25 November 2024
In her book, Hospicing Modernity Vanessa Machado de Oliveira offers tools to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of, and to “stay with the troubles,” to add the phrase of Donna Haraway, another important contemporary voice. One of the psychological tools offered in Hospicing Modernity is referred to as “layering existence and experience:”
Modernity conditions us to think in only a singular, linear layer based on an objective description of reality. In this context, contradictions and paradoxes are perceived as an impediment to sustaining linearity, progress, and coherence, and need to be eliminated. This severely limits our capacity to develop discernment and to hold space for a range of multiple and conflicting thoughts, feelings, desires and relationships.
To address this impediment, Machado de Oliveira suggests a practice where we see ourselves not as linear personalities existing on a single plane, but as beings made up of “layers of existence and experience”: the me, or ego layer; the societies that myself and my ancestors have lived in; the whole of humanity, past present and future; all entities on the planet, including those with a much longer temporality than humans. It strikes me as a valuable framework.
In yesterday’s post I engaged Albert Camus to wrestle with the politics of the current moment, to echo Camus’ call for moral clarity and responsibility. Today I speak from perhaps a different layer, one that does not seek to offer hope and inspiration, but to stay with the troubles by dwelling in a despair that, I believe, needs to reckoned with and metabolized in order to engage effectively in the world. In that spirit, I offer up a poem:
Observance: On Despair
Even when we don’t desire it
the world is ripening.
A pear is aging in its wooden bowl
its yellow-green flesh
aged brown and soft
rotten beyond repair.
Who am I to stop this fruit
from its ripeness?
Inside the mountain
the gold is ripe, the lithium.
When we’ve ravaged her
we won’t stop digging.
We’ll never stop digging.
Even when we don’t desire it
we and the digging are one.
The Watering Hole :: Jeff Conant 