Burning Man 1998

June 14, 2005 | Share/Save

I was walking around in the middle of the desert at three in the morning with a friend of mine and we walked past a tent that had giant black lights set up in front of it that made the eyes and teeth of passersby glow purple, like some sort of demonic St. Elmo’s Fire. My friend grinned at me and I grinned at her, and she disappeared, and reappeared, and off to our right was a giant robotic walking machine stomping through the sand, with four legs below and four people drinking and dancing on its’ back. It paused every few steps and belched forth great clouds of flame. We giggled.

And everywhere we went, there were people walking around naked, and fucked up, and dressed like aliens or devils, and fires burning in pits in the sand. And I felt nauseated and sat down on a bale of hay, I don’t know for how long, and as we made our way through the crowd to warm ourselves by a fire, I noticed that everyone was talking about me. That is, somehow my mind was reaching out and grabbing every single spoken human phrase that floated through the night air and weaving them all together into a one continuous, negative, ongoing commentary on everything I was and was experiencing.

And it was more than just ‘negative’ - it was brutal and nasty. No matter where I went, I couldn’t escape it, for hours and hours and hours. If I took a step to the right, a girl spoke up: ‘Oh no, that guy! Who invited him? If I took a step to the left: ‘Ew, gross! There’s that pathetic excuse for a man. What does he want? If I backed up ‘Thank God, he’s leaving,’ if I walked forward, ‘Don’t you realize you’re ruining Burning Man for everyone? And even though I knew it was all just an illusion that my mind was creating, it was torture nonetheless, and I decided I had to go further out into the desert, away from all the people.

So I grabbed my friend and insisted that we walk away from the crowds, off into the dark, and we left the fires behind us and walked and walked and walked. And the moonlight was shining, and I felt kind of confused, and my friend was about twenty yards ahead of me, in the middle of the desert at four in the morning.

And I saw her swirling black coat from behind; and suddenly the whole back of my friend detached from her and turned to face me, whirling across the sands in the moonlight like some sort of malevolent gyroscope shrouded in black. And I couldn’t tell if it had a face, or a head, or arms or anything, just that it was coming closer and closer to me, and that it was not my friend, but some other being that had taken this opportunity to slip between worlds unnoticed and feed off of my panic and confusion and fear and pain. And I screamed out my friend’s name, and she turned, and suddenly the shadowy wraith disappeared, and everything was normal again.

We walked back to the playa where the revelry of the last night of Burning Man was in full swing, and as I looked at all around me I noticed what had escaped me before - this was Dante’s Inferno, this was Hell writ large and acted out by 16,000 people. Everywhere around us, everything was in flames; every landmark we had grown to know in this elaborate wooden city in the sand was now burning. And I looked up at the sky, at the twinkling lights, and I could see vast rings arranged in concentric circles all around the earth, cosmic platforms made of stars on which the gods perched as though poolside to observe human affairs from above. ‘Look, the rings of the rulers,’ I said. I can’t remember when I fell asleep.