Things I want to remember about Burning Man
Things I want to remember about Burning Man before I forget, because I am afraid that I will:
I want to remember having to actually prepare for a trip. Buying shorts for the first time in I don’t know how long. Cutting, crimping, and soldering for the first time in years. Buying food, making food, freezing food, packing food. I want to remember chili with butternut squash and chard. Buying water. So much water.
I want to remember driving, up and over mountains, across desert, in the dark and along dusty tiny roads, slowing for little towns, to music, to Neutral Milk Hotel and Jay Electronica and Joy Division and Neon Indian and Led Zeppelin. The lonely echo of Handsome Furs across dark, empty hills.
I want to remember Burning Man. The waiting in line, the setting up of camp, the waking to dubstep art cars rolling by.
I want to remember the heat and the dust and the stiffness of my hair, caked and coated and grey. I want to remember falling asleep in a tent, on a couch lifted up on scaffolding. I want to remember squinting out across at the desert from the top of the man.
I want to remember the playa at night. The land so flat that everything around gets compressed into the horizon line. The visual tricks: whether something is close up or far away, whether something is art or human. The swarming of blinking bikes, blinking art cars, and blinking people across the desert, like some deep underwater scene flattened, then saturated. The flash of fire from the pillars and how it turned the glowing lights to people, the darkness to shadows, thrown long and deep across the dirt.
I want to remember Burning Man as a religion, not of gods but of light and music and fire.
I want to remember the awe at the strobing wheel of skeletons, crawling and rowing up into the sky. I want to remember the cage fights at Thunderdome, climbing up and seeing the mass of people shouting and cheering. I want to remember stumbling across the Dust City Diner and how that hunger swelled up from somewhere deep and forgotten.
I want to remember wandering in deep playa and thinking how this must be what it feels like to be lost in space, if space were dimensionless, flat.
I want to remember staring at my boots, lit by laces of EL wire, watching them turn that pale white. I want remember the contrast between the crowd and the crush and the vast and the quiet. I want to remember that sense of everyone trying desperately to look different, but gathering to be coated and dulled back to the same palette.
And I want to remember that word, gathering, not just as an event, but an action, a way to draw these loose threads up together, a way to try and stretch your arms and wrap them around everything and pull it all back into you.
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