You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We can thank Freud for the definitive modern demonstration that nothing in human experience is simple.
The theory, make that theories, that contemporary psychoanalysts rely on in our clinical work can be thought of as honest efforts to extend Freud's heroic and lifelong effort at making sense of the complexity underlying apparently simple things. But useful and reassuring as our efforts may be, we are always aware of their inadequacy. We know that in every human encounter (clinical or otherwise), the mystery remains.
The Meaning of Simplicity
I hide behind simple things so you'll find me; If you don't find me, you'll find the things, you'll touch what my hand has touched, our hand-prints will merge.
The August moon glitters in the kitchen like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way because of what I'm saying to you), it lights up the empty house and the house's kneeling silence—always the silence remains kneeling.
Every word is a doorway to a meeting, one often cancelled, and that's when a word is true: when it insists on the meeting.
Poetry, it could be said, addresses the same mystery-without the need for explaining. It allows us to appreciate and take pleasure in our mystified situation; in the apprehension that things are both what they seem and more than what they seem; in our awareness of the quivering balance between what we know and what we'll never know. Poetry aims, moreover, at celebrating this tension-economically and concisely. Surface simplicity, underlying complexity; surface clarity, deeper ambiguity.
Here's a lovely meditation on simplicity from the modern Greek poet Yannis Ritsos.
“The Meaning of Simplicity” is populated by simple things. An August moon, the kitchen of an empty house, the moon shining like a tin-plated pot, an absence, a presence, a meeting. Merging handprints: a lover's kitchen, we think-but we're not s