For we are Atlantis, and the town of Prester John
As I've just arrived back from Burning Man it seems like a suitable time to post my write up from last year again while I finish this years' photos and mini-lecture. Please note that as it was written for the church blog it contains extremely overwrought prose and some Christian Talk.
For the curious amongst you the title of this piece is taken from We Are Shangri-La on Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest because that book is the closest thing I've found which touches the feeling of living in and longing for Black Rock City. The poem the track is based on was originally written about BRC so it's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking that.
“We raise and raze our city like the strangest house of cards, a ghost-breath mist of snow;
A ghost-breath mist of snow where no snow falls,
For we are Atlantis, and the town of Prester John.
Three weeks apart from never, we dance and do not fall.”
- We Are Shangri-La, S. J. Tucker
This year instead of going camping in Cheltenham for a weekend I went camping in Black Rock Desert (Nevada) for a week. When I first broached this with Ian he encouraged me to write a post about the experience which left me a little taken aback because, well, you may have heard of Burning Man. In hindsight the hipsterish “but it’s too cool for you” response was a bit over the top even for me. If I have one flaw I suppose it could be arrogance and having been unchurched for so long, and isolated spiritually even when I was churched, I am still getting used to the idea that I can other Christians can express and understand their spirituality along the same lines. Even though that’s why I came here in the first place, even though that’s why I stayed. I compared the Ten Principles of Burning Man to the Five Spiritual Practices of Moot and really, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Then there’s the problem that, well, you may have heard of Burning Man. At it’s current size of 50,000 people it’s impossible to suggest that it means any one thing to all its inhabitants. It’s a temporary autonomous zone, an exercise in radical community building, a party, a challenge, a group, a holiday, a way of life, a celebration of art and humanity, a place for hedonism, a place for spirituality, a place for grief and love and letting go. I’ve wanted to go ever since I was 12 years old and I discovered it online. I have spent half my life, more or less, waiting for my turn. I was (and still am) fascinated by the idea of a city that exists in time as much as in space, all that effort and art for a brief week and a pyre. It is what you bring.
Make a Wish
This is how it works: you bring at a bare minimum shelter, shade, food, water, sunscreen, a first aid kit, things which glow, clothes for the day where temperatures reach 40 degrees and clothes for the night when they dip to 10. There is no commerce or barter, it is an exercise in radical self-reliance and decommodification amongst other things. There is no mobile phone signal and only intermittent wifi from the few theme camps generous enough to provide satellite connections. You take care of yourself and the people around you. The environment is harsh, the dust (which gets everywhere and you’ll soon learn about playa black) is very alkaline so you have to wear shoes or risk chemical burns, the heat is intense and the elevation high so you must start the day with sunscreen and top up frequently or risk sudden and painful burns, you drink all the time or risk dehydration and a trip in the helicopter, there are dust storms, one year famously it rained for days. You have to eat properly, drink constantly and take care of your body. You lose most of the first day adjusting. My priorities changed completely, how fast I could walk, what I needed to carry with me, dust under my finger nails until I clipped them all right down and even then.
And why, you may well ask, why would I chose to go to a place which is hot and full of people with an emphasis on social interactions?
Black Rock City is literally what you make of it. All of the art, the theme camps, the talks, the shows, the newspapers, the bars, the clubs are provided by the participants. It’s a different world. At night everything glows neon but I could still look up and see the vault of heaven, stars so bright that I could pick Orion out like a textbook, close enough to touch. Yoga in center camp and sunrise meditation meets clubs still running until 6, 7, 8 in the morning when they have to turn the subwoofers off. Gifting. Gifting is also cooking breakfast, helping to build a shower, saying hello, stopping to help someone injured, doing the washing up, offering a drink, offering what you have. Whatever you have. It is a lovely fragile place to live where within my particular limits (because knowing yourself and enforcing your boundries is also radical self-reliance) I can talk to strangers, bond with people I’ve barely met or known for years but never really spoken to. Where I want to help, to volunteer, to be a part of the community as a whole. For a while.
This is not to say that it’s perfect or sustainable, bikes and other items were stolen, people were rude, towards the weekend I had to fend off obvious and pushy men if I wanted to dance and the group weren’t around or my partner Mathias had gone to talk to someone, the heat and stress leads to short tempers. Things are simple because we have chosen to take ourselves out of the world for a time but they can’t stay that way forever. In the real world you have off days. Sometimes you just don’t want to connect. Then there is the overwhelming irony of the amount of money that we needed to spend in order to get there in the first place, “leave no trace” along side transatlantic flights. What Burning Man does well is that it gives you a chance to explore ways of connecting with people, to learn how you can judge yourself by bench marks other than money, it shows you the value of small gestures, it gives you a chance to learn about your strengths and weaknesses.
Of the many things which used to irritate me when I heard it from burners the one which stuck out the most was “you have to be there to understand”. They’re not wrong. There’s a reason that one of the Ten Principles is “immediacy”, why they encourage participants not to spend all their time taking photos or video. To frame a shot you need to step back, step outside, step away from what’s happening and reduce it to shape and colour and light. It takes you out of the picture. I can tell you about the Temple of Transition, the place I took more photos than any other because it made the biggest impact of any single piece, but I can’t put you there. I can tell you about the sun so hot it presses down like a second gravity, pens on the ledges, messages on every wall and spilling on to the floor, the bells peeling, the photos, flowers, tributes, the sound of a couple nailing up a childs bed sheet. All those sacrifices of time and care for the beloved dead. One of my campmates wrote something for her grandmother, brought her old ring to wear while she watched it burn. You have to be there.
Forgiveness is Freedom
How can I give you prayer flags, dust devils, a complete stranger turning round to offer sunscreen because she heard me say that I’d forgotten mine, ice at noon, long meandering conversations at camp about whatever we were passionate about, promises, dressing up, dancing for hours, the raw open space of the playa, sunrise from the Man, a heart clean and undivided in every moment, watching bikes flood to the CORE burn twinkling like stars, hello and who are you and I love your mask and free coffee first thing in the morning. What do you need?
Welcome home.
During the Introduction to Kabbalah class at Sukkat Shalom (people wandering in and out, I could have hoped for more respect for knowledge but there you go) the teacher pointed out that many biblical prophets went into the desert for visions. What I got was clarity.
We stayed to watch the Man burn, inside the ring of art cars with a fire conclave veteran we’d just met from the dances to the fireworks to the mushroom cloud; an effect done with Methanol Mathias would tell me as he pointed out the wires holding the plinth and the Man, arms raised high and fire dancing around his legs so it looked like he was walking. Waiting for the moment after they go slack and it will all come tumbling down. On Thursday we had a camp meeting where we were reminded to take extra care, that the people coming in now wouldn’t necessarily adhere to the Ten Principles, that this was a city and there are predators. Lock your bike. Watch your drink. That night we passed around whatever we had within the group we’d just met, strawberry wine, bourbon, vodka, candy. What do we have that we can share? We said goodbye to the camp knowing that we’d be leaving in just a few hours, goodbye and take care and we’re so happy that we met you and next year. We’ll see you next year.
Black Rock City is the dream of a city. We value gifting because we are not generous, decommodification because we live and breathe in capitalism, community because we are isolated, civic responsibility because we don’t take any. It is defined by our lack and at the end of the night you wake up.
I came home a little more thoughtful, a little more connected, my journal full of emails and profiles for everyone I shared anything with. It may not last but there’s always next year.
We say next year, next year, next year at Burning Man like a prayer.
For the curious amongst you the title of this piece is taken from We Are Shangri-La on Quartered: Songs of Palimpsest because that book is the closest thing I've found which touches the feeling of living in and longing for Black Rock City. The poem the track is based on was originally written about BRC so it's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking that.
“We raise and raze our city like the strangest house of cards, a ghost-breath mist of snow;
A ghost-breath mist of snow where no snow falls,
For we are Atlantis, and the town of Prester John.
Three weeks apart from never, we dance and do not fall.”
- We Are Shangri-La, S. J. Tucker
This year instead of going camping in Cheltenham for a weekend I went camping in Black Rock Desert (Nevada) for a week. When I first broached this with Ian he encouraged me to write a post about the experience which left me a little taken aback because, well, you may have heard of Burning Man. In hindsight the hipsterish “but it’s too cool for you” response was a bit over the top even for me. If I have one flaw I suppose it could be arrogance and having been unchurched for so long, and isolated spiritually even when I was churched, I am still getting used to the idea that I can other Christians can express and understand their spirituality along the same lines. Even though that’s why I came here in the first place, even though that’s why I stayed. I compared the Ten Principles of Burning Man to the Five Spiritual Practices of Moot and really, I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.
Then there’s the problem that, well, you may have heard of Burning Man. At it’s current size of 50,000 people it’s impossible to suggest that it means any one thing to all its inhabitants. It’s a temporary autonomous zone, an exercise in radical community building, a party, a challenge, a group, a holiday, a way of life, a celebration of art and humanity, a place for hedonism, a place for spirituality, a place for grief and love and letting go. I’ve wanted to go ever since I was 12 years old and I discovered it online. I have spent half my life, more or less, waiting for my turn. I was (and still am) fascinated by the idea of a city that exists in time as much as in space, all that effort and art for a brief week and a pyre. It is what you bring.
Make a Wish
This is how it works: you bring at a bare minimum shelter, shade, food, water, sunscreen, a first aid kit, things which glow, clothes for the day where temperatures reach 40 degrees and clothes for the night when they dip to 10. There is no commerce or barter, it is an exercise in radical self-reliance and decommodification amongst other things. There is no mobile phone signal and only intermittent wifi from the few theme camps generous enough to provide satellite connections. You take care of yourself and the people around you. The environment is harsh, the dust (which gets everywhere and you’ll soon learn about playa black) is very alkaline so you have to wear shoes or risk chemical burns, the heat is intense and the elevation high so you must start the day with sunscreen and top up frequently or risk sudden and painful burns, you drink all the time or risk dehydration and a trip in the helicopter, there are dust storms, one year famously it rained for days. You have to eat properly, drink constantly and take care of your body. You lose most of the first day adjusting. My priorities changed completely, how fast I could walk, what I needed to carry with me, dust under my finger nails until I clipped them all right down and even then.
And why, you may well ask, why would I chose to go to a place which is hot and full of people with an emphasis on social interactions?
Black Rock City is literally what you make of it. All of the art, the theme camps, the talks, the shows, the newspapers, the bars, the clubs are provided by the participants. It’s a different world. At night everything glows neon but I could still look up and see the vault of heaven, stars so bright that I could pick Orion out like a textbook, close enough to touch. Yoga in center camp and sunrise meditation meets clubs still running until 6, 7, 8 in the morning when they have to turn the subwoofers off. Gifting. Gifting is also cooking breakfast, helping to build a shower, saying hello, stopping to help someone injured, doing the washing up, offering a drink, offering what you have. Whatever you have. It is a lovely fragile place to live where within my particular limits (because knowing yourself and enforcing your boundries is also radical self-reliance) I can talk to strangers, bond with people I’ve barely met or known for years but never really spoken to. Where I want to help, to volunteer, to be a part of the community as a whole. For a while.
This is not to say that it’s perfect or sustainable, bikes and other items were stolen, people were rude, towards the weekend I had to fend off obvious and pushy men if I wanted to dance and the group weren’t around or my partner Mathias had gone to talk to someone, the heat and stress leads to short tempers. Things are simple because we have chosen to take ourselves out of the world for a time but they can’t stay that way forever. In the real world you have off days. Sometimes you just don’t want to connect. Then there is the overwhelming irony of the amount of money that we needed to spend in order to get there in the first place, “leave no trace” along side transatlantic flights. What Burning Man does well is that it gives you a chance to explore ways of connecting with people, to learn how you can judge yourself by bench marks other than money, it shows you the value of small gestures, it gives you a chance to learn about your strengths and weaknesses.
Of the many things which used to irritate me when I heard it from burners the one which stuck out the most was “you have to be there to understand”. They’re not wrong. There’s a reason that one of the Ten Principles is “immediacy”, why they encourage participants not to spend all their time taking photos or video. To frame a shot you need to step back, step outside, step away from what’s happening and reduce it to shape and colour and light. It takes you out of the picture. I can tell you about the Temple of Transition, the place I took more photos than any other because it made the biggest impact of any single piece, but I can’t put you there. I can tell you about the sun so hot it presses down like a second gravity, pens on the ledges, messages on every wall and spilling on to the floor, the bells peeling, the photos, flowers, tributes, the sound of a couple nailing up a childs bed sheet. All those sacrifices of time and care for the beloved dead. One of my campmates wrote something for her grandmother, brought her old ring to wear while she watched it burn. You have to be there.
Forgiveness is Freedom
How can I give you prayer flags, dust devils, a complete stranger turning round to offer sunscreen because she heard me say that I’d forgotten mine, ice at noon, long meandering conversations at camp about whatever we were passionate about, promises, dressing up, dancing for hours, the raw open space of the playa, sunrise from the Man, a heart clean and undivided in every moment, watching bikes flood to the CORE burn twinkling like stars, hello and who are you and I love your mask and free coffee first thing in the morning. What do you need?
Welcome home.
During the Introduction to Kabbalah class at Sukkat Shalom (people wandering in and out, I could have hoped for more respect for knowledge but there you go) the teacher pointed out that many biblical prophets went into the desert for visions. What I got was clarity.
We stayed to watch the Man burn, inside the ring of art cars with a fire conclave veteran we’d just met from the dances to the fireworks to the mushroom cloud; an effect done with Methanol Mathias would tell me as he pointed out the wires holding the plinth and the Man, arms raised high and fire dancing around his legs so it looked like he was walking. Waiting for the moment after they go slack and it will all come tumbling down. On Thursday we had a camp meeting where we were reminded to take extra care, that the people coming in now wouldn’t necessarily adhere to the Ten Principles, that this was a city and there are predators. Lock your bike. Watch your drink. That night we passed around whatever we had within the group we’d just met, strawberry wine, bourbon, vodka, candy. What do we have that we can share? We said goodbye to the camp knowing that we’d be leaving in just a few hours, goodbye and take care and we’re so happy that we met you and next year. We’ll see you next year.
Black Rock City is the dream of a city. We value gifting because we are not generous, decommodification because we live and breathe in capitalism, community because we are isolated, civic responsibility because we don’t take any. It is defined by our lack and at the end of the night you wake up.
I came home a little more thoughtful, a little more connected, my journal full of emails and profiles for everyone I shared anything with. It may not last but there’s always next year.
We say next year, next year, next year at Burning Man like a prayer.