City of the Written Word

 

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.
                                        -Seamus Heaney

The night before, I read that in Dublin there's a writers museum. A writers museum. I’ll say it again, a writers museum. The Dublin Writers Museum, dedicated to Irish literature throughout history. To me, Irish literature is the history of literature.

I bought a plane ticket, packed a bag and bolted from the Charlotte Street hotel in London. I headed for 18 Parnell Square, Dublin.  

If you want to know about a city ask its statues

It was last minute and haphazard but something - or someone - told me to go. Like when the old country blues man just shook his head and told me he can’t play unless the spirit is there. Or, like whenever I give in to such feelings and am rewarded with the sweetness of life.

After touching down, from a flying taxi I passed statues of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Mary Lavin, Yeats and Shaw. Not wartime generals, writers. Statues carved by pen. Dublin, city of words.

If I was lucky I’d get there just in time for the last guided tour. I was lucky.

Portrait of an Artist as a Tour Guide

My guide took me through the two main rooms and the portraits in the Gallery of Writers. He pointed out the little people's room. I had forgotten Gulliver’s Travels was Irish.

Everywhere there were the original manuscripts and notes. Typewriters that were there when the words were pounded out and when labor was slow and painful. Pens authors must have held to their lips in thought.

A feast for the eyes but I could hardly keep my eyes open. I didn’t sleep much the night before and had been in route since before dawn.

Out of the blue, the tour guide (a writer. I could tell) recited by heart Digging by, the poet and playwright, Seamus Heaney.   
I was awake now.
As dark as a pint of Irish stout. Straight and crooked at the same time like a shillelagh. With a rich man's command of language and humble like a rotting thatched roof. And, brilliant. Because it was both of of those things at the same time. Digging was past, present and future in a few sentences. And, in the end, brash, confident, and hopeful. Irish.
I didn’t catch the writer's name – it sounded strange, stranger than when you see it in writing: Seamus Heaney.

The Importance of Being Earnest

I would talk to my guide and tell him that in an embarrassingly miniscule way – a life as an advertising writer - I, too, was a writer.

The Great Hunger - Patrick Kavanagh

But first I explained my drowsiness.  I told him all it took to even get to there and all it meant to be at the museum now. I’m not sure it helped my cause. He was a real writer.
Then, I asked about the poem and where I could get a copy.

He told me it was Digging by Seamus Heaney. "Can you say it again?" "Se-a-mus-He-a-n-ey." 

The Dubliners

Hungry but no longer tired. My clothes even felt wrinkled. I ran downtown where I found bookstores everywhere near another holy place, Trinity College.

Inside one of them, I interrupted a college student who was leafing through a book.  "I will dig." "Like my father." "With my pen." "Do you know it?" 

She knew it. Instantly. As if I was asking, Is this a bookstore?" She was nice enough to find the book for me. I still have it.
UNESCO refers to Dublin as The City of Literature. Which means this wasn’t a dream. (I told you I was sleepy). According to my passport it happened on August 26, 2006. 

City of words, city of writers, city of readers. Dublin, city of people who build statues to their writers. The writers who live there in the museum.

Lead-in excerpted from Digging, part of Death of a Naturalist (1966), Seamus Heaney.