I went to Burningman one time only, way back in the summer of 2005. Instagram would not come into existence for another five years, so this was still before it was completely overrun by Coachella Instagram douchebags and the likes of Paris Hilton. This is the main reason that I haven’t gone back, because my time there was personally transformational. It’s only gotten bigger since then, but Burningman has always been so big that you can really have whatever experience that you want there. I didn’t have any weird costumes, nor did I take up a “Playa Name”. I went with the younger brother of my girlfriend at the time, and we didn’t stay in elaborate Geodesic dome camps – we stayed in individual two man tents. I showered by hanging a five gallon water bottle up over my head, and did it in front of God and everyone. It only took one or two days before I blended into this new reality and just didn’t give a shit. I did Psilocybin way out in the center of the dry lake bed and stared at the mountains and really understood how ancient the Earth is. I climbed up on some metallic art installation far away and sat in it. A girl came out of nowhere and sat next to me. The wind made the sculpture make sounds. She spontaneous sung a line from Pink Floyd – “Welcome my son…
Welcooome to the machiiiiiine”. We sat together in silence and in the warm wind for a while. I felt in love. I felt so connected to her. I felt in love with all women and their femininity. Then, she gently got off and disappeared. I stayed for a while and had a vision of Christ in the desert, but that’s another story.
I took very few photos, because believe it or not, at that time, you were asked not to, and that request was widely respected. No phones, and no contact with that outside world – which became even more surreal when we were leaving at the end, and heard on the radio that one our biggest cities (New Orleans) had been basically wiped off of the map by a massive hurricane. It’s hard to describe how otherworldly that felt.
Anyway, I wrote something about my experience a few weeks afterward, and I only recently found this while consolidating some old hard drives.
This was what I wrote about my Burningman experience:
In August of 2005, an endless train of vehicles wound like a snake through a scorched two-lane blacktop into what looked like a post-apocalyptic city from a Mad Max movie, complete with an ominous, raging dust storm that forced the greeters at the gates to dress like futuristic Bedouins, complete with goggles and masks, in an effort to protect themselves from the fury of the bitter, alkaline dust, as the pilgrims entered the gates of what is now known as Burningman (BM); an annual week-long event held on a prehistoric dry lake bed playa in the northern Nevada desert.
It all began in the summer of 1986, when a landscaper named Larry Harvey decided to construct a life-sized human effigy out of wood scraps, and take it to San Francisco’s Baker Beach along with a few friends to have a summer solstice party. At the end of the night he was inspired to set the wooden man ablaze to close their celebration with a bang. They were all strangely moved and mesmerized by the experience, and they decided to do it again the following year. Four years later, the effigy had grown to forty feet, and he crowd had grown to eight hundred people.
This year, on a new moon nearest the summer solstice, the man burned under a crisp, desert night before a crowd of 36,500 artists, spiritual seekers, hippies, white collar professionals, neo-tribalists, punks, psychonauts, ravers, and other adventures and pilgrims from around the globe who had come to build, live in, and then destroy a city that would temporarily be the 6th largest in the state of Nevada, and then leave absolutely no trace of its’ existence behind when they left. This is the growing phenomenon called, BM, and its’ founders and participants believe and desire it to become a force for cultural, political, and creative change in the world. The way it is growing geometrically every year like embryonic cells in the womb, this Cultural Revolution just may come to pass.
Grey-bearded hippies sit naked in center camp as the occasional child runs by the Balinese monkey chat circle, which is composed of software engineers, burnouts, college students, and working Joe’s of every ethnicity and from dozens of countries all over the globe. Any trace of identity from the outside, alternate world is left behind. Traditional, contemporary clothing is highly discouraged. If a burner is just plain naked, they might be wearing knee-high leather boots, black and white striped tights with garters, and an orange bra with pixie wings fluttering around on the shoulder blades. Actually, that might tend to be a bit conservative and unimaginative around here. “Playa names” are often used instead of one’s legal name in the outside world. A journal from a first-time “burner” reads, “Today I made friends with a girl named, Mermaid, who was camping with her guy friend, Prometheus. My name is Paddy, and I’m thinking maybe I should go by, “Mr. T” instead?”
BM is based on several key principle ideas: self-reliance (every burner must bring all of their own food, water, shelter, and other survival needs), participation (being a mere spectator is highly discouraged), radical self-expression, and in the concept of leaving virtually no trace behind (There are no garbage receptacles at BM. All burners must store and remove their own waste.). At BM, nothing is sold but ice and coffee, and the proceeds of those go directly to the local town of Gerlach to help support their school system. Selling anything at BM leaves a burner subject to expulsion from the event. Even bartering is discouraged. It is a sharing and communal economy and culture. Paddy the first time burners journal wrote of, “getting stopped by this cool Israeli guy in a sarong who made me try these Indian sweets, as he called them. They were these multi-colored balls of dough about the size of a golf ball. I’m lucky they weren’t laced. I was just walking by his camp and he came out with this platter of these things and made me try one. Then he spray painted my T-shirt with a Burning man stencil. We’ve never met before, and we knew we probably wouldn’t again, but we were friends here, and we would share whatever we had to offer. That’s just the way it is here.” One example of radical self-expression is summed up in another burner’s journal entry, “Saw a purple-haired girl today standing up on a platform. She was spreading her ass cheeks out to the crowd and proclaiming to the world that her asshole was beautiful while demanding passers by to stop and admire it. I kept walking. She mocked me while looking upside down from between her legs as I picked up the pace a little.”
Living on the playa for a week is not exactly comfortable and easy. Burners are subject to the furnace-like sun in the day, and to bone-chilling winds at night. Blinding, choking, whiteout dust storms commonly roll in at speeds up to 60mph, and flash floods have been known to strike with little warning. There are no government inspections of the many art structures and mutant vehicles that burners climb and ride on, and it is expected that at least one burner winds up dying every year. Burners agree when they enter that by taking part in BM, they may be subject to injury or death, and yet BM not only continues, but also is rapidly growing every year without the aid of any marketing or advertising whatsoever. More and more people have the unexplainable need to come her every year. Many see BM as an opportunity for heavy partying and desert debauchery, but many more see it as a week where one can sacrifice who they are in the everyday world and become resurrected into a new self like a butterfly born free from its cocoon of the modern world.
BM is a social movement. It is a way for disconnected, modern people to come together as a tribe and a community in a consumer-based, alienating world without being restricted by the tick-tock regulation of outside life. Every burner is part of a tribe without the restrictions of race, geography, and social mores. It is a sense of total community, self-expression, and acceptance. As one burner’s journal reads, “My buddy and I were wandering in the darkness of the playa with the neon lights and sounds of the city in the distant horizon. Balls of fire and glowing Dr. Seuss-like cars seemed to explode and move to the mixed sounds of Indonesian gamelan, drum circles from all directions, and thumping techno house music. It’s all hard to assimilate. A large submarine that used to be a bus drove by us a sounded off a submarine ping like it was underwater. It seemed to glow in the dark, and mist seeped out of any opening. Loud music was pounding inside. We decided to chase it down and commandeer it. We jumped in the side door and into a thick pounding fog of mist and pulsating lights. It was hot and full of humans. Total disorientation. We looked out one of the few windows and saw a strange vehicle pull up next to us and belch a ball of fire at us through a flamethrower of some kind and drive away. This was the first night, and it would only intensify as the week went on. For many, BM is far too overwhelming and just too much to attempt to describe and label. It is definitely something that must be experienced to begin to understand what it is.
“The man burned last night.” the first-timers journal continued. “It was one of the most primal experiences that I’ve ever had. Joints were passed around and shared as we huddled in the darkness before a gigantic procession of hundreds of fire-spinners who performed an opening ceremony before the big event, the burning of the man. It felt like we were all one tribe together. The man was set ablaze with enormous explosions of multi-colored fireworks. When the man burns, something happens collectively. There’s always a sense of community here, but at this moment, something primal and unexplainable takes over. The group becomes what they seem to feel that they are missing in the outside world. They seem to become one. It feels like a collective initiation into a community. The people rush to the center when the man falls in flames and begin circling it as naturally as geese fly south in the winter. As Paddy’s journal reads, “He burned like an ancient sacrifice against the black sky. At the final moment, I started yelling. I don’t know where it came from. It just came out of me as the man tumbled to the ground in flames, and thousands of people rushed toward it to surround it and circle it like the Ka’ba in Mecca. The energy was hypnotically palpable in the air. It all just happened naturally. It was dreamlike. People were dancing naked and drumming around it until it was just a smoldering pile of ashes. I was entranced. I never felt so authentically human and whole.”
As Paddy the virgin burner’s journal reads, “BM is sort of like a sensory, creative, and psychic overload that works like an eraser on the blackboard of your ego. You’re naked. You have a different name. You don’t have any contact with the outside world; you probably don’t even look into a mirror for a week. You’re not restricted by any social norms. You’re probably at least at one point on some sort of mind-expanding substance, and you’re surrounded by almost 40,000 others all experiencing this liberating, Alice in Wonderland world in the desert. It can’t be rated or analyzed too much. It is a pure experience only. It is what it is. BM is about being an actual human being for a week.”
BM continues to grow on a grassroots level. Some expect that it may eventually attract over 2 million burners. BM may remain a semi-underground annual event for yuppies and others to shed their identity and let their hair down for one cathartic week every summer, or it just may actually become the catalyst of a new cultural, political, and creative zeitgeist at a time when our society seems to be almost crying out for such an answer and transformation. As they say on the playa, “Have a good burn!”
Me at Burningman 2005 – “Psyche”