back from black rock city

Still glowing, inside down and upside out -- but gradually the world I left behind five days ago is fading back in -- to the periphery of my vision at least.

Burning Man restored my faith in what I believed before growing up. The fiction of an externally-imposed universal moral law promotes the very atrocities from which it claims to rescue us. We desire to love more than we desire to harm. Somehow I’d forgotten that, or had been talked out of believing it.

Burning Man clarified the difference between my ego and my soul. To the ego’s tiny nation-state, the soul consists of vast continents and oceans extending beyond its borders. The ego’s walls depict a ficticious menagerie of Bosch-like horrors allegedly populating the outside world. So the ego spends most of its time reenforcing those walls and rendering their illustrations ever more vivid. Somehow I’d forgotten that, or had been talked out of believing it.

I realize that I’m not stating any of this particularly well and I’ve no doubt that both the poet and the philosopher in me will look back at this entry and, together, cringe. That I’m unconcerned about such a possibility right now, that I feel a compulsion to state the above before the real world talks me into censoring it, is a testament to the power of the experience I had there. That power can’t be pinned to any one aspect of Burning Man, but is somehow a synthesis of the self-reliance required by the extreme desert setting, the sense of community such self-reliance ironically makes possible, the replacement of a monetary economy with one based on barter and/or giving, the shedding of so many social reference points signifying such things as class and lifestyle, the radical tolerance for just about any form of self-expression that doesn’t involve physical violence, the fact that creativity and desire drive just about everything that happens, the culminating ecstatic yet symbolically neutral rituals of burning a 40 foot wooden effigy and a profoundly magnificent temple, the way the anarchy and chaos of it all strips one of an ability to focus on anything but the present and makes it impossible to hold any serious expectations of oneself or of this temporary and improvisatory city . . . and there’s more than that, much more, that I just don’t know how to put into words right now.