Nomad Codes

I could not resist categorical identification: Pirates . Given the year’s theme, I had expected to see many such crews: loud, obnoxious young men walking a dangerous line between honoring the anarchist sodomites of yore and using a tired Hollywood cartoon to float stupid frat-boy antics. But this was my first encounter.
    Within moments I heard, or rather sensed, a large animal hurtling my way. In an instant, I was tackled by a pirate. He slapped and rolled me around, slobbered curses down my snorkel, and mimed my decapitation by pressing a red plastic sword against my neck, none too gently sliding it across my Adam’s apple. I remained perfectly still throughout this commotion, registering but not reacting to it, and because padmasana is an extremely stable posture, I kept my shape even as I was rolled around in the dust like a human pretzel. After capering around for a minute or so, the pirate politely set me back on my haunches and ran off to enjoy further escapades. I immediately recommitted to the posture and my breath, and sat for another half hour or so.
    For all of Burning Man’s rhetoric of participation, such spontaneous interminglings of theme are relatively infrequent. One commonly enters into another’s “trip,” but two trips don’t often collide with such intensity, and rarely pass into physical contact without consent. To this day, I blaze with admiration for my pirate’s aggressive lack of restraint, his perfectly Zen instinct for the performative possibilities of the moment—possibilities that were not only comic, but cosmic as well. I flashed on the Tibetan practice of chöd , wherein the yogi offers his body to bloodthirsty, blade-wielding demons in order to separate himself from self-clinging.
    I suspect my pirate had no idea of chöd, nor of the mahavidya Chinnamasta, a Tantric goddess pictured with her own decapitated head in her hand, as blood spurts from her neck into her own mouth. But no matter: the fellow had split me open. I was facing the hot sun, and the glow behind my eyelids began to intensify, slowly swallowing me into a sad ecstasy. Inhaling and exhaling the light, I felt my heart open to the massive, glorious pain of all the beings in this world. There I sat, with a serene broken heart, the bands of my Donald Duck flippers cutting into my ankles and my magenta Toys-R-Us face mask slowly filling with tears. Gradually the trance passed. I could hear people stopping to take snapshots, and felt the stirrings of pride. But these feelings and sensations just melted into the red ball of yearning absurdity that the moment had become.

THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE

    At the core of Burning Man’s spiritual wager is the commanding claim of personal experience. “Beyond belief, beyond the dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical ideas of religion, there is immediate experience,” wrote Larry Harvey. [5] Newbies quickly learn that status and fun are not to be gained through familiar modes of consumption or spectatorship. Instead, participation, spontaneity, and immediacy are prized, even (or especially) at the sizable risk of delirium, discomfort, or the sort of excess that your parents might call “making a fool of yourself.”
    At its most basic level, the cult of experience makes itself known through a continual parade of intense and not-altogether-pleasant physical sensations: the brain-numbing heat and Porta-potty stink, the crusty snot and the dry, cracked feet. These offer continual reminders to you and your body that something is definitely going on here. The cult also manifests itself in the pervasive mode of seduction: the blinky light or exotic body or hilarious performance that seeks to distract you from whatever goal or concept you were riding in order to draw you ever more deeply into the wildfire of energetic activity blazing in the Here and Now. Burning Man represents the ultimate attention economy: what participants exchange are the willingness, and the opportunities, to submit to new experiences. These experiences in turn create stories, which become the coin of the realm, fetishes traded over the fire, always pointing back to the mysterium tremendum of consciousness itself.
    The cult of experience demands a Sisyphean struggle. Human beings are habit-breeding machines, and no more so than in our patterns of thought, sensation, and perception. Though the Dalai Lama might taste something like “pure experience” on his meditation pillow now and then, humans sink and swim along