A friend once announced that she was looking
for people to put together a Burning Man theme camp with her. I looked up
Burning Man, decided I wasn't interested, and promptly forgot all about it.
This week, the name surfaced under piles of
rubble in my mind, and I looked it up again. What is “Burning Man”?
Burning Man is a hippie utopia. For one week
each year, tens of thousands of people encamp in the Nevada desert to engage in
“radical self-expression”. No commerce is permitted: it is a gift-based
economy. People bring their own food; they bring enough to share; some operate
free restaurants. Burning Man is also a no-holds-barred arts festival. No cars
are permitted to budge, unless they have been transformed into something other
than a car – say, a flame-throwing octopus. There are a great many
extraordinary art installations on the blank canvas of the desert floor – but
they Leave No Trace. It isn't back-to-the-land-y, though: people bring
generators and there is a great deal of electric and electronic display and
racket, 24/7. The festival culminates in the burning of an enormous effigy of a
man, for no particular reason; but the burning of the man has come to serve in
the minds of many “burners” as a symbol of 'carpe diem, live intensely and
immediately, because everything is exquisitely fragile'. Then they all pack up
or burn their art and pick up every last fleck of glitter and get back in their
cars and go back to what they call “the default world,” which is usually the
Bay Area, or perhaps dear darling PDX.
Burning Man attracts a lot of spiritual
seekers, artists, troubled souls, wandering Jews, and people who have
completely lost their moorings and want to be loud about it.
I don't remember why I wasn't interested in
Burning Man the first time I heard about it. This time I find the idea very
interesting, but I won't be attending; one, because I have a low noise
threshold (that includes trance music); and two, because when you invite people
to a place with no rules, you get not only good art and catharsis but a great
deal of cheap behavior. It doesn't sound as if cheap is exactly vanishingly
rare at Burning Man.
Cheap is the pitfall of “radical
self-expression” untempered by tsnius. (How shall I translate tsnius? It is
sort of the anti-cheap, but a positive concept.)
Tsnius, save when it inheres in the self
being radically expressed, is not one of Burning Man's Ten Principles. Cheap,
like noise, is, at Burning Man, OK. And I don't think I would benefit from a week of it. So as much as I would kind of like, in some alternate universe, to open the one-woman Burning Man Community Kollel, I don't see it happening.
But there is quite a lot about Burning Man
that I like the sound of – I have a thing for idealistic, creative
people forming groups devoted to some end – and I was chewing over its
principles, and as I got sleepier and sleepier the many other elements of it
that I find attractive started to sound to me more and more like... lehavdil elef havdalos...
...well, it's Adar.
In two weeks there will be a day when the
Jews dress up in costumes. And go about all day giving each other presents. And
nichnas yayin yotzei sod, men will be dancing and singing in the streets and
round each others' tables. And one of the themes of the day is not to be
inhibited by self-imposed, artificial limitations. And it is all pretty crazy. My Purim is such that I can plan its details for weeks, but on Purim itself, I just wake up and say, Let's give food to everyone we know! And everyone we don't know! And it doesn't essentially matter what!
But the story of Purim is not one of
straight “radical self-expression” – on the contrary, the joy of Purim comes
out of it being a day of tsnius. Esther didn't reveal who she was. The
old minhag of costume was to dress up, not like your inner martian, but like
the enemies of the Jewish people – because things aren't what they appear to
be. The megilla itself is about the Divine working invisibly – so much so that
the name of G-d does not appear in the megilla. Cheap, on Purim, is not OK. The
rules are not suspended: things get artistic, generous, and crazy, but the
world of Purim is complex enough – through its being so very tsnius – to be truly exquisite.
Intense. Immediate. Those things that people go to Burning Man to find.
In two weeks, I will have that right here on my block. In my house. With an entire community of similarly Purimmy people.
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