On Poetry

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Art and poetry can be perceived as places of memory: memories of our primal fears and desires. For myths, images and sounds, generated from this material, provide a resonance for ongoing clarification.

This is what happens when the arts show us how to fill in the dark space, the unknown so that the ear and eye open to our inner self. As a kind of common memory of humanity, in which the inner and outer world separated from each other become one again and restore identity in our perception. For myth reflect things from their origin and try to restore the order of the world as a whole.

When Freud calls the theory of drives our mythology, “ ‚Die Triebe‘ are mythical beings. Great in their indeterminacy“, this view can be modified in such a way that, according to the ‚genetic code‘ we see in animate nature, we recognize in myth the poetic code of the human mind.

©Rosemarie Zens in: Hidden Patterns, Berlin 2011, revised 2020