D.S. BLACK August 29, 1997

AS SUMMER winds down, a good many of us left San Francisco this week for what we hope will be another exquisite, unforgettable fire in Nevada.

The Burning Man Festival will draw an increasing number of people into a vast adoptive family, or movement. Some might call it a cult.

The 12th iteration of this incendiary celebration is a far cry from its apocryphal beginning in 1986 on Baker Beach. Barred since 1990 from burning the effigy in San Francisco, celebrants moved the festival to the desert north of Reno.

There, a 40-foot wooden man limned by a neon skeleton will stand for less than a week. Then it will go up in flames.

This year, more than 12,000 people were expected to trek to the back of beyond and revel in the Temporary Autonomous Zone that is Black Rock City. Most are from California, but participants come from all over - Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, even South Africa.

For the few short days of the long weekend, a self-sufficient metropolis will coalesce on the beach of the ancient bed of Lake Lahontan.

Like Essenes who quit Jerusalem in the first century, we have rejected the commerce of the Temple for an experiment in intentional - even, spiritual - community, however ephemeral it may be.

The only commandments are:

• Bring everything you need to survive - this is a desert - and leave nothing behind when you leave.

• Do not interfere with anyone else's immediate experience.

• No spectators. All are participants whether drawn to the desert for ascetic reasons or for the bacchanalia.

Some celebrants are pagans. Some are hippies mourning the death of Jerry Garcia. Many consider themselves artists - even if by day they work as lawyers, secretaries, carpenters, tax accountants, librarians, computer programmers or firefighters.

There is no unifying belief apart from an active love of freedom and unfettered expression. The desert provides the perfect blank slate for bringing dreams to life in an otherwise pitiless environment.

Eschewing the passive and mercantile qualities of consumer society, Burning Man enthusiasts have delighted in creating what might be called village effigies: Tinsel Town, a Satanic opera stage and mock skyscrapers festooned with wickedly altered corporate logos.

Theme camps abound. They express elective tribal and artistic affinities, from Alien Abduction Camp and S&Merald City to a House of Doors (composed of vintage San Francisco doors whose "fractured geometry suggest the entrance into new realities" ).

We remain informed by our daily newspaper, the Black Rock Gazette, and several pirate radio stations.

Towering over all is a Man who will be torched in a pyrotechnic frenzy.

Will success ruin Burning Man?

CNN and MTV have sent reporters. Burning Man has graced the cover of Wired Magazine. It's the topic of a coffee table book. Stories have appeared in Life Magazine, U.S. News & World Report and other mass media.

Viewed as spectacle, this freak show voyeurism has draged what was an obscure ritual on a Richmond District beach into the harsh, image-hungry headlights of the last years of the American Century.

Was last year's festival Woodstock - or was it Altamont? Casualties were few, but duly noted: One person died in a head-on collision; others were injured by a drunken driver running over two tents.

This year, Burning Man moved from the 400-square-mile Black Rock desert north of Reno to private land nearby, a miniplaya on which car traffic will be restricted; admission is $75. In this way, a community that has exiled itself to the desert has brought with it some of the very human and mechanical problems of civilization.

Still, an army of fire-dancing visionaries is a force to be reckoned with. They may be unleashed for only a few days in the desert, joyfully atomizing and recreating the ways of the world. But when they come home, like modern day Prometheus, they will bring some of that mad brilliant energy with them.

Examiner contributor D.S. Black is a San Francisco writer. He planned to ride his bicycle in the midnight Critical Mass late Friday at Burning Man.