Readers - email exchange with Angeline Adams 4_11_6

this is the first part of an email exchange that I had with Angeline Adams which she has kindly allowed me to put on this site...

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Angeline: The Chosen: I absolutely loved it. I was increasingly fascinated by how the theme of sight permeated the book, both as a practical issue revolving around the masking taboo, and as an intellectual and spiritual quality to be perfected only by the physically blinded Wise.

The whole culture seems pre-occupied with the phenomenon of sight, the visual experience of the world and visual communication at every level; from the sign-language to the visual splendor to the very public methods of showing the allegiance, ownership or punishment of an individual. You can read a person's history on their skin. How apt that the only people with whom this is impossible are the Chosen, whose allegiances shift too subtly to be easily documented by tattoo anyway.

The key expression of this is Carnelian's series of epiphanies about himself, everyone and everything around him. Overall, it's very rare to see a theme so fully-realised or so integral to the heart of a book. It is the heart.

Ricardo: *grin* what a wonderful analysis... and though what you say is right, I certainly had not thought of it in these terms. There are so many aspects and themes in the books... and only a proportion of them were put in by me consciously... For years I've been talking about how the Stone Dance is like an iceberg, that the parts of it that are under the surface are far larger than those above... When I said this, I was specifically referring to those subtle undercurrents which I had consciously woven into the text. Over the past couple of years I have begun to appreciate that this is even more true about the subconscious elements of the books. I don't know if you've read any Jung... but there is certainly a lot of evidence in my work of what he calls the collective subconscious...