White Sands. Geoff Dyer

      

      ALSO BY GEOFF DYER

       Another Great Day at Sea

       Zona

       Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 1999–2010

       Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

       The Ongoing Moment

       Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do

       Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews and

       Misadventures 1984–99

       Paris Trance

       Out of Sheer Rage

       The Missing of the Somme

       The Search

       But Beautiful

       The Colour of Memory

       Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

       Geoff Dyer

      White Sands

      Experiences

      from the

      Outside

      World

      Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © 2016 by Geoff Dyer

      The moral rights of the author has been asserted

      First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

      Grateful acknowledgement is made to Alfred Music for permission to reprint an excerpt from ‘Riders on the Storm’, words and music by The Doors, copyright © 1971 and renewed by Doors Music Co.

      Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music. All rights reserved.

      The acknowledgements for previous publications can be found following the text.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 740 7

      Export ISBN 978 1 78211 809 1

      eISBN 978 1 78211 741 4

      For Rebecca

      The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

      —Annie Dillard

      There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.

      —Franz Kafka

      Contents

       Note

       1

       Where? What? Where?

       2

       Forbidden City

       3

       Space in Time

       4

       Time in Space

       5

       Northern Dark

       6

       White Sands

       7

       Pilgrimage

       8

       The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison

       9

       Beginning

       10

       Notes

       List of Illustrations

       Acknowledgements

      Note

      Like my earlier blockbuster, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, this book is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. What’s the difference? Well, in fiction stuff can be made up or altered. My wife, for example, is called Rebecca whereas in these pages the narrator’s wife is called Jessica. So that’s it really. You call yourself the narrator and change the names. But Jessica is there in the non-fiction too. The main point is that the book does not demand to be read according to how far from a presumed dividing line—a line separating certain forms and the expectations they engender—it is assumed to stand. In this regard ‘White Sands’ is both the figure at the centre of the carpet and a blank space on the map.

      —GD, California, September 2015

      1

       Next to my primary and junior schools, in the small town where I grew up (Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) was a large recreation park. During term time we played there at lunchtimes; in the summer holidays, we spent whole afternoons playing football. At one corner of the rec was something we called the Hump: a hump of compacted dirt with trees growing out of it—all that was left, presumably, of the land that had been cleared and flattened to form the rec; either that or—unlikely given the size of the trees—a place where some of the detritus from this process had been heaped up. The Hump was the focal point of all games except football and cricket. It was the first place in my personal landscape that had special significance. It was the place we made for during all sorts of games: the fortress to be stormed, the beachhead to be established (all games, back then, were war games). It was more than what it was, more than what it was called. If we had decided to take peyote or set fire to one of our schoolmates, this is where we would have done it.

Where? What? Where?

      In the course of changing planes at LAX, in the midst of the double long-haul from London to French Polynesia, where I was travelling to write about Gauguin and the lure of the exotic in commemoration of the centenary