White Sands. Geoff Dyer

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СКАЧАТЬ have to settle for eking out an existence in a carved bit of rock.

      That left just Iipona, the last site on what was turning into an itinerary so wretched that I was bracing myself for some climactic letdown, for disappointment of such purity that I would not even realize it was being experienced: there would be so little at this site, I’d think we were still on our way to it even after we had got there. Such fears proved entirely unfounded.

      The jungle had been cleared, the air swarmed with mosquitoes and, as soon as we approached, I felt the gravitational force of the place. I mean that literally. The main tiki—the largest in Polynesia—is squat, rounded, strong. There is an unmistakable power here. Even the leaves are conscious of it, can feel it, are part of it. At some level this came as no surprise. There had to be something here, lurking or buried in the midst of the island: it was inconceivable that a place like this would not have generated some kind of belief in itself that could be felt—if not understood—by the stranger or visitor.

      The denuded features of the round face were thick with moss, emphasising that this stone had no intention of budging, let alone rolling. You need know nothing of the beliefs it incarnates to sense that this is the most earth-bound of gods: as rooted to the spot as a Bulgarian weight-lifter about to attempt a record-breaking clean and jerk, or—going back to an earlier comparison—a Tahitian who has decided never to vacate his seat. This was a Larkin-god: the god of staying put, of not moving. I wanted to stay put, or at least remain longer than the guide had anticipated, to give this god his due and bask in the simplest of emotions (though it is more than that): I was glad I came.

      The following day I made another significant discovery as I walked from the hotel down to Atuona, where I hoped to check my e-mail and buy ointment to reduce the torment of my heat rash, which was, if anything, even more tormenting than it had been the previous day. This was the village football pitch. Beyond the touch line, on either side of the pitch, was a mixture of deciduous trees of varied origin (no crowd segregation here). The other end—standing room only—was the preserve of tall palms, swaying together. You’ll never walk alone, they seemed to be saying—or, more accurately, you’ll never even walk, for these were fair-weather fans who only attended home games. Every now and again the wind sent a Mexican wave through the stadium of trees. The pitch was nibbled short, the goal mouths worn out. There were no players, just a dog dribbling (saliva), warming up on the touch line.

      A hundred years from now (or a thousand, let’s say, to be on the safe side), after it had been overgrown with jungle and then rediscovered by some intrepid archaeologist and the engulfing vegetation hacked back, this place would have something of the aura of Iipona or, for that matter, of many other places of apparently abandoned meaning. Assume that only a scanty knowledge of football—the odd picture of Diego Maradona and a few random results (Brazil 2–England 1) rendered meaningless by depth of perspective and the lack of context—had survived that long interlude of neglect and vegetative concealment. The place would still have something special about it, if for no other reason than that it was somewhere with no utilitarian function (like growing food or providing shelter), a place that had been set aside, enclosed within its own specific and, some would say, sacred purpose. This is what we would feel, and we would not be wrong if we deduced that the rectangular shapes at either end, the goals, were altars at which people worshipped and in whose names heroic sacrifices had been made: vestiges of a certain delirium, of a strange and simple faith. You would sense that this was a site of celebration and sorrow, both of which, ultimately, would give way to an all-engulfing sense of futility; that it was a place devoted to a practice with its own rules, which were at once arbitrary and the generators of meaning, a set of rules without which this place would not even be a place. I imagined this future, with the nets gone and the lines barely noticeable, and immediately realized that it already looked as it might in this imagined future—and this in turn made me realize something which should have been obvious all along: that much geographical travel is actually a form of time travel, and that I was, to all intents and purposes, a visitor from a thousand years hence, come back to puzzle over the significance of this place.

      I sat behind the nearest goal so that it framed the one at the far end of the pitch. There is always something pleasing about this view of the goal within a goal, whereby the goal (the far one) becomes a substitute for the thing (the ball) you are normally trying to force into it. As I sat there, looking at the goal within a goal, I thought of the album Playing by Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell. Like many ECM records this one has a striking cover: a photograph of an empty goal post, very white, backed by a wall of dark green trees (almost a forest). In front of the goal is the lighter green of the pitch, the lines of which—six-yard box, penalty area—are impossible to see. Like this the goal becomes something tangibly abstract, and the pitch almost a meadow.

      I knew all the musicians on the album—that’s why I’d bought it—but knew nothing about the person who took the cover photograph. He was credited on the back cover, but I paid it no mind, and the name, in any case, would have meant nothing to me back then. It was only years later that I came properly to appreciate the identity of the photographer. I was looking through Kodachrome by Luigi Ghirri and there it was: the same picture, but as often happens in such circumstances, slightly different. The forest on the album cover had lost some detail, its implied depth, and the grass was somewhat yellowed, drier-looking, either because of faulty reproduction or because, over the years, my copy of the album had faded. The biggest change, however, was simultaneously subtler and clearer, and it was what might be called Ghirriesque.

      Like many Ghirri pictures, this one is quietly but rigorously self-enclosed. The frame within the frame—the frame of the goal posts—concentrates our attention absolutely within the frame of the image (which on Playing had been framed again by the white background of the album cover). In the picture there is no narrative to suggest what might be going on either beyond the spatial frame or beyond the moment depicted, because—and this is often the case with Ghirri—there is absolutely nothing going on within it, no hint of movement. This is what a still from a dream might look like. Each picture is pellucid and infinitely mysterious, contains almost no incentive to move on, to turn the page and look at another. We are content to look and wait, to attend. The experience might, in this context, best be described as ‘Staying’—which is what I was happy to do, looking at the goal within the goal.

      Under the spell of this image of recessive teleology—the goal within the goal—I saw that the intended purpose of coming to Hiva Oa (a Gauguin pilgrimage) was framed not by the lack of a larger goal but by a larger lack of goals, by an all-engulfing purposelessness. This larger lack did not mean, however, that there was no larger perspective. Such a perspective was provided by the empty pitch, whose goal was to show that everything that happened here—the human triumphs and tragedies, the manly victories and defeats—was lent meaning only as a result of its own continued non-human existence. That’s to be expected—but the pitch also induced a vision of its own demise, when it would no longer be here, when it would be indistinguishable from the vegetation that would engulf it: the long interlude of forgotten-ness that is a precondition for eventual rediscovery and reclamation. The pitch was like a forgotten photograph depicting the moment when it is remembered and rediscovered.

       Uputa

      Gauguin’s decision to go to the Marquesas is in keeping with the psycho-pathology of island life. ‘Polynesia’ translates as ‘many islands,’ all of which you wish you were on instead of the one you actually are on. En route to Hiva Oa we had flown over any number of paradisiacal islands and atolls. In the course of my time here I had become aware of still more islands and atolls, each of which sounded more idyllic—with finer beaches, surrounded by sea more turquoise—than every other. As I studied the guide books and brochures I began to develop a profound resentment against Gauguin, that he had come to Hiva Oa and not to Bora-Bora or Raiatea. I phoned Tahiti Tourism (who had underwritten part of my trip) СКАЧАТЬ