[Note. I often have voice dreams without any accompanying imagery. They can be complex, with multiple voices, or simple and short. The tenor of the voice is often “commanding” and I take these to be “tasks.” Many of my publications have had their origins in such voice dreams. A recent one was: “Remember Skye.” What follows is what stands out in my memory.]In the summer of 1992, I was invited to represent the United States at the 12th Dunvegan Castle Arts Festival in Scotland. The patron of the festival was Yehudi Menuhin, long-time friend of clan chief John MacLeod of MacLeod, the host of the festival held on the Isle of Skye in the 800-year old ancestral home of the MacLeod clan. The festival took place over a two-week period, featuring poets, story tellers, pipers, singers and lecturers.The previous year’s US representative was Helen Vendler, then Keenan Professor of English at Harvard University (the first woman to achieve a senior professorship there) and poetry critic of the New Yorker. Her lectures had been on “The Structure of Poetry” and “Three Shakespeare Sonnets.” Pretty big footsteps to follow! I had been asked, as well, to speak on poetry. I am not a poet, but I have strong feelings about the necessity and value of poetry. The titles of my lectures were “Writing from the Inside of the Inside,” and “The Cost of Poetry and the Price of Its Loss.” It took all the courage I could muster not to prepare formal lectures, but to have faith that I could speak from some deep well in me that values poetry and why it matters. To this day, these two talks remain my personal favorites. Both talks were extemporaneous and no recordings were made, so the lectures exist only as memories now.I wasn’t the only Jungian analyst at the festival. John had also invited his friend Bani Shorter, an American living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is known for her work on the Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis with Andrew Samuels and Alfred Plaut, as well as her book, An Image Darkly Forming: Women and Initiation. Her talk at the festival was titled “The Thread of the Story: The Fairy Flag.” Click here to read the full post:
