Here, have a look at the labyrinth’s ferns:
(Hover over for caption/description; click for new view.)
This is when I know there’s no turning back. If I were of a crude nature, I’d call it some kind of feeling of inevitability that one encounters every now and then.
The labyrinth itself needs to be mowed and the paving stones trimmed, but that’s the kind of thing I can do later.
In Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World: mischief, myth, and art, he has a chapter called “Speechless Shame and Shameless Speech” in which he posits that shame is linked to societal rules about speech and silence, and that those rules have an “ordering function,” not just of society but of the body and the psyche as well.
He quotes from Hunger of Memory, the memoir of one Richard Rodriguez:
The normal, extraordinary, animal excitement of feeling my [teenaged] body alive—riding shirtless on a bicycle in the warm wind created by furious self-propelled motion—the sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied. I was too ashamed of my body. I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body.
Hyde goes on to note that “…an unalterable fact about the body…”—in this case, Rodriguez’s brown skin— “… is linked to a place in the social order,…”—i.e., less than white skin— “… and in both cases, to accept the link is to be caught in a kind of trap.” [1]
The Trickster, however, subverts that trap. Remember that Trickster = Raven, Coyote, Br’er Rabbit, Shiva, Dionysus, Jesus.
Or Old Men.
If you take Rodriguez’s passage and substitute old for brown, you can see another source of the power of 3 Old Men’s ritual at burns:
Wise to the tricks of language, the [Trickster] refuses the whole setup—refuses the metonymic shift, the enchantment of [societal] story, and the rules of silence—and by these refusals [he] detaches the supposedly overlapping levels of inscription from one another so that the body, especially, need no longer stand as the mute, incarnate seal of social and psychological order. All this, but especially the speaking out where shame demands silence, depends largely on a consciousness that doesn’t feel much inhibition, and knows how traps are made, and knows how to subvert them.[2]
That’s long and complicated. But what it means for us is that rather than be complicit in the role that society has constructed for the words an old man, the 3 Old Men troupe rejects that metonymy— “a kind of bait and switch,” Hyde says, “in which one’s changeable social place is figured in terms of an unchangeable part of the body”[3]—in this case, our aging male bodies—and instead substitutes a different reading.
This reading (about which you can read my original thoughts here) also links into Hyde’s contention that any social structure of meaning undergoes “purification” as it continues to create order, discarding undesirable or repellent bits, i.e., “dirt.” He contends that in an eternal dialectic, the Trickster takes the dirt, the waste, the excluded detritus of the system and revivifies the system by breaking it open and throwing the dirt back in.[4]
Thus, our society’s ideals of beauty and power have over the centuries focused more on the youthful male body—sleek, virile, strong—and rejected the aching joints, sagging breasts, and protruding bellies of the old. 3 Old Men uses its ritual to call attention to those attributes of “oldness” and to overturn and recreate that societal order in the labyrinth, and then to include that society which excluded the former “dirt,” by opening the labyrinth to the journey of others, ending with our agon encounters at the boundaries.
Ritual: Order. Community. Transformation.
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[1] Hyde, p. 169
[2] ibid., p. 171
[3] ibid. p. 170
[4] In a stunning bit of synchronicity, the chapter after “Speechless Shame” is “Matter Out of Place”: dirt is that which is out of place when we create our order. Matter out of place, or MOOP, is of course a key concept in Leave No Trace, one of the 10 Principles of Burning Man. (I do not know whether there is a connection between Hyde’s work and the growth of Burning Man—it would be interesting to find out.) UPDATE: Indeed, Larry Harvey, founder of Burning Man, got the term from Hyde.
Fall is here.
This isn’t autumnal color—ivy is evergreen. But it’s still striking.
We recently cleaned out and culled our years of Halloween decorations. This came to live in the labyrinth.
All the maple leaves are from the neighbor’s yard. The trees themselves are spectacular, especially in afternoon light.
I’ll say it forever: my labyrinth is a sacred space.
I have not reported on my experience at Alchemy 2015: Amalgamation because I’ve been busy getting A Christmas Carol on its feet. Not only that, but as you will guess, it took me two weeks after the burn to get the 3 Old Men’s stuff all cleaned, dried, and packed away.
Disclaimer: Many of these photos were taken by other people, and to my shame I did not make any notes for crediting them in this post. If I can go back and find them, I’ll correct that. If you’re reading this and recognize one of yours, let me know and I’ll credit you.
Also disclaimer: You will notice a great lack of people in these photos. The burn community is very protective of its privacy, and I feel a little strange even posting about the weekend, but I think it’s worth sharing. For the same reasons, I will not be giving an overly detailed account of the burn. Sometimes you have to experience the mystery for yourself.
Alchemy was nearly a month ago, the first weekend in October. I arrived at the burn on Wednesday on “early entry,” to set up the labyrinth along with another of the 3 Old Men troupe, who was bringing fire art to our camp for the first time. Here’s our theme camp area:
I had gone up the weekend before to help the Placement Team lay out the theme camp areas, so I knew what to expect (which was an area smaller than I had requested and which barely had room for all of us). First we set our tents up, and then we got to work on the labyrinth. You will recall that I spent many weeks sewing hundreds of yards of muslin to create the new walls for the labyrinth, and on the whole it looked good.
There were still some saggy spots due to some inexplicable errors in my measuring. Safety pins worked; I’ll pull it all out and fix it next April before we hit the road again. You will also notice in the photo above the octagonal mat at the north entrance, with the tripod holding the bowl of kaolin.
Here’s our first test of the new fire thingies—actually called “poofers” by those whose craft this is. It was very cool:
However, the weather was not in our favor. It was supposed to be pretty all weekend, with a high pressure area keeping a rain front at bay until we were done, but Hurricane Joaquin ruined all that. It began raining Wednesday night and did not stop until Sunday. The 3 Old Men generally do four of our labyrinth rituals a day, but at this burn we were barely able to do four altogether.
But boy, we looked great when we did:
It looks like we’re holding the flame, but we’re not. We’re holding our 8-foot staffs; the poofers were right behind us. Quite impressive.
For some reason, I own more tarps than necessary, but thank goodness for that. We were able to fashion a reasonably comfortable shelter from two of our canopies and the tarps. Here’s our kitchen/living room area. I bought a propane fire pit after last year’s experience of freezing half the time—you can see it back with the chairs. Everyone rejoiced that I had made the purchase:
I joked that the number of new structures in our camp was deplorable. Passersby would have seen multiple Old Men poring over instructions while others helped assemble their tents and canopies. But we were not alone in that regard, I discovered as I walked about.
It rained. After so much planning and execution, it was very disappointing that everything you owned was wet and muddy. Dry socks became a commodity. The camps became mudpits; the parking lot and roads became impassable:
The leadership of the event prevented what could have been a catastrophe with speed and decisiveness. They closed the gates to keep the parking lot from trapping thousands of vehicles in the mud; had gravel brought in for the roads inside the burn itself; reopened the gates; provided shuttles to get people/stuff into (and out of) the burn; and in general leadership neither played nor slept for the four days of the burn.
This didn’t solve all the problems, of course. More than a few theme camps never made it, and several funded art projects were never installed. Those that did were severely hampered by the weather—a cuddle pit of stuffed animals, for example, becomes problematic when they’re all soaked. It was uncomfortable to travel, so many people didn’t get out and about as much as they normally would have. (My personal goal this burn was to get out and experience more of the burn. Because I’m a great wimp, I partially failed at that, although I did see more this year than last year.)
In our own camp, three members never made it, and three went home on Saturday afternoon during a break in the rain. Because the labyrinth was now a sopping wet, heavy mess, I asked my campmates to help me take it down while they were still there, which they kindly did.
After we got it all down, we found that despite the weather we had had enough visitors to trample the grass into the very recognizable outline of our labyrinth:
At that point we were grateful that the owner of the property had not mown our area again before we got there. The trampled grass prevented our camp from being a complete mud hole.
However, everything was still soaked to the core. I had put my tent where a depression ran through the campsite, and it became a river. One corner of my tent ended up below the water level, pulling a Titanic and letting water in over the rubberized flooring. Even after I shored up the corner and then mopped/bailed out the inside, it felt and sounded as if I were walking on a water bed, and after I took my tent down on Monday I discovered why:
By Sunday afternoon when the rain finally stopped, the three of us remaining had all decided to stay until Monday to let the mud settle a bit and to see if there was less competition to get out of the parking lot. This proved to be the right decision, and without too much trouble I was able to load the trailer and cross the flooded “dry creek” to get back on the road to Newnan.
Here’s the thing: even though my mantra for the entire burn was “I can be cold, or I can be wet, but I cannot be cold and wet,” and nothing I owned would dry out, and half my camp either left early or didn’t arrive at all, and everything was just wet, wet, and gross, it was still a burn. It was still full of wonderful people doing amazing things. Art still went up, food and drink were still served, whomp-whomp music still played all night [I’m looking at you, Discordia…], and stuff was still burned.
For example, here’s the Minotaur, a 30-foot tall sculpture by Vermont artists Kim and Chris Cleary:
Here’s the Effigy itself, atop the hill:
That thing was actually climbable. Hippies younger than I did that.
Here’s the Temple at night, lit from within:
So much more, none of which I have photos of, and which I would be hard pressed to list or describe. There was a butterfly dome with scores of Monarch butterflies, all released the last day of the burn to find their way south. There were amazing sculptures of light, programmed to react to the presence and movement of the itinerant hippies. There were camps to dance in, to sing in, to eat and drink in, to take shelter in. There were thousands of muddy hippies, ruefully making the best of a terrible situation with good humor and sass; the burn was soon rechristened as “Alchemuddy: Almudgamation.”
Because of the Principle of Radical Self-Reliance, Alchemy never threatened to turn into a disaster like TomorrowWorld, which had stranded thousands of unprepared party-goers in similar muddy woods just the weekend before. (Someone who camped at Tomorrow World told me that for those who were burners, TomorrowWorld was fine. It was just the “sparkle ponies” who descended into chaos.)
Above all, there was that sense of community which sustains those of us who burn and which lures us back again and again:
That’s a shot of Center Camp—information stations, performance space, and art projects—from Effigy Hill. Does that look like a terrible place to be? It was not, rain or no.
Here’s another shot of the main camping area, taken from Silent Hill:
Behind this view is a hilltop covered with more camps, and out of sight to the right and to the far right are three more camping areas. You never run out of places to go and hippies to meet.
And did the rain stop the hippies from burning All The Things? It did not:
The Minotaur burned—the Effigy burned—the Temple burned. We cheered, we danced, we sat in silence. On Sunday, it was very strange to walk around the burn and be aware that the hill was empty: no Effigy, no Temple, all consumed, gone.
And Sunday was just fun. The burn officially goes through Monday morning, but many people leave on Sunday since they have to work on Monday. I of course do not have that problem, and now I plan to stay through Sunday night anyway. The rain had stopped and it was warmer. My fellow Old Men and I tromped all around the burn—all the large camps were in full swing, and we ended up at a sound camp deep in the woods, watching brilliant fire spinners do their thing and dancing to the DJs set.
So was it miserable? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Without any hesitation.
So here are two photos of Alchemy 2015:
Both are true.
Back in the summer, a Kickstarter campaign came over the transom and I was intrigued enough to click on the link and learn more.
It was for this company, SoLight Design. They had a new design, the Solar Helix, that they wanted to bring to market, and they were crowdfunding that effort. The hook was that they also wanted to be able to send their original design, the SolarPuff, to the victims of the Haiti earthquake as a sustainable light source. Just as the campaign launched, Nepal was hit by its earthquake, and so the company added Nepal to the list. (They have since added Syria.)
Like most Kickstarter campaigns, there were different levels of donation, and for each level you received various numbers of SolarPuffs and Solar Helixes and some other number of SolarPuffs would be sent to Haiti/Nepal. I ordered the one Helix and two Puffs package; I don’t remember how many lights that donated.
The response was so overwhelming that the company missed all their donor shipping dates in order to manufacture and ship the donated lights to Haiti and Nepal. Somehow I was not annoyed by that.
Yesterday, my three lights came, finally, and all I can say is WOW!
Here’s the SolarPuff:
Here’s the Helix:
They both come in little ziplock bags, already charged. Both are these charming little origami packets.
See? That’s the Helix in mid-opening. And here it is fully opened:
And lit:
Here’s the Puff fully opened:
And lit:
Both have three settings for the LED lights: regular, bright, and blinking. Both put out an amazing amount of light: last night in the labyrinth, one of them hanging out over the labyrinth lit the entire southern half of the pathway. No more stumbling about wondering where the lines are!
Both have straps/handles on one side for carrying or hanging. The light is warm, not that hideous cold blue that most LEDs are. Eight hours of charging will give you 8-12 hours of light.
Besides the different construction and materials, the Helix has its strap on the same side as the solar panel, while the Puff’s strap is on the opposite side. Both configurations would be useful in their own way, I guess. The Helix can hang and shed light from above; the Puff might be better suited sitting on a table—if you hang it, the solar panel blocks the bottom light, and in fact the light would be aimed upward.
But what incredible stuff! Lightweight, collapsible, sustainable, safe, and beautiful—they require no fuel but the sun, and there’s no danger of burning your house down or filling it with carbon monoxide. What an amazing gift to people in disaster areas! And for vaguely hippie-ish types like myself, what a cool, elegant way to light your various labyrinths, theme camps, or patios! I imagine caterers and party planners would snap these up.
I’m off to buy some more.
Well, poot, as my mother used to say:
This is the water endstone. I made the mistake, the day of the pouring, of picking it up to remove the cardboard form. It crumbled. The others seem to be fine, so I’m left to wonder whether I added too much water to the bucket for this one or I just should have waited to disturb it.
Not a problem: I have 30 pounds of concrete mix left. I can make another one.
After months of procrastination planning, I finally got around to creating the new endpoints for the labyrinth.
Digging out the holes for the forms was easy. Next I mixed up the concrete—slightly nerve-wracking, since I’ve never done this before—and scooped the muck into them. I knew enough to shake the form a bit to get any air bubbles out, although truly the structural integrity of the bricks is not an issue.
After I got them poured and they set up for about an hour, I decided that I did want the alchemical symbols for the four classical elements engraved into them. I cast about for ways to do that and came up with a simple solution: a flower pot and a folded piece of cardboard.
So here we have…
I realized that if this doesn’t work out—and there are some issues I may not be able to stand—I have half a bag of concrete mix still available.
(I had extra concrete this time, which I used to pour a small slab for the westpoint bowl’s stand to sit on. It had begun to list.)
Almost, so close, asymptotically close…
Yes, all the walls are done, and yesterday I went out to Craig’s to lay it out. I approached the task with some trepidation, because if my math science was wrong, then I was well and truly screwed—Alchemy is in two weeks, and I don’t have the funds to start over anyway.
I knew there would be irregularities in the layout; that’s just the nature of fabric and wobbly stakes, plus I’m not at all sure that the original layout rope triangle is entirely accurate. And there was the matter of the eight short walls missing that critical two inches to accommodate the pleats…
On the whole, though, it worked well, and well enough.
As planned, the new look makes the labyrinth look more important, especially in that it now looks like what it is, i.e., a labyrinth. It’s clear now that this is something you enter. So that part of the idea is a complete success.
In this quasi-aerial shot, you can see the floppiness in some of the walls. Somehow I added too many two-inch accommodations to those walls, but all I have to do is twist the center pocket once and stitch it down, thus taking up the slack. We’re also adding some central pockets to some long walls that are not holding themselves up.
In the foreground of that shot you can see the octagonal mat upon which we will place the tripod and the bowl of kaolin. No MOOP here, folks!
Onward!
Update:
I rolled out one of the long walls to begin marking the pockets that needed taking up:
Oi. It reaches all the way up to the middle of the carport. It was probably better that I didn’t realize this.
“Dale,” I hear you asking1, “I understand that you’ve hemmed six football fields worth of muslin strips…
“…but how on earth do you do the pleats and create the pockets that the tent stakes slip into?”
I’m glad you asked.
First of all, cardboard templates are your friend. I make mine out of Ram Board, a miracle substance carried by Home Depot. Every home should have at least one roll.
Here’s what happens. For every tent stake in the labyrinth I make a pocket, reinforced on each side with a pleat. When I finish a pocket, I use my handy chart to measure from its center to the center of the next one. Then I position the template:
Here you can see the center mark:
On either side of the 4-inch pocket, there is a 2-inch pleat.
On the left hand side, things are a little different. Usually I just mark the 2-inch pleat, but sometimes I have to insert a salvaged piece from an earlier mistake, or I run out of fabric. Since a bolt of muslin is 25 yards, i.e., 75 feet, and these long walls are 108 feet, this adaptation is inevitable. We’ll deal with that process in a moment.
Mark the pleats on the bottom and the top, draw lines on either side of the template, then connect the other lines using the template as a straightedge.
As it says on the template, pleat the outside line to the inside line.
Topstitch the pleat on both sides. I’ve found that it’s easiest/best to topstitch the edge on top, then flip and do the backside.
Here are both pleats topstitched.
To create the pockets, fold the fabric in half and pin both pleats. Use the other cardboard template to mark two inches down from the top of the pocket.
Topstitch again, this time backstitching both ends of the seam. This is to keep the stitches from unraveling, of course. The two inches at the top are for an eventual channel for LD lighting. That’s right, the 3 Old Men labyrinth will glow in the dark. It will be beautiful beyond measure. (I will actually go back and stitch that 2-inch channel across the entire wall, but that may not happen before Alchemy.)
So what about those times when you run out of fabric and have to tack on the next strip? Or where you have planned to insert sections of fabric salvaged from an earlier screw-up of epic proportions? Here we see my chart of measurements which shows how long each segment of the wall needs to be, plus the ID of each tent stake. That’s to help me keep track of where I am in the 108 feet. See the green capital letters?
Those are the salvaged sections, which I measured and labeled:
So when I measure the section before the insert, I mark the left-hand side of the pocket like so:
There’s a 1-inch piece—the bottom of the pleat—then a half-inch section for the seam. That’s where I cut.
I take the salvaged section and pin it to the wall, wrong sides together:
Stitch it, iron it flat, put the template back into position, and mark the left hand side of the template, i.e., complete the left hand pleat.
The seam allowances are thus concealed within the pleat, and the wall looks as if it’s made from one continuous strip of muslin.
And there you have it. A long and boring post, you say? Try doing this process 144 times. Thank you.
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1 Unless those are the voices in my head. Hard to tell.
