Burning Man, part 10

aethyrflux

and I wandered off and had one of those magical Burn­ing Man nights where you meander across the playa talk­ing about mys­ti­cism and sci­ence, emer­gent con­scious­ness and creativity. 

We saw Swarm (I’d been look­ing for them for a few nights), four beau­ti­ful metal­lic robot spheres that changed color and emit­ted sound as they rolled around near each other, inter­act­ing with each other. The first one was amus­ing and off-put­ting: glow­ing pink, it mur­mured ”I’m a bad girl” over and over as it crept closer to another sphere. Later, they appeared to be dan­cing with each other, singing deep Tibetan throat chant­ing in off-beat har­mon­ies. Again, pic­tures coming as soon as someone posts decent ones. My photos turned out black.

We saw Crude Awaken­ing, the enorm­ous oil der­rick with stairs all the way to the plat­form, wor­shipped by nine enorm­ous fig­ures craf­ted from recycled metals twis­ted into bodies, lift­ing burnt offer­ings in their hands, eyes blaz­ing, unable to look upon their deed, having turned from wor­ship­ping the gods to wor­ship­ping oil. Stripped tree trunks stand aban­doned nearby. 

aethyrflux

says to me, ”At first I hated the oil rig, but then I real­ized it’s the wor­ship­pers that are the problem.”

We go to the Temple and write on the walls. I write ”I for­give my father” and I write some­thing for Doug.

We wander across to the crazy mon­keys and snakes swinging on the zoetrope tree, watch as it stills then as the cyc­lists start it rotat­ing again, the mon­keys appear to come alive, swinging from limb to limb as the snakes slither down towards them. (Awe­some photo and descrip­tion here)

At some point we decide to look for a chill space and I remem­ber hear­ing about a place called Celes­tial Heav­ens or some­thing like that, some­where on 4 o’clock or 4.30. We find it but every­one has gone for the night and it’s dark. We head back to the 4.30 key­hole where we saw a place called Iron Rose and dis­cover it play­ing reggae and we lie down and drink red wine and I dance occasionally.

After a while we head next door to the chai bar to have chai, dis­cover they’ve run out and have mate instead, listen to a woman singing accom­pan­ied by someone’s beau­ti­fully played piano. We end up singing ourselves, ”Bridge Over Troubled Water” and ”the Rose” and many other tacky clas­sics. As the sky began to lighten, we went back to camp.