Metaphysical Speculations on Burning Man 2007: Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?

Part 1: What is the infinite beyond toxic representation?

Black Rock City, 2007: Burning Man: sounds like a line from a poorly written detective novel: it can only be my own attempt to put this experience in phrases. Burning Man runs like a collection of cities all rolled into one for a week or two of an "art festival:" part Brigadoon, part Bankok, part Tabriz, part 1960's hippie paradise, part lethal injection. And yet the place feels safe to me; my camp-mates were largely kind, despite the brutally harsh climate of intermittent dust storms ("white outs"), toxic heat, and suprisingly pleasant evenings...

While the city takes on the shape of 40,000 or so teeming inhabitants in close woven streets the shape of concentric circles... much of the art installation is placed outside of the human habitation in a great open space of a dry lake bed, known as "The Playa." I had walked a few miles out into this open desolate space in the late morning and now simply sat down on the fine dry caked mud. I had seen a number of art pieces from various distances, including the work of Dan Das Man and Karen Cusolito, "Crude Awakening."

I was sitting out on "The Playa" ("beach!"-- there hasn't been any ocean here for millions of years) shortly before a terrible mud and sand storm will devour our encampment for 2-3 hours. There are no benches or seats out in the middle of a dry lake bed. I simply sat down. I carried a large black umbrella to shade me from the sun, but the clouds were gathering and for the moment the weather was entirely tolerable. I continued looking at the monumental piece of art in the distance "Crude Awakening"

"Crude Awakening" was a portrait of the horror of idolatry. The figures were set in praise to an oil derrick. The represent our American society which in its worst respect worships the power of crude oil, the only energy source developed and promoted. Crude oil importers and refiners become fat and rich, while "We the people" rot, waste and become impoverished by our indolence to seek any other energy resource. We are addicted to oil. I could look out of my living room window here in San Pedro and see the "minarettes" of the oil mosque: the oil refinery here in the USA.

The oil derrick was artless. Indeed, it was quite intentionally artless. There was no carving, no collage, no sign of ornament anywhere to be seen. It was a mere utilitarian structure of steel and wood. (And our society is devoted to the worship of utility at the expense of ornament.) The derrick lacked any purpose other than to gain some 40 feet of elevation above the ground level of "playa." Pure, artless elevation, it made certain people higher than others: those who rose to the top of it. I was reminded of the Zigurats of Babylon, and the ominous Tower of Babel, the root source of so much of our suffering to begin with, if we believe the myth. False escalation toward "God" or the Heavens" brings forth calamity: Tarot trump card XVI is called "The Tower." Everything in everyone's soul screamed to have it blasted.

This is also figured in Heidegger's "Frage Nach Der Technik." It was the shape of the artificial and simultaneously the artless: it was only elevation: the oil derrick itself. Artificiality that lacks art itself compared to the splendid art of the woven links of steel within the worshipping figures, some of them burned and singed by previous years of being in installation. All figures of praise... to what? To an oil derrick?

But just how much is this the true and undisputable vision of our predicament? How much was this depiction a true depiction of the times? Could we think otherwise?

Beyond the oil Derrick was the mountain. This at last was an object worth worshipping to, an object worth adoring. This I believe was Trego Mountain.

Trego Mountain through my days at "Burning Man" had an inescabable force for me: it was ostensibly a heap of blackened slag during the day, but it shone in the evening at dusk, white before a darkening sky. Mount Trego bore no signs of any plant life, simply a heap of rock, and yet it had a special trembling beauty to it.

So what was the religious question? First came the statues in expressions of worship. Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies "Praising is what matters!" ("Ruhmen, dasists!" ) Before there were statues there was just the open empty space of this Black Rock Desert and Mount Trego. Then there was an idol. The idol was clearly a bad idol. It was easy to see that it was a false divinity and to want it burned down.

My attentions wander further out in this great open space to the "God of Metaphor." What is this "God of Metaphor?" It is in part the essential iconoclasm that extends from Abraham and Isaac down through to Mohammed. This entire world is a metaphor for... what? (We are still waiting for the answer) We can say that the world and all its books and religions, its priest-kings (Rex/Flamen) present and represent an image of the ideal and the sacred. They manifest power of life and death, just as today the oil corporations manifest this power. But they are NOT the real power. Christ is reported to have said "My kingdom is not this kingdom" (John 18:36).

Part 2: Digression on Monotheism, Polytheism, and Pantheism

The problem I realized was the assertion of a "oneness" to this divinity. This externalized "oneness" of divinity was also the source of the externalized sense of manyness being bad. But could there be a manyness of infinity? Could there be different kinds of infinity? ... not just infinities of various finite ontic conditions (infinite apples or infinite oranges).

There is more to this argument than some sort of logical progression of ideas. I put forward polytheism as a belief system because I cannot reduce the divine or "the god of Metaphor" a single "one-ness." One-ness is a human construction. We use it to keep our very tiny minds from getting bent out of shape. I will not impose my human sense that the infinite is only one kind of infinite. If there is a space of "infinite," beyond my awe at mount Trego, for example, then that infinite leaps and over-rides itself. It is not bound to rational fixity, nor is it without the capacity to manifest as reason. It is simply beyond:the Prajnaparamita mantra: gate gate, paragate, parasamgate. Kafka calls this the sagenhafte druben, the "fabulous yonder," but I am not prepared to get into his parable on parables any more at this moment.

The father archetype here is the "God of Metaphor": the "transcendent sky god" as Lionel Corbett puts it... transcending the one and transcending the many at the same time. Were I to discuss the pantheistic perspective then I must see the divine in every moment, the mother as "god immanent" (as Douglas Overton Blue, Swami Atmatatwananda explained one lovely day about 10 years ago at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood).

I add this digression about polytheism and pantheism because I have felt oppressed by the promulgation of traditional Christian and Muslim "one-ness" of God or divinity. Something about this "one-ness" if not questioned becomes another form of idolatry... it stands between us and the divine yet again (yet another oil derrick) when the divine is best met with total incomprehension, and the best humility we can muster. The saint is sacred fool, steps once again into his innocence, the sage steps only to his defense as needed.

Part 3: Figments toward "The God of Metaphor"

IN the film Il Postino (Radford, 1994) there is an assertion about the nature of this world as a metaphor for... ( ... ).

"for example,
I don't know if you follow me...

that the whole world...

the whole world,
with the sea, the sky...

with the rain, the cIouds--

Now you can say etc., etc.

Etc., etc.

The whole world is
the metaphor for something else?"

( http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/i/il-postino-script-transcript-postman.html )

Perhaps this is where we derrive all our nonsense about what Nietzshe dismissed as "the afterworldly": heaven. For Nietzche (Geneology of Morals), life is to be lived here in the midst of its wealth and abundance, not leached away by the vampires of the priest-hood, always promising a better place (figured also in Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor.". Perhaps in this passage of simple words ["Then this world is a metaphor for... ( ... )"] we see a doorway to a much more complex expression of the world... would this then be "heaven?"

Perhaps the mistake is made in the announcement of the "whole world" as a totality of "etceteras." The whole world can never be gathered, much less one single mountain, much less, in Kafka's words a trip to "The next village."

If nothing can be gathered, then nothing can be metaphored. (notice how the dialectic of nothing and no-thing-ness is constellated in this phrase: this compiles a second threshold in the text, between this world and the realm of stars.) (That previous comment is extremely problematic and must be held forth with... it marks my ineffectiveness and ineptitude in the realm of thinkers, but it may also mean I have found something.

Peter Handke writes in "Lied vom Kindsein" used in Wender's Wings of Desire):

Als das Kind Kind war,war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen:Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum?Ist was ich sehe und höre und riechenicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?Gibt es tatsächlich das Böse und Leute,die wirklich die Bösen sind?Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin,bevor ich wurde, nicht war,und daß einmal ich, der ich bin,nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?

(http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2005/04/05/lied-vom-kindsein/ )

The "World as Will and Metaphor" might be another term for Schopenhauer's work. In this sense "Vorstellung" becomes "Gleichnis": representation becomes parable. The parable or metaphor has the uncanny ability to somehow delay or defer desire in a sudden confusion, was this real fulfillment, or just the promise thereto? (A parallel exists here between Shopenhauer and Freud's model of incest taboo as deferral of desire... as read through Derrida's Post Card)

Part 4: The Performance: Abortion: Heinous trampling of tenderness

All these efforts to speculate on religion and the infinite should now be bracketed in the light of the "performance." This "performance" was on the night of the first into the morning of the second of September 2007. In the "performance" there was no room for the niceties of theological speculation. I am sure that given the mood of the evening anyone would simply look at me with empty eyes and tell me to stop babbling. The "Crude Awakening" stayed true to its name in this respect, and remained only alive in internal speculation. The outward expression was ghastly. To my knowledge no one was hurt or killed by the performance on the "playa." Nevertheless the maiming and killing goes on without cease in Iraq and the centers of our "crude oil" based theocracy and culture. Areas of "vital importance" to the United States are still maintained at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives and unknowable ecological damage.

When I look into Das Man's effort I see that the Crowd of onlookers was part of the performance. Heidegger ironically calls the everyday ignorance of humanity das mann. This ignorance was far more horrifying than the didactic spectacle of "star-spangled-salute-turned-apocalypse." We were listening to the senseless ramblings of the pathetic instrumentalizations of "The Mutator," a band started by a child molester, the audience was drawn and numbed by a special spectacle of a half-naked woman on a high wire spinning fire: the music (self-laceration) signifies something more horrible because it drew us to this location: ART AS ABORTION (the very essence of the spectacle part of Burning Man).

In the end our little spectacle was over soon enough, after two hours of numbness and waiting accompanied by the senseless cliche's of rock culture, the pablum of music called "the Mutator." Suddenly the diarhea of music was replaced by a deafening wail of a "victory siren": an unbelievably loud "air raid warning." This was followed by smoke, pathetically celebratory fireworks display, and rending apocalyptic explosion. The "derrick" was immolated in hydrogen flame, collapsed to a flaming heap, a rubble of missed expectation: the members of the audience still commented: "that explosion wasn't nearly loud enough!" or "That tower's height was still unsuitable; it should have been even more massive!" These comments, true enough point to our essential role as audience: we must remain essentially ignorant. The statues returned, through the writhing holocaust of technological pain, to worshipping the infinite: the object-lesson's criterion had been satisfied. Certainly we as a collective were least likely to consider the work's true implication. I was left to ponder the work of Carl Jung, wherein he calls the Rebis of the Rosarium Philosophorum as the object of alchemical work: "A monster and an abortion."