiar with it. How silly we are, to grieve for inanimate buildings, for places, for brands. Would a truly socialism-socialized young chap even have the capability of feeling such things? 

Even when we aren’t sure of a space’s active or inactive status, that ‘liminal’ feeling of emptiness, of night-time quietude, seems specifically to emulate a state of defunct, closed-down, long-lost, purposelessness. Would socialist eyes look at such places and see instead, I don’t know, potential? Opportunity? Nothing in particular?

That’s where the capitalism comes in, I guess. I’m sure Mark Fisher or someone has written about this exact sort of idea much better, much earlier, or maybe he hasn’t, because the whole thing is completely crackpot. Whatever. 

Hmmm… the logical question this presupposes, then, is: would a child of true socialism find ‘nostalgia’ as a whole to be a completely alien concept? Wow, now there’s a neat idea. If any Vonnegutesque whimsy-forward Sci-fi authors want to take a stab at that one, go ahead, and you can just send me the royalty cheques through here. 

(Sorry if these thoughts were a little all-over-the-place. Lol. The mind of a genious…)