Notebook - When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Notebook
It might be a strange way to think of it, but just about everything I write and preserve on this website, be it poem, story, notebook entry, drawing, or book review, also serves as a kind of journal entry. They all show to some degree what I was thinking or how I was feeling at a particular time, the mood I was in, my defective insight, and general outlook. Many of the pieces also contain hints or references to the weather and time of year, giving them, in addition to whatever information, emotion, or concern they might convey, a haiku-almanac-travelogue sort of feel. It�s also safe to say, I think, that I�m Telling You All I Know can be seen as a massive single document � a work-in-progress by one who is simultaneously cursed and blessed to write his life and to try to understand it through words, despite his obvious limitations, but perhaps also in honor of the humble nature of his mostly informal education, which proceeds to this day willy-nilly, according to rules of its own. In a way, the whole experience reminds me of Wordsworth and Coleridge on a summer walking tour, or Basho�s journey on the �narrow road to the deep north.� Out of one grows The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and from the other, a sore neck after a long night in a damp hut on a mountain. In other words, I am both crazy and crazy, and that is where my sanity lies. If it�s a quest, it�s a peculiar one. If it�s a journey, I seldom wonder about its destination. I�m here in any case � by choice and by accident, condemned to live with my mistakes. When I consider how my light is spent, as John Milton said three and a half centuries ago in reference to his blindness, I marvel at how my light � my time, truth, love, and negligible talent � slips through my fingers in a way that somehow leaves me feeling renewed. �I have been all the way around this mountain. I tell you, it has no other side.�	Also by William Michaelian POETRY Winter Poems ISBN: 978-0-9796599-0-4 52 pages. Paper. �� Another Song I Know ISBN: 978-0-9796599-1-1 80 pages. Paper. �� Cosmopsis Books San Francisco Signed copies available Main Page Author�s Note Background A Listening Thing Among the Living No Time to Cut My Hair One Hand Clapping Songs and Letters Collected Poems Early Short Stories Armenian Translations Cosmopsis Print Editions Interviews News and Reviews Highly Recommended Let�s Eat Favorite Books & Authors Useless Information Conversation Flippantly Answered Questions E-mail & Parting Thoughts
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