Stewart Harvey - Playa Fire: Spirit and Soul at Burning Man

CONTENTS

STEWART HARVEY is an award-winning photographer whose work has been featured in both museum and gallery exhibitions. His Burning Man photography has also appeared in numerous publications, including Wired and Life magazines as well as the books Burning Man, Playa Dust, and the cover of Geoff Dyers Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It. He attended the last Ansel Adams Yosemite Workshop in 1981 and received an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2007. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

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To the Harvey Boys

(Shorty, Larry, Bryan, and Tristan)

and the Harvey Girls

(Katherine, Lynda, and Naomi)

Foreword by Larry Harvey, originally published as part of Radical Ritual: Spirit and Soul on The Burning Man Journal blog. Used by permission. Afterword by N. K. Guy, author of Art of Burning Man.

PLAYA FIRE. Copyright 2017 by Stewart Harvey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Harvey, Stewart, author, photographer.

Title: Playa fire : spirit and soul at Burning Man / Stewart Harvey.

Description: First edition. | San Francisco : HarperElixir, 2017. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017027347 (print) | LCCN 2017027848 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062564030 (ebook) | ISBN 9780062564061 (hardback)

EPub Edition August 2017 ISBN 9780062564030

Subjects: LCSH: Burning Man (Festival) | Performance artNevadaBlack Rock Desert. | CountercultureNevadaBlack Rock Desert. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Customs & Traditions. | PHOTOGRAPHY / Subjects & Themes / Celebrations & Events. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. Classification: LCC NX510.N482 (ebook) | LCC NX510.N482 .B534 2017 (print) | DDC 700.9793/54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027347

Digital Edition OCTOBER 2017 ISBN: 978-0-06-256403-0

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-256406-1

Spirit Flies Abroad

The experience of spirit is identified with breath. The word inspiration has a pedigree that extends back to the middle of the sixteenth century, deriving from the even more ancient Latin word inspirare, which means to breathe in, to draw air into the lungs. In this sense, we encounter spirit constantly in daily life in the form of sighs and sobs, snorts and gaspsany involuntary intake or expiration of breath. We speak of high spirits, low spirits, and spirited actions. We also know that spirit is highly contagiousit can spread with lightning speed through great assembliesand it is identified with states of exaltation, as when we feel we rise above ourselves. Very often an excess of this feeling can produce an upthrusting of the arms.

One example of this aspect of spirit is revealed by an occurrence at the Temple Burn in 2016. For nearly a year prior to this annual ritual, a very lively debate smoldered like a creeping fire on Burning Mans discussion lists. The dispute involved community members who viewed this Burn as taking place on hallowed ground, as at a wedding or a funeral. Many were particularly impressed by the profound periods of silence that had come to punctuate the ceremony. Their adversaries countered this by advancing the principle of Radical Self-Expression, contending that everyone has an individual right to express him- or herself, which in extreme cases might include yelling profanities.

As with many such disputes, this ideological conflict belied a difference in sensibility; both arguments were tied to strong emotions, and after one long summer of intermittent sniping and shouting on the Internet, a breakthrough occurred. The spark that had originally ignited this controversy involved the loud playing of Free Bird and a fair amount of profanity, and one day a discussant directly addressed what had actually happened. The offending group was made up of members of the DPW, our Department of Public Works, he explained, and they were commemorating the death of a friend whose favorite song was Free Bird. The raucous bellowing was of a piece with how this group sang birthday songs to one another. The contending parties did not exactly kiss and make up, but with this empathic insight they established an apparent truce.

This set the stage for the Temple Burn in 2016. This temple, choked with hundreds of remembrances of the dead, was being quietly readied for burning, when a series of unrehearsed actions occurred. The crowd, numbering in the thousands, had gathered around the Burn perimeter, when suddenly a sound arose, a sort of treble yipping, like the keening of coyotes; it traveled twice around the circle in a wave. Then a second wave of sound arose, this time pitched in a more dulcet tone, and rippled around the temple three full times before subsiding into silence.

The crowd then paused, as if in contemplation of itself, when suddenly a single person tossed out a profanity; it hung there in the air, as if it posed a question. Everyone appeared to wonder what might happen next, and then another shout was heard, but this was not a word, more like a stifled proto-word that stuck in someones throat. Instantly it felt as if a spell was lifted, and moments later the temple erupted in flames. One could hear the fire soughing, as a great billowing wind rushed upward. It felt like a long and continuous sigh, a vast exhalation of breath. I was there to witness this, and it occurred to me: If this is not the action of spirit, alive and on the hoof, voiced and freely circulating, what else can it be?

Soul Remains at Home

Soul relates to experience embedded deep in our bodies. It is traditionally regarded as the source of human vitality and is associated with passionate prompts to action: it is muscular, emotional, and visceral. In our daily lives we speak of gut feelings, soulful looks, broken hearts, a catching of the throat, a shiver down the spineand nearly everybody understands that the