STEPHEN O'CONNOR

From Himalayan Diary

May 22, 2013

I like the term "lose your soul" for the way it implies that one's most essential being is both precious and something you yourself can destroy.

 

Of course, the truth is that, short of death, one can never "lose" one's being but one can change it into something less or more precious.

 

My being—essential or otherwise—seems especially precious to me this clear, cold morning at this camp in the Himalayas near the borders of Kashmir and

 

Tibet, after a day during which I believed myself close to death many, many times.

 

Eight hours driving along the edges of precipices with nothing but cement blocks, rusting oil drums or, often, only the crumbling edge of a one-and-a-half lane two-way road to preserve us from plummeting a thousand feet into a rushing river.

 

Down the gravel slopes I could see cars so devastated by their falls that they looked like shredded tin foil, and in one village I saw a van that had been transformed into a crater of metal junk by a falling boulder.

 

We often had to drive around boulders, some the size of armchairs, others as big as houses.

 

Yet Indian families traveled these roads as happily as American families might trundle off to Cape Cod.

 

I am prepared to admit that I am neurotic.

 

But still I was abjectly terrified for hours on end.

And so, at this moment, my life now and all the thoroughly ordinary things I have to look forward to seem a sort of blessing.

 

But is my "soul" this life of "ordinary things" that now seems so precious?

 

In the Christian tradition the most essential part of one's life is almost always understood to be one's moral being, or virtue.

 

Too lose one's soul is to cease to be virtuous, profoundly, within the depths of one's being.

 

What actually is precious about the soul-as-moral-being?

 

Or what exactly is it about leading a life in accordance with one's morality that might be described as precious?

 

Simplicity?

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I delivered the following talk about the role of the unconscious in my writing at Johns Hopkins on February 4, 2013. I began my presentation by reading parts of two works of fiction. The first was “Ziggurat,” a version of which was published in the New Yorker in 2009. Here is a link: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2009/06/29/090629fi_fiction_oconnor
The second was an unpublished excerpt from my novel-in-progress, HUMAN EVENTS. Here is the first paragraph:

“A drizzle grays the air when Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings visit the Museum of Miscegenation. They approach the columned and domed marble edifice (which Thomas Jefferson cannot help but notice is in the Palladian style) along an avenue of plane trees, all-but-invisible droplets drifting between bare branches tipped with the tiny lettuces of just-bursting buds. The drizzle coats the square cobbles like breath upon a mirror, and Sally Hemings, wearing leather-soled shoes, finds the footing so slippery she has to cling to Thomas Jefferson’s arm until they are inside the museum.”

*

MUSE AND MYSTERY

I am going to talk about the role of the unconscious in my writing, and in my writing career. But I should probably start by telling you two things.

The first is that I am the son of a psychoanalyst. People have often asked me if my father psychoanalyzed me when I was a kid—a possibility that would have horrified him, I suspect, as much as it does me. While I never lay on a couch and told my father my troubles, I did grow up in a house where it was a truism that people rarely said or did what they thought they were saying or doing, and that my real self—especially in regard to my fears and desires—was and would always be something of a mystery to me. I grew up thinking less that I was the captain of my self than a passenger, or even a stowaway.

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The following questions were put to me by Catherine Lacey (http://www.catherinelacey.com), who is working on a book about faith and spiritual practice. As my answers might provide readers with insight into certain aspects of my work, I asked Catherine if I might include them in this much-neglected blog, and she graciously consented.

~~~~~

Did you grow up in the same faith you practice now? If not, when did you begin practicing this faith?

--I was brought up an atheist by two lapsed Catholics, both immigrants. My mother was French, and her Catholicism had never been terribly serious, as is true for many French—France reputedly being the most atheistic country in the world. My father, however, was an Irish Catholic, and went to Catholic schools in Ireland and in New York City. Although he claimed never to have taken religion seriously, his hatred for religion in general and for Catholicism in particular was so extreme that he would not even allow a Bible in the house.

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HOW I WRITE A POEM

I always start a poem by trying not to think—which is one reason why I prefer to write first thing in the morning, before I have eaten, when I am still partly in the associative mode of dreams, and the cares of the day have not yet taken hold of my mind. Often I am deeply groggy when (coffee in hand) I sit down at my desk, and it sometimes astonishes me that I can write at all, given how utterly incapable I would be of talking to another person.

My goal is to sink into that part of my mind where inspiration seems to arise of its own, without the influence of my will.

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