Having selected a labyrinth pattern to be a part of the 3 Old Men ritual, our next issue is construction.

Remember that whatever we use has to be dragged out into the middle of nowhere, set up, and then struck, leaving no trace.

Despite the fact that a city of 68,000 occupies the Playa for over a week, the Burning Man organization is very protective of the the desert floor.  They have to be; otherwise, the federal Bureau of Land Management will not give them permission to return the following year.  Digging is therefore frowned upon; a turf labyrinth is right out.  Plus, who wants to scrape out a trench in 100° weather?

I’m thinking tent stakes and rope are our best bet, but how will we lay out a circular labyrinth that way?

Geometry to the rescue: we will make it octagonal.

… becomes …

Now it becomes a matter of calculating the number of tent stakes (144) and the length of rope (1900 ft) and how to lay it out.

For the record, it’s 40 feet wide, with the paths two feet across.  The site plan also allows for a ten-foot swath around it for the officiants to stand.

Here’s an image of the labyrinth with tent stakes:

I show this because if you look a bit at the patterns of the tent stakes, it’s not hard to imagine the outline of the Man himself therein:

So that could be a fun thing, outlining the Man with glowsticks or something.  If we had a techwad like Kevin McInturff on board, I bet he could make solar-powered lights that outline the Man in all four directions, fading from one to the other.  Yeah, that would be cool.  But Kevin McIntuff is chicken to go to the Playa and pretend to be a dirty hippie freak with me.  Wait, did I say that out loud?

To set the thing up onsite, I’ve devised a plan:

I even have a detailed, step-by-step process to do it, using the 8-foot staves to lay out the central octagon and then proceeding to use the layout triangle to place the tent stakes in an orderly fashion.  The above image, FYI, is from my online workspace at Mural.ly—I highly recommend it as a collaborative workspace!

Shortly after coming up with the idea for 3 Old Men, I had lunch with my partner in crime, Craig.

He immediately suggested that we include a labyrinth as part of our ritual offering.

Well, OK.  I’m all about the labyrinths, of course.  But the issue is still cost and transport: what do you build it out of, and how do you get it there and back?

Craig talked about an experience he had in a psychology class, a “final exam” consisting of rituals, including a “birth tunnel,” from the participants would emerge into an altar area and then encounter different experiences past that.

So, perhaps a multi-cursal labyrinth?

This is from a 1557 publication, Devises heroïques, by one Claude Paradin.  It has four entrances, but I thought it was odd that the East/West entrances don’t actually lead to the center: they go up to the wall of the center, but then you just turn around and go back out the way you came.

So I punched holes in the walls:

Now all four entrances lead to the center, which adds an interesting fillip to the experience—not only can you choose your entrance, you can also choose your exit.

So now the 3 Old Men, rather than trekking across Black Rock City and its surrounding Playa, make their trek around a labyrinth, stopping at the entrances.

In the months I’ve been working on this, I have struggled not to call the Old Men guardians of the labyrinth, because they’re not there to keep anyone from going in.  They’re not there to protect the labyrinth.  Officiant is the word I’ve settled on for the time being.

Now we have three officiants who take up their posts outside the entrances to the labyrinth.

Going with Craig’s memory of emerging from a ritual to encounter a variety of experiences, I came up with the idea that each officiant would offer a different encounter, an agon if you will, to the celebrant emerging at his exit.

• One would offer to bless you.
• One would offer to be blessed by you.
• One would offer to struggle with you.
• At the fourth exit, there is no officiant, and you would encounter no agon.

The nature of these blessings and struggles are undefined for the moment.

At the same time, a new image entered the mix:

Now the 3 Old Men are wearing long, draped skirts.  They seem to have lost the hazmat mask, but they are still bare-chested and painted white, and they still carry staves.  (The parenthetical reference is to a costume design I did for Pericles, Prince of Tyre at the Newnan Community Theatre Company in 1987.)

Who knows where the skirt idea came from?  I like it, though: the skirts would emphasize the effort of moving forward.  It’s otherworldly enough to pique the interest of your average Burner, and would actually photograph better than the loincloth idea.  It also makes us look more like officiants and less like ascetics.  Those guys are no fun.

Here’s where we are: three old guys who need a schtik, preferably ritualistic, that can be transported across the continent so that we can Participate in the Burning Man Festival.

Here’s a funny thing about inspiration and creativity: sometimes—just sometimes—an idea will come to you fully born.  That’s great, because then all you have to do is justify it.

So it has happened here.

Remember back in December when I gifted myself with all the little notebooks, waste books?  My life is littered with them now, and one set is the Burning Man set.  I’m on my second one.

I opened that first notebook and wrote Three Old Men at the top of the first page, and then made a sketch:

Transcription:

Craig David Me

leather loincloths,

long-nose masks

(Pantaloon?)

staves

Butoh paint on bodies/heads

single-file — unison movemeneet

dance breaks — slow-motion staff dance

THE IMAGE CAME FIRST; NOW — FLESH IT OUT WITH ABSTRACTION

Some interesting points about this page.  Notice the note about Pantaloon.  That comes from the commedia mask, which would resemble the “long-nose mask” I envisioned.  (And the mask was actually a hazmat particulate matter mask: the Playa is very dusty.)

The problem of course is that Pantaloon is the antithesis of the Crone-equivalent we’re looking for.  He’s a figure of ridicule, decrepit and impotent.

The other notable thing, which might seem trivial, is that by the bottom of the page I was writing in all caps.  That stuck—the rest of my input is in all caps.  It just feels right.

Anyway, here’s a further sketch of an Old Man:

Gas mask: check.

Loincloth: check.

Saggy manboobs and belly: check.

(Notes on Butoh—ignore those for the time being.)

At this point, we’re good to go.  All we have to schlep across the country are gas masks, loincloths, and staves.  We can buy the ingredients for body paint when we get to Reno.

If you’ll imagine our setup: three old men, nearly naked and painted white, their faces covered by almost alien looking devices, walking silently in single file across the Playa or through the streets of Black Rock City like some new priesthood.

They stop.  Silently they raise their staves and begin a sequence of movements that seem ritualistic, a cross between martial arts and Butoh dance.

Finished, they resume their trek.

So far, so good.  Like all good and perfect ideas, it changed almost immediately.

In doing further image searching for this post, part of a continuing series on my plans for Burning Man, I came across this:

 

This is “Dr. Jeffrey Life” after and before his personal transformation.  I can certainly understand looking at oneself and wanting to be more fit, but there is something to be said, I think, for moving on into the last phases of life.  I know plenty of men my age and older who are slenderer than I, who have watched their weight and kept up with their exercise, but if you were to see a photo of their torso you would not mistake it at first glance for a 30-year-old weightlifter.  Again, that’s “at first glance,” because it doesn’t take long to see the good doctor’s body as a simulacrum of youth.

Women of the wiccan/feminist variety have a handle on this:

This is a plaque depicting the Triple Goddess: Maiden, Mother, Crone, pictured here in reverse order.  The youth of the Maiden, the fecundity of the Mother, the age and wisdom of the Crone—all three are present and available to women throughout their lives, and it’s a pathway from power to power.  The seemingly useless old woman has been reclaimed as a sorceress, a queen, a figure of authority and knowledge.

This motif is ever-present in ritual studies.  A Google image search reveals an unending supply of variations on the theme.

Here’s the deal, though: there is no male equivalent.

Part of the issue is that the female archetypes present themselves readily based on women’s ability to bear children, but men do not have that defining role.  Our ability to procreate does not end as women’s does, and that does lead to some problematic archetypes.  (“Problematic” for our Burning Man ritual purposes, that is.)

Mostly the image of the older man in culture is like this:

(See also, also, and also.  This appears to be an anomaly.)

Or this:

The first is Silenus, tutor of Dionysus; the second is Shakespeare’s Falstaff.  This is what is embedded in our heads as archetypical “old man”: fat, drunk, lustful without cause or hope of consummation—in short, an impotent laughingstock.  Hardly a counterpart to the Crone in terms of dignity or power, and so it’s no wonder that Dr. Jeffrey Life, after taking stock of himself in the mirror, might want to take steps to turn himself into this:

Yes, well, wouldn’t that be nice?  (For the record, I never looked like that in my life, not even close.)

But that’s not what a man’s body looks like or is supposed to look like as we age.

Here’s a set of photographs by Thomas Eakins, now thought to be of Walt Whitman.

 

This is an old man.  He brings his experiences,  his accomplishments, his gnosis, and while a 20-year-old may be prettier to look at, you will not learn from him what you will learn from Old Men.

The point of all this is that as I thought about heading out into the desert as a 60-year-old—and in celebration of that fact—I was interested in establishing our bodies as Old Men, as positive figures of wisdom, power, and authority, the male equivalent to the Crone.  To that end, some exposure is required, and although nudity is a thing out on the Playa, that’s not my main interest or a goal at this time.  Bare chests and bellies will make our point just as well, I think, without risking Total Sunburn.

So tomorrow we’ll look at the birth of 3 Old Men: a ritual troupe.

 

You will recall that, having decided that I wanted to go to Burning Man Festival, I had to decide what to do that qualified as Participation.  It had to be transportable and not too expensive, and I at least wanted it to be meaningful.  I mean, I could  just grow a beard and throw on a tutu and that would be sleazy but part of the scene.  But I want more.

I’ve  spent a lot of time over the last two or three years studying ritual and how it functions in our lives—posts for another series, perhaps—and so naturally I began to think in those terms.  Another concern of mine has been that of aging, especially the relationship between our physical bodies’ decay and our interior growth.  What does it mean to be an old man?

First, the physicality.  There is no question that there is a difference between these three photos:

Youth, middle-age (a 47-year-old Johnny Depp), and old age.  We look at these three men differently because their physical shapes are different.  We expect different things from these three men—socially, societally, physically, artistically—because their physical shapes are different.

That’s one reason I find this guy disturbing:

There’s just something wrong here.  His face tells us to expect one thing, but his pecs and abs are telling us another.  There is a conflict, too, between his buff physique and the actual skin he owns; it’s not the skin of the young man above.  He’s a chimera.

No—while I’m not completely happy with my physique, I am proud to have earned my 60 years, and my Burning Man offering should reflect that.  So, ritual and old men is where we’re headed.

Next: Maiden/Mother/Crone