The War of Art by Steven Pressfield dispenses no-nonsense, read-it-in-a-day advice for anybody striving to channel their creative juices into a floodtide of productivity. In brief, snappy chapters titled clearly for easy reference, Pressfield calls it like he sees it:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Resistance” becomes Pressfield’s keynote. You’ll get his drift if you’ve ever wished to finish a creative project (or start one, for that matter) only to succumb to procrastination and self-inflicted guilt. Resistance is the nattering, excuse-making voice in our heads that keeps us from quieting down, focusing, and getting to work.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. …To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Here lies my one significant quibble with Pressfield’s book. I find his terms, though helpful in a wake-up-call kind of way, to be a bit extreme.

For isn’t Resistance sort of … necessary to creativity? Rather than seeking to wholly suppress and kill Resistance, isn’t the artist’s task to tame it and train it to one’s service? (“Resistance sparks the flame,” goes the old adage.)

For me, the edict “You must declare Resistance evil” sets up a false duality that seems a little Manichean. I personally favor John Dewey’s more nuanced outlook on the very same subject (Resistance and the Artist) in his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. … The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In other words, without Resistance, how could we know artistic success?

Nevertheless Pressfield’s central point is sound. “It’s not the writing part that’s hard,” he observes, “What’s hard is sitting down to write.” And the perspectives of The War of Art are frequently salutary. For instance, I love this bit:

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

The War of Art gets somewhat New Agey for my tastes toward its close, but it nevertheless serves like all good books of the “Inspiration” genre to affirm creative expression.

Creative work is not a selfish act nor a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

That is a message of inestimable value to artists striving in a culture that all too often instills shame in answer to creative enterprise. Even those entities that ostensibly nurture the fledgling artist (e.g., university MFA-programs) can be tacit accomplices in this shame game, for they inadvertently suggest that only a degree, or firm “career track,” can dignify the artistic attempt.

Iconoclastic playwright David Mamet, in his wonderful 1997 book True & False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, excoriates such sham authority, and extols artistic self-reliance. (True & False is a resource of wisdom and solace for any kind of artist, actor or not.)

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

If the value in The War of Art is how it galvanizes the artist to get working and keep at it, the value of True & False lies in its authoritative philosophy about the creative life. Mamet continually vindicates the artist in his or her headlong impracticality. I’ll leave you with the following passage which does just that.

Read Pressfield and Mamet and be inspired. Work and be well.

The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is ‘Have something to fall back on.’ The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life. … Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, ‘Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,’ to which the captain responds, ‘Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.’ … Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.

(Thanks to Chris at the The Art of Non-Conformity for alerting me to Pressfield’s book)

(This post comes to you from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Andy Goldsworthy talks to rocks. He stacks driftwood. He bites at finger-like chunks of ice and welds them together into swirling lines. With strands of stem he sews broad green leaves into ribbons and sends them afloat on rivers, where they glide as sinuous as snakes.

Goldsworthy is a sculptor –- but not of marble or of metal. Often his works endure for a matter of moments –- no longer. Their home is under the sun, in the rain or snow or dappled autumnal light. His sculptures stand on beaches, in fields. They sway in trees or drift atop natural water. Ultimately, they fall apart.

In Rivers and Tides, the mesmerizing 2001 documentary by director Thomas Riedelsheimer, we see Goldsworthy in his element, at work in the elements, borrowing all his materials from nature and letting nature bring his sculpture to life, then undo it –- and, by the same token, patiently submitting when nature resists collaboration, stymieing his work or destroying it too soon.

Goldsworthy’s delicate, painstaking process teaches much about the creative or artistic endeavor, which is almost always a matter of surrender. And Rivers and Tides contemplates beautifully, through breathtaking imagery and Goldsworthy’s own soft-spoken voice-overs, the nature of meaningful creative work.

On a damp, solitary beach Goldsworthy arranges gathered stones, stacking them one at a time, studying his placement of each. The stones are large and heavy, but seem to oblige his design for them. He feels he understands the stone, and that his work will emerge from this understanding, to exist, if only momentarily, as a complement to its natural setting.

The stones accumulate, a gesture toward the instructive sculptings of nature herself. A form arises. But something is off, and the stones begin to resist one another. They lean and pull apart. The form collapses. Sighing, Goldsworthy reconsiders. He dismantles the rubble and starts anew.

He intends to construct an enormous cone, taller than a man, wider than a tractor tire, before the tide draws in to cover his working area. He wants the cone to be ready, finished and standing, when the water arrives, because the flooding is part of the sculpture. The cone will drown away. The tide will dismantle it. The vision for the work includes the work’s impermanence.

Goldsworthy does not have cash on his mind, nor career trajectory. His work is a way of life, wonderfully impractical,  rich with mysterious rewards.

The stones topple again –- and for an agonizing moment Goldsworthy is crushed. But he collects himself.

That’s the fourth –- the fourth collapse. And the tide is coming in. I think it would be better to wait. Oh, the moment when something collapses, it is intensely disappointing. And this is the fourth time it’s fallen, and each time I got to know the stone a little bit more, and it got higher each time, so it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone. And that is really one of the things my art is trying to do –- is trying to understand the stone. I obviously don’t understand it well enough … yet.

Process is paramount. Many a creative aspirant bears constant reminding of this inspiriting truth. The true artist works wholeheartedly and faces failure willingly, devoted to an end that is often of no practical significance, striving simply to better understand the materials at hand. If the material resists, the artist seeks to glean the lessons in its resistance. The artist does this all in the faith that something beautiful, if gleamingly ephemeral, will come forth.

For those undertaking it, and for those witnessing it, there’s a message in work of this kind, pointing toward a fulfilled life.

(See Goldsworthy at work here, in this breathtaking clip from Rivers & Tides.)

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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In 1799 the English mystic, poet, and painter William Blake sat down to pen a lively document in defense of the imagination, the inventively eccentric, in sum: the artistic spirit. For anybody laboring in service to a dream, an image, or voice of inspiration, whose work defies convention or leaves folks wagging their heads in disapproval or bewilderment, this text is a prime comfort.

Blake was addressing a dissatisfied client. Reverend John Trusler had commissioned from him some illustrations, but upon receipt found them to be stylistically disagreeable — and, one guesses, too drastic a departure from traditional Christian iconography. Blake specialized in the unorthodox but evidently what Trusler whiffed most clearly in the artist’s flair was “immorality.”

August 23, 1799.

Revd. Sir,

I really am sorry that you are fall’n out with the Spiritual World, especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your ideas & mine on moral painting differ so much as to have made you angry with my method of study. If I am wrong, I am wrong in good company. I had hoped your plan comprehended all species of this Art, & especially that you would not regret that species which gives existence to every other; namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas. But you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the ancients consider’d what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Aesop, Homer, Plato.

Given Blake’s uninhibited defense of his own work –an act justifiably recognized in some as blind egotism — it’s worth bearing in mind that he had by this point in his career attained a stage of technical mastery. For all his eccentricities, his self-confidence (righteous indignation?) was just. In other words, it was not self-importance, delusional pride, or base implacability that prompted his letter, but something far more profound. Blake knew well — and said himself — that “Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice is Art. If you leave off you are lost.” And he knew the intensity and dedication with which he practiced.

Because Blake was consummate he could be honestly unconventional, and rise to his own defense without unduly flattering himself regarding his gifts. There’s an important difference between faith in one’s unique vision and fallacious pride.

But as you have favor’d me with your remarks on my design, permit me in return to defend it … I perceive that your eye is perverted by caricature prints, which ought not to abound so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much fun is of all things the most loathsome. Mirth is better than fun, & happiness is better than mirth. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of Imagination & Vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser, a Guinea is far more beautiful than the sun, & a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule & deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil, & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is true painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks & the best modern artists. …

Blake’s religious regard for the Imagination (capital I) reminds me of some remarks by his contemporary John Keats, written in a different letter some years after: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not.” What was it Blake said at the outset? “If I am wrong, I’m wrong in good company.”

I am happy to find a great majority of fellow mortals who can elucidate my Visions, & particularly they have been elucidated by children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my pictures than I even hoped. Neither youth nor childhood is folly or incapacity. Some children are fools & so are some old men. But there is a vast majority on the side of Imagination or spiritual sensation.

To engrave after another painter is infinitely more laborious than to engrave one’s own inventions. And of the size you require my price has been thirty Guineas, & I cannot afford to do it for less. …

I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient servant,

William Blake

There it is: the stout and soundly articulated refusal to compromise or let one’s Art be co-opted for fear of missing out on a buck. And time has proved the rightness of Blake’s refusal. His work is still very much with us. Who over the last several generations has not read or memorized in school those haunting lines…

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

(As for the good Reverend Trusler? We’re told he was the author of two books: Hogarth Moralized and The Way to be Rich and Respectable. Says it all, I fear.)

“[Blake] was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion,” say the editors of The Portable Blake. “He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself “a mental prince”; and was one.” Yes, Blake knew what he was about, knew how to go about it, and didn’t let anything divert his vision — certainly not a crabby critic.

Note, by the way, that little biographical tidbit about living on a dollar a day. Uh-huh, Blake was poor. Good art has never guaranteed good income, much as being guided by one’s own lights rarely does. Therein we find a caution for the faint of heart. … But also, perhaps, comfort for creatives unpaid but as yet undaunted.

Stay the course. William Blake and countless others have got your back.

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Some years ago, in the Special Collections of the Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts, I sat for several hours with a thin green notebook, poring over the distinctive scrawl in its pages. A forty-five-year-old writer had worked on this manuscript in his last days, considerably weakened with tuberculosis. At several points in the notebook the scrawl broke off, replaced by a neater feminine script. The manuscript was the first draft of the famous essay, “Walking,” one of Henry David Thoreau’s crowning creations. Thoreau’s sister and deathbed nurse, Sophia, took dictation when he was too weak to write.

My feelings upon holding that notebook are probably indescribable. Eighteen years old, I had crossed the country to Concord, alone on the longest journey of my life. I wanted to walk through the historical world of Thoreau and Emerson, the writers who meant most to me then. I wanted to pay my respects at their gravestones. I wanted to see Walden Pond. But I’d never expected to enjoy the transcendent, time-defying privilege of turning through Thoreau’s last handwritten pages. Nobody had told me such things were possible!

As I held them, I imagined the pages changing hands. First Thoreau had propped them in his lap as he sat up in his sickbed immersed in his poetic outpouring. Later, seeing that he’d fallen asleep, Sophia gently drew them from beneath his hands. Henry stirred and said he would like to keep working and asked her to take down his words. The pages in her lap now, Sophia sat beside the bed transcribing. Eventually the pages were delivered to Henry’s publisher Ticknor & Fields. Years later Mr. Fields donated them, bound in the green notebook, to Concord’s Public Library. And a century after that a young literary pilgrim on the longest journey of his life sat in the library basement reading the pages for hours, alone in the ghostly presence of his literary hero.

This profound experience taught me conclusively that the artistic and historical past lives on beyond textbooks or centennial editions of great works. The past abides in centuries-old rough drafts, or in the rooms where these were written, or in the village or city where the rooms were located, or in the very landscape where the village or city stood. The past is not the room or village or landscape itself, but can be found there. It can be held in hand. It can be felt underfoot.

Why look for the past this way? Because as the playwright John Guare observes, inspiration does not arrive merely because one waits around for it. Rather, inspiration is an assertive act:

If you love something it is a categorical imperative commanding you to absorb what it is you love and make it yours.

By an act of inspirational pilgrimage we make the past ours – and once the past is ours, the present turns powerfully prescient. Whatever our hopes may be, we find them enlivened with new possibility, given vital precedents to support them and speed them on. This, precisely, is what I learned in the Concord Free Public Library that day. The past can come alive within us, more significant than textbook pages, more useful than legend, more personal than hagiography.

So, since that first long journey to Concord, my life has been punctuated by pilgrimages. Being a naturally solitary person (and a non-academic), I have, over the last twelve years or so, searched among literary ghosts for kindred spirits, for guiding voices, and a godspeed from the enduring past. This has been a remarkable — and remarkably vivid — education. The ghosts themselves have been my teachers.

My pilgrimages have affirmed beyond doubt what Thoreau’s friend and mentor Emerson proclaimed in a poem.

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

Human beings are mutable and mortal, of course. But the human spirit never vanishes without a trace. Humans, living in a place or passing through it, will always be in that place for having been there once. Pilgrimage can reawaken one to this important mystery (it’s no coincidence that the word is often used to describe human existence).

As the ruminative narrator of Thornton Wilder’s ageless play, Our Town, observes while standing in the hilltop cemetery above Grover’s Corners:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses, and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars. Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it.

Pilgrimage can connect us to one another across a gulf of generations. Wherever the span of time threatens to make a person remote or an event impersonal, pilgrimage can restore immediacy and facilitate intimacy. Pilgrimage reminds that every past had its present (just as our present will eventually be a past).

And for the artist or aspirant, pilgrimage reveals that every enduring work was once unborn and unknown to the world — each required the vision, commitment, and often seemingly senseless dedication of a living person. Is that particular person now a so-called “immortal”? It wasn’t always so. Once, however long ago, in a room in a village or city, a solitary soul filled pages with words, covered a canvas with paint, or dotted a scoresheet with musical notes (and did so, perhaps, despite looming anxiety about paying the bills, staying healthy, or striving not to disappoint friends and relations).

My pilgrimages have taken me across the globe (and not because I have money to burn; I don’t).

In the Wye Valley of Wales, high on the hill overlooking Tintern Abbey, I declaimed Wordsworth’s famous poem and understood anew his rendering of the surrounding countryside:

…hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

In Prague, I wandered the labyrinthine, paranoia-inducing streets of Rainer Maria Rilke’s fearful boyhood (and of Kafka’s).

In Glen Ellen, California I stood in Jack London’s living room and read multiple rejection letters of The Call of the Wild. (“The reading public doesn’t care to read stories about the Yukon, thank you all the same.”)

More recently, I took a somewhat less literary pilgrimage to a tiny township (population 700) in the heart of the Midwest. Nobody particularly famous ever came out of this place, though local lore has it that Jesse James passed through at least once. One drizzly morning I visited the old cemetery on the edge of town and found the weathered headstone of an ancestor from five generations past.

At age eighteen or nineteen this great-great-great grandfather was severely wounded in the Civil War. He suffered the privations of a deplorable Confederate prison and lived to tell of it.

While I’d read his regiment’s various histories, that young Union soldier had remained an essentially fictional character to me. But now I knelt before his simple grave-marker and ran my fingers over the etched letters of his name, regiment, and company number — and was flooded with unexpected emotion. I whipped the cap from my head, letting the rain wet my hair as I paid proper respects.

In that powerful moment, as in many another transformative moment of pilgrimage, I heard a voice like the one in Walt Whitman’s majestic poem, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry“:

What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or the hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not — distance avails not, and place avails not …

… Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

Every past was once the present. Its voices are real, as mine is real. The process goes on, and I am part of it. We all are.

Feeling uninspired, inconsequential, disconnected? Seek inspiration, consequence, and connection. Consider a pilgrimage.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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I’m closing in on the completion of my new manuscript. I mean it this time.

Those who know me know I’ve been saying this regularly for the last year, as my personal “deadlines” keep retreating by weeks, months, seasons. The fiction-writing process is so inherently anti-efficient, so non-streamlined, based so much on necessary detours, excavations, mysterious distractions (“What’s this secondary character’s back-story? His upbringing? Romantic disappointments? Obsessions and hang-ups? What does he like to eat for supper?”) that a self-imposed deadline is, more often than not, just a helpful illusion. Almost there, almost there … but wait, what’s the rush? Why not push the finish line back a bit and take some time to flesh out this sub-plot.

There are, of course, other reasons for a rubbery deadline. Daily life tempts, absorbs, distracts — sometimes disrupts. For instance, you happen to spend three months battling a sinus infection, as I did this winter, or you happen to have back problems, or you can’t shake those migraines, or you’ve got loved ones in town and would rather rack up on quality time than word count, or your household appliances stage a revolt and begin leaking, smoking, screeching, or kicking the bucket one by one. As distractions go I have not been undersupplied this past year. I’ve enjoyed the blessed kind (visitors), and cursed the perplexing (appliances).

And yet returning to my work, as I somehow manage to do for hours upon hours each week (thanks to late nights and sacrificial weekends), I’m conscious of a steady, if glacial, progress. Pages accumulate. Plot tightens. Lines grow leaner, tauter. Characters walk and breathe. It’s sort of mysterious, almost inexplicable. After many a frantic day spent fretting about receding personal deadlines and all the work I am not managing to do, I come back to the desk to find an ever thickening stack of pages, an ever stronger book.

Going Strong While Getting By is how I’ve come to think of it. It’s a time-honored tradition among novelists, if not among artists in general. Somehow, somehow, patiently abiding interruptions while remaining intent on the continuing imaginative process, you make headway.

It made me smile today to come across this snippet in The Journal of Jules Renard, penned in 1889:

I can’t get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued. I must make a choice. I prefer to be plagued. I am stating it. I’ll be properly annoyed when I am taken at my word.

Renard was rather more declarative on the subject than I care to be, but his words strike a chord.

Last month the bank account was overdrawn. The kitchen window-pane has been broken for nine months (yes, nine; thank God for storm windows). The car steering makes a noise. One headlight is out. There are bees in the wall of my writing room. My toddler has a runny nose and has cut the length of his naps in half. The lawn is shin-high. At the flip of a switch the other night, three overhead lights made a zapping sound and went black (not a fuse issue –  something in the wiring, as I learned by shocking myself at the fuse box during a bumbling troubleshoot). And, oh yes, I’m a day late writing this post.

But I’m not complaining. I’m getting by, I’m also going strong. Here’s to making the best of  it, and seeing that it brings out the best in me.

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In the Absence of “Yes”

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal entities like the NEA, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. — Denis Donaghue

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?”

“You Are Not a Gadget”

“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers“

A Lone Wolf Sets Out:

In my earlier life a driving passion and talent for the theater led me to believe I’d pursue a career as an actor, but in the end it was the written component of drama that drew me into literature. Always somewhat ill at ease in the communal, collaborative atmosphere of the thespian world, I found in the more secret art of writing a quietude, concentration, and privacy that appealed to my solitary nature. Here was something you could do (perhaps had to do?) alone.

Writing required no facilities, no stage lights or auditorium seating, no orchestra pits, no janitors to tidy the lavatories. Most importantly, perhaps, it required no return at the box office. String together a few healthy advances and you were set (after all, you weren’t aiming for world domination). As a writer you didn’t have to fit your life into a rehearsal calendar or the matrix of personalities (outsized egos amongst them) that make up a theatrical cast. Writing required nobody else’s presence. The writer could be cast, crew, director, conductor, usher, and janitor — all in one, and all it took was pen and paper, discipline, and yes, self-reliance.

Given those basic tools plus a strong commitment to excellence, it looked like a writer really could “make it” alone and enjoy the gratification of success earned by pure individual merit as well as the liberty of being one’s own man.

I embraced this vision early, and believed that in doing so I was parting ways with the false American Dream, a.k.a.: the rat race. No nine-to-five or gold watch for me, thank you very much (even if I worked full-time to pay the bills — and for periods I did — it would not be my employment that defined me, but my calling as a writer; this I determined early, and so it was).

It was a useful vision in its way, and galvanized me to great productivity. Later on, however, even after successfully completing and publishing numerous works, I developed a lurking suspicion that my Lone Wolf outlook might be a bit flawed. Most prominently, it seemed to engender mild but undeniable feelings of humiliation whenever I filled out grant or fellowship applications. And months later, receiving the form letter containing the phrase “your application was not successful,” a strange dejection would dog me for days: Some Lone Wolf you are! Spurned Puppy is more like it.

Something was out of joint.

Recently, upon reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, it occurred to me that my early go-it-alone vision was never really a break with the American Dream, but more precisely a variation upon it.

That is to say, I had subscribed to the (western capitalist) idea that one succeeds alone.

Thornton Wilder once described American individualism thusly:

The inability to draw strength from any dependency.

I had crept dangerously close to feeling ashamed of myself for seeking, or needing to seek, help.

Success Myths:

In Outliers Gladwell encourages us to see through our culture’s success myths, and presents numerous compelling case-studies to help us do so. It seems to me his message is particularly beneficial in a present moment rife with job loss.

In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness. … [But] people don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

Later he goes on,

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think Outliers [Gladwell's term for the brilliantly successful] spring naturally from the earth.

Meritocracy: “Those Worthy of Success Should Need No Help”:

America, we are encouraged to believe, is a pure meritocracy. But we do well to remember — especially in tough economic times like now — that faith in meritocracy is a recipe for unhappiness, for as Alain de Botton eloquently reminds us in his remarkable book Status Anxiety:

In a meritocratic world in which well-paid jobs [can] be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money [begins] to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich are not only wealthier, it seem[s]; they might also be plain better.

De Botton quotes this creepy sentiment from Andrew Carnegie, written in the latter’s 1920 Autobiography:

Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of the race never do.

Anti-Gladwellian myths have long obtained all around us:

• • The self-made icons of success did it on their own
• • Success is won by individual virtue and determination
• • To need help is to be unworthy of success

As these success-myths persist, the following equation too often applies:

Belief in myth of self-made success + Belief in meritocracy = Shame/Disillusionment/Despair/Resignation

The Lone Wolf Was Never Really Alone:

Though it’s true that the discipline of writing must ultimately be honed and matured in solitude, the sustainment of this endeavor calls for help, be it moral or financial, from beyond the writer’s solitary zone. The bracing encouragement of friends and loved ones, the inspiration of teachers or literary luminaries long dead, and indeed, the material assistance of grants and endowments — all are essential to the writer’s survival and vitality.

I may give my best, do my all, and still need help. We all need it sometimes. Without the unfailing support and encouragement of my wife it would have been immeasurably more difficult for me to write and publish two novels before I was thirty. This is just the tip of the iceberg of my moral debts.

Likewise, the livelihood that comes of publishing one’s work depends upon help from others. Without the continued interest and attention of editors and readers I will not appear in print.

Furthermore, to seek the assistance of grants or fellowships, indispensable as such help would prove to be, needn’t cause me shame — even when I am passed over.

I have not done and cannot do it alone. That, paradoxically, is a freeing thought.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“You Don’t Have to Be an Insider”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

“What Am I Doing With My Life?”

“Readers & Skimmers”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“The Soul of an Entrepreneur, the DNA of a Business”

“Entrepreneurship: Why It’s Not About You”

“The Anchovy’s Rules of Goodwill & Good Work“

— Here’s to the most liberal of liberal arts education —

Envisioning and designing the University of Virginia in his later years, Thomas Jefferson imagined a haven of higher learning where students could come and go at will, seeking whatever knowledge they pleased and laboring under no expectation to earn a degree. In fact, degrees would not even be offered. It was to be a Utopian bastion of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Back in my days of institutional higher learning I was a student in the Jeffersonian mode (though I didn’t even know it). I hungered for knowledge but never really cared about obtaining a degree. Not a few of my elder relations and teachers chafed at this academic lassitude of mine, and amid our culture’s attitudes about university attendance I felt myself being branded an underachiever and pushed out of the system. Only the career-minded need apply. I never did acquire the coveted, gold-embossed, frameable, cardstock certificate.

Ultimately, despite the social pressure to either a) proceed lock-step along the academic path or b) admit myself a wash-up in the gutters of higher learning, my reasons for resigning my university career and not seeking a degree were my own. Maybe I was a young kook, but I came to believe that knowledge and culture could be found all around me at relatively little or no monetary cost (primarily through libraries, conversation, and travel), whereas a full and formal college education was sure to set me on a lifelong path of debt. I figured my self-expansion and edification could happen more economically and more effectively on my own terms and by my own methods of inquiry. I sought the most liberal of liberal arts education.

Maybe I’m still a kook, because now, years later, my convictions about the ready availability of knowledge remain pretty much unchanged. Devoid of a degree as I am, I have never stopped reading, inquiring, and exploring the world of ideas and facts. All this is not to deny, of course, that formal education is good in its way (and naturally some specialties — law and medicine most notably — absolutely require old-fashioned collegiate training). But I still believe deeply in the worth and merit of impractical learning — that is, learning not yoked with any particular worldly ambition — and I wish that this kind of “aimless” learning could find better cultural legitimacy.

In 1892 the thirty-four-year-old poet and classical scholar, A.E. Housman (1859-1936), gave a lively, stylish lecture on the subject of why human beings seek knowledge. It’s the best defense of “aimless” learning I’ve ever read. Here follows an inexcusably brief abridgment.

Housman kicks off with a retort to a contemporary writer who “define[s] the aim of learning to be utility,” and thus science to be the single most desirable subject of learning. Ah, but can any one type of knowledge really hold the claim of being better, or more beneficial, than another?

The popular view…is that the aim of acquiring knowledge is to equip one’s self for the business of life; that accordingly the knowledge most to be sought after is the knowledge which equips one best; and that this knowledge is Science.

… In short, the fact is, that what man will seek to acquaint himself with in order to prepare him for securing the necessaries of life is not Science, but the indispensable minimum of Science.

… In addition to the initial studies of reading, writing and arithmetic, [a person] needs to acquaint himself…with the indispensable minimum of those sciences which concern the trade or the art he earns his bread by: the dyer with chemistry, the carpenter with geometry, the navigator with astronomy. But there he can stop.

… A life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily. …Our true occupation is to manufacture from the raw material of life the fabric of happiness.

… The acquisition of knowledge needs no…justification: its true sanction is a much simpler affair, and inherent in itself. People are too prone to torment themselves with devising far-fetched reasons: they cannot be content with the simple truth asserted by Aristotle: `all men possess by nature a craving for knowledge.’ … This is no rare endowment scattered sparingly from heaven that falls on a few heads and passes others by: curiosity, the desire to know things as they are, is a craving no less native to the being of man, no less universal in diffusion through mankind, than the craving for food and drink. …The desire of knowledge does not need, nor could it possibly possess, any higher or more authentic sanction than the happiness which attends its gratification.

But now Housman pauses to acknowledge that “we see, every day of our lives, plenty of people who exhibit no pleasure in learning and experience no desire to know.” So is the human thirst for knowledge really as involuntary, and crucial to one’s survival, as one’s bodily thirst? Well, yes! The man who ignores his natural thirst for knowledge and chooses to wallow in ignorance may still appear to be a living, thriving human being, but…

…though the man does not die altogether, part of him dies, part of him starves to death: as Plato says, he never attains completeness and health, but walks lame to the end of his life and returns imperfect and good for nothing to the world below.

But the desire of knowledge, stifle it though you may, is none the less originally born with every man; and nature does not implant desires for nothing, nor endow us with faculties in vain.

… The faculty of learning is ours that we may find in its exercise that delight which arises from the unimpeded activity of any energy in the groove nature meant it to run in. Let a man acquire knowledge not for this or that external and incidental good which may chance to result from it, but for itself; not because it is useful or ornamental, but because it is knowledge, and therefore good for man to acquire.

… For knowledge resembles virtue in this, and differs in this from other possessions, that it is not merely a means of procuring good, but is good in itself simply: it is not a coin which we pay down to purchase happiness, but it has happiness indissolubly bound up with it. …The pursuit of knowledge, like the pursuit of righteousness, is part of man’s duty to himself; and remember the Scripture where it is written `He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul’.

In fact, argues Housman, knowledge of some type will come to us all whether we like it or not — through the maturing process of passing years, through tragedy, through regret. This is the nature of life (“live and learn”). So is it not natural, then, to seek knowledge outright, and empower ourselves against avoidable regrets and mistakes?

It is and it must in the long run be better for a man to see things as they are than to be ignorant of them; just as there is less fear of stumbling or of striking against corners in the daylight than in the dark.

… The pleasure of learning and knowing, though not the keenest, is yet the least perishable of pleasures; the least subject to external things, and the play of chance, and the wear of time. And as a prudent man puts money by to serve as a provision for the material wants of his old age, so too he needs to lay up against the end of his days provision for the intellect. As the years go by, comparative values are found to alter: Time, says Sophocles, takes many things which once were pleasures and brings them nearer to pain. In the day when the strong men shall bow themselves, and desire shall fail, it will be a matter of yet more concern than now, whether one can say `my mind to me a kingdom is’; and whether the windows of the soul look out upon a broad and delightful landscape, or face nothing but a brick wall.

Well then, once we have recognised that knowledge in itself is good for man, we shall need to invent no pretexts for studying this subject or that; we shall import no extraneous considerations of use or ornament to justify us in learning one thing rather than another. If a certain department of knowledge specially attracts a man, let him study that, and study it because it attracts him; and let him not fabricate excuses for that which requires no excuse, but rest assured that the reason why it most attracts him is that it is best for him.

(Here I’m reminded of a past discussion on this blog, in which Soul Shelter Director of Fortune Clark introduced (COOT^TM), Clark’s Option on Opportunities Theory. Tim was confronting a reader’s question: ‘Is education always a good investment?’ His response? “No. But if you have serious thoughts about going back to school, that’s a powerful sign that it’s a very good idea for you.”)

…Other desires perish in their gratification, but the desire of knowledge never: the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. Other desires become the occasion of pain through dearth of the material to gratify them, but not the desire of knowledge: the sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read we shall never come to the end of our story-book.…

Read Housman’s lecture in full, here.

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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“Why It’s Desirable to Be Eccentric”

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“Why We Should Contradict Ourselves”

“Soul School“

In a prior Soul Shelter post, I wrote:

In spite of some great successes (my first novel was glowingly reviewed, nominated for a prestigious award, and even earned me royalties) living by writing continues to be a struggle, requiring — as ever — extreme determination and ceaseless hard work.

Inevitably, the life of a writer (or of any creative person) also requires constant reckoning with doubt.

Doubt takes many forms. Let’s consider two that seem to be of particular relevance to the creative soul — that is, anybody seeking to rise with dynamic freshness to a challenging endeavor.

• Doubt Version 1: What Am I Doing With My Life? Or: When you feel you’ve got nothing to show for all your efforts.

You could just as well call this The Story of the Artist’s Life. This kind of doubt is exerted, or rather you may perceive it to be exerted, upon you by people around you — folks pragmatic and well-meaning, probably (but occasionally insensitive or even mean-spirited), who find it hard to understand your objectives. These befuddled commentators affect you, consciously or not. Your endeavors are called into question, and by some unavoidable reflex you begin comparing yourselves to more successful people: “Look at her. She’s thirty-three just like I am, but she’s achieved, she’s earned accolades, she’s in demand. Must be that she’s really good at what she does. Must be that I’m not as good as I thought.”

In his classic book On Becoming a Novelist, the late beloved teacher John Gardner describes this particular version of doubt as it applies to the literary aspirant, but creatives of all kinds can certainly relate:

If a writer learns his craft slowly and carefully, laboriously strengthening his style, not publishing too fast, people may begin to look at the writer aslant and ask suspiciously, ‘And what do you do?‘ — meaning: ‘How come you sit around all the time? How come your dog’s so thin?’… Nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. …

Gardner continues:

Because his art is such a difficult one, the writer is not likely to advance in the world as visibly as do his neighbors: while his best friends from high school or college are becoming junior partners in prestigious law firms, or opening their own mortuaries, the writer may be still sweating out his first novel. Even if he has published a story or two in respectable periodicals, the writer doubts himself. … Each rejection letter is shattering, and a parent’s gentle prod — ‘Don’t you think it’s time you had children, Martha?’ — can be an occasion of spiritual crisis…

• Doubt Version 2: Oh, What’s the Use? Or: When you feel suddenly and overwhelmingly daunted in the midst of action.

This kind of doubt emerges from within, often stemming, strangely, from the same burning idea or vision that originally set you in motion.

Think of Doubt Version 2 as a location, or vista point en route to accomplishment. It’s the place where you stop and observe that the gap between your gift and your goal yawns wider than you’d ever thought (in business terminology this is referred to as ‘Gap Analysis‘). Initially inspired, you started out with jaunty step — but now after cresting a few summits you stand and behold innumerable other summits ahead, just as big or bigger than the ones you’ve already struggled to overcome. An icy wind burns at your face, and attainment of your ideal vision seems to recede before you. Reviewing your work so far, you can’t help feeling that the bright thing you meant to create has actually emerged a bit pale. You wonder if you can see your task through to its end, or if you ought to even try.

* * *

In his short story “The Middle Years” Henry James famously wrote:

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Writer Cynthia Ozick recently called this

A declaration of private panic mixed with prayerful intuition.

That’s a turn of phrase I quite like — and one we might apply as a serviceable definition of doubt.

After all, if viewed as a crisis of spirit, doubt really is a kind of, well … prayer. Or in other words: Doubt is a means of clarifying vision, sharpening focus, polishing the lens of inspiration.

We doubt in order to become more intuitive in our task. We doubt in order to proceed more discerningly.

In a private notebook, Henry James made a further astonishing remark on the subject:

One has one’s doubts and discouragements — but they are only so many essential vibrations of one’s ideal.

Doubt, indeed, is at the soul of creativity.

(This post appears from the Soul Shelter archives)

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Trust Thyself

In a powerful lecture entitled “Mythic Literature,” recorded in the 1960s, the noted scholar of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell, said:

Every now and then, you will face the great mysteries that mankind has been facing. The mystery of death, when it eats into you. The mystery of the magnitude of the cosmos and your own place in it and all. And the imagery that will be coming up then will be imagery that will be matched in the mythologies of the world…

Abraham Maslow [a psychologist and a spokesman of the "positive psychology" movement]…published a little paper in which he discussed the values for which people lived. He named five:

Survival
Security
Prestige
Personal Relationships
Self-Development

And I remember when I read that, I thought those are exactly the values that go completely to pieces when one is seized with a mythological zeal. If there is something you are really living for, you will forget security, you will forget even survival, you will forget your prestige, you will even forget your friends, and as for self-development, that’s gone. When Jesus said ‘He who loses his life shall find it’ he was talking about this.

And it’s that jump, from the thing that animals live for, to the thing that only a human being can live for, that is the jump [into the Heroic Journey]…

Over the past ten years or so, I’ve done a good share of reading into world religions and mythologies. These age-old story patterns and images have taught me much about the art of writing (my first novel used a mythic structure of sorts). Naturally, as any inquiry into mythology will do, mine led me to Campbell, and his powerful ideas have had a lasting impact on my life.

For the last twenty-odd years, Campbell has been criticized as a guru of the New Age movement. He was nothing of the kind, however misappropriated some of his ideas have been. Quite to the contrary, he was an eminent scholar — and certainly one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth-century.

Campbell came to public attention in the mid-1980s, thanks to the wildly popular six-part PBS series, The Power of Myth, in which he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. But Campbell’s career as a mythographer had its truer, more auspicious beginning a full three decades earlier, with the 1949 publication of the groundbreaking book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

In its pages, he presented a comparative study of mythological stories and belief systems from all over the world, and demonstrated the universality of many symbols (or archetypes) mankind has used for ages. He called this the “grammar of symbols,” and argued that every world culture produces a “mono-myth” in which the journey of a hero figure is marked by certain clearly distinguishable stages, such as: The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Crossing of the First Threshold, The Belly of the Whale, The Road of Trials, Atonement with the Father, Refusal of the Return, Crossing of the Return Threshold.

The Heroic Journey, found in so many different myths, reveals a psychological reality common to all human beings, and Campbell showed how modern psychology can shed light on the symbology of these diverse myths.

Each of us is born, confronts life’s mysteries, enjoys its graces, suffers its blows, and must eventually face death. That experience, being universal, is a “mythic” experience. We all share it, and we all look to stories, images, and belief systems to better understand it. That’s what Campbell’s work explored. In his preface to that 1949 book, he wrote:

There are of course differences between the numerous mythologies and religions of mankind, but this is a book about the similarities; and once these are understood the differences will be found to be much less great than is popularly (and politically) supposed. My hope is that a comparative elucidation may contribute to … unification, not in the name of some ecclesiastical or political empire, but in the sense of human mutual understanding. As we are told in the Vedas: ‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.’

And being a passionate humanist, and believing that his scholarly studies could be deeply relevant to the wider culture beyond academia, Campbell did not shy away from speaking in very personal terms about the “Heroic Journey” as it applied to everyone, even in modern life.

“The final secret of myth,” he said, “[is] to teach you how to penetrate the labyrinth of life in such a way that its spiritual values come through.”

In Campbell’s view, recognizing the mythic forces at work in one’s life could deeply enrich that life. He was at his most outspoken about this in The Power of Myth. And it was there, while talking about the Heroic Journey, that he used a phrase that has almost single-handedly popularized him among New Agers: “Follow Your Bliss.”

Frankly, I cringe whenever this phrase gets invoked in a twinkling, wind-chimey, neo-mystical manner, because all too often it’s being appropriated to justify self-indulgence or shallowness (it’s used in just this way by a character in the recent film, The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel).

I believe Campbell’s maxim is most meaningful — and useful — when placed firmly in the context of the man’s serious thought, and his lifelong work. “Following your bliss,” as Campbell means it, requires more than doing what feels good at any given moment. Being a matter of “mythological zeal,” it might require a confrontation with a dragon or two, a painful sacrifice or an embarkation into loneliness — in short: a parting with one or a few of Maslow’s Five Values. Here’s where bliss comes up in the conversation with Bill Moyers:

-Moyers: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?

-Campbell: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

-Moyers: Is it my work or my life?

-Campbell: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you choose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, ‘Oh no! I couldn’t do that!’ that’s the dragon locking you in. ‘No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,’ or ‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what So-and-so is doing.’

-Moyers: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

-Campbell: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and to become alive yourself. … There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

The idea that following one’s bliss, finding one’s own heroic path, requires sacrifice and the abandonment of “security” or “prestige” or “self-development” rings very true with me, and I think it’s unfortunate that this elemental, recurring aspect of Campbell’s thought does not come out clearly enough in this oft-excerpted part of the Moyers dialogue (read closely, though, and you see it embedded in that last comment about not “getting any money”) .

Still, as a writer of stories, I identify strongly with the vision in Campbell’s lifelong work: the recognition of a universal human narrative, a Heroic Journey through life’s frightful and glorious moments alike, a constant adventure that demands we remain on the path which will best allow us each to confront our fears and fulfill our potential. As Campbell reiterated throughout his career, the journey may be hard, the road may be narrow, the destination obscured, but we mustn’t refuse the “call to adventure.”

I hope I’ll be brave enough, always, to make the most worthy sacrifices, to go toward the dragon if that’s what’s most necessary, to seek spiritual adventure over stagnant convention. I want to recognize true and enduring fulfillment.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. — Joseph Campbell

(This post is adapted from the Soul Shelter archives)

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A Message of Improvement From Self-Help’s Founding Father