The cover blurb written by Martin Shaw for Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira declares that “This is a book about breaking spells. And not just the obvious kind, but the grievously impacted, deep-in-the-psyche variety”.
I believe Shaw is right. However, I wonder how many people have truly understood what spells are being broken.
Vanessa Machado de Oliviera is a moving writer. I would imagine that she is even more inspiring as a speaker and teacher. I envy her students. In her hands, difficult concepts are rendered into clear parables and lively metaphors. In a brilliant analogy, she compares the human psyche to a bus, with shifting shuffling passengers and drivers. Readers are repeatedly instructed to “check your bus” — notice which emotions, which personas, which histories and narratives, which parts of “I am” are in the front seats, which are in the middle, which are barely visible in the back seats, and which is currently driving the whole “me”. She asks that her readers only notice, without engaging the emotions. Act as an objective observer of your own interiority, paying particular attention to ideas and images that seem to agitate some passengers and which passengers are perturbed. Notice all that, sit with your observations, and then move on.
In this way, she gently prepares her readers for friction and dissonance, evidence of spells being broken. She goes further, telling her readers that many will not be ready for these ideas, that some parts of the book may cause more harm than good for those who are not able to keep the bus calm. Some people are advised to shut the book and walk away. 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. Instead, I am concerned that many people — especially those who write about our collapsing culture — consider Machado’s book a watershed moment. It is very good, no doubt, but none of this is new. It has been said before. For about as long as this culture of modernity has been at its project of churning all the bodies of the world into wealth for a very few Moderns.
Machado’s basic message is that a culture that is premised on appropriating the labor and resources of others is eventually going to fail — but not before damaging everything that it touches, most especially those who have materially and socially benefited from the appropriation. Moderns must be willingly blind to the destruction and pain that underpin their success and wealth. They must redefine this reality in ways that free them from culpability, that allow them to keep what they have stolen without guilt or remorse. They must view this culture through filters that occlude the necessary harm in this system so that they can benefit from it and yet believe themselves good people, people who have earned their status and wealth, people who deserve their fortune — while those who have not benefited are seen as undeserving. Those who are not Moderns, or even those who once were and are now falling through the widening cracks in our crumbling culture, must be at fault. They must have earned their pain because they did not conform or follow rules or work hard enough… or have the proper color skin…
Moderns must create and make impregnable this view of the pain they cause the world or they would be incapacitated by the horror of what they’ve done. So they weave charms and enchantments between themselves and the damage they cause. They ward off empathy and bind their senses in self-gratifying glamors. They mistake muttered incantations for truth. This is all to say that they lie to themselves. Every minute of every day. For an entire lifetime. Every thought and act and desire is a lie. Of course, this is deeply damaging.
Moderns are emotionally and intellectually broken by these spells, utterly incapable of understanding what is actually happening. Thus we have people who know that the system is devouring itself, who know that everything we depend upon for our basic life needs is failing, who know that there was never any chance of it continuing perpetually because there aren’t enough Earths to support it, and yet who remain unable to act or even think in ways that might lead to change. They can’t think outside the system of modernity precisely because they can’t see themselves in any light other than the spellbound false images they have created to hide what they truly look like to those they have harmed.
Those who have been on the wrong side of modernity have been leveling this critique against it since its inception. Machado has a disarming way of delivering the message, but it is nothing new. It is depressingly repetitious. People who should know better, who are actively engaged with imagining a different way to organize human living, who are aware of the destruction underpinning this culture (though perhaps only at some remove from actual sensory experience), who understand that it is finite and that we are closing in on, if not beyond, the boundaries, have said that this is a difficult book to read and understand.
But is it? My best friend in childhood may not have known these terms, but she knew what modernity was and how it worked and, most particularly, that it would never include her — that it could not include her or anyone like her or it would fail. If it did not continually reproduce the pain it caused her, it would stop working. As a third grader, she understood this and made me to understand it also. I don’t think we were especially astute. Just outside. If you are outside modernity, beyond the wards, you can’t help but see the hurt it does to the world — because you physically experience that hurt. But few people outside modernity have any voice within it. This too must be true for modernity to function. If most Moderns could hear the pain they cause, modernity would collapse. (Because not everybody in this system is a narcissistic asshole… yet…)
What Machado does bring to the discussion is a frank demand to get over ourselves. She repeatedly tells her readers that everyone is culpable. Deal with that. Know that. Internalize that. Do not try to reconcile or excuse that. But get down off your false privilege and get to work fixing what you have broken. Don’t wallow in attention-seeking guilt either. We don’t have time for theatrics. We all need to roll up our sleeves and do what is needed. And do what is needed, not what we think is needed. We first need to listen to the world, listen to the voices we’ve suppressed, listen to reality. As Machado says, “Do the dishes”, meaning tend to and take care of the physical bodies enmeshed and entangled with modernity.
I have seen many reviews of Machado’s book, but none that have commented on this core adjuration of hers, one that she repeats over and over and over — do the work! Take care of this world! Nobody seems to have noticed that the title of the book is a job description. Hospicing is a craft; it is work; it is care work. It is that devalued, but invaluable, labor that every body needs as it comes to the end of its life — mostly done by bodies who are of lower status than the dying body. And so it is with modernity. Those who are doing this work — those who have noticed that it needs doing at all — are mostly those who have not benefited from modernity. Still, they do the work, putting effort into this system to gently end it, so that its demise brings about the least harm. And while they hospice this system, they are also doing the work of midwifing the next, bringing whatever is to follow modernity into the world.
Machado is an educator. Most of the stories she tells deal with how we teach our children and how those children perceive being taught. Kids are rather resistant to glamor… In fact, they’re normally embarrassingly observant and, where encouraged to speak freely, will unerringly give voice to exactly what adults would prefer to keep hidden. Machado’s best anecdotes are in the voices of these kids. You will laugh.
But after you’ve wiped the tears off your face, you may, like me, hear the true story. Because the future is for these kids, not us. They will live it. They will craft it. They will midwife it into being. Our job is to let them — to clear away the messes we’ve made, to rehabilitate what is necessary and bury what is not, to give them the tools they need and the courage to be themselves. Seems simplistic. After all, our one mundane task in living is to produce a new and successful generation of life. But modernity has been twisting our views of success for so long, we no longer know how to do this one basic animal function.
So… wash the dishes. Start with the tasks that need doing, the small things that do not breed status or wealth, but that reproduce life. Do the work that leads to health and well-being for all bodies and that will therefore necessarily unravel modernity — because universal health and well-being undermines differential wealth and status, modernity’s necessary foundation. Make way for the future, for the children, for those who will live undefined and undamaged by this dying system. And make your own way out of your self-created illusions.
Most of all, care. Unbounded empathy is the surest way to break the spell, to heal yourself and hospice this whole disastrous culture into unbeing. But, make no mistake, caring is hard work. If you’ve been on the privileged side of modernity, you may find yourself making excuses and trying to shirk. You may begin to fall back into old habits, telling yourself the stories that excuse modernity and your role in it. You may even forget why you ever took up with this menial work. Surely, you deserve better… Once, we were gods…
When that happens, listen to the kids. They’ll be more than happy to tell you when you’re screwing up, I’m sure. With a dismissive flick of the hand and a “blah, blah, blah“, they’ll set you back on your own two little feet… so you can get back to reality… so you can get back to doing the hospice work… so you can break modernity’s spell.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
