Burning Man 2004
The Vault of Heaven

By moontroll
BM 2004

A dysfunctional circus. A Wild West round-up. The 21st century’s grandest Be-In. A summit of visionaries. The cutting edge of participatory art. A psychedelic gathering of extraterrestrials, dissident poets, nudists and modern primitives. A post-apocalyptic bar-b-que in the far reaches of the American desert. A collision of gypsy caravans. A hedonistic playground, acid carnival, spiritual retreat and all-night rave all ground up into one dusty, sleepless, love-filled sausage. Utopia.

Burning Man is all of this and more. So very much more.

For one week out of the year—while the rest of America trundles around the country in RVs to observe the obscure rites of the Labor Day holiday— 35,000 people gather together in an ill-begotten corner of Nevada, establishing an encampment on a dusty playa in the Black Rock Desert. Black Rock City, an anarchic, impermanent city made up of representatives from every state (and several distant countries), lurches to life literally overnight, a mass of tents, rental trucks, domes, towers, school buses and lean-to’s that looks as if it crawling up through the cracks in the dry desert floor.

What is this powerful yet short-lived quickening? Who are these body-painted, smiling, salt-encrusted people? Why draws them to this nowhere place?

These are tough questions, namely because there are no right answers. I mean, really, all imagined answers are right. Just like all possible answers are wrong, too.

I can only speak to what I saw and tasted and felt during the short, hot days and long, star-spackled nights of Burning Man 2004. Actually, even that limited goal might not be possible. I’m a wordsmith at loss for words here, as if my stash of them trickled out of my satchel while I made my wandering way through the pulsing city, like Scrabble tiles carelessly strewn across the sand.

Here, let me quote another writer to see if I can get some traction: “Burning Man is a gathering that has taken place in the Nevada desert every year since 1986 in the week prior to Labor Day. Its founders call it an ‘annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.’ The festival becomes home to artists, performers and free spirits and is a mix of pagan fire ritual, circus, performance art and other forms of expression.”

The writer—David Crumm, a religion writer for the Detroit Free Press, whose spot-on article I found online—continues, explaining, “After 18 years of evolution from a few guys burning a roughly-made wooden figure on a beach in San Francisco, Burning Man has grown to embrace utopian ideals, environmental spirituality, artists’ visions—all fused with a dose of rock and roll, a taste of every spiritual tradition on the planet, nudity—and lots and lots of fire.”

Well put, David. But you forgot to mention the naked zip line.
burningManChristian
At Burning Man, I drank margaritas that sprayed out of a zebracorn’s butt. I went to a prom at the Space Virgins temple (yes, in the purple prom dress, with hair to match), got a spanking at the Kostume Kult’s dome party, danced atop a metallic piranha as it swam across the playa, got tattoed at Armadillo’s Goddess Gathering and played bartender on the mobile Chaos Bar, a dark creation which shot 30-foot high roaring blasts of liquid fire into the night sky as it drove from dance party to dance party. I can remember bleary fragments—the Orgasmatron, a march of drunken Santas, the Chairway to Heaven, the Hookahdome, the Roaster-Coaster, the Winking Lotus, a bicycle parade of 3,000 topless women, dancing with vampires and butterflies and domanatrixi—but they certainly don’t add up to anything that makes reasonable sense.

Some straight talk: Burning Man is an annual gathering of eccentrics and dreamers—a majority of them from the San Francisco Bay area—who drive out to Nevada to hang out, party and be themselves (albeit an extreme version of themselves.) Other than the grand finale of the group torching of the iconic man-effigy, there are no central, adhesive events bring everybody together. There isn’t any commerce either—no buying, no selling, not even any bartering. “Gifting” is the preferred economy. So all people, very young and very old, drive out to the desert to give things away and have a good time and mingle with fellow freaks and Black Rock City appears. It has street names, postal, police, fire and medical services, a Department of Mutant Vehicles and civic (volunteer) jobs like being a Greeter, a Lamplighter, serving on the MOOP patrol or delivering the daily newspaper—basically everything any normal city of 35,000 people has, except this city only lives for one week a year. And it is ferociously dusty and hot. And there’s no money anymore. Or mean people.

One week it is the 3rd largest city in Nevada, the next but a smoldering daydream.
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An uber-summit of every American subculture, sub-sect of subculture and heretical offshoot of sub-sect of subculture, non-dogmatic and fun-loving all, drawn here to this collective energy by some voiceless calling. It is a pageantry that revives ancient traditions while charting the way forward into the space-age future. Burning Man wildly celebrates music, sensuality, art, intoxicants, performance, the intellect and our human potential for kindness while incinerating inhibitions and mocking mainstream culture that we left far, far behind us.

Through exposure to extreme temperatures, dust storms, a lack of food and sleep, loud music, libations and raw emotions, one’s ego is steadily worn down until the shinning core emerges. People interact freely, openly, with shining genuineness and an electric connection. Masks and protective armor drop away, clutter is stripped, the naked soul is revealed, and the joyous tribe take a collective giant leap forward, which turns out to actually be a move backwards, a returning to the roots of our ancestral heritage as a species.

Or maybe not. You’ll just have to go and discover your own myth of the Man.

copyright 2004