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.

Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.

Stealing is a way to stop time. Also, it refocuses the mind, the senses, if they become dulled, for instance by drinking. Stealing puts reality into sharper relief.

Man, bland and featureless in this myth, lacking in his own special trait, was condemned, instead, to ingenuity, to being a devious little bastard.

—The Neanderthal was a conjurer, and this act, Bruno said, to bring into being something new, was the fundamental kernel of true art. To render the unseen seen: that is what an artist does, Bruno said.

Mosquitoes tormented Lucien. They have never bothered me. I’ve always attributed this to character, and to the idea that it’s sensitive people who get targeted. But the fact that mosquitoes are interested in some and not others might have to do with antigens and blood type, rather than weakness and strength. Then again, it could be that blood type is connected to character.

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

people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the permanence of tattoos.

What is it people encounter in their stark and solitary four a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt. This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.

In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew: Life goes on a while. Then it ends. There is no fairness. Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished. The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.

These people were always repeating a maxim about the end of the world, that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than it was to imagine the end of capitalism.” The point of this maxim was that bringing down capitalism would require a more robust imagination. But just because something is harder to imagine does not mean it’s correct. In terms of which of these two will end first, capitalism might be more insidious and durable than the blue-green miracle of planet earth and its swaddling of life-giving ether.

For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.

It is bad enough to be a vagrant, Bruno said. But to be locked into a nunnery, and barred from enjoying your vagrancy? This was worse.

It is not unlike waiting for Jesus to arrive, to both abolish and fulfill biblical law. In both cases, Bruno said, the waiting is the thing, and the commitment to waiting is bound up with a refusal to acknowledge that what you wait for is not coming

But then I gave up the beer. Gave up drinking. Just stopped. That was it. No, it was not easy. But I did it. Few things worth doing are easy. Any habit that offers pleasure becomes a hassle if you need it to get from hour to hour.

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.

Our stars have been replaced by satellites, whose clocks tell atomic time. With GPS you can know your location without looking out the window, he had said. You can know your location without knowing your location. You can know things without knowing anything.