Creation Lake

by Rachel Kushner

If symbolism could be defined as the act of storing information outside of one’s own mind, early Homo sapiens had chosen to store images that were already abundant, and by rendering likenesses of the animals he hunted, the Homo sapiens was attempting to exert power, and to own. The Neanderthal, in contrast, wanted to record what he saw in dreams, to put into the world what otherwise did not exist. The marks that Thal was believed to have left, on cave walls, on rocks, on animal bones, were abstract codes of great mystery and transcendent beauty. Lines, dots, slants, cuts. And two colors: red and black.

a lot of them had come from other social milieus and had tattoos from earlier lives, since people who change affinities are the same kinds of people who are attracted to the permanence of tattoos.

They wandered through the woods, Bruno wearing the scavenged helmet, holding it so it would not fall off. The helmet’s weight, its reduction of his visibility—it rode low—felt to him, he wrote to the Moulinards, like the intrinsic burdens of men and war. He was trying on those burdens, which was the essence of play, to rehearse the dramas and terrors of adulthood.

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, archived as chains of information inside the bodies of every living person. No man was not the product of such a chain. Every human was a child of a child of a child of children of mysterious mothers who once lived, and whose secrets we carry.

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. The French might have better novels (Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert) and they have better cheeses (Comté, Roquefort, Cabécou). But in the grand scheme that’s basically nothing.

What I don’t like about jumping from heights into water, including from diving boards—even low ones into clear water whose depth is known—is that once you’ve initiated your jump, you cannot change your mind. You can’t turn back. I don’t like irreversible decisions. I don’t see the point. I always want the option of doubling back, reversing course, changing plan.

You fight for a lost status quo, he said, and your victory is what? A slightly more functional capitalist relation. That’s all. But, he said, I understand that Jean’s way, the tireless organizing, the debates, the little victories, is more straightforward than what I might propose, than what might constitute “my way.” 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.

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. Instead, say hello. Be friendly. Be patient. These things you’ve brought along will pass. Say hello and watch them go.