Mechanical Distance

   I walked through Red Square during the pre-class rush for the first time on Monday. Most people do it every day, but for someone who almost exclusively rides his bike, it’s a bizarre experience. First of all, the realization that in almost 9 months I haven’t once been off my bike in the Square during the peak hours was a jarring look into what a pattern driven individual I am. The strangest part, though, was seeing the people in the square as actual people. I have gotten used to viewing them as obstacles, a crowd of predictable, moving road-cones, meandering along set paths, only deviating if they think I’m going to run into them. They were only significant insofar as I had to plan a course between them. Ride too close and they behave erratically. Same thing with skidding or riding with my hands in my pockets. Make slow, logical changes in direction; swerve and people start to try to get out of the way, making them harder to track. Get 10 people all trying to make things easier for me and I have to stop to avoid hitting somebody. The speed and the height advantage, combined with familiarity and loud headphones isolated me almost completely from the surrounding people. I could not hear their conversations, pick out features, or focus on one particular person. Then my bike broke and I had to walk.
   I was suddenly traveling the same speed as the people around me, and as such, able to hear more than blurred, Doppler-effected truncations of conversations. What was a single word or an abstract sound became a sentence or a paragraph. I was no longer moving through the flow; I was a part of it.
   After getting used to the idea of having no mechanical advantage, I started to notice what a strange and vibrant spectrum of people go to school here. There was a heavily makeuped girl in the striped stockings and the knee-high leather thrash-boots, looking like she stepped out of a Tim Burton movie. There was a preposterously tall guy with his shirt buttoned too high and a stereotypical bustling professor-looking person, dropping papers every few seconds and having to pick them up. I began to notice that there had been another level of consciousness beneath the one I had become accustom to. A dimension, perhaps, whose occupants could see me, but who I could only truly observe when I lost the ability to be mechanical. I realized that to mechanize is to distance, whether it be riding a bike through a crowd or plurking. 
   The parallels between plurk and cycling to class are less abstract that it would at first seem. For instance, it could be argued that sites like plurk enable one to meet and make friends with more people. It is true that I feel like I “know” most of the people from the class based on the plurk-mediated conversations I had had with them, but I have only twice talked to a nano-student in person. Furthermore, I don’t think I would be able to carry on a “real” conversation with a large portion of the class, despite the fact that I “know” most of you. Much like riding a bike enables you to see more people but prevents you from interacting with them, plurk allows you to talk to more people but limits your ability to truly connect to them. A real world friendship requires that both parties open themselves to injury and is built upon the trust this requires. A virtual relationship does not require investment from either party, allowing either to simply not respond, thereby ending correspondence.
   A while ago I read a book by a former Luftwaffe pilot who talked about this mechanical distancing phenomenon. He told of his squadron once happening on a group of Allied transport planes filled with troops. The pilots who still had ammunition (the author among them) engaged the planes and shot several down. The author recounts how he dropped in behind and slightly above one of the troop carriers and, taking aim at the cockpit, drained the remainder of his ammunition (several hundred rounds) along the length of the plane. One of the wings separated and the plane spun in. He wasn’t bothered by the incident, or the lack of parachutes, until a few years later when he came across a similarly crashed transport plane on the ground, and approaching to look for survivors, opened the door to find that the plane had been turned into what he referred to as a “toothpaste tube of blood.” He recalls how intestines hung from the ceiling, and gore was piled around the cockpit where it had landed after being hurled forward by the force of the crash. He vomited over and over, not because of the crash, but because he realized with horror that he had become someone that could turn 20 or so people into little pieces of bloody meat without even being bothered by it. I read another account by an American fighter pilot in the Pacific who had a similar experience. He was ordered to drop fragmentation bombs on a group of Japanese boats filled with troops just off the coast where his base was located. He recalls going down to the beach a while later while on leave and encountering hundreds of swollen body parts bobbing in the surf and washed up on the beach, many already defleshed by gulls. He remembers that he sat down and cried for hours upon seeing what he had done. In both cases the machinery of the airplane allowed for an emotional distance. Only when confronted in person by the realities of their actions did they understand their true implications.
   On another note, I find it interesting that military aircraft, which tend to have the most destructive power of any military vehicle, are also the most removed from the destruction they cause. Particularly in modern jets, where the target is often destroyed many miles away from the actual fighter, the most the pilot sees is a flash or a cloud of smoke, and often there is nothing more than a message on a screen in the cockpit. Death is never directly witnessed in a plane. Even when a comrade dies, all his or her fellow pilots see is a damaged plane heading down.

2494

 Horizon flight 2494, leaving Seattle for Bellingham at 11:05 PM. I’m munching on the pretzels I snatched earlier from the back of Horizon flight 2174 when no one was looking and listening to Ben Harper’s “Needed You Tonight” on my iPod. The cityscape sprawls through the port-side window like a complex glowing carpet. At any given moment, I am looking at hundreds of thousands of people, devoid of individuality from this height, nothing but drops in a phosphorescent sea. Streetlamps create peach-colored pools of light, arranged in rows to create fuzzy, rounded streaks of illumination slicing the prevailing darkness into manageable pieces. The occasional low-hanging cloud adds soft focus, like water drops on sunglasses, abstracting the separation of light and dark. The main roads snake lazily through the haze, a flowing ribbon against the checked background of smaller streets. The freeways lance through, stretching off toward the distance, gathering the larger of the surface streets to them like tributaries.
 As we rise higher, the city takes a more organic appearance. The grid of neighborhood streets fades into a delicate membrane separated by intersecting arterials. The lighted areas become great neurons with cities for nuclei, interstates for axons, headlights for impulses. A whole city on the move, hundreds of thousands making a single entity. A single braincell in the hivemind of the earth.
 R.E.M.’s “Perfect Circle” comes on. We climb higher. The moonlight deals a glancing blow to the surface of the sound, highlighting the coastline and separating the uneven tungsten glow from the uniform platinum sheen of the water. Manmade fungus against a clean petry dish. 12000 feet away, but I could be looking through a microscope. An impartial observer would have hard time determining what was nature and what was man. The woman next to me snaps on the light to read her skymall, and I stare at myself, fuzzy in the multi-pane aircraft window. For a second I stare, becoming accustomed to the change. I pull out The Filth and read.