In the afterglow, it all seems like a dream.
And so much of it is utterly dreamlike. The steel ladder with 108 rungs, rising from the alkaline anvil of the Playa into the radiant sky; the giant Unicorn with its jeweled eye, breaking from the flat expanse of earth; the woman with a purple hat and giant tricycle, offering ice-cold milk and homemade cookies to the dust-covered vagabonds on the seemingly infinite plain.
So much has been said about Burning Man, and every experience is so unique,
that
the thought of writing about it has never occurred to me. It’s like trying to draw a tesseract – a four-dimensional object – in two dimensions. My experience in Black Rock City is all about stories, conveyed not on the page but in urgent or sleepy tones, tinged with wonder or disbelief, told over gritty-eyed breakfasts or dinners by Coleman light, fingers tracing accidental semaphores through the fine layers of dust on coffee cups and tortilla chip bags…
My own stories from the Burn are as personal as dreams. It’s difficult enough to convey them on the Playa itself, let alone to all of you out in cyberspace. Let’s just say that one makes a lot of wishes, and says a lot of prayers – and the stories we tell are often about how those wishes come true, or how certain signs and symbols indicate that they may, someday, be fulfilled. Like the Tin Man from Oz, I left Black Rock City with a big rubber heart around my neck, its soft red valves pulsing with a rainbow of LEDs…. But scattered amongst the thicker themes are countless other encounters; some of them my own, others conveyed by my dusty pals. (After a while, it’s like the borderline between memory and imagination; you can’t really remember what you actually saw, what you heard about, or what you dreamed of. Writing that makes me think about Aboriginal dreamtime, which displays a similar alchemy.) A few examples:
The man who blindfolded his eyes with duct tape, and walked the Playa with a cane and a “Guide Me” sign. (To up the ante, he spent an afternoon manning the Kissing Booth.) The dominatrix with a whip, who led a giant insect across Black Rock City on a leash. The art car shaped like a giant giraffe. The camp where you made a big pizza, and “delivered” it to anyone you met on the playa. The big, boisterous ladies from Texas, serving goblets of wine from a convertible covered in glowing grapes. The fire-filled footsteps leading to an enormous steel sculpture of Mother and Child, a cascade of flame joining their hands. And the Grand Hotel Ashram Galactica: Black Rock City’s first “luxury hotel,” with an eager-to-please concierge poised in a gorgeous Moroccan tent where dried figs, vodka, and buckets of ice waited on the lobby tables.
Everything free, wild, and operating at a level of imagination and humor that locks the brakes on this Age of Anguish and throws the gears into reverse.
And in the center of it all The Man, meaning whatever you want him to mean: transformation, redemption, inspiration, invocation. Glowing in an exoskeleton of green and pink neon, he would explode in an ecstasy of flames on Saturday night, only to be resurrected again in 2006.
We have seen the bombing of Manhattan, and the greatest tsunami in 2,000 years; we’ve seen the flooding of New Orleans, and the first pre-emptive war waged by the United States. But we’ve also lived through the genesis of Burning Man, the most inspired gathering of artists and fools ever witnessed. The higher the wire, the longer the balancing rod. It astonishes me that, in the space of nine months, a person could experience both Banda Aceh and Black Rock City; and that in both places, the thought at the center of the best and brightest minds is exactly the same: building a renewed community, up from the scoured ground.
* * *
On a similarly hopeful note, those of you who live in or around the Bay Area might take a look at the website of San Francisco’s Theater Artaud. Through September, two tremendous talents – Nina Wise and Wes “Scoop” Nisker – are featured in Here/Now, “A festival of optimistic voices.” Wes – well known for his Occasional Scoop on KFOG, as well as his Spirit Rock teachings – will perform “Be Here Wow,” a profound and hilarious show that combines cosmology, evolution, Buddhism, politics, and most of everything else into an alchemical awakening. Nina Wise is one of the world’s most gifted improv artists; she’ll be doing spontaneous performances following a series of live interviews with some of the nation’s most intriguing minds: including Brian Swimme, Medea Benjamin, and Jack Kornfield. I wish Larry Harvey, instigator of Burning Man, was in the mix!