Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

It’s tempting to picture the Neanderthal as a weak competitor, Bruno said, who was trounced by Homo sapiens

If there had been a war between them, it had been a soft war, a competition for resources, slow and relentless.

Another advantage would have been Homo sapiens’s lighter frame, which required less food. And he—or rather she—was a more frequent propagator. Not by a lot. It was suspected that female Homo sapiens produced just ever so slightly higher numbers of offspring than female Thal. But after long stretches, thousands of years, these numbers would compound into huge population differences.

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.

decade into the twenty-first, it is time to reform consciousness, Bruno said. Not through isms. Not with dogma. But by summoning the most mystical secrets we have kept from ourselves: those concerning our past.

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

planet was not a simple three-act play structure, of up and out of Africa (I), into Europe (II), and across a land bridge (III). Bruno said it was far more diffuse and mysterious how people had settled various corners of the earth.

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

Addiction, Bruno told them, could have been the distorted expression of a quite useful trait: the instinct to move toward joy, and even to gorge oneself on joy.

Pleasure augers survival. Think of sexual pleasure, Bruno said, the very root of existence: we further our species with ingenious simplicity—by going toward what feels good, by letting things happen, by allowing our bodies to speak and to say: “This.” To say: “Yes.”

riding backward in a swaying first-class train car, a canister of modern French technology tearing through French countryside at three hundred kilometers an hour, farms and rolling hills and little medieval villages being pulled backward as if a monster vacuum cleaner was sucking the landscape into its unseen mouth.

so that these women have to emerge single file, or rather, one at a time. If I witness an army of women in housedresses occupying town squares or breaking shopwindows with their rolling pins, I will know I was wrong, and I’ll be amused to have been wrong, but those are scenes I have yet to see.

Neanderthals had hunted in teams, had lived collaboratively, but were introverts by temperament and kept their clans small. 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.

red and black. This could have been retinal, and unconscious, that the eye is drawn to this opposition of hues, colors that stir us to commitment, to strength, to a longing for a better world, but Bruno counseled not to relegate such an echo to chance, because the enduring duality of red and black deserved more. He had found in his own cave a small disc of black obsidian that had a cross grooved into its surface.

In its absence, he could deduce the following precepts, pertaining to ancient art: —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.

To render the unseen seen: that is what an artist does,

That environment helped me to understand something. It gave me an idea, a plan.

the club’s ambiance was slightly beat-up and ad-hoc, like everything in Marseille.

But a lesson in this curious hybrid skull, of Thal face and Rectus braincase and brain, seems somewhat obvious to me, he said. The lesson is that you cannot judge a book by its cover. Because just as this individual looked like a Neanderthal but could have thought like Rectus, there may be modern individuals with similar developmental disjunctures, with modern faces but the mind and instincts of an older ancestor. Even if someone looks like you, they may not think like you. New and complicating genetic evidence of how we have evolved is being sequenced all the time from bones, teeth, even

At the end of an endless saga, H. tardissimus, aka “Tardie,” arrives on the scene, only to destroy everything.

no friendship, no contract of sympathy or trust with other people, comes with a guarantee of permanence.

I hear people, he said, whose voices are eternal in this underground world, which is all planes of time on a single plane. Here on earth is another earth, he said. A different reality, no less real. It has different rules.

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.

It is hard to explain, he said. You would have to have lived as I live, done what I have done, learned what I have learned, in order to hear what I hear. You would need a different consciousness, he said.

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.

Cagots were categorically subhuman. The count’s wife, for her gender, was sub-man and a baby girl sub-baby. It was Loli that was the final straw. A fiefdom that could burn an innocent horse at the stake was a fiefdom worth destroying. A

can hear that sound, a water bucket rolling on its side. It is the sound of danger’s retreat, and also a signal that is more complex for me, he said, because in the absence of an enemy, an “other,” we become, ourselves, responsible for good and evil.

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. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities they present to the world as “themselves.” Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego, and what forms that ego, is strong.

he was taking a stand to protest the cruel treatment of animals. He wasn’t a poseur. But still his real motivation was libidinal: he did it for the promise of love. Love confirms who a person is, and that they are worth loving. Politics do not confirm who a person is.

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.

Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete. 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. I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth.

Renouncing individuality, that’s for rich kids.

“Men are all the same,” she says. “They try to get what they want. And after they get it, they change. They’re

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.

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.

Don’t underestimate the power of time to erase, he said. Much of life, and what matters most to a culture, consists of what a visual artist would deem “fragile materials”: Wood, say, and wax. Feathers, flowers, fish bones. Plants and unstable pigments. Ice. Emotions, and their transmission from one person to another. Blood, tears, tenderness, joy. Very little of what comprises culture can be found at a dig site.

Rocks endure, Bruno said, and they give us this mistaken idea that human lives revolved around them, when it is merely that rocks are what is left.

Watching her, I had the thought that when people cry, their most rudimentary tools of self-comfort, from their deepest and earliest self, are called upon.

The girls Bruno’s age, who had been similarly heaved up parentless onto the shores of postwar Paris, whether from concentration camps or from safekeeping in the countryside, these girls were housed in orphanages managed by strict nuns. The boys who were out on the streets were the lucky ones, Bruno said, and so they tried to share their good luck with the girls,

the farmers of the Guyenne are dependent on the state. The state is their lifeblood. They cannot compete in an open market! They depend on state subsidies and price protections.

victory is what? A slightly more functional capitalist relation. That’s all.

How many Amys were out there, pressuring activists into committing illegal acts, and then disappearing, untraceable and scot-free?

Some of the ship’s crewmembers, Bruno wrote, were convinced that Tupaia’s ability to talk to the Māori was proof of God, who had created all people from molds or templates, but each island people in its location, so that they developed quite similarly and yet without contact or intermingling, consistent as a single variety of perennial, flowers from seeds scattered near and far.

To look up and see stars is to look inward and see ourselves.

There’s that old myth about the humble lighthouse and the giant battleship.

Our own earth, our version of it, is fitted with Cartesian coordinates, a straitjacket of plumb lines and cross-stitches. The sky is no longer visible in most places. 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.

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. You join a continuum, an ever-present. You see through your eyes, and the eyes of others. Difference dissolves. But you stay you.

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.