Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Review of Down to a Sunless Sea Review of Words of a Feather Creative Nonfiction Burning Men By Gerard Sarnat Integration By David Caplan Hands Across the Sea By Jennifer Mazik Poetry I Can't Wait Until the Resurrection By David Halliday Dashing With You By Mick Joyce Island of Hong By Mick Joyce Fiction The Price of Shoes By Sandra M. McDow Jeux d'Esprit By Julio Peralta-Paulino Feed Me, Pet Me By Stephen Dorneman The Lovely Peasant By G. David Schwartz About the Contributors © 2008, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Editor - Elizabeth Murray Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
Burning Men By Gerard Sarnat 1. American pastoral, end of summer's tail, Labor Day holiday, desert's dessert. Tall tales of outrageously costumed naked painted pagan celebrations. Nevada sheriffs' cooperate (reluctantly); the Bureau of Land Management finally granted a use permit. Newly minted Silicon Valley entrepreneurs drop in in helicopters. Queues of huge refrigerated trucks and Angels' choppers snake through hot as hell sands. Speeding U-Haul vans and overpacked sedans are hassled by rangers in the here and now less than in the past. Our tent city of thirty thousand gathers nineteen years after year from all corners of all hemispheres while belated ditherers sleep in ditches beside the road. Many languages. Folks from Tokyo don't understand much. (Please use my nom de guerre, Hamster.) But East West and visa versa illiteracy's made trivial by the unity of music blood-piercing the playa's hot dry wind day and night, night after day after night for our play week on the Black Rock Desert. Have faith, brothers and sisters. Welcome home to Thunderdome love and Firefly abyss. So many old friends enlisting goats and monkeys to assist their mayonnaise-eating performances. At chocked-full Frog Pond, The Burning Rock News' Cheap Thrills Melting Pot announces the Miss Black Rock City Beauty Pageant will replace swimwear and evening gown action with dust storm gear Day Glo illumination -- which later in the Herculean afterburn wins a legitimate Smithsonian competition for it's Flambe Lounge photo fictions. Friday night kid DJ Mitch Meat spins Death and Decay's vinyls while old-timers (me) rock out to Morrison's Doors' Texas Radio at the Stoned Pyramids. A half dozen rabbis hawking their talk spread out in the desert, together offer a rich Shabbes buffet. Sampling all entries -- eating, drinking, smoking, swallowing everything offered -- my favorite scene's outside. Wild-eyed dancing and chants. Bearded, emaciated loin-clothed prophets straight out of the Old Testament. Rain god prayers answered by a believe-it-or-not Biblical torrent. Next morning I is a sloggy sleepingbagged rat in a rain ditch, washed out in grateful living Grateful Dead City. Saturday night the whole pagan community congregates. Light and fire shows culminate in the gigantic hot wood Man burn. Like summer solstice throughout the Christian world, flesh to touch, flesh to burn. Don't keep the Wicker Man waiting! At the week's end Jack Rabbit speaks, “Conscientious self-reliant men and women, forming our temporary communion of radical self expression, respect the sacred land, be alert to leave no trace of us in this hallowed desert until we play here next in 358 days…” Back home, frightened by startled rats come across on the hot tub cover, I realize when the Man burns next, I'm sixty. Have faith. 2. Indian urban end of autumn, Hindu Diwali holiday, non-Chanukah Festival of Lights. Outrageously costumed painted celebrations here in Varanasi, Holy City of Lights and sacred cow shit. Tales of bathers brushing their teeth in the sacred Ganges as turbaned corpses and feces float by dog and cat tails. The dead burn on gnat platforms without use permits. My surname is Sarnat, from Polish Sarnatski. (First name Gerard started as Gesundheit -- but that's a whole different story.) Serendipitously I meet a much younger Israeli cousin, scion in our long line, here for the festival, just a few steps behind in the madness. We talk and talk after bhang lassis at Baba Tandai's. Next door is Sarnath, the town where the enlightened Buddha first preached: when signing me in, Clarks Hotel adds an H and demonstrates unusual reverence to a wrongly perceived holy man. Many religions converge here. Ramadan just ended. From all corners of India, men carry the dying and dead on cars and backs, striving to make Varanasi their final resting place. Many too heavy or too rotten are ditched beside the road. Have faith, brothers and sisters. Welcome home. Surrender to samsara's born again abyss, to nirvana's sweet end of suffering, to the kiss of infinite bliss. Funeral pyres burn 250 a day. Saved from rats 24/7/365 (no holidays) by attentive relatives. And although modern times have brought progress, most families continue to profess that good millennia-old burning wood remains the favorite. Electric cremations no more than a passing fad before ashen remains are returned into the sacred Ganges. Have faith. 3. Yesterday the bipolar express claimed one of my kids' friends. Head in the oven. No note. No one knows exactly why, whether a combo of endo/exogenous chemicals, his buddies not talking. Today a good buddy of my Dad's was laid to rest. Ninety-two at the end. His personal plumbing and wiring had deteriorated even faster than his lifelong home's pipes and electricity. A special guy in private and public, especially to those he didn't know well, who offered him nothing. He was a consummately admirable and well-intended man. Although not preened by Burningman or Varanasi -- no tilak marked his forehead like devout Hindu men; nevertheless, he had a silent third eye that made him wise and kind. An only good to come of old age and illness when it's time, death doesn't look so bad. I can understand why husbands and wives might want to follow, jump alongside into graves and pyres. As I peer outside this dusky afternoon, as we stand to chant, “ Walk in the valley of the shadow of death,” the winter sun flickers off and on a spider's single diagonal strand. And in a matter of minutes, oscillations in the balance in fits and starts, all illumination is reclaimed into the invisible. An oracle unto itself. Surrender, have faith. |