"Unto mine eyes did recommence delight
Soon as I issued forth from the dead air,
Which had with sadness filled mine eyes and breast ---Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio
Talk Talk ---
I've felt the coldness of my winter
I've never thought it would ever go
I've cursed the gloom that set upon us... --- Led Zeppelin (Page/Plant) "The Rain Song"
Sky Harbor Airport - Phoenix, AZ. USA - Most airports look pretty much the same any more: humans-as-consumers-and-commodities paw the ground ad nauseum in these anxious, stress-full shopping malls. Like most airports, tense signage adorns Sky Harbor airport. Some of the alarmed red rhetoric in Sky Harbor exclaims "Smoking Is Prohibited In The Airport --- Except In Designated Areas." The " --- Except In Designated Areas" portion of the tense exclamation offers me hope that I can indulge in a pre-flight ciggie somewhere in Sky Harbor. I'm going back to Los Angeles; although the flight is short, I do feel an urge to pamper, what is today, my heretical vice. I don't want to puff a whimsical Bidi nor do I desire to pull long drags from a rebellious Marlboro Red; rather, I prefer to roll some Shag into a non-cut-corner ZigZag paper --- and then smoke it.
 |
"The Box," I find out, refers to the "penalty box" in sports-speak. The Box is a proverbial American sports bar; this particular Box --- or pigeon hole, one could say in these demographic-happy times --- is brought to us, the Average American Consumers, by FOX (a fattening media cat). Identical Sports Bars decorate the increasingly predictable --- and redundantly eerie --- Bourgeois American Landscape. The prolific "sports bar" features a slew of excited, stuttering TV's that splatter baseball, basketball and other team sport spectacles at the patrons; manly, feel-good music, such as Huey Lewis & the freaking News or Bruce freaking Springsteen, blares and rebounds about the walls of the sports bar and the nerves of the patrons. All the world is a stage and most of us are spectators.
Modern American people sit (tensely) within the Box. The modern American is a monad, self-consciously assuming an appropriate (and designed) modern public role in these modern zero-tolerance times. The modern American hurries and waits while constantly conforming to social engineering like birds adapting to bad architecture. In this Box we are waiting for someone to arrive at Sky Harbor airport or we are waiting to leave Sky Harbor airport. Some of us are waiting for a different flavor of living to come into vogue; some of us are waiting for better times or worse times; some of us are waiting for the other shoe to drop. We don our retrograde fashions that mock the castrated spirit of times past with each cyclical appropriation. We drum our fingers in our retrograde fashions and bend our humanity like contortionists with every tedious regulation that confronts us. The Box is a perfect waiting room in this purgatory disguised as life --- or, are we descending deeper, deeper into the repetitive nightmare of Hell?
It is not surprising to find the cliché "Box" in the Phoenix Airport because
- A) airports are pretty much all the same anymore
- B) different locales are increasingly less different and
- C) Phoenix is a particularly disturbing wasteland of homogeneity.
I was visiting a friend in Phoenix and she was the only color that I detected in this anemic landscape of rampant tract housing and strip malls. Perhaps, it is the desert motif --- a stark, eroded land --- that lends itself so especially well to the fad of sprawling gentrification.
The men in this Box all appear to be lumberjacks. Notions of virility are conjured amidst the plaid flannel shirts and tight jeans that bedeck hairy, burly bodies. The women are fairly innocuous; they don non-hazardous, muted tones; my orange shirt is a shriek.
No one appears to be watching other people nor interacting much with each other; our private reveries drift with our smoke. We are not human beings, we are "smokers," "Democrats," "anti-guns." We are statistics. We are polled opinions.
A plaid-flanneled, tight-jeaned guy asks me "gotta light, sweetheart?" I hold up the flame emitting from my plastic chartreuse lighter. Peppy, boisterous music continues to insist upon a peppy, boisterous attitude from all patrons. We all must be interested in sports, too. There is no getting out of this interest in sports as it continuously slaps us across the face. Our needs are conveniently defined and requited.
My personal experience is that the more artificially peppy the ambiance, the more saddened and depressed I become --- I am often a pain in the ass in this way. The guy who needed a light stands next to me, occasionally flicking a cigarette ash into the tray on my table. He's a lonely guy. Everyone appears lonely to me. Airports are lonely. People leave, people come back before they leave again. I'm lonely; this place is hollow. The peppy music and continuous staccato visual stimulation cannot seduce the emptiness inside of me.
Led Zeppelin's "Rain Song" subtly slinks into Box. The Rain Song is a haunting, sentimental song --- I am surprised to hear this underplayed, maudlin composition in this peppy, boisterous setting. The Rain Song is a weeper, eliciting tenderness and faith for travails of life; it is a love song, too. Most of the people in this Box appear to be old enough to have experienced Led Zeppelin underscoring their adolescent and young adult years (not so long ago). I am a 70's chick myself --- my Angst-ridden adolescent years occurred in the 70's. Many a keg party of my predominantly white, bourgeois youth was musically scored with the hefty, indelible sounds of Led Zeppelin. Music is probably the ultimate mnemonic tug and the Rain Song duly yanks the psychic cords of The Box patrons.
The peppy, boisterous aura of the Box shape-shifts in the rain: faces pinch as memories, tangible and murky, slip through the fingers of intricate, non-uniform, exceptional psyches; the disguises of the times temporarily drop into the laps of these people.
I weep and puff.
The flannel-clad guy who needed a light quickly snuffs-out his ciggie in the tray on my table before sidling up to another female, begging "gotta a light, sweetheart?"
Perhaps, memory serves its most profound purpose when it haunts us with what was buried and forgotten rather than what is conveniently remembered. As I wait in Sky Harbor, I remember a more tolerant time when our lives were a little bit more our own, when hysterias had more quality, when constraint and courage, for better and worse, loped on longer leashes. My smoke is a prayer for redemption in this Divine Comedy.