Temple Burn
I have visited some of the oldest and most famous temples in Asia – Borobodur in Indonesia, Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I’ve been to cathedrals; St Paul’s and Salisbury, have visited grand and holy mosques from Bahrain to Brunei, the mist-shrouded monoliths of Stonehenge.
But one of the most touching and intimate experiences I’ve had in a temple occurred just this year, in the middle of a desert, at a temple in a city that no longer exists. That temple burned to the ground – the city was swept from the face of the earth a few days later – and neither event happened at the hands of a destructive horde, as has often been the case throughout history, but by the architects and inhabitants of the temple, the city.
The Temple of Grace was the latest of a long line of temples in Black Rock City dating back to the year 2000; conceived by David Best and constructed of wood by a team of volunteers, The Temple was, according to the team that built it, “intended to be a spiritual and sacred space for memorials, reflection, celebration, and to commemorate life transitions…”
I found it to be a place of beauty, and of deep sorrow when I visited it at sunrise on the morning before it burned, and walked through it in silence, taking a few pictures, reading and absorbing as many of the myriad little memorials as I could.
One of the first ones that really touched me was this one:
To my brother
I never said
I love you enough
I have 3 amazing brothers, and 8 equally incredible sisters, and it occurred to me as I read those words that although we are all alive and well today, that will not always be the case. And that while I am sure I will someday write something upon the wall of a future Temple in their honor, I would hope it is not the words “I never said I love you enough” – but it is not enough to hope, is it?
In Verities, the poet Kim Addonizio wrote,
Into every life a little ax must fall.
Every dog has its choke chain.
Every cloud has a shadow.
Better dead than fed.
He who laughs, will not last…
…a stitch in time saves no one.
The darkest hour comes.
For US Army Specialist 4 Daniel Jason Freeman, that darkest hour came in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan on April 6, 2005, when the CH-47 helicopter that he and 15 other soldiers were flying in crashed during a dust storm. Almost a decade later, you can still feel the hole he left behind as you read the words written on the wooden wall with a Magic Marker. Specialist 4 was my last rank in the Army before transferring to the Marines – and I was a helicopter crewchief, so this memorial, too, had a special significance for me.
I continued my slow, reflective perambulation of the Temple, a lacework filigree of wood, simultaneously delicate and strong, much like the people whose epigrams were inscribed on the walls, whose little shrines and memorials; pictures, letters, stuffed animals, and sundry mementos filled the many nooks and crannies of the interior.
There were many testimonials to love lost, lives lost, friends and family gone to soon. A few bitter screeds to people who had left behind more anger than affection in the turbulent wake of their lives, but those were the exceptions.
There were also inspirational notes:
Wise words:
And poignancy juxtaposed with humor:
I drank in all the sorrow, the sadness, the philosophy and the wit that would soon be released into the Universe as a towering pillar of fragrant smoke, marveled at the intricacy of the structure, watched the sun rise above the distant mountains, and then slowly pedaled back into Black Rock City to spend the day among friends both new and old.
That evening, we rode our bikes back to the temple as the sun set, a loose group of 20 or so people from France, Canada, Australia, the United States, all citizens of Black Rock City, a place reminiscent of any number of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, a city whose layout evokes Anastasia, with concentric dusty roads in place of canals, or Zirma, from which travelers return with distinct memories, a place which will later become a ghostly version of that half-Sophronia of the shooting galleries and carousels, counting the months, the days, before its people return and life begins again.
We arrived at the temple in the gathering darkness, and had no sooner settled ourselves amongst a great circle of tens of thousands other human beings when the first glimmers of flame appear within the wooden filigree that made up the structure.
The crowd was silent – the flames crackled, hissed, and began to spread throughout the temple, to leap higher. A pillar of smoke laced with sparks rose into the night sky, carrying with it the combined wishes, prayers, farewells, and philosophic musings of the gathered multitude, and the silence was broken, here and there, with sobbing and the sounds of weeping, of tears being gathered upon the dry, dusty ground.
I shed no tears, and found myself grateful that this year, I had no reason to cry, reflecting that this would not, inevitably, always be the case. As Calvino observed, “you reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.” The open, airy structure of the Temple became a conflagration, an inferno, but it retained its form right until the sudden end where it collapsed into a crumbled bed of still-burning timbers.
The Black Rock Rangers let the crowd surge forward, then, as close to the edge of the burn as the still-intense heat would allow. My group stayed where we were; we rose, exchanged long, sincere hugs, some with old friends, some with people that we’d met just days before.
And then, we slowly walked back to our bikes, rode back to the city, and found ourselves again in Black Rock City, a city that would begin to vanish the next day, and that would be gone without a trace in less than a fortnight, to be rebuilt, not elsewhere like Ersilia, but elsewhen.
Postscript
The years to come will bring more travels for me, more visits to temples and shrines, monasteries and cathedrals, but I suspect that the one that I will visit with the most regularity, the one that will evoke the strongest spiritual connection for me will be the most changeable, the most ephemeral; a Temple built not as a hubristic monument to the very human desire to simultaneously exalt a higher power and ourselves, but as a fragile vessel to collect a few thousands of the sweetest, saddest, bitterest and most eloquent expressions of the human spirit, hold them for a brief moment, and then launch them into the Universe in a cloud of fragrant woodsmoke, the individual atoms of carbon to be carried by the winds and washed by the rain, eventually finding their way into a new generation of humanity, in whose collective bodies those particular atoms are the second most abundant element.
Someday, I like to think that my own elegy may be carried aloft, but not, perhaps, too soon. There is a wide world out there, and blank pages to fill, so in the words of the poet, gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Somewhen, your Temple is waiting.
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