"Really?" the guy at the Alamo Rental Car place said, when I'd told him about Burning Man. "I heard it was just a lot of naked people running around on drugs."
Coated in gypsum dust, and still high not on drugs but on the altered consciousness of radical creativity and community, I had just tried to describe what Burning Man is, somehow. I think I'd said something like, "It's a temporary city of 50,000 people, devoted to radical self-expression. So you'll find anything you'd find in a regular city -- art museums, dance clubs, yoga studios -- only in the middle of the desert, with no money, and with more creativity than you've ever seen."
Of the two descriptions, surely Rental Car Guy's is the more familiar. When Adam Lambert revealed that he'd gotten the idea to go on American Idol while on mushrooms at Burning Man, America groaned. The image, I assume, was of a drugged-out weirdo coming up with a loopy idea in the middle of wild, crazy party.
The truth, though, is that Burning Man is an ideal place for self-reflection and self-transformation, whether substance-aided or not, and as someone who's just gotten back from his 8th Burn, Lambert's revelation didn't surprise me a bit. Friends of mine have changed their names, their professions, and their entire lives at Burning Man. And not because they were stoned or tripping, but because Black Rock City -- the temporary city (built and erased within a month) where the event goes on every year, the week before Labor Day -- has a tendency to expand horizons, reveal possibilities, and question the assumptions most of us make about how we're supposed to live our lives.
Burning Man does this, I think, because of a combination of factors. One of them is the sheer size and scope of the thing. 50,000 people. Hundreds of cars and trucks modified to look like dragons, whales, radios, and steamboats; many breathing fire; most with dozens of revelers dancing on them. It's like "Mad Max" meets "Blade Runner" meets "The Ten Commandments," and it's real, it's actually happening.
And it's happening without capitalism. There's no vending at Burning Man -- it's a gift economy. Entire "theme camps" exist just to give away spaghetti, to serve people free margaritas, to make pancakes. Yes, it does cost a lot to get in (between $150-350), but that mostly pays for the rental of the land from the government, the porta-potties and other infrastructure, and grants made to large-scale art projects. No one -- not the celebrity DJs who were there this year, like Armin van Buuren and Carl Cox, and not the people who build the solar electrical grid -- gets paid. No one is making a buck.
This is incredibly liberating. It's not sustainable, but it is a temporary autonomous zone of bullshit-free living. And just being there, just participating in the creation of an entire city devoted to what we want to do, rather than what we have to do to make money, has the tendency to invite self-reflection like Lampert's. Who am I? What do I really want to be doing? If people can create a twelve-ton sculpture of a bird's nest made entirely out of plumbing pipe, what are the limits on my own creativity? "Once you are free," said Baudrillard, "you are forced to ask who you are."
The freedom is more than just freedom from conventional economic life, though. Yes, there are some naked people running around on drugs, because the culture of Black Rock City is a very, very liberal one. (It's not free of law enforcement -- this year in particular, I heard many stories of people being busted for drugs, and for giving alcohol to minor-aged-looking undercover cops.) Of course, how people choose to exercise that freedom is up to them. For every NPRAOD, I'd guess there are two people wishing they had the courage to do so, one person playing the violin on a sofabed in the middle of a desert, two people cooking pumpkin ravioli, and another person writing the name of her beloved on the wooden walls of the Temple -- this year a three-story, Lotus-shaped construction just north of the center of the city, that was burned last Sunday night.
Of course, we don't hear about these other people, which, to me, says more about the puerility of the default world than the sexuality of Black Rock City. It's as if radical self expression is boring, but if it means naked people on drugs, then it's titillating, easy to condemn -- and also comprehensible. Oh, I get it.
You don't get it. You don't get what it's like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars -- and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire. You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don't get it. None of us do, because it's not about any one thing in particular; "it" can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. "It" is chiefly a space in which all these things are possible.
The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses descended from Sinai.
But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions, peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it's just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?
Follow Jay Michaelson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaymichaelson
http://www.realitysandwich.com/giving_astonishment_burning_man
One of my favorite experiences of Burning Man is sitting around talking about all the "controversy" of the event, and trying to answer the questions about the hypocrisy, meaning, and purpose of the week.
I'll be back next year and many more to come...
the " temporary autonomous zone of bullshit-free living " notion, one night, i didn't dress up. no one would talk to me. it wasn't until i put on a silly costume that i was finally accepted. it's not that it's bullshit free, rather, it's burner bullshit. still bullshit to me. i believed all the hype, but that wasn't what i found at all.
everyone was so drugged, that a conversation was impossible. everyone was wandering, looking for the party........ kind of like the nirvana "plateau" song. it wasn't until i realized that some great truth was not going to come to me, that these people are exactly same sheeple that i see in traffic everyday.... that i was able to see the truth.
i'm with the alamo guy. burning man is nothing but a bunch of neo-hippie-yuppies getting naked, doing drugs, and having lots of sex. calling it mystical, and happening outside of capitalism is exactly the kind of over-hyped, higher than thou, hypocritical non-sense that just pisses me off.
Tell me that you did something for the community that expresses your individualism and creativity. Tell me that you were part of a theme camp that did something amazing, or that the desert happily absorbed your blood as you built your art project or that you spent a majority of 2009 planning and preparing for this one week so that others could for just a brief moment, enjoy being a part of what you created...
What's that? You didn't do any of these things? You went to Burning Man just like you would go to Disney World? Expecting everything to be done for you and giving nothing back to the community? Poor bobse, it's not because you weren't wearing a costume that noone would talk to you, it's because you just... don't... get... It.
Please, prove me wrong. Tell me what you did to make BRC a better place.
i found the whole thing shallow. i'll also readily admit it's all about perception, but MY perception was that the whole thing was very shallow. i'd ask someone about their art, and the meaning would be this nothingness. a couple did a hand binding or hand fasting ceremony...... i asked them what it meant, and the at the same time.... the girl said it was a long term commitment, while the guy was saying it bonds them for 3 months. they looked at each other like, wtf? and i realized THEY didn't know what it meant!!!
i always have my ways of expressing myself. i give. i participate. i just don't like being told HOW to do that, and people like YOU, and your big headed condescention really irritate me. maybe i'm not kewl enough to be "in", but i thought that was the WHOLE POINT, that anyone can be accepted. apparently, not.
Not sure if anyone has said this yet (and I don't have time to read all the replies), but I think BM is a lot like that Hindu parable about the blind men and the elephant. One guy touches the torso and thinks it's a wall. One touches the trunk and thinks it's a hose. Etc. Please don't judge the whole event based on your narrow experience.
Few of the people I met were totally fried on drugs. In fact, many of them remarked on how unnecessary they were given all of the amazing art and human interaction.
One request: please be careful with phrases like "nothing but." One of my favorite things about BM is the complete impossibility of pigeon-holing the experience. In fact, I'm not convinced you even begin to grok the experience. For one thing it's a gifting economy, not barter - huge difference there.
Enough for now, time to start preparing for next year's trip to BRC.
went out in 2005 and i have never in my life been in the presence of such a magnitude of human creativity for the sake of itself and community. People from all over the world (with admittedly too many white people from California for my taste due to the proximity and cultural basis) sharing culture including sculpture, music, knowledge and faith with the result of enriching and inspiring the human spirit - as i belive 9/10 responses from attendees have illustrated.
Like many here have said burning man is many things to many people...inspiring, enriching or even potentially life threatening (for those that underestimate the harsh environment).
For anyone who is brave (and admittedly finanically secure and flexible) enough to venture out of their day to day life...If you wander around you will find something that you didn't realize you were looking for.
Is burning man perfect?
- clearly i have listed a couple points that are not ideal for me...but a utopia on earth shared by 50,000 people seems a bit unrealistic on it's face. For me the scale and beauty of human expression was humbling, joyful and magnificent. This scale and depth is unique to Burning Man.
I am a theatre professor who wrote a university grant to take 2 students and myself to Burning Man this year. Our university is in very conservative, rural South Carolina (I know...). I think our experiences there allowed the students a view of what art can be, how community can function, and some great new friendships--exactly what I hoped for and more....
By Susan Barron - Working for the Man: The building, burning and disappearance of Black Rock City 2000
This one is all about the year-long process of getting the event together and putting it on. It's eye-opening, raw, and about 65 minutes long.
http://www.amazon.com/Working-Man-building-burning-disappearance/dp/B001PRZXKE/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=digital-video&qid=1252980506&sr=8-4
By Brian Doherty - This is Burning Man
This is Brian's book all about the history of the Burning Man event.
http://www.amazon.com/This-Burning-Man-American-Underground/dp/1932100865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252980647&sr=8-1
This temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most Liberals, terrifying. The truth, though, is that NASCAR is an ideal place for self-reflection and self-transformation. But of course, if you haven't been to it then you'll never really know, so you can't judge...
http://www.spatial-ed.com/index.php/projects/monitoring-at-burning-man.html
http://www.spatial-ed.com/images/documents/final_bm08_report.pdf
Interesting stuff and certainly worth checking out if you intend to attend the burn.