Burning Man 2007, by Daniel Pinchbeck:

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This year I attended my eighth straight Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. It was an awesome event, featuring a lunar eclipse, an early act of arson perpetrated on the festival's iconic stick figure, a more-than-double rainbow, and some of the greatest works of art I have ever seen, touched, jumped on, and danced around. I stayed at Entheon Village, one of the largest camps on the Playa, bringing together 400 people from around the US and the world. Entheon featured several domes and stages, a nightly environmental film program, a cardboard zendo for meditation, a goddess temple, and a full kitchen serving delicious Vegan food to the entire camp. Entheon brought together and synergized different groups that I have known and camped with before, including 'tribes' from Salt Lake City (rabble-rousing former Mormons turned shaman-artists), North Carolina, and the North West (visionary vibesters responsible for a giant 'art car' in the form of a fire-breathing, copper-skinned dragon), scientists from MIT (my friend Ryan Wartena's nanotechnology projects have been featured on the cover of science magazines ­ his website is growingarchitecture.com), and Djs, jam bands, visual artists, and performing artists from the Bay Area.

Monday night, Burning Man hosted the lunar eclipse, in a dark night sky of pinwheeling galaxies and shimmering constellations. As the earth's shadow covered the full moon, this most familiar of all stellar bodies was revealed as what it is without the usual bright reflective glare: An orb of rock, like a grape hanging up there, not even too far away from us. Symbolically, the moon represents projections and illusions ­ the two-hour eclipse seemed like a chance to withdraw all projections, an opportunity to see beyond the veil of our usual concepts and illusory dreams.

I was sitting with three friends in deep desert watching the extinguished moon in meditative silence when we noted a bright yellow glow far in the distance. A few people ran past us, gripped by an unusual urgency, and one slowed briefly to tell us, 'The Man is burning ­he's burning right now! This is not a joke!' We got on our bikes and rode to the center of Black Rock City, where, indeed, a fire was spreading across the body of the Man, as firemen and Rangers arrived and sprinklers streamed water across it.

Burning Man generally offers an experience of controlled chaos, but this was uncontrolled chaos, and there was an ambiance of exhilaration as well as anxiety around the unexpected destruction of the event's archetypal centerpiece.

Watching the Man get reduced to a charred, carbonized skeleton with the extinguished moon above his shoulder was doubly surreal. The event seemed rife with symbolism. If the lunar eclipse seemed to suggest a cosmic unveiling or withdrawal of projection, the Man's sudden reduction to a burnt husk reinforced that idea. Any construct we might want to hold onto, any concept in which we might seek solace or meaning, seemed insubstantial and delusive, ultimately untenable. As Karl Marx once noted, 'All that is solid melts into air.' I suspected the arsonist had been touched with true 'lunacy,' moon-madness

The early destruction of the Man resonated with something I often think about and, in my anarchist heart of hearts, increasingly yearn for: the collapse of centralized authority. These days, one of my favorite books is Society without a State, a classic work by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres. Clastres argues that tribal groups around the world were organized in such a way that they did not allow for the emergence of hierarchical relations of power and obedience, dominance and submission. The Chief in a tribe was the best listener and talker, and the most gifted mediator, but he had no power to command others to do his bidding, and would get laughed at if he tried. Clastres describes how the Chief's role was to tell the myths and stories of the tribe, even though nobody paid his constant prattling much attention. This is intriguingly similar to the function of television in our mass society, which spews out a continual smog of capitalist propaganda. Perhaps some sort of semi-articulate background noise is the minimum requisite for social cohesion.

In fact, the modern world is suffering from a deep crisis of legitimacy. The program of permanent war instituted by the US government - the war on Iraq, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, etc. - has undermined our moral standing in the world, and created a void of meaningful authority. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, from their excellent book Multitude, war 'is becoming the primary organizing principle of society, and politics merely one of its means or guises.' (For more on my perspective on our legitimation crisis and on Multitude, please read my latest column in Conscious Choice magazine, Life During Wartime, ). Rule by force has replaced rule by law, with devastating consequences.

Instead of realizing that dominance is our civilization's historical 'trip', we have projected our ideology of power relations onto all other cultures. My own feeling is that the non-hierarchical 'society without a state' is the natural way of being for humanity; after all, tribal cultures have been around far longer ­ tens of thousands of years longer ­ than dominator civilizations. As I will discuss in my next book, profound new media technologies often lead to new forms of social organization. Just as the Guternberg printing press allowed for the emergence of mass democracy, so the emergence of the Internet suggests a different model of governance. We now have the potential to transition to a direct democracy and trust-based exchange system combined with a precise utilization of resources a sustainable planetary culture. The window of opportunity for making such a shift may appear within the next few years.

In any event, I felt a small disappointment when I found out, over the next few days, that the Man would be rebuilt before Saturday. I had already become attached to the idea of his absence, a lacuna or abyss at the center, projecting not power but patriarchal meltdown. In the end, I enjoyed the second burn as well, partially for its anticlimactic atmosphere.

-- Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012

View more information about Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl

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