Bogongfjärilen is an australian moth. Like birds can navigate with the help of magnetic field. Exactly how is a mystery.
I listened, fascinated, a P1-documentary about this butterfly. The documentary ends with the main character, today a professor in Lund, happen to encounter an old professor at the university of Canberra. It’s the same professor as the main character associate to an embarrassing memory. Once happened to all of his butterflies to accommodate out of its cage and lusa down the entire department. He dared not speak to malören was his fault.
immediately to the old professor must know the truth. She runs up to him and tells him that it is the researcher who released a bunch of butterflies on the department for twenty-eight years ago.
An embarrassed professor from Lund finally got to apologise, ends the documentary with satisfaction.
the Journalist seemed never to have asked himself the question whether her protagonist had no desire whatsoever to apologize. She made the decision for him, some of the Swedish motto: You must be able to talk about everything.
put words his feelings, to articulate their trauma, to get to the bottom of it that chafe IS important. There is nothing man can from birth, but something you have to practice on. Over and over again.
It does not mean that everything necessarily gets better, just one talk enough about it. Just this fact, there are many who have misunderstood in Sweden.
three Hundred emissions moths on a biological institution for three decades ago might not as a profound trauma. But there are experiences that have damaged people for life. As a fellow human, you can never force someone else to go to the bottom of them. It is a decision that each must make for yourself.
You may not know all the circumstances that may lie behind a man’s decision to not talk about a certain issue.
arrive each year, thousands of people who have experienced war, oppression and authoritarian systems. The notion that one must talk about everything is not a good starting point when responding to these people.
There are things that are just going to talk about with someone who has it. Things that go to portray indirectly. Things like that simply not going to talk about, or perhaps to talk about after ten, twenty years.
My grandpa was a war veteran from the winter war and the continuation war didn’t like to talk about the war. When we grandchildren asked about it, he used to always tell me the same stories. If it was so cold at the front that the hair froze solid in the ground when they slept in a tent. About how it was to get home the horse when the war finally was over.
He never spoke about the terrible dödsskräck he must have experienced. I have read about the latter, including in Benedict Zilliacus books. Grandpa could not express it, he didn’t even want to try. He wanted to forget.
I Myself am saddened by how little I know about my grandfather’s war experiences. I would have great use of it now to understand the people I meet in my job. And I would like to know how it was, because he was my grandfather, who survived by chance, and that he survived, I am here.
But one thing grandpa taught me: That it is not always those who talk the most about their traumas to listen to.
In Russia, war veterans become so impregnated with the wartime propaganda effort that the interviews they give on the Day of victory is often completely empty. They just repeats the same pompous phrases. Nothing about how how it was, there they have stashed away, at the bottom of a dim consciousness of whither the door is closed. The veterans know that these stories are not welcome in today’s Russia, and no one would still understand them.
But the stories are. That tour is much documented.
To put words on things is important. It is important to at least try.
So simply you can, as far as you can.
Read more texts by Anna-Lena Laurén here . For example, this: ”No, we finns are not the least bit happy.”
