If I fear death, then of course I fear life, because life and death can’t be separated: they’re mutually dependent, present in every process, inextricably intertwined. For proof, I need look no further than my body, where life and death are happening every minute of every day — not as a battle between the two, but in a movement so beautifully efficient and harmonious that it makes them, in terms […]
Now that I think of it, No Tobacco, a poem that is a story that is a poem, fits nicely within the style or genre known as Magical Realism. What happens in it is to me, though, an everyday reality, because reality, while impossible to define, is a magical experience. When I say impossible, I mean it’s impossible for me, no doubt in part because I don’t need or want […]
You can look at this canvas for half an hour and see little or nothing. Or you can surrender to it and see everything, and imagine even more. It depends on how hustled and harried you are, how busy, how important, how judgmental, how sure, how willing to be open or blind. What you do and what you see will be the result of your own vision and experience. It […]
I love what I call shared faces — faces that blend and overlap in mutual understanding, compassion, and sympathy. I have drawn many such, without knowing how the first of them came about; it was, most definitely, not a matter of deliberation or intent. In other words, it just happened. And just as they exist in me, in the so-called “imaginary world,” they exist around me, in the so-called “real […]
While this society we have created is teeming with distractions, and is noisome and unsettling at every turn, we must not allow ourselves, in our hunger for relief, to be mere seekers of entertainment. Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is more distraction. We cannot thrive unless we are engaged. Even if it is something as simple as watching the rain and listening to the sound it makes on the roof, being […]
What grew in me without my knowing, what crept stealthily into my burgeoning little boy’s identity and went unrecognized for years, was a keen sense of competition. The expectation, need, and desire to be the best was administered in tiny doses without their knowing by family, friends, acquaintances, and teachers. The best reader, the best speller, the best runner, the best at throwing or kicking a ball — the process […]
Once I realized I would live forever, I forgot all about it. Truth be told, if in my life there’s a common theme, it’s that almost without exception, whatever flash of insight I have, or feel I have, I forget within a day or two. And so it might be said that my present understanding is an accumulation of inspired residue dating back to childhood, those tiny bits which, against […]
One day, at a very early age, I reached the conclusion that I would live forever. I remember saying to myself on that occasion, in all simple certainty, I cannot die. It was a revelation, not a plea, one which arose not from long deliberation or fear, but from the earth itself, and seemed to emanate from the palm of my upheld hand. This startling new truth was borne out […]
A state of which, contrary to a lifetime of observation and experience, one expects thought to solve the problems it has created. . [ 1676 ]
Of all the arts, love and friendship are the most intimate, because each person creates the other, and the experience leaves both transformed. . [ 1572 ]
William Michaelian 