Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks, which required, also, a supply of peachickens for the laying of eggs. She speaks frequently of peachickens, which is really just a great word; it completely undercuts the stately exotic-ness of the word “peacock.” In an essay called “The King of the Birds,” O’Connor writes that the peacock “frequently … combines the lifting of his tail with the raising of his voice. He appears to receive through his feet some shock from the center of the earth, which travels upward through him and is released: Eee-ooo-iiI Eee-ooo-ii! To the melancholy this sound is melancholy and to the hysterical it is hysterical. To me it has always sounded like a cheer for an invisible parade.”
Yogi tea produces a steady stream of fortune-cookie-beatingly vacuous and illogical one-liners. The winner so far:
“If you unconsciously live a conscious life, you can never be poor.”
Flannery O’Connor, in a letter, on a review of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”:
“The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.”
and in fact I am not sure I have ever been anywhere where spring is quite so truly itself. There was very little mud, only the leaves unfurling greener every day, and the birds sing not just at sunrise and sunset but all day long. Today it was 91, according to the weather report, but until now it has mostly been the kind of weather it is almost humanly impossible to complain about — crisp and sunny and warm but not hot. And then there was the tornado, too, which was only a big thunderstorm where I was, but did a lot of damage elsewhere.
In the past few days I’ve been thinking about Jane Mead, a poet I love. This poem of hers is about fall, and I read it last night to friends who are having a baby in October. Then this morning one of my housemates got baptized, and so I have been thinking even more than most Easters about falling and rising. The poem is partly a catalogue of terrors and partly a hymn to the kind of order that makes life possible. And above all, it is a poem, I think, about the beauty of children, just the fact of them, alive and growing.
Fall
for Aspen and Shaheen
This morning I found
a used needle in the empty box
marked produce in the empty
icebox, sponged the blood speck
from its tip. The fog pushed at the windows
with a sickening heave. I picked
another moth from the drain.
To pick a moth from the sink
for the pain its flight might waken
in the mind’s tepid stagnation
is a desperate act.
But last night I sat on the concrete floor
watching flies on the toilet seat,
and listened to my father, who was up
in the loft waving is .38 at the place
where the north star should have been—
shouting at my cousin who’d gone down
to Santa Cruz with scabs
the size of nickels on her feet
to trade her baby for someone’s Porsche,
and I have forgotten
what it is to be human.
What it is to be human:
I forget the dusted wings, the whiff
of sage on the fog; I forget
that an action could be made
to make meaning.
Did I choose
the humiliation of my own blood,
this hiding in shirtsleeves?
If this moth could shock me
I might remember the half-thought
before I smoked my first cigarette
at the top of the vineyard
fifteen years ago—that split
second when I sensed
I was choosing—or that fleeting
tug the first night I rummaged
in the tack room for a horse needle.
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
It may be too far
to get to.
This morning my sister’s children
knocked on the door—
I said I was sleeping; my eyes
were crusted wild and they said “but
Aunt Jane, we don’t have
mud on our feet, please
can’t we come in?”
Their terrifying, trusting voices
come back and back.
If I stepped outside
now, I could watch them
pedaling up and down
the foggy rows of vines,
their eyes clear
and open wide. Someday
I would like to write something
beautiful for them,
a song of order, undrunk,
but livable, a song
of frogs tongueing into themselves
the quiet deaths of flies, of nights
needing days, a song
equal to this season.
“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend — if you have one.”
[George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill]
“Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second — if there is one.”
[Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw]
She says she was a “pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.”
What would you say of yourself?
My first shot: I was a cross-eyed child with very long bones and a John-Steinbeck-deserves-to-die-for-killing-the-red-pony complex.
Or: I was a horse-crazy child with an eye patch and an expression on my face of oh-dear-I-just-realized-that-sound-was-your-voice-and-I’m-sorry-what-was-the-question?
I think the stack would be as tall as I am.
Normally this would overwhelm me, but right now I feel excited about it; I am in the idea-finding stage of two papers, where everything feels possible. And astonishingly, Simone Weil and Flannery O’Conner (who I have been told disagree sharply, which they do — O’Connor calls Weil “ridiculous”) also say EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS sometimes about love and grace. It is uncanny.
God bless the heart of whoever wrote this fortune cookie slip:
“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
