With Geoff Dyer, you inevitably face the problem of how to describe his literary acrobatics in all their sunny impertinence. He doesn’t make it easy.
Dyer insouciantly mixes fiction and nonfiction, smuggling invented bits into the seams of his reported essays and stitching long threads of transparently autobiographical material into his novels. A number of his works are the print equivalent of MC Escher’s Drawing Hands — studies about the act of studying, books about the act of writing books.
His texts also chat with one another. Pick up something recent of his and you’ll find him resuming a conversation he started sometime in the late ‘90s. Subjects that particularly preoccupy Dyer: jazz, photography, travel.
Almost of all of his writing involves travel. He’s a neurotic Siddhartha, forever going on hopeful pilgrimages that wind up leaving him disappointed and hollow, the brunt of a much larger cosmic joke. (As an Englishman, he has a talent for telling that joke well, with perfectly titrated doses of self-deprecation.)
White Sands: Experiences From the Outside World,” Dyer’s latest collection of essays, is packed with such blighted pilgrimages, whether he’s squirming from heat rash in the tropics or shivering in the Arctic, encased in so many layers he’d put Kenny on “South Park” to shame.
Dyer starts with an essay about a deeply unsatisfying attempt to retrace the footsteps of Paul Gauguin on the centenary of the artist’s death. The project is doomed from the start. Somewhere between London and French Polynesia, the author realizes he has lost his most important reference book about Gauguin, meaning he has to scratch out his notes from memory. The islands themselves are an archipelago of letdowns and lemons: Tahiti, “like Bali, has no great beaches even though it is famed for its beaches.” There’s no surf for surfers — “the sea was flat, like a watery pancake” — and Gauguin’s grave “merits a stop of about two minutes, max.”
He is similarly disillusioned in Norway, while making a trip with his wife to see the Northern Lights. “The temperature was a thousand degrees below zero,” he writes, and then puts the odds of having sex in about the same range. He wipes out while dog sledding. His camera freezes. Only on the plane ride home do those elusive, ethereal whooshes of green iridescence finally make their cameo in the night sky — but on the opposite side of the aircraft from where Dyer and his wife are sitting.
It’s like we’re reading outtakes from Alanis Morissette.
But White Sands isn’t just a catalog of travel mishaps, with Dyer cast as an English-speaking Monsieur Hulot. It is also a rumination on the meanings we assign the strange destinations of our pilgrimages — “the power that some places exert and why we go to them.”
DH Lawrence thought a lot about this idea. He is yet another of our author’s unruly preoccupations, and Lawrence’s meditations about place heavily inform Dyer’s. (In 1998, Dyer wrote a whole book, Out of Sheer Rage, about a study of Lawrence he never managed to write — which in turn wound up being a pretty good study of Lawrence.) While in voluntary exile in New Mexico, Lawrence noted that certain places exuded a kind of otherworldly significance.
“When you get there, you feel something final,” Lawrence wrote. “There is an arrival.” And a mysticism, too, as if the spot has absorbed the hopes and wonderment of the many travelers who have sought it out.
Dyer has both an intellectual and emotional interest in finding these places. Despite his dyspeptic start in Polynesia, and despite his dark and uneventful excursion to Norway, he shows himself throughout this collection (and in much of his work generally) to be a man who is quite capable of being overwhelmed.
Walter De Maria’s outdoor installation The Lightning Field in New Mexico speaks to him, for instance, and so, to a lesser extent, does Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah. Each artist, he realizes, was trying to create that sense of arrival that Lawrence was describing. Many of the great land-art visionaries, Dyer writes, “were thinking big, not just in size and space, but in time.”
Dyer is keenly, almost achingly, aware of our own impermanence. His imagination, you could say, has a built-in time-lapse function. He sees a lifetime of past and future boredom in a museum guard’s face; the sight of a particular soccer field immediately induces “a vision of its own demise;” The Lightning Field makes him wonder what aliens will make of it long after humans are gone.
And he’s in awe of the Egyptians, who, even at the peak of their glorious civilization, had intimations of their own extinction, and — could this be? — buried themselves and built their monuments with an eye toward being found.
It is only toward the end of White Sands that you are reminded, with a terrific jolt, of why impermanence and decay are of special urgency to Dyer at this particular moment. In 2014, he had a stroke. It was an extremely mild stroke — so mild he filed his regular column for The New Republic between CT scans and diagnostic tests (a fact that’s sure to bring shame upon procrastinating, feeble-excuse-making writers the world over) — but it was an alarming experience nonetheless. He wrote about it for The London Review of Books. A version of it is the penultimate essay in White Sands.
In light of his brush with mortality, you now understand why a book about pilgrimages might have an added, poignant appeal to Dyer. Maybe his personal lodestars will reveal hidden traces of the sublime. Maybe they will connect him in some meaningful way to the past.
He recognizes that many of his journeys will fail him. “That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage,” he writes. “The latter always has the potential to disappoint.” Yet then he realizes, “My enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory.” It was, he marvels, “proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world.”
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