The mirror was in the middle of the desert, hundreds of miles from me. I drove to it without knowing it was there. To the desert, to camp naked. I knew the desert was there. I came to it from where I was. A place devoid of all life, of cacti, insects, birds. Cupped by mountains, flattened by liquid. It had been a lake, when rivers were still in the process of carving canyons south and east. A place can dry up. A time, too, can dry up, though slower. The dust, alkaline, absorbent of all moisture, reduces a man to a husk of skin. The least breeze turns the air into a sifted solid object, a vision of opaque white. Is it possible that through this blindness, this swirl of nearsightedness, a city, a civilization, a land of blue and pink lights could emerge? Could emerge and dissolve in a specific time frame, a Brigadoon containing a dust-covered mirror, risen from nothing, disintegrated to nothing?
How can a place devoid of life, abandoned by water the dust drank, bloom so suddenly, and vanish? Sustained by trucks of non-potable water, to make the dust heavy and so keep it stuck, to leaven the air and the ground to maintain them as separate things. An importation of moths by hitchhiking. A body is a canteen of sorts, a vessel for the dust to sip. One would expect to see earth among the stars in the night sky, and distinguish east from south by its location.
This is the Black Rock Desert, but it is not the Black Rock Desert. It is a reflection. Except it occupies a larger amount of space than a mirror can contain. Some concepts, some spaces, are too vast for that. The mirror can, however, contain me. The space of me, though not the concept. I am, perhaps, too vast for that. This is Burning Man, except it isn’t, or it isn’t what I’m trying to get at. Even in reflection. I’m trying to lead you through the crowds of fire spinners and women dressed as glowing green-and-yellow snakes and cars disguised as Cheshire cats and gladiatorial pirates, to a small camp surrounded by other small camps, in the center of it all. It took me years to find it, to know I was looking for it. And when I did, at the end of August of 2006, the year of “Hope and Fear” by the Burning Man calendar, I was so inebriated and sleep-deprived that the mirror at this camp made me seem both small and vast all at once.
It was very early Friday morning, or very late Thursday night. In the 36 hours since I had last slept, I had boarded what had once been a bus and was now a Spanish galleon sailing across the playa1, had danced to house music inside a giant wooden structure known as the “Belgian Waffle”, had watched a friend compete in a contest called “Dance Dance Immolation”, and had tequila shots with a clan of garish oddities who referred to themselves, collectively and individually, as Zardoz. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the timeframe here. I might have only been awake for 32 hours at that point. I might have visited the Belgian Waffle on Friday night and not Thursday night. Time can dry up. The point is that I was delirious, at a place beyond and saturated with exhaustion, and my head was filled with strange and fascinating images.
Ghosts in the darkness that themselves were exhausted and dragging their footprints, who scattered into dust when I looked at them directly, as if maintaining themselves as solid objects took a force of will greater than they could conjure. Armored men with fiery whips dancing and pounding drums, a vast plastic orchid garden illuminated in soft white. A woman with tall red hair, painted half-silver, handed me the King of Coins from a tarot deck, said it would represent me starting at sunrise. And the deeper into that bright night I wandered, the further from me the sun was.
The point is that I was trying to get to my camp, to sleep a while before the sun came up and made sleep impossible, and I was lost. I was trying to find my blankets so I could stave off the ice, so I could rest a moment before the furnace. I wanted to soak my blistered feet, to eat, to find new water, to resuscitate my soul. And instead, I found the mirror that night or morning, when I was furthest from myself and unsure that I would ever find my way home.
My home was at 7:00 and Chance, and I had been steering myself in that direction for hours. The problem was that every time I started walking that way, I became instantly distracted by some strange and wondrous and beautiful thing, some sound or sculpture or woman, and two hours would vanish. I had already lost my bicycle, and my feet were beginning to blister. I made full use of the assorted couches and huts that were scattered across the desert to provide comfort and ease for wanderers such as myself. I stared at the Cubatron for long enough that I didn’t feel any time go by at all. By the time I reached Center Camp, I was so weary I couldn’t feel my body anymore -- I was a mist or ghost, a thing without legs, hovering an inch above the ground and propelling myself by sheer force of will. One of those disappearing ghosts I had seen out in the deep empty spaces of night, returning to dust. Since my will was variable and wan at that point, my traversal of time and space was also variable and wan.
I knew where I was. I was in Black Rock City. I was at Center Camp. I was in a human body, more or less. I also knew where I was going: 7:00 and Chance, home, bed. I even knew the route to get there. And yet I was unable to comprehend the process that would be involved in walking from point A to point B. So I suppose I had just been hovering a while, somewhere on the exterior of Center Camp, when I saw it. The mirror. There, just across from me, maybe 15 feet away from me. It seemed to be just an ordinary full-length mirror set in a purple-and-gold frame, slightly scratched at the level of my shoulders, yet I was drawn to it as if by a gravitational force. There was something odd about the reflection it cast, and it took my twenty-percent-functional brain a good while to figure it out.
The person in the mirror didn’t look like me. Or, rather, he didn’t look like any me I had ever seen before. He seemed to be an autonomous being rather than a reflection. There was something about his movements that was independent of me, and his face reminded me of mine, but wasn’t quite. It wasn’t my ragged appearance -- my hair white with dust, my purple snakeskin-pattern pants, the blue faux-fur coat, dimly glowing. My eyes had deep dark circles under them, yet my pupils were keenly alert, almost frantic. This was all to be expected. I had spent my time in this desert. I knew. But this was not quite right. After studying the mirror for a while, I realized why this figure was unfamiliar to me, why he deeply unnerved me.
All my life I had seen myself in mirrors, in still water. All my life I had seen reflections of myself, reverse images. If I raised my left hand, my reflection would raise its right. When I shaved, I transferred the movement of the reflection’s razor, reversed it, to tell my hand how to move and avoid cutting myself. I had never seen myself unreversed, as any other person who ever met me over the course of my life has seen me. My whole experience had been based on a distorted image of my physical dimensions, a 180° flip from the way I was experienced by others, by the world. And this mirror, the image in this mirror, wasn’t reversed. When I raised my right hand, my reflection raised his right hand. If I tilted my head left, so did he. It was as if there were a hologram of myself standing in front of me, or a twin with my exact tics and habits of motion, instead of the distorted projections of myself I had seen since I was a small child. I could, suddenly and finally, see myself as my friends and family and lovers had always seen me.
It shook me to my core. I was frightened in a way that I hadn’t been frightened in years and years. I lost track of who I was, externalized myself into the image before me. Of course I couldn’t look away. In my semi-conscious state, I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. Which is why the time and place is important. If I had such a mirror in my apartment, if I saw that reflection under ordinary circumstances, I may have been charmed by the oddness of the image and gone about the rest of my day without a second thought. But since I had arrived at a certain feeling of etherealness over those past 36 or 32 hours, and had witnessed a plethora of vast and astonishing acts of imagination in that time, my reality at that moment was extremely fragile. In this desert, coated in a fine sheen of playa dust, parched and cold and lost, in the waning of the night, I found myself in a literal way, in a physical way, like running into an old friend on the street, a friend I had never seen face me. I had to introduce myself, had to examine myself closely, gesture so as to watch myself gesture. I stood rapt for a long, long time. Then, with a suddenness that caught me off-guard, I panicked and ran from the mirror, from myself. The fear focused my mind, and I was able to navigate back to my camp in only a few minutes. I curled up in my tent, wrapped in my sleeping bag and several blankets, and, once my breathing calmed down, passed out for six hours. I’m still not sure what frightened me so much about the mirror. I think I must have seen something in myself, something in that image of me, that I couldn’t process. The eyes had something to do with it. When you meet a person, your right eye looks into their left and vice versa. In a mirror, it’s backwards. So I think that looking into my own eyes as if I were looking at another person’s, looking into them as I never had before, made me question who I was at a fundamental level. Perhaps I was sure before and couldn’t stand that new uncertainty, the alienness of my own eyes, especially since I was already in a mental state that could be described as “adrift” that night. I certainly didn’t have any answers to those questions, and still don’t. But that mirror convinced me to ask. Remove the distortion and there is truth. The truth that I can shake hands with myself, right hand to right hand, the way civilized people do. The important thing about a mirror is the reflections in it, after all.
