On the Adult Choice scale, I think today would rate maybe a B-.
I woke at my regular Tuesday time, to sit before heading off to my BNI group, my business marketing group. But, with this cold lingering and it raining outside, and it being 5:30 am, I decided to crawl back into bed, in the space-heater heated bedroom, and get a few hours more sleep before going to see clients.
My first session was with a couple I've been seeing for about 10 weeks, who have been struggling for a while, and today felt like they were back on their cliff edge. Couples are both a joy and a pain to work with, and such is this duo. Well, clients in general...well, like therapists often say, what a strange ass profession we've chosen. It was a very rough session, with the male half saying he was going to leave her, and that's how it ended.
Now, it's difficult not to get attached to your clients, especially your couples. Well, at least for me, and it feels like a chunk of my work to find a detached compassion. Because when the therapy seems to go south, it can be incredibly wrenching, calling up all sorts of feelings, usually negative, in varieties of "I'm terrible at this," "I made horrible mistakes," and "Other therapists are going to think I suck." And apparently these thoughts never really go away, you just get better at managing them. It's no work for dedicated control freaks. However, for CF's in recovery, it's a wonderful practice in letting go and acceptance.
My second client, I struggled to stay present with her as the recently departed couple's energy kept intruding. I asked their ghost traces to stay out in the lobby, and I'd be back for them after the session, but they kept coming in to complain or point fingers at me, or each other. But the session ended pretty well if not real elegantly, and my client seemed to get some benefit.
Then I had coffee with my mentee, a brave soul starting his practice from the ground up, just recently being out of grad school. It was a good, ranging talk
So, heading home, I debated what the most Adult thing, but felt more like curling inward. Heather helped me recenter a bit, and did some EMDR with me. Then we went to see "The Mist," for distraction. Thus the B-. ("The Mist" was a credible B monster movie, but with a contrived, emotionally manipulative, falsely bleak denouement.)
Home, still carrying my stuff from session, I sat, which was somewhat clearing, and then came to write this. Well, actually, I spent some time with this new program called Sketchup, a simplified AutoCAD program, which I'm using for sort of a virtual abstract sculpture. And now, at the end of a long day, I'm glancing up to watch Heather play Halo on the new Xbox 360.
Brain is more or less fried, so not much depth for this one.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Adult Month: Day 2
Today started with a bought of anxiety. I woke up in our space heater-warmed room, and I groggily thought, "Isn't it nice to be able to stick my leg out from under the covers." But a familiar, nebulous anxiety jumped on me like a puppy who sees your eyes opening. Laying there, wondering what to do with it, I sort of fell into the thought of, "Oh, just love." So I dropped into a generalized loving space, and it felt like I, as strong and compassionate parent, was there with myself. And it seemed that the anxiety and compassion couldn't co-exist, so I basked in that as it waxed and waned, and reflected sleepily on what the effects of the Adult Month might turn out to be.
I couldn't say for sure that the anxiety isn't also a result. You change one part of the puzzle, and rest often moves in tandem.
But as it was Adult Month, I got up asking myself what, among the myriad choices available to me at 8am, was the most adult. I chose meditating, and sat for an hour in pretty good concentration. Then I was up and sent off a note to a colleague I'd promised to introduce to an esthetician I'd met recently. Then I walked for my morning coffee at Javaholics, around the corner from our house, and returned to work a bit on the December "Tame Your Mood" newsletter, sketching out a piece on cultivating one's own Nurturing Parent.
Ok, so points for morning Adulthood.
Then Heather and I drove to work together, and perhaps something about the sluggish gray weather, combined with a lingering sickness led to a low-grade bleakness and loneliness, as I drove down to work in Redwood City. I picked up a message from the female part of a couple I see, who continue to struggle with each other in rather profound ways, and something got tweaked inside. I did some EMDR as I drove (probably not the safest way to practice) and came to an image of my parents sitting us down for the announcement of their separation. I've noticed that with couples, I'm often struggling to hold the crisis conflicts. It seems a young part of me gets all stirred up, thinking, just like back then, that if I can't fix their crisis, I'm going to go down with the ship. So I tried working with this Adultly, but it didn't clear easily and lingered on as I got to work.
Then I checked in with Matt, my co-worker at the psychiatric rehab house, who let me know that a recent graduate of the house had killed himself by stepping in front of a train. I felt a slow rush as he told me, but it passed quickly and we were able to discuss our work with the man, and the ways our work put us pretty close to death. With this fellow, it came as little surprise that he offed himself. But there's an odd feeling of non-tragedy to this, not because his life wasn't empty and barren, but because his definitions of himself were not ones I was attached to. The body gets recycled one way or another, and the mind that destroys it, that's about as much compost as the meat. The suffering was real, and I have compassion for that. But thinking I actually know what death is about, and that it's tragic, that I can't buy into. He's off to who knows where, and best wishes on his journey.
A co-worker came to relieve me so I could attend the coordinating meeting for next year's Non-dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy conference, and I arrived at the little Pilates studio in Emeryville a few minutes late. John P., a big non-dual name in the Bay Area, motioned me to put my shoes in the corner, then join him and the five or so other folks. One I recognized from my old internship site, and a couple from the conference.
It was a little stilted at first, but then as we began talking and interacting, the group warmed up and I felt comfortable speaking to several points, and describing why I was there. Adult-wise, not too bad, though the young anxiety kept with me throughout the meeting, not helped by my rising temperature (this seems to be one of those colds that ramps up in the evening). We decided to take all comers for the selection committee, and Kerry, John and I (and the tech guy) will work on the website upgrade. It was a loosely formal organization, and decisions were made organically and without a lot of ego. I'm quite happy I made the effort to go, as it had that kind of scent which I've mostly learned to follow when it tickles my nostrils. It's an ingress into a community which it's time to join, moving in a direction in my work and practice which is very natural right now.
Then I drove back to work in the dark, always an odd experience (since I'm almost always commuting in daylight). Heather and I chatted on the way, but I was still feeling this underlying bleakness until just around the corner from the house, when it just shut off and there was a surge of optimism.
I set to work and avoided the evening movie, for the most part, though there were scenes in "Perfume" which were hard not to be attracted to. But I asked myself what the Adult choice was, and so worked some on the Christmas decorations (per bosses' directive), and then worked on notes and listened to a few Ken Wilber clips. Then wrote this.
All in all, a pretty good Adult day.
I couldn't say for sure that the anxiety isn't also a result. You change one part of the puzzle, and rest often moves in tandem.
But as it was Adult Month, I got up asking myself what, among the myriad choices available to me at 8am, was the most adult. I chose meditating, and sat for an hour in pretty good concentration. Then I was up and sent off a note to a colleague I'd promised to introduce to an esthetician I'd met recently. Then I walked for my morning coffee at Javaholics, around the corner from our house, and returned to work a bit on the December "Tame Your Mood" newsletter, sketching out a piece on cultivating one's own Nurturing Parent.
Ok, so points for morning Adulthood.
Then Heather and I drove to work together, and perhaps something about the sluggish gray weather, combined with a lingering sickness led to a low-grade bleakness and loneliness, as I drove down to work in Redwood City. I picked up a message from the female part of a couple I see, who continue to struggle with each other in rather profound ways, and something got tweaked inside. I did some EMDR as I drove (probably not the safest way to practice) and came to an image of my parents sitting us down for the announcement of their separation. I've noticed that with couples, I'm often struggling to hold the crisis conflicts. It seems a young part of me gets all stirred up, thinking, just like back then, that if I can't fix their crisis, I'm going to go down with the ship. So I tried working with this Adultly, but it didn't clear easily and lingered on as I got to work.
Then I checked in with Matt, my co-worker at the psychiatric rehab house, who let me know that a recent graduate of the house had killed himself by stepping in front of a train. I felt a slow rush as he told me, but it passed quickly and we were able to discuss our work with the man, and the ways our work put us pretty close to death. With this fellow, it came as little surprise that he offed himself. But there's an odd feeling of non-tragedy to this, not because his life wasn't empty and barren, but because his definitions of himself were not ones I was attached to. The body gets recycled one way or another, and the mind that destroys it, that's about as much compost as the meat. The suffering was real, and I have compassion for that. But thinking I actually know what death is about, and that it's tragic, that I can't buy into. He's off to who knows where, and best wishes on his journey.
A co-worker came to relieve me so I could attend the coordinating meeting for next year's Non-dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy conference, and I arrived at the little Pilates studio in Emeryville a few minutes late. John P., a big non-dual name in the Bay Area, motioned me to put my shoes in the corner, then join him and the five or so other folks. One I recognized from my old internship site, and a couple from the conference.
It was a little stilted at first, but then as we began talking and interacting, the group warmed up and I felt comfortable speaking to several points, and describing why I was there. Adult-wise, not too bad, though the young anxiety kept with me throughout the meeting, not helped by my rising temperature (this seems to be one of those colds that ramps up in the evening). We decided to take all comers for the selection committee, and Kerry, John and I (and the tech guy) will work on the website upgrade. It was a loosely formal organization, and decisions were made organically and without a lot of ego. I'm quite happy I made the effort to go, as it had that kind of scent which I've mostly learned to follow when it tickles my nostrils. It's an ingress into a community which it's time to join, moving in a direction in my work and practice which is very natural right now.
Then I drove back to work in the dark, always an odd experience (since I'm almost always commuting in daylight). Heather and I chatted on the way, but I was still feeling this underlying bleakness until just around the corner from the house, when it just shut off and there was a surge of optimism.
I set to work and avoided the evening movie, for the most part, though there were scenes in "Perfume" which were hard not to be attracted to. But I asked myself what the Adult choice was, and so worked some on the Christmas decorations (per bosses' directive), and then worked on notes and listened to a few Ken Wilber clips. Then wrote this.
All in all, a pretty good Adult day.
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Margot at the Wedding: And if you thought your family was bad...
David and I took in "Margot at the Wedding" after a pretty good, but kinda-expensive-for-this-town Thai meal at Oshas. It was playing at the Embarcadero theater, which I'm guessing either is financed by a cinema sugar daddy/momma, or runs guns out of the back entrance, because with the wacky and oddball films they run, how do they possibly afford the rent at their location? But it's a nice theater, with good coffee and a nice, mature staff that never seemed to have had to read an employees manual--i.e., are not nice by design. (Going to the AMC 1000 on Van Ness is like being in my suburban mall haunts as a kid, with angst personified giving me my popcorn and coke.)
"Margot" reminds me a bit of the other film I saw in the theaters recently, "No Country for Old Men." Both are like slightly different hell realms. Both are visions of a life without Spirit, though "Country" is much more totalisistic in its vision. "Margot" doesn't say there isn't Spirit anywhere, it just focuses its lens in a way that excludes Spirit from the frame. Or even just a representative of sane human relationships.
"Margot" tells the story of two sisters coming back together after several years of estrangement, for the event of one of the sister's wedding. The details are not very important, nor the plot. It's the portrait of scathing dysfunction that's the real raison d'être, scathing not because it is writ so large or luridly, but because it is so unconscious and common.
Margot, the titular character played by Nicole Kidman, can't reflect on herself with any effectiveness; her sister says, "She can be a monster when she's angry." But it seems that she's angry all the time, and for her, that means attacking wherever it will hurt the other. She is brutal energy channeled through sophisticated means. She has gathered language and culture to her as a way to defend a fragile, scarred interior. Her way of creating a sense of safety and control in her life is to destabilize others. At the beginning of the film, she criticizes her son for not wearing his new glasses, and then at the end, when he puts them on to prepare for his solo bus ride away from his mother, she says, "They make your face look fat." Her persona is that of an aware, observing woman, but what she does and says is disjointed and fragmented, because her m.o. is not truth but defense. She says to her sister, "I'm a speaker of truth," while delivering a cruel verbal blow.
The other characters are not much more developed than her, though their personas are of relative sophisticates. Jack Black's character, the groom to be, is perhaps a bit more honest in his being "cognitively disheveled" (one of my favorite phrases from Ken Wilber), but really, they all are lost in the idea that their beliefs and thoughts are true and coherent. These are very lost people who are "very" lost because even their attempts at self-reflection can find nothing substantial to rest their gaze on.
They are not empty people here, just internally fractured, with "self-knowledge" which is created as works of fiction, not the result of self-inquiry. Margot doesn't know herself: she either holds concepts about herself ("I'm a speaker of truth") or touches on her own pain and pathology, but looks away so quickly, distorting her vision with self-disgust, that she can't learn from her seeing.
These are people who don't learn because they essentially cannot tolerate their own pain long enough to have it tell them about who they are. Jack Black's character says at the end of the film, as he's unraveling, "I ate the cake and I don't know why." There's a surface cohesion to these psyches which is belayed by their disjointed actions and words. Often communications will drop from each mouth to plunk in the mud at the others feet, without being picked up and understood. "I masturbated last night," says the son out of the blue, before getting on the bus to leave his mother. "You don't have to tell me things like that," says Margot, not stopping to understand or reflect on her son's confession, or maybe sharing.
These are damaged people in sophisticated personas, which makes them more toxic to each other than the merely ignorant. This is what mind-fucking is about, and it's often coming from people whose selves are broken and the fragments are being defended even more fiercely for the brokenness. Margot is a legion of lawyers charged with protecting a pile of shattered glass.
But like "Country," it's a particular hell, and it's a big mistake to view it as any coherent vision of life. "Margot" is what life looks like for a child stuck within their toxic family. There's no way out, there's no sane "other," there's no sanctuary of escape. Such a child does the best they can to survive and protect their Self from the literate and sophisticated desperation of their parents, trying to experience love despite it's union with pain.
"Margot" has a claustrophobic pain which describes a particular type of family, not families as entities, or life as an experience. "Margot" has no one who sees it clearly; even Baumbaugh, the director, seems to be grasping for sanity simply by articulating the insane. But there's no sense of seeing these people, this hell realm, in perspective, in relationship to what is sane, grounded, and self-aware. There's no mature touchstone anywhere in the film, which is what makes it a partial vision, the depiction of a family made hellish because there's no "outside."
Not to say I didn't like it. I did like the film, quite a bit. And I felt empathy for the people. I just wouldn't want them anywhere near me.
The Adult Month
I just went to see "Margot at the Wedding," with my old friend David, my first collegial date when I arrived at grad school. He's living over in the East Bay now, and is plugging away at his hours at a brand spanking new counseling center. We'd been trying to arrange dinner for weeks, and gotten hung up on scheduling, and then on illnesses. I barely made it, as a flu found it's way into my nasal passages, and laid me out all yesterday. It seems to be passing through quickly, but I had to cancel a few appointments yesterday and this morning.
So, coming out of the movie, I was struck with an impulse that also struck me some time back, after watching "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which was to limit myself to adult entertainment. I think that fizzled because it was so open ended, so I've decided, as an experiment, to make December '07 "The Adult Month."
Today was a mixed start to The Adult Month. I meditated in the morning and read my teacher's EMDR book in the bath, then asked Heather out for a walk and hot cocoa. Adult. Then, when she shooed me off for another hour of sleep, I played a video game we got for the new Xbox 360, which captured my attention for an hour and a half. Not adult. Not bad, just not adult. Then we walked and went to visit a sculptural exhibit at the De Young. Adult. Then we got into a heated fight for an hour and a half (or more). Not so adult. Then we sort of made up. Adult! Then we did an EMDR session, which, while Adult, was not well-advised. With all the transference and countertransference, it was a bit like trying to pass a tennis ball through a Velcro tube. More fighting ensued, but pretty quickly resolved--Adult. Then dinner and some talk, a little gaming, then off to dinner with David. Dinner was about catching up and talking about our practices and thoughts about therapy (Adult), then into a dark but Adult movie. And home to write, not watch TV or vege on the Xbox. Adult!
I'm really kind of curious what this sort of limited choosing will do. What happens when your choices are pre-oriented in this way? We'll see and I'll keep you informed.
So, coming out of the movie, I was struck with an impulse that also struck me some time back, after watching "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which was to limit myself to adult entertainment. I think that fizzled because it was so open ended, so I've decided, as an experiment, to make December '07 "The Adult Month."
Today was a mixed start to The Adult Month. I meditated in the morning and read my teacher's EMDR book in the bath, then asked Heather out for a walk and hot cocoa. Adult. Then, when she shooed me off for another hour of sleep, I played a video game we got for the new Xbox 360, which captured my attention for an hour and a half. Not adult. Not bad, just not adult. Then we walked and went to visit a sculptural exhibit at the De Young. Adult. Then we got into a heated fight for an hour and a half (or more). Not so adult. Then we sort of made up. Adult! Then we did an EMDR session, which, while Adult, was not well-advised. With all the transference and countertransference, it was a bit like trying to pass a tennis ball through a Velcro tube. More fighting ensued, but pretty quickly resolved--Adult. Then dinner and some talk, a little gaming, then off to dinner with David. Dinner was about catching up and talking about our practices and thoughts about therapy (Adult), then into a dark but Adult movie. And home to write, not watch TV or vege on the Xbox. Adult!
I'm really kind of curious what this sort of limited choosing will do. What happens when your choices are pre-oriented in this way? We'll see and I'll keep you informed.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Thoughts on non- and un-space
Coming to work at Hawthorne, I've often felt a descent, like I used to experience as a kid during the summers of Sacramento. I was just in Sacramento for my cousin Jack's wedding, and while my parents were gone to pick up my uncle and aunt, I sat by the front window like I'd done as a kid, feeling the edges of that lonlienss that accompanied me so often, and that desire for someone to come home and put dimension back into the world.
I've begun experimenting with this space, which so many years into therapy and meditation, still is felt as a lack, a pain-laced void. Not fertile, not rich, not healthy, not me.
On waking last week at home, there was Anxiety to meet me, and as I lay in bed meditating on the anxiety, it struck me to think about what my "self" felt like in that moment. It/I felt fragmented, pourous, "see through." But instead of jerking away from it, my mind sat with what was there, the experience of emptiness, uncertainty of definition, void. But without the fear and recoil, it presented itself as innocuous if not friendly. It didn't consume "me," there was no explosion. Nothing happened. Just void.
So here at work, at this residential house full of people whose days are full of void--smoking on the back porch, maybe a walk to the corner store for a soda, a few brief conversations with their patio-mates--it dawned on me today, walking to fetch my laundry, that perhaps the friendly void of last week is the same void that we all experience here. The depression that I've often felt here, within and without, and which I've battled away like a poisonous gas, maybe it's actually this void, tangible and real and benign as any beautiful plant or lush sunset.
I've begun experimenting with this space, which so many years into therapy and meditation, still is felt as a lack, a pain-laced void. Not fertile, not rich, not healthy, not me.
On waking last week at home, there was Anxiety to meet me, and as I lay in bed meditating on the anxiety, it struck me to think about what my "self" felt like in that moment. It/I felt fragmented, pourous, "see through." But instead of jerking away from it, my mind sat with what was there, the experience of emptiness, uncertainty of definition, void. But without the fear and recoil, it presented itself as innocuous if not friendly. It didn't consume "me," there was no explosion. Nothing happened. Just void.
So here at work, at this residential house full of people whose days are full of void--smoking on the back porch, maybe a walk to the corner store for a soda, a few brief conversations with their patio-mates--it dawned on me today, walking to fetch my laundry, that perhaps the friendly void of last week is the same void that we all experience here. The depression that I've often felt here, within and without, and which I've battled away like a poisonous gas, maybe it's actually this void, tangible and real and benign as any beautiful plant or lush sunset.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
3:10 to Horse Shit
On Monday, midday, I thought I'd treat myself to what in my family was termed a "funkie." That would be the movie you'd turn on on weekend afternoons, in the midst of the heat, that would usually be a gun opera or involve oversized lizards.So my choice what a nuevo Western called "3:10 to Yuma," starring Russel Crowe and Christian Bale as the antagonist and protagonist, the charming sociopath and the frumpy one and one-half legged ex-Massachusetts militia man turned Arizona cow farmer. And then there's Ben Foster, the young actor who keeps getting case as quasi-psychotic weirdos or psychopaths, a la the boyfriend in Six Feet Under, or the creepy criminal in Bruce Willis' hostage movie, who burns himself to death at the denouement. And some miscellaneous bad guys, my favorite of which being the silent sharpshooter Mexican.
The thing I really didn't like about the film was not the improbabilities--why was the stage coach robbery so badly planned. I mean, they're running behind a coach loaded up with a backward-facing Gatling gun. Well, and for that matter, why doesn't that early machine gun hit more of them? It isn't that Ben Wade (Crowe) stays inexplicably in town after "taking" the comely frontier town bar wench (could they really have been that attractive and worked in a bar for long). It was the fuax psychology. The last time I'd seen such a psychologically shallow film parading itself as something deep was Clint Eastwood's "The Unforgiven." That one won some award. Apparently there's a prize for most self-deluded.
I mean, how hard is it to make a Western? The template is already there, either in Eastwood's early films of the great operas of Sergio Leonne ("Once Upon a Time in the West" is about as good as it gets). You take archetypally exaggerated characters, pit them against each other in archetypally charged situations, and bring them to an archetypally loaded climax and conclusion. You don't need to fuss around with real motivation, with complexity of psychology and relationship. Unless you do, and then you have GOT to get it right.
If you're going to tell a story of human psyches, for God's sake, know what you're talking about. Don't get your information from other shallow movies that are pretending to be deep. Or maybe being as deep as they can, because they've never looked inside for their source material.
3:10 to Yuma was, I guess, as story of fathers and sons and redemption. In Wilberian terms, it's the story of the "red," self centered, ego-centric level of development maturing into an "blue," family/village-centric level of development, the story of the transition from the social form of the strong man to that of the strong law. Ok, fair enough. Deadwood, David Milch and HBO's fantastic ballad of civilization, did it for three years. It's a great subject, rich and deep.
Except for in this film. Just as in "The Unforgiven," human motivation is presented with the form of depth--yes, fathers and sons have complex relationships, and sons have to choose their idealized figures and then come to grips with their real world men; darkness must be struggled with and brought to the light, socially, interpersonally, and intrapsychically--but it doesn't actually have the substance. It's like someone quoting Shakespeare, and at first it seems they are taking those pieces that are meaningful, yet pretty soon you realize they are spouting those parts that they believe are deep, because of what they've heard or read. But not what they have felt.
That's this film: callow, un-heart felt, bleak in it's confused morality, shallow in its understanding of human nature and minds. Blah.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Burning Man 2007--"Wierd is the new black"
MY FAILURES AT BURNING MAN
So, in the interests of fairness, I'll start this review of my Burning Man experience with a description of my own failures, before going on and describing the failures of BM. First, not compassionate enough. What my challenge was at BM was my own well-developed tendency towards judgement and criticism. I could see myself veering towards well-laid tracks of separation, of wanting to disconnect and dis-identify from what was going on around me. It's very easy, for me anyway, to slip into easy categorizations of people that mask my discomfort or fear about them. On this count, I'd give myself about a B- overall, not a sterling success, but not the test-taking meltdowns of previous times.
Second failure: not being more engaged. I'm very skeptical about the "no spectators" ethos, for reasons I'll describe below, but I do think there were a number of ways I could have been more involved or investigatory than I was. Much of this has to do with failure #1, in that when I'm in judging mode, I'm not that willing or eager to connect with what I'm judging (that's the point, I suppose). With some effort, I probably could have wrung more out of the event, and found more of the nooks and crannies that would interest me.
So. On with the snarky bits.
INTRODUCTION
Ok, here we go, Burning Man 2007, the festival of ego in the desert of Nevada. The dancing of hippified nihilists in the dust of the Black Rock Desert, attacking meaning in a fuzzy, bleary, grinning way that would embarrass some black-clad dour German. An amazingly intense locus of consumption for the "default world" which tries, in a shimmering, desert way, to deny its connection with the encompassing, supporting economy. A bouncy celebration of inclusion that in quiet and not so quiet ways, tells its critics to shut up and stop harshing others' buzz. "All-inclusiveness" that just happens to draw the loud and noisy and egocentric, which naturally pushes out the quieter, more introspective experiences/desires away. And a sort of gargling declaration of a "community" which requires no sacrifice or negotiation of conflict, an embrace of mutual aid which actually requires no effort. Even the "gifting economy" is, in my experience, a formal ritual of belonging, not a real heartfelt exercise in transcending one's own attachment.
But there were some real nice people.
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
We set off from San Francisco, a few miles from the birthplace of Burning Man on Baker Beach, on Monday the 27th, truck laden with consumer goods and my big glowwire puppet (photo), to drive up into the mountains en route to the Nevada desert. Heather had very bravely invited me to come with her after having a deep experience there last year. I began skeptical, but my excitement for the event creeped upwards as the launch date approached. We tied ribbons of cloth, in the colors of a Tibetan temple, to the various protuberances of the truck, making us look like the Tibetan remake of the Beverly Hillbillies.
We picked up the tent at Lombardi's, from the Outdoor Adventure Club, and, after a quick trip back home to get Heather's blankie (the slick green parachute-material blanket that serves as a soothing self-object, without which she literally has trouble sleeping), off we went. The drive was smooth and relatively traffic free, which was great for me since the stop-and-go of the freeway sends me tumbling from Buddhist equanimity down into the red depths of the reptilian brain.
I haven't been into the Sierras in some time, and have forgotten how much I love the high mountains. Especially the area around Donner Summit, which I consider one of the most beautiful places on earth. I'm not so fond of the high desert, though, what creeps out of the rain shadow of the Sierras East of the summit. And I certain don't care for Reno. In such a beautiful and honest environment, it is so ugly and harsh, a physicalization of the separate, arrogant, and deeply frightened ego. At least in the gambling strip, because we got lost and drove through areas that looked like standard, reality-based working class neighborhoods. But that strip--you feel like bathing after leaving it.
We didn't make the entrance to Burning Man until after dark, and after Heather got a ticket from a polite local trooper who tagged us in a speed trap. About a mile off the freeway, the road goes from 55 to 25, and that's where he was sitting. But it was an amiable enough bust, and we were soon on our way with a road semi-clogged with burners.
The entrance way to the gate was a dirt road lined by Brillo Cream-like messages, a snippet on each placard. The message was mostly the organizers' response to critics, taking the critics' voice on in sarcasm, in a very oddly unaware welcome message. "Burning Man was better last year/The women were cuter and we were given more beer," or something to that effect. But on reflection, it was actually an appropriate welcome for a festival of self-absorption, where relationship and attention to the effects of one's actions are given lip service. Well, actually more of a toothless gumming.
The gate to the event--the event space is about 2 or 3 miles in diameter, with only one entrance/exit (you can't come and go during the event)--and is manned by people who are charged with checking your tickets, and examining your vehicle in case you're trying to smuggle people in. At around $200-250 a head, there's some incentive to smuggle. Our guy poked his stick into the back of the truck, and let us pass when no one cried out from the depths of sleeping bags and canned goods.
Next up were the greeters, apparently there to soften the treatment we'd just got (which you'd face at any typical stadium happening). Ours gave us a chirpy, "Welcome home," and wrote me up a release form for my video camera. Home. Well, where have we been all this time? Such a soon to be typically odd way of expressing a feeling state which had no basis in fact, and nothing supporting it emotionally except, I guess, the will to be in that state. (I guess there's a certain self-reliance in that, choosing a state of mind and then supporting it emotionally, on your own and with a community of like-minded. Kind of a frontiers ethic.)
Home here seems to be a temporary encampment in about the deadest natural space I've ever experienced, with 45,000 strangers who have no obligations or responsibilities to each other, who can pick and choose their experiences as if they were at a buffet in a Reno casino. What is the bond that makes it a home? Well, it would seem that the common agreement that it is makes it so. Reality is as we say it is; our feelings track our stories, not anything outside. I think the people who enjoy BM the most have a capacity for a selective abstraction and exclusion which eludes me.
But these gate folk were not toxic, I should say that. They weren't out to harm anyone intentionally, or be controlling, or play power games, none of that. It was fun enough playing the first moves in this odd and silly desert game, all moving in one direction with a common purpose...umm, which, it seemed, was to move in one direction. No one was mean. Just a bit silly.
So on we drove into the camp site, where Heather met up with her camp mates from last year, and introduced me around. The organizing idea of my new camp was the serving of Vietnamese iced coffee (VICC), and itself was part of the larger Avalon Village, I think the central gay-oriented encampment. Nice, welcoming folk all around.
However, disaster struck! When we went to set up our tent we found that the poles had never been packed into the bag. This caused some consternation. We tried to get creative with stringing ropes between cars, fighting back despair, until a camp mate suggested using a spare VICC tent. That worked out great, though it wasn't the huge, multi-roomed palace we were planning. However, if we had stuck with the adult equivalent of the tent-under-the-kitchen-table, our house would have been absolutely shredded by the Wednesday and Thursday wind storms. So that worked out.
As we set up the loaned dome tent, out across the plain we could see the small green effigy of the Man on the horizon. Then midway through our work, a voice wafted out of the darkness, shouting, "The Man is burning!" Sure enough, He was aflame like a flare in the distance. People in our camp seemed mostly bemused or amused, with a fatalistic overtone. One of the main VICC people was a Black Rock Ranger (the event site is referred to as "Black Rock City"), who ironically quipped, "Well, this is going to be an interesting night."
It turns out that a fellow who had for years been talking about burning the Man early had made good, climbing up a guy wire and setting off fireworks at the base of the wooden statue. When we rode out to look, he was on the ground in the midst of a phalanx of cops (BM has both the rangers, the unofficial police, and real police, the kind with guns), about to be charged with felony arson and misdemeanor possession of fireworks and resisting a peace officer. (Later I heard second hand that his motivation was something about protesting the corporate quality of BM, Larry Harvey (one of the founders), or somesuch. However, given that the guy is about to do a one man show based on Hunter S. Thompson's life, maybe it was just a marketing stunt.)
Oh, and there was a lunar eclipse at the same time as the premature burning of the Man, which put a beautiful bloody red cast to the moon.
THE "CITY"
Thus commenced our tour through "Black Rock City," the name given to this temporary entity in the middle of nowhere. (As you drive up to the site, you keep thinking, "Hey, this is the middle of nowhere!" And then, driving some more, you realize that, actually, you were just on the edge of the middle of nowhere. Black Rock Desert is actually the middle of nowhere.) It seems to me that this name gives away a lot about the ethos of this event. And here, commencing my carping, I'll say what I've been saying to my much more BM-positive wife, that because the institution may be silly, young, and self-deluding, does not mean that all the individuals there are also silly, young, and self-deluding, or that the experience individuals have there are silly, immature, and delusional. Kay?
Calling this event a City strikes me as analogous to what children do with building "separate" spaces and declaring them sovereign. There's a developmentally appropriate experimentation with individuality and individuation, but for adult onlookers to agree with their magical thinking would be, um, a little odd.
Cities are actually hard won entities, embedded in their environments, with intricate lattice works of dependency and nurturance with what is around them. Labor and culture flow back and forth between the countryside and city, supporting both, creating conflicts and opportunities. Can the same be said of this place? Does it have the historical and integrated identity of a traditional city?
Of course not. It's a sand box for adults, with a lot of pretend elements of real cities (the villages, the city blocks, the street grid, the central plaza) as well as real elements (the police, fire, psychiatric, and medical services), but it has no roots. It does exchange culture with the outside world--of a sort--for its use of goods and services, but it is not integrated. It lays on the surface of what surrounds and support it: it arrives, erects itself, churns for a week, and then disappears within a month. Calling this a City is what struck me as a characteristic fuzzing of language, an "emotionalizing" of language. Cute and necessary in children, but a little retro in adults when it's not recognized for what it is.
THE "COMMUNITY"
Starting with that chirpy "Welcome home!" Burning Man's loopy conception of community announced itself, where concepts are defined by their ascribed or abstracted emotional tone, not by their context or history. As far as I can tell, "community" at Burning Man is a feeling. It reminds me of a housing project in Sacrament that was being developed by that fellow who was running for governor. It featured porches where the new suburban dwellers would, it was said, sit in the evenings and greet neighbors out walking dogs and kids, etc. Warmth and community would be reestablished by restoring the lost architectural underpinning of connection: the porch. The web of community apparently unraveled because no one had anywhere to sit, driving them inside and away from each other.
Heather started feeling all warm-n-tingly when we joined up with the petrochemically powered caravan, everyone moving together with one purpose...to get to Burning Man, I think. Now, I love Heather deeply and unquestionably, and she's got a profound soul, a wealthy heart, and a good head on her shoulders. And, though BM is a pretty innocuous event to inspire such feelings of group belonging, couldn't this sense of community also be organized by a charismatic leader? A religious bigot? A jihad? Um, I'm going to say "yes" to that.
Community, like a city, is an integrated, rooted phenomenon. It has developed through time, with struggle and conflict and cooperation, and sustains itself through a dynamic of homeostatic and change efforts. It is a dynamic being which people belong to in various ways, which is organized around different centers, and both requires sacrifice from, and gives nurturance to, its members.
Burning Man is a very thin community. People can belong just by showing up and paying the admission fee. Or, maybe a layer deeper, by volunteering to work in one of BM's institutions (the Rangers, selling ice, etc.)--Anya (whose playa name was assigned as "Carbohydrate") got a card from someone, giving her "citizen" status because of volunteer work. It is a community in terms of emotional tone, like the feeling evoked by those architectural sketches of suburban porches, not in terms of depth or earned membership.
As far as I can tell, being a citizen of Burning Man means holding a certain emotional stance, a belief that the place is alternative to the "default world" (more on that below) and that there is something new and life-full happening here, and perhaps a belief that art qua art is transformative. Oh, lastly, that states of consciousness are the same as traits of consciousness (see my Wilber rap below). As long as you feel these to be true, you belong! Welcome home!
THE "DEFAULT WORLD"
Yes, so Burning Man is an alternative to what I heard was a BM term for where you live the other 51 weeks of the year: "The Default World." Most of what I experience at BM I was pretty OK with seeing as developmentally young play behavior. Play house, pretend city, etc. But this term strikes me as just rank arrogance, the kind that brings up this nausea in my gut, and a desire to pugilize someone.
"The Default World," that unconscious, routine, rigid, programmed (apparently) space that stops at the gates of BM is actually the world that has allowed and which supports this incredibly self-absorbed and, in the non-party sectors, pretentious event. BM is the beneficiary of the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, with its huge economy and liberal social environment. BM is the child of so many liberation movements in the "Default World," which wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the incredible and self-sacrificing struggles of the Women's Liberation movement, the Black Power movements, artists fighting stiffling conventions and laws, political struggles for labor, for immigrant rights, for acceptance of "alternative" lifestyles and sexuality--all of it is the milieu from which BM arises. Try a BM in contemporary Iran and see how far you get.
So to talk about this complex world of conflict and growth, of violence and compassion, of struggle for repression and liberation, to refer to it with the dismissive "default" term is just inexcusable arrogance. What people are really referring to is their own deadness, and that exists within them and without. So take some damn responsibility. Natch.
THE "GIFTING ECONOMY"
Ok, so there is a huge deal made about there not being a consumeristic economy at BM. The green corporations who were asked, or allowed, to display their technology at the event were unable to display logos, propaganda, etc. I heard stories of one of the founders physically blocking RVs from admittance when they had advertisements on the side. The only products sold within the "City" are ice (you couldn't pack in enough to survive the week), coffee and rehydration drinks. Everything else is supposed to be gifted.
Well, nice idea. We served Vietnamese iced coffee--which, by the way, is outrageously tasty--at an encampment of Brits down on the corner of Avalon Village, probably giving away 200 glasses each serving day (I think four times during the week). All the materials were bought by the camp and trucked in to be prepared and given away. Nothing was required of people other than standing in line and waiting for the coffee to be prepared.
Ok. So I think the point of this "gifting" is that it's an alternative to the economy of consumption "outside" of Burning Man. And as such, it is supposed to (yes?) function differently than consumer driven capitalism, producing different outcomes materially and relationally. Otherwise, why bother?
Here again, though, is that emotion-over-fact, state-over-reality ethos of the event. The facts are that BM, the event, is a HUGE locus of consumption for the outside economy. Goods are not produced here (maybe assembled, like the necklaces I made), raw materials not extracted, and there is only very low grade distribution of goods within the 2-3 mile perimeter. What does happen is that the goods that were mined, produced, assembled, and distributed in the global economy are trucked out to the desert to be consumed. We stopped in Reno on the way in to buy bike locks so people wouldn't steal our playa ("beach" in Spainish, the name for the whole Black Rock desert) bikes, and fresh veggies to eat and share. And there were dozens of other "burners" who were doing the same. Accumulate your goods and then eat them on the desert. This is some alternative?
Ok, so maybe, given the large economic forces, this is inevitable. So what about the positive effects of the "gifting economy," Marty?
I'm assuming the background critique that gives rise to this "alternative economy" (really, aslightly alternative consumption phase of capitalism) is that the social relationships produced by capitalism are divisive and atomotizing. Ok, I can mostly agree with that. Capitalism does not reward altruism, at least among economic units, and encourages us to see each other as opponents, struggling for the same piece of meat.
But what traits does the BM "economy" produce in its participants? What I saw was certainly nothing toxic or dangerous, and people were perhaps a bit nicer to each other. But nothing radical was going on. The "gifting" I saw had a conventional quality, like the potlatches in the American Indian cultures of the Pacific Northwest, a giving not from the heart of the giver, but rather because the social milieu deemed it a norm. Our service--the iced coffee--and what other I saw (the circus performers, the pancake servers) had a conventional, routinized quality to it. Yes, in form it was different. There's not big swaths of the "outside" economy which is about giving. But in substance, and in the radical quality of its structure and relationships, it seemed to mimic the outside culture. Harlequin dress on the same old manaquin.
EGO AND BURNING MAN
The excitement that grew as we approached going up to the desert was, I suppose, connected to the idea that there might be different kinds of relating encouraged at BM, a milieu that called forth and encouraged more openness in its participants. The first day there I held out hope, but as I started having interactions with people, it became pretty obvious that the trappings of BM were certainly different, but the substance was more or less, more of the same.
The form did have some interesting expressions, with the most impactful being the view back to the "city" from the center of the Playa, at night, towards the end of the event. The sight of a hundred tents and art cars lit up with different lurid shades or neon or glow wire--it wasn't the power of a city scape, the sweep of culture and industry and history represented in patterns of light. It was the outrageous ability of humans to make a spectacle of themselves, a kind of magnificant excess and waste and ridiculousness. There's a particular class of joke which packs its punch not in its content or wit, but in its length and the sheer ballsiness of its excess. That's Burning Man at night, all that light, all the absurd sound in the middle of what the rest of the year is an enormous basin of silence.
That juxtaposition, all this visual and auditory and neurlogical noise against the vast flatness and emptiness of that natural space, it feels like children shooting sparklers at the stars. The stars, ultimately, win, but it's a magnificent display of an absurdity that the stars could never express.
But much of the rest of the experience was utterly common human ego.
In fact, because of the setting, and the abstraction of people from the matrix of their lives, the ego seemed even more magnified in its expression, as if the lack of relationship or work or environmental constraints allow it to shine even brighter. But what I saw was not a toxic ego, not a malignant predatoriness or abuse. Rather, it was the kind of ego that you see in young children, which you would rightly respond to with, "You ARE the most magnificent boy/girl in the world!"
Much of the nudity, for instance, had a quality of hey-look-at-me narcicism rather than jubilent self-transcendence. Maybe for some there was a challenge of their own limits, and in that way I can see the event serving people. But apart from that, it felt quite prosaic and conventional without having the groundedness of an established nudist beach, say. It was as if the prevelance of nudity was supposed to, itself, overcome the body-baggage that most of us carried through the gates. That the form of physical presentation trumpted the substance of hangups and neurosis. Pfaw.
After a day or so, people looked as ego-bound as anywhere else I'd traveled. I couldn't see this place and happening as in any way presenting a different substance than I'd just come from. There were no rituals of ego-transcendance, and in regular interactions, there was the same boundaries, limits, rules as in the "default world." I remember one little bit of social edginess, when a young man said in Center Camp (the coffee shop and performance space of the event), where a hundred people were qued for coffee, "Will anyone let me ahead of them in line?" No one moved, and he said, with a mix of triumph and smugness, "Well, this was a test." Ugh. I loathe those sort of self-serving demonstrations of the obvious.
Perhaps if you were from small town Midwest, this might be a mind-blowing experience, but coming from a decade of life in San Francisco, exploring psychology, and another decade of life traveling and exploring radical fringes and spiritual circles, Burning Man struck me as pretty damn tame and conventional.
Which IS NOT A PROBLEM, if it would only see itself clearly. Just say its a big, bloated party in the desert for the priveleged middle and upper-middle class and be done with it! It's ok! Just make it a Mardi Gras for the ego and be honest about it!
BURING MAN'S "RITUALS"
I was--and even Heather agrees with this--able to hold my tongue pretty well throughout the event. In past incarnations of me, I'd have been angrilly ripping into people, or sniping inappropriately. But here, I practiced letting be and letting live and trying to just appreciate the samsara in and around me. Really. But when it came to the "rituals" of the burning of the Man, that was just too much.
We went out to the Man early and got a front row seat on the perimeter marked by a glow cable, maybe two hundred yards in diameter around the stick-figure Man up on his log-pole support. We ate jelly beans and when sated, let them drift off through the crowd like a leaf on a stream. Ranger Bacon, a sweet, skilled crowd control guy from Reno, was positioned in front of us and kept us entertained while they were reading the conflagration. He also kept the unauthorized individuals from crossing the line, those playing out the same games they would with any other "oppressive authority" figure, not able to distinguish the difference between here and, say, a cop line at a demonstration.
Anyway, when it got dark, the fire dancers and spinners prepared themselves in the space between us and the Man. Then the show got started and a procession of folks dressed in white flowy Bedouin cloths, carrying a litter of fire, walked solumly passed while the drummers played the same, unispired rhythm over and over. The fire spinners were supposed to light their instruments from the fire, but got confused so the procession had to come around again.
Here's where I asked, "What exactly are we celebrating?" and Carbohydrate's friend said something like, "Who cares," out of irritation. I think that I was intruding on her feeling tone (Heather later said I was certainly intruding on her's); the meaning of what was happening didn't really bear on anything. Apparently.
The fire dancers began doing their thing, spinning poi (balls of fire) and swords and lances and big balls of fire, etc. I love Heather doing it because I can understand the personal, idiosyncratic, particular meanings and import of her engagment with it. But as a social/cultural form, as a "ritual," it's just--excuse my French--fucking absurd. Children playing dress-up with others' cultures, without really getting inside those cultures, without submitting or sacrificing anything of themselves to gain admittance.
BM is about belonging through adopting form, not through surrendering to substance, not about actually transforming oneself. Effective ritual connects the participants to a deeper, more expansive part of themselves. This bit of ritual was just to make your feel a little buzz, another in BM's offereing of tepid state changes, requiring nothing and offering little more than you'd get from, at best, a tab of acid, at worst, a night of spectacle on the cable channel.
KEN WILBER AND BURNING MAN
On philospher and mystic Ken Wilber's site, integralnaked.org, there are two diologues about Burning Man, one with a Wired-era culture critic, and another with Larry Harvey, co-founder of BM. In the first of these, he refers to Harvey in a slightly exasperated, but mostly gentle way as "cognitively disheveled," and as "interested mainly in monological not diological discourse" (I paraphrase slightly). Also, that Burning Man is a "states carnival," meaning a venue for changing state of mind, rather than traits of mind. Another way of stating this is that BM is a buffet of ways to get high, chemical or not. But it is not about transformation or permanent change and growth, at least not in structure. Some people may get that from their experience. But Thomas Merton had a spirtual awakening on a corner of a small town, I think near a drugstore. Was the experience of that location designed to evoke such an experience? No, it could have been anything because Merton was ready for it. You can experience the divine at a football game, but that does not mean the football game is crafted to evoke the divine. It's crafted, like BM, for entertainment.
And that would be just fine, and I think probably is for many participants, if it just stated that clearly. The patina of radical or alternative rhetoric is like a film of oil on top of the deep hedonism of the event. Like my preference for strait ahead Republicans to wishy-washy Liberals, I'd take the party hound over the fuzzy revolutionary any day.
OK, MR. WET BLANKET, SO IS THERE ANYTHING YOU DID LIKE?
Yes! I liked my campmates at VICC, not because of anything connected to BM, but because they were sweet, mature people who didn't take the event too seriously. I enjoyed hanging around at camp, chasing the shade of the RV, reading a book of Werner Herzog interviews. Time hanging out with Protein and Carbohydrate was great, providing a depth that otherwise would be VERY missing.
The light-saber battle out near the Man, at dusk on Thursday or Friday was great! We stumbled upon it when someone gave us an armful of plastic toy light-sabers, and told us the battle would begin at dusk. Playing with 500 other silly revelers, hacking and slashing and dying dramatically was so fun and light, and then the rushing into Center Camp while the punk rock band played an impromtu ballad about Star Wars--that was just lighthearted, spontaneous performance art.
And along that vein, coming across a hundred people dressed as bunnies, clambering up on the Thunderdome fighting...dome, and being chased by Black Rock animal control in order to innoculate them with syringes of what we guessed was vodka--that also was just light and fun and silly.
The sandstorms, those were tremendous, not for their connection to Burning Man, but just as natural events, as new phenomenon that I'd never experienced. I didn't know the planet could do that with wind and dirt.
And even though she was grumpy at times, I enjoyed my lovely wife, especially that we did so well together in such a place, after a rough and touch-and-go summer. That was where I got to feel real depth and potential for relationship.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON SEX
One thing that I've noticed since returning, and for which I'm grateful to BM, is that I don't seem as knee-jerk activated by womens' bodies as before going up to the desert. Apparently the sheer volume of magazine-perfect female forms burned off some of my typical male conditioning. So points to BM on that score.
So, in the interests of fairness, I'll start this review of my Burning Man experience with a description of my own failures, before going on and describing the failures of BM. First, not compassionate enough. What my challenge was at BM was my own well-developed tendency towards judgement and criticism. I could see myself veering towards well-laid tracks of separation, of wanting to disconnect and dis-identify from what was going on around me. It's very easy, for me anyway, to slip into easy categorizations of people that mask my discomfort or fear about them. On this count, I'd give myself about a B- overall, not a sterling success, but not the test-taking meltdowns of previous times.
Second failure: not being more engaged. I'm very skeptical about the "no spectators" ethos, for reasons I'll describe below, but I do think there were a number of ways I could have been more involved or investigatory than I was. Much of this has to do with failure #1, in that when I'm in judging mode, I'm not that willing or eager to connect with what I'm judging (that's the point, I suppose). With some effort, I probably could have wrung more out of the event, and found more of the nooks and crannies that would interest me.
So. On with the snarky bits.
INTRODUCTION
Ok, here we go, Burning Man 2007, the festival of ego in the desert of Nevada. The dancing of hippified nihilists in the dust of the Black Rock Desert, attacking meaning in a fuzzy, bleary, grinning way that would embarrass some black-clad dour German. An amazingly intense locus of consumption for the "default world" which tries, in a shimmering, desert way, to deny its connection with the encompassing, supporting economy. A bouncy celebration of inclusion that in quiet and not so quiet ways, tells its critics to shut up and stop harshing others' buzz. "All-inclusiveness" that just happens to draw the loud and noisy and egocentric, which naturally pushes out the quieter, more introspective experiences/desires away. And a sort of gargling declaration of a "community" which requires no sacrifice or negotiation of conflict, an embrace of mutual aid which actually requires no effort. Even the "gifting economy" is, in my experience, a formal ritual of belonging, not a real heartfelt exercise in transcending one's own attachment.
But there were some real nice people.
PILGRIM'S PROGRESS
We set off from San Francisco, a few miles from the birthplace of Burning Man on Baker Beach, on Monday the 27th, truck laden with consumer goods and my big glowwire puppet (photo), to drive up into the mountains en route to the Nevada desert. Heather had very bravely invited me to come with her after having a deep experience there last year. I began skeptical, but my excitement for the event creeped upwards as the launch date approached. We tied ribbons of cloth, in the colors of a Tibetan temple, to the various protuberances of the truck, making us look like the Tibetan remake of the Beverly Hillbillies.
We picked up the tent at Lombardi's, from the Outdoor Adventure Club, and, after a quick trip back home to get Heather's blankie (the slick green parachute-material blanket that serves as a soothing self-object, without which she literally has trouble sleeping), off we went. The drive was smooth and relatively traffic free, which was great for me since the stop-and-go of the freeway sends me tumbling from Buddhist equanimity down into the red depths of the reptilian brain.
I haven't been into the Sierras in some time, and have forgotten how much I love the high mountains. Especially the area around Donner Summit, which I consider one of the most beautiful places on earth. I'm not so fond of the high desert, though, what creeps out of the rain shadow of the Sierras East of the summit. And I certain don't care for Reno. In such a beautiful and honest environment, it is so ugly and harsh, a physicalization of the separate, arrogant, and deeply frightened ego. At least in the gambling strip, because we got lost and drove through areas that looked like standard, reality-based working class neighborhoods. But that strip--you feel like bathing after leaving it.
We didn't make the entrance to Burning Man until after dark, and after Heather got a ticket from a polite local trooper who tagged us in a speed trap. About a mile off the freeway, the road goes from 55 to 25, and that's where he was sitting. But it was an amiable enough bust, and we were soon on our way with a road semi-clogged with burners.
The entrance way to the gate was a dirt road lined by Brillo Cream-like messages, a snippet on each placard. The message was mostly the organizers' response to critics, taking the critics' voice on in sarcasm, in a very oddly unaware welcome message. "Burning Man was better last year/The women were cuter and we were given more beer," or something to that effect. But on reflection, it was actually an appropriate welcome for a festival of self-absorption, where relationship and attention to the effects of one's actions are given lip service. Well, actually more of a toothless gumming.
The gate to the event--the event space is about 2 or 3 miles in diameter, with only one entrance/exit (you can't come and go during the event)--and is manned by people who are charged with checking your tickets, and examining your vehicle in case you're trying to smuggle people in. At around $200-250 a head, there's some incentive to smuggle. Our guy poked his stick into the back of the truck, and let us pass when no one cried out from the depths of sleeping bags and canned goods.
Next up were the greeters, apparently there to soften the treatment we'd just got (which you'd face at any typical stadium happening). Ours gave us a chirpy, "Welcome home," and wrote me up a release form for my video camera. Home. Well, where have we been all this time? Such a soon to be typically odd way of expressing a feeling state which had no basis in fact, and nothing supporting it emotionally except, I guess, the will to be in that state. (I guess there's a certain self-reliance in that, choosing a state of mind and then supporting it emotionally, on your own and with a community of like-minded. Kind of a frontiers ethic.)
Home here seems to be a temporary encampment in about the deadest natural space I've ever experienced, with 45,000 strangers who have no obligations or responsibilities to each other, who can pick and choose their experiences as if they were at a buffet in a Reno casino. What is the bond that makes it a home? Well, it would seem that the common agreement that it is makes it so. Reality is as we say it is; our feelings track our stories, not anything outside. I think the people who enjoy BM the most have a capacity for a selective abstraction and exclusion which eludes me.
But these gate folk were not toxic, I should say that. They weren't out to harm anyone intentionally, or be controlling, or play power games, none of that. It was fun enough playing the first moves in this odd and silly desert game, all moving in one direction with a common purpose...umm, which, it seemed, was to move in one direction. No one was mean. Just a bit silly.
So on we drove into the camp site, where Heather met up with her camp mates from last year, and introduced me around. The organizing idea of my new camp was the serving of Vietnamese iced coffee (VICC), and itself was part of the larger Avalon Village, I think the central gay-oriented encampment. Nice, welcoming folk all around.
However, disaster struck! When we went to set up our tent we found that the poles had never been packed into the bag. This caused some consternation. We tried to get creative with stringing ropes between cars, fighting back despair, until a camp mate suggested using a spare VICC tent. That worked out great, though it wasn't the huge, multi-roomed palace we were planning. However, if we had stuck with the adult equivalent of the tent-under-the-kitchen-table, our house would have been absolutely shredded by the Wednesday and Thursday wind storms. So that worked out.
As we set up the loaned dome tent, out across the plain we could see the small green effigy of the Man on the horizon. Then midway through our work, a voice wafted out of the darkness, shouting, "The Man is burning!" Sure enough, He was aflame like a flare in the distance. People in our camp seemed mostly bemused or amused, with a fatalistic overtone. One of the main VICC people was a Black Rock Ranger (the event site is referred to as "Black Rock City"), who ironically quipped, "Well, this is going to be an interesting night."
It turns out that a fellow who had for years been talking about burning the Man early had made good, climbing up a guy wire and setting off fireworks at the base of the wooden statue. When we rode out to look, he was on the ground in the midst of a phalanx of cops (BM has both the rangers, the unofficial police, and real police, the kind with guns), about to be charged with felony arson and misdemeanor possession of fireworks and resisting a peace officer. (Later I heard second hand that his motivation was something about protesting the corporate quality of BM, Larry Harvey (one of the founders), or somesuch. However, given that the guy is about to do a one man show based on Hunter S. Thompson's life, maybe it was just a marketing stunt.)
Oh, and there was a lunar eclipse at the same time as the premature burning of the Man, which put a beautiful bloody red cast to the moon.
THE "CITY"
Thus commenced our tour through "Black Rock City," the name given to this temporary entity in the middle of nowhere. (As you drive up to the site, you keep thinking, "Hey, this is the middle of nowhere!" And then, driving some more, you realize that, actually, you were just on the edge of the middle of nowhere. Black Rock Desert is actually the middle of nowhere.) It seems to me that this name gives away a lot about the ethos of this event. And here, commencing my carping, I'll say what I've been saying to my much more BM-positive wife, that because the institution may be silly, young, and self-deluding, does not mean that all the individuals there are also silly, young, and self-deluding, or that the experience individuals have there are silly, immature, and delusional. Kay?
Calling this event a City strikes me as analogous to what children do with building "separate" spaces and declaring them sovereign. There's a developmentally appropriate experimentation with individuality and individuation, but for adult onlookers to agree with their magical thinking would be, um, a little odd.
Cities are actually hard won entities, embedded in their environments, with intricate lattice works of dependency and nurturance with what is around them. Labor and culture flow back and forth between the countryside and city, supporting both, creating conflicts and opportunities. Can the same be said of this place? Does it have the historical and integrated identity of a traditional city?
Of course not. It's a sand box for adults, with a lot of pretend elements of real cities (the villages, the city blocks, the street grid, the central plaza) as well as real elements (the police, fire, psychiatric, and medical services), but it has no roots. It does exchange culture with the outside world--of a sort--for its use of goods and services, but it is not integrated. It lays on the surface of what surrounds and support it: it arrives, erects itself, churns for a week, and then disappears within a month. Calling this a City is what struck me as a characteristic fuzzing of language, an "emotionalizing" of language. Cute and necessary in children, but a little retro in adults when it's not recognized for what it is.
THE "COMMUNITY"
Starting with that chirpy "Welcome home!" Burning Man's loopy conception of community announced itself, where concepts are defined by their ascribed or abstracted emotional tone, not by their context or history. As far as I can tell, "community" at Burning Man is a feeling. It reminds me of a housing project in Sacrament that was being developed by that fellow who was running for governor. It featured porches where the new suburban dwellers would, it was said, sit in the evenings and greet neighbors out walking dogs and kids, etc. Warmth and community would be reestablished by restoring the lost architectural underpinning of connection: the porch. The web of community apparently unraveled because no one had anywhere to sit, driving them inside and away from each other.
Heather started feeling all warm-n-tingly when we joined up with the petrochemically powered caravan, everyone moving together with one purpose...to get to Burning Man, I think. Now, I love Heather deeply and unquestionably, and she's got a profound soul, a wealthy heart, and a good head on her shoulders. And, though BM is a pretty innocuous event to inspire such feelings of group belonging, couldn't this sense of community also be organized by a charismatic leader? A religious bigot? A jihad? Um, I'm going to say "yes" to that.
Community, like a city, is an integrated, rooted phenomenon. It has developed through time, with struggle and conflict and cooperation, and sustains itself through a dynamic of homeostatic and change efforts. It is a dynamic being which people belong to in various ways, which is organized around different centers, and both requires sacrifice from, and gives nurturance to, its members.
Burning Man is a very thin community. People can belong just by showing up and paying the admission fee. Or, maybe a layer deeper, by volunteering to work in one of BM's institutions (the Rangers, selling ice, etc.)--Anya (whose playa name was assigned as "Carbohydrate") got a card from someone, giving her "citizen" status because of volunteer work. It is a community in terms of emotional tone, like the feeling evoked by those architectural sketches of suburban porches, not in terms of depth or earned membership.
As far as I can tell, being a citizen of Burning Man means holding a certain emotional stance, a belief that the place is alternative to the "default world" (more on that below) and that there is something new and life-full happening here, and perhaps a belief that art qua art is transformative. Oh, lastly, that states of consciousness are the same as traits of consciousness (see my Wilber rap below). As long as you feel these to be true, you belong! Welcome home!
THE "DEFAULT WORLD"
Yes, so Burning Man is an alternative to what I heard was a BM term for where you live the other 51 weeks of the year: "The Default World." Most of what I experience at BM I was pretty OK with seeing as developmentally young play behavior. Play house, pretend city, etc. But this term strikes me as just rank arrogance, the kind that brings up this nausea in my gut, and a desire to pugilize someone.
"The Default World," that unconscious, routine, rigid, programmed (apparently) space that stops at the gates of BM is actually the world that has allowed and which supports this incredibly self-absorbed and, in the non-party sectors, pretentious event. BM is the beneficiary of the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world, with its huge economy and liberal social environment. BM is the child of so many liberation movements in the "Default World," which wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for the incredible and self-sacrificing struggles of the Women's Liberation movement, the Black Power movements, artists fighting stiffling conventions and laws, political struggles for labor, for immigrant rights, for acceptance of "alternative" lifestyles and sexuality--all of it is the milieu from which BM arises. Try a BM in contemporary Iran and see how far you get.
So to talk about this complex world of conflict and growth, of violence and compassion, of struggle for repression and liberation, to refer to it with the dismissive "default" term is just inexcusable arrogance. What people are really referring to is their own deadness, and that exists within them and without. So take some damn responsibility. Natch.
THE "GIFTING ECONOMY"
Ok, so there is a huge deal made about there not being a consumeristic economy at BM. The green corporations who were asked, or allowed, to display their technology at the event were unable to display logos, propaganda, etc. I heard stories of one of the founders physically blocking RVs from admittance when they had advertisements on the side. The only products sold within the "City" are ice (you couldn't pack in enough to survive the week), coffee and rehydration drinks. Everything else is supposed to be gifted.
Well, nice idea. We served Vietnamese iced coffee--which, by the way, is outrageously tasty--at an encampment of Brits down on the corner of Avalon Village, probably giving away 200 glasses each serving day (I think four times during the week). All the materials were bought by the camp and trucked in to be prepared and given away. Nothing was required of people other than standing in line and waiting for the coffee to be prepared.
Ok. So I think the point of this "gifting" is that it's an alternative to the economy of consumption "outside" of Burning Man. And as such, it is supposed to (yes?) function differently than consumer driven capitalism, producing different outcomes materially and relationally. Otherwise, why bother?
Here again, though, is that emotion-over-fact, state-over-reality ethos of the event. The facts are that BM, the event, is a HUGE locus of consumption for the outside economy. Goods are not produced here (maybe assembled, like the necklaces I made), raw materials not extracted, and there is only very low grade distribution of goods within the 2-3 mile perimeter. What does happen is that the goods that were mined, produced, assembled, and distributed in the global economy are trucked out to the desert to be consumed. We stopped in Reno on the way in to buy bike locks so people wouldn't steal our playa ("beach" in Spainish, the name for the whole Black Rock desert) bikes, and fresh veggies to eat and share. And there were dozens of other "burners" who were doing the same. Accumulate your goods and then eat them on the desert. This is some alternative?
Ok, so maybe, given the large economic forces, this is inevitable. So what about the positive effects of the "gifting economy," Marty?
I'm assuming the background critique that gives rise to this "alternative economy" (really, aslightly alternative consumption phase of capitalism) is that the social relationships produced by capitalism are divisive and atomotizing. Ok, I can mostly agree with that. Capitalism does not reward altruism, at least among economic units, and encourages us to see each other as opponents, struggling for the same piece of meat.
But what traits does the BM "economy" produce in its participants? What I saw was certainly nothing toxic or dangerous, and people were perhaps a bit nicer to each other. But nothing radical was going on. The "gifting" I saw had a conventional quality, like the potlatches in the American Indian cultures of the Pacific Northwest, a giving not from the heart of the giver, but rather because the social milieu deemed it a norm. Our service--the iced coffee--and what other I saw (the circus performers, the pancake servers) had a conventional, routinized quality to it. Yes, in form it was different. There's not big swaths of the "outside" economy which is about giving. But in substance, and in the radical quality of its structure and relationships, it seemed to mimic the outside culture. Harlequin dress on the same old manaquin.
EGO AND BURNING MAN
The excitement that grew as we approached going up to the desert was, I suppose, connected to the idea that there might be different kinds of relating encouraged at BM, a milieu that called forth and encouraged more openness in its participants. The first day there I held out hope, but as I started having interactions with people, it became pretty obvious that the trappings of BM were certainly different, but the substance was more or less, more of the same.
The form did have some interesting expressions, with the most impactful being the view back to the "city" from the center of the Playa, at night, towards the end of the event. The sight of a hundred tents and art cars lit up with different lurid shades or neon or glow wire--it wasn't the power of a city scape, the sweep of culture and industry and history represented in patterns of light. It was the outrageous ability of humans to make a spectacle of themselves, a kind of magnificant excess and waste and ridiculousness. There's a particular class of joke which packs its punch not in its content or wit, but in its length and the sheer ballsiness of its excess. That's Burning Man at night, all that light, all the absurd sound in the middle of what the rest of the year is an enormous basin of silence.
That juxtaposition, all this visual and auditory and neurlogical noise against the vast flatness and emptiness of that natural space, it feels like children shooting sparklers at the stars. The stars, ultimately, win, but it's a magnificent display of an absurdity that the stars could never express.
But much of the rest of the experience was utterly common human ego.
In fact, because of the setting, and the abstraction of people from the matrix of their lives, the ego seemed even more magnified in its expression, as if the lack of relationship or work or environmental constraints allow it to shine even brighter. But what I saw was not a toxic ego, not a malignant predatoriness or abuse. Rather, it was the kind of ego that you see in young children, which you would rightly respond to with, "You ARE the most magnificent boy/girl in the world!"
Much of the nudity, for instance, had a quality of hey-look-at-me narcicism rather than jubilent self-transcendence. Maybe for some there was a challenge of their own limits, and in that way I can see the event serving people. But apart from that, it felt quite prosaic and conventional without having the groundedness of an established nudist beach, say. It was as if the prevelance of nudity was supposed to, itself, overcome the body-baggage that most of us carried through the gates. That the form of physical presentation trumpted the substance of hangups and neurosis. Pfaw.
After a day or so, people looked as ego-bound as anywhere else I'd traveled. I couldn't see this place and happening as in any way presenting a different substance than I'd just come from. There were no rituals of ego-transcendance, and in regular interactions, there was the same boundaries, limits, rules as in the "default world." I remember one little bit of social edginess, when a young man said in Center Camp (the coffee shop and performance space of the event), where a hundred people were qued for coffee, "Will anyone let me ahead of them in line?" No one moved, and he said, with a mix of triumph and smugness, "Well, this was a test." Ugh. I loathe those sort of self-serving demonstrations of the obvious.
Perhaps if you were from small town Midwest, this might be a mind-blowing experience, but coming from a decade of life in San Francisco, exploring psychology, and another decade of life traveling and exploring radical fringes and spiritual circles, Burning Man struck me as pretty damn tame and conventional.
Which IS NOT A PROBLEM, if it would only see itself clearly. Just say its a big, bloated party in the desert for the priveleged middle and upper-middle class and be done with it! It's ok! Just make it a Mardi Gras for the ego and be honest about it!
BURING MAN'S "RITUALS"
I was--and even Heather agrees with this--able to hold my tongue pretty well throughout the event. In past incarnations of me, I'd have been angrilly ripping into people, or sniping inappropriately. But here, I practiced letting be and letting live and trying to just appreciate the samsara in and around me. Really. But when it came to the "rituals" of the burning of the Man, that was just too much.
We went out to the Man early and got a front row seat on the perimeter marked by a glow cable, maybe two hundred yards in diameter around the stick-figure Man up on his log-pole support. We ate jelly beans and when sated, let them drift off through the crowd like a leaf on a stream. Ranger Bacon, a sweet, skilled crowd control guy from Reno, was positioned in front of us and kept us entertained while they were reading the conflagration. He also kept the unauthorized individuals from crossing the line, those playing out the same games they would with any other "oppressive authority" figure, not able to distinguish the difference between here and, say, a cop line at a demonstration.
Anyway, when it got dark, the fire dancers and spinners prepared themselves in the space between us and the Man. Then the show got started and a procession of folks dressed in white flowy Bedouin cloths, carrying a litter of fire, walked solumly passed while the drummers played the same, unispired rhythm over and over. The fire spinners were supposed to light their instruments from the fire, but got confused so the procession had to come around again.
Here's where I asked, "What exactly are we celebrating?" and Carbohydrate's friend said something like, "Who cares," out of irritation. I think that I was intruding on her feeling tone (Heather later said I was certainly intruding on her's); the meaning of what was happening didn't really bear on anything. Apparently.
The fire dancers began doing their thing, spinning poi (balls of fire) and swords and lances and big balls of fire, etc. I love Heather doing it because I can understand the personal, idiosyncratic, particular meanings and import of her engagment with it. But as a social/cultural form, as a "ritual," it's just--excuse my French--fucking absurd. Children playing dress-up with others' cultures, without really getting inside those cultures, without submitting or sacrificing anything of themselves to gain admittance.
BM is about belonging through adopting form, not through surrendering to substance, not about actually transforming oneself. Effective ritual connects the participants to a deeper, more expansive part of themselves. This bit of ritual was just to make your feel a little buzz, another in BM's offereing of tepid state changes, requiring nothing and offering little more than you'd get from, at best, a tab of acid, at worst, a night of spectacle on the cable channel.
KEN WILBER AND BURNING MAN
On philospher and mystic Ken Wilber's site, integralnaked.org, there are two diologues about Burning Man, one with a Wired-era culture critic, and another with Larry Harvey, co-founder of BM. In the first of these, he refers to Harvey in a slightly exasperated, but mostly gentle way as "cognitively disheveled," and as "interested mainly in monological not diological discourse" (I paraphrase slightly). Also, that Burning Man is a "states carnival," meaning a venue for changing state of mind, rather than traits of mind. Another way of stating this is that BM is a buffet of ways to get high, chemical or not. But it is not about transformation or permanent change and growth, at least not in structure. Some people may get that from their experience. But Thomas Merton had a spirtual awakening on a corner of a small town, I think near a drugstore. Was the experience of that location designed to evoke such an experience? No, it could have been anything because Merton was ready for it. You can experience the divine at a football game, but that does not mean the football game is crafted to evoke the divine. It's crafted, like BM, for entertainment.
And that would be just fine, and I think probably is for many participants, if it just stated that clearly. The patina of radical or alternative rhetoric is like a film of oil on top of the deep hedonism of the event. Like my preference for strait ahead Republicans to wishy-washy Liberals, I'd take the party hound over the fuzzy revolutionary any day.
OK, MR. WET BLANKET, SO IS THERE ANYTHING YOU DID LIKE?
Yes! I liked my campmates at VICC, not because of anything connected to BM, but because they were sweet, mature people who didn't take the event too seriously. I enjoyed hanging around at camp, chasing the shade of the RV, reading a book of Werner Herzog interviews. Time hanging out with Protein and Carbohydrate was great, providing a depth that otherwise would be VERY missing.
The light-saber battle out near the Man, at dusk on Thursday or Friday was great! We stumbled upon it when someone gave us an armful of plastic toy light-sabers, and told us the battle would begin at dusk. Playing with 500 other silly revelers, hacking and slashing and dying dramatically was so fun and light, and then the rushing into Center Camp while the punk rock band played an impromtu ballad about Star Wars--that was just lighthearted, spontaneous performance art.
And along that vein, coming across a hundred people dressed as bunnies, clambering up on the Thunderdome fighting...dome, and being chased by Black Rock animal control in order to innoculate them with syringes of what we guessed was vodka--that also was just light and fun and silly.
The sandstorms, those were tremendous, not for their connection to Burning Man, but just as natural events, as new phenomenon that I'd never experienced. I didn't know the planet could do that with wind and dirt.
And even though she was grumpy at times, I enjoyed my lovely wife, especially that we did so well together in such a place, after a rough and touch-and-go summer. That was where I got to feel real depth and potential for relationship.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON SEX
One thing that I've noticed since returning, and for which I'm grateful to BM, is that I don't seem as knee-jerk activated by womens' bodies as before going up to the desert. Apparently the sheer volume of magazine-perfect female forms burned off some of my typical male conditioning. So points to BM on that score.
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