This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty

Some notes taken from a book about that experiment in a self-organizing culture and ephemeral city-springing, This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty. And the subtitle is:

page 272
What I'm picking up from Larry's new dispensation [more anti-consumerist and political activism... BM used to be apolitical event] struck me as antithetical to what I originally found interesting about Burning Man--that it offered a seeking and celebration of creative expression and liberated experience as a key to brain change and a means to search for what one might call the sacred. There are times, though, when Larry and I are feeling the same things. "We are beings, created things," Larry tells me. "We're the products of genetic mutation, and we're infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone's gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress," he surmises, "might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn't make any sense by the world's standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed--each one different. A wed is simply an unwanted plant. It's a human category. There's no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can't get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That's the problem everyone faces."

As he looks around at Burning Man, Larry sees lots of weeds essaying things with no apparent practical purpose. "It's weeds, but it's their weeds. Who knows what that leads to? Maybe nothing. But unless people are given that opportunity they will never find out. If their judgments are always governed by the world's standards, they might never find that one thing they are brilliant at, that they were born to do, and that's the greatest tragedy of all--the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote of. That just means that they never discovered what they were meant to do with the transcendent faith that they were meant to do that something. And that's been the moral of my life."

There's a lot I could argue with Larry about, but not that.

page 273
[What is it?] This book, I hope, provides some answers to that question. It's a place for human beings to live vividly free lives and have--as Larry used to recognize--experiences that are fundamental, unconditional, marvelous, and worth a thousand lectures on why one ought not to shop at Wal-Mart. [Kind of giving Larry a jab on that last bit.]

page 274
Interactive is the buzzword for Burning Man-style art, defined by BRAF's Jessica Bobier as "art that blurs the line between artists and audience, with collaboration in the creation or the experience of the piece. Art that requires the action of a participant to complete the piece. It represents the opportunity for people to come together and incites them to interact with one another, whether directly because they are needed to make something happen, or just something so exciting it makes people gather, brings them together." It fits in smoothly with the old Burning Man dispensation: art that creates community, art that gives you an opportunity to have an experience other than spectating.

page 282
It didn't start out as an art festival. It didn't really start as anything but an act and an excuse to gather. "What is art, you know?" muses Michael Michael on the meaning of this train he's riding. "Why art at Burning Man? What is this art thing? There's something much larger here. Art is a vehicle, a symptom of something bigger occurring. It's spreading beyond the desert, beyond the playa. It's a way of being, of thinking, to change a person: That's the real story, the real thing that's happening."

The change--that knowledge within that you no longer have to be and think and act as you previously been and thought and acted if you don't wish to--is a mystery, and Burning Man has no monopoly on the technology of generating it. It can come in an instant like a thief in the night, like Christ, or after years of difficult discipline, like those spent with a yogi master, but what's important is that it can happen and that the technologies of change exist and Burning Man is very, very good at reminding people of that.

page 280
Chris Radcliffe: "You don't need to go to Puerto Vallarta and lay on the beach and eat fish and drink frozen daiquiris and read Jacqueline Susann novels. You can have a primary experience of existence instead of something processed and fed back to you. Someone once said to me, if you're being entertained, you're not having any fun. And that's perfectly right. What we were doing was a very primary thing."

The main blog is at Crossroads Dispatches; this is accompaniment blog for longer excerpts cited there.

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