How can you collapse that which has no structure? How can you erase that which has no name? How can you break that which has no bones?
What happened to the witches?
In our mind she lives far from the village center. The villagers fear her, but in times of last resort, it is her name they speak.
The problems that drove them to witches have not gone away: interpersonal conflict, inner turmoil, struggles against the power structures that scaffold society. New institutions have absorbed them. Therapists, like witches, as outsiders, have no stake in the outcomes of daily life, but lack the ability to intervene on your behalf. Social workers and lawyers bargain on your behalf, but are beholden to the very institutions that drive these problems: the state, money, or both.
How did the witches lose ground to such poor substitutes? Their power was always a tenuous one, by design, I think. Formless in the face of bureaucracy. Secretive against shows of force. Frightening as institutions grow friendly. Kind as power is cruel. Only ever a subversion, a dialogue, a counterpoint to another power. Like a shadow, you cannot stamp it out. To try to drive it out with light is to throw it elsewhere, brighter. A shadow dies only if it clings.
If you had stayed, you would have seen it. But you ran, so only I watched, distanced.
Highways, HOAs, the atomic family, everyone else a twenty minute drive away. Ever longer commutes outpaced only by the lengthening of shifts. At home, exhausted by the frustrations of more demanding, less meaningful work, TV masks the isolation. This, the witches could have survived. The whisper networks thinned, but there was nowhere else to go. But, then, the internet, and social media, and witchcraft’s offer—to change the mind of one person—only one, becomes a pittance.
This web we weaved, what is it really? A thousand warring norms, all watching, waiting to strike. Exposed, for all time, for your friends and family, your employers and lovers and servants and masters, to find. Even in its secluded spaces, still always the fear of a listening ear, by the establishment’s ever hungry proprietors, by the similar sharks who might profit off their neglect or subpoena. All those eyes, those tongues and teeth, pressing into an ever tightening mold.
But the magic happens in the formlessness, in the intimacy. When the world collapses to two, the fragile body, the ritual dance, the offer on the breath. With two, when it seems the whole universe might be negotiated. Social pressures, to accept or refuse, only a memory, the lumbering rituals of ‘normal’ life, a distant nightmare. A time where there is space to change, a place where something might be born.
So then, what did the witches do, as they felt the threads slip from their fingers? The same thing what we all might do—grasp harder. Adopt the likenesses of what had severed us: hierarchy, exclusivity, procedure and approval. The very thing it is anathema to. A shadow clings, then it dies.
If you had stayed—if they had not pushed you away—if you and I had not dreamed, not so recklessly at least—would you have noticed? Could, we together, have slowed, fixed, the unweaving?
Or maybe you and I would’ve clinged as well. Held each other and burned to nothing into the light.