After reading On the Eighth Day, the question I ask myself is this: If my writing could be turned into loaves of bread, and be given to hungry people, would I embrace that miracle, or would I want to keep the writing as it is and let the people starve? In other words, would I cling to the fleeting image of myself as a writer, even at the expense of […]
Writing about dreams is much more difficult than writing the dreams themselves. On the other hand, writing is a dream, and being able to write is possibly the greatest dream of all. So perhaps it’s best to look at it from this vantage point: parts of the dream are written, while other parts, though not written, influence the written parts so much that they read like highway signs on my […]
Am I my own best, most attentive reader, or am I like so many others who write, and who somehow remain strangers to their own words, as if they are embarrassing and awkward to be around? Haste is the great enemy. If, while reading, I do not engage all of my senses and weigh each line on a scale of personal and universal truth, while being sure that, as it […]
I can write about the poem, I can write about myself, or I can write about my mother; but it’s plain to see I can’t write about one, without writing about the others, which is why I wrote the poem in the first place — that, and the simple fact that on that day in 2018, it was her birthday, the fifth we marked since her passing. I did, in […]
Footfall to the Nth degree equals Thunder. Such is the startling extent of my mathematical prowess. What I learn from this is that my writing is not of a loud, urban nature, and never will be. Everything is quiet and cushioned with moss. Where the acorn falls, an oak is allowed to grow. I am as old as the hills; a babe in arms; a satisfied smile after a bowl […]
James Joyce aside, there’s a complexity to simplicity we humans create seemingly for the joy of wallowing in the confusion that results, and seeing the puzzlement it brings to others. An instance of this can be found in A Listening Thing, wherein Stephen tries to make sense of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, which, like Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, have been causing confusion for ages, some of which is quite […]
Not long ago, in a letter, I told a friend that, these days, The blog kettle is on low, on the back burner…. pending a time when I find I have something to say that I haven’t said already many times before…. Since then, I’ve been thinking about that, and what it might truly signify. For one thing, over the years, upon beginning any new piece of writing, it has […]
Once upon a time, there was always something to say. Now, saying it seems a transgression against the silence we so desperately need. Silence can heal or cure anything; especially the silence of the grave. To write from that kind of silence, without breaking that silence; to make ourselves felt and known from Hamlet’s undiscovered country — is that not the only writing there is left for us to do? […]
Although these days by all appearances I write very little, the fact is, I’m writing as much as ever or more. But instead of publishing that writing here, or anywhere else online, I’m leaving it, in all its inky and papery glory, snug and secure in my journal. I add something every day, sometimes as many as three or four pages. I enjoy doing it. It gives me a good […]
As noted then in these pages, my brother, Kirk, died two years ago today — an interval which seems much more like one expansive, all-encompassing breath. I see, meanwhile, that it’s been almost a month since I last wrote. During that time, I’ve felt neither the urge nor the need. And I don’t feel it now. What I do feel is the arrival of spring. Why, then, am I writing? […]
William Michaelian 