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As psychoanalysts we deal all day long in stories-stories that never begin at the beginning or end at the end, stories often barely articulated or relying on words with unfamiliar shades of meaning, about people who may seem very little like us-different in age, in gender, in values, in native tongue, told by people whose lives have been led in other parts of the world or in other parts of town. Yet, the mystery: however strange, the stories speak to us.
How is this possible? Is it the essential shared humanness of the teller and the listener? Is it the medium itself-the way narrative (even when composed only of narrative gestures) organizes experience for both teller and listener?
Here's an example. “Dead Horse” is by contemporary poet Thomas Lux. The poem's rural American, conversational setting is reminiscent of Robert Frost. But the diction is even plainer: Lux does so much with (apparently) simple, direct speech. As with Frost, a deep sophistication is folded into the simple language.
This little report of an ur-American childhood experience is, to say the least, a long way from my own childhood experience in the Bronx. And yet, I get it.
And what we understand-as a matter of deep apprehension-is that this tale of a small tragedy, and small awakening, is a moment in a much larger narrative. We understand that although a sharp new awareness for the boy, the death of a horse, is not an exceptional event for a farm family. Death, certainly an animal's death, is part of life's routine. These would be people with little patience for sentimentality, with no time left for mourning a loss as usual as this.
And this is a life where words have little use. What happens gets summed up in a kind of grunt: “Happens.” The people in their own way are as dumb (that is, inarticulate, not stupid) as the cow. That inarticulateness can also be seen in the way the lines often break in the middle of a simple thought: one pauses for breath, for orientation, in the wrong place. The poet may