Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 04:40 PM

Friends, Kind  and Patient:
I am  embroiled in the horrid process of moving... back from Rhode
Island to Colorado, again. A strange year indeed, going on two strange
years.  More when my brain does surface. I trust it will... it has gone into  hiding. Meantime, a thought from one of my favorite writers of strange stories:

"I care about the literary art, and I know
exactly what the Ancients meant by 'the promptings of the Muse'.
The stories which I consider to be my most successful came to me as if
dictated...  The true ghost story is akin to poetry:  only in
part is it a conscious construction, and when the Muse does not speak,
you cannot write it."
                              ~  "An Essay" by Robert Aickman  1914 - 1981

To my mind, Robert Aickman was one of the very few writers to capture the genuine strangeness of dream;  insinuating, inevitable and obscure.

Comments

[Midori]

Courage Forest! Speaking for Terri and I who managed separately to move three times in less than two years...I can tell you it really is an odd sort of limbo. We have been shaking our heads trying to figure out why at this later half of our life we should find ourselves so uprooted? All I can think of -- it must be some kind of peculiar midlife puberty involving leaving home...

I pray all goes as smoothly as it can, and that which has been packed, will soon be unpacked.

[Forest]

Thank you, Midori! Oh my, my sympathies to you both... a limbo indeed. May we all settle -- well, for the while, at least -- and find it fruitful!Yours,Forest