Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

I’m not going to finish this one right now, although I think it’s an important book. I’ve made it about a third of the way through.

I tend to agree with this review in Resilience. Specifically:

With all the admonitions, I was prepared to be deeply affected by this book. However, while I found much to think on in her writing, I did not encounter any novel ideas aside from new ways to analyze how humans think.

This book is unusual in that it spends nearly the first quarter of the book encouraging you not to read it. You may not be ready to let go of modernity, the author warns. You may not be ready to break modernity’s spell on you. You may not want to see the world differently, and once you do, you can’t un-see it.

In the early pages, I appreciated Machado de Oliveira’s exploration of stories and how they are treated under modernity, particularly the distinction between “wording the world” and “worlding the world”:

In wording the world, we are socialized to treat stories as tools of communication that enable us to describe reality, prescribe the future, and accumulate knowledge. In worlding the world, stories are living entities that emerge from and move things in the world.

She writes:

Since people tend to turn away when paradoxes are presented through logic, I have learned to translate them into stories, images, metaphors, and pedagogical exercises.

And in fact, this is where I felt I had the most to learn from Machado de Oliveira. Her use of images, metaphors, and pedagogical exercises is deeply skillful.

She writes of introducing the way that modernity has constrained our imaginations by asking a roomful of educators to imagine corn. Everyone imagines yellow corn, not the multicolored varieties that were much more common prior to homogenization and factory farming. She weaves this into a larger story of modernity’s exploitation and shutting down of options, in practice but also within what we can imagine.

Machado de Oliveira moves gently, often asking the reader to check in with themselves, using the image of a bus with many riders to create space for the reader to acknowledge conflicting ideas and emotions within themselves. She explicitly makes space for the reader to find themselves defensive, in denial, angry, or despairing. (I mainly found myself numb and weary, although whether that reflects my previous engagement with the subject matter, or just my general state as a parent of a newborn, I couldn’t tell you.) It was an interesting, and odd, reading experience to be so consistently checked-in-with by the author, yet to not be experiencing many of the emotions the author appeared to anticipate for the reader.

It did make me feel like the book was not “for” me, even though I did have much to learn from the book. Perhaps I’ll return to it another time when I have more energy.

Here were some parts that stayed with me:

I wish I could put this at the front of all my writing:

Please understand that your interpretations are the result of different traveling stories intermingling and spinning together in a direction of their own that happens in your time and context—they may have very little resemblance to my own interpretations. This is fine as long as we are both aware that there may be significant differences between what I wrote and what you will interpret.

This resonated for me as a trans person—the expectation to be of service, to make “diversity” work in a way that allows business to go on as usual, and especially to feel grateful for the “opportunity to contribute.” Especially that last one—a story for another day!

We are expected to be in and of service to those who see themselves as the rightful heirs of the academic ivory tower. Regardless of what we actually do, the impact of what we do, or want to do, from an institutional perspective our main job is to make “diversity” work in ways that make people feel comfortable and that allow business to go on as usual. We are expected to feel grateful and indebted for the opportunity to contribute.

The last line here struck me:

What if learning to activate this medicine requires coming to terms with our violent histories (as painful as that may be); learning to see the world through the eyes of others (as impossible as that sounds); and facing humanity (in our own selves first) in its full complexity, affliction, and imperfection? What if the purging prompted by this medicine leads us to confront our traumas and learn to let go of fears of scarcity, loneliness, worthlessness, guilt, and shame? What if we must learn to trust each other without guarantees?

I loved this about stories:

We are living off expired or expiring stories. Stories that expire can no longer dance with you. They are lethargic or stuck, they can’t move things in generative ways anymore, but we often feel we cannot let them go. Many of these expired stories give us a sense of security, purpose, and direction—precisely because they seem stable and solid. Thus, we become attached to them and get used to their weight in our lives. If we notice they are dying, we refuse to accept it and we put them on life support because we fear the void left in their place when they are no longer there. We forecast that this void will leave us empty, story-less, and that there will be no vitality in this emptiness because everything will be meaningless, pointless, purposeless, and sad.

At times, with this talk of stories and worlding the world, I was reminded of my time in the Buddhist community:

Wording the world drives the privileging of meaning within modernity/coloniality. We search for the meaning of life. We value things that are meaning-full, we ignore things that we perceive to be meaning-less. This obsession with meaning overrides other sensibilities to the point where we can only register what we consider meaning-full, and we may numb to sense-fullness (in the broadest, most sensorial sense).

This felt critical—this dynamic about what is a “concept,” the idea that we consider our terms to be correct and universal, simply because we cannot imagine otherwise.

I have observed it at work when Indigenous colleagues talk about “the earth as a living entity” and are met with someone referring to this as “the Indigenous concept of the earth as a living entity”—to which they respond, “This is not a concept!” This is hard to explain because we expect our explanations to word the world so that we can understand it with the terms we have inherited from modernity/coloniality. We consider these terms to be correct and universal, because we cannot imagine otherwise.

An important question about stories:

Instead of “Is this story true?” or “What does this story mean?”—questions that come from the expectation that stories will describe reality and convey a fixed meaning—the approach to storytelling illustrated here invites us to ask, “What is this story trying to move?” and “What does it do over time and to time itself?”