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.

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

The trick of riding backward is to understand that this orientation of travel is time-honored and classical. It is like rowing a boat: you enter the future backward, while watching scenes of the past recede.

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

People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old-growth logging, or protest nuclear power, or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics, to its knees. But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric—the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present—is to shore up their own identity.

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.

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.

The lessons that I took as a teacher in Rodez, he said, have outlasted everything else, all the twists and turns through my history. The ideas that I developed are in fact one idea, he said: 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. The work to be done, he told them, is a refusal of savagery.

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.

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.