Brian Doherty - This Is Burning Man

Copyright 2004 by Brian Doherty

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: September 2007

ISBN: 978-0-316-02892-9

For
Jean Poulet
Showman

Without whom...

What is extraordinary about the search for self-fulfillment in contemporary America is that it is not confined to a few bold spirits or a privileged class. Cross-section studies of Americans show unmistakably that the search for self-fulfillment is instead an outpouring of popular sentiment and experimentation, an authentic grass-roots phenomenon.... It is as if tens of millions of people had decided simultaneously to conduct risky experiments in living, using the only material that lay at handtheir own lives.

Daniel Yankelovich

In the form and function of play, itself an independent entity which is senseless and irrational, mans consciousness that he is embedded in a sacred order of things finds its first, highest, and holiest expression.

Johan Huizinga

Dont work for my happiness, my brothersshow me yours show me that it is possibleshow me your achievementand the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

Ayn Rand

An unintelligible passionate yearning drove them out into the desert.

T. E. Lawrence

Its the strangest thing. Ive wiped the dashboard of my 87 Subaru almost a dozen times now, and the white powder filling all its crannies just wont go away. When its wet, it looks clean, for a minute. But when it dries, the coating is still there.

It wouldnt matter if I got it out of my car anyway. That dustthe residue of the Black Rock Playa, in Nevadais inside me now. And its never going away.

Many great faiths have been born in visions arising from the desert. And no desert has ever seen a vision more inspiring of faith than the annual gathering called Burning Man. Burning Man, wrote journalist Daniel Pinchbeck, with admirable precision, in Breaking Open the Head, is more decadent than Warhols Factory, more glamorous than Berlin in the 1920s, more ludicrous than the most lavish Busby Berkeley musical, more of a love-fest than Pepperland, more anarchic than Groucho Marxs Freedonia, more implausible than any mirage.

Every year, increasing numbers of pilgrimsmore than thirty thousand in 2003drive down a long two-lane highway, heading about one hundred miles northeast of Reno, Nevada. Their destination is the widest stretch of utter desolation in the continental United States, nearly four hundred square miles of desiccated lake bed. Theres no water, no plumbing, no shade, no lifenothing but packed-down alkali dust cracking off to every horizon.

The temperature at this terribly inhospitable wastelandthe Black Rock Playacan, and probably will, stay well above 100 degrees all day. At night it may well plummet to near freezing. It is frequently beset by unpredictable and brutal windstorms during which the dust rises and coats and blinds you and whatever shelter youve built will very likely be dashed to the ground.

So many people will be there, crammed into such a small space, that the desolation beyond the encampment will seem a cruel tease as the inhabitants live for a week in an impromptu tent city that screams refugee camp more than it does vacation.

Still, almost all of them are more than just resigned to a week condemned to this unpleasant-sounding fate. They are ecstatic. They are at Burning Man.

Burning Man started in 1986 as a little ritual for a couple of buddies and a handful of their friends on a beach in San Franciscothe simple burning of a simple wooden man, for no reason they will specify. They decided to keep doing it every year, and slowly, by accident, this act attracted more and more people, who became dedicated not so much to the burning of a blank icon as to the things that started happening around the fire.

At first it was nothing more than a reason for some friends to gather. Now, a fully functional cityBlack Rock Cityappears and then quickly disappears around the ritual. This temporary city is complete with a local constabulary, a mainstream daily and an alt-weekly, more than a dozen radio stations, a power grid, thirty-eight miles of roads, and more artistic expressions in more media per square inch than anywhere else on Earth. Journalist Fiona Essa once aptly described the scene as akin to a war zone where the explosions had left art in their wake.

Every year on the Saturday before Labor Day, in Americas most beautifully forbidding and awesomely empty landscape, a forty-foot statue adorned with lovely neon lighting gets burned. But the burning of the statue is just the MacGuffin, the thing around which the real story gets set in motion, not the theme. The real story is what happens to peoplewhat they do, what it means to them, how it changes themwhen they can make a temporary society qualitatively different in many respects from their everyday one. Its a civilization that by the mutual agreement of all attendees has almost no commerce and is dedicated purely to creativity and play, where the standards of normal life can be inverted or ignored in the pursuit of fresh experiences and fresh identities.

People do work at Burning Manand work remarkably hardon building ephemeral things for the joy of creation, for the fulfillment of working with others to pull off the grand gesture, for status and bragging rights in their transitory community, pursuing a preindividualist vision of the good life, which at Burning Man is found only in working with and contributing to the polis.

The experience provides so much more than any one person can see, do, or be. Burning Man is not an event or a happening or a theme park or an arts festival, though it has aspects of all those. It is, truly, a city. Black Rock City began as somewhat of a wry gag on the part of the tight-knit group of Bay Area artists and cultural rebels who started it. But it has grown way beyond their control, or anyones. A true city arises, develops, evolves, catches fire, then disappears, built on a backdrop of nothing, imbuing it with a rich metaphorical resonance and also summoning an extraordinary and ever-shifting visual panorama as the city is constantly either growing or dissolving.

The story of how a handful of people burning a statue on a beach became, in only fifteen years, a temporary civilization of tens of thousands is one of the stories this book tells. While it is a long story, in its way, it is not ultimately very complicated: It happened because people wanted it to happen, people made it happen, and no one stopped them. No one planned for it, ordered it into existence, bought it, or paid for it. It was a spontaneous flowering of a felt need of a free people.

The experience of Burning Man is unique. Aspects of it do resemble older traditions or other gatherings of intentional community. Assembling to burn an effigy reminds one of ancient myths of Celtic sacrifice like the Wicker Man (and the cult movie of the same name based on it), and also of Zozobra, when the Kiwanis in Santa Fe, New Mexico, burn a giant firework-laden effigy in a city park and party all day. The Rainbow Family is another countercultural intentional community that meets on federal landin national forests rather than a dry lake bedbut a Rainbow Gathering is little more than a get-together, a party for those keeping alive hippie values. Burning Mans unique combination of insistence on active creative participationin a consciously grim and unwelcoming blankness that becomes a canvas for the largest act of ephemeral collective creativity man has ever known, in an atmosphere largely free of imposed meanings or behavioral normshas no real parallel.