Burning Man 2004
Part 5: The Burn
Saturday. Hot, but no wind storms at all! It's a burn day miracle! We wander and lounge during the day. The plan is to pack up everything we can get away with packing tonight, before the burn. Tomorrow morning we'll get on the road early. Hardcore burners stay for the Temple burn on Sunday night, but we've got to get back to our lives. We share a spaghetti dinner with the Vulture Gang. At dusk we head toward the Man.
A circle was marked on the ground around the Man, maybe 50 yards out, and a crowd had already formed around it. We got a spot three or four rows back from the front. Behind the people sitting and standing, art cars circled like covered wagons, a continuous wall of lights and music and monsters with people clinging everywhere. We sat on the ground and waited. After it got good and dark, a procession of fire spinners started up, making a slow circuit in front of the crowd. For the most part, this was tedious. I kept waiting for some big synchronized spectacle, but all they would do is swing their torches forward and back. Eventually some cool stuff came along: people doing tricks with flaming swords, flaming fans, flaming hoops, a flaming whip. The best part was the row of fire breathers who passed a fireball through the air. But most of the show paled in comparison to fire spinners we'd seen at random on the playa. People started screaming for the Man to burn. One guy behind us screamed like a quintessential sports fan, "BUUUURRRRN THAT FUCKER!" After all the amazing things weÕve been immersed in all week, why are we so anxious to see this big statue lit on fire?
The spinners faded away, and the fireworks erupted. Giant sparks fountained up around the Man, shooting from the ground to high above his head. Then flames appeared in the structure beneath the Man, creeping up slowly, slowly. They crept up the sides of the dome, crept up the Man's legs, continued the slow creeping even when the gallery below was a raging inferno. The blue lights adorning the Man went out one by one. The guywires holding his arms in their upraised position snapped. More sparks shot from his hands. The burning dome shifted and dropped, but some unseen support kept the Man in place. The flames still hadn't reached his head, but finally he toppled into the blaze below.
Afterwards we wandered around the playa. The whole city was out there, roaming by foot, pedal and motor. It was easy to lose our bearings without the Man; when standing, he had been a landmark visible from anywhere in Black Rock City. Eventually we came back to the pile of crackling embers. A crowd moved around the edge together, by some random unspoken consensus, in a slow circle.
My sensei talked to us about magic one day. Magic is in how we treat things, he said. For example, take the wooden weapons that we practice with. We bring them to class inside a protective covering, we bow to the shomen when we take the weapons out and when we put them away, we carry them around the mat in a certain way, we sand them and oil them to maintain a fine, smooth finish. After doing all this long enough, it doesn't matter if you believe in magic or not; you have a different mindset when you hold that weapon in your hand. It's not just a piece of wood, it's a tool for transforming yourself, which is what magic is all about. That's why we train, or at least that's why I train-- to become someone who can cope in a crisis.
So look at how the Man is treated. He has a whole city dedicated to him, for Frith's sake. He is the center of a ritual that arguably lasts the whole week, or for some people the whole year. In order to see him burn you have to live in an environment that breaks down your concept of reality. The potential for magical energy is staggering. But for what? What does it mean? ThatÕs the absurd beauty of the thing; it means NOTHING! It's just a bunch of weirdos building things and doing things that no one has ever built or done or seen before. As a community it's nothing but a rich primordial soup, with random cultural institutions spawning and dying in the eddies of pure imagination.
By itself, Black Rock City is clearly not a viable organism. As a rant in Piss Clear pointed out, the gift economy utopia survives on food and water and gear trucked in from the world of dirty ol' money and mundane work. The place would fall apart if not for Honey Bucket Inc. emptying the toilets twice a day. Black Rock City has to have a fleeting existence, there's no way it could sustain itself over the long term. But it has the romance of the superstar who dies young, to be remembered in all its glory before the trash has a chance to pile up.
I did feel transformed after Burning Man, at least for a short time. As we drove away Sunday morning, I had a sense of taking the playa with me, that it would be there under my feet wherever we stopped. For several days afterward I was still a native of Black Rock City, working in Beaverton without a green card. We went to a park and I joined a Frisbee game with people I'd never met, as naturally as anything. Now, almost a year later, it's all long gone and I'm as socially inept as ever. More than ever it seems. Someday I'll go back. I'll wear a real costume, and bring a bundle of things to throw on the fire.
