Cuttle fish, cults, and confusion
A long, long time ago, I read about a man in the Guardian, who had decided to opt out of money. He lived in a caravan, foraged for food, bartered, and made his own toothpaste. I searched for that article now, and found it is more than fifteen years old, and yes, there is a mention about him making toothpaste with cuttlefish bones. Why did that detail stick? Perhaps, even such mundane details become fascinating when someone chooses to live an alternative life. What will you do for toothpaste? How would you get books to read? Will you wear bras?
Every day there is a new warning about the planet breaching temperature records. There are wars, ever present patriarchy, caste system, and religious fundamentalism. There are some who believe we can still make a change, fix things. After all, don’t we have the miracle of opening a tap and watching water flow? They quote statistics on increased life expectancy. They say, it is a much better world than all the others we have known in history, despite all you might say.
Then, there are others who say something is deeply broken. This house cannot be fixed. Instead of plugging a planetary sized hole with toilet paper, let us start afresh. Let us leave behind this oppressive, ossified system, and create a new world.
Tempting, no?
Of course, it is not a straightforward choice. For starters, who has this choice? Who has the privilege to move into wilderness ungoverned by the Revenue Department, and create a life there? What kind of a movie Captain Fantastic would have been if it were an African American family instead? If you buy a patch of land and create a cocoon, does that really translate to opting out into a new way of life or is it a form of elite isolationism? And there is the question I keep asking my anarchist dost — the revolution is good, but who will wash the tea cups after the party?
My fledgling idea for a comic book titled ‘Kintu, who will wash the tea cup?’
Of course, there are no easy answers. As a wise dancer said, in the doing is the knowing. Much as we would like it to be, reality is not bounded by elegant theories. There is a messiness, and it is in living that messiness, you get to experience the texture of life itself. It is the difference between a philosophical treatise and the novel. As Kundera said, the novel is born when a character does something; as long as a character sits and mulls, it isn’t a novel yet — the novel is born when the moment of choice occurs — when the character jumps out of the window and runs, when they accept a bribe, when they reply to the text message from their ex. I am paraphrasing, but you can read Kundera’s Art of the Novel for the actual quote. And that’s precisely why, novelists are interested in those making these alternative choices — they have jumped out of the window, and you want to know how far they can run before they get caught.
Stories about people who live in communes, intentional communities, or call it what you will, say something about our condition today, our collective psyche, and our ever present absurdities. That is why, when I read the blurb of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, I was drawn. A French cult of eco-activists. An American spy infiltrating that cult. A mysterious thought leader of the cult whose letters on neanderthals and humanity’s shadowy past (ok, emails) the spy reads. It felt like the kind of meaty novel that would both speaks to the questions of our times, and would be good to bite into because of all the drama such a setting provides. Confusingly, it was not the case, and this long letter, dear readers, is to understand that confusion.
The 34-year-old spy woman called Sadie Smith initially works for the United States government and now is engaged by private interests. Who are these private entities, and what interests they have remains unsaid during the novel — it is a spectre of shadowy corporate interests who are not keen on any ecological activism. They are The Bad Guys (I am sure they have a DEI policy too, which if they are based in the US will soon be scrapped like Walmart, but we shall still call them the bad guys). It is through her eyes that we see the world, and the eco-activist community.
The main activist you encounter is a French nobleman (ok, elite) called Pascal Balmy. A person of ideas, a person who understands and could spout words such as hermeneutics and episteme, a person who fashions himself after the likes Guy Debord* (I am not making up this last part — in the novel he is a person who fashions himself after the likes of Guy Debord). This is not a person who makes toothpaste from cuttlefish bones. He is more suited to theorising about the complex interplay of cuttlefish and the metaphysics of toothpaste, and writing a monograph that shall remain unpublished. He is the epitome of the posh activist, the one who spouts Karl Marx over caramel latte. See, I don’t like him, and you aren’t meant to either, for he is that caricature of an activist with no shade that is not performative.
There are other activists you encounter — but you encounter all of them from a distance, the ironic distance Sadie Smith sets up between you and them. She judges these activists, their actions, their motivations, and their beliefs.
The person Sadie Smith is drawn to is Bruno Lacombe, who lives in cave (in the French countryside there are caves, one of which he discovers and begins to live in), the person who writes these rambling emails about neanderthals, which she has hacked into and reads like a newsletter every now and then. He ruminates about Homo Sapiens and thals (as he calls the neanderthals), to philosophise on what has happened to us, the humakind, now. These ramblings sound Osho-lite-esque, if Osho-lite were to live in France in a cave previously inhabited by prehistoric humans, except Osho is wickedly funny. Perhaps, unlike Sadie, I was not swayed by the folk wisdom and piercing insights of Bruno because in India there are so many swamis and gurus who do this all the time that the bullshit detector screamed red. So, I did not much care for Bruno too, except for the portion where he speaks of his childhood during a war. He tells a story there — there is no overt philosophising or random fact sharing, rather a narration of what happened to him — finding a dead body of a soldier and his helmet. In what follows (if you ever read this book, I don’t wish to spoil it for you), the imagery is sharp, strangely moving. I saw Bruno slightly differently after that — he became a person. He did not feel like an ironic portrait of a guru anymore.
Perhaps, that’s the sthaayi-bhaava the author intended — irony. What creates the confusion is whether the irony was intentional or not. Do any of the characters take their quests, their longings, their beliefs, their ideas, and their choices seriously? Does the author take any of these characters, their questions, their longings, their beliefs, their ideas, and their choices seriously? There’s a difference between these two questions and in that difference lies the confusion.
Long ago, I read this piece on how irony is the ethos of our age (this is a decade ago — so who knows if we still live in the same age), and the article spoke of this self-conscious irony that permeates everything we see, consume, and do. If you think of these characters as ironic then, they do not take their beliefs seriously. The bourgeoise activist does not take the desire for a better world, the hope that we can change the world we live in, and create a revolution of sorts, seriously — they are comfortable in their eliteness, and that’s why they perform the role of an activist instead of inhabiting it fully. Sadie Smith is a spy for hire; she is doing a corporate job where she is interested in the pay cheque, and does not believe in what the corporates stand for. She could be like that severe rationalist who hopes to witness a miracle so that they can let go of that rigidity, but she is designed to mock that impulse too — irony smiling at itself. The mocking self is safe from critique, for there are no markers for that self to aspire to, every aspiration is mocked at. It is this ironic self-referential cycle from which there is no redemption, for that arc is too old school. Bruno Lacombe is the only one who seems to have beliefs; he has renounced the world and lives in a cave, but he remains distant, filtered through letters, and thus, there is less irony, but more distance.
That would make Creation Lake a fascinating novel, a novel so steeped in irony to the point that it does not take itself seriously. By taking such an ironic stance, the novel asks, if every actor in our humanity’s drama lacks belief, are we taking the climate crisis seriously? Then something niggles, and that’s the sharp edge that divides irony from cynicism. I am not sure where that line lies, but something tells me, there is that line. These are characters who cannot take themselves seriously is different from I cannot take these characters seriously, and yet, I am using them. If that is the case, then there is no genuine desire to understand these characters. When reading an article on Maata Amritanandamayi, I wondered about who she was, what kind of a person, what she liked, what she believed in — if I were to write a story about her, I would need to understand her. I need not believe in her, but the novel demands understanding at a human level. Cynicism enters when that understanding is replaced by judgement. The novelist creates a distance because of which the irony transcends the space of the novel and becomes the novel in reality. With Creation Lake, I am unsure whether the novel is on this side of that line or has meandered to the other side, or goes all around, and perhaps, therein lies the confusion.
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*Guy Debord is a French philosopher who wrote ‘Society of the Spectacle’, which critiques our consumerist culture. Philosophise this has a comprehensive overview of his work.