Linda Katherine Cutting's memory slip was brought on by hearing the sound of footsteps which, like the red barn for Jung's patient, cued memories long since gone from recent memories.
For me, this hooked into something I just read in Barbara Hurd's Stirring the Mud; on Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). If you remember, she wrote Entering the Stone; on Caves and Entering the Dark (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
What Hurd says about the mud is:
"to drop to our knees in algae, push hands into the fringed and seepy edges into which pieces of our lives have sunk, places where year after year the crust grows thin, too thin, finally to mask the sense the underneath the unkempt border something else is breathing: the origins of our worlds, wiser afterthoughts, the whispered asides of the spirit." [p. 3]Notice the words: "seepy", "algae", "edges", "unkempt", "underneath", "border". They support the narrative text tremendous subtext.
When Linda Cutting stopped performing and entered therapy, she was doing exactly what Hurd describes, dropping to her knees, searching beneath the crust.
What do you think of this? What are your ideas? I'd like to know. Post a comment.
Writing is, to me, an entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurial ideas are the life's blood of my writing and real estate practice. For entrepreneurial ideas go to www.hatman2.blogspot.com and for entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog
Ian Kearney, the director of the Kearney Music School, an elite musical training school in Philadelphia, dies after a fall from a balcony during a recital. World-famous cellist, Henry Harrier, recently forced from the faculty, returns to investigate Ian's death when his prized former student is arrested. Henry shows through his brilliant and single-minded pursuit of the truth that, as usual, they have it all wrong. This Sherlock Holmes-type mystery leads the reader through the world of classical music and lays bare the conflicts which dominate the lives of talented adolescents when placed under the pressure of studying for a demanding, stressful, and often elusive career as a classical music performer. Henry Harrier is part John Le Carre's George Smiley, part Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, and part Orlando Cole the beloved teacher, renowned chamber musician, and until his own retirement, the premier cellist of the Curtis Institute.
Tim was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1946. In 1951 he moved with his family to Schenectady, New York, where he lived through high school. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College, Berea, Ohio, from 1964 to 1968. He graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in history and philosophy. He received his Ph. D. in history in U.S. history in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison after spending 2.5 years in the U. S. Army. Most of his army service was completed in Wuerzburg, Germany, from 1969-1971. In 1972 he returned to Madison to complete his doctoral study. His dissertation, Those Who Moved; Internal Migrants in American 1607-1840, combined the statistical analysis of genealogical and biographical data with the study of traditional literary diaries, letters, and journals.
