Dispatch from Zembla

What will it be like when public self-critiques are mandated?

Today I wanted to get it out of the way, so I went to the wall first thing and wrote down my self-critiques. I worked very little yesterday and didn’t tell my employer. My mother has called me three days in a row, and I haven’t answered. Although it’s within my power to redistribute some of my money to my neighbors, I’ve not done it. Signed, A. Newbery. The cleanup crew had just erased yesterday’s chalk, where I had seen I killed a lizard on the tennis court the night before, after a lavish dinner out, including dessert. I spent money on chocolate cake that¹ could have been given to my neighbors.

My grandmother’s generation² did their shaming online. People swarmed, reducing the offender to bones in the space of minutes. Before that, there had been private guilt, born³ by the individual. And before that, collective shame.

This government, which gave us healthcare and made the trains run on time determined that we ought to critique⁴ ourselves but not carry that burden in isolation. We do as they say. We scrawl out our faults and get our prescriptions filled for free.

At lunch, I talked with Pavan, who hadn’t yet written on the wall today. I told him that this process feels like a sham, that my self-critiques may well be true but the act of articulating them robs them of their power. “Isn’t that the idea?” he said. “But now I don’t feel an itch to improve myself,” I told him. “My mother will call again tomorrow. Again I won’t answer. Not that I would have answered in an earlier era, but I would have at least felt guilty. As it stands, my self-critique is a performance, nothing more.” Pavan shrugged. “Maybe you’ll perform your way into picking up her calls,” he said. Did that make sense? Not quite. A thin cloud drifted by. The weather was affectless⁵. “In any case,” Pavan went on, pointing to a woman approaching us, “I read your critique this morning and took the liberty of inviting a guest to lunch. Now you can apologize to her in person⁶. Failing that, you can perform an apology.”⁷

1. Ambiguous. Do I mean the chocolate cake could have been given to the neighbors? Or the money used for the cake?

2. I overuse this device — referring to how an earlier generation experienced some phenomenon in order to contrast the changes brought on by the premise. Rework this.

3. “Borne” with an “e”

4. This isn’t a futurist premise. Or if it is, it’s Victorian futurism. (Chalk on a physical wall?) Whom does the government think this will help? And why? Half-baked.

5. Why this detail? Why here? I didn’t knowingly plagiarize this from a modernist poet, but it feels like I did. Can’t I create an aesthetic of my own?

6. This isn’t a story. Nothing happens. Revise.

7. Were there too many adjectives in this story? Probably so. Adjectives collect like debris around a storm gutter. Subordinate clauses and comma splices abound. “A breeze tickled the downy hair on her arms, the peach sun falling lower in the sky, the intoxicating smell of lilacs in the fresh, cool air.” I’ve written that somewhere. If I haven’t, I will. We need not restrict ourselves to nouns and verbs, but it’s not enough to hurl florid descriptions at the page. Florid descriptions have no correspondence with real life. Real life is harried thoughts and scrawny cries and feigned remoteness.