Read Blake, Stand Up to Your Boss


Edgar Degas, "At the Stock Exchange"

Thanks to a recommendation from regular reader Sue Schmidt, I’ve been reading David Whyte’s 1994 book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.  In a meditative, rambling style, the author shows how he has turned to poetry to hold on to his soul in the business world.  Heart Aroused appears to owe a lot to Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul and, like many such books, can get slippery at times. But while I wish it was clearer and more systematic and included a wider range of examples from the world of work, I appreciate how Whyte continually draws on poetry to help him negotiate his challenges.

To give you a sense of the book, here’s an excerpt about how William Blake can give one the strength to tell a boss an unpleasant truth.  Whyte tells the story of a friend who, along with others, was asked for a 1-10 assessment of a plan. The CEO clearly wanted his subordinates to say “ten,” and although Whyte’s friend found the plan terrible, he said “ten” along with everyone else. Whyte talks about the galvanizing effect his friend would have been achieved had he said “zero.”

Excerpted from David Whyte, The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

The people who hear themselves say zero do not have the same life ahead of them as those who gave the hesitant ten. Saying zero literally means they have guts, and their voice is resident in their guts. They have a vessel to hold their fire. They have a stomach for the consequences, a place to which their voice can belong no matter the outward change in circumstances. Ambition is not rejected, but placed in the greater perspective of the soul, which again and again seems to choose a fuller experience of the here and now over a preordained trajectory through the organizational heavens.

The executive who is ambitious at all costs finds himself ritually killed by the sharpness of his own voice: the right word, said almost against his will, at the right time. Out of that annihilation arises another person, wilder, less predictable to others but more trustworthy to himself, stepping out on and deciphering a path he could at last call his own. But the courage in saying zero comes from the fact that we have only a hazy intuition of that person now coming to life who will pick up the pieces and carry on. It demands a simultaneous familiarity with two opposing sides of ourselves when we are more used to choosing one and ignoring the other.

My friend had already figured out in his mind that the CEO’s plan was not a good one. But the fire in our belly literally goes out until we find the courage or the circumstance to walk back into those parts of our bodies we have disowned and claim their earthy, grounded qualities for our own again. Sometimes we have so disowned our bodies in the cerebral machinations of the corporate world that a phrase like “Walk back into the body” may not compute. I am in my body, we say, where else is there to be? But the question must then be which body? The body we use like a machine to get everything done, or the body Blake described as “the chief outlet of the soul in our age”? The body as an entangled way of perception and experience, or a door set against the world? Blake himself worked all his life, through art and poetry, to open up that door.

If the doors of perception we cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For the man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. – Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

William Blake, like my friend in the meeting room two hundred years later, had to walk back into his own body, into his own unconscious physical memories to cleanse the muddy doors of perception and articulation. Arriving there, Blake found them shut against him. He describes this in a brilliant but sobering poem called “The Garden of Love.”

I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut
And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;
So I turned to this Garden of Love
That so may sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be,
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
and binding with briars my joys and desires.

We turn to our inner garden and find it full of dead bodies, closed and with a sign over the door of a chapel: THOU SHALT NOT!

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds
and binding with briars my joys and desires.

Unable to enter the garden, the wounded child remains in limbo, its desires bound by briars, unable to experience the joys of its birthright or to grow into maturity with the rest of the adult psyche. It finds that a mode of being it was forced to employ during a stressful period when young, simply in order to survive, has become part of the imprisoning personality of the grown adult.

Children or not, we all have experience of this trauma to the body and the difficulty in opening those parts of ourselves that clanged shut so firmly in order to survive. It is a common but disturbing experience to hear our voice revert to old childhood timbres when we are put into fearful or vulnerable situations. Caught in the tension of a high-stress presentation, we might find ourselves playing out the same essential soul struggles we had as children with our parents or teachers, especially with those figures of authority who now dominate our work lives. Blake’s “priests in black gowns” are with us internally; we carry them with us wherever we go. If we do not find them literally in another person, we will project them onto those who look as though they might do in a pinch.

Every manager has had to deal with people who are absolutely allergic to any kind of direction, seeing in a simple request the hand of an internal bully with whom they have yet to come to terms. We carry these internal taskmasters with us because the soul is desperate to speak its desires in their presence and thus be freed from their rule. Until then, the part bound with briars can never escape, experience joy, or grow to maturity.

. . . As Rilke said, “Where I am folded in upon myself, there I am a lie.” [from “I Am Too Alone in the World”]

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