a poem/memoir of BM2007

[yacman]

It feels impossible, but this will be my sixth year. I thought I'd post my
memoir from 2007, which I passed around in 2008. I hope to read it at a venue or two on the Playa this year. Please let me know if you know of any appropriate venues. (I've already Emailed Magenta the spoken word person for center camp)

I'm staying, as usual, in Hushville again. Stop by say and hello, if you're
so-inclined.

Enjoy, and have a great burn.
Scot Bastian AKA Master Nashwan


Sand Serpents, Dust Devils, and Leprechauns
a memoir of Burning Man 2007

by Scot Bastian © 2008
Hushville, Seattle, WA
[email protected]

I wake up in a dusty tent—too hot to sleep. Crawl outside and stretch.
I come to the desert to play with my friends—my tribe. To give. To love. For a
time, laughter and song. Like a dream—it is a dream. I blink. I walk up the
hill—it feels like a hill. Who would have ever thought that desert latrines
would play music?

Burning Man is the freemartin of the default world. Once a lake, but now a
desert plain. A flat, dusty, chalkboard where the leprechauns come to play
games. There are no sidewalks, only playgrounds. The streets are curved,
confounding a sense of direction. Every street circles or points to the Man.

We play the games, but the desert makes the rules. You will not move too fast—it
is too hot. You will stop and drink water. You will wear sunblock or clothing—or
you will burn. The desert is the opposite of a shopping mall.

A pile of money has no utility here. You can't eat it. You can't spend it. It is
only debris—capitalist MOOP. In the desert we share.

We are the leprechauns of the planet.
Our footprints erased by the wind.
Little people—yet lumbering giants.

It approaches dawn as I bicycle toward the playa. It is cool now. I feel the
vibration of my tires as they rotate in time with the never-ending
thumpada-thumpada-thump of rave camps where sleep is apparently banned. I pass
the esplanade to the playa and a smiling gaggle of pink puffery on bicycles
floats by, talking, laughing, and singing. They nod and veer sideways, leaving a
trail of happy-dust in their wake. I carry with me the blur of thousands who
have done the same. Playa children sharing temporary connections. Polar bonds
like water molecules—never frozen, always moving. Like the symbiotic exchange of
hummingbirds feeding on flowers we absorb each other's essence—drinking deeply.

In the default world these interactions feel like painful collisions bouncing
off each other. Brownian motion. Touches without bonds. But in the desert, we
touch, make love, and move on, the moment fading like falling dust.

I bicycle past the temple, the bleeding heart of the playa, where the
leprechauns lament the past and reach for the future. Hope rides like a surfer
on a wave. The lost friend, the departed lover, the growing cancer. There is
more nudity here than anywhere else on the playa—naked souls.

Cindy forgive me

Goodbye Father

Please let me smile again

Please make my lover's AIDS go away—and mine too

The sun doesn't smile—but it burns, exposing all.
There is no sunscreen that will protect burning hearts.

I bicycle on.

A bird flies over—curious. There is life here. The dust is alive.
Puddles of loose sand—sand serpents—writhe on the playa surface. A swirling dust
devil crawls across careening sideways stinging the ground with its scorpion
tail. Another follows, and a third. They chase each other before dissipating,
exhausted, at the edge of the plain. Then the dust is animated by a sudden wind.
A blizzard of alkali stirred by a weird witch, transforming dust devil to
hurricane. Squinting. I cannot inhale. The dust bites. A dust storm
is like a blizzard without the cold. Sand doesn't melt, it stings your eyes and
coats your throat. Thirsty. Dry. I cough.

Thoreau reduced our needs to four elements:
Food, fuel, clothing and shelter.
But Thoreau was wrong, for in the desert I am reduced to the minimal:
Thirst, heat, wind and dust.
The antithesis of Thoreau—yet I live.

The wind shifts and rain, an absurd concept in the desert, threatens, but does
not harm. It seems impossible that playa dust could become playa mud—but it is
not unknown. Not today. Only a few intrepid drops pass through. Most disappear
before they touch the ground—stolen by the wind. After a time, the wind relents
and the dust settles. Dust masks disappear and goggles are put away. We have
survived yet another day. Someone looks up. An atmospheric prism—a miracle of
color. And one miracle encapsulates another: A double rainbow.

We leprechauns dance, for the pot of gold is in our hearts.

They say that we love our pets because, no matter our faults, they love us
unconditionally. But the desert doesn't care. The desert has no time for
narcissism. It will simply ignore your vanity until you die. We are the desert's
pets.

I bicycle past the center camp.

A maiden's eyes borrow the blue of the sky as she dances the pain away. A desert
wraith with helium heels and electric feet powered by a butterfly heart, she
whirls in circles with a skip in the middle, barely touching the ground. She's
a B-side girl in a flipside world. At Burning Man her walk is a freedom-dance.
If only, she dreams, I could walk at home this way. But in the default world
there are cracks in the sidewalks, and curbs on the streets. Dance on desert
dervish—you are welcome here.

I am back at camp and the beer tastes good. My shade structure has failed, so I
share with my neighbors. The heck with self-reliance, "I've always relied on the
kindness of Burners," I muse. My eyes close and I live inside my head a
while—not a bad place to be.

I drift...

...Will we one day burn in the Gobi Desert?
Or build a snowman in Antarctica—and melt it?
Will it be called Cool Man?
Will we travel to the Moon, Mars, or even the stars?
Will the leprechauns one day dance with E.T.?...
...I awaken to a cheer: The sun has gone down!
The evening revelry begins.

I sing the playa electric!—to borrow, and twist, a phrase. Swarming with
glow-sticks and LEDs—colors borrowed from the afternoon rainbows—nothing could
be more natural. The lights are a mad impressionist painting. A delirious Aurora
Borealis on the Fourth of July. A frenzy of fireflies and glow worms gone
insane—they've taken too much LSD and snapped—popcorn in the mind of God. Like
a child who holds his breath and presses on his eyes. I wonder how hallucinogens
could possibly enhance this experience?

I fly across the plain, swerving to avoid mutant vehicles and poorly-lit
pedestrians, nearly becoming mired in a playa serpent—but I struggle through. I
travel to a quieter place in the deep playa, where the air is calm and the noise
more distant—more conducive to thought.

When I have a thought in the poignancy of the here-and-now, stripped of
antecedents, knowing no future direction, it becomes a precious thing. As
special and temporal as melting wax on a candle, the life of a mayfly, or a
first kiss. My words make love to the universe, and the universe returns the
favor.

We both get lucky.

I marvel at the ashen-gray moon, the sun's lantern—her desolate sister—a relic
of the past. Last night we were treated to a full eclipse, but tonight it glows
unobstructed. It seems to loom larger when near the horizon. An optical
illusion, I'm told, but sometimes illusions can be our best friends. I could
carve my initials on the moon, but not the sun. Unlike the man-in-the-moon there
is no face-in-the-sun. The sun has no bumps or pocks. It is a featureless mass
of fire. The sun is the bright, opaque, future. You cannot stare directly at the
future. It is too bright. Too formless. Too fluid. My emotions thaw in the
swelter faster than a snowflake on the sand. My thoughts form and are
immediately erased and burned. They liquefy like butter in a frying pan, in a
bubbling puddle of confused musings and deep-fried conjectures.

I am astonished at the technology and sublime creativity on the playa. Perhaps,
I will one day build a dragon or a monkey swing—but I doubt it. For I am a
dabbler in words, trying to elicit memories of the past and write the ineffable
thoughts to bootstrap into the future. But exactly what is it I search for? An
epiphany? A catharsis? A journey? A plan? A pat on the head from the sky?

I bicycle toward the fence on the border of the playa and squint at the horizon,
hoping to see what comes. The world never stops turning. Tomorrow displaces
today, fading into yesterday. Ad infinitum. The days are not cyclic—they are a
treadmill. I spin the wheel, seeming to go nowhere, yet the world turns.
Galileo was wrong. I am the center of my universe—it's all a matter of
perspective.

Imagine if King Solomon's swordsman had acted on his orders too quickly—before
judgment had been rendered? Sometimes thoughts must be taken gradually. I must
savor the gradual unfolding of the universe, lest the baby be sliced in half.
Time must be consumed slowly, like fine wine, or licked, like a popsicle.
Wisdom has its own pace—not always an epiphany. You cannot swallow an ocean, nor
drink from a fire hose.

Sometimes the wind of your thoughts has to blow for a while.

Robert Frost chose the road less-traveled, which made all the difference. But on
the desert plain there are infinite roads, radiating in all directions. And
yet...I am drawn to the east. I seek the burning, bleeding, edge of tomorrow,
where the sun is always at the horizon, hugging the cusp of dawn. And although
the colors of the sunset are the same as the colors of the dawn—they are
different—for the sunset recedes behind, shrinking, but the dawn will ever be
new. Soon the man will burn, signaling the passing of another year.

The sun seems the same, but I have changed.

The man will burn.
The man will burn.
The man will burn.
The man will burn.

And so will I.