WEEK 15
There will never be enough hours to do all there is to do at Burning Man. You have to accept that and move beyond the fear-of-missing-out.
After my first couple of years, I’d read articles post-Burn on the 12 best art pieces, none of which I saw, or hear about so and so DJ’s epic sunrise set, which we missed because we were dancing at another venue. Or there was the year we couldn’t find the full 747 art car that taxied around the playa after dark with people dancing on the wings.
With 75,000 people contributing and more than 400 art projects and 1,200 theme camps it’s a lifetime of immersive adventure in a week. Which makes it all the more amazing that I had to really work hard this week at doing one entirely new thing I’d never done before on the playa.
On some level, everything feels new each year. But just as I think about skiing my favorite run from last season or returning to my favorite restaurant in Paris, when I get back to Burning Man there’s a lot of “let’s go dance again at Pink Mammoth this afternoon … “let’s do our annual morning bike tour while the sun is low and the air crisp” … “let’s go to Center Camp and read the BRC Weekly” … “let’s watch sunrise from Bubbles and Bass” … “let’s try to find that camp from last year with the pitch-black, air-conditioned meditation dome” (shockingly we did).
Burning Man is founded on 10 principles which are lovely to consider in all our days, no matter where we are and live. When I am there, the principles I feel most deeply are Participation, Radical Self-Expression and Immediacy. These guide my rhythm and movements, along with equal parts spontaneity and zany ideas.
Irena and I also live by a few of our own tenets: eat when we’re hungry and sleep when we’re tired. On that last point, if possible, sleep six hours in every 24—we are not prescriptive on how that goes down, but achieving 6 in 24 gives us the stamina to dance from midnight through sunrise on several occasions and bike all over the place to both admire and climb a lot of art and spend lazy mornings / afternoons in our camp or any camp with new friends or old friends and run across the street when someone declares it’s time for a pickleback.
Now for my two new things:
I went to a lecture. Some context: after an interminable wait to go through the Gate where your ticket is scanned and your car checked for stow-aways, you arrive at the Greeter station and are met by fabulously-clad Burners (all of these jobs are volunteer by the way) who offer hugs and hand you this year’s city map and What Where When guide, which a friend calls “a beautiful work of fiction.” This year’s guide is 190 tiny pages of events listed by day then hour that our fellow Burners aspire to pull off. But things never go as planned here. No one wears a watch, and the concept of time is completely fluid — and aside from sunrise and sunset which are unequivocal (right?), you have no idea what time it is.
Nevertheless, at 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, I headed to 3:00 and Echo to find the Academy of Arts and Sciences for my lecture on the geology of the Black Rock Desert. Here’s the page from What Where When so you can see the events competing for my attention at that hour:
Thoughts going through my head as I biked into a wind storm:
- The camp address will be wrong, and I’ll find a roller disco instead.
- I will be the only one there because no one reads What Where When.
- The lecture happened yesterday, just because.
Get this. I biked up to a crowd of about 200 Burners crammed together under a shade structure, standing room only, and the geologist had started early! It was Tutu Tuesday so we had a good complement of students in uniform, including the speaker, whose name I never learned, but delivered on “geologist” wearing dark blue toile around his waist, black shirt, thick-framed glasses and a mad scientist fop of playa-dust-crusted hair. Of course there was the token naked guy, too.
Now, 3:00 is a major radial street as far as BRC streets go, double-width and non-stop activity. As our geologist was trying to project over the crowd (he forgot until about 30 minutes in that he had a microphone, which I am sure took some ambitious campmate a very long time to wire up seeing that the playa eats electronics), a giant art car the size of a city bus but shaped like a red rooster came rolling by with its own carnival barker who got on his megaphone, interrupted the lecture and told all of us at the count of three to say cock-a-doodle-do, which of course we did to hoots and hollers. But we were there to learn (duh), and I did in fact get smarter going deep on cool things like fault lines and hot springs and the mostly basalt mountains surrounding us and massive geothermal activity under the lake bed which dried up 10,000 years ago and is now our playa.
I went to the ballet. If the words “ballet” and “Burning Man” in the same sentence leave you scratching your head, throw in “live orchestra” for more amazement. Remember, this is a place for dreaming big and creating audacious, ephemeral acts.
The performing arts collective Art Haus had chosen to perform Stravinsky’s Firebird in honor of the Metamorphoses theme. Two years ago, they performed Rite of Spring, which I desperately wanted to attend. But in classic playa fashion, just as the group finished its dress rehearsal, a massive dust storm obliterated all hope of another performance at the scheduled time, so sure enough, I biked up just as the dancers were taking their bows.
This year the sky was pristine, and Irena and I rode out to Wing Portal at sunset. I later learned that this spectacular sculpture had been built from recycled metal found in the ruins of the 2018 fires that burned in California, as a metaphor for transcendence and metamorphosis. You really couldn’t imagine a better backdrop for a story like Firebird.
We waited patiently in the dust for a very, very long time as the two art cars flanking the stage/art got their systems calibrated to amplify the orchestra.
And then the orchestra played their first notes, triggering thousands of LED lights on the sculpture, the dancers came on stage and we were mesmerized.
These are the experiences I cherish the most. You are exactly where you need to be in that moment, sharing with those lucky souls around you, the beauty and the majesty of a vision before you. It is a gift.
Wow. Pure wow and beautifully written imagery.