NMScene

Preface

I feel like I must write this edition of From the Front Lines in a slightly different fashion. The direction I’d like to take this writing is in the form of a letter to my younger sister, Candace. Although we are separated by only two years of experience in life, those experiences are quite a bit different. It’s often been hard for me to describe to my family the honest details about my trips to Burning Man, not only because of the adult nature of a lot of what I’ve experienced, but because of the extreme crapyness of the way we were brought up to communicate with each other. This brings a bit of irony due to the fact that I love to write so much.

My sister called me up the other day and asked me, meekly, about my vacation, and how it was, and what did I do. I was somewhat at a loss for words when describing any of my experiences at Burning Man to anyone, let alone to a family member whose life revolves around finishing her masters’ degree in abstract math. Add together her learning disability and my extreme lack of eloquence when it comes to spoken communication and all she knows right now is how I went camping in the desert with some friends.

So here, without much ado, is my heartfelt explanation of what I’ve been up to for the last two weeks and what I’ve sort of done three times prior.

From the Front Lines: Burning Man 2009

Dear Candace,

You called me up yesterday trying to pry some golden bit of information from me in order to see how my vacation went for these last two weeks. Well first and foremost I want you to know that I had, perhaps, one of the best trips I’ve ever had, and I’m someone who has gone on too many trips to count. You once told me that it was sad that the best thing that I’ve ever participated in was my trips to the black rock desert, I hope that this writing will change your mind, as I wasn’t exactly clear on what I experienced.

When people ask me what Burning Man is, I always find myself at a loss for words to explain it properly, because it is so many damn things all at once. I’ve told mom that I was simply going to an art and culture festival out in the desert. This is like saying math consists of counting and numbers. We both know that this is such a broad statement that it is almost false.

To be precise, burning man is what ends a week long experiment in so many different things. An entire city is built and exists, in the Nevada desert, for a week every labor day. This city is affectionately called Black Rock City, after a mountain range near by that is volcanic, and black, in appearance. It’s held at the bottom of a dry lake bed which had, since the last ice age, evaporated, and left an alkaline flat that is the largest, flattest place on the planet, some thirty miles long and at its widest up to ten miles wide. It’s an amazing backdrop to what has become a city I’ve come to call my second home. It is, during this week, the third largest city in Nevada.

The city itself is something of a marvel of what an efficient planed community can become. I’m sure you’ve seen the poster in my apartment that I got in 2007 of the city, a circle ¾’s full. The city holds, at its current size, around 50,000 residents, which fluctuates every year but has floated around there for a while. Burning man, as an event, itself is over twenty years old, moving to the black rock desert, and has been growing every year since.

The burning of the man, which is a 40ish foot structure, is just one event at the end of the week of thousands that occur over the course of the week. The events that do occur are made by the people who come to live in black rock city. This brings me to one of the key, central ideas that burning man has instilled in me and the others who attend; Participation.

Participation, as opposed to spectation, is probably the most central theme to this event. I didn’t really understand this going to the event, the first or second times, but by the third and definitely after this trip, it’s like all the little pieces make sense to me now. It’s hard to translate the concept clearly for someone who hasn’t participated before, but I’ll do my best.

Many people will go to Burning Man a few times, hit the parties that go on there and get bored of it and never return. I feel supremely bad for those that go there, get so fucking close to “IT,” and leave never getting “IT.” Most of the people who are like this are what are lovingly called tourists. They come to see the spectacle of it all, tour the sights, but, like a good, preprogrammed little drone of society, they don’t get it.

When you participate, when you build something with your own two hands, regardless of what it is, you do what few others in this life ever do. You lead. You tell people, hey, I have this zany idea, come check it out. Play with it. Maybe my crazy idea can inspire your crazy ideas and something really good can come out of it.

The first part of participation in Burning Man is survival. As easy as it is for most people to just buy their way into survival, its much less easy for others. There are a lot of people who go to burning man in a large, luxury RV, with satellite TV’s and tons of stupid amenities. While these things are nice, and I’ll probably roll up one day in one myself, those who haven’t gone their first time with nothing but a tent, a cooler, and some instructions on how to survive in the desert have really done themselves a massive disservice. Understanding how difficult it is to survive on your own with a minimum of things put into context how insanely good we have it as Americans. Things like indoor plumbing and refrigeration, not to mention the easy accessibility to goods take on a almost sacred meaning when you’ve been deprived of them for only a week. Its only when scarcity is in abundance that abundance is truly valued.

Radical self reliance, then, is a second key topic when it comes to what Burning Man is. By radically self reliant, its ment that you understand *exactly* what it is and means to rely on yourself for your own survival, and, not only survive, but thrive decently in one of the harshest environments on the planet. The playa, which the desert is called due to its beach like atmosphere, is a bed of highly alkaline dirt left over from the previous lake that used to be there. Nothing can grow in the soil, and there are high winds which gust upwards of 60 on a bad day, dust storms (remember when we went to go see the shuttle land at white sands, and all there was what dirt in the air? It’s like that) which can last all day, and temperatures which I’ve experienced peaking out at 115 degrees. Surviving in this climate takes extra precautions, like learning to keep your camp together when extreme winds hit, how to keep cool, and how to keep our skin from turning to the consistency of paper.

Being radically self reliant isn’t enough, however. Bringing excess, i.e., more than you would need is also a crucial idea when it comes to the event. Being able to provide for your camp isn’t enough; one also needs to be able to help his neighbor in both terms of stupid crap like alcohol, but also in terms of ability. This leads us to another idea which was introduced to both of us at a young age going to catholic school and later to church, that being of giving.

The economy of burning man is a Gifting economy. This is another crucial idea which I didn’t really give a shit about until I came to black rock city. Being able to give to your neighbors *without* the expectation of return, is a key concept that is completely lost in our modern world. We all are told there is no free lunch. I disagree with this. There sometimes is, but we can not expect it, and further, we should be the one’s giving it if its there. Giving with out the expectation of return is a funky idea. It often falls flat on its face; the recipient of the gift will usually not value it, or even worse, take it for granted.

There is a unique synergy that occurs, however, when you combine the scarcity of resources that living in black rock city creates and the idea of a gifting economy. The value of anything given in such a situation increases exponentially to the gift. Simply sharing a drink or a sticker suddenly becomes a very unique experience. I think this is a hard concept for Americans, in particular, to grasp, as we have relatively instant access to most things that we need. Our society is unbelievably wasteful which we just don’t see.

Alright, so, there, we have some core concepts. But just how was my experience? WTF did I do? Well, it’s like this. This has been not just a hard year, but, one of those years in which I’ve personally grown unlike any other in my life. It began with a broken heart and a bit of a crisis inside myself. This took the better part of the year for me to deal with and sort out. You and your husband and mom have been riding my ass about getting back into school, but unfortunately, this last year made me stop and re evaluate where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing. Thank god, I came out on top, stronger than ever. Like, unbelievably solid, better than I’ve ever been in my life. Just as that ended, the situation with mom loosing her house hit, and again, like you, my life was put on hold as I dealt with another crisis.

I mention this on purpose, because Burning Man, and my participation in Black Rock City, is a year long event. My experience with the prior three burns gave me the ability to organize and lead and take care of two people who’ve never been and include two extra camp mates at the last minute. We built a dome (a 20 foot shade structure) in my friend Cetta’s back yard, and I got together my equipment and loaded up the trailer and headed out. Of the three prior burns I’ve gone to, this was decisively my best, funest, and most eye opening. Like every burn, there were the usual indulgences and craziness. There were naked people (gasp) people on drugs, people sober, artists, tourists, first timers who didn’t know what the fuck was up, cranky fucks who complain about the whole thing, art, and, unbelievable moments that really cant even been described.

I have to be honest, however, I wasn’t feeling like going this year but knew once I got out there I’d have a blast. I really only had one thing that I felt like I had to do, and that was to put a picture of me and a certain someone inside the Temple. The temple isn’t a temple, say, to god, or to man, or to some kind of pagan beast. It’s just…a temple. A sacred space. It’s a place that most people end up putting something of significance into because at the end of the week, much like the man, it is burned, and the fire takes away whatever you choose to put into it. This was my favorite temple that I’ve experienced and the hardest for me to deal with.

The temple was built by a group of artists from Austin, Texas this year and was amazing to be inside. People brought art, pictures, and stories of people they loved and lost and needed to let go. I used it for this purpose. I took me four trips to the temple (it was about a mile and a half walk one way to get to it) before I was able to put to rest what I needed to.

After I did so, I felt a strange kind of release. It’s amazing how we hold on to the hard things in life, so often, and allow it to define us, often in the most negative of ways. I feel intensely sad for anyone who can’t let go, and allow a small fire to simmer inside them their entire lives.

Of course, there were a great many things to do out there. So many, in fact, that it would be impossible if I went on ten trips to the same event to experience all of them. There are the more urban things, like bars which will fill your cup for free, to go to, or the stupid things, like the flaming enema (gives you a little flame thrower action when you sit down on a special chair.) there were art installations like “soma” by the flaming lotus girls, a group of women who are welders and sculptors from the bay area. There are the art cars, which are vehicles that have been changed in some way that become a sort of traveling party.

There are tons of workshops out there, on anything from learning to hug yourself better, to adult themed, to how to generate green electricity, to cooking. It’s like finding some of the coolest, most interesting things out there and bringing all the nutty, productive, creative people into a pietre dish and seeing what happens.

I think one of the unexpected and best parts of my experience with the burn is bringing people who wouldn’t have, otherwise, been able to go, out there. This is for two reasons. The first is because I get the opportunity to teach and lead and organize people in a way that I would never get to. It’s kind of selfish but it hass really taught me how to, in a sense, herd cats. I find it to be one of the most important skills I’ve ever been able to develop. I’ve learned more about teamwork and getting things done that I ever could have in some kind of corporate job where people are being paid to do as I say. Getting them to do as I say with out them *having* to do it is something you can never learn in a corporate environment.

Secondly, and most importantly, its opened up these people to something new that I don’t think they would have imagined had they not gone. They get to participate in something that is mind opening and pretty fucking cool at the same time. By mind opening, they get to see what others are capable of doing, and in a sense get to measure themselves against a pretty high bar in some cases that I don’t think they would have known was out there. I know that in my case it has made me want to aim way higher than I thought was possible before. This is very much true for the year ahead of me, as I’ve set some bars that I didn’t think I could hit, but, now I’ve got the gumption to try.

I hope this has given you a taste of my experience this year in black rock city and at burning man. There are a lot of experiences that I had that are too abstract to talk about, like, a conversation I had with the clouds, getting on my knees for a shot at kitty camp, watching a father beat on his daughters boyfriend with a whip, drinking a bit much, the “love seat” which shocks you when you sit on it, and scores of other experiences like cleaning up the moop left behind by camps that were near us. These are secondary to the above things which I think I came to realize solidly this year.

I don’t expect you to ever go, but I hope one day you’ll be open enough to let me take you and your husband there, and experience the unbelievably amazing things I have in the black rock desert.

Your loving brother,

-L.