ANDALUSIA

Main House, Andalusia

The gravel and red clay road just off Highway 441 North in Milledgeville, Georgia leads uphill to a white frame house with a spacious screened front porch, its red roof gleaming in the May sunlight. The home, known as the "Main House," is the major residence in the complex that incorporates a smaller farm home, cow barn, equipment shed, calf barn, a water tower, an aging pump house, and a horse stable. It’s the former home of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, and is the place where most of her work was completed before her life was shortened by the onset of lupus. The agricultural setting of a dairy farm provided the retreat necessary for O'Connor to depict what she called the "Christ haunted Protestant South" in her arresting fiction that made her one of the most important American writers of the 20^th century.

Home of farm workers
at Andalusia

We toured the 19^th century home, peering into O'Connor's downstairs bedroom/study that held a single bed, covered with a simple blue and white bedspread, set only a few feet away from a desk that held a manual typewriter, flanked by a straight-backed chair sans cushions of any kind. It was a stark room, a setting where O'Connor wrote her novels, short stories, essays, and letters from nine until noon every morning of her writing life. In the afternoons, she tended peafowl – at one time, she had fifty of them – and painted (even her self-portrait), sometimes entertaining people who would drop in to see her.

As we walked around the grounds that included a small pond, a peacock aviary, and a few nature trails, we thought about the mysterious, often violent fiction, that had emerged from the quiet landscape and connected with the words in O'Connor's essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country:" "When we talk about the writer's country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world…"

Diane next to red dirt road
beside Andalusia

As I walked through the grounds, I passed a completely dilapidated garage that seemed strangely incongruous with the well-kept landscape, a large pile of broken wood that mocked the romanticism I had attributed to the scene of a southern writer who had once said people didn't understand her writing about the people and region that surrounded her farm. O'Connor also said her Christian affiliation centered on redemption and what she saw in the world in relation to that redemption, adding that her Christian beliefs freed her to observe and affected her writing "primarily by guaranteeing her respect for mystery."

If you haven’t sampled the work of Flannery O'Connor, you might enjoy the short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) which includes a bizarre baptism in "The River," a one-legged woman's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People," and other discomfiting stories that bear out her words, "In order to recognize a freak, you have to have a conception of the whole man."

Main house, side view of Andalusia

We had been to deepest south Florida prior to the O'Connor visit, and after sojourning in an environ of Fort Lauderdale and being hustled like most tourists, for me, the visit to O'Connor country seemed to be an occasion of  a "blind sow finding an acorn," to descend to a "countrynism" that might have come out of the mouth of a character in one of O'Connor's stories.

In the small gift shop of the old farmstead, I bought a volume that included all of O'Connor's books, short stories, essays, and letters, published by the Library of America, and began reading it aloud to my friend, Vickie, while traveling home to Sewanee, Tennessee, arriving back on The Mountain after being transported by O'Connor's "The Train."

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

THE SINGING INSIDE

One of the perks of my association with Pinyon Publishing is that I sometimes form a friendship with a fellow poet, via e-mail, and the poet and I make a spiritual connection through reading each other's work.  One of those incidents of serendipity has been through my recent correspondence with Michael Miller, a very fine poet who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Michael and I share a fondness for the New England poet Robert Francis, "a man who owned freedom and leisure," as I described him in a former poem – a poet who subsisted on a pittance for years before being recognized as an important New England poet.

I reviewed Michael Miller's newest book of poetry, Into This World, published by Pinyon Publishing, a few weeks ago, and before I traveled to Florida recently, Miller referred me to another of his works, The Singing Inside, a beautiful book of poetry set by hand in 14 pt. Perpetua, a font designed by Eric Gill.  The text was printed letterpress on a Heidelberg Original Cylinder press, and the cover was printed by hand on a 10x15 Chandler and Price platen press.  Artwork was printed from wood engravings by Frank C. Eckmair, and the book was designed and printed by Birch Brook Press.

I describe these exterior qualities because I seldom see such beautiful, hand-printed books of poetry.  The Singing Inside accurately defines the poetry inside – the singing inside of a man who pays tribute to his wife and their journey together as they mature in married love, passionately and honestly.  There are so many fine poems in the volume that I wouldn't strike out even one as unfit for the theme of married love, from its inception as a passionate love affair to the present decade of their aging.  Miller sings about the latter stage of married love: "Our house is singing as it sinks/A gradual decline with choruses/We can hear beyond the floorboards/Cracking, the old beams creaking,/The stone foundation shifting as if/It were looking for a place to escape./How we resist our body's aging!/Resentful of our brittle bones,/Our muscles slackening as if asleep,/Come, let's open all the windows/And sing to the warblers, the wrens."

I was also impressed by the cogent feelings expressed in two exquisite love poems reminiscent of the Persian poet Rumi, on facing pages, XIX and XX, the latter defining a love that has been plumbed and kept intact: "We have delved into the anatomy/Of each other's darkness,/Of each other's light,/Uncovering a grave,/Unveiling a hidden sun./We have explored without a caution,/Reconnoitering each other's heart,/Refusing to believe there is/Nothing left to discover."

Although Miller speaks of "maple leaves reddening and curling at their edges," he recognizes that mature love takes "decades of struggle/And ease to arrive at this/Three-foot wall built with/Smooth and rough stones/Where the countries of lichen grow,/And we sit upon it looking out/With the joined perfection of hands."

These poems are true and powerful – no frills, each word crafted with precision, each poem condensed into tight, concrete imagery and rendered in passionate phrasing.  I read this volume while vacationing in Weston, Florida, a city of wonderful light and felt a synchronicity of environment and the wonderful clarity and light in The Singing Inside.

A FIELD OF EXTREME YELLOW…

I've always loved the drive from Sewanee into the valley of Cowan and on to our grocery destination in Winchester, Tennessee. A few days ago while making that drive, a friend and I were wowed at the sight of a hillside covered with bright yellow flowers – a sea of shimmering plants that we later identified as Rapeseed. Of course, I didn't like the sound of the plant's name but was glad we photographed it for a blog as it was a sight worth recording.

When I researched Rapeseed, I was surprised to find the Brits think it's a plant that scars their landscape since they prefer more natural green hills. However, they've been inundated by Japanese tourists who began flocking to the windows of a train passing through the UK to view the brilliant yellow plants and later exclaimed that the sight brightened the typical rainy, gray landscape of the British countryside. Actually, the Brits have been using the plant's oil for lubricating engines since the 19^th century, and they plan to increase their tours of Rapeseed fields from 20 to 70 this year.

Rapeseed could cause hay fever, but there's no conclusive evidence that it does and no reason for anyone to defame it in this manner. The crop is being utilized for animal feed, as well as for vegetable oil. The Chinese make oil cakes of the plant and use it for fertilizer. Farmers in the U.S. grow two crops of Rapeseed – one for industrial uses that has a high content of erucic acid, and another edible crop with low content of erucic acid that is used for the popular salad dressing, Canola oil.

I’m glad that someone gave one of Rapeseed's cultivars a new name – Canola, and I was moved to write a wry snippet about the flowering hillside I saw on our trip to the valley this past week:

A FIELD OF EXTREME YELLOW

cascades on the hill near Cowan,

carrying the name of a ravaged past,

Rapeseed.

Brilliant as the April sun,

a phalanx of plants emerges,

having endured hard frosts,

a season of strong wind,

now glints with yellow light

soon pressed into oil for leafy salads,

lubricant for machinery.

Used, used,

everything radiant to the eye

used for anything

pickled, cooked, sauced,

preserved before natural decadence,

the pain it cannot escape

in fraught territory.

Seeds of the yellow lake

have survived since 5,000 B.C.,

twenty million hectares

waving in fields today,

hillside plants slain,

joining poor relations:

cabbage and mustard,

their ancestors, too early.

And humans, abashed,

blushing at the plant's sobriquet,

have finally given it

a less despoiled name,

a lyrical one that sounds

as if they won't really ravage the plant

before allowing it a timely end…

Canola.

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan.