Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.

Between Boulière and Tayssac I had seen this corn, vast fields of green, sterile as a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon.

Good things happen to them or people they like and they think, “justice.” Bad things happen to people they don’t like and once again they think, “justice.”

Guy Debord had once bragged that he wrote much less than those who write but drank much more than those who drink. He had not changed the world. Instead, he had merely become famous.

If symbolism could be defined as the act of storing information outside of one’s own mind, early Homo sapiens had chosen to store images that were already abundant, and by rendering likenesses of the animals he hunted, the Homo sapiens was attempting to exert power, and to own.

In a bunker, you cannot hear the human community in the earth, the deep cistern of voices, the lake of our creation.

lot of them had come from other social milieus and had tattoos from earlier lives, since people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the permanence of tattoos.

Bruno spent his days roaming with a group of boys, some his age, some older, others mere toddlers—ambulatory, as Bruno put it, but not yet into language.

In reality, problems leave when they are ready to go, when they have exhausted their stay, just as these lice did.

Lice decide on their own when to retreat, Bruno said. The true remedy for them is not poison but patience.

“How do you imagine hell?” “A place where you cannot see God.” Her eyes redden and water. She looks to the side. And up. And again to the side.

In Nebraska I followed anti-Monsanto activists to a “Beef Days” festival that had a hay-bale-throwing contest, six-pound steaks that were free for anyone who could finish eating one, and a band that performed Lynyrd Skynyrd covers.

These people made Nebraskan Beef Days look like an Amish prayer circle.

The man turned and put his hand on her arm, an ancient gesture employed in every epoch of history by gullible men attempting to calm strident women beset by reasonable doubts.

What had Bruno said about the future? When we face our need to control it, we are better able to resist that need, and to live in the present.