number 20 - September 8, 1999

September 8, 1999

Fearful symmetry.

I went, I saw, I did, I returned. Feeling better, re-energized and full of hope for the future. I'm tired now, and my left ankle and right knee ache from making the daily multiple trips across the hard open playa. But as David Letterman would say, "It's a good kinda tired."

I went yesterday morning and had my nighttime pictures developed. It was only four rolls, but it was an experiment and on the whole I'd have to say it failed. I got a few good shots, but only a small amount out of the number of frames that were

taken. I used 1600-speed film, and I hoped that I'd get some great images without having to use a flash, which would be of little use for shots with any depth in that environment. I got better results than I did last year, but still not the clarity that I'd hoped. It's kind of appropriate for the experience as a whole, though. It's one of those things that you can't really capture on film. Like taking Polaroids of the Grand Canyon, the resulting images are merely inadequate shadows of the thing itself, and can never convey the emotion you feel when trying to describe them.

The way it's usually worked with my group is that we wake up, stretch, check in with each other and separate for daily rounds about the city; seeking out people we met the night before or have yet to make contact with but know are present this time around, or just to take in some of what we haven't yet seen. Late in the day we might gather for coffee or tea at the cafe in Center Camp, take a nap, or wander off for solitary reflection.

As the Sun ducks behind the mountains of Black Rock to the west, personal energy levels rise as quickly as the temperature drops. That's when we gather for cocktails and mull over the night's plans. We typically start out together as a group, but within an hour we splinter. This is mostly due to sensory overload; there's just too much to take in, and it's hopeless to assume that any group of more than two would be drawn to the same stimulus.

I enjoy being with my friends who I only see once a year and have now become my Burning Man "family."

Like any large extended family, we gather with varying needs, expectations, and goals for the time we spend on the playa and with each other. As the years pass, there are some who become lost to us yet we continue to think about, and there are still others who are close to us although distant due to the larger or different focus their personal journey is taking them. Somehow, though, it all comes together. I talked with Doug, who I met in '97 and who has now been attending Burning Man for 6 years, about how we both feel the same anxiousness as the time to make the trip to Black Rock City approaches, and how arrival feels spiritual...even reverent.

Compare it to finally making it "home" with confessions to be made and a new resolve to be set. To be a better person, to have greater faith in others, to have renewed faith in self; all of these things are humbling to confront yet necessary to our individual health and well being.

Like many others, I grow weary of so-called New Age claptrap, or the glossing over of the event by others who ask tongue-in-cheek if I was "enlightened." If you've never been there, it doesn't make sense to make a joke out of it. This happens to me all the time and it pisses me off to no end. It's a big, big thing, and I constantly evangelize the event particularly to those I encounter who seem so weary of their life, and have the attitude that "nothing matters." Yeah, there are things that "matter," and you have to seek those things out, let them penetrate you and change you if posible. I don't know anyone, including myself, that has no need of an attitude adjustment. Once a year may not be enough, but hey, I'll take what I can get.

The pictures that I'm showing here are a small representation of what we saw over the weekend - I still have 14 rolls of daytime shots on the way. The scale is so much larger than you can imagine. Like a dream, I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around it even now and I was there a only a matter of hours ago. People ask me, "What was the strangest thing you saw?," or "What did you do?," or even "What was it like?" I never know what to say. I may change my mind as time revises my memory, but right now I have to say that my Perfect Moment happened late Saturday night after the burn.

I'd been separated from the group for hours and came back to camp around 3:30am to see if anyone had wandered back. The others were either asleep or still out and the Petting Zoo was quiet, so I set up one of the camp chairs in front of my tent, popped open a MGD (that's right, Crossbow, a MGD), lit a Camel Light and had myself a think.

I sat there and let the elements wash over me like water...the spectacle of the burn a few hours earlier, the soreness in my lower extremeties from a week of power walking, the events that had transpired over the year since I was last in that place, the faint illumination from the glowsticks around my neck and inside my water bottle, the dissapating effects of the magic mushrooms I'd ingested as the night began,

the cold wind whipping around my face, the THUMP-THUMP-THUMP of the rave camps nearby, the 180 degrees of vision showing expolsions... strobes... lasers... so many shooting stars, knowing that only a few people in the world would ever see anything like what I was seeing right then. Feeling very lucky.

The key to it all was seeing Orion in the night sky for the first time this year, massive, dwarfing everything else that was happening beneath his eternal hunting expedition, centered above the spot where the last Man of the 20th Centruy had been burned to cinders. I sat alone and wept with a smile on my face, knowing that there are things much bigger, much more mysterious and older and wonderful than I could ever understand.

And so we return,
and begin again.

#20