Burning, For You!

While you were filtering back into Harvard, gearing up for a hearty week of lecture-hopping and back-slapping, an old friend of mine and I sat at the bar, chewing on Mexican tamarind candy and chatting up some strung-out Spice Girls rejects.

“At least you’ll only be missing shopping,” my Cornellian friend assured me.

“But shopping…” I trailed off.

A seraphic Irishman, mid-to-late twenties, top hat, exposed lower half, smiled his way through the crowd and mounted the bar. Supine, he clutched a battered bottle of Jameson and gave a signal of “have at it.” Without ceremony, strangers (in even stranger costume) proceeded to shoot the whiskey off an unmentionable place, one by one—seven, when all was said and done.

Forty-eight hours before shopping week began, I was eating dust, watching a man on a giant spaceship go up in balls of fire. You should have joined me.

Burning Man, a regular late summer gathering on the silt playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, defies description. You’ll learn from any of the few dozen media profiles out there that two weeks ago, 68,000 people squatted around a giant effigy in clock formation, in the midst of pretty lights and crazy cars. But the moment I decamped on the playa, I could tell there was something more to it. You see, Burning Man ain’t your frat brother’s festival—it’s a strange, immersive totality that is both city and ethos, heaven and hell. There is something uniquely essential about Burning Man, and Harvard kids need it.

Our home on the Charles counts itself as diverse, and by many measures it is. However, as I’ve written before, Harvard tends to select for certain domesticated traits across demographic and socioeconomic lines: conventionality, conscientiousness, and profound risk-aversion. Burning Man, while similarly diverse, selects for the exact opposite—bringing together all the wackiest, most open-minded, and most experimental hippies, rednecks, Silicon Valley execs, and retirees under a common ethos of decommodification, radical self-expression, and civic responsibility.

Your writer would not be a fan of such things if they were but the empty, hokey aspirations of some hippie revivalists. But coming back to Cambridge, where alternative expression and communal earnestness are golf-clapped and then summarily dismissed, the value of Burning Man and the principles by which it runs has become absolutely clear.

There was no such thing as a pleasant day at Burning Man, nor anywhere in the Black Rock Desert, I would imagine—though to be sure, there were plenty of margaritas and pretty girls. Rather, every waking hour resounded with the emotional range of life taken to its most radical possibilities. I became instant friends with neighbors, climbed avant-garde jungle gyms, stood in awe of great craftsmanship, and participated in a wonderful, norms-challenging human carwash. And yet at every corner, there were unspeakable things, too—forcing me to confront the limits of my open-mindedness nearly every few hours.

However, the liberal elite experience sought and delivered at Harvard has little room for things like beauty and terror, which disrupt pleasant equilibria and stop people in their tracks. Perhaps the Burn’s strongest impressions were left in moments full of both: the hour I spend locked in a flashing box with a kind French couple, the time my friend and I ran from a dust storm before an installation challenging us to construct the personalities behind magnified close-ups of open eyes. With moments like these at every step, it’s no wonder that I saw more people in deep, soul-searching contemplation than I’ve seen at college—the officially-sanctioned mecca of self-discovery—over the course of the last three years.

If any of this sounds intriguing and if you can deal with dust, make your next vacation in the Black Rock Desert. Beyond the admission fee of $380 and your initial contribution of supplies, the rest is free—and much of it invaluable. And while cruise or island getaway on a similar order of cost promises to be an exercise in isolation-in-comfort, Burning Man is something you can actually use: belonging in the midst of discomfort.

And finally, if I succeed in convincing you to get lost in the desert for a week next summer, you’ll at some point find yourself pulled over in the godforsaken hamlet of Gerlach, Nevada as you prepare to make your final approach to the playa. A volunteer ranger will hand you a compact program of the week’s events, listed by the hundreds and advertised with ample cheek. Don’t use it: you’re supposed to run into things.

Joshua B. Lipson ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Lipson