Flannery O’Connor & the Habit of Attention
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
In her essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of Studies,” Christian mystic Simone Weil writes “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” For Weil, the purpose of academic studies for young people is to cultivate the habit of paying attention, to achieve an absolute state of perception wherein the child participates fully in the act of seeing the subject in front of her without distraction. Such attention aspires to the condition of prayer and offers the possibility for mystical union with the divine, making every school exercise, in Weil’s eyes, “a sacrament.”
Flannery O’Connor would almost certainly object to Weil’s lofty characterization of school exercises. An indifferent student at St. Vincent’s Catholic grammar school in Savannah, young Flannery was thought by the nuns who taught her to be a bit on the dumb side. She was far from dumb, of course, but the good sisters were flummoxed by Flannery’s inattention to school subjects that bored her—such as spelling and math—and by her exclusive and excessive attention to the single subject of birds. Chickens, ducks, geese—any creature with beaks, legs, and wings—drew and held the child’s gaze in a way that mere letters and sheer numbers could not.
Yet, despite their differences, Weil and O’Connor would agree on this: that the habit of attention is holy, that seeing the world with absolute focus and devotion is a way of seeing God.
The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, a new book “especially prepared for highly intelligent adults and precocious children” by writer Amy Alznauer and artist Ping Zhu celebrates this habit of attention that Flannery O’Connor cultivated, from childhood through adulthood, and made possible the strange and visionary world she has bequeathed to us in her fiction. Alznauer’s text reflects the directness and clarity of O’Connor’s own prose as it tells the story of Flannery’s lifelong devotion, not just to the birds she loved all her life, but to the sacrament of seeing. The child “took a shine” to chickens, “spent hours playing with her backyard birds,” trained a bantam “by glaring at it so long it backed away,” and thereby brought a New York newsman to her backyard. It was her first flirtation with fame. Flannery’s discovery that freak, backward-walking chickens are more interesting than ordinary ones led her to the discovery that the same was true of people. But to see the strangeness of human beings and their strange lives, she had to pay attention, to look closely at what animated and crippled them. So “she took to staring,” transferring the considerable powers of attention she had cultivated in studying birds to the study of people. Simone Weil would have been proud.
Alzanaur’s story celebrates the beauty of strangeness, affirming a truth every child (and adult) instinctively knows, and Ping Zhu’s illustrations make that beauty fully present to the reader in her captivating depictions of children, books, and birds of several kinds. Like the writer who inspired it, this is not a polite book. It is extravagant—in its size, in its coloration, in its insistence on the sacrament of seeing.
“Young lady, it’s not polite to stare,” says Flannery’s mother to her curious daughter.
“No writer should ever be ashamed of staring,” says Flannery.
The same might be said of every child, every adult, every human person. You aren’t paying attention if you aren’t staring.
Towards the end of the book, when the adult Flannery receives the first shipment of peacocks she orders to keep her company on her mother’s remote farm, the Railway Express arrives with a special box, “a shining blue head poking up through the crate like a trapped king.” Of all the beautiful sentences and illustrations in this book, this one haunts me. We are all “trapped kings”—creatures of extraordinary beauty trapped in mortal bodies, difficult circumstances, pasts we can’t change, presents we endure. These may include loss (like the death of Flannery’s father), sickness (like the lupus Flannery suffered from), and limitation (imposed on us by others and ourselves)—all painful experiences in Flannery’s life that this brave book chronicles.
Yet, like that peacock in that crate, we are all capable of transformation and transfiguration, of unfurling our gorgeous, excessive tails that look for all the world “like an unfurled map of the universe.” And like the child who stares and stares at the birds and the world around her, we can see it all unfolding before us, once we master the impolite and extravagant habit of attention. Give this book to the children in your life, and give one to the child in your self.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, and writer at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and six collections of poems, most recently, Andalusian Hours (2020), a collection of 101 poems that channel the voice of Flannery O’Connor. In addition, O’Donnell has published a prize-winning memoir, Mortal Blessings (2014), a book of hours based on the prayer life of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy (2012), and her biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (2015) was awarded first prize for excellence in publishing from The Association of Catholic Publishers. Her new critical book on Flannery O’Connor, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020.