The act of faith in the age of mechanical locomotion - J. Tooke

Image: Max P. Rudd -helsinki Airport Jan 2006

“…the construction [of airports]…serves to guide the passenger from darkness to light. The arrival is in a huge cave from which the passenger gradually ascends…after passing through clearly organised stages of preparation…[into] a point where the initiate can contemplate the heavens”


If the signs are to be believed, then all the promises of heaven as a posthumous destination are obsolete. Eternity has been supplanted by the eternalised memories in holiday photographs, longing and desire shifted from a future paradise to one in the present and obtainable with only a small financial sacrifice.

Sacred journeys of the soul towards an ecstatic afterlife are out; sensual secular trips abroad are in.

In short, let’s go on holiday.

The holiday has taken on some of the characteristics of sacred processes and ritual.

The language of holidays owes much to the rhetoric of the pulpit: journey, transformation, sacrifice, finding your self or just holidays from hell. But the simplest link is with the etymology of the word holiday itself. It derives from days when Saints names were celebrated-literally Holy Days- and work was postponed in favour of more sociable activities.
Despite their secularisation, holidays persist with the language of heaven and the gods; the presence of celestial bodies a prominent selling point. The sun, the preferred deity amongst ancient Egyptians, is worshipped still by most holiday makers. Locations with the most sunlight hours are favoured by the traveller, while the moon becomes the necessary backdrop for all romantic encounters.
Brochures often advertise their wares superlatively as a `trip to paradise’ or `heaven on earth’. Holidays often demand conversions (albeit ones of currency) or at least possess the power to transform, to restore, to offer the potential for re-birth.
Landscapes inspire awe, and are populated (if you believe the ads encouraging trips to Turkey) by ancient gods and mythical creatures, while the bodies that inhabit the beach, one hopes, are divine.

Whether for the soul or for international travel, it is the buildings used and how they organise people that reveals a strange correspondence between sacred and secular structures. In terms of scale, carefully constructed spaces, views along enormous corridors, the contemporary airport is on a par with the finest medieval cathedral. In some senses they represent similar dynamics: the meeting point of worlds, an in between place subject to forces out of the ordinary that require strict observances to control them.

“For many Airport designers, design is subservient to the idea of the gateway, which affords a view of the journey into light”

The airport, like the temple, has a number of distinct areas, each more exclusive than the last, separated from each other by a succession of guarded doorways to which only the initiates have access. These are the outer area/foyer, where anyone can be; the waiting area for your gate where duty free gifts may be bought (only by licensed travellers and pilgrims must have their souvenirs); the area beyond the metal detector and finally the air craft itself-the holy of holies. Churches have a similar system of spaces organised in order of sanctity: the graveyard; the porch; the nave (from the same root as navy-the seats arranged like those in a ship-another link to travel), the area behind the rood screen (that represents the veil between earth and heaven); the altar and tabernacle.
Within the airport complex, spatial awareness is kept to a minimum by a considered lack of external referents. Geography is wilfully confusing and relies on signs and guidance. This accentuates the mystery at the heart of air travel. The psychological confusion of the interiors prepares the traveller for the shock of meeting the gods, acts as a cushion between the reality of earthbound movement and the surreal lunacy of flight.

Access to these areas relies on strict controls and the possession of talismans.
Tickets are talismanic: a sacrifice is made to the operator of the air line and in return permission to travel is granted, at a specific time, place, and exclusively for named travellers. Once the ticket has been used, the charm will no longer work. The ticket will only work in conjunction with other charms: the sanction of an authority- the high priesthood or the passport office. Having provided these to the satisfaction of the attendants/priests, a further document/talisman (the gate pass) is awarded for admission to the air craft.

The passenger is subject to a number of cleansing rituals. Just as those entering the Temple of Amun in ancient Egypt were depilated, washed, and dressed in specially designed robes before admission was granted to the inner temple, so the passenger must pass through security. Documents checked, verified, the luggage vanishes (the first miracle: a disappearance also the first act of faith: it shall be returned to me, the passengers remind themselves), the traveller must pass through the door in the air, the portal without visible reason (a metal detector). If the applicant is found to be unclean (or forgot their keys) they must be cleaned by the temple attendants and pass through again.

The holiday requires acts of faith. The first, as already noted, is the belief that the relinquished luggage, that contains all the departed will need in the holiday life, will manifest itself once again at the desired location and time. The second and much greater act of faith comes when the passenger steps onto the aircraft. This is placing one’s corporeal being in the hands of the god of technology. Despite the physics, the ratios between thrust, speed and lift, all points to catastrophe: the flight of tonnes of machinery makes no real sense. They are too heavy for flight, too cumbersome to land with grace. But it is too late. The decision is made. The tube of metal must be trusted.

The trust is justified- we fly through space in the glorious void of heaven.

The immediate reward for those with faith is the view from the window. The sky, traditionally where gods have residence, is full of the iconography of heaven: a cloud landscape so white, billowing and pure it sears the retina. The cloudscape often contains great lakes of air through which, many fathoms deep, glimpses of the world of mortal men be seen. Sinuous roads like ribbons covered in ordered lice, and cities appear from above like cut steel encrustations on a patchwork quilt of fields. Or there is just emptiness: vast expanses of empty oceans, or snow capped mountains that go on to the horizon.

Flight connects disparate destinations with such rapidity that it must be a sort of magic. The speed of flight, beyond comprehension, can only be produced by a god or goddess, with full and potent mastery over nature. Vast distances, oceans, mountains and deserts are no longer obstacles to travel; geography is as plastic as the imagination. The thousands of miles covered are only half sensed as if the passenger were in a dream or trance, jolted awake by the boiling air off the hot tarmac. Even then, impressions remain unreal, the smells, the taste of the air, and unfamiliar landscapes.

Sacrifice, death looked at in the face and denied, disappearances, reappearances, acts of faith, miracles, and rewards. These are journeys that in the past could only be made by the spirit, technology has made them possible for the body.