A ninety-foot tall oil derrick bore spiritless witness to nine gigantic steel humans in various poses of prostration and supplication. Crude Awakening, the installation on the edge of the open playa was called, and throughout the week I found myself vaguely annoyed by this piece. Impressed by the scale and ambition, most certainly, but isn’t that theme overwrought? Yes, we worship petroleum. Surely everybody gets that by now. Even the people running generators all day in their RVs understand that.

So there are those who say that Burning Man is hypocritical, wasteful, hedonistic, and false. They are correct, in their own way, but not as correct as those who, when asked what Burning Man is like, simply shake their heads and fall into gazes faraway, as if remembering a lost love, for Burning Man is nothing if it’s not heartbreaking. To witness how beautiful everyone is when they allow themselves to be free, to see how we all want to dance, to love, to be authentic, and then to return to the antithesis of all of this, the workaday world of anxiety, insecurity, guardedness, where people are who they think they should be rather than who they actually are, this is heartbreak.

But of course, the heart can only break open.

There seems sometimes to be an anticipatory sense that something is going to *happen* at Burning Man. Aside from the hundreds of people you meet, aside from the uncanny synchronicities, aside from the hookups, aside from the startlingly original art, aside from the burning of the man, there is an undefined mysterium tremendum that reverberates through the event, as if the event itself is the center of a vortex that has been pulling you toward it for months, a wormhole that threatens to leave you in a whole new world on the very same planet.

At least, this is what happened to me. I first attended Flipside, a regional burn outside of Austin, Texas, over Memorial Day weekend. As it happened, I walked into Whole Foods on the Thursday prior and promptly ran into a friend who was stocking up on provisions on her way out. She asked me if I was going, and in the supreme confidence of unabashed ignorance, I shrugged and said, “naw, that’s not my scene.” You know, hypocritical, wasteful, hedonistic, false, all that. But she told me I should go if I could find some tickets, and this challenge was at least diverting, and I remembered a friend who’d told me months ago that he had a Flipside ticket but didn’t think he was going so I called him and it turned out he was going after all, so sorry man. No worries, didn’t think I really wanted to go in the first place, but then he calls back a few hours later—his girlfriend had just broken up with him—to see if I still wanted a ticket. Sure, I said, not at all sure, but it’s only forty-five minutes outside of town, and I figured I’d just drive over, walk around and check it out for the night. I grabbed two bananas, two apples, two avocadoes, and two gallons of water and headed out. I arrived back home three days later, having been perfectly provided for, and shining like I’d just witnessed a solar eclipse at sunrise.

But this is all just prologue. The summer following Flipside and preceding Burning Man, I found myself taunted by periodic dreams, difficult to describe but having something to do with a pulse at the center of Burning Man, some ominous storm of consciousness that first swiped me off my feet with Flipside and was now drawing me into a rebirth canal before hurling me into points unknown. One dream in particular I remember clearly: Upon arriving at Burning Man, someone pointed at me friendly and demanded, “why are you here?” I awoke to the echoes of my unhesitant reply: “To completely let go of my former relationship.” As I was still recovering from the splinters of a broken eleven and a half year relationship, there was now no obstacle too great to prevent me from making the 3500 mile round trip to Black Rock City. And as fate would have it, I ran into my former partner two days before I left for Burning Man. A poignant sadness passed between us, but she looked good. She looked fantastic.

But on to Burning Man. The portentous soundtrack upon my arrival happened to be Seal’s “Crazy.” "We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy." An auspicious opening to a crazy week spectacular, though it did not really begin until I made my early pilgrimage to the Temple to write my prayer, citing Rumi, "All I ask is that you forever remember me as loving you." After that, my week began in earnest, and I could regale you with tales all night long and my eyes would sparkle and enthusiasm would strain my voice, but let me just tell you about the night of the burn itself. Atop Abraxas the Dragamuffin, a brilliantly-realized work of rolling art in action owing itself to the effort of the Solarians, I had an excellent view of the burning of the man. I wish I could say that it blew my mind, but really it was just a big fireworks and laser show surrounded by the Zippos of the 21st century, thousands of glowing LCD screens as the assembled watched it via the viewfinders of their digital cameras, saving instead of savoring the moment. Fun, yes, but missing was the mystery. Of course, what I did not yet realize was that the burning of the man is not the climax of Burning Man. It is only the blast-off.

It was in the disorderly dispersion after the burning of the man that I began to feel the pulse I had known in my dreams, an emergent rhythm simmering beneath our feet, and we reconvened a couple of hours later at Crude Awakening out on the edge of the open playa to witness the burning of the oil derrick. Again atop Abraxas, I am huddled and cuddled with shipmates reincarnated from a glorious pirate ship, fireworks and lasers, oh my, and then… and then… I don’t know if I gasped or if all the air was sucked out of my lungs by the detonation of the largest controlled propane explosion in the world, a Guinness I guess, 900 gallons of NASA jet fuel and 2000 gallons of liquid propane and oh my god a thousand foot high mushroom cloud churning hellish red and demon black, 2.4 gigawatts of energy, just enough to power the entire Bay Area for one minute (or, come to think of it, two trips back to the future in Doc’s De Lorean…), and the only thing more wow fantastic than this is the firelit faces around me, fireshadows flickering across their wide-open eyes, transfixed in apocalyptic wonder.

And you know, the word apocalypse derives from the Greek word, apokalyptein, which means, “to unveil.” And there was indeed a renting of the veil that night, an opening into a realm where every encounter is authentic, and consequently, deeply meaningful. I had painted the word IMPULSE across my chest in fluorescent white, and as the night wore on I discovered that this was as much invitation as invocation. I was hugged, kissed, licked, squeezed, nibbled, massaged, hit on, and slashed with chocolate, and before long I became the impulse, daring the impulse from whomever chose my presence. During one extended moment, I shared an hour long shoving loving shouting kissing encounter with a woman bursting out of her chrysalis. She showed me how tightly our spirits are crammed into this life, how our bodies are but leotards for our soul, and how our soul just wants to dance, and dance we damn did and nighttime disappeared into blackness all around and there was she and there was me orbiting around one another like Shiva and Shakti growling and grinning across the galaxy, and this is not even the climax.

Finding my way to Opulent Temple, I’m aware of an uncanny sensation of familiarity, of recognizing everything that is happening, a sort of “oh yeah, this is the part where I share an extended shamanic dance on the open playa,” or, “oh yeah, this is when I kiss a pregnant woman’s belly,” or, “oh yeah, this is when I throw it down with a dozen other dancers at Opulent Temple,” as if it all happened in one bright shining moment, a big bang, and life is a vastly reduced awareness of that moment that is right now, and gods and goddesses are dancing the dance their bodies have been dying for, impulses pulsing timeless and tireless and oh yeah this is the part when the dance floor opens around me and surrounds me and eyes are so bright like stars of the night and I am between now and nowever and we are so fucking lucky to be alive.

A dragon breathes fire in the distance and I heed the call of my shipmates and make my way toward the mothership, noting the sky rosy on the horizon and thinking holy cow what a night but it has yet hardly begun. Abuzz with activity, setting the generator a-rumble, bolting into place a platform for spinning, samurai warriors are striding about, preparing for the final assault upon the ego panting upon the periphery, for we have sailed out upon the dead calm of this dry lakebed to do battle only with ourselves, and we won, and we are a float in our own victory parade, and Bassnectar is spinning and people come together to dance the dawn awake and my are we alive today as the sunrise pales next to the light shining out of the eyes of everyone and how are we so beautiful and Seth good brother that he is grabs my shoulder and points to Crude Awakening and do you see how now that the derrick is burned they’re actually worshipping the sunrise?

And I would have wept but my grin would permit me only to dance for I was not yet done and oh yeah this is the part where I’m dancing on the catwalk and a sparkling woman joins me and writhes in close but then something in me closes imperceptibly and I humor her for a couple of minutes before dancing my way away and down the ladder I go and I take three steps and happen to glance back and she’s leaning over the railing and glaring at me in aggressive compassion and where do you think you’re going get back up here and I comply yes I do and regard the dance proper ‘cause you’re not really dancing till you imagine that you are making love and I clearly see how I have been breaking the circuit of sexuality in my life ever since my split and she doesn’t know how she healed me and I don’t know how I healed anyone around me but it happened all the same and the deejay lays down Frou Frou’s “Let Go,” and an exhilaration of epic healing gasps into atmosphere and we dance, and dance, and dance the wild divine.

Epilogue: The next night, during the Temple burn, I watched in somber fascination as it collapsed, sighing satisfied as a wave of cheers swept round and round. Later, I was having a snack with a friend and she asked me if I had let go of what I wanted to let go of and it occurred to me that my former relationship had not crossed my mind all week, not even during the Temple burn. I forgot to let go, I said, realizing that letting go requires no effort, no remembrance, and certainly no action. It requires only release, and acceptance, and that I forgot to let go only demonstrates my success in doing so.

Thank you to all who shared this experience with me. It is surely the morning we will return to upon our death.

Be your biggest,

Impulse, a.k.a. Tony Vigorito
www.tonyvigorito.com