Snapshots of Carver and O’Connor, Pre-Mortem :: Photographs Photos Carver OConnor Essays

Snapshots of stonecutter and OConnor, Pre-Mortem Raymond Carver is obvious from the other side of the hold over, one beefy arm dangling on a chair, the other planted firmly in front of him. His eyeb in each(prenominal) are white, ethereally white, and his hair is a salt and pepper gray. He looks exchangeable someone who buys rounds of drinks for everyone at a bar downtown, or, as one dilettante noted, maybe hes your sons little unify coach. He is tough but jowly, going slightly soft, like a man who had a hair-trigger temper once but has worked all these years to overcome it.Flannery OConnor, on the other hand, is a sunshine school teacher bookish, awkward in a necklace, looking such(prenominal) older than 39. She is smiling crookedly, furtively, smiling away from us. At church socials, she would be a fixture, a great conversationalist, or possibly the woman that holds everything together, flitting from table to table, cooing in a gentle Georgia lilt.You might see Ca rver at the hardware store, or OConnor picking through the haemorrhoid at the library. You might spy Carver raking his lawn on Sundays OConnor would be trying to settle a group of eight-year olds in a church basement with colorful stories of Noah and Moses. They seem like hatful I know, people I have seen around town, people I wave to on Sunday mornings. Yet for all their vigor, for all their bearing, their days are numbered. I know that these are snapshots of people who are going to die. In a few years, their vivacity will be undercut by mortality, their photographic presence instead marked with the great void of absence. The later pictures show a Carver who is puffy, bald, with jowls dropping to the floor, paying for all those nights at the bar and all those cigarettes, a victim of intensive radiation treatment. OConnor deteriorated in the reverse gear direction, not bloating but shrinking the sinews in her neck jut step to the fore like those of a strange, scraggly bird, her soulful eyes bulge, and her body is tight with lupus. In the final days, she had her God and her peacock farm in backwoods Appalachia. He had his friends, his writers reputation, his temporal achievements. Their intensive creative lives macroscopic across their faces in the early photographs have been replaced by tranquility, the comforting promise of death, and a final absolution.