Round trip tickets to God, Arnon Grunberg

When it comes to (serious) criminals, people claim - as though it were something shocking and new - that they always seemed so normal, and that in court they seemed completely normal too. Normal people who did abnormal things. A similar claim could be made concerning plane spotters. Normal people with a peculiar pastime.
Heidegger (1889 – 1976) felt that the word “pastime” was a misnomer: what is made to pass is not time, but the boredom that we try to “poison” with our pastime. The road to death is so long that people start getting bored halfway. Is boredom the same as a death wish? Boredom, I would say, is the assumption of a gloomy sort of predictability in which it is precisely death itself that is lacking. In that sense, boredom is one of the lesser dangers from which we flee.
My three-year-old son regularly asks: “When will it be tomorrow?” Or: “Is it afternoon already?” Sometimes he asks his mother’s voicemail, when his urge to see her becomes too great: “Why are you only coming in the afternoon, and not the morning too?” A sense of time is starting to dawn on him. Before long, the fact of time, his mortality, will sink in, although one hopes that will remain an abstraction for a very long time.

According to some ancient Greeks, the realization of our mortality is by definition abstract. Where I am, after all, death is not, and where death is I am not. But there are suspicions, and as one’s days pass by they become graver. That gravity is what we call the realization of mortality. This realization, it would seem, presses more heavily upon us humans than on other animals, and that is why we have resigned ourselves to so many fleeting and sometimes also fabled undertakings. The suspicion itself is no more than a pesky gadfly. He who runs keeps it at a distance. Mortality is for other people. We live, they die. But how do we live? How does the human run for his own life? From his own self-knowledge, or what he takes as such?

“Might someone have a calling to be a taxi driver?” wrote the Brazilian – Jewish writer Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) in a posthumously published volume of work. One of the essays in it, entitled “A brief bit about taxi drivers”, ends with the plain yet still somehow cryptic lines: “In fact, how many folks have I run into since setting myself on fire who have set themselves on fire too? It seems like a habit.”
The biographical note in the translation reads: “On the night of September 14 [1966], she falls asleep in bed with a lit cigarette. She is saved in the nick of time.” But Lispector’s own words are more mysterious, more metaphorical. People are in the habit of igniting themselves. Outstripping the realization of one’s mortality is little more than that. The flight is the fire. Which is not the same as fleeing towards death. Without the fire, boredom always lies in wait. Apparently, people take their own lives only very rarely out of boredom.
There is little that makes us more somber than the realization of not being aflame at all. For no one and nothing, not even for ourselves. If boredom is a predator, then it is a boa constrictor. It reaches its zenith during puberty. The sense of passing time has by then become reasonably developed, the adolescent has largely shaken off the magical thinking of the toddler; that, after all, is what childrearing and education aim for: instilling a sense of reality. At the same time, though, death itself still seems so distant that eternal life feels all too real, and with it eternal boredom.
The flip side of eternal boredom – eternal happiness. Or is that a fallacy?
On June 3, 1972, Lispector noted: “No, she didn’t want to be happy.” She writes in the third person, but we may assume that she’s talking about herself, or about herself as well.
That same day she writes: “The love for that mortal life killed her gently and gradually.” Only to add a few lines further: “Then rather the mediocrity of a life she knew?” Caught between the factually all-consuming fire of love and the mediocrity of the all-too-well-known. What is happiness? Isn’t the crisis the same as the fire? Isn’t it the most personal, the most picayune crisis that makes us see and hear at last?
And can one be bored by one’s own death? I doubt it: dying is generally a one-off thing that will, if only for that reason, present new and relatively unfamiliar stimuli. I once met a lady who seemed to entertain herself with her own death. She was already quite old, in her nineties, she died at home, and had dedicated almost her entire life to the social grace known as detachment. The phase before stoicism; one is detached but not yet in such a way that all suffering is snowed under by indifference.

The question of whether the taxi driver has a calling is more apt than that of whether the pilot has a calling, although for the frequent flyer with a mild addiction to cabs there seems little difference between them. A faint trace of romanticism clings to the pilot, the way a trace of dog-doo can cling with horrible persistence to a child’s shoe, and where there are traces of romanticism, the calling and the zeal cannot be far behind.
One might, in “aviation porn”, detect an atavistic longing for the immortals, for the gods. Not the prayer, the ritual or the sacrifice are the vehicles to approach those immortal gods; the vehicle itself is the vehicle.
Flying can be grand, the occasional passenger still applauds upon landing, as though the pilot has saved them from certain death while still delivering them to their destination without great delay. Suffering, dying, love and all the illusions that go along with love are, at the best moments, that too: grand. Breathtaking. Lebensbejahend, even if it can kill you. The time-honored human dream of flying is of course only one of our attempts to shake off space and time and death, in which that negative “shake off” is readily interpreted as a positive desire: for freedom. Free of the earth. The earth is too earthly. Yet attempts to escape the limits posed by time and space, and thereby escape mortality, can have dangerous consequences. The fate of those who apply all-too-practical methods to approach the gods is well-known. The myths allow no misunderstanding about that.

Might the plane spotter have a calling? How might we compare him to the pilot? Like the game to the soldier? The fan of thrillers to the hitman? Though I tend to think that many hitmen have a professional predilection for thrillers. People like to read about themselves.
This book by Thomas Nolf about the fascination for flying is, to a great extent, also about awe. Flying is viewed and photographed from close by, flying is simulated as closely as possible, but no flying is done. A circumspect distance is maintained.
I don’t know Thomas Nolf all that well, we had coffee together once in Amsterdam. Then we met one more time in Kortrijk. After he had read an earlier version of this text, he told me that the people he photographed were mirrors. And projections. Which brings me back to the question: what is it precisely from which we flee? That’s clear enough in some cases: wars, famines, repression. But in other cases the reason remains vague, or one thinks one knows the reason, while it is only self-deception. Where is real life to be found? Years ago, after our relationship ended, a girlfriend wrote that she would see me again someday in real life. But my real life takes place largely on paper. The real life, can one buy tickets for that, is it a travelling circus? Do we think that taking down the tent is more real than the show that took place inside it?
Watching people who fly and taking a seat in the flight simulator would therefore seem a prudent way to shake off the human condition. The same most probably applies to the photographer who, in turn, watches the people at play. A form of role play – one plays Icarus, but as with most games the risks remain limited. Although one can, of course, become addicted to playing. Every pastime worthy of the name has a potentially addictive character. A nervous tic is not a pastime.
Looked at in a down-to-earth fashion, plane spotting is about awe for the machine. The kind of awe that, in bygone eras, was probably reserved for the beast. Now that nature, and above all man himself, has largely been tamed, the only hope of awe is that for an artificial product that slips the bonds of human control.
On the whole, the meanwhile-almost-forgotten covid pandemic taught us that the larger animals are easier to tame and eliminate than the smallest. Although the theory that the virus escaped from a lab would make of it a minuscule Frankenstein.
In any case, Frankenstein remains the iconic archetype of the machine as untamable beast. And Frankenstein is, at the same time, an erotic fantasy. The monster, even when a machine, is still an object of sexual desire. Horror and craving. The thrill of the circus, whether it is the trapeze artist or the man sticking his head in the lion’s mouth. Interesting in this regard is the story of Roy Horn, who was bitten and mauled by his tiger, Mantacore, in Las Vegas in 2003. In the ambulance he is said to have pleaded with people to take good care of Mantacore. Others say he mistreated the tiger, and that is why it attacked him. Horn, by the way, apparently died of covid. From the maw of the tiger to that of the virus.
Whether one watches a man stick his head in the mouth of the beast or a plane making a landing, the point is the spectacle, the minor chance that disaster will ensue. Like the visitor to the circus, those who eavesdrop on human flight, who observe flying as a hobby, always reckon with disaster. No matter how slight the chance may be. Not that they hope for it per se, not the way the lottery player hopes for the jackpot; it is simply one possibility among many. “At Muan Airport a passenger plane exploded after a failed landing. At least 120 people were killed. Eyewitnesses filmed the plane as it came down beside the tarmac and careened into a concrete wall,” the Flemish daily De Standaard reported in late December of 2024. The catastrophe must not be merely observed, it must be kept, recorded, for later enjoyment. The visitor to the circus and the plane spotter are serious about disaster tourism. That is the essential difference between the plane spotter and the birdwatcher. The birdwatcher is waiting for a miracle, the spotter for a catastrophe.

That not everyone is able to appreciate the spotter’s calling is unimportant. A calling can be a lonely thing: consider the person who builds an Eiffel Tower from matchsticks. And then moves on to the Louvre. Followed by the Statue of Liberty. The flame itself does not rule out the mediocrity. And who’s to say which is wiser: fleeing mediocrity, or embracing it as the only relevant art de vivre.
He who has never longed for greatness has missed something so essential that you might say he has never fully been born. But mortality always looms behind the greatness, transforming it into futility. The Nobel Prize for Literature? The world championship of chess? The Taoists believe that the whole point is to become an old woman before one’s time. But how would the world keep on turning if we all became old women before our time? The economy does not run on overcoming desire, but on being overcome by it. Where consumption has truly ceased, death begins. The citizen-as-consumer may seem like an empty vessel, yet the Bible says: better a living vessel than a full vessel that is dead. (Confessedly, this is my paraphrase, the Bible doesn’t speak of empty and full vessels, but of a dog and a lion.)
The machine has gone the way of all grandeur: the airplane, once the symbol of freedom, adventure and, at a certain point, decadence (the Concorde), has become a flying cookie jar for the intensely Biedermeier. Frankenstein has been whittled down to Delta flight number 48. Vegetarian pasta or chicken? First class is not much better. Yes, some flights offer something that resembles a bed. But the bed in your average youth hostel is better. And the beds in IC units are said to be fantastic. If you die there, you at least have no reason to complain about your mattress.

The plane spotter is that curious creature who spies on the flying bourgeoisie. A Don Quixote of our times. He has no desire to save anything, we are past saving, he wants only to record that which goes up and, on rare occasions, also comes crashing down.
All escapism, every flight, is marked by two spots: the spot from which one wishes to flee, and the one to which one flees. Death – for those who lived in the right way – was once considered a one-way ticket to God. But the desire for round-trip tickets to God has become huge. To catch a glimpse of God, and the very next evening to enjoy one’s usual breadsticks. The bourgeois God was made flesh in a Boeing 787.
According to the philosopher Marc De Kesel, modern faith no longer pertains to an object, God, to whom one relates. It pertains to the truth, to the way one relates to “the disclosive truth about the truth.”
De Kesel recaps Kierkegaard’s famous text about Abraham’s sacrifice thusly: modern faith is the realization that there is nothing to which one can cling. And, I would add, one clings to that realization.
Man is an insignificant dot, but that dot has no footing, is in itself no footing, rather an abyss. An abyss above which light aircraft are circling, I imagine. The occasional plane barrels into the abyss. The footage of 9/11 might flash through everyone’s mind here, even those who were not born at the time; they are, after all, iconic images.

Who wouldn’t wish to transcend the abyss that mankind itself is, with binoculars, at a safe distance, perhaps from behind a fence? The bourgeois faith in mediocrity, as the final faith, one might also call it the reformist faith, needs churches as well, and rituals, and questions: what, in god’s name, does mediocrity look like from the heavens? What do the gods see as they view our mediocrity and recognize in it their own mediocrity? Like every tourist, the plane spotter also wants to return to the spot where his adventure started.
In the end, one can cling only to the idea that there must be something to cling to. The plane spotter knows there is nothing to look at, and he looks at that. A modern believer. An ethical tourist among fellow creatures with a highly developed flight response.

Arnon Grunberg

December 2024

Translated by Sam Garrett