I am very happy you felt it flowed. It's a pico pitfall for me because I focus on the excerpts individually and then they seem to become more independent, rather than parts of a whole.
I'm thrilled that you liked the part where James calls to the night. There was no way I was going to be able to write even a line of poetry for him to read, so I attempted to describe a poem. He does appear to be feeling that he might be more comfortable being half-blind.
...the feeling that James is working out his own psychodrama with Q is clear, but I can't tell yet exactly why Q is fostering it, he remains elusive... though beckoning.
I was very, very anxious about that scene and whether it could appear plausible that it would develop from what had preceded it. If they had been clothed, that would have been the first touch of skin under a half-unfastened garment, but they were already nude and instead it was an even more intimate gesture, slipping through the first crack in the defenses of the psyche, which, of course is something Q is trained to do.
Q's defensiveness about his work makes me wonder.
There are a number of issues for him. Although 7 Springs nurtures creativity of all kinds, including scientific research (it's a big place), there are a large proportion of artists there and they specialise in communicating on a level different from the everyday, they reveal more of their psyche in their work and engage those of others when they do it. Their talents are often considered "gifts", abilities which must be honed through study and practice, but that are essentially mysterious in their origin. He is taking some of those abilities (drama, music, poetry) and using them as tools to open the psyche in a different, less mysterious way so that people can, hopefully, understand themselves and others better. By breaking that process down into teachable bits (what he did with the staff at the hospital) and putting those tools into the hands of people who may not have a "talent" for them, but will be able to approximate what the talented can do, he wonders if he may be vivisecting the muses and selling off their mummified body parts. This is just one of his issues.
Both of them are using all the skills at their disposal, including their professional ones, in their interactions. They can't really help but do that because those skills are part of who they are, but there is the question of whether they are as evenly matched in other things as they were in fencing. And if they aren't, is it ethical?
Can I get any of this across? Well....
(Oh, this is just as long as the last one and I was trying to be briefer!!)
no subject
I'm thrilled that you liked the part where James calls to the night. There was no way I was going to be able to write even a line of poetry for him to read, so I attempted to describe a poem. He does appear to be feeling that he might be more comfortable being half-blind.
...the feeling that James is working out his own psychodrama with Q is clear, but I can't tell yet exactly why Q is fostering it, he remains elusive... though beckoning.
I was very, very anxious about that scene and whether it could appear plausible that it would develop from what had preceded it. If they had been clothed, that would have been the first touch of skin under a half-unfastened garment, but they were already nude and instead it was an even more intimate gesture, slipping through the first crack in the defenses of the psyche, which, of course is something Q is trained to do.
Q's defensiveness about his work makes me wonder.
There are a number of issues for him. Although 7 Springs nurtures creativity of all kinds, including scientific research (it's a big place), there are a large proportion of artists there and they specialise in communicating on a level different from the everyday, they reveal more of their psyche in their work and engage those of others when they do it. Their talents are often considered "gifts", abilities which must be honed through study and practice, but that are essentially mysterious in their origin. He is taking some of those abilities (drama, music, poetry) and using them as tools to open the psyche in a different, less mysterious way so that people can, hopefully, understand themselves and others better. By breaking that process down into teachable bits (what he did with the staff at the hospital) and putting those tools into the hands of people who may not have a "talent" for them, but will be able to approximate what the talented can do, he wonders if he may be vivisecting the muses and selling off their mummified body parts. This is just one of his issues.
Both of them are using all the skills at their disposal, including their professional ones, in their interactions. They can't really help but do that because those skills are part of who they are, but there is the question of whether they are as evenly matched in other things as they were in fencing. And if they aren't, is it ethical?
Can I get any of this across? Well....
(Oh, this is just as long as the last one and I was trying to be briefer!!)