Airport

In both cases, the station with its inveterate grime and jostle, its fuss and crush, its mad dashes and endless waits, loses its living soul, without which it becomes nothing more than a fat dot on the city map. The true full-blooded train station is far more than its purely functional mass-transit intent. Life here is always seething and sizzling, filling the grotesque station recesses with its effervescence. Indeed, a station is a highly livable environs - people live here in the fullest sense of the word: they eat, drink, sleep, fall in love, loiter, gamble, steal, kill, hide, cry, and chortle.

The airport, meanwhile, is uninhabitable by definition. Everything here is as functional and practical as the moving walkways of horizontal and vertical escalators that shuffle us from one obligation to the next. A train station sorts out the crowd into individuals - sober and drunk ones, if nothing else. But who's ever seen someone sozzled at an airport? Here neither virtue nor vice sets you apart, you and everyone else are converted into identical pre-fab cargo units.

Isn't that why airports are such an attractive venue for terrorists? In an airport their notion of unmotivated, random murder becomes all the more terrifying and pronounced. The very setting erases a person's individuality and prepares him for the role of faceless, guiltless victim.

Still, the airport's utilitarian spirit is not a menacing product of industrial civilization, but a physical and metaphysical necessity. The airport is a vestibule between earth and sky. In order for man - a hopelessly terrestrial creature - to take flight, he must be prepared for a crossover into another dimension, into another element. A train can be chased down, stopped, brought back, but the airport sees a plane off into nowhere, into a mysterious, unimaginable void. Unthinkably, we travel from air space into airless space, with only the frail membrane of our depressurized shell separating us from it.

The airport's secret aim, therefore, is to conceal from us the gravity of the approaching crossover. The passenger who finds himself in the airport's soft but tenacious clutches is gradually divested of everything extraneous: first they take his baggage, then his ticket; they strap him to a chair and deprive him of his freedom of movement. Last but not least, he is left without an exit; the only way to get out of an airplane is to be thrown out.

Chiefly, though, what an airplane offers in place of the detailed geography visible from a train window is an unearthly, Cubist skyscape. Traveling through air, we count hours and minutes instead of miles and yards, and thus we move in time rather than space, not so much toward the end of a road as simply toward the end.

All of which makes the analogy with the River Lethe even more relevant: as for the airport, well, where else would Charon store his oars?

And so, airports become America. They underscore its isolation in an ocean so vast that one no longer even bothers to distinguish water from air. History has cheated America out of borders justified by tradition, culture or blood. The only boundary that matters, in fact, is the one between the Old World and the New, a line so hard to cross that many people spend their entire lives bumping up against it.

Which, if you think about it, is not that surprising - after all, to enter America you must first touch the sky before touching down in an airport, sure points of transit on the journey from that world to this, and from this world to that.

XXX

With their cheap-lollipop smell that vaguely suggests sterility, sex shops are reminiscent of a men's restroom. This is where adult males come to lock themselves in private booths. In one, you might be shown an intimate act between a man and a woman; in another, between a woman and a stallion; in the third, between two stallions; and in the fourth, between all of the above.

In America, where to this day there exists something along the lines of moral censorship, the very concept of sin is woven from Victorian values and Puritanical prohibitions. Thus, the sex shop with all its explicit paraphernalia somehow manages to be the celibate instrument of vice: erotica is rendered harmless, banished to the realm of sexual fantasy. Sexuality here is dehumanized, distanced from the individual. And even those acts that take place 'live' on-stage have a decidedly artificial, dreamlike, celluloid feel to them.

It is in this very mechanization that the peculiar bashfulness of the sex shop rests: here you can buy neatly wrapped illusions designed to satisfy the most refined and the most degenerate tastes. Together these establishments are like dream factories carefully fabricated so as not to infringe upon reality.

Even in Amsterdam's Red Light District, for example, sex is more than just an industry. The women you see tempting passers-by from their brightly lit windows are busy with more than their professional duties: they read, drink coffee, watch television, knit. As a result, their clients must relate to a real person, one who has not been deprived of her wholeness. The American sex shop, in contrast, is as soulless as the inflatable dolls that line its windows.

And that is the difference. What is in the Old World a window for viewing, is, in the New World, a display case for merchandise: in these sex shops the viewer and the viewed are separated either by a terrarium-like glass wall, or by a hollow buffer zone that effectively turns any act into a theatrically staged spectacle.

Roland Barthes, describing the striptease, referred to this quality as the 'alibi of art.' Pornography, dressing itself in exotic clothes, and using music, dance and special lighting effects, so successfully plays the part of theater that it defeats the whole erotic purpose. In order to restore it, Barthes continues, the professionals must be replaced by amateurs, in other words, by people capable of instilling the tired ritual of public undressing with spontaneity, unpredictability, and the sincerity of personal experience.

With time the American pornography industry has come to much the same conclusion. Once confined to the seedy sections of large cities, it has taken to the airwaves, changing its modus operandi along the way. Rather than selling sexual fantasies, now it 'shares' them. The American video market has been flooded with homemade amateur videos, leading Camille Paglia, audacious researcher of American morality, to call this phenomenon a rebirth of pagan fertility cults.

Now this very same keyhole is making its way to a wider audience thanks to the countless daytime talk shows that have stretched the boundaries of what is intimate. As surprised critics note, now housewives openly discuss on national television topics that used to make them blush at home.

As opposed to the sexual revolution of the 1960's, however, the sex invasion of the public arena is occurring with impunity. The spirit of all-out promiscuity has found a way to coexist with a powerful and overriding monogamous imperative. Public morality has so willingly accepted the illusory seraglio of the sex shop that it has even invited it home to help out with its matrimonial duties.