We wanted to go to the foam dome for a shower but the line was down the block when it opened at 1, and Leia got really frustrated standing in the dust storm after seeing someone smoking and shirt-cocking by our portos. Shirt-cocking is a man half-dressed: arguably the wrong half. We gave up on the shower plan and got a seat in the MAPS lecture dome hours earlier than we needed to.
The theme for this day's talks was art and mysticism. We listened to some lectures on flow states from a pretty passionate speaker, mostly about using small or micro-doses of dissassociative and ego-dissolving drugs to achieve and maintain creative flow. Since this dome was associated with MAPS he also had some interesting insight on the value of psychedelic drugs in the therapeutic setting: everyone's subjective psychedelic experience is different, but it's also different from their everyday perception of reality, and he said changing the lens through which you see the world has epistemological value in demonstrating that there IS a lens through which you see the world, be it depression, anxiety, trauma, or whatever else. He also pointed out that while a psychedelic trip requires surrender to the experience, you can surrender in a disciplined way by creating a more safe, intentional therapeutic setting, and getting enough sleep, electrolytes, and proper guidance before and after the experience.
There followed a therapist giving a talk on the historic use of mushrooms and other natural psychedelics as traditional medicine, that retrod much of the same ground as the previous talk and things we'd already heard in lectures by Paul Stamets. We sat through it just to keep our spots inside the dome, but she gave out gifts of a very good lip balm she had made. One funny point was that pyschedelic toads have a similar endocrine system to humans so it's possible that they go through life constantly high on their own secretions. Each new talk some people filtered out and everyone else had to squeeze forward to let more in, so we got quite near the stage by the end, squashed among our neighbors.
The talk we had come to see was by Paul Stamets, a famous mycologist - or as famous as one can be in the mycology world. There was a crowd outside trying to hear. We'd heard him speak twice before and this talk used the same slide-show but covered only some of the same material, including his fascinating research with mushroom extracts to inoculate bees against deformed wing virus transmitted by varroa mites, which is one cause of colony collapse disorder. It was a bit less organized than prior talks of his we heard, but he insisted that some of us were at Burning Man not only to party, but to change the world.
We really needed the portos by this point but stayed for one more short talk by Android Jones, a digital artist who talked a lot about how he enjoys learning to use tools - he's kind of a tool himself - and is running a treatment program using ketamine and VR headsets. He used ketamine to disassociate from his own feelings and hang-ups when he made art because he thinks that produces "purer" art, but cautioned against prolonged use of it. He said he brought his family to Burning Man this year because his son was the best art he could think to bring, which got "awwwww"s. He talked about his personal history with Burning Man - how at some point if you come there for many years it starts feeling like you are unimaginative in your summer vacation plans - and how people come there in search of healing because sane, healthy people don't come out to camp in the desert for a week.
After these talks we got our much-needed bathroom break and visited camp for some snacks and to put away some of our belongings and the camp's. Hall of Game started our tear-down of our public space this afternoon to get an early start on packing up, and many other camps did the same so it looked like parts of the city were collapsing in on themselves, away from the roads.
Wanderer's Camp nearby was giving out their end-of-week hot-dogs, trying to dispose of the thousands of hot dogs they brought. We stopped there and each had two, on the way to visit friends. We kept trying to tell people a joke about a Zen Buddhist monk and a hot dog vendor, but people didn't seem to get that we were telling a joke, and many of the wanderers might not have had English as a first language.
We biked out to the suburbs (where you can pitch your tent if you're not in an official camp) to find some friends of our camp and chat with them while they enjoyed their steak dinner, then asked some neighbors if we could climb their tower for a look around and through my binoculars spotted our friends A. and V. walking past. They told us where to find the camp we were looking for around the corner, and we met many friends there. Leia ate some of their pizza and I caught up with everyone we didn't get to see yet. There were other friends' camps we wanted to visit but didn't get to this year. In the evening Sushi cooked us all a hearty multi-course dinner from a combination of everyone's leftovers.
Tonight the Folly burned and we all loaded up blankets onto our bikes and rode out as a group to watch it. We chose a spot really near the perimeter to lay out our blankets, and some of us held the location while I and others went out to explore. This was really impressive with all the art cars, lights, and music, sort of like the main burn itself. I didn't know what to expect but this is when I really got why people enjoy going out at night in Black Rock City so much. It's one thing to see the city of 80,000 people laid out in a semicircle in the desert, but it is quite another to see so many of those people in concentric rings surrounding a burning structure, with music, lights, and art cars behind them in every direction. I got on a swing suspended by a crane from one car and was launched around until the phone fell out of the pocket of my light-up wizard robe, but I noticed it quickly and went back for it.
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