LITMIR.BIZ

      The Creative Journey

       O for a Muse of fire that would ascend

       The brightest heaven of invention.

      William Shakespeare, prologue to Henry V

      Traditional ways of learning can teach us a great deal, but what they can never provide is the serendipitous moment in a musty old bookstore when you stumble across the words that set your soul on fire.

      Many years ago, on a blustery afternoon in Galway, Ireland, I was meandering through the labyrinthine rooms of Kenny's, the legendary bookstore, when an intriguing book title seized my attention. Down the spine of the book ran the words In the Chair. The book was a tantalizing collection of interviews with poets from the North of Ireland. I opened the book at random, in the spirit of the ancient practice of bibliomancy, hoping to find an auspicious line or two to inspire me.

      My eyes fell on the words of the great Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, one of the writers who has most deeply influenced me. Speaking about his own rigorous standards, Heaney warned that a writer “shouldn't waver into language” or “tame the strangeness” of his work. The luminous turns in his poems, he says, “are a matter of following on down that road of truth.” He concluded the interview with what he called the famous Dublin triad: “This is it. This is the thing. This is what you're up against.”

      Who knows why some words ignite the hearts of some readers while others are like wet matches that won't light? Who can say why some words seize the imagination of one reader and not others? Who can say why one person's epiphany is another's cliché?

      All I know is that, at that moment, those strangely commanding lines felt mythic, as if they had been written directly to me by an unknown hand. I really had no idea if they were verses from an epic riddle, chants from a battle cry, or some raffish advice Heaney overheard at McDaid's, Dublin's famous literary pub. I only know that they sent a shiver of recognition right through me.

      My fingers tingled as I read the words. They had a flintlike quality. They threw off sparks; they ignited the kindling of my imagination. I was transported into the distant past where I could hear the voices of my parents, coaches, mentors, and friends voicing a hundred variations of “No excuses, no alibis, no apologies. Just do what needs to be done now.” I'd lived with that sense of urgency. So why did Heaney's words haunt me? Why was I suddenly stricken by “a riot of emotion,” in the tumultuous words of Ireland's modern mythmaker, James Joyce?

      Suddenly, I knew.

      I was stuck. I was lost. I'd lost my fire. Worse, I was waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting for a miracle, a muse, a breakthrough.

      By that time, in early 2001, I'd been blessed with some success, publishing a number of books, shooting many documentary films, and lecturing all over the world. But I'd hit the wall and had the brick marks on my forehead to prove it. I was mired in the quicksand of an unfinished companion book to one of my documentary films, discombobulated about ghosting someone else's book, and confused about how to tell the truth about my own unlived life.

      Stuck and, some would say, unfocused—although, if pressed, I preferred the baseball metaphor of just being in a slump. I just hadn't had a hit for a while.

      Sure enough, in the strange way of mythic language, Heaney's haunting words seemed to have been written for me, for that moment, for what I was up against. Deceptively simple words, but somehow expressive of my own coiled feelings of amazement and terror. Those three lines reverberated in me like a Celtic carpe diem—a reminder to seize the day, live life to the fullest, use time wisely.

      As the Roman poet Horace wrote about the mysterious power of mythic language, “Change the name and it's about you.” Uncannily, the chance discovery of the incantatory Irish verses drove home to me questions that are perilous to forget: What are you waiting for? Why are you avoiding the real work? What will it take for you to go deeper?

      What I heard that day in Galway was an echo of the secret struggle I'd been engaged in from the time I was a skinny, idealistic sixteen-year-old cub reporter for my hometown newspaper. Since then, I'd written millions of words and shot thousands of hours of film. But in every one of my projects, I'd gotten as stuck as Brer Rabbit in that nasty old Tar-baby patch. Stuck so often, I realized then and there, standing in the cold Irish rain outside the bookstore, that I hadn't written anything more original than a check or a postcard for months. In the frenzy of life, I'd lost my focus.

      All right, I thought. So I'm stuck. I'm lost. I admit it. That's life. I recalled how the maverick mythologist Joseph Campbell confided to me once at the Clift Hotel, in San Francisco, that the essence of the journey is that a hero is stuck—and has to get himself unstuck or there's no adventure, no story, no art. The point, he added, isn't the agony of the quest, it's the rapture of the revelation. That note from the herald's trumpet meant the world to me.

      As I left the bookstore, a soft rain fell over the medieval city. I sauntered past Nora Barnacle's old slate-roofed house, which her husband, James Joyce, visited only once because her parents believed he wrote dirty books. In the town square, I gazed at the statue of Padraic Colum, who spent his life wandering the West Country collecting Irish fairy tales. Fiddle music floated across from Collin's Bar around the corner. I felt a wild surge of joy for the first time in years, a kind of vertigo in the stark beauty that surrounded me.

      And then a fugitive line came back to me, as if tossed like a life preserver by my own soul. When the great Tennessee explorer Daniel Boone

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