Ghost Ship Fire Memorial
2017
A ritual of solace and blessing held on September 1st, 2017 for the Ghost Ship Fire Victims in Black Rock City. The Ghost Ship Fire was a warehouse fire that took palce in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California on Friday, December 2nd 2016. The first took the lives of 36 people, predominantly young artists and musicians, that were there to attend an underground electronic dance music party at the illegal nightclub established in the basically derelict warehouse. This enormous tragedy has had a negative impact on the arts, and especially on live-work spaces and alternative art and music venues in the Bay Area and throughout the USA.
The goal of the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication was to give solave for the living and blessing to the dead. The intentino was also to move any souls stuck in the Bardo (Tibetan Buddhist term for the realm in between death and rebirth) onward to the beyond. I directed this blessing to be a 'Bodhisattva Blessing' that gave the Ghost Ship souls the encouragement and permission to transcend the cycle of incarnations and ascend to Nirvana to exist as Boddhisattva (a form of angel in Buddhist Theology). To effect this, I used painting as a ritual structure. 36 paintings were created in honor of the 36 victims of the Ghost Ship fire, and an additional 37th was created in honor of fire. The paper was Japanese washi (handmade traditional Japanese paper) that was acquired in Kyoto and blessed at the Buddhist holy mountain of Koyasan, the center of Shingon Buddhism, a faith which tenets 36 Boddhisattva that surround Fudo, the Japanese god of fire. On each piece of paper the name of an individual soul was written in gold ink, and these papers were taken from Japan to the Burning Man festival where 37 paintings were made in a shrine built there for this purpose and then brought in procession to the Burning Man Temple (a large and beautiful temporary temple that is built each year as a repository for dedications to the dead and then burned ceremonially on the closing night of the festival). The 36 paintings were brought to the temple and placed tehre and burned with the temple. The 37th painting dedicatied to first has been preserved.
I believe that, in the end, I successfully accomplished the ritual and that those souls who were still suffering in the hinterland between life and death, the Bardo, moved on to a better place, their next incarnations, heaven, or trancendence to Nirvana.
Paintings Catalogue 1
The Ghost Ship Fire Dedication Ritual was a success. However, it was the most difficult thing that I ever did in my life. What follows is a long description of what I did and what I experienced:
Earlier this year I had what I would describe as a "tectonic shift" in my psyche from a place of depression and low self esteem to a place of joy and self-worth. My spirituality deepened and it was during the process of creating a new project, "Laboratory of Hallucinations", a live action painting performance installation, that the holy spirit called upon me to make a ritual for the victims of the Ghost Ship Fire. I was doing my Laboratory of Hallucinations art performance at the Autonomous Mutant Fest, a small festival that has been held for over 20 years in a community closely connected to the Ghost Ship Fire. I had decided to dedicate the Laboratory of Hallucinations to Jonathan Bernbaum, a video artist I had worked with for my 2013 exhibition in San Francisco because when I was thinking of how I would like to incorporate video into the project I realized that Jonathan was the person I would go to, but, very unfortunately, he is no longer with us. While I was painting at AMF, and tripping in the festival mode, the spirit spoke to me and said, "It is nice that you dedicate this to Jonathan, but if you can do something for one victim of the fire then why not do it for all the victims of the fire?". I agreed to take this on. Immediately I had a vision of doing the ritual at Burning Man with a procession and an elaborate ceremony in the Burning Man Temple.
Initially after accepting this assignment I felt trepidation and a sense of, "Why me?" My friend Blazej (the foreman for this year's Burning Man Temple) answered it succinctly: "Because you are the one that can do it." I think that because I was not really directly enough connected to the Ghost Ship Tragedy to actually be in mourning, yet still within the community affected by it, and also because I had the connections within Burning Man, as well as having the vision to do it, Blazej was very correct - I was just the right person to do a spiritual work that needed to be done.
Yet to say that I was not prepared for the task would be an understatement. The goal of the ritual was to bring solace for the living and blessing to the dead, and in so doing bring a healing to the collective consciousness that has been deeply wounded by the unspeakable atrocity that is the Ghost Ship fire. I believe that many of those who died in the fire did not die well. Young people confronted with completely unexpected and horrifying death did not pass on smoothly to the beyond, but rather were left stranded in realms between life and death, stranded in the Bardo (to use the Tibetan Buddhist term). Another goal of the ritual was to give them the blessing to become Bodhisattva if they chose to be, and definitely to move these spirits on to the next world, or next incarnation. I felt that, to some degree, I took on the weight of 36 dead souls, that is to say; that within a deep vibrational level that we share collectively (and unconsciously) in our spirits these souls became enmeshed within my own. My soul became a vessel to carry all of those dead who had not really passed on, but continued to exist (in a word imbued with bitter irony) as ‘ghosts’. This had a deep psychic impact upon me that was by turns ecstatic, maddening, and deeply sad.
Initially I approached this with a kind of flippancy and artistic egotism that was perhaps not appropriate for the task. Yet it has been said that the lord 'uses imperfect people to make his perfect plan'. I looked upon this as yet another art project to express myself, investing my ego, my artistic persona, into it and viewing it as something to be promoted with an eye towards career benefits that could accrue from it. To say that this is in poor taste and exploiting a monstrously painful event is certainly appropriate and I think worthy of reproach, yet considered from another point of view; perhaps that what was precisely the atittude needed to accomplish the ritual. Yet regardless of ego and artistic pretensions, on the deepest level my intentions were pure, and I was upfront with everyone from the beginning about the involvement of my artistic ego in this ritual.
My initial vision for the ritual involved a boisterous procession with marching bands and Burning Man art cars in the form of ships that would come to the temple en masse to witness a flamboyant ritual involving Japanese Rope Bondage suspension and a bound Japanese calligrapher using her long hair to write Kanji for the dead. For me it all made sense on some abstruse metaphorical level, and encompassed aesthetic interests of mine in an exciting way. I approached the Temple about this and they, not surprisingly, asked me to make changes.
Paintings Catalogue 2
The ritual that eventually transpired was the creation of 37 paintings dedicated to the 36 dead with a 37th dedicated to fire. These papers were used to create paintings - monoprints actually - and the 36 paintings were brought to the Burning Man Temple and burned there ceremonially with the temple.
I went to Kyoto, Japan and acquired 37 large sheets of washi - traditional Japanese handmade paper. In the Gion District of Kyoto, on the full moon of August 9th (Nagasaki Day) I wrote the names of the 36 ghost ship victims on the papers in gold ink. A friend, Ioana Cetashya, a talented singer, helped me prepare these papers and then sung over them tenderly, singing with a voice as beautiful as any mortal woman ever possessed. Yet despite these auspicious beginnings, trouble entered the ritual at this point: The ritual of signing the papers was long and tedious. After 18 papers were signed my friend and I began to feel tired and took a break. I began to make mistakes signing the names, and Ioana stopped singing. I was the master of the ceremony, and yet I was really winging it - since I was informed by no religious tradition whatsoever and I was just making the ritual up as I went along. I should have insisted that Ioana continue singing, but when some souls were sung for and others were not, a psychic disturbance, a rupture in the morphic vibratory field that was woven around the intention of the ritual took place. Ioana and I finished the ceremony, but tension built up in us as romantic confusion and eventually a terrible misunderstanding took place between us. I acted badly and slammed the taxi cab door as she was leaving, and for that I lost her friendship completely.
Yet that was not all the trouble brewing on that full moon night. I received a distressed call from Blazej, my friend, the Burning Man Temple foreman, and he let me know that at a meeting of Temple Crew that night he had been cornered by 5 people who confronted him about me and my ritual. They told him that they could not “get past my ego” and blamed him for introducing me to the Temple. Needless to say, I found this very unfair to Blazej who was giving his all to the Temple and certainly not responsible for me. I later found it telling that this conflict occured at the same time as I had botched the signing of the papers. I think the Temple Crew intuitively felt the spiritual disturbance that had taken place in the ritual, but not knowing exactly what they felt or why, they could only express it as discomfort with me.
Why was the singing so important? What happened when the singing stopped and some souls were not sung for? I mean, the singing was a spontaneous gift - it had not been scripted into the ritual beforehand and it only took place when Ioana volunteered to help with the ritual. Yet her gift was crucial. Keep in mind that the victims of the Ghost Ship Fire died for music. They were in that underground club to make music and hear music. In ritual all sensory inputs - sound, sight, smell, touch and taste - all have their vibratory resonance that creates a spiritual space that carries intentions. A ritual done correctly follows an established protocol, what sounds, sights, scents, etc. - will be used adhere to those protocol in the execution of the ritual. If the protocol are poorly defined and/or not followed properly, then the ritual is weak or goes awry. When the singing was not completed a spiritual imbalance was created that was turbulent with negativity.
Despite these foreboding mishaps, I continued with my plan. My friend, Donald the Nut, a collaborator of mine on theater projects in the late ‘90s and now an expatriate in Kyoto married to a Japanese woman and speaking Japanese fluently, accompanied me to Mount Koya. This small mountain just Southeast of Osaka is an ancient temple complex that was established in the 9th Century by the Buddhist saint Kobo Daishi who brought a form of Tantric Buddhism intact from the Himalayas where it is practiced to this day. Central to Shingon Buddhism is a mythic symbolism of 36 Boddhisatvas who surround Fudo the Japanese god of fire. For me this was the perfect symbolic corrollary to the 36 souls of the Ghost Ship and the element of fire that took their lives. I brought the papers to Koyasan during the Japanese holiday of Oban which honors the dead. There they were kept in the temple called Hongakuin overnight, and early in the morning were blessed by the Buddhist priest in a ceremony for the dead. This part of the ritual went very smoothly - I was on the firm ground of a well-established religion, and the blessing that took place there was done within the strict protocol of Shingon Buddhism. Some have said that this was the most important part of the entire Ghost Ship Dedication, and certainly I feel that it helped enormously. I believe it did much to re-balance the energy that was disrupted when I screwed up on the ritual of signing the names.
Paintings Catalogue 3
The Ghost Ship Fire Dedication was not all that I was doing. For me this ritual was connected with the “Laboratory of Hallucinations” that was the basis on which the Ghost Ship dedication rested. The Laboratory of Hallucinations was/is a complex experimental project that involves a fusion of live action painting with experimental interactive sound and video. It’s goal is to evoke Synaesthesia through the transmutation of one sensory stimuli to another through a continuum of feedback effected by the use of custom sound electronics manipulated by synthesizers, motion and video capture of the painting process mixed with animated loops.
While in Japan I worked assiduously to assemble all of this - the needed collaborators to create the entire Laboratory of Hallucinations installation: The wooden structure; a gazebo like structure with projection screens mounted on top, the video projections with video artists, loops, and other needed equipment to create the video art, the ‘Wheel of Samsara’ illuminated painting panel built of steel with custom electronics to translate brush-strokes into sounds. The Laboratory was and is a complex project that is difficult to explain, but in its deployment would be, to a large extent, self-explanatory. With the help of friends I whipped this project together at breakneck speed. My old friend Rex Mundi created an exquisitely beautiful wooden structure in less than two weeks flat (a miraculous achievement and a masterpiece of wood sculpture). Rex also found a welder, Andre’ Sitting Up, to create the Wheel of Samsara, and enlisted his friend Kate Erland to make the custom projection screens. All of this work was done in Lawrence, Kansas and Rex trucked it out to the Burning Man Festival. In the Bay Area, Theremin Barney worked to create the custom electronics for the Wheel of Samsara while Max Hunter built custom dust protection boxes for the video projectors, and cut the acrylic sheets for the Wheel of Samsara into hexagonal shapes, as well as consulted and advised on technical aspects of the project throughout.. In Los Angeles, visualists Evan Pierre, Brent Bucci, and Nat “VJ Voodoo” Leonoudakis worked to organize the projection art aspect of the project, preparing a library of Jonathan Bernbaum’s material, and organizing projectors and other necessary equipment.. All of this I arranged in Kyoto, and then completed the final steps while in the Bay Area - mostly in Vallejo with Max.
For me the process of pulling together a project like this is one of magical manifestation. Through visualization, social skills, and the adroit use of intuition and timing I am able to make things happen with a kind of synchronistic aplomb that often crosses the borders of the miraculous.
Yet I arrived at Burning Man ill-equipped for camping, and with little time to set up the “Laboratory of Hallucinations”. Further, I was welcomed with a forbidding letter from the Temple:
“Hi David,
Marisha, Mark and I have been busy for the last few weeks building the temple and are just now reading the email you sent regarding a ceremony for the ghost ship fire victims in the temple. We are very sympathetic to the people affected by the tragedy and hope that the temple can provide comfort for them. However we do not approve of a ceremony or procession involving the temple. Please do not place the large square paintings in the temple either, as they are part of this ceremony as well. Marisha, Mark, myself, and the entire temple crew have worked very hard to bring the temple to Burning man this year. Please respect our final decision regarding this subject.
-Steve Brummond”
As I approached closer and closer to the conclusion of the Ghost Ship dedication, and especially in the harsh exhausting environment of the Black Rock Desert, my spirit became more turbulent and my emotions more raw. I felt that if I could not bring the paintings into the temple then truly the ritual would fail, and I felt that the failed ritual would be a curse upon me engendering madness and/or a cascading series of karmic misfortunes. These thoughts and feelings tormented me. I simply could not and would not accept this unfair edict from the Temple. I had waged an overwrought campaign of words upon the organizers of Burning Man through a series of open letters. Deftly exploiting the structure of the festival, it’s themes, it’s ‘institutions’, and it’s philosophy, I had evoked in peoples’ minds images of vast crowds marching and chanting in torchlit procession, flamboyant and bizarre ceremonies of painting and bondage and masked dancing and sepulchral singing, and all of it swelling morbidly around the bow of a symbolic Ghost Ship fire memorial whose tragic power seemed to overwhelm the capacity for rational thought on the part of the reader. Yet this was no cynically manipulative mummery, I intended wholeheartedly to join in whatever madness I could muster, and perhaps because I was serious about all of it people were alarmed and over-reacted.
Paintings Catalogue 4
I began painting on Wednesday evening of the festival. Before long I had a very dignified visitor: David Best, the great creator of Burning Man temples whose magnificent structures have become iconic symbols of the festival and captured the imagination of people worldwide. David had not arrived to congratulate me, rather he was stern and angry. He asked me if Temple Crew had given me permission to enter the Temple, and I said “Yes . . . “, but before I had time to finish my sentence with an explanatory clause he cut me off and called me a “passive aggressive guy” and said that I had “bullied Marisha into agreeing with the ritual” and then turned on his heel and stormed off. I chased after him to no avail - he would speak to me no further. In truth, as far as my dealings with the temple were concerned, there was neither bullying, nor passive aggression - I was always calm and polite, yet forthright in asserting my aims - all communications reflect this and nothing else.
For my part, I would not be bullied by David Best or anyone else. I kept going. The creation of the paintings proceeded. A noble gentleman, “Wolverine”, stepped in and helped with many of the paintings and he supported the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication through and through. Wolverine is a glass painter and so he was perfectly comfortable painting on the plexiglass - a substrate that many painters find disconcerting. Together, Wolverine and I created the 37 paintings. Wolverine’s partner, Rosemary, also a painter, contributed a painting as well, and gave to me a valuable technique which I continued to use throughout the creation of the paintings: Rosemary placed her hands on the Wheel of Samsara and meditated until an image came to mind connected with the specific soul that she would paint for. I adopted this mediumistic technique and used it for all of the paintings that I created. I would consider the name on the piece of washi and then place my hands on the Wheel of Samsara, close my eyes, breathe, and wait until an image came to mind. Each soul seemed to want something different - one wanted a horse, another wanted cherries, yet another a simple cube, a skull, devil’s head, a flower, a sunset, an open door, two souls wanted dragons - many different themes. The paintings were made rapidly in a loose Expressionist style and as they were made they were hung up around the “Laboratory” which had, in actuality, become the de facto shrine for the Ghost Ship Memorial.
None of the electronic art planned for the Laboratory of Hallucinations could be deployed successfully at Burning Man. The video projectors while successfully protected in their dustboxes had technical problems with powering up due to them being mounted too close together thus causing erratic behavior when the remote control was used. The friend that was supposed to do the synthesizer music in conjunction with Theremin Barney’s custom electronics cancelled at the last minute and so there was never a way to translate the signals from the Wheel of Samsara into sound. Indeed, all things pertaining to sound and music imploded on this project. My magical interpretation was that these were consequences of the disrupted ritual in Kyoto when the singing stopped. Still, I did what little I could to try to correct the technical problems, but to little avail, moreover, creating the paintings was taking all of my energy. I began to see clearly that what I was doing at Burning Man was not really “Laboratory of Hallucinations” at all, but was really all about the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication, and after a little while I went with the flow.
Yet, I felt enormous pathos related to the element of sound specifically. It was eerie to me how all things connected to sound collapsed. It was as though when the singing stopped, and then later I slammed the Taxi Cab door on the the singer, Ioana, I collapsed a standing wave of magical vibrations that were essential to the success of the ritual. As I reached closer and closer to the completion of the ritual I became more and more distraught. I had fallen in love with Ioana and her contribution to the ritual seemed to me intrinsic, seminal and crucial. For me she was at the heart of it all since we had done the opening ritual of writing the names on the papers together. I became frantic about this and implored Ioana to forgive me and come to Burning Man as she had originally planned, but she would not forgive me and she stonewalled me, would not talk to me, and my pleading was to no avail. With the Temple opposing me, and busy with the strange mediumistic communion of making the paintings, and in the delirious harsh environment of the desert, my heart broke with remorse and grief for the way I had mistreated Ioana. Throughout Thursday and Friday I was subject to uncontrollable fits of sobbing and grief. Perhaps next to the grief of losing a loved one the only comparable suffering of separation is the rejection of heartbreak when the one that you love and desire has closed the door of the heart absolutely. In a way, I think that because I had no connection deep enough to any victim of the Ghost Ship Fire to really be in mourning, the loss of Ioana created it’s own kind of grief without which I would never of had the empathy needed to really viscerally understand the loss of the Ghost Ship souls.
Paintings Catalogue 5
Yet I kept going with the process of the ritual. I continued to paint, and on Friday afternoon Marisha, the designer and head of the Temple, visited me at the Laboratory where I was painting. She apologised to me for forbidding the procession and the paintings, and told me that many people had told her how beautiful what I was doing was, and how moved they were by it. I told her that we were just like Jesse and Walter White on the “Breaking Bad” TV show, and recalled to her a scene where, after a particularly difficicult meth production run, Jessie said to Mr. White, “Hey! We need to debrief, Yo!”. I told Marisha we need take some time to “debrief”! It was my way of saying that we really had not communicated adequately, and much of the difficulty (as it usually does) arose from poor communication, and that we ought to take the time to discuss it all, “debrief”, in the future. Documentary filmmaker Harrod Blank filmed the interaction.
At 10 PM on Friday night I completed the 37th painting that represented fire. Dressed in an old theatrical sort of wizard robe, I slathered on the reds and yellows on the Wheel of Samsara in a fierce mandala that sybolized fire, and took the last sheet of washi and pressed it down upon the panel. I invited everyone to rub their hands over the back of the paper to make the print. Together we pulled the last print, and after that was accomplished we proceeded to the temple. Nine months to the day of the Ghost Ship fire, a human birth cycle, a ritual to take the Ghost Ship souls to the other side was completed.
It was a small group of people that had gathered for the procession. Despite distributing handbills and making announcements on Burning Man radio, only a handful of people, either loyal to me and the project or strongly connected to the Ghost Ship Fire, showed up. Most notable was Ed Bernbaum, father of Ghost Ship Fire victim, Jonathan Bernbaum. Ed is a scholar of comparative religions; a mountain climber and advocate for Mountain spirituality, culture, and ecology; and now, lately; the initiator of a non-profit called, “Vital Arts” dedicated to advancing the cause of property rights for artists in the Bay Area and beyond - a constructive response to the Ghost Ship Fire Tragedy that has affected him so directly and tragically.
Our procession was a quiet affair. There were no marching bands, art cars, and certainly no impassioned crowd chanting and bearing torches. What had grown in people’s imaginations to a tsunami was in reality just a gentle wave that lapped silently up to the temple bearing the blessing for the Ghost Ship souls with a poignant tenderness. As I led the procession I continued to be wracked with grief, and as we approached the Temple I made a prayer, “Please Lord, I have done this service and I would gladly do it again, but can you give me one reward: Please lift this rage from me, release me from the irrational anger that has burdened me for so long. For I can no longer bear to live with this anger”. For many years I have been subject to internal fits of rage. Mostly a private thing, this impotent rage has no outlet, but only turns back upon myself - it is a symptom of depression. I felt that this anger caused me to sabotage my relationship with Ioana, not only because being filled with anger makes it easy to lose one’s temper, but because the anger turned inward devastates one’s self-esteem causing one to feel unworthy of the greatest blessings in life, such as an amazing woman like Ioana, and to act out the feeling of unworthiness in fits of self-destruction. It has been more than a week since the Ghost Ship dedication has been completed, and the feelings of rage have vanished, though I am still left with sadness.
The paintings were rolled up in six rolls of six each. Since the Temple had made such a fuss about any display of the paintings (they felt that it was both an aggrandizement for me, and also an unfair dispensation of the Temple’s resources on a specific cause), I intended only to place the rolls of paintings in the lattice like spaces in the Temple’s walls to respect their wishes. When we arrived at the Temple, immediately we were approached by a woman who said she was seeking the procession, and that she had photos of three of the victims. She wanted to pair each photo with one of the paintings. First she had a photo of Jonathan Bernbaum, and, amazingly, the very first painting peeled off a roll was that of Jonathan’s. Then she had a photo of Chelsea Dolan, the singer and DJ who was performing at the Ghost Ship that night, and again, the very first painting peeled off a roll was Chelsea’s. The way the photos found the paintings was simply uncanny. When the photo of Chelsea was placed on the painting everyone gasped: The image I had painted matched the photo. In my painting you could see Chelsea’s round face surrounded by black - even a sort of headgear seemed to be around her head. In the photo, Chelsea is looking up from the turntables smiling brightly, headphones on, with the dark background of a nightclub surrounding her. In my painting her eyes are closed and she is not smiling, and while I personally don’t find the resemblance that strong, everyone present saw it immediately without analysis - a clear and direct perception that I had portrayed Chelsea herself in the painting.
Paintings Catalogue 6
While death is a mystery, the emotions of the living are less so, and I was immensely gratified that Ed Bernbaum came out to Burning Man and participated in the ritual. Ed was grateful for all that I did, and also told me that it helped him a lot, that he felt much better for participating, and if that alone was the result, that if I could help only one survivor of the tragedy then that is all the reward that I need. Yet I feel that I accomplished more and that I really did bring spiritual closure for all the Ghost Ship souls remaining in the Bardo and welcomed them to become bodhisattva as I intended.
The Ghost Ship dedication also had ramifications in the material world. After the ritual, the following dawn, I found myself circling on a bicycle around the majestic temporary monuments of Burning Man; the Manbase and the Temple, as the sun rose. As I whizzed along, I couldn’t help but laughing out loud at the skirmishes with the Temple. At the crux was a philosophical argument: I was advancing the cause of free expression - “Radical Self Expression” - one of the 10 Burning Man Principles, within an atmosphere of increasing institutional constraint exemplified perhaps nowhere so strongly as in the dogmatic pomp of the Temple. Ultimately, I had to concede to the Temple’s wishes and so I never made any ceremony within the Temple, nor were the paintings hung up in the Temple. However, I still felt that I had won the argument after a fashion; when a subject is debated, and two sides ‘respectfully disagree’, the first side to lose its cool and blow up in anger is the side that has lost the argument, regardless of whether the side that kept it’s cool really proved its point or not. I kept my cool and won. When David Best stormed away from me and my installation I felt firmly that rather than this being an end, it was the beginning of a new friendship and an important dialogue.
Having been involved with the Burning Man Festival since 1994, and having made some respectable contributions with my art and ideas over the years, I feel an ongoing commitment to Burning Man. I see the festival as a crucible for the exploration of new ideas. Beginning as an essentially anarchist festival where the greatest exhilaration in participating was the unbridled sense of freedom one felt in the remote Black Rock Desert in the company of an elite band of artists and free-spririts, it has grown to be a major cultural phenomenon with a gigantic following whose artistic expressions have a bearing on the global stage of cultural history and touch millions worldwide. One of the central challenges facing the festival is the balance between “radicalism” - a central concept in its ten principles - a concept that enshrines transgression into the social fabric of the festival, and the institutional hegemony needed to manage the juggernaut festival. Is casting yourself into the fire of the Man Burn (as one deranged individual did at this year’s event) the only real “radical self-expression” left at Burning Man? Or can a structured, consensual transgression be made as this year’s festival theme “Radical Ritual” seemed to imply? My experience was that the transgression I requested was not tolerated, and that every radical aspect of the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication ritual was squelched by the orthodoxy of the Temple.
This tension that exists between the freedom of individual sovereignty and the restraints of social destiny that challenges Burning Man is also at the heart of the conflict that gave rise to the Ghost Ship tragedy. Young artists and musicians sought a place outside the laws of society to express themselves freely, and in so doing ended up locking themselves in a giant tinderbox, the Ghost Ship warehouse, to burn to death in the name of the romantic dream of underground culture. Saturday morning after the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication, I introduced Ed Bernbaum to Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man. I anticipate that a dialogue will take place between them about how Ed’s non-profit, Vital Arts, and Burning Man can work together to address these issues through Vital Arts mission to create safe and affordable spaces for artists to live, work, and express themselves freely. For me that would be a concrete and tangible good unfolded through the difficult ritual of the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication, and I hope to have an ongoing role in that dialogue.
My mind keeps taking me back to when I visited Bali for the first time in the year 2000. I had the great privilege of meeting the Balinese Shaman (‘Balian’ in the Balinese tongue), Jero Tapakan. Jaro took a shine to me, and gave me her time generously. She was in her late 70s then and over decades had risen to the stature of the pre-eminent traditional healer on the island of Bali, and perhaps the entire Indonesian archipelago. She would give me long massages that made me feel like every bone in me had been taken apart and put back together in a better way. I feel that she transmitted not just healing, but some of her magical power, enfolding it through her touch into my soul. One day I visited Jero with my friends, Lena and Melissa, through whom I had met Jero. My friends and I were seated together on a bench when Jero croaked at me, “Kamu Dukun!” (“You are a shaman!”). I protested and said, “No, Jaro! I am only an artist!”. She laughed and said, “Maybe that is true for now, but when you are older the art will lead you to be a shaman.” Over the years I have dabbled in the shamanic, dong the occasional ritual and experimenting with plant medicines, but the Ghost Ship Fire Dedication could be considered my first major shamanic ritual. Certainly it could have gone more smoothly, but I came through it bloodied but unbowed, and I feel I accomplished what I set out to do. Terima Kasih, Jero Tapakan!!
Flowers open in their yearning
Like debutantes eager for the ball
Dancing seasons of Earth’s turning
Love is light for one and all