humility is endless

friend Barnaby penned a wonderful essay recently about the early burning of the man. he is allowing me to repost it here (though this doesn’t fall under my creative commons copyright, please contact me for requests to repost it.) Barnaby writes:

Dear friends,

A print of Salvador Dali’s “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” hung on my wall for many years. The painting depicts an oblique-angle view of the crucifixion, suspended in a great darkness over a prosaic scene of a fisherman by the shores of a lake. In 1961, a man with a knife attacked the painting where it hung in a gallery and tore the canvas.

A reproduction Michelangelo’s exquisite marble “Pieta” sits on my altar. It is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the reclining body of the crucified Christ in a posture of infinite compassion. In 1972, Laszlo Toth entered the chapel that houses the sculpture, shouted “I am Jesus Christ,” and struck the sculpture repeatedly with a hammer.

I have been to Burning Man five times now, and I always love the great Anthropos presiding over the dynamic, luminous carnival until he burns in the refining fires. Last Tuesday morning during the lunar eclipse, Paul Addis scaled the guide wires of the Man and set it on fire.

How strange that three of the most powerful works of the creative imagination that I have experienced have inspired an ungovernable impulse toward their destruction, despite obvious and unavoidable consequences. What drives people to attack a work of art?

It is impossible not to notice that all three works depict death and resurrection. In the language of depth psychology to which I subscribe, this archetype expresses a fundamental truth of the ego - that the Self is an ephemeral and transitory apparition, continually born, continually dying, evolving in an ongoing, passionate mystery.

I can only speculate that this archetype poses a threat to a fractured ego. Addis may see himself in the lineage of his hero Hunter Thompson, but in my ears his messianic statement sounds more like Toth’s proclamation as he hammered Pieta. Both bear the mark of an inflated ego over-compensating for the yawning chasm where feelings of self-worth should be.

Perhaps a weakened ego can be galvanized and inflamed by symbols that evoke the limitations and transience of the human vessel in which we all must live. To deny the symbol of death and resurrection is to proclaim, in effect, “I am not like you others, I do not suffer your limitations.”

In response to that deeply inhuman impulse I recall the words of T. S. Eliot:

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
The houses are all gone under the sea.
The dancers are all gone under the hill.

Whatever the character of Addis’s actions may be, the fire that he started burned out of his control. In my experience it transcended the human, all-too-human rationale of the arsonist and became a thing alive. The empty center of this year’s event evoked a second mystery - that I am lost, and lost, and lost again.

This year no man emptily presided over the carnival of lights with a great, silent presence. On that plane I see Addis as a brother, lost like me.

Barnaby

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