Searching for the Zone

• Share

There are few people I'd be inclined to join on a voyage of self-discovery. Fewer still if I knew that journey was heading for an existential train wreck. And in the first few pages of Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It, the warning signs that I am entering an author's exercise in angst-ridden navel gazing are all there. A quote by Nietzsche on the fly page. A preface that starts with a snippet from Auden and ends with a disclaimer: "Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token all the things that didn't happen didn't happen there too." I should have put the book down then and there.

But by page three I was hooked, reeled in by Dyer's witty dialog and his spare, exquisitely descriptive prose: the tiny balcony of his rented flat in New Orleans, for example, overlooked "a vacant lot which seethed with unspecified threat." His suicidal friend Donelly, asked if he might possibly be an alcoholic, replies "I should hope so, after all the time, money and effort I've put into it." By the fourth chapter, I was as much an accomplice to Dyer's quest for experience as his poor Parisian sidekick who smokes marijuana for the first time while on a romp around Paris. In an explosion of weed-induced paranoia she asks Dyer why he does drugs. "It enables one to enter the Zone," he answers, "the dream space of the city."

		LATEST COVER STORY The Secret Life of Kim Jong Il June 30, 2003 Issue Past Issues Harry Potter June 23, 2003 ----------------- Arthritis June 16, 2003 ----------------- Narco Korea June 9, 2003 ----------------- Nature vs. Nurture June 2, 2003 ----------------- Endless War? May 26, 2003 ----------------- The Democrats May 19, 2003 ----------------- Inside The Matrix May 12, 2003 ----------------- China: SARS Nation May 5, 2003 ----------------- Asian Heroes Apr. 28, 2003   ASIA  India: The Kidnapping Business  Laos: Licensed to Kill ARTS  Books: Searching for the 'Zone' NOTEBOOK  Terror: Poisonous Minds  China: Stop the Presses  Sports: The Real Deal  China: Stealing Beauty  Milestones  Verbatim TRAVEL  Goa: Sipping on Susegado CNN.com: Top Headlines

Many travel books use a quest to shape the narrative, and Yoga is no exception. The author is searching for the mythical Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 postapocalyptic film, Stalker, a place where, Dyer says, "Everyone can become whatever they want to be." As both author and central character of his "somewhat fictionalized" travelogue, Dyer can likewise choose an identity. But instead of striking a heroic pose, he portrays himself as a hapless failure, someone who is always wishing to do something—hop a freight train, ask a woman out, adopt a child in Goa—but never follows through. "I have an idea for a self-help book," he tells an alluring beauty on the beach, "Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it." To which she responds, "But you can't be bothered to write it, right?"

The person Dyer least wants to be is himself, a fact that he makes brutally clear as he describes staring into a mirror to find "the awful reality—gray hair, bulbous nose, scrawny neck. It was as if all the hidden misery of my life had suddenly manifested itself." Only when faced with his essential self, and the realization that sex, drugs and travel have not brought him any closer to the Zone, does he catch a fleeting glimpse of his Holy Grail in the Roman ruins of Libya's Leptis Magna. "Immediately there was the sense—which I've had in only a few places in the world—of entering not so much a physical space as a force field, a place where time has stood its ground." But Leptis is only a brief sojourn on his inexorable descent, which culminates in a total breakdown in a Detroit diner.

As a travel companion, Dyer is a lively raconteur, the kind of person you'd want to journey with even if the destination was a nihilistic hell. His stories are peppered with amusing asides and deft observations, not just from him but his fellow travelers: "What a strangely consistent country this is," remarks his girlfriend about a Cambodian river that because of flooding, reverses its current twice a year. "Even the river lacks a clear sense of direction." Oddly, Dyer's narrative also loses its sense of direction in the final chapter, just as he reaches what he has described throughout the book as the ultimate Zone—Burning Man, a weeklong celebration of self-expression held every year in the Nevada desert. He is able to describe his emotional collapse in explicit terms: "Everything had become scattered, fragmented. A day was not made up of 24 hours but of 86,400 seconds, and those did not flow into one another—so that, as a consequence, there was not enough time to get anything done." But, at journey's end, he seems unable to draw any satisfactory intellectual conclusions and resorts instead to hollow, dreamlike comparisons with other places, other Zones.

Ultimately, Dyer is so enamored of his own decline that he cannot be bothered to get on with his rebirth. Perhaps that's as it should be. In an early chapter, he meets a vacationing Swede who has had a dead baby shoved in his face by an Indian beggar. "We were all horrified and, I think, more than a little envious," he writes. "All visitors to the developing world, if they are honest, will confess that they are actually quite keen on seeing a bit of squalor." And readers, if they are honest, will confess that they are more interested in this traveler's disintegration than in his resurrection.