Burning Man 2005

Year of the Psyche

(If you want to see photos instead, then scroll down, beyond the text.)

This year I returned to Burning Man, briefly.

Thursday afternoon I drove into the now familiar dust bowl that is Black Rock City. This is a city that exists for one to two weeks out of the year. For the other 50 weeks it has a population of zero. At its peak Black Rock City reaches a population of 10 to 20 thousand.

The signs greeted me. The theme of this year was Psyche, the subconsious, and that fickle mouse-gray matter in general. Each sign contained a handful of words. Over the course of a few hundred feet I was introduced to an evocative quotation by Diane Ackerman:

Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.

An Alchemy of Mind. The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, 2004

First Contact

For a couple of hours I rolled, curled, and followed the curves of a partner's body. Without glasses, I can't read anything more than a foot away. All the world becomes a blur, splotches of fuzzy colors, lights, and shadows. Whereas this is normally a disadvantage, in contact dancing a lack of focused vision is a virtue, for it forced me to rely on the sense of touch. Kinesthetic, haptic, and tactile feedback from my partner guided the dance.

Contact improv is said to have been invented as a fusion of aikido, gymnastics, and modern (improvisational?) dancing. For me, like improv (theater), it was play; sanctioned sensuality among adults. Rediscovering this children's activity is wondrous. It is not sexual, but immersively playful. I let go of thoughts, social status, and expectations, to play.

The night before I hadn't eaten healthily, and found myself nauseous. I curled on the playa to puke, but none would come. Damn it, I thought, I haven't even done any drugs and here my body is already suffering to the point of making all positions besides horizontal unbearable. So, I returned to my car. I gingerly set up my tent and lay down to rest. I lay there until dawn, cursing myself for missing dances and a reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead at the Twilight of the Gods.

On the Wheel

Later that morning, I sat in a class at the same camp to learn vipasanna meditation. Or rather, to be refreshed in its practice. This was the same technique I had first been introduced to back in '94 at a Theravada buddhist temple, Taungpulu Kaba-aye Monastery.

It slowly sank in during the teacher's explanation of what sets this meditation apart, that I had already been using this technique off and on for a decade. It is rather simple. A typical sitting pose for meditation and a focus on breathing. The teacher added two terms to my vocabulary of mental awareness: hamster wheels and merry-go-rounds. He said that most distractions are of these two types. Hamster wheels are thoughts that go nowhere, such as worrying about something you could be doing instead of meditating, anger at someone, and so on. Merry-go-rounds are self-congratulatuory hamster wheels, such as pride in one's own accomplishment, a wish-fulfilling scenario, and so on.

I think most of my thoughts fit into these two categories. Short-duration, simple human-brain-based memes. They are simple cycles of thought. Each cycle ends where it begins and may continue round and round, but going nowhere. Damn. I remembered meditation having fewer of these wheels when I started. Was it selective recall? Or was I accumulating distractive discourse, like unbrushed teeth collect plaque. The teacher wondered why people meditated. I do because it works as mental floss. It removes unhealthy thoughts before the build-up into unhealthy habits. If it does, I haven't been doing it regularly as I should. Plaque accumulates on the teeth within 24 hours. So, brushing and flossing once a day prevents this buildup. At what rate does mental plaque accumulate?

After cooking a stew that tasted delicious in comparison to the harsh environment, I returned to a contact dance class. Pepper, a friend of Richard's that I'd met at Burning Man (or at Stanford?) years before, was teaching the class. I enjoyed the second class even more than the first.

Twilight of Sobriety

My appreciation for the adaptation erupted into gleeful laughter when Pentheus came on stage. Rather than Pentheus, this was "Ego," which was in line with the Psyche theme of this year's Burning Man. Ego wore a grotesque mask of George W. Bush. His voice-actor had a flawless imitation of G.W. Watching and hearing Ego's battle with Dionysus sent my thoughts spiraling and my belly into waves of laughter.

As some of the younger audience members were being lost in the long soliquoys, they cut to the chase: or rather the death of Ego. With a modest preamble, Dionysus grabbed Ego, and with the assistance of another player, his body was cast onto the altar. It was done with such violence that I feared for the player of Ego's safety. Dionysus and his helper jerked off Ego's pants, shirt, mask, and everything save black briefs. They caught the violence of the play. But would the player survive?

They grabbed his arms and legs and held down the struggling Ego. Having reapplied their grip, they dragged him, kicking and barking, on the playa out of the temple. Dust flew in the excitement. They spun him on the playa. I was morbidly concerned: How far would they go? And... Can I watch?

Thus, the play came to a close. The altar was converted into a bar, the temple into a dance area, and the play into a party. After the party wound down, I wandered, full of fiery exuberance that my rich rest and day's exercises had instilled. I found a black-lit party of raunchy techno music and discovered that chakra breathing is pretty good for keeping tempo while dancing.

Saturday morning greeted me with a hot sun, and half a stomach of nausea. What curse was this? My ribs or lungs ached, I couldn't distinguish which. Rolling up to sitting position was a painful chore. I refused to lose another day, but recognized that I was in no state for partying, or much besides lying and (hopefully) puking. Still, I missed my friend Richard who I hadn't seen, and his shade was cooler than my tent. So I stumbled to contact dance camp and continued my slow reading of The Difference Engine.

Faith in Science

Now, I do agree with Richard that most religions fashion anthropomorphic projections of a human diety that matches the ethnic demographic of the worshippers. But a dismissal of such an infantile belief should not lead to throwing out the possibility for a divine intelligence within the universe. Hell, as Arthur C. Clarke's famous quotation suggests, even a sufficiently advanced alien civilization would be indistinguishable from divinity.

It takes quite a bit of faith to be an atheist. You have to claim that although over 99.99% of the universe has not been examined, that there is no divinity. That's an awfully small sample set from which to draw a conclusion about the universe.

Perhaps, though, I am a Devil's advocate. I don't really expect divine intervention, although I often expect psychosomatic influence. Even if a god doesn't exist, I recognize that a belief in a god empowers the psyche of the believer. God becomes a ballast in the tumult of experience. The belief in a divine intelligence becomes a user-interface to genius. When working with the meat we were born with, it's much easier to influence the body when thinking in terms that it recognizes, namely mystical and magickal extensions of the evolutionary history of our transpecial lineage. If my limbic system responds favorably to a figure of an angel with a flaming sword, I'll use that interface.

Besides, hard reductionism is the religion of the Twientheth Century. (Even the current hypothesis of the origin of the universe was invented by a priest, George Lemaitre.) To the layman, a scientist's conclusion from a experiment is no more testable than a priest's divination. A particle accelerator is no more fathomable than a tower to heaven. Fanatical athiests that I've debated with (such as Objectivists) have a prejudice against any findings from the non-secular world. They distrust religious rituals, beliefs, and customs. While there is a lot of laughable baggage in religion (such as abstinence from pork, cloven-hoofed animals, etc.) and damnable politics in religion (such as the Crusades, Inquisition, Salem, and Eastern European pogroms), it is a mistake to conclude that there are no precious nuggets within religions that could enrich even an athiest's life.

Hard reductionists have had a damnable time discovering the nature of the human mind. Whereas, over two thousand years ago, religious meditators had techniques for improving intelligence, concentration, relieving stress, lowering blood pressure, regulating digestion and diet. Just because a mystic employs a fanciful (and anti-reductionist, ergo fallacious?) model does not invalidate the rituals and techniques of mystics.

On the other hand, narrow-minded mystics could do a whole lot better by recognizing an objective reality, or at least by making a coherent and comprehensive explanation of a subjective reality. One that explains as much of what little we do know about the universe.

I am eclectic. I employ the meditation of Theravada buddhism, the pranayama of kundalini yoga, the asanas of hatha yoga, the chakra model mind-body interface, the rituals of Western magick, the metaphor of a Holy Guardian Angel in Thelema, the space-cadetry of Robert Anton Wilson's reality tunnels, the philosophy of scientific positivism, the analytical power of physics, and the profundity of evolutionary biology. Each has their own non-exclusionary intellectual tools to offer.

Art on the Playa

A woman and child made of iron bits. Buffed steel talons. The upper half of a purple head. A giant wooden clock. And the one that let loose the floodgates beneath my eyes: a mausoleum.

So, sail with me, on the playa...

By day, a mild mannered man.

Welcome to my mouth?

Welcome to my mind?

A mother and child, made of nuts, bolts, and other bits.

A phoenix that sleeps by day...

...and burns by night.

Mausoleum

A gate to a mausoleum...

A mausoleum of the dearly beloved dead...

...and from the other side.

Farewell to those on the other side.

The Evening Before

The hour is getting late.

The flowers are fading fast.

A gate to a tower of the braindead.

Some people pray to god...

...while others have a direct line.

The Night the (Wo)Man Burned

A show of fire dancers.

From fourth row, I watched a spectacle of poi dancers. Gorgeous men and women dancing with fire and shadow. Most people watch the fire; sure, it's the bright light. But with every rotation of encircling fire, there is an equal rotation of shadow. This is as much a characterization of the dance as any. No one watches these dances during the daytime. It is the shadow that lends the light its power.

A stoner on the second row told us the Man was a Woman. He said those lines on his chest were breasts and the three lines at the pelvis were ovaries. This is the year of the Psyche. The guy who built the man was playing a joke on us all. Think you're burning a man? You're burning a woman. The man (or woman) took a long time to fall. Someone joked, "If these keeps up, we'll have to stop burning women."

But fall (s)he did. And rise we did. For the rest of my night, I slowly soaked in the changes and similarities. Thunderdome was more popular than ever. The gawkers and the party-goers were as they have always been. Mardi-gras in the desert.

An explosion announces the end.

And fire consumes us all.

Yet after the burn, the partying begins.

Afterword

My diet on the playa was trimmed back. I only ate when hungry, and this came to be about a meal and a half a day. It's a hot environment. Water is constantly necessary. But without a regularly scheduled eating time, without a convenient method to get food quickly, eating became something I only did when I truly was hungry. That's a habit I'd love to keep all-year round.

Late that afternoon, back in my comfortable, complacent apartment in Berkeley, I was shocked. People wear ridiculous fashions. Not at Burning Man, but everywhere. It's all ridiculous method of concealing sex or a luxuriant method of boasting wealth, or an elitist method of boasting tribal affiliation.

All the laws of civilization. All the comforts of a city. All the rituals of currency. These separate me from the primitive experience. Burning Man reconnected me with that primal experience. In doing so, it reminded me, like a thump on the head, what is necessary and what is superfluous. Most every contraption is superfluous. Most everything worn, cared for, envied, or kept as a custom, is the result of a mental plaque.

Burning Man chewed me up and spit me out. In doing so, the living the rest of the year is easy. Living is so easy. And everything else is of secondary importance. Again Burning Man scraped away a layer of plaque. Unnecessary concerns, habits, worries, and over sensitivities toward non-utiliarian fashion and customs, mostly created to keep the mind on yet another hamster wheel.

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