Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

many people carry Neanderthal traces, he said. Two percent, four percent, this measure of ancient life was stunning, given that there have been no living communities of full Neanderthals actively contributing to the gene pool for forty thousand years. It’s as if our chromosomes cling to this old share, he said, as if it were a precious keepsake, an heirloom, the remnant of a person deep inside us who knew our world before the fall, before the collapse of humanity into a cruel society of classes and domination.

(Eau-de-vie

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.

Murder is understandable when you think about it. It’s human to want to annihilate your enemy, or to demonstrate to the world: this is how angry I am right now, even if you might later regret killing a person. But to spray-paint an inscrutable sloppy symbol on the outside of a building? Why?

Every culture has wild regions, wild lands, whether forest or desert or steppe. Every wild land contains some wild person, human or humanoid of unknown origin, who lives separate from the rest, separate from the built world, the social world. I have come upon no culture without such a legend, of a man who lives in nature, whose life is formed of secrecy, of a vow never to join us.

The strong jaw, the big brain, the heavy bones and large face, these were positive traits. Perhaps Thal, he said, was a man graced with good qualities, and H. sapiens, in his plunder and advance toward the devastating dawn of agriculture, was a man with no such grace, a man without qualities, who substituted violence for the hole at the center of his heart.

Protected from predators and from harsh climates by their fire, the Neanderthals had slept for longer and longer periods, from generation to generation. Sleep was key to thought, and to intellectual development. As man’s thoughts became ever more complex, the longer he needed to sleep.

And then he leaned in like billions before him have done, acting upon a desire to kiss some woman. In such a scene between new lovers, a moment repeated everywhere all the time with no originality to it—none—Lucien surely felt that something singular and novel was taking place.

THE GENE FOR ADDICTION that many of us inherited from Neanderthals, Bruno wrote to them, a gene associated with depression and artistic temperaments, might have served a quite practical purpose for the Thal.

But of course, to embrace what feels good, to have a natural and quite strong instinct to do so, poses risks. Serious ones. Most notably, it leads to crippling attachments to drugs and alcohol.

anhedonic

They did not hoard supplies, or engage in a growth-at-any-cost mindset. Their brooding, Bruno speculated, may have aided their resistance to such a mindset, of greed and accumulation. And Thal’s freedom from ambition for ambition’s sake may have led him to the most refined and least practical of human drives: to art for art’s sake.

—The Homo sapiens was a copier. Despite his virtuosity in drawing animals and scenes of hunting, he depicted what was already there. —The Neanderthal was a conjurer, and this act, Bruno said, to bring into being something new, was the fundamental kernel of true art.

And so the Neanderthals were artists. While the Homo sapiens were absolutely, definitely not artists. They were frauds.

Vito was not in denial of Italy’s bland culinary offerings, and he had a sense of humor, which he steadily employed in this short-term friendship pact that he and I had formed. Its temporary nature was unknown to him, but no friendship, no contract of sympathy or trust with other people, comes with a guarantee of permanence.

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

“glotto-chronologies.”

For a long time, he said, you cannot tune in. Then, you might sense a current or buzz of telluric energy. This sound transforms, the more time you spend in caves. It becomes voices. You hear these voices but are unable to isolate them. It takes years to learn how to listen, to differentiate, to adjust your inner tuner to a position on the atemporal bandwidth of the underground world.

Cave frequencies, he said, are not three to thirty megahertz. Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to get inside the monophony, to tease it apart. Eventually, you encounter an extraordinary polyphony. You begin to sort, to filter. You hear whispers, laughter, murmurs, pleas. There’s a feeling that everyone is here. A wonderful feeling, I should add. Because suddenly you realize how alone we have been, how isolated, to be trapped, stuck in calendar time, and cut off from everyone who came before us.

I could not help but see his discussions of cave frequency as a naked expression of grief. He was down there looking for his dead daughter, convincing himself he heard her voice.

Peasants had targeted the Cagots for generations, and so this collusion between Cagot and peasant was shocking. It was as if, Bruno said, the poor white overseer and the Black man forced into chattel slavery had colluded against plantation owners in the American South, as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.

the peasant had to ask himself, Even if he looks a bit different from me, what is it that I hold against this man, the Cagot? Why have I believed he is my enemy, when my real enemies are the magistrate and the tax collector?

No one in the family liked this man, although Lucien hadn’t quite put it like that. The uncle didn’t fit in, was what I understood from Lucien’s coded language. (Then again, it could be argued that a good bourgeois family isn’t truly good if their purity isn’t marked a little by some bumbler from low-class stock marrying in: he reminds them what they are worth, and what they need to protect from people like him.)

I imagined them dressed crudely, in cloaks of rough burlap, these social outcasts without rights, who would come into the village to submit to the authority of the church. There was something moving about it, as if God and God’s emissaries on earth were separate from the cruel feudal structure that deemed them “Cagot.”

people who organize their life around some subculture or other: People can sometimes pretend so thoroughly that they forget they are pretending. At which point, it could even be said that they are no longer pretending.

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

His argument is that the wedge between human beings and nature is far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth-century life. That’s a blip, to him. He has gone back to what he considers a fundamental estrangement, which he’s convinced we must address in order to transform consciousness.

But this was a commercial photo, an advertisement for Lamborghini, a make whose broad fan base has never owned and will never own actual Lamborghinis. Lamborghini fans own a poster or calendar. They have a T-shirt.

metempsychosis,

But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics, or they cultivate, instead, a strait-laced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are (who they consider themselves to be).

People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the four a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves, alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.

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.

Guy Debord,

Whoever he believed himself to be was coterminous with his performance of who he was. He didn’t need a woman to make him feel whole.

I once had to meet a contact at Termini, and afterward I had passed on foot through the sleazy neighborhood adjacent, composed of bleak and homogeneous postwar apartment blocks, lines mounted out every window and hung with flapping laundry—the international flag for anonymous women’s work.

How much of fishing was fishing and how much was something else, a way to empty the mind, to stop time.

It is better to let people come to you than to go to them, and this is as true of the people you are surveilling as it might be of someone you want to seduce.

I pictured viragos fighting over Michel Thomas, never mind that he had the sexual energy of a grandmother with bone density issues.

French letters.

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.

Children will choose love over brutality, if given the chance. Adults will do the same, if given the chance. All acts of savagery originate with authority, he wrote.

Certainly, they had both long ago rejected official state communism, such as the Soviet Union, but Jean still believed in the possibility that capitalism would be dismantled, or would collapse on its own, and be replaced by some form of communism—a lowercase c communism, as Bruno put it.

Whether Christian or communist, the real goal of believing, falsely, in a better world, was to energize people to keep going, to keep on trucking (he wrote this phrase in English, suggesting Bruno was fluent in our cultural idioms). Keep on trucking, he repeated, toward the return of our Lord and Savior. Toward a future that will draw away from you, in lockstep with your advance.

Plumbing the depths inside yourself is not easy work. It is difficult work. But I am convinced, he said, that the way to break free of what we are is to find out who we might have been, and to try to restore some kernel of our lost essence.

A key principle of their navigation, Bruno had explained, was an inversion of movement: destinations arrived toward sailors, rather than sailors moving toward destinations.

When you engage the heavens, Bruno had said, you merge into the flow of time, the right-now and the before and the to-come.

Understand that you can never leave purely, he said. We want to escape what ails us, into some idyll, but know that when you go, you travel with cargo, stowaways, souvenirs from the old world. Don’t be afraid of them.