BM 2010.

It was like watching the rise and fall of a city in fast forward. We arrived as camps were building up their stages and shade structures; by the end of the week, we watched as it all got broken down. In between those two endpoints, an entire city of 50,000 people existed and thrived. There was a "downtown" at Center Camp where you could buy coffee and ice (the only two commodities that could be purchased with money- priorities, priorities); there were "suburbs" of tents and camps stretching out into the desert; there were rangers whose job it was to keep order and there was a DMV that registered official Mutant Vehicles; there were workshops and events at all hours of the day, bars, clubs, art galleries, a Census, and services of every kind, based purely on human ingenuity and what could logistically be hauled out into the middle of an alkaline desert- which was, surprisingly, a lot.

There was also the equivalent of a place of worship, which was the Temple- by far my favorite place on the playa. The Temple, like the Man, goes up in flames at the end of the week each year. Before it burns, it is a place where people can go to leave offerings, pray, grieve, and write on the walls. I went out to the Temple every day, usually at dusk when the playa would start settling into the quiet transition between midday heat and nighttime revelry.

At the Temple, Burning Man was just as much about mourning as it was about hedonism- two different forms of letting go. And again, at the Temple, Black Rock City was a city, as with any city. If you open the walls to the people, they will write love poems, they will write regrets and I miss you's, they will write hopes for themselves and others. They will write declarations of pride, joy, heartache, and triumph. Some of them will tag with Sharpies and spray paint. They will vent anger. They will write responses to each other. They will write things that they find they can't say.

(What is it about sharing it that helps to let it go? It's like a large-scale, written attempt at integration, and comfort through shared experience and resonance- knowing that your experience is not unique, even as you are alone with it. It is as if, together, people are saying to one another, I hear you.)

We camped with Vulcantown, the Burning Man contingent of a lot of fire spinners, jugglers, and object manipulators who live at the Vulcan in Oakland. Vulcantown was a part of the "inner circle" at Conclave, the massive fire show that happens before the Man burns on Saturday night, so we got to be as close to the Man as it was possible to get. The fireworks literally landed around us, like showers of fireflies, as they fell from the sky. Then a blinding dust storm kicked up as the Man collapsed into a giant bonfire, and the storm turned everything around me into a windy, howling orange-black punctuated by the glow of the fire, the shadows of other people, and the disembodied techno music from passing art cars. I had never been part of such an alien landscape in my life. That was the point at which I stopped taking photos. I couldn't even try; I just wanted to be there; and suddenly there was a very clear limit as to what I could ever hope to document.