White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

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 of his death, I lost my most important source of information and reference: David Sweetman’s biography of the artist. The panic into which I was plunged by this ill-omened, irreparable and inexplicable loss gradually subsided, giving way to a mood of humid resignation that threatened to dampen the entire trip. Robbed of this essential work — and sometimes loss is a form of robbery, even when it is purely the fault of the loser — I spent much of my free time in Tahiti trying to make good that loss, writing down what I remembered of Gauguin’s life and work from my reading of Sweetman and other art-historical sources.

Gauguin was nothing if not a character, I wrote, but he was an artist first and foremost. His life was every bit as colourful as his paintings, which influenced all the artists who came after him, including the great colourist Matisse, who was inspired to travel to Tahiti ‘to see its light,’ to see if the colours in Gauguin’s paintings were for real (they were and weren’t). Gauguin was born in Paris in 1848 but thought of himself as ‘a savage from Peru,’ where he had spent his early childhood. The fact that he was a savage did not prevent him becoming a stockbroker with a wife and family he left behind when he went to Tahiti. Part of the reason for going to Tahiti was to get in touch with his savage roots and shuffle off the veneer of civilization while being able to enjoy all the perks of a French protectorate. The name gives away the colonial game: in classic gangster style, the French offered protection in the full knowledge that what the Tahitians needed protection from was the French. Before Gauguin went to Tahiti he lived for a while in Arles with the tormented genius Vincent van Gogh, and they pretty well drove each other nuts, but of the two Gauguin drove Van Gogh more nuts than Van Gogh drove him nuts, but that is not saying much, because Van Gogh was so highly strung he had it in him to go nuts anyway, was partially nuts even before he went totally nuts. The inherently volatile situation of two artists — as immortalised by Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn — living in such close proximity was not helped by their always getting loaded on absinthe, and although it took everyone by surprise it was probably no surprise when Van Gogh cut off his ear to spite his face. Another problem was that Gauguin was a real egotist. He really had a big ego and he was always having to prove himself and eventually he decided that the only way to prove himself was to go to Tahiti to live among savages, of whom he liked to think he was one. He was forty-three when he got there.

La vai taamu noa to outou hatua

‘Where do you come from?’ asked the immigration official at Papeete. ‘Where are you going?’ Had he been briefed to ask these questions — the questions posed by Gauguin in his epic painting of 1897, the questions I had come to Tahiti to answer — as part of the centenary celebrations?

When Gauguin waded ashore in 1891, the local women had all gathered round to laugh at this proto-hippie with his Buffalo Bill hat and shoulder-length hair. When I passed through immigration, they were not laughing but smiling sweetly in the humid, pre-dawn darkness, and they welcomed me and the other tourists with necklaces of flowers that smelled as fresh as they had on the first day of creation. It is always nice to be greeted with a necklace of sweet-smelling tropical flowers but, at the same time, there is often something soul-destroying about it. A lovely tradition of welcome had been so thoroughly commodified and packaged that even though the flowers were fresh and wild and lovely they might as well have been plastic. There was also something soul-sapping about the men driving the tour buses, waiting to ‘transfer’ the tourists to the barbaric luxury of their hotels: built like prop-forwards, biologically programmed to crush the English at rugby, they were reduced to the role of super-polite baggage handlers.

By the time I checked into my deluxe room it was getting light in that prompt tropical way, so I threw open the French windows, stepped out on to the balcony and took in the pristine view. The dream island of Moorea was backdropped against the half-awake sky. It was a magnificent view as long as you didn’t turn your head to the right and see the other balconies geometrically gawping and Gurskying out to sea. I was in a huge and luxurious hotel, and even though the view was fantastic the ocean itself seemed manicured, as if it were actually part of an aquatic golf course to which hotel guests enjoyed exclusive access.

Before everything went pear-shaped between them, Gauguin and Van Gogh had a plan to set up ‘the Studio of the Tropics’ in Tahiti. These days Papeete, the capital, looks like the kind of place Eric Rohmer might have come if he’d decided to make a film in the tropics: a film where nothing happens, set in a place that resembles a small town in France where you would never dream of taking a holiday, which exists primarily in order to make other places seem alluring — especially if you have the misfortune to arrive on a Sunday, when everywhere is shut. There’s not much to see anyway, and on Sunday ‘not much’ becomes nothing. It would have been wonderful to be here at the tail end of the nineteenth century, when Gauguin first arrived — or so we think. But Gauguin himself arrived too late. By the time he got here it was ‘notorious among all the South Sea Islands as the one most wretchedly debased by “Civilization”’: an emblem, I remembered some art historian writing, ‘of paradise and of paradise lost.’ Only in Gauguin’s art would it become paradise regained and reinvented.

When Captain Cook came here it was amazing: a premonition of a picture in a brochure. I went to the spot where Cook — and the Bounty and God knows who else — had landed, a place called Venus Point. It is the most famous beach in Tahiti (which, like Bali, has no great beaches even though it is famed for its beaches) and there were a few people sun-bathing and paddling. The sand was black, which made it look like the opposite of paradise, a negative from which an ideal holiday image would subsequently be printed. Or perhaps I was just turned around by the jet lag.

‘Are we ten hours behind London or ten hours ahead?’ I asked my guide, Joel.

‘Behind,’ he said. ‘New Zealand, on the other hand, is only an hour behind — but it’s also a day ahead.’ In its intense, near-contradictory concision this was an extremely confusing piece of information to try to compute. That is almost certainly why Joel’s next, ostensibly simple remark—‘On Sunday this beach is full of people’—struck me as strange, even though, for several seconds, I was not sure why. Then, after an interlude of intense calculation, it came to me: this was Sunday — and the beach was almost deserted. It may not have been full of people but it was full of historical significance, and, for a hopeful moment, I had a sense of what it might be like to be a highly regarded species of English novelist: the sort who comes to a place like this and finds inspiration for a sprawling epic, a historical pastiche with a huge cast of characters who contrive to do everything they can to waste the reader’s time with what is basically a yarn in which the ‘r’ might more honestly be printed as a ‘w.’ Simply by having this thought, it seemed to me, I had effectively written such a novel — all seven hundred pages of it — in a split-second.

From Venus Point we continued our circumnavigation of the island until we came to Teahupoo.

‘Do you like surfing?’ asked Joel.

‘Watching it, yes,’ I said.

‘That’s good, because they hold international surfing championships at this place.’

‘Great. You mean they’re on now?’

‘Almost.’ It was a subtle answer, potentially meaning that the championships were either starting tomorrow, had just finished yesterday or even — though this was the least likely option — might actually be in progress by the time we got there. The net result of these permutations was that there were no surfers. Nor for that matter was there any surf, except in so far as the word is contained in the larger term ‘surface’ (as in ‘surface unbroken by waves’). The sea was flat, like a watery pancake. I sensed the emergence of a pattern — of thwarted expectations and disappointed hopes — which had first manifested itself in Boston a month previously.

Gauguin’s epic painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is in the Museum of Fine Arts there, and, by an astonishing bit of serendipity, shortly before flying to Tahiti, I found myself, for the first time ever, in Boston. I had been wanting to see this painting for at least ten years and I was going to see it shortly before following, as the authors of travel books like to say, ‘in the footsteps of’ Gauguin to the South Seas. Although I had done many other things in those ten years I had also been waiting to find myself in Boston. And now I was there, in Boston, wandering through the museum, not even seeking out the painting, hoping just to come across it, to stumble on it as if by destined accident, as if I were not even expecting it to be there even though I knew it was there. After seeing some paintings twice (Turner’s Slave Ship, Degas’s motionless At the Races) and Bierstadt’s Valley of the Yosemite three times, I began to suspect that I had trudged through every room in the exhausting museum, had been walking in my own footsteps for almost an hour, without even glimpsing the one I had come to see. Eventually I asked one of the attendants where Where Do We Come From? had gone. He looked up from the strange limbo of his station: exhausted, bored out of his mind, wanting nothing more than to take the weight off his feet but, at the same time, eager to respond to any enquiry even though he had already heard every question he was ever going to be asked a thousand times before. The painting was not on display at the moment, he said. It was being restored or out on loan, I forget which. Having thanked him, I trudged away in a state of disappointment so all-consuming it felt like he had put a curse on me, a curse by which the force of gravity had suddenly increased threefold. The afternoon would be redeemed — the curse and weight of the world lifted — by an encounter with a painting by a painter I’d never heard of, had never seen in reproduction and had somehow missed during the earlier, pre-letdown trudge through the museum’s extensive holdings, but at that point, with no redemption in sight, the experience of the missing masterpiece, of the thwarted pilgrimage (which is not at all the same as a wasted journey), made me see that the vast questions posed by Gauguin’s painting had to be supplemented with other, more specific ones. Why do we arrive at a museum on the one day of the week — the only day we have free in a given city — when it is shut? On the day after a blockbuster exhibition has finally — after multiple extensions of its initial four-month run — closed? When the painting we want to see is out on loan to a museum in a city visited a year ago, when the featured show was the Paul Klee retrospective already seen in Copenhagen six months previously? An answer of sorts comes in the form of a droll exchange in Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager, an adaptation of Max Frisch’s novel Homo Faber, in which Faber (Sam Shepard) asks an African guy when the Louvre is open. ‘As far as I know it’s never open,’ he replies with the wisdom of magisterial indifference. All of which leads to another, still more perplexing question: what is the difference between seeing something and not seeing it? More specifically, what is the difference between seeing Tahiti and not seeing it, between going to Tahiti and not going? The answer to that, an answer that is actually an answer to an entirely different question, is that it is possible to go to Tahiti without seeing it.

I was able, at least, to get a sense of the size of Where Do We Come From? at the Gauguin Museum in the Botanical Gardens of Tahiti, where a full-scale copy now hangs. At the very centre of the painting, an androgynous figure reaches up to pluck a fruit from a tree, though exactly what this symbolises is difficult to say, and there are many other symbols as well. Gauguin was a symbolist, which means his art was full of symbols. Even the colours are symbolic of something, even though they often seem symbolic of our inability to interpret them adequately. Not everyone has had the patience to try. For D. H. Lawrence, who stopped briefly in Tahiti en route from Australia to San Francisco, Gauguin was ‘a bit snivelling, and his mythology is pathetic.’ This visual mythology — a magpie fusion of Maori, Javanese and Egyptian, of anything that appealed to his sophisticated idea of the universal primitive — achieved its final and simplest expression in Where Do We Come From? According to the most important mythic element in all of this (the myth, that is, of the artist’s life), once Gauguin had finished it he tried to kill himself but ended up overdosing or underdosing. When he had come back from the dead, he spent some time contemplating his answers, his answers in the form of questions in the form of a painting. Then, as with almost all the other paintings he’d done, it was rolled up and shipped back to France, leaving him with little evidence of the world he’d created. It is quite possible that some days he woke up and thought to himself, ‘Where did that big painting get to?’ and then, as he sat on the edge of the bed, scratching his itchy leg, he would remember that he had sent it off and would have to start another one. In the Gauguin Museum there are little photocopies of all these paintings with captions explaining where in the world they have washed up: the Pushkin in Moscow, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld in London. As part of the centenary, however, forty works of art were being temporarily returned to the island. Following Pissarro’s bitchy remark that Gauguin ‘is always poaching on someone’s land, nowadays he’s pillaging the savages of Oceania,’ it has been fashionable in recent years to see Gauguin as an embodiment of imperialist adventurism. In this light the return of his works can be read as a gesture of reparation, but it would be a mistake to extrapolate from this, to think that there is a groundswell of support in Polynesia for making the islands independent of France. On the contrary, the fear is that France might one day sever its special connection with Polynesia, thereby staunching the flow of funds on which it is utterly dependent.

After the museum we went to Mataiea and Punaauia (now a featureless suburb of Papeete), where Gauguin lived and where some of his most famous works were painted. I suddenly had the idea that yellow might be a symbol for banana, but apart from that my mind was completely blank and I couldn’t think myself into Gauguin’s shoes, couldn’t see the world through his eyes. As I stood there, however, seeing what he had seen without even coming close to seeing as he had seen, I did get an inkling of the attraction of Islam. Impossible — not even conceivable—that a Muslim, on making the mandatory, once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca, could be disappointed. That is the essential difference between religious and secular pilgrimage: the latter always has the potential to disappoint. In the wake of this realization there swiftly followed another: that my enormous capacity for disappointment was actually an achievement, a victory. The devastating scale and frequency of my disappointment (‘I am down, but not yet defeated,’ Gauguin snivel-boasted) was proof of how much I still expected and wanted from the world, of what high hopes I still had of it. When I am no longer capable of disappointment the romance will be gone: I may as well be dead.

A Faaohipa noa i te taime ati

There’s no use putting it off any longer. The unaskable question is crying out to be asked. Not ‘Where are we going?’ but ‘What are the women like?’ Are they babes? No one was more eager to answer this question than Gauguin himself, and the answer, obviously, was yes, they’re total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom. Many of Gauguin’s most famous paintings are of Tahitian babes who were young and sexy and ate fruit and looked like they were always happy to go to bed with a syphilitic old lech whose legs were covered in weeping eczema. Of course, he was also a great artist, but they didn’t know this, since at the time he did not have the reputation that he has now, and to see how great an artist he is you have to know something about art, which they didn’t, because they hadn’t seen any. To them he was just a randy old goat who was always trying to persuade them to get their kit off, which they were happy to do even though the killjoy missionaries who had come to the island before Gauguin and converted people to boring old Christianity had got them to cover up their breasts. The missionaries made them wear something called a Mother Hubbard, which was a shapeless and not very flattering frock, but Gauguin knew that underneath their Mother Hubbards they were, as a famous British ad campaign from the 1980s had it, ‘all loveable,’ and their melon-ripe breasts were still there, and were no less nice for not being visible to the naked eye until they were undressed. They might not have known he was a great artist but Gauguin believed himself to be one, right up there with Manet, whose Olympia bugged him in the sense that it goaded him to do a really horny picture of a naked Polynesian woman, ideally one who was only about thirteen, as much a girl as a woman. At first, though, Gauguin didn’t do much painting. He just tried to look and understand what was going on in their heads. He read about Maori art and artists and this helped him understand, but he was an artist, and for an artist looking is its own form of understanding. Earlier visitors to Tahiti had noticed the grace and stillness of its inhabitants, but while they interpreted this as torpor or boredom, Gauguin saw ‘something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their poses, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.’ As well as trying to understand what was going on in their heads he was also keen on getting down their pants, and the other colonials took a dim and possibly envious view of this.

That’s how it was in Gauguin’s day. But what about now? I can give a very good answer to this, because it so happens that while I was there the finalists for Miss Tahiti were all being photographed by the press, in the luxury of my hotel, looking like they’d stepped straight out of a Gauguin painting. So, yes, Tahitian women, they’re really beautiful — especially when they’re young. Then, almost overnight, they get incredibly fat. It’s as if they discover Fat Is a Feminist Issue and gobble it up. They don’t just read it; they eat it. Not to be outdone, the dudes get even fatter. It’s like some calorific battle of the sexes. The most popular sport here is canoeing, but the thing at which Polynesians really excel is weight-lifting, otherwise known as walking or standing. Every time they heave themselves out of a chair they equal or exceed a previous personal best. And although the canoe is essentially a slim-fitting vessel, in Tahiti it has presumably adapted and evolved — in a word, expanded — to accommodate the area’s distinctive twist on Darwinism: the survival of the fattest. The people are huge. They stare at you from the depths of their blubber. It’s like they’ve gone into hibernation within the folds of their own flesh. Part of the reason for this, according to Joel (slim by Tahitian standards, immense by any others), was that Polynesians have the highest per-capita sugar intake in the world. It so happened that as Joel was saying this I was taking my first, tentative sips of a canned drink called South Sea Island Pineapple. Huge letters proclaimed that it was ARTIFICIALLY FLAVOURED, as though the lack of the natural were a major selling point. A closer reading of the can revealed that it had more Es in it than a nightclub on that other island paradise Ibiza. It was also, by some considerable margin, the sweetest drink I had ever tasted: anecdotal confirmation that, as Joel explained, Polynesians were also the world’s number two in diabetes and number three in cardiovascular illnesses related to sugar. Joel reeled off these statistics with a kind of appalled pride, as if this ranking in the league-table of sugar-derived illnesses were the source not only of the nation’s obesity but also its pre-eminence.

Another claim to fame announced by Joel is that they’ve got the highest electricity bills in the world. It would be strange if this were not the case, because everything here costs a big fat arm and a leg. Everything is imported from France, and by the time it’s made its way around the world it costs a thousand times what it would in Europe. As I sat down for dinner one starlit night, a waitress waddled over to explain the difference between this over-the-water restaurant and another, less glamorously located elsewhere in the hotel.

‘This restaurant is gastronomic,’ she said.

‘Astronomic, more like!’ I quipped.

The fact that it was astronomically expensive meant that I ended up like Gauguin, eating ‘dry bread with a glass of water, making myself believe it is a beefsteak.’ Metaphorically speaking, anyway. I was actually eating mahi-mahi with vanilla sauce, as I did every night of my stay. Mahi-mahi was in season and vanilla is the opposite of money: it grows on trees — but still ends up costing a fortune — and tastes like concentrated essence of artificial flavour, flavour for people whose idea of culinary refinement peaked with bubble gum.

The expense didn’t just mean that things cost a lot. It meant that my fellow diners and tourists tended to be on the old side, were usually on a cruise, often a tad square—and always in couples. I was surrounded by couples, murmuring couples who amused each other over dinner by tossing bits of baguette into the sea, where they were gobbled up by fat fish. The idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet had been extended to the ocean itself. The fish were so domesticated that if they’d had fingers they’d have signed for the meal and charged it to their room. That the ocean had been tamed in this way contributed to an impression that had been building up in the course of my stay, and which I now communicated to another solitary tourist, an optimistic Australian in whose company I had sought solace.

‘We are not in Polynesia at all,’ I said. ‘We are in a casino in Vegas called the Tahiti or the Bounty.’

‘But look out there,’ he said. ‘Look at that amazing sea.’

‘You obviously haven’t been to Vegas recently,’ I said.

We only chatted together for five minutes, but that was enough to make him my closest friend in Tahiti. Where, I asked myself, were the modern primitives of the international party scene, the tattooed savages with their piercings and dreadlocks whose company I enjoy even if I cannot count myself among their number? They were nowhere to be seen, that’s where they were. Even when I was nowhere to be seen, when I was alone in my room, I felt a bit embarrassed to be here in this once-natural paradise that had to be cosmetically improved and maintained in order to look perfectly natural. Useful, in an entirely useless way, to discover that embarrassment is not only a public emotion or reaction, that it’s possible to experience it in private, when no one is looking. If embarrassment became something else when internalised in this way, if it began to transmute itself into any kind of insight or resolve, it would have something going for it. Instead, it lingers like a blush which deepens the more intensely you try to wish it away.

Tei raro ae the hatua poito i to outo parahiraa

Gauguin stayed in Tahiti for two years. Then he went back to Paris. Then he came back to Tahiti, but he didn’t like it, because in the time he’d been away it had got all developed and wasn’t savage enough for him any longer, so he decided to go somewhere more remote, to Hiva Oa, north-east of Tahiti, in the Marquesas. He didn’t actually get there until 1901, and in the meantime he moaned and groaned and complained about everything, but he never lost the sustaining artistic belief that he could turn everything that happened to him to creative advantage. It was in this period that he produced some of his greatest paintings, many of which had Tahitian titles—Merahi metua no Tehamana, Manao tupapau—even though his grasp of the language was fairly flimsy and sometimes these titles did not mean quite what they were meant to mean. Things often went badly. Sometimes he found himself on the brink of despair, but always, at the last moment, something turned up to bring him back from the brink or push him over it — but if he did go over it then it turned out that that was a good thing, because going over the brink had a somewhere-over-the-rainbow quality to Gauguin. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was a martyr to his art. One picture was called Self-Portrait near Golgotha—his way of saying that although he was in desperate straits he was going to redeem everything in paintings like this one of himself near Golgotha. All of his other paintings he sent back to France, but the Golgotha one he kept by him and took with him to Hiva Oa so he would always have an image of his own suffering to keep him company and cheer him up. There is a moral in this, as there is a moral in almost everything. In this case the moral is that paradise or what we call paradise is often a kind of Golgotha, as exemplified by the experience of the many tourists who each year find their holiday dream turning into a nightmare as they are stranded at Gatwick for several days due to an air-traffic controllers’ dispute in Spain. Either that or their luxury villa turns out to be a crumbling pit with plumbing problems. Gauguin didn’t care about things like this. He was happy with a basic hut. He didn’t crave a deluxe over-water bungalow, though he was perturbed by the increasingly desperate state of his own plumbing, namely his poxy old schlong, which, frankly, no one in their right mind would chow down on unless they were paid a good deal of money and offered a course of high-dosage penicillin.

The flight to Hiva Oa took three hours, and since, in Gauguin’s day, you couldn’t just hop on a plane and fly anywhere, it must have taken a long time on a boat, because it’s a long way and even now people in Tahiti regard Hiva Oa as the back of beyond, so he really did end up a long way from home, so far away that if he’d gone any further he’d have ended up nearer home, the world being round like a melon.

A simple and single law governs life on remote islands: there is nothing to do except go completely to pieces. Gauguin was no exception, and although he continued working, much of his time on Hiva Oa was spent squabbling with priests and judges and generally making a nuisance of himself. He still painted, but the years of his greatest productivity were behind him, and one day he just died, and although a friend of his bit into his scalp to try to bring him back from the dead it was to no avail, because this time he was not coming back. He had joined the spirits of the dead who look over naked thirteen-year-old girls, as in the infamous painting Manao tupapau, in which, he had said, it is difficult to tell whether she is dreaming of the scary spirit or the spirit is dreaming of her, specifically of her ass, of which we enjoy an unimpeded view. But he had also joined the immortal dead, the great artists of the Western world, the choir visible, and he wanted to lie back and enjoy a view of the posthumous fame to which his strange life was no longer an impediment.

Gauguin is buried in the cemetery near the village of Atuona. There’s a rock with his name on it, and a tree. It merits a stop of about two minutes, max, and visiting it was pretty much a non-experience. It did nothing for me, possibly because, a few minutes later, I came to another memorial, to someone I had never heard of:

NAOPUA A PUUFAIFIAU, SOLDAT:

MORT POUR LA FRANCE 1914–18

There are memorials like this throughout France, but none of these had expressed so powerfully the scale of a catastrophe that had engulfed not just Europe but the world. To think that someone born here, in one of the most remote places on earth, could have been sucked into the First World War: Gauguin’s movement was centrifugal, from the centre to the edge, but it was counter-balanced by this opposite, centripetal movement compelling someone from the fringes of the world to the epicentre of history. From that moment on it would be impossible, even in paradise, to live in a way that was untouched by history. Working backwards from this, we can deduce that our (historically constructed) idea of paradise is, precisely, a place untouched by history.

After visiting the grave, I was scheduled to spend an hour at the Cultural Centre, which is a facsimile of the house Gauguin built for himself. There was one slight problem: it did not exist. Effectively, I was shown the place where the Cultural Centre was going to be (i.e., a building site). As such it was almost indistinguishable from building sites the world over, but they had begun work on reproducing the carved door-frame that Gauguin made over the threshold of his ‘Maison du Jouir’: ‘Soyez Amoureuses et Vous Serez Heureuses.’

The climax of that day’s tour came with the chance to see objects found in Gauguin’s well. Actually, that is to put it too grandly. I should say remains or fragments of objects: some broken bottles, bits of crockery, jars, a syringe, ampoules of morphine and clumps of congealed paint. It was, on the one hand, just a load of old junk. On the other hand, it was still a load of old junk, but no more persuasive exhibition has ever been mounted to demonstrate the status of art as religion, the artist as secular martyr. We were pilgrims and these were the relics, invested with all the majesty of Christ’s sandals or whatever it is they have in Lourdes. And this secular veneration does at least have the benefit of honesty and scepticism. As the curator explained: although they were found in Gauguin’s well, ‘we can’t certify that they were Gauguin’s, but it’s quite possible they were.’

. .

Because Hiva Oa was not beautiful in the way I had expected, it took me a while to see that it was beautiful at all. The island looked both tropical and non-tropical and it seemed that every kind of tree grew here. This was a result not just of the fecundity of the soil but of the long history of trade and exchange. Joel had explained to us that Cook or Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame) had brought the pineapple to Tahiti from somewhere else — Hawaii, I think — and taken away the breadfruit or something like that, but I could not remember the exact details and so was unsure whether the grapefruit was indigenous or imported. Either way, as I was taken on a march through jungle which seemed, in places, more like Sherwood Forest than the lush tropical paradise of Rousseau (Le Douanier), the grapefruit and every other variety of fruit and flower seemed happy to have made a home here. In places the island was lush, in others stark and jagged, cloud-shrouded and desolate. This, together with the cosmopolitan mix of vegetation, meant that it kept looking like somewhere else, mainly like Switzerland in the grips of a record-breaking heat wave. This was not what I had expected at all. I had been expecting to meet local artists who continued a tradition initiated by Gauguin but soon came to see that the real art of the Marquesas, and of Polynesia generally, was tattooing. Everyone here has tattoos of breathtaking geometrical precision, density and intricacy. There was a time when a tattoo was like a bodily CV conveying all sorts of data: who your mum and dad were, the names of your ancestors, what your trade was (warrior, nobleman), what grade A-levels you got and even, possibly, what you had for lunch last Thursday. The tattoos were the Polynesian way of answering the questions ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ the very questions that religions either answer or — to those of a Nietzschean bent — are designed to stop you answering.

The missionaries buried the pre-Christian, polytheistic religion of Polynesia (and, for a time, put a stop to tattooing) but it is possible to visit some recently excavated sacred sites. The most impressive of these is at Iipona on Hiva Oa, where there are five monumental sculptures or tiki.

I was not that keen on going, for several reasons. Instead of recovering from jet lag, I was sleeping less and less every night. I didn’t just have jet lag; I had jet-lag lag. I had also developed a terrible heat rash, which was tormenting me every bit as much as Gauguin’s eczema, and all I could think about was the non-availability of soothing ointment.

A few days earlier, before the rash really got going, we had visited another archaeological site, which, in its small-scale way, was a monumental disappointment. There were just a few blackened stones that the guide sought to render interesting by nattering on about human sacrifice and cannibalism while I stood there, both not listening and looking like I was listening.

It was a short-lived relief to go from here to another site — at Taaoa, near Atuona — where the tiki’s power had been denuded to almost nothing: a round rock as big as a beach ball on which the residue of a human face — slits for eyes and mouth, the merest hint of a nose — could just about be seen. Aesthetically it was on a par with Wilson, the volleyball with whom Tom Hanks develops such an intense relationship in Cast Away. As Hanks ekes out his existence, the longing for something in which one can invest belief and hope is shown to be almost as basic as the need for shelter and warmth. The thing — in this case a Wilson volleyball — responds in kind, taking on the magical quality of those hopes. Taaoa, though, was a place that showed how, over time, those beliefs can wane and even a god can 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) and pointed out that Gauguin had actually spent a little time on Bora-Bora, but the patient lady with whom I spoke did not feel that this justified changing my itinerary. Well, how about Huahine, I said? But Gauguin did not go there, she said, sounding slightly less patient. Yes, I explained patiently, but perhaps places like this have the appeal now that Tahiti did back then. Perhaps, I said, if Gauguin had been alive now he would have gone to Taha’a Noho Ra’a and stayed in an over-water bungalow at the Pearl Beach Resort and Spa as a way of reconciling the savage part of his own nature with the contemporary need for boutique luxury. In the humid heat none of this cut any ice, and it soon became apparent that the question ‘Where are we going?’ was turning into its vexed opposite, ‘Where are we not going?’—to which the answer was: all the places I really wanted to go. Other people thought Hiva Oa was paradise, but if this was the case then it was a paradise from which I was becoming impatient to be expelled. With this in mind it seemed certain that the apple in Eden grew on the tree of knowledge of elsewhere. Up until that point Adam and Eve were happy where they were. Then they ate the apple and it was slightly disappointing to them, and they started to wonder if maybe there were other kinds of apples elsewhere, if there were crunchier and crisper and sweeter apples to be had from somewhere else. They began to think that there might be a funner place, where the food was better. They even began to suspect that paradise itself might be somewhere else. And not only that: they began to think that there might be some commercial potential in this knowledge, that it might be possible to make a living importing and exporting these apples and marketing paradise as a destination. From there, to keep the history of the world as brief as possible, it is only a small step to package cruises and supermarkets stocking the full spectrum of exotic fruit.

Increasingly, the question on my mind in Hiva Oa was ‘When can I leave?’ I had exhausted everything the island had to offer, was counting the days to my departure. There was talk of a daytrip to a place where Gauguin’s grandson or great-grandson lived. The idea was to have lunch or at least take tea or coffee with him, but it turned out that he doesn’t like foreigners and did not want to meet me. Which was fine by me, because I have some dislikes of my own and near the top of that extensive list are the sons, daughters or grandsons and granddaughters of famous parents who consider themselves special by virtue of having been born. Within that general category of detestation I reserve special contempt for those sons and daughters who, while claiming special status from the strength of their lineage, also lament the inhibiting weight of expectation bearing down on them because one or both parents achieved such renown that the pressure on the descendants to do something condemns them to doing nothing, to a life of endless weakness. So fuck you, motherfucker.

In lieu of tea or lunch with Gauguin’s heir, I joined some other tourists for a boat trip to a nearby island. The mini-van taking us to the boat was late, but this did not matter because, when we got to the port, the boat was not ready to sail. That was the thing about Hiva Oa: the huge wait to leave contained within it other little pockets of waiting, so that one was caught in an endless hierarchy of waiting. I was always waiting for the next bit of waiting, climaxing with the final day’s waiting, in which I would wait to be transferred to the airport, where I would wait for the plane taking me back to Tahiti before the wait for the enormous airborne wait of the flight back to L.A. (more waiting) and on to London itself. In a sense that is what we are here for: to wait. In Tahitian terms, to put on wait. While waiting, however, one necessarily ponders other questions, questions that don’t go away irrespective of how long one waits: the tiki questions, the questions that stay put, the same questions, according to Harrison Ford’s voice-over in the climactic scene of Blade Runner, that the replicant Rutger Hauer wanted answered, ‘the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?’ But the answers to those big questions turn out be small, or at least have to be itemised in detail if they are to have any chance of doing justice to the big questions. We are here to accrue unredeemable air miles and tier points, to try to be upgraded on aeroplanes and in hotels whenever possible, to try to alter our itineraries to include Bora-Bora and Huahine and to wish that the Internet connections were faster and more reliable. We are here to suffer terrible disorientation and jet lag and to be plagued constantly by the desire to be somewhere else, either somewhere else in French Polynesia or, ideally, somewhere else altogether, preferably nearer home. We are here to wish we had brought different books to read and to wonder what happened to our biography of Gauguin. We are here to wish the food was better and to be afflicted by the torment of heat rash and to wish that we had brought some calamine lotion to lessen that torment. We are here to buy presents for our loved ones and then to spend long hours constructing excuses as to why this was impossible because everything in Tahiti is so expensive and there’s nothing worth buying anyway. We are here to be bored rigid and then to wonder how it was possible to be so bored. We are here to wait at Hiva Oa Airport in the drenching humidity and to feel definitively what we have felt before, albeit only fleetingly: that we are glad we came even though we spent so much of our time wishing we hadn’t. We are here to make sure our seatbelts are securely fastened, our tray tables stowed and our seats are in the upright position before take-off and landing. We are here to go somewhere else.