Back from an Alaskan cruise. It is good to be back. Two weeks is a long time to be on a ship, hiding from reality.
I've always thought cruises are strange. They are a means for the upper middle class to feel opulent for two weeks: exotic locations, a staff dedicated to serving you every minute, rich foods, luxurious facilities...I suppose they are not that strange; cruises, along with other similar vacations and many television programs are a way to live the American dream of wealth. You buy a ticket or sit down with a program for a while and live out your wildest fantasies of being rich and pampered. I understand the appeal for people who still believe in the dream.
For many a cruise is a wonderful experience. They are pampered, they are treated to good food, they get to lie around and relax, and they get to experience sights that are often spectacular. And don't get me wrong, I was grateful to be on that ship. I did eat great foods and I did see great sights. But I also felt very uncomfortable with the artificial society within the ship. Many cruise companies hire men and women from all over the world to serve the guests, to make the experience more exotic and exciting I suppose. But this has a strange dehumanizing effect: here are people from all over the world, people I would love to converse with and learn from and enjoy, and they are dedicated to serving me. They are in a definite servile position, and this is very discomforting.
I talked to some of these people and they had fascinating perspectives, but all of the conversations were filtered through a very strict power relation. I was the customer (though I didn't personally pay a cent) and they were the servants. I was put in an unearned position of power (since I feel money no longer indicates earned power) and this was immediately felt. These relations were complex and numerous, I suppose I could write more in depth some other day.
But here we are, cruising from port to port, being ferried to all the tourist stops and gift shops full of useless crap that thousands and thousands of tourists pour into. And the jewelry shops are like Starbucks in the tourist destinations. I don't know what it is with vacationing and buying jewelry, but people love that shit.
You don't really experience the land for what it is. You simply dance along a manicured, white-washed, consumerist platform that has been graciously laid out by the authorities to collect for their economy.
And the land was gorgeous. The picture above is of the ice fields we creeped through to catch a glimpse of the Hubbard glacier. Here was a glacier, a compressed mass of ice, that slowly crawled its way through a valley, driven by gravity towards the sea, where it cracked and dumped into the frigid waters until its fractured pieces drifted as icebergs out to open waters where it melted to be evaporated back into the water cycle. What an incredible microcosm for the contractions and expansions of the universe! Here was an ice universe, being born and dying and cycling before our very eyes. Of course the cruise line felt the need to blare commentary out of its loud speakers. God forbid its passengers should settle and listen to the cracks and pops and gurgles of a living ice galaxy.
I did attempt to listen intently to the subdued sounds in the waters below. These people need to be constantly entertained, constantly fed, constantly stimulated I suppose. A strange state of being we've ushered ourselves into. I can't event talk about the on-ship entertainment they carried out in the bowels of the ship; I sat through two of them, and they were truly horrifying spectacles.
I thought I would escape American life for two weeks to enjoy wonderful landscapes with family. It was naive of me, I should have known a cruise line of all places would be the perfect setting for an exotic extension of American madness. It was there all around me, like a higher brow Las Vegas on the water, complete with a garish casino where the elderly gambled away their savings in search of the next big jackpot.
Again, I'm not trying to say I was ungrateful and loathed the whole experience. I was happy to be there, and felt indebted to family for including me. However, I was dismayed to find that the American consciousness was truly everywhere, a pervasive force that colored even the most majestic sights. I can't escape it. Much of my life will consist of coming to terms with it and the aftermath, unless there is a vast shift in consciousness.
