Search Results for: luck plays

What happened on the playa that Monday night? There you are, in a fireman's coat, hurling through the wee hours across a parched and dusty lakebed in a 1979 American LaFrance fire truck. Above you the rare shadow of the earth has morphed the full moon into a dusky half-burnt clementine that hangs there pendulous like some wandering orb on the cover of a 70s SF paperback. "Baby's on Fire" is spewing out of the iPod, and Fripp's incandescent solo mixes with Burning Man's surrounding soundscape of engines, explosions, house beats, and the rising cries of gesticulating passersby who have-wait a sec-just realized that the iconic 40-foot-tall trademark that centers their entire week of organized revelry is prematurely aflame.

As part of an ongoing but essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality, and self-healing powers of the body.