My first Burn

Back in Honolulu, it's hard to describe the Burning Man experience in a way that doesn't seem slightly unhinged -- although it all makes perfect sense when you're there.

After amassing a long list of items to buy for the expedition, and plenty of friendly but puzzling advice from people I knew, who for various reasons were taking a break this year, I gathered everything I could manage during a busy afternoon of shopping in San Francisco -- items included ski goggles, hat, baby wipes, dust masks, and copious quantities of beef jerky and sports bars. I then found that my ride plans to get out to Black Rock City had fallen through, so resorted to that wondrous staple of early 21st century networking, Craigslist, to find someone to take me to the event. I took a phone call at about 11:30pm on Tuesday evening, a day and a half after arriving in town, and the fellow on the line said he was planning to leave in an hour's time, drive through the night, and set up camp at the playa on Wednesday morning. Sorted.

Mark, the guy who had responded to my ad on Craigslist, rolled up at about 1am in a blue sedan, and a trailer, both groaning with provisions, in contrast to which my two backpacks seemed absurdly minimalist. He was a Bay Area native and an entrepreneur between projects (which, a friend back in Honolulu astutely remarked, is San Francisco's answer to LA's ubiquitous unemployed actors). We made our way through the night toward Reno, and after sunrise, beyond into the Nevada desert, and the road-trip provided a good opportunity to exchange stories about our lives, and for Mark to entertain himself by asking me what I expected of the event, knowing that however well researched, my expectations could be but two dimensional sketches that were bound to be shredded by the blooming, buzzing confusion of the experience itself. (I noticed a gleam in the eye of almost any regular participant, or Burner, who discovered a Burning Man virgin in their midst.) As a four-time Burner, he took a certain pride in being prepared for any eventuality that might befall him in the desert, and was pleased to maintain the highest possible level of hedonism in the face of an extremely inhospitable environment. He also brought extras of pretty much everything, which was an unqualified blessing, because -- there's no two ways about it -- like most first timers, I was underprepared.

What can prepare you for Burning Man? I've been wondering about that, and although there are answers I could give, my conclusion is that if you could fully prepare for it, by definition, it wouldn't be as thoroughly worthwhile as it is. The scale and energy of the whole thing are so stupendous that, if they don't take you by surprise the first time, you're probably clinically dead.

That, it turns out, points to one of the signature themes underlying the event. Not indulgence, exactly, but joyful, artistic excess -- a half-million dollar wooden sculpture that looks like an architectural-scale Billy Idol hairstyle -- why the hell not? Three hundred cars, golf buggies, go-karts, school buses, and sailboats made up to look like pirate ships, dragons, UFOs, giant illuminated turtles, etc, most of them pounding out music, while cruising around a giant dustbowl? Naturally. 40,000 people celebrating life in a desert environment where ordinarily, no life survives? Now there's something you have to see to believe.

It's difficult to put in words, but if you combined a pagan feast; the Las Vegas strip; Disneyland reimagined by Dalí; Amsterdam; Woodstock; Mad Max; and the biggest rave you can imagine, you'd still be nowhere near it, but you would at least enjoyed the challenge of trying to mentally blend all that together. The day and night contrast sharply, not just in temperature (one's too hot, the other too cold) but in tone -- there's a shift from carnival to dance party, and each mode has its charms. Sleep, for me a necessary evil, was an agenda item which some participants appeared to find the wherewithal to forego for the duration.

I first heard about the phenomenon -- and it is a phenomenon -- two or three years ago from a splendid book called Breaking Open the Head (mentioned in this earlier post). The author, Daniel Pinchbeck, gives a great description, including the following observations: "Black Rock City is the psychedelic vision made visceral. [...] The event is a highly evolved, brilliantly organized follow-up to the Be-Ins and Happenings of the 1960s." (p. 81) Pinchbeck does well in his account, which I recommend highly, to capture the energy and intensity of the experience, but no number of written descriptions, photo essays or documentaries could possibly substitute for being there. Even so, it's an interesting challenge to try to cram into language the richness of it all. Burning Man is a spirited, as well as spiritual, celebration of life in all its variety and strangeness, with dazzling displays of artwork in every possible medium, ranging from the unmissably huge to the very understated, and shot through with experimentalism, irony, humour and surrealism.

There may be other places where you can awaken to your neighbours hula-hooping naked atop an enormous RV and singing "The Star Spangled Banner"; where you can watch hand puppets doing beatboxing and singing hip-hop; where you can breakfast for free on freshly shucked oysters beneath a canopy in the desert sun; where you can find a thousand pingpong balls with coloured lights inside them, arranged in 3D spokes so you lie underneath in the dark and have rainbow patterns shower onto your retina; where a serpent as long as 30 people spurts out synchronised bursts of flame; where 1,000 fire dancers put on a half-hour show followed by the ignition of a giant neon-lit effigy of a man, out of whose fiercely burning carcass emerge whistling dervishes of dust created by the heat... but if there are such places, I don't know about them.

Black Rock City is a marvel. While it exists, it is the fourth largest city in the state of Nevada. It's a vast camp arranged in a near circle, as on a clock, with each "hour", from 2:00 around to 10:00, a dusty road radiating from the centre; crossed by eight concentric streets (this year, in keeping with the designated art theme; Anxious, Brave, Chance, Destiny, Eager, Fate, Guess, and Hope). The Esplanade is the inner circle, where most of the larger art camps and villages (collections of camps) can be found. In the middle is a vast alkali dustbowl called the playa, with The Man in the middle, and populated by an ever-changing array of odd, mostly mobile art installations to explore day or night. Every corner and every road is populated with tents, vehicles, shade structures, and other temporary edifices housing all kinds of bars, clubs, stalls, shows, and creatively dressed, or undressed, people doing interesting things to, for and with each other for the hell of it.

It is impressive that the whole thing has managed to reach the scale it has -- about 39,000 people this year -- and yet it's still managed largely invisibly. The actual provided infrastructure and list of enforceable rules are minimal, but highly effective, and rely heavily on the "orgware" of the participants; a solid commitment to the evolved culture, which has its reasons and works exceedingly well. It occurred to me that this would be impossible to implement, fully realised, from scratch; but it's because it has been evolving for 20 years, and a core of returning participants seeds a strong sense of continuity and obligation to do the right thing for the community, that the event is able to keep running. For instance; apart from coffee, tea and ice sold at the Center Camp, money does not change hands on the playa. I was shocked to learn that this actually works -- that the gift economy can be, at least for a while, a reality. I was no less shocked to find that, unlike every other fair, concert or similar community event I've ever attended, where copious amounts of garbage appear underfoot within hours, after a week of outrageous partying, there was hardly any "matter out of place" in evidence: the ideal of "pack it in, pack it out" actually functions amid all the apparent chaos. The notion of "radical self-reliance" which BM proudly manifests of course depends on lots of consumption in advance, since you need to bring everything with you; and the event could be -- and is, by some -- roundly criticised for its profligate use of resources (especially the gas used for the art cars and pyrotechnics). Having weighed those criticisms, though, it seems to me a petty complaint in light of the broader purpose of the event. What feast, party or other worthwhile human celebration is fundamentally "sustainable" in its own right. That this could not continue all year round is beside the point. It isn't intended to continue year round.

Now, the art theme this year, which played no small part in my getting organised to actually attend, was "The Future: Hope and Fear". My colleagues at HRCFS and I had talked about staging a guerrilla campaign to pluralise every singular instance of the term "future" -- making it "futures" -- under the team name "S-cargo", with a logo somehow involving a snail. Yeah, well we thought it would be clever. But our duties to "Hawaii 2050" won out, so that didn't happen, although I did inexplicably find myself having lots of conversations on the playa about studying futures, and what that meant, and didn't mean, and so forth. An interesting question asked more than once was whether I thought the gifting economy could provide a viable model for a future society, or an element thereof. This is a topic I'll surely return to at some stage, because it's a really interesting thought. My reaction at the time was, it would be great to think so, but practically the reason it can work is because it's temporary, and everyone's pretty much on holiday from their "ordinary" lives. Currency -- the medium of exchange, whatever it may be -- evolves independently in different societies because barter is simply too inefficient to get everyone what they want. Money's an indispensible middleman. I'm still thinking about it, though, because what really counts here is the contrast between a spirit of mainly selfish accumulation of wealth, which prevails where most of us live, most of the time, and the largely selfless habit of gifting, and "paying it forward " which prevails at Burning Man. Speaking to someone this morning about this remarkable aspect of the experience, she speculated that the bigger idea of BM, in which people establish experimental communities operating on different values, may well become more common as they grow tired of the exploitation of mainstream capitalist culture. I think she may be right.

Now, despite the art theme, which gave rise to some very cool stuff, it is the conceptual and community level at which the Burn was most interesting from a futurist perspective, rather than the details of the art per se: I don't have other years to compare, but my impression was that the chosen theme didn't make a huge difference to what people produced; it tended to provide a loose inspiration, or a final gloss. The event is therefore likely to be equally interesting in any other year, and I urge futurists who haven't been to make it a priority -- if you're interested in being exposed to other ways to be, Burning Man is an inspiring and overwhelmingly energetic place to do that.

And as I reflect on the experience., there are two other ideas that stand out for me more than the "Hope and Fear" of the official theme. The first is serendipity. There is no much going on, all the time, that a saner strategy than trying to dart between scheduled events is simply to go with the flow of whatever you might stumble upon. There's plenty I missed that I would have liked to see (a thick program of scheduled events I barely glanced at all week), but each person's experience there is uniquely their own, and embracing that is one of its pleasures. (This is also true of life generally, but a heightened awareness of that fact is among the interesting lessons Burning Man gave me.)

The second theme is impermanence. On the playa, almost everything is moving, albeit at different rates. Most people get around on bikes, which are extremely useful in view of the scale of the event, but when you're exploring you need to be careful to park your wheels near some kind of landmark that looks like it might be there for at least an hour or two. Impermanence also comes through at a broader level, though, and there is a palpable life cycle to the build up and winding down of each day and night, and of the Burn as a whole. Mark stayed on several more days to volunteer with the cleanup, so I had to hitchhike back to civilisation, and shortly after being picked up by three kind souls in an RV, we were each given a parting gift through the window by a fellow Burner: a small purple box containing some of the ashes from The Man, and the salutary inscription:

Ashes to ashes
dust to dust
The Man
2006
RIP
Death is
the only
certainty

It boggles the mind to consider that this whole community springs forth in the wasteland of the playa each year, and that much of the art -- including vast installations representing thousands of hours of work -- are designed and produced specifically for the enjoyment of participants. And The Man himself is not the only ritual burning; many other artworks are also ceremonially sent off in the same way. The end of a particular art piece in this way is deliberately and appropriately celebrated with not a whimper, but a bang. For all we might say to bemoan the instant gratification ethos of disposable consumer culture, an equally insidious syndrome in our common experience is arguably a reluctance or inability to let go of things whose day is done. A life lived to the full is lived in recognition of its inevitable ending, and I liked the fact that there this was (implicitly) celebrated, eyes wide open, deepening rather than lessening the joy of the experience.

But overall, I think the best thing about this experience was that I used to feel sometimes like I was born too late, missing out on the major cultural shifts, experiments and innovations of the sixties and seventies. I don't feel that way quite so strongly anymore, because there is indeed a vibrant, growing group of cultural creatives looking for new ways to see, to express themselves, and develop in their lives and communities. It was inspiring and exciting to be a part of it in this case; and having completed what I now see as a reconnaissance mission, I'm looking forward to the chance to get back to the next incarnation of Black Rock City, and more fully engaging the Burning Man creed of active participation.

"Western civilisation"? Mushroom for improvement

As part of his project of eviscerating complacently held conventions, especially those in the popular news, the late, maverick stand-up comic Bill Hicks (01961-01994) used to do a routine fantasising about what a true drug story might be like, if the media ever cared -- or dared -- to report one: "Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration... that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather."

Seems improbable, doesn't it?

I was rather tickled, then, to read the following report today on so staid a newsmedia staple as the CNN website:

"Mystic mushrooms spawn magic event"
Tuesday, July 11, 2006, Posted: 12:57 a.m. EDT
CNN.com, Associated Press

A brief extract:

People who took an illegal drug made from mushrooms reported profound mystical experiences that led to behavior changes lasting for weeks -- all part of an experiment that recalls the psychedelic '60s.

Many of the 36 volunteers rated their reaction to a single dose of the drug, called psilocybin, as one of the most meaningful or spiritually significant experiences of their lives. Some compared it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent.

Such comments "just seemed unbelievable," said Roland Griffiths of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, the study's lead author.

Bill Hicks would surely have been as startled as I was to encounter an upbeat news report about psychedelic experience.

Now, there's an interesting tension in the fact that the highly subjective, personal, even spiritual, benefits of a substance like psilocybin have to pass muster in the scientific community in order to gain widespread recognition. No surprise, of course: the scientific method is the prevailing gold standard of intellectual credibility. But with or without science's imprimatur, those with first hand experience of the profound power of a mushroom trip are unlikely find these participants' responses at all difficult to believe. Indeed, since the "psychedelic '60s" a devoted subculture has persisted, or flowered if you will, for whom the potential learning, insight and pleasure offered by this and similar drugs has outweighed the possible legal penalties associated with them. The 90s rave scene, though probably more notorious for the mainstream advent of ecstasy, was also in part a locus of psychedelic revival, and though this has now gone off the boil, threads persist in culturally transformative projects such as the annual festival, Burning Man, about which I have heard much during my last two months in San Francisco. No, it will come as no shock at all to people who know something about this field that there may be positive, significant, sustainably life-enhancing possibilities inherent in the mushroom experience.

Of course, due to legal constraints, the type of research discussed in this article is very rare. A colleague of mine at the University of Hawaii, Dr Peter Miller, has undertaken a large project in this domain, without a laboratory element, but instead involving extensive surveys and interviews of people who use what he calls "psychoactive biotechnologies", which include magic mushrooms. I'm looking forward to the outcome of this research, and also my Hawaii futures colleague Jake Dunagan's thinking on the futures of the brain ("neurofutures"), which is likely to explore, among other things, the effects on political consciousness of psychedelic substances. In contemplating cultural change, there is much of interests for futurists to consider in the possibility of a significant revival or mainstreaming of hallucinogens.

It was the 01994 book Cyberia by cultural analyst Douglas Rushkoff that gave me an introduction to the intersection of psychedelic drugs and countercultural creativity. In it he documents the intertwining of psychedelia, electronic music, and the early Internet and hacker culture, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area. While the new golden age that this work idealistically and tantalisingly seemed to portend has not quite materialised, the connections Rushkoff makes between the hallucinogen-facilitated exploration of inner space and the outward development of promising new avenues of creativity and cultural evolution remain valid, fascinating, and important. The recent book What the Dormouse Said (I acquired a copy a couple of months back, but haven't yet read it) explores the connection between San Francisco's infamous period as the epicentre of the 60s counterculture (viz. Tom Wolfe's essential account of the adventures of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test ) and the subsequent blossoming of the computing and software industries down the road in Silicon Valley. Hallucinogens such as mushrooms are -- among other things, to be sure -- catalysts for personal, and by extension cultural, change. On acid, Stewart Brand famously envisaged the power of the view of the "whole earth" from space, and thereby helped push the environmental movement into the spotlight. Dreams have long been associated with invention and discovery (Mendeleyev's design for the periodic table of chemical elements, for example); at some level the hallucinogenic properties appear tap into a similar reservoir of subconscious wisdom and creativity.

We need not invoke anything supernatural, religious, mystical or transcendental here, although those aspects of the discussion are certainly worth close attention too -- the import of this news article is simply that certain mind-altering substances long regarded with suspicion and fear, for reasons that are not particularly well articulated, are now being found by scientists to be useful.

In the meantime, (illegal) drug use is virtually synonymous with decadence, social decay, escapism and irresponsibility. This is an ill informed, completely unhelpful, cultural prejudice. People that use drugs (illegal or otherwise) creatively, responsibly and productively are somehow eclipsed in the popular -- perhaps I should say political -- imagination by those who use them exploitatively or carelessly. It is utterly inaccurate to equate the use of hallucinogens with social parasitism; not everyone who drinks alcohol beats their wife, either; but this is not an argument anyone needs to make to justify having a beer. Convention is on the beer drinker's side.

A management consultant friend of mine, one of the most fastidious and relentlessly logical people I know, regularly uses psilocybin mushrooms to "rewire", generating and assimilating new insights, both intellectual and emotional. His is a deliberate and rigorous use of the drug's self-improvement potential, the antithesis of the starry-eyed hippie stereotype. For him, the trips are like a Pollock painting; not to be "read" too literally, but a densely packed message nonetheless. He won't accept every part of the mushroom experience for what it first appears to be, but carefully teases out signal from noise during later reflection.

Other hallucinogens, too, have much to offer, as recognised by various premodern cultures in a traditional and ritual context. There are tribes in Brazil which use a dimethyltryptamine-containing vine called ayahuasca as a sacrament in shamanic rituals. Peyote has long been used by native Americans as part of a spiritually intense rite of passage. Likewise for mushrooms in parts of Mexico. An episode of the riveting BBC TV documentary series called Tribe featured the intrepid Bruce Parry spending six weeks with the Babongo tribe in Gabon, West Africa, which culminated in a gruelling three-day induction ritual in which he ingested Iboga, a powerful naturally-occurring hallucinogen that prompts its user to experience the consequences for other people of their own past decisions. (I thought of this when I saw the film adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which features the "point of view gun", which blasts people with insights into the thoughts and feelings of the person pulling the trigger. It might take a little while before the neuroscience gets there, but won't it be interesting when that particular gadget hits the shelves...) Interestingly, iboga is used as the basis for Ibogaine, which helps recovering heroin addicts and alcoholics.

I would argue that the judicious use of substances in this way is symbolic of cultures that may be, in some important respects, wiser and more mature than our own; cultures that value fearless introspection; intimate connection to both community and place; cultivation of awareness and pursuit of non-material progress, and the improvement in relationships that results from this. The ritual context represents a culturally evolved setting that renders them psychologically safer and helps interpret the inner journey. Our own four decades of reticence regarding hallucinogens, in contrast, might be seen as a collective fear of the transformation that can result. Not to downplay the potential medical harm that can arise from psychedelic experience, but clearly, this alone is not sufficient to explain their suppression. Cars, alcohol, electricity, tall buildings, cigarettes, hamburgers -- every commonplace of technological civilisation can be deadly; we accept the risks because we have bought into the advantages. The possible advantages of wider usage of mushrooms are almost too delightful to imagine; the risks are, like any risks, simply the price of admission, and with care, can be mitigated.

So, where might this lead? It is commonly recognised, by those who pay attention to such things, that Western culture's hostility to using certain drugs -- if only for pleasure, let alone more constructive, therapeutic purposes -- has a use-by date. English comedian Ben Elton wrote a novel a few years ago called High Society which roundly criticised the British policy on illegal drugs, when so many people, including those who maintain a public stance of censure and disapproval, privately use them. Traffic, Steven Soderbergh's superb film released in 02000, highlighted the contradictions and tragic consequences of the United States' "war on drugs", the effects of which inevitably span not just across social strata within a country, but across borders to the places which serve as centres of production and distribution. Tagline: "No One Gets Away Clean".

There is a sense here that something's got to give; and it seems to me that to the extent the contemporary passion for self-improvement and the mania against hallucinogenic experience are profoundly at odds with one another, it is the latter rather than the former which must eventually give way. My own position on the "drug issue" is simple, and in no way original: decriminalise it all. Educate rather than prohibit; regulate production so people know what they're getting; tax it to pay for the regulatory apparatus, and hold people accountable for any irresponsible behaviour indulged under the influence, exactly the same way we do for alcohol. Now, I realise that to lump vastly differing chemical compounds together in discussion, and frame the debate around a broad freedom to engage in recreational drug usage, both of which sins I've committed in the last couple of paragraphs, begins to take us away from the point at hand. Heroin and crack cocaine, for instance, have nothing whatsoever to do with psilocybin mushrooms, and the fact that they are casually drafted into the same regulatory universe implies not only ignorance but also laziness on the part of legislators. I have no personal experience with LSD, but on the few occasions I've taken mushrooms, they have been entirely beneficial, and have given rise to insights and understandings of incalculable personal value. We certainly ought to be able to differentiate between different kinds of "drugs", which is rendered rather tricky when they're prohibited, so that following the rules virtually ensures having no idea what you're talking about.

There is much more that could be said, but others have said it earlier and better than I. Further reading for the uninitiated might begin with Daniel Pinchbeck's investigative memoir Breaking Open the Head, and the late hallucinevangelist Terence McKenna's The Archaic Revival. Meanwhile, however, insofar as this unassuming CNN article may be read as an early signal of growing public recognition of the value of psychedelic exploration, it is a precious example of very, very good news.