| Seattle, Oct. 6, 2001 Friends, Romans, Cousins, Well, what is there to say, really? Okay, I'll think of something. First, though, about the photo above, from a Wired photo gallery of Burning Man 2001. Burning Man, as you probably know, is an annual gathering in the Nevada high desert where 25,000 people do just about whatever they want except harm one another. Many of you have seen the photos of "the man" burning, which I saw in reality for the first time this year. That was astonishing in itself, with the entirety of Black Rock City turning themselves into a human stadium as the sun set over the western range, and the Pisces full moon rose over the desert playa, and fire dancers began their twirling, flaming, shimmying, pelvic acrobatics, and fire cannons shot bursts 150 feet into the night sky. And then, the burning of the man, as fireworks flared from his arms and legs, lit in green and purple neon, standing six stories above us, and he seemed to smile triumphantly or just gleefully, and the whole creature and its pyramid base, a monument, really, burst into flames. The feeling was a cross between being at an ancient pagan ritual, a big-ten college football game and the rodeo, yet the message, the feeling, the reality, was celebrating the fire of transformation and release. The next night, Sunday, was different. Many people had already left the city, heading home. The spectacular weather of the prior night had been replaced by raging dust white-outs that looked like snow... for all the world, the world looked and felt like being lost in the middle of a Buffalo blizzard... but it was dry, and hot, and strange. Another burnable art creation, called the mausoleum by most people but really, a tribute and memorial to the dead, had been created by Bay-area artist David Best. Built three stories high from 600 sheets of die-cut negatives left over from wood toy manufacturing, it was assembled in the shape of a Japanese temple, with altars and surrounded by lamp-lit pagodas over huge bins of tiny blocks on which we could write the names of the dead we had known, which would burn with the temple. Over the course of the week, and particularly the last two days, the temple to the dead became a focus of Burning Man life, a hub of consciousness devoted to grieving and awareness of transitions: to transience, the ending of time, of entering worlds beyond. On Sunday afternoon, my friends and I returned to contribute the names we knew. The center altar within the temple was devoted to those who had taken their own lives, and Best, in an impromteau talk on Sunday evening, told the story of a young friend who had done this a little before last year's festival, which had inspired the creation. After the talk, I began writing names on blocks: of relatives, of friends, of animals, of people I had admired but not known. Block after block, written in a black dry-mark pen I had found that afternoon. I placed them in their appropriate sanctuaries: my grandfather and Lizzy in the suicide altar, the rest with the names of the souls who had died naturally or been killed by some other cause. Then we went back to our camp for dinner. A few hours later, we set out through the blazing dust that night to return, four of us, groping across the playa wearing respirators and goggles and hoods like something from a scene from Dune. Normally, one navigates the playa by the neon-lit man at the center, but he was gone, and it was not possible to see more than a hundred feet ahead. So, we walked not knowing quite what direction to head but plunging into the white swarm of darkness and venturing the mile or two into the wind and dust elements with no bearings, just a little faith. Eventually we arrived at an encampment of about a thousand people and bicycles and art cars, and then saw Black Rock Rangers holding the fire line and someone making announcements on a bullhorn saying that when the storm settled down a little, we would burn the mausoleum. There was no rush; something two hours late at Burning Man might even be early. 
Eric at Burning Man, Sunday night.
Photo by Angela Mahan. | We waited about an hour, sitting or laying on the dust surface of the planet, camped next to a school bus, as people gathered around us. The storm seemed to fade, the air was more still and the crowd was growing larger. The goggles and dust filters weren't quite necessary. And then, standing up, we could see the figure of someone moving inside the temple space with flame and then, a few moments later, the temple was ablaze. It burned like nothing I have ever seen burn: houses, cars, bonfires, supermarkets, Lundy Brothers restaurant in Brooklyn: it was made to burn. | Hot and orange and bright against the shadows of its own delicate, meticulous design, it lit up the chaotic white-frosted night and seemed to grow hotter and more fierce, taking with it all the names of the dead, between six and ten thousand names and photos and memorabilia of their lives rising into the invisible atmosphere far above in a torrent of gas and energy and minds witnessing the strangeness of such fragile beauty burning, surrendering itself to an even greater wonder, until finally it began to collapse on itself, and the crowd surged inward and surrounded the embers, and people watched and danced and drummed and spoke to one another above the din, or softly in the outer distance. The wind and dust seemed to have stopped. I imagined what those watching at a distance saw, from center camp or their home camps, the firelight penetrating the thick air, a huge silent orange dome in the horizon. Finally we wandered back to our camp, passing the site of the prior night's burn, stopping to meet people who had gotten lost or delayed because of the storm, walking through what was left of the Babylonian orgy of light, sound and art on the promenade, and went home to sleep. Everyone lived to tell the story. 
Hermann Haindl's The Tower | The Tower A week later, the Burning Man concept, so elusive to so many people ("isn't it negative to burn a model of a man?" "why would you do that?"), would be witnessed and experienced and broadcast, in its darkest shadow form, by the world. Monuments of society would be burned, but not in effigy: so many commentators claimed the towers were "symbols" of our society; of course, everything is a symbol on some level, but the people drinking coffee on the 83rd floor were just people drinking coffee. But somehow media culture and our own media-trained intellects transposed this into some kind of representational message. | We could say that because many people have gone through a transition and made a choice to open their hearts and minds because of what happened, and to find community -- either out of necessity, in New York City, or by choice, everywhere else -- we "got the message of the symbol." But really, a Tarot card is a symbol; an astrology chart for an event is a symbol; two buildings each one-fifth of a mile high crumbling to dust is "an actual scene from real life," in the words of The Onion -- but the "scene" part reminds us that mostly we got the message in pictures, symbols yet, but conveying something quite real. For millions of people who live in Manhattan and indeed much of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, many parts of which had direct views of the World Trade Center, they were eyewitnesses; Eric Nicolas tells me that in the East Village where he lives, people are still freaked, and the air stinks (usually described as burned rubber and steel); the stench has reached New Jersey. If polyvinyl chloride burned, and it did, there is dioxin; there is surely asbestos and PCBs; these are real. There are about six thousand bodies buried in the charnel. Burning Man, that is, the burning of the man, is a symbol; Sept. 11 is a reality; reality is what happens when we don't quite get the message of symbols, or when we ignore them, or fail to communicate with them. Symbols leave us with more options than reality. We usually have time to interpret them and make choices. Now, it turns out that there is a symbol that bears a true relationship to what happened, called The Tower. The Tower is the sixteenth trump card from the library of symbols known as the Tarot (there are two sub-decks in the Tarot, the trumps or major arcana, and the minor arcana). These cards, particularly the trumps, tell a story, the story of the world and of the soul's journey through the world, which begins in the un-numbered trump, The Fool, who is the hero of the journey, that is, me or you. The Tarot is so old that nobody really knows where it came from, but we can be reasonably confident that The Tower is a symbol at least 400 to 500 years old. Sometimes called "lightning strikes the tower," it is usually depicted as a tower, a man-made creation, being struck by lightening from which are falling a man and a woman. The basic message, according to Joan Bunning of LearnTarot.com, is "sudden change, release, downfall, revelation," which is a pretty good summary. The Tower represents the structure of the ego, high and proud, which is struck by some natural force. Haindl, in a modern interpretation, depicts a skyscraper. We live in the age of towers; even modest cities have tall buildings, and they are almost all used for capitalist businesses. We do not know what force has struck Haindl's tower, but today the image has a whole different and rather chilling meaning than it did previously. Look at it for a few moments and see if it seems familiar. For some, the corresponding astrological symbol is Mars, which is pure energy; for others, Uranus, because of its spontaneous nature; in my own divination prior to these events, I kept getting the rune Halagaz, which is about disruption by elemental forces, and I saw The Tower a few times as well. In both The Tower and Halagaz, the implication is that we are being freed from something that we need to be freed from. We can now recognize terrorism as such a force, in the collective human psyche. We might wonder what we can do about terrorism, and we might fool ourselves into thinking that X-Ray machines, sky marshals and lots of military spending can help. But in the end, because of human ingenuity and determination, we can no more prevent terrorism than we can prevent Mount Rainier from erupting. I gaze at it from my office window many days with great respect; it could, potentially, end the civilization known as the "Pacific Northwest." Where I live, a mile from an active fault line, our homes can be leveled in the space of three minutes. Checking my email one day this year, a 6.9 earthquake struck. That was that. (In my reckoning, the existence of these natural forces accounts for most of the difference between the culure of the east coast and the culure of the west coast.) The story of the human experience is living with, near and amongst such elemental forces. Our modern minds, which have strived to control nature, and created the illusion of having done so, have also left much untamed, and we have banished our own warrior spirit into the image of Osama bin Laden, who we think comes along and knocks down the towers of ego in lower Manhattan: symbolically, really and every way in between. But bin Laden, who is a kind of fictional character (for many reasons, but mainly because catching or killing him will do nothing except inspire his followers) is really part of who we are. He is the elemental force of rebellion, of "faith" or obsession driven to its extreme, like a hyperactive overblown insane cartoon of one of our own hateful televangelists. He is our shadow self. 
Pamela Coleman Smith | These elemental forces are extremely important, due to certain facts of human nature: such as the fact that we would not usually bother changing our lives or our ideas without them. What we have depicted in The Tower is the release of the energy trapped in a structure or structured situation. The insides come out; the energy used to hold the structure up is liberated as The Tower is blown apart and falls down. Perhaps a lie is exposed or an illusion is torn apart. The people involved are freed, or released. We have all lived through this kind of situation, and generally it is a life process and not a death process. | There are still five cards left in the deck; there is still a journey to make. The Tower sets us free, but we usually don't think of it at the moment lightning strikes, the dam bursts, or the lady tells you to take a hike. The Devil Made Us Do It The Tower's preceding card in all traditional decks is The Devil. The Devil is a card about the making of structure, as symbolized astrologically by Capricorn. Pushed to its negative limits, The Devil is about the worship of structure. On a cultural level (rather than an individual personality level), Capricorn is the sign associated with corporations and all their associated structures, as well as the formal structuring if ideas (religion, as opposed to the spirituality of Sagittarius). Both The Devil and Capricorn (represented by a goat or sea-goat) are materialization processes. Capricorn is the sign that is associated with our bones, for example, the structure that holds up our watery bodies. The Devil is a fictional creature, full of mischief, cloven-hoofed and horny, invented and made into material form by the Roman Catholic Church (itself a process of materializing structure and the amassing of real estate and capital). The Devil is not the same thing as what Catholics usually call Satan -- though Satan, what we might call the dark force itself, usually works through materialization processes and depends upon the lure that the material world as the all-there-is. An example of The Devil concept is the worship of the structure of relationship at the expense of love and companionship, which would alienate us from love. Or, worship of the individual ego instead of the shared community of relationship. 
Lady Frieda's
The Star | Now while the over-done or negative attributes of this process are difficult turf, materialization is a necessary fact of life on Earth. We must build and structure our worlds. Each of the Trumps is a step along the way to wholeness. We need to go through our individuation processes. The question might be, do we do this as part of life, or as an end in itself? When individuation or structuring process goes too far, we have a dependable elemental force that will tear it down: The Tower. | What comes next is The Star, depicted above as drawn by Lady Frieda Harris in the Crowley Tarot. The Star is the image of energy moving. It is about a connection between the human world to the cosmos, and the recognition that the two were never separate. Lady Frieda's star is based on spiral movement of energy from a star through Nut or Nuit, the Egyptian goddess of the stars (whose body is the celestial dome), to the body of the Earth. The card's meaning encompases the living truth, community, freedom and the results of liberation. Its form of love is fraternal: brotherhood and sisterhood. Its expression of compassion is about the world family. Its astrological sign is Aquarius. When we look at what has happened as a result of the Sept. 11 disaster, we can see a clear progression from The Devil through The Tower to The Star. Our country, the world's leading exporter of bombs, war planes and gunboat diplomacy, is speaking openly of not wanting to harm the Afghani people. Not that the government will listen, but people are for the most part calling for restraint. Much like the UK after the death of Princess Diana, we have opened up and become able to express grief. Money is pouring into Red Cross accounts and blood banks are unable to take donations for weeks or months. Let's see how far it goes. But we might well ask: why do we need a horribly destructive event to teach us to open up? Well, how about because we're a species dominated by those who are ignorant, greedy and shut down to the life force? How about because we resist change? How about because we go through life tending not to notice one another, offer ourselves to service, or express love and kindness to our fellow people? Yeah. Well. Whatever. 
Bonfire, Monday night, Black Rock City, photo by Eric. In Black Rock City, it turns out that we (us people, that is) don't need catastrophe to remind us to take care of our neighbors. We already know we're up the creek without one another. That is perfectly adequate. For whatever reason, mainly because it was created that way, the ethos of Burning Man is to see how much you can bring of whatever you have to give away free; to make sure you have extra for your neighbors. My contribution was bringing a homeopathic pharmacy stocked with remedies appropriate to the climate, and, at some expense and effort, designing a way to keep it at a stable temperature for a week. Other people set up free healing clinics, popcorn shops, rave parties, rides, face painting, swing clubs, Tarot card reading, bicycle repair camp, all of it free, all of it given not in sacrifice but from abundance. We don't need to see thousands more people die in order to be reminded that life is fragile. It's enough that so many other people have already died. It's enough to have to keep drinking water all day. But because The World as we know it is lost in its games, we seem to need experiences to take us out of one space and into another. So, the next time anybody says, "Hey, what's it gonna take to get people to wake up a little?" you can say, "A 757 plunging into an office tower on live television." In the language of Buddhism, what happened last month was an experience of maha yana, an event prompting the extension of sympathy, an opening from the narrowness of self-conscious reality. This is the great highway of Buddhism, the Way. We realized that there are indeed other people and they have pain and needs. We realized that compassion is available, and that only good things happen when we express it: and hey, we still have our credit cards. We gave blood and we still have blood. We got to feel our hearts open to others and experience extending ourselves to others, in the expression of natural sympathy. And the world did not end because of it. If you ask me, America wears it well. Good to be with you, Eric Francis
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