…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
Trying to get on an earlier sleep schedule just means a day of punishment, I think. I thought if I went to bed at 12:30 I’d be able to wake up at 8:30 without too much fuss. But I know myself better…when used to crashing at 2am, my brain simply will not quit at midnight. Well, I tried. I’m just going to have to be sleepy in the morning.
I’ve been meaning to post anyway for ages. I wanted to write about Burning Man, which was so built up for me over the course of the last ten years that the reality could be nothing but deflating, despite the fact that I got to go flying around in a little plane and saw one of my favorite pieces of art ever there and stayed up past dawn on consecutive nights and roamed around in the desert–my car is still coated with playa-dust on the inside. Black Rock City is a lovely place, if a little obsessed with itself.
The thought of describing the art that I liked is daunting. I’m going to give it a shot, though. I’m afraid of boring myself with it, because it takes a lot of words to describe. Feel free to skip this entry if it bores you, too.
So one of the first things I saw, the first night I arrived, was a 100-foot wooden tower built to look like an oil derrick. You couldn’t miss it; it was well outside the main city horseshoe, but it was gigantic. Also at its base were huge metal worshipers…maybe 30 feet tall? industrial-style (gears and chains and so forth were the building materials) human beings in contorted postures of ecstatic worship. The sculptures had fire pulsing inside at various chakra points, and there were levers and buttons that onlookers could fiddle with to produce giant fireball-gouts of flame from out one fellow’s head and another woman’s gut. One woman’s chest pulsed with flame like an apocalyptic heartbeat.
If you join the line at the base of the tower, you are eventually allowed to climb it and survey the whole of Black Rock City from the top. This was a surreal event for me, as I had arrived in the desert mere hours ago, and to see the city from above was more or less to look down on a giant, hyper video arcade. At night, people and bicycles are decorated with glowing, flashing, and pulsing colored lights so that the art cars roaming the desert sans headlights don’t run them over. Most of the big art installations and all of the on-playa dance clubs also had considerable multicolored wattage pouring forth. The city itself is like a circle with one side rubbed out from 10:00 to 2:00, maybe two miles in diameter? and art is scattered throughout the city and far beyond it, so that you can travel a mile or two out into the open playa to visit more remote installations (this faux-derrick was only about a third out, compared to some of the farther-away installations.)
So anyway. From the top, you can look down on those frenzied worshipers and the much smaller flesh people milling among them, and see the panorama of the crazy city, and feel mild vertigo. Very nice. I climbed down and went on looking at other things in the city up close.
Now, like most wooden art in BRC, this derrick was slated to burn at the end of the week, the night before the Man burned. That day, though, there was an intense white-out dust storm (yet another apocolyptic experience that was maybe the best of all) that had delayed their preparations for that event, so the burn was delayed until after the Man burned on Saturday. I’m happy about that, because the Man would have been an awful anticlimax if I’d seen this first.
(Actually, the Man was already an anticlimax on its own. I wasn’t expecting much from it…and it didn’t let me down. Funny that the thing that started this whole crazy event is sort of an afterthought now. (and I think that would have been true even if he hadn’t been pre-burned this year.))
So after the Man burned on Saturday night, I and a few friends biked over to the derrick to see the show. The side facing the city was bound to be crowded, so we biked over to the far side of it. The Rangers had established a wide perimeter around the thing, and we were right at the edge of the cleared area. No one was behind us, and to either side were people widely spaced. I understand that being on the city side of this event was a vastly different and far more crowded experience.
Now, all day I had been hearing rumors about this event. They were using some ridiculous amount of rocket fuel to not just light it on fire, but to really explode it. The perimeter they had set up around the thing was so big I couldn’t see or hear the people opposite me on the circle, yet my friend (who has experience treating burn victims) didn’t trust even this generous distance and was even farther back from the edge than Mez & I, who were right up on it, talking to the Ranger who was on guard against folks suicidally rushing into the circle. From where we were, the figures of the metal worshipers were clearly visible, though less than hand-sized (a la “I’m skvishing your head”) and the tower was still of considerable size, field-of-vision-wise.
Nothing in Black Rock City starts on time. It was quiet where we were, and as the minutes flowed nonchalantly by with nothing happening, there was a growing sense of peaceful expectation. Half an hour or an hour passed from the time the thing was supposed to go. Finally, we saw a vehicle (a moped?) drive into the circle, and out the other side. Dim figures were visible moving quickly away from the structures in the center, out to the edge of the circle. Everybody stopped talking. And we waited.
I don’t really remember noticing the smoke start to rise, but it covered the base of the tower. Then it covered the bottom third of the tower, and the twisted worshipers disappeared into it. The cloud rose inexorably until it was covering the tower, and I realized it was getting bigger side to side too–then I realized it wasn’t necessarily getting bigger, it was just coming toward us. In a moment the stars were consumed in the creeping greyness and we were engulfed in a cloud of uncomfortably chemical-smelling smoke, and I thought nervously of my friend sitting 50 feet behind me, and wondered if I wasn’t making a stupid choice by trusting the perimeter set by strangers whose credentials I hadn’t bothered to familiarize myself with. What if they were incompetent? What if this smoke was flammable and they hadn’t counted on the wind? But I sat where I was, resigned to dying at Burning Man for my stupidity, being *pretty* sure I was going to survive but entertaining notions of how many people would die if the flames came out this far.
The smoke cleared in about a minute, and we saw the tower again, motionless, intact.