It’s elegant that anywhere would rise and fall in a week, and, some years here, that even happens twice.
At night—this is one of my favorite things to do—I walk out into the darkness of the desert, beyond the neon blush of The Man, and turn around to see the spectacle in the middle of nowhere that is Black Rock City. I am amazed.
It is a wonder-carnival of light: banners and flags, domes and towers, illuminated in twisting, tilting beams of laser light and whirly-fire-birds and flickering flames in every color, sprawling out across the flatbed wilderness, a vivid virtuality. And none of it here to make money or careers, to gain security or position. All this wild extravagance, ushered out across mountain ranges and state lines at great financial, emotional and physical expense. Art for Art’s sake. It is most heartening. It raises my expectations, rebuilds my belief in human beings, and awakens my appetite for life.
When you sign up to go to Burning Man, the folk deliver you a ticket, a survival guide and a map to a place, both notorious and obscure. In the beginning, people don’t usually spend weeks and months preparing for these dispatch proceedings, but then maybe next year they do. It’s a passion you grow into. This year was my third. After rampant preparations, it took us about fifteen hours to pack our vehicle like a piñata with nine days of concepts. Leaving San Francisco at 3 a.m., and well behind schedule, we came upon desert Mecca, through nowhere to nowhere, portal by veil by layer, all the while gravitating toward the arbitrary totem of The Man. It is a bit of Paradise Lost in reverse, as one arrives at The Capricious Zen Garden where, as the creatures steadily take their places, boundaries will become tighter and tighter, and the openings obscenely wide. Even my thumbs will crack open from alkali exposure. Maybe the lotus will emerge.
The wild wind that tore down our shade arbor about twenty minutes after we raised it (never mind that we seriously needed shelter from the blistering sun) has whipped itself into a massive white-out; and so whatever landmarks of Black Rock City had begun to rise, that’s all a lot gone now too. It’s elegant that anywhere would rise and fall in a week, and, some years here, that even happens twice. Thank you, storm. We have no shelter, other than our vehicle, for two full days.
When we finally do have our lanai in place (a rather special place, I must say), I scare myself and make like Dr. Jekyl-Sitting Bull-Jetson, entertaining the locals as they come hither. Personal alchemy is predictable, as my profession here is simply my presence. I am nothing beyond who I am here and now: phase one of deliverance and release. Then there are many shifts of reference; and if I tend to forget or ignore the familiar in my other life—well, this town is very fresh every day. For one week only. We are attentive and visceral; alchemical and anarchistic . . . and this anarchy is something beyond the obvious: people are thinking and acting, there is heavenly exchange and activity. There is emancipation. You see the tiny town of Gerlach in the distance, the occasional sheriff’s car bumps by: just the palest scent of judgment or government. Thank heavens there exists a cadre of Burning Man lawyers who protect us, battling every conservative muscle in every self-appointed morality police body this side of Salt Lake City. And my reaction to The Status Quo Reality, which is truly ever a threat, fuels my celebration. I suspect that something about it adds to our collective anticipation of the burning of our Man and our reverie in that beautiful, spectacular hour of consummation.
I figure we are good and ripe for composting a new society. I am so free to be here today. No one else cares either way. But of course we all know that suddenly the lovely arrangement will end; and so there is also freedom from tomorrow, and even from today . . . tomorrow. Mere days from now . . . all this will be gone. The social economy is largely the moment’s lust for life. Our mark can only be solarized upon the playa here and now. This town is a unique ephemeral place, so make of it today . . . what you will have for today.
By midweek it is clear to me that this is the Dionysian communion of the cybertribes, the pagan homeland re: Post-Modern Tomorrow. I walk the dusty streets on the arm of my Vampire Lestat, with the eyes of Hieronymous Bosch. The village energy is tribal. Theater of ritual is a favorite flavor, and the whimsical surplus store settlements are stage sets: all peopled with living revelers in their fantasy roles, all bathed in an aura of the Timeless-Universal, each vignette alive and ingenious. A few nights and days of this … and my walls crumble. I take up with something akin in the soulful characters around me.
That we experience, in this yeasty, western Alexandria, a profound bonding as a people, should come as no surprise. The Burning Man motto “No Spectators” is really just preaching to the choir, to all but the weekend drop-ins. It takes first-time- and late-comers a day or two to grok the deferential consensus required to make this work. But to simply arrive here requires so much self and resource: we here are all already that deeply invested. Only inspired commitment and tenacity can produce more than a pitched tent and a cooler of beer and sirloin steaks floating in what was formerly ice. Looking around, I see our collective madness here is far beyond camping; looking around, I see that those who love their work do it well. One of my neighbors built a playful, interactive shrine to his recently deceased mother. I approve of my neighbor’s beauty and I toast it.
Still, the most profound emotions and senses I have of Burning Man are inscrutable to me, and I want to keep them that way. I can’t name specific magic; but I know that something charms me here—something that I crave the other 51 weeks of the year. I know I return from the desert an altered version. It’s an escapist exercise; the same can be said of Disneyland or Las Vegas, but those adventures do very little to expand my sense of humanity and its immediate potential. And of life. Extreme and exquisite: Burning Man highlights the sensual aspects of living and breathing, the breadth and basic facts of nature, and the very desirable reality of human beings all together—many in body, but for once, for one long week, one in Spirit.
Author Wade Gordon is an abstract painter living the life of his dreams in San Francisco with his lover. He wishes to offer “profound thanks to Dave Bine and Tom Howard for their participation in the creation of this piece, without which it would look very different.”
Photos by Maggie Hallihan.
Originally published late 2000, in arcCA 00.2, “Common Ground.”
