…so I actually wrote at the end of my last entry that I was finally tired, that it was incomplete but I was going to finish the rest of that entry next time I sat down, but I just reread it and it totally doesn’t say that, it just stops in the middle of the narrative. I don’t know what happened to the rest of that text. Did I accidentally delete it? Did I only imagine typing it? Very strange, what happens to the brain at 2 in the morning. I was pretty sure I had said that.
Well, anyway, here I am back to finish it! I had lots of espresso yesterday and a too-rich dinner last night, which I think is why I woke at 4:30 in a mild bout of gastronomic discomfort. That has passed, but so has sleep. So I am here with my blog. This is a continuation of my previous entry.
So the tower was there after the smoke had cleared. I was there at the front, nervous, excited. Minutes passed.
Then the ground at the base of the tower was glowing red & yellow, simmering, heaving
with flame that I couldn’t see distinctly. I imagined rumbling. The tower itself was untouched by flame, but it seemed a bit like a rocket near takeoff.
There followed an artfully constructed fireworks show from the base of the tower, which did well for building suspense but seemed to go on rather too long (I found out from other friends later that there was music playing during this on the populated side of the exhibit; that probably would have made the timing of the fireworks more sensical. Still, though, I’m a fan of the expectant hush that was on my side. We were tense. Waiting.)
The fireworks died down and there was nothing again. A minute crawled by. Another minute. I was breathless; I could not speak. The sense of something enormous about to happen was overwhelming.
And
then
it
BLEW.
The explosion filled my entire field of vision. There was a bright mushroom cloud at the base of it and a second one on top. Mez took a picture of this as it was beginning that doesn’t do it justice. Maybe this one gives a little better of an idea. The heat created by it was so intense that I could not remain sitting upright; I dropped back to my back and looked up at the sky that was suddenly, violently, totally consumed in flame. In that moment, the incessant voice of critical analysis that had been chattering in my brain for all of Burning Man was incinerated. Just blasted out of my head. I felt vulnerable and adrift and like I had been punched in the stomach and the head at the same time. My gut was reeling.
I sat up when the explosion was finished (must have been a few seconds, but it seemed like minutes) and saw four great jets of flame, the height of the derrick, just blasting away, surrounding but not yet consuming the thing. The wood, astonishingly, still seemed intact, untouched, despite being bathed in intense flame. It was like all this fire was happening so suddenly that the wood didn’t have time to warm up or catch on. And as I looked at this shocking fire, this raw, too-fast burn that hadn’t even gotten to the wood yet, I was suddenly enraged. With my critical voice knocked out of me, all that was left was the experience of this massive fire, this incomprehensible, overwhelming power that felt like it was burning inside me somehow. And I was full of anger and bitterness and overwhelmed with helplessness about our relationship, as a culture, to oil. I watched the silhouettes of these twisted, frenzied worshipers seem to dance to this unnatural fire. They were unable to turn away, unable to do anything about the power of the destructive force of this material but glory in it, be swept up in its power as I was myself at that very moment, be entranced by its poison. I was furious and there were tears in my eyes and I was in agony. And after minutes of this vertical inferno, the wood of the tower finally caught–I think I saw the bottom sections burning first and then finally the top, though the details are hazy now. And eventually the jet flames died and it was just the tower burning. We were far enough away that we couldn’t see individual flames; there was just the tower outlined in glowing red-orange-yellow-white, burning light into my retinas, burning futility and anger into my being. Giant showers of sparks and massive chunks of 2×4s detached themselves from the structure to rain directly onto the oblivious, upturned faces and arms of the worshipers. It was awful. It was the most visceral and least intellectual understanding I have ever had of what this fuel does to us, what it makes us do; an emotional understanding of lives lost over this, like a crazed sacrificial dance, the blood we spill for oil and the damage we do and the passion, the romance, the glory that we do it with. It was me burning in there, and I was so clearly one of those twisted figures, dancing to this dark, evil dance, unable to turn away, sobbing uselessly as I trod innocent still-living bodies into pieces, into the earth. Like the figures had been doing all week, I was burning on the inside. It was like being swept painfully, brutally away in a crashing tidal wave of fire. It was…it is impossible to describe what it was like. I reread what I’ve written and the enormity of it escapes me. I was both scarred and purified in that flame. I was both implicated and redeemed. Not forgiven, but cauterized. Changed. It is the most viscerally powerful experience of art I have ever had or expect to have.
We watched the thing burn until finally the whole structure leaned, toppled and crashed. I did not return the next day to visit the now-lonesome figures.
here’s one of the burning figures; here’s another. And another from above.
Thanks, Mez, for the photos. Check out his other pictures of burning man in that group, if you have time!
xoxo
We are all damned
-Alissa