I was willing to look horrors both real and imagined dead in the eye, which can be nothing but useful to the novelist.
But at Greater St Mark Family Church, where Saturday's march from the site of Brown's shooting ended, the drawings were more explicit: kids drew outlines of their own imagined dead little bodies.
The characters are both real and imagined, dead and alive.
Put the world behind a tiny frame/screen (handheld technology perhaps) and suddenly, by focusing smaller and blocking out the imagined dead weight of the world around us, we can manage to take in even more information, do more, feel bigger, lighter, move faster... even to a pathological degree.
More movingly, Alan Berliner examines the relationship between himself and his lonely, recalcitrant father in a film entitled "Nobody's Business," and in a narrative quilt Faith Ringgold imagines dead members of her family assembled in the Matisse Chapel at Vence, France, accompanied by a text that lays out a brutal tale of slavery.
Imagine dead bodies of more than a million innocent humans who were killed just because they were Armenian.
"If we on Earth had to imagine dead bodies on the lunar surface … the specter of that would have haunted us.
It is all imagined things dead — rotten seas, decaying books in the tropics, rats trapped dead in drainpipes, forgotten fish, cheese that has become flesh.
Take for example the opening line of Imagination Dead Imagine: No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead good, imagination dead imagine.
Had he been "undeceived," as Herman Melville imagined the dead at Shiloh, men who no longer cared for "fame or country"?
In 2011, Bailey published the novel "Chapman's Odyssey," in which an elderly male protagonist, lying ill in the hospital, is visited by people real and imagined: lovers, dead parents, characters from literature.
