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Burning Man (www.burningman.com) is not an annual pilgrimage that I make. I was first invited to attend in 1992 (just two years after the event reestablished itself on the Black Rock Desert of Nevada) by two buckaroos from the Soldier Meadow Ranch which lies on the north end of the Black Rock playa. I politely refused because I was in a zone of solitude on an 850-mile horse ride adventure, retracing the Southern Route of the Oregon Trail through five states. I didn’t want to be around many people, though I was curious about the event and all of the controversy that surrounds it. Fast forward to 2007. A ticket was gifted to me to attend. The same thing last year and this year, too. Three years in a row I have attended. This year, I arrived on Sunday, the day after the Man was burned. I was one of few arriving on Sunday with most of the festivities and events already having transpired. I came for the Temple burn, though—my favorite event because of its significance in relation to life and death, to memory, to honor, to mortality and immortality. I was moved beyond words in 2007 with the Temple burn, a hush coming over a crowd of 20,000 which I had never experienced before or since. Each of us, in our own and communal way, honoring the preciousness of life and the lives and spirits of those who had preceded us in mortal death—including my wife, who was cremated nearly ten years ago and her ashes spread in places of significance to her life, our life and the life she shared with our son and myself. The Temple can be and is a metaphor for many things in our lives, and beyond our lives.
Burning Man is a spectacle of art, fusion, revelry, poetry, celebration and expression that takes place every year during Labor Day Weekend. It is truly an unexplainable event (though all of us will try) where a city (Black Rock City) of 50,000 is created and dismantled (basically in a week, but longer for those who create and tear down the main infrastructures, leaving the least trace possible). Burning Man is a visual feast—a manifestation of inner words and thoughts brought to visual finiteness, or, at least, worthy attempts.This year’s theme was Evolution. The City is gridded out like a clock with inhabitants staying between two to ten o’clock. Ten o’clock to 2 o’clock is open space for the Man, the Temple, art installations, traveling art floats or other traveling concoctions of the human imagination. Streets are named by the time of the clock. The main avenue is Esplanade, which keeps its name every year along with the three Promenades that lead to the Man. Avenue names change each year according to the theme of the year. This year’s avenues were: Lineage, Kinship, Jurassic, Inherit, Hominid, Genome, Fossil, Extinct, DNA, Chaos, Biology and Adapt.
It is impossible to “show” all of Burning Man in one travel story. It is impossible to “show” Burning Man in any kind of story. What follows is a photo essay without captions as seen from the eyes of one Homo sapiens. |
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