About the trip: I want to show you pictures. But that’s just lazy, though I’ll probably do it anyway. It seems because I make my living composing and typing out all the crap in my head out for the purpose of selling new, exciting carpet patterns and toilets that clean your ass with a lovely shot of purfumed water (these are my clients, god love ‘em), I seem to have this mental logjam working when writing anything for myself. Stuff on this site included. But damnit, I’m going to try. Starting with this:
Some background, first. At Burning Man, lots of things, well, burn. As the name implies. Artwork, temporary shelters, signs, and makeshift shower pallettes—and of course, the effigy of the man, and the temple.
The temple - and it burning down - is my favorite part of the entire event.
In case you haven’t seen this thing or heard about it, every year artist David Best creates plans for a structure to be built of negative plywood cutout pieces from those little 3-d dinosaur-bone puzzles you find at the discovery store. The effect, after these huge sheets and smaller pieces and whatnot are puzzled together, is an incredibly lacy-looking, intricate structure that really doesn’t exist anywhere else that I know of. It’s truly awe-inspiring. And, because of its focus, gut-wrenchingly solemn.
The temple is different every year. Two years ago, it was the temple of joy - several stories tall with razor point spires and cupolas that would swallow a normal building. This year, they built it long and low, with tea-garden like bridges. It was called the temple of sorrow. Which is probably more aptly named than the temple of joy, because sorrow is what it attracts.
Here’s what I wrote down while I was there:
Everything about this place makes me cry. I cried on the way here, tears streaming out of my eyes as I pedaled across the impossibly huge desert. I cried as I walked up, losing all but one of the 5 people I came with - everyone scattering silently, instantly in the dust. There are hundreds of people here. All of them heavily strolling in a reverance, a plodding, slow-motion solemnity that I’ve never seen anywhere else. All of them dead quiet, or murmering, whispering, making the unmistakable sounds of grief. Sobs. Wails. The heavy sniffing of the modest.
This is a place built, intentionally, for pain. Tacked to the swiss-cheese walls of the structure are notes. Pictures. A wedding dress. Someone’s parents shut themselves in their garage one day, and started up the car. They’re gone. Their Olan Mills wedding picture is here, fading in the sun. Someone’s best friend died in a car accident a month ago. Her picture is here. Someone has offered two feet of their hair, dreaded, bundled with a journal. I can’t even bring myself to look at the note next to the wedding dress. I’m crying too hard to see already.
Among all of that, what gets me the most are the inscriptions. Written in sharpie, in pencil, in gel ink, covering every reachable inch of the temple, in a thousand differend hands, are pleadings for forgiveness - and grantings of absolution. Please forgive me for turning my back on my family. Please release me from my addiction. Please help me understand my life. And conversely, I forgive you (dad, mom, sarah, john…) for leaving. I forgive you for hurting me. I forgive you for never noticing.
I am the whole time overtaken by the sorrow around me—the women huddled in a circle, holding hands and shaking, the man on the ground doubled over with a puddle of muddy tears in front of him. But I am and at the same time wonderfully, gloriously thankful that I cannot think of a single person whom I need to forgive. I realize that, on the whole, my life has been pretty great. Nothing to complain about, really. And that makes me cry harder.
Then, I feel the need to contribute something. So I find an empty spot down low, and write a few lines for Christopher. He doesn’t even know. And I can’t tell him what I asked for, on his behalf, but I know that it was appropriate. Needed. And something he couldn’t ask for himself.
On the final night of the event, they burn the temple down. The man burns the night before, and is all blinking lights and frenzied festivity. Fire twirlers and fireworks, flashbulb pops and hoopla. The temple burn is eerily silent. Holy, in a way. A towering inferno of flame that erupts suddenly, then releases a plume of millions of tiny, glowing emebers that lift off and float away. Some move quickly, like theyr’e in a hurry to get home and burn out. Some linger, dangerously grazing the tops of heads before settling on a low orbit and slowing dying away.
Christopher grabs my shoulder and says “You see those? Those are all those people’s messages.”
He’s right.
And little does he know that one of them belonged only to him.