I built it. I burned it.
/As most of us are, I’ve been feeling very weighed down by our Captivity to the point of hitting the wall emotionally, physically, creatively. Even those whose job it is to create are feeling it. (Maybe especially those who job it is.)
(The music Diplo made is quite lovely, but still…)
So today I bring you my story of hope and regeneration. It is not advice; Lichtenbergianism is a structure for the creative process, not a self-help regimen, and as I note at the end I have personal resources that others may not have. But I offer you the example of how I shook off last week’s ennui. I hope it can help you as well.
As I said last Friday, my goal on Saturday was to build a small effigy and burn it on Saturday night.
Dear reader, I did.
I had a couple of 2x2s, but almost as soon as I started I realized I would need more, so one trip to the Home Depot later I was ready.
I had a vague idea of what I wanted, a kind a spiral of spires, but no real plans. The point was to just start with the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT and then figure it out as I went along.
First plunge:
So there’s my inner spire, with the beginnings of the spiral wall. I began to think that the waveform, if repeated, would become boring or distracting, so I planned to level out the outer wall at a lower height.
You will also notice that I began including gateways in the wall. I had two reasons for this: first, I had to make the effigy explorable for the imaginary hippies at my burn. Second, if I’ve learned anything from the past couple of burns, an effigy not only has to be impressive and to be explorable, it has to burn well. You have to plan for ways for the fire to play, as it were.
It was time for math: what dimensions did the platform for this thing need to be in order to fit into my fire pit? Diameters, inscribed polygons, etc., etc. The diameter of the fire pit was 28”, so the platform needed to be ≈19” square, and the circle which would fit on that square would have a circumference of ≈75”. (Website for that kind of calculation: https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1223430387)
The platform in pieces:
The platform tested in the fire pit:
Notice, again, the spaces between the slats for the fire to find its way. I had some concerns about the legs giving way and spilling a tower of burning lumber into the viewers’ laps, but on the whole I figured the center would give way first. (I was right.)
The platform in its place of honor, the intersection of the labyrinth:
Back at the wall, I kept going with the flow and adding fluctuations and spires and doorways as I went, ending with the tallest spire of all.
I had decided before I began that I would use mending plates to attach the boards to each other: just hammer them in, and they were thin enough to bend into a circle. However, they didn’t really stick so I ended up having to screw them on.
The moment of truth: would the whole thing hold as I rolled it up like a jelly roll? I felt like a contestant on The Great British Baking Show.
It did:
From another angle:
It was after I finished attaching all those boards together and began to think about rolling it up that I realized that if my plan was for the angled tops to face outward, I had done it completely backwards. Oh well. (Important point though: because I was building it to destroy it, none of that mattered. It was the ultimate ABORTIVE ATTEMPT: nothing in the universe could force me to worry about making it perfect. It only had to exist.)
I sent out the invite to my fellow Lichtenbergians and to my campmates in 3 Old Men that if they’d like to drop by, I’d love to have the company. The times being what they are (and my invitation being last minute), I had a handful of friends to help celebrate. They were enough.
My worktable set up as the bar:
And as the sun set, the labyrinth was especially beautiful:
Finally it was time to level out the fire in the pit, remove the lights from the effigy, and carry it over to the fire.
Here is the video we shot. You don’t have to watch all 15 minutes of it, but I would suggest watching at least part of it. It’s pretty wonderful. (Thanks to Marc and Molly for the camera work.)
And this is where my lesson comes in. Just the building of the effigy itself was enough to rouse me from my fogged-in state — with all the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT/GESTALT/SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION, all the not-quite-right angles and the inside-out installation, the MAKING OF THE THING THAT WAS NOT was the point.
Then the burning of it, the glorious burning of it, was an incredible release, one that I needed. It burned well, and we all got to let it go. It was a thing I did. I felt — and still feel — reinvigorated.
Eventually the fire burned down enough for us to sit back down and enjoy the embers, which even in their decay reminded you of their architecture.
It was a fantastic evening.
I know that what I have described here is due to my enormous privilege: the wherewithal to have attended regional burns for the past six years; having a fire pit and labyrinth as a personal retreat; the income simply to run out and buy $50 worth of supplies just to burn it all — this is not something that everyone can do.
But my hope is that if you need to find a way out of your Captivity-related doldrums, my experience can be a model for your own RITUAL to give you the same feeling of release. As I said previously, there’s nothing as liberating as knowing that what you create is going to be destroyed to give you the freedom to MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT, and the act of destruction is completely empowering.
Build a thing. Burn it. Let it go.
