Back to Class Via Black Rock City: Another Trip into the Zone
Written by Carolyn Cooke, author and professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts (MFA) at CIIS.
How and what do you pack for a trip to a destination that must be imagined into existence?
Once again, while gathering equipment for an eleven-day revel in the Nevada Desert, I ask myself: why help build a temporary and even imaginary city in the last week of August when I really should be preparing for my seminar in Serious Play for Deepening Work or my course in Love, Death and Annihilation in Contemporary Literature and Cinema in San Francisco?
The road trip to Burning Man begins months in advance, planning what to bring and what not to bring, who to be (if different from yourself), any additional characters to include, how long to stay. In this sense, it’s not so different from embarking or continuing on any large-scale project that requires both rigorous planning and constant deviation, such as writing a screenplay or a novel or devising a piece of theater. How and what do you pack for a trip to a destination that must be imagined into existence?
I have some ideas, some influences. The French Oulipo movement came of age in the same decade I did. Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, 99 different tellings of a single story, and Harry Matthews’s fantastically transgressive essay “Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)” both ruined reality for me forever. So did Pataphysics — the “scientific” foundation of the Oulipan Movement — in which the “imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real.” The Cacophony Society, whose membership overlapped with the early years of Burning Man, literally drew a line in the sand to demark “the default world” from “the zone” of the trip, the destination. (The line was that substantial.) “New” and “Gonzo” Journalists Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ryszard Kapuscinski showed me how to combine observation and experience, then shake or stir.
The point really is to do something difficult, or at least to do something.
So here we are again. Taking a real trip into an imaginary zone requires equal measures of visionary and delusional confidence. It demands humility and hubris; reason enough to go. It helps to have friends for the road trip and to trust, sometimes, in the kindness of strangers, but the journey is, at heart, a solitary and existential one.
The point really is to do something difficult, or at least to do something. This year, my camp, The Burning Globe, will erect a 20’ balcony so that strangers can clamber up and deliver a soliloquy or a rant, or enact a scene that is as public as it is intimate. I met a guy a few years ago who spent three weeks building a pyramid that didn’t get close to being finished before it was time to burn the thing down, rake up the charred bits, and go home. Working 20 hours a day in 100+ degree heat on an impossibly ambitious project was, he said, among the most important experiences of his life. I feel the same way about my novel and screenplay, which contain worlds beyond my human capacity and understanding, but which I live in anyway for hours, days, and years at a time, writing what I see and hear in there.
In my seminar on Serious Play next month, we’ll look at pranks, obsessions, and perversities as aspects of artistic discipline and devotion. In Love, Death and Annihilation in Contemporary Literature and Cinema, we’ll explore the limits of human survival and the creative possibilities that open up when we rampage — or are casually tossed by chance — far from equilibrium. What will we need? What should we bring? Right now, in addition to required readings by Gaston Bachelard, Clarice Lispector, Anne Bogart and Roxanne Gay, I’m packing a sleeping bag, bungee cords, Jerry cans of fuel, my bike, every flashlight, lantern and loose battery in the house, a deluge of water, pickles, tinned sardines, and jerky. It’s rough out there.
For more information on the MFA in Arts and Writing at CIIS, please see https://www.ciis.edu/academics/graduate-programs/mfa-programs
