I had been invited by members of the Danish Navy and I was taken on a formal tour. My guide was a navy Commander, a sardonic clever fellow named Hans Ole. As we drove up the coast, he told me about the festival: how effigies of witches are burned on bonfires all over the country. People sing and celebrate. I could imagine how this tradition sprung up. When critical thinking, justice, and logic came into play with increased levels of education and self-awareness, it became more difficult to claim that some local midwife danced naked in the woods at night and had coital relationships with Satan. This inconvenient evolution meant that, without the entertainment of a witch-burning, neighborhood parties lacked a certain flair. So they had to pretend.
I still remember Hans Ole telling me, deadpan: "We burned our last witch in 1810. And it's a good thing you weren't around back then because we would have burned you as a witch."
I laughed at this. But Hans Ole did not think he had been funny and he turned to look at me with a penetrating stare.
"No," he said simply. "You would have been burned as a witch. You are far too clever."
This trip to Denmark, I've missed the witch burning. I am here three weeks late, although the timing seems somehow significant to me. It would have been around the time that my Leadership was looking through the "evidence" that the Dutch Intel boys had provided to smear my name. And they decided it was better for the soul of the village if I were burned.
The truth is that any organization will act to save itself - even if a few people are hurt in the process. I learned this in graduate school when I reported to the Ombudsman's office that my advisor had solicited me for sex. I naively believed that these people were supposed to prevent or punish bad behavior and protect the weak. Not so. They were there to limit the liability of the institution by appearing to have a response.
Never underestimate people's desire to maintain the status quo.
The advisor is still teaching physics and advising students, as is the sadistic solid-state physicist who spent two years systematically belittling and undermining me. At this point, I have no faith in the righteousness or ethics of any institution. The institution can never be wrong. The institution must be preserved. This is why we must have a witch to burn.
I am here in Denmark with friends. Daniel and his girlfriend have moved to the suburbs with their fifteen month old daughter with white blonde curls, and a son due any day now. The Danish summer is a cold bright blue with sun rising at 3AM and the sky still glowing after 2200. It is a comfortable, filial life. I make food and write with chalk on the paving stones with the little papoose. We go for walks in the stroller where we look at birds and meet the neighborhood dogs and she falls asleep with a blanket tucked around her.
This is a life I can never have. I feel my isolation even as I take part in the routine and play games. At one point, it would have been so painful to be so close to something that is forever removed, but I am a long way away from the beach in Boa Vista. I am able to give and receive affection and spend time in these peaceful domestic moments. But they are not mine.
Is it so damaging to society that someone like me exists? That I be allowed to have my own mind and thoughts, that I fight against intolerance and unethical behavior? That I insist that we be better than we are? Would I have traded my moral compass and my reason for this beautiful little life? If S had asked me to? I cannot imagine myself making that compromise. But I would have given anything to be with him.
He is gone now. As corrupted and broken as the men who made him that way. And I am the witch.
No comments:
Post a Comment