Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

Although it was likely, he said, that these noble and mysterious Thals (as he sometimes referred to the Neanderthals) extracted nicotine from the tobacco plant by a cruder method, such as by chewing its leaves, before that critical point of inflection in the history of the world: when the first man touched the first tobacco leaf to the first fire.

Huh. I guess this is fiction so I shouldn’t sweat the fact that Thals and tobacco plants did not geographically overlap.

I was translating, as he was writing these emails in French, I drew from the full breadth of English, a wildly superior language and my native tongue.)

Their question was about plant origins and tobacco: Was tobacco not a New World plant? they asked.

Lavender oils, for instance, always made at monasteries, as if the monks worshipped lavender instead of God.

glass jars of jellied meats that look like cat food, and which French people call a “terrine” and eat as if it were not cat food.

how people had gotten from one landmass to another over the last half million years was not yet understood, Bruno said. Polynesians had crossed the ocean long before European navigators ever dreamed of leaving shore. On another occasion he would take up this subject but for now, he implored them to understand that nothing was how they might have thought it to be, and Neanderthals in Europe and Asia—without question—smoked tobacco.

They weren’t even the first to do so, he added. That accomplishment goes to Thal’s earlier ancestor Homo erectus (Rectus, in Bruno’s parlance), nominally recognized for the rather low achievement of standing—it is in the name, Bruno said, Person Upright, but in fact, the true accomplishment of Homo erectus was that he was the first man to play with fire. And we must infer, Bruno told them, that the first man to play with fire was also the first man to smoke.

fire is not a quality. It is not a trait that a life-form can possess.

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

Man would come to rely on fire as a crutch. His use of fire would stand in for what man was denied, the possession of a positive trait, as all the other living creatures were given.

The use of fire for harm instead of good seems to have taken hold, suspiciously, and damningly, just as the Neanderthals began to disappear and Homo sapiens rose up, an interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with.

Currently, he said, we are headed toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car, and the question is: How do we exit this car?

I AM A BETTER DRIVER after a few drinks, more focused.

The breadcrumb trail of cryptozoology becomes a site of resistance to Big Science, and to crushing pessimism, this lore as a place where people can say, but… but… but are you sure?

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.

This term, “early man,” is itself a misnomer, Bruno said. Early man was Rectus, and before him, Homo habilis, or “handy man.” While the Homo sapiens that some call “early man” in fact strode in two million years after habilis and was actually “late-arriving man,” Homo tardus, or even Homo tardissimus.

Revolution, which back in 1968 he had believed was possible, he now understood to be foreclosed. The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.

But why would you want to survive mass death? What would be the purpose of life, if life were reduced to a handful of armed pessimists hoarding canned foods and fearing each other?

Jean deplores Lacombe’s interest in prehistory, his talk of species.

The lice were in the helmet because their host had died, and they were in search of a new host.

It was wretched to inherit the lice of a dead Nazi soldier, and yet an experience that he later turned to, again and again.

These lice were real, Bruno said, but he had come to understand that they were also a metaphor: they stood for the transmigration of life, from one being to the next, from past to future.

Bruno said that transmigration, what some called metempsychosis, wasn’t magic in the degraded sense of taking place outside physical laws or as conjured by people draped in wizards’ cloaks. Transmigration, he said, was the entire story of people and their long history, arc...

Science and technology are embattled terrain among those who reject capitalism, he acknowledged, but the new discoveries in the study of ancient DNA were stunning and consequential. They have to be dealt with, Bruno said. I am linked, he said, to ancient people not as a vague and baggy “idea” but as little pieces of string examined under an electron microscope.

Spirit travels, he said, from the dead for centuries, for millennia, into the living.

Each of us inherits code, blueprints, a set of instructions—call it what you want—from those who came before us, all the way back into the deepest sediments of time. These codes, Bruno said, are genetic lice, which crawl from ancestors to descendent; they travel from the many to the one, right on through human history.

They take a transmigrational highway, he said. The lice had helped...

The bromides marketed to us to fix our problems, like kerosene was once believed a remedy for lice, these posited solutions tend to give us hope more than material benefit. In reality, problems leave when they are ready to go, when they have exhausted their stay, just as these lice did.

Bruno found in the crimps to his peripheral sight something meaningful. I did not find the crimps to my own sight meaningful. I ignored them as the doctor advised. If the crimp was there, it lasted maybe thirty minutes, and I waited for it to subside. I never could later recall the moment when it did subside. I only noticed that it was gone.

We’ve seen her emotional and moral lack of affect, now it expands into other realms

I asked what they did with the quince, a fruit that to me has always seemed useless. Quinces look like apples puckered with blight, cannot be eaten raw, and when cooked have no flavor.

Interesting expansion of her affectlessness

He was a man of about seventy, his face and arms and bald head stamped in large, square freckles. He had a big round belly, the kind that looks hard rather than soft, which the French call a bidon.

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.

Carl Jung, James Hillman might have said this

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. This truth is stored in their salt. Some have access. Others don’t. A gift or a curse, that my salt is right here, with me all the time? A gift.

Bruno had declared in his letters that capitalism wasn’t coming to an end. The only option was to leave the world. An abstruse idea, as he didn’t mean leave the blue-green earth. He meant leave our world on it, cast off an entire manner of inhabiting reality. At first this idea struck me as lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.

I miss being at home in a culture. Using English with other native speakers is what I might miss most. 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.

googled and found an interview with him on YouTube. The video was from one of those talk shows they have only in France, where people think writers are interesting.

don’t disavow my own history, my association with Debord. At the same time, I shudder to think of those who keep the flame, manage the legend, who believe that the twin hobbies of drinking and denunciating are signs of life. They are signs of death.

Whether in a rural outpost or an urban core, trying to dismantle capitalism from within capitalism is a dead end. (It was the first time I’d noticed his use of underlining.) 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 (he was back to his italics).

The price for sex with the Māori women was the same, Captain Cook noticed, as it had been for women in Hawaii and in Bora Bora and Tahiti and Easter Island: one iron carpenter’s nail per union. Captain Cook had threatened to shackle his crew, Bruno wrote, in order to stop his men from prying all the nails out of the Endeavour, reducing their own vessel to scrap in order to pay for love.

If astrology was built upon myths, Bruno was now coming to see that he himself had clung to a different set of myths, painful as it was for him to admit it. He had looked to species to locate where we’d gone wrong. He had believed it was Better Before, and he was beginning to suspect that this was a kind of reverse teleology, a mystification of the past, and a presumption that progress is bad, that progress itself is not progress.

We are all sieves, Bruno had said. We catch and hold on to things along the way. We say hello to these things, these distractions, and we let them float past.