Sorrow-Acre

A two-year-old girl falls down in a full-blown tantrum on the sidewalk in the middle of a lot of people, thrashing and screaming. Her parents stand a few feet off, looking at her with amusement. They don’t pick her up. We pass by. A while later, we see the same little girl trying to crawl up the steps to a store where her parents must have gone, screaming with desperation.

Well, this is Denmark, in a small town outside of Copenhagen. The rules here must be different. But I can’t help connecting this display of parental detachment with the stony lack of expression that seems so marked here: no eye contact, no greeting, no smiles. Yes, we are tourists from a plague-infested country. Denmark requires vaccination cards to enter any kind of restaurant, hotel, or shop, so they don’t wear masks and the whole problem seems to have been eliminated in a country where the inhabitants can simple be told to get their shots. And they do. But the Danes treat each other, as far as I can see, with the same wooden lack of expression. What is going on?

The almost total absence of any form of art, or artistic expression, including music, is also striking. Edvard Munch is the only Scandinavian painter I know, and his works are not in the museums here. The best known one is called The Scream.

Any connection?

And what about the three best-known writers: Henrik Ibsen (A Doll’s House, among many other plays, August Strindberg (The Master Builder, again among many other plays), and Isak Dinesen, whose short story, “Sorrow Acre” (among many others), displays the iron rule of a landowner over his serf, resulting in her death as she cuts an acre of rye in the hot sun to save her son’s life.

“Sorrow Acre” ends, “In the field where the woman died, the old lord later on had a stone set up, with a sickle carved on it. The peasants on the land then named the rye field “Sorrow Acre.”

All artists kick hard against conformity, and for the strongest, conformity may be the goad we need to release our talents. This seems true when I reflect on the extraordinary show I saw called Mother! in the Louisiana Museum, also outside of Copenhagen. The Renaissance portrait of the Madonna on the front of the catalog stands in vivid contrast to the many astonishing works that make up this big show: Elina Brotherus’ 2013 self-portrait, My Dog is Cuter Than Your Ugly Baby, puppy in one hand, middle finger challenging ,after what the catalog calls “a failed fertility treatment”; Catherine Opie’s 2004 Self Portrait/Nursing, enormous naked breasts, infant, and tatoo; Kaari Upson’s room-sized display of hanging tree trunks, titled Mother’s Legs (2018/2019). And even the Renaissance Madonna echoes a half-hidden theme, totally immersed in the infant who, in turn, is totally immersed in a bauble on a coral necklace.

And these are only three of the complex, talented and startling images that fill gallery after gallery of the enormous Louisiana Museum—named, by the way, by the founder, for his three wives, all named some version of Louise. I have no idea what happened to them.

Is there some connection here with the heavily emphasized heterosexuality—so many couples, man and woman, in the old way? It is Gay Pride Week but you would never know it, except for the poster in the hotel abjuring us all to love everyone.

I came home newly grateful for our argumentative country and our multicolored populace: I never saw a dark face n in Denmark. We are almost impossible to govern, and I feel certain there will be many outbursts of rebellion here in Santa Fe where the annual Indian Market brings in hordes. Our estimable governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, has just mandated masks for everyone, meaning that young women servers in restaurants, working for minimum wage, will have to deal with abuse from well-funded would-be diners who refuse to wear masks…

We pay the price for our many forms of immaturity—but I prefer that to what seems to be the ironclad maturity of the well-cared-for Danes. In a working Socialist Democracy where everyone makes a living wage, has free health care and education—and rides bikes!—is the result this relentless conformity?

In Travel Henrik Ibsen Isak Dinesen Denmark