For the last couple of months, I have been seeing advertisements around town as part of a new campaign by Citizens Bank: Made Ready. It was bannered all over South Station when I got back from New York in October and the cavernous overlit emptiness of after-midnight in a shuttered train station gave it an additionally ominous look, but I have also seen it by day on the glass planes of the head house at Porter and it still bothers me. Sometimes there's a photo of a person captioned with a monologue beginning I'm made of . . . Sometimes the photo appears intended to embody the viewer: You're made of . . . All energetic, aspirational things, indiscriminately abstract or concrete: Ready to teach. Ready to make it. Ready to set the example. Ready to vlog. They all conclude with the same gnomically inclusive declaration, which appears to be the slogan of the entire project: You're made ready and so are we. It makes my skin crawl. I have been trying to figure out why. I find it impossible to separate the catchphrase from the term readymade, not sensu Dada, but the original sense of the mass-produced, manufactured objects on whose commercial status Duchamp was playing with the concept of found art, as if we are—surely we can't be—meant to take all these go-getting people as coming off the production line stamped for their own particular purposes. So first that gets Malvina Reynolds stuck in my head with her doctors and her lawyers and her business executives all made out of ticky-tacky and then I get the phrase linked up with His Girl Friday's "production for use," which in context of the film is a cynical appropriation of political rhetoric in order to provide a sympathetic angle on a frail little cop-killer and therefore not necessarily to be applied unironically, but it zeroes in on the unease I feel at the idea of summing up a person as made ready. For what? It's a transitive kind of descriptor; there's a future expectation, a tension, as if it's not enough to have accumulated life experience and opinions, there must be a use for it, an end for which you have been unknowingly but fortuitously prepared, whether that's teaching or vlogging or making it—whatever that means in the great American songbook of vague but indispensable ambitions—at which point the whole thing starts to feel like the rebranding of Amigara Fault. I do in fact believe in being prepared for all sorts of eventualities, by which I mean less survival-prepper doomsday scenarios than having some idea of how you might respond in a situation so you don't get caught flat-footed by it and lose your boundaries. I don't believe it is valuable to view a person's life as the sum of its useful applications. I don't even think I believe that a person needs to have useful applications, at least not in any way that can be represented by the pre-packaged arete of thinking outside the box, super-sized dreams, curiosity and forever embracing the unknown. It is wonderful when people transform their lives. It is not because they were always meant to. I was just trying to deposit a check, why am I having an argument about teleology with Aristotle? Or optimism with Leibniz? In short, I can't view the campaign neutrally, as the catchy, challenging, personal-trainer encouragement it seems to want to be; it makes me think of philosophy and dystopias. What does Citizens Bank think is coming anyway, that we all have to be ready for it? Whatever it is, like the man says at the end of Nightmare Alley, we were born for it. The conveyer belt to the future ticks on.
2019-11-05
My poem "Without Prayer or the Place in the Forest" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.
It is somewhat snarkily overstating the case for me to refer to it as A.K.A. The Subtweet About Jewish Magical Realism, but there are shapes of story and then there are the ways people actually go on. The title comes from a story retold by Elie Wiesel in The Gates of the Forest (1966), which has become important to me:
When the great Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light the fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.
Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished.
Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.
Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.
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selkie, for you.
It is somewhat snarkily overstating the case for me to refer to it as A.K.A. The Subtweet About Jewish Magical Realism, but there are shapes of story and then there are the ways people actually go on. The title comes from a story retold by Elie Wiesel in The Gates of the Forest (1966), which has become important to me:
When the great Rabbi Israel Ba'al Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light the fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.
Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: "Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer." And again the miracle would be accomplished.
Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: "I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient." It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.
Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.
selkie, for you.