The Art of Manliness - Bringing More Soul (and Poetry) Into Your Work

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.120 When you think of areas of life that speak to the soul and elicit poetry, you likely

00:00:15.240 think of things like romantic relationships and natural landscapes.

00:00:18.420 You probably don't think of office work and cubicles, but my guest today says that the

00:00:21.780 soul is involved in every kind of work, and poetry is an essential vehicle for examining

00:00:25.520 what your work is doing to your soul and for learning to bring more soul into what you

00:00:29.180 do.

00:00:29.440 His name is David White, and he's a poet, a philosopher, and the author of multiple

00:00:33.300 books of both poetry and prose, as well as a corporate consultant who uses poetry to help

00:00:37.760 companies with their organizational leadership.

00:00:39.940 We begin a conversation with David's background in marine zoology, how his experience being

00:00:43.620 a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands influences ideas on the conversational nature

00:00:47.960 of reality.

00:00:48.680 We then discuss how the amount of time you spend in your job is greatly shaping who you

00:00:52.100 are, the way we lose youthful idealism for our work, and the importance of inviting the

00:00:55.600 right kind of danger into your life.

00:00:57.080 David then unpacks what the ancient tale of Beowulf can teach men about having hard conversations,

00:01:01.820 both personally and professionally, and bridging one outer and inner lives.

00:01:05.020 We also talk about the importance of men having good friendships outside of the office, and

00:01:08.440 along the way, David recites a few short, stirring poems that speak to these themes.

00:01:12.540 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash white.

00:01:15.900 That's W-H-Y-T-E. 1.00

00:01:25.840 All right, David White, welcome to the show.

00:01:28.260 It's a pleasure to be here.

00:01:30.000 So you are a poet, philosopher, writer, lecturer, and you've written a lot of books of poetry,

00:01:36.140 poems, and we're going to talk about some of that today.

00:01:38.480 But before we do, let's talk about how you got to be doing what you're doing today, because

00:01:42.040 you weren't always a poet and a writer.

00:01:44.900 In fact, you have your degree in marine zoology.

00:01:48.580 So how did you go from marine zoology to writing poems?

00:01:54.120 Yes, actually, it's more accurate to say that, actually, I always have seen myself as a poet

00:02:01.360 from when I was very little, actually, or however, seeing yourself as a poet is configured in a

00:02:07.740 very young mind of a seven-year-old or eight-year-old.

00:02:11.920 So sciences were really a kind of excursion for me.

00:02:17.560 I was very influenced by the lyrical articulation of a wonderful mother, an Irish mother, growing

00:02:25.720 up in the north of England, and her beautiful singing voice, as well as her storytelling voice.

00:02:32.320 And I think early on, I always saw poetry as a secret code to understanding.

00:02:39.880 And I felt quite early on when I was young that the adult world was living in a kind of

00:02:46.260 amnesia of this basic code of the priorities of life.

00:02:51.780 And I always felt that in poetry, in a sense, the original, powerful innocences of childhood

00:02:59.600 were kept alive into adulthood.

00:03:01.980 So I was very happy in my initial disappointment with listening to the conversation of the adult

00:03:09.300 world.

00:03:09.880 I don't know if you ever had that experience, Brett, of listening to adults when you were

00:03:14.380 a child and thinking that these people were actually quite insane.

00:03:19.080 Yeah, yeah, I know I've had those moments.

00:03:22.500 As to what their priorities were and what they were interested in.

00:03:25.840 And so I was quite relieved to find poetry kept, it was possible to keep what I felt was

00:03:34.720 really precious and really alive, to keep it vibrant into what we call adulthood or into

00:03:41.400 being an adult male in my instance.

00:03:46.800 But then you did poetry, you always thought you saw as a poet, but then you decided to

00:03:51.640 go get a degree in marine zoology.

00:03:53.700 What happened there?

00:03:55.320 Well, I was caught by the image of Jacques Cousteau, the great French marine zoologist and

00:04:00.720 the inventor of the aqualung.

00:04:02.620 And he had a series on the television that was worldwide, really, back in the 60s, where

00:04:08.580 he traveled on the good ship Calypso and made documentaries of what he discovered in the oceans.

00:04:14.680 And particularly underwater, which was quite revolutionary.

00:04:19.160 And so I was so moved by that life that he led that I just thought it was astonishing that

00:04:26.780 you could have work like this.

00:04:28.400 You know, my images of work were all the images of a young boy, which was being a fireman,

00:04:34.640 being a soldier, being a train driver, all of those.

00:04:38.000 And my father was a skilled electrical jointer of the large cables that go into power stations.

00:04:45.640 So that was part of my imagination, too.

00:04:48.140 And then suddenly to see that you could have work that would take you over these blue water

00:04:53.620 horizons was really quite incredible.

00:04:55.580 So I was completely and utterly taken apart.

00:05:00.920 I mean, I remember standing with my mouth open in front of the television.

00:05:06.400 And so just a year or two later, when I had to specialize, I made a kind of vow there, I suppose,

00:05:13.900 in front of the television that I would follow the life of the dolphin aboard the good ship

00:05:19.120 Calypso or whatever equivalent I could find.

00:05:21.260 And in the British system, you had to, in Yorkshire, in the north of England, where I grew up,

00:05:28.340 you had to specialize at 15.

00:05:30.460 You had to choose between sciences and arts.

00:05:33.540 And so I chose sciences because I, even though I was writing poetry from quite seriously in my early

00:05:40.360 teens, I always knew I could pick up a book of Wordsworth or Emily Dickinson myself.

00:05:46.660 I wouldn't be able to pick up a book on ecological genetics myself.

00:05:52.140 So I didn't think it was that great a sacrifice, actually, to do sciences.

00:05:56.980 I just found it much harder than my more scientifically inclined mates, friends.

00:06:02.920 You know, I had to work twice as hard they did to get the same results.

00:06:06.420 But I did get the results to go to university and study marine zoology.

00:06:10.500 And then, luck of the Irish, I mean, it was luck. 1.00

00:06:14.380 It was a series of incredible circumstances.

00:06:17.880 I got this job in the Galapagos Islands as a guia naturalista.

00:06:22.220 I learned, it was called later when I learned Spanish, a naturalist guide.

00:06:26.260 And it totally transformed my world and my young adulthood, my young manhood.

00:06:32.260 I was, I think I was 20, 22 when I went out there, 21.

00:06:39.440 So really quite an astonishing opportunity for a young man to have.

00:06:44.860 Well, how did it change?

00:06:46.640 Because you're not doing that anymore.

00:06:49.780 How did I change from marine zoology?

00:06:52.540 Yeah.

00:06:53.240 Yes.

00:06:53.820 Well, after over a year there, a year and a half or so, the islands had completely transformed

00:07:00.660 not only my understanding of what I thought was a scientific world, but it had completely

00:07:06.620 transformed my identity as a person.

00:07:10.580 You know, I went there with the unconscious sense that your identity depended on what you

00:07:16.400 believed and your inherited beliefs, especially.

00:07:21.360 And really, Galapagos didn't care about what you believed at all.

00:07:25.160 And it was really inviting you into this deep, fierce, almost warrior-like sense of attention

00:07:33.080 and intentionality.

00:07:35.160 And I realized in very short order that my identity actually depended on the depth of attention

00:07:42.960 that I was giving to things that were other than myself.

00:07:47.260 Animals, birds, plants, landscapes, seascapes.

00:07:50.800 And that the deeper the powers of attention I had using all my five senses, the deeper sense

00:07:59.980 I had of myself.

00:08:03.500 So really, I understood, I came to understand human identity as a kind of live conversation.

00:08:09.700 And when you weren't meeting anything other than yourself, you had nothing in the way of

00:08:14.700 a real identity, really.

00:08:15.940 They just, you were just making proclamations to the world, mostly defensive proclamations

00:08:22.480 because you were so unconsciously afraid of it.

00:08:26.020 So part of paying deep attention to the world is to become, first of all, consciously afraid

00:08:31.460 because there's no way of really meeting this incredibly powerful set of elements we call

00:08:38.560 life without being terrified by it.

00:08:40.800 Galapagos did terrify me.

00:08:43.460 And then finding the part of you that has the same kind of terrifying elemental nature

00:08:50.160 as the world.

00:08:51.920 And so getting beyond fear, in a way, by being fully in the conversation.

00:08:57.580 And I had plenty of opportunity to be in those terrifying conversations, diving with all kinds

00:09:03.880 of very powerful creatures under the water, six or seven different species of sharks down

00:09:09.080 there and orca whales and angry male sea lions at times and almost drowning, caught in a kind

00:09:19.600 of mini tsunami one day.

00:09:22.480 So, and having various life-threatening adventures on the sailing boats on which we traveled from

00:09:28.900 island to island.

00:09:29.680 So, so it was a great old adventure for any young man or woman to have, actually.

00:09:35.760 And I imagine those, that fear you experienced, those, and just all those experiences, like

00:09:39.980 science, the language of science, it, it can only go so far in describing it.

00:09:44.980 And poetry probably does a better job of, of capturing that, those, those, that experience

00:09:50.900 and those emotions.

00:09:52.600 Yeah.

00:09:53.040 I mean, science is marvelous to give us, especially around linear nomenclature.

00:09:58.140 You know, Linnaeus, the great Swedish classifier who gave Latin names to everything and which

00:10:04.900 caught on around the world.

00:10:06.080 So it was a way really of, of our all being able to talk about the same thing and know

00:10:11.640 what we were talking about.

00:10:13.260 But it certainly didn't mean to say that the name we had given to an animal or bird or plant

00:10:21.880 was actually accurate and that the world actually speaks back to you in its very, very own, very,

00:10:29.940 very particular voice.

00:10:32.700 And I mean, all great scientists actually discover that themselves, that, you know, whether it's

00:10:37.920 a set of numbers and data that you're looking at, the data starts to speak back to you instead

00:10:42.580 of you trying to manipulate the data to what you want the numbers to show you when you first

00:10:47.800 started, you know, all scientists have to get beyond themselves.

00:10:51.820 But I was really interested in speaking to this conversational identity where the world

00:10:58.660 starts to talk back to you.

00:11:01.800 And, and when it talks back to you, it finds a much larger person than the one who first

00:11:07.840 began the journey into that world.

00:11:09.940 And it's someone who, what you might say in the old Catholic tradition has been, has been

00:11:17.140 shriven, you know, the outer casing, the, the outer complications of being human have

00:11:24.260 been shriven away, have been taken away.

00:11:28.600 And what you're left with is this radical simplicity, which to begin with, you don't know what to do

00:11:35.060 with at all, you know, because you were used to all the complicated names you'd given yourself

00:11:38.920 and what you were good at and what you weren't.

00:11:42.140 And this radical simplification, this elemental conversation actually puts you into a frontier

00:11:51.220 conversation with the unknown, where to begin with, you're actually not meant to understand

00:11:58.540 what you're working with.

00:12:00.400 It's a bit like when you're at the beginning of a romantic relationship and you're so shy

00:12:04.860 and you don't know what to say or how to say it or what to wear.

00:12:07.500 So it's the same at the beginning of a passionate relationship with, with the world.

00:12:15.660 And your work is exploring this conversational nature of reality.

00:12:20.900 Yeah.

00:12:21.280 You spend a lot of time, not a lot, but quite a bit about our interaction with work, particularly

00:12:27.460 you wrote this book decade ago, two decades ago called The Heart Aroused about bringing soul

00:12:34.000 back into the corporate world, into the office space.

00:12:37.440 And I think that's really interesting because I think most people, when they think of poetry,

00:12:41.680 they don't think of poetry speaking to office work.

00:12:44.980 They might think of poetry, maybe speaking to artisanal work or farmer, like a, like a Wendell

00:12:50.360 Berry.

00:12:50.760 But for some reason we, we, for me, at least, maybe there's just me, we often think, well,

00:12:57.000 poetry, arts, literature has nothing to say about 21st century office work.

00:13:03.940 Why do you think there's that disconnect?

00:13:05.960 Like why, why are we able to say, oh yes, we can have poetry about farms and agriculture,

00:13:11.220 culture, but not spreadsheets and computer, sitting at a computer all day?

00:13:17.400 Well, the intuition is a good one because the language we tend to use in the office is

00:13:21.940 so de-racinated and it's been taken away from, from the racines, from the roots of real human 1.00

00:13:28.140 experience.

00:13:28.680 So, so we use euphemism, we use jargon, we use, we use words to cover up what's actually

00:13:37.720 going on because we don't actually face up to a lot of the, the hierarchical imperatives that

00:13:44.780 until now have steered relationships in the workplace.

00:13:49.420 I think they're being broken apart now.

00:13:52.140 So it's very hard to use the language of the office.

00:13:55.040 You'll see none of my poetry used as the language of the office, really.

00:13:58.600 You have to bring the greater human language to bear on the dynamics of the workplace,

00:14:05.040 whether it's in the human resources department or in leadership or on the shop floor, you

00:14:10.780 know, on the, uh, on the line where people are, uh, working, uh, actually doing physical

00:14:17.680 work.

00:14:18.560 So it just seems very, very evident to me that it's not a passive process to work.

00:14:25.820 You can't work 40 hours a week in the classic sense and, and be someone else than the way 0.92

00:14:33.820 you're made and not suffer from that covering over of who you are.

00:14:40.320 The understanding, you know, whether it's in physical work or whether it's in the offices

00:14:44.080 is while I'll recover myself at the weekend or on holiday.

00:14:49.240 But actually you're actually practicing at being someone when you're in your workplace.

00:14:56.760 Imagine if you played an instrument, Brett, for the number of hours, the same number of

00:15:02.720 hours that you do your work.

00:15:05.680 So say in a classic sense, if you practiced six, seven, eight hours a day at the piano,

00:15:11.760 at the saxophone, at the violin, could you imagine how good you would get?

00:15:16.160 And you wouldn't even have to have any musical proclivity.

00:15:20.260 If you practiced so many hours a day, you would get incredibly good.

00:15:26.160 So, uh, it's interesting to think that when you're in the workplace or on the phone or in

00:15:32.220 the meeting room, you're actually practicing at being someone.

00:15:38.060 And because you're practicing at it so much, seven or eight hours a day, five days a week,

00:15:43.120 at least, and if you're in leadership, it stretches into the, into the weekends, there's no one

00:15:49.400 else you're going to become than that person you're practicing so much at.

00:15:54.500 So it's a very beautiful and disturbing question to ask yourself.

00:15:58.300 By the way, I am in my work, you know, where I spend most of my time, who or whom am I practicing

00:16:06.000 at becoming? Do I even want to become that person? Almost always because of the manipulations and

00:16:14.920 coercions and besiegements of the workplace, we almost always start to actually cultivate a defensive

00:16:24.640 kind of personality in the workplace rather than an invitational one.

00:16:31.100 So a lot of my work, you know, as far as talking about the soul in the workplace is, is that

00:16:36.860 simple movement from a defensive to an invitational identity. I mean, you can look at a definition

00:16:43.380 of the soul as being that part of a person, you know, we don't need to attach it to any

00:16:47.980 religious, any religious inheritance, but, uh, to my mind, the soul of a person is that part

00:16:55.460 of a person that's trying to belong to the world in the biggest way they can, you know?

00:17:01.100 And the soul can be quite ruthless in breaking down defenses that you've set up. Actually,

00:17:07.460 sometimes we look on the outside and realize that we've sabotaged the work we were doing

00:17:14.300 actually. And it looks as if you've actually inflicted self-harm, but to the soul, it may

00:17:20.820 have been something it's been quietly engineering for years so that you could break out of this

00:17:25.980 imprisonment. Being fired or being a disaster for the personality. It may be something your soul

00:17:36.780 has been quietly preparing you for for years, yeah? So that you could break out of something

00:17:45.500 that is incredibly deleterious and incredibly threatening to what is most precious to you.

00:17:53.780 And that's the one life you can lead that no one else can lead in your stead.

00:18:00.940 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:18:02.920 And now back to the show. You said, okay, soul's this idea. It's the bigger thing that wants

00:18:10.400 to connect and engage with the world that's bigger than us.

00:18:12.660 Yeah. It's the faculty of belonging in a human person.

00:18:15.260 Faculty of belonging. And then you said personality. Is that like the ego, the self?

00:18:20.100 Yes. And it's what I call, I call it the strategic mind. It gets called all kinds of things. You know,

00:18:27.560 in the Eastern tradition, it's the monkey mind. William Blake actually called it Satan.

00:18:34.220 And, but it's only Satan when you put it first, when you think that the thoughts you have are you,

00:18:40.480 all the names you've given to your wife, to your children, to your intimate partner, to your work

00:18:45.340 are real. Yeah. And instead of letting your wife speak back to you in her own voice, instead of the

00:18:53.220 one you've thrown into her body through a kind of psychological ventriloquism, when you let your

00:18:59.440 child speak back to you as the person they are, rather than what you're trying to shape them into,

00:19:05.720 when you let anyone speak back to you in their own voice. I mean, this is a big thing around

00:19:11.220 gender nowadays to just allow people to be themselves, whatever they call themselves and

00:19:17.780 however they, what does it have to do with us, how they see themselves, except in the sense that

00:19:25.320 we should be curious about it in a real foundational way, in an invitational way. Who's this person

00:19:32.240 coming into my life now? Let them announce themselves instead of my, instead of my naming them.

00:19:39.200 Let my work start to name itself. Almost always we find we enter a vocation with, with certain very

00:19:48.000 simplistic goals and ambitions. And we find that it leads us in a, through the trials and humiliations

00:19:58.040 of a career path to, to its true essence. We almost always come to understand the true essence of a work

00:20:06.480 through, through, through humiliation and through a certain kind of outer failure.

00:20:12.000 Yeah. And I want to talk, dig deep into that because you have, you have some great

00:20:14.980 pros and insights about that, but also you mentioned that people go in with simple and sort of

00:20:21.340 sometimes pure ideas of why they started a career. It's very soulful, but then eventually for some,

00:20:27.640 for some, whatever reason, personality can take over, right? You forget that, that soulful reason why

00:20:33.600 you joined. I mean, I know this happens to a lot of attorneys, like some attorneys, they go to law

00:20:37.260 school thinking, well, I'm going to, you know, do some sort of social justice, environmental justice.

00:20:43.280 I'm going to help the elderly. I'm going to help, I'm going to do a cause. But then they get to law

00:20:46.980 school and they realize, oh my gosh, I have so many student loans. I can't, I can't pay them off,

00:20:51.900 you know, working as a public defender. So I might as well take that corporate gig because I got to do that.

00:20:56.580 Yes. Yeah. George Eliot, the great 19th century writer was brilliant on this slow process of

00:21:04.980 disbelief and disappointment and giving up on what was not just an ideal, but was something that

00:21:11.340 lived in the very real way inside you. So keeping your soul alive is incredibly important. It's very

00:21:19.380 difficult in the American system. You know, French doctors, if they qualify, and it's very hard to

00:21:24.960 qualify even to study, to be a doctor, you know, but if you make it, it's all paid for. So, so you

00:21:31.960 appear in the world and you, you don't have to pay off all of these loans. So idealism in the French 1.00

00:21:39.120 system is much, is much higher, which is a turnaround from the way we usually see, see the French. So part

00:21:46.780 of it is the systems we've made and the, and the, the burdens we place on young people. And we're

00:21:54.400 starting to reset, realize that societally. I know there's a movement to forgive student loans just

00:22:01.380 because of the way it's, it's just crushing a whole generation, but also the way it's actually

00:22:08.400 holding our economy back at the same time. There should be a way of letting yourself loose on the

00:22:15.000 world in your twenties where you're able to invite what I call to invite the right kind of peril.

00:22:24.760 Everyone in order to find their way has to invite the right kind of danger into their life. We all

00:22:31.460 know what it's like to invite the wrong kind of danger into our lives. And part of the, the difficulty

00:22:38.980 of the path of the human path is finding out what dangers you're supposed to call that are germane

00:22:47.360 to your future work. So Galapagos, I thought I was going out there as a scientist who would impress

00:22:54.220 everyone, you know, by taking people lecturing around the islands. That was the, that was the job of a

00:22:59.880 naturalist guide was to be a police man or woman and an educator at the same time. But mostly, you know,

00:23:08.260 you, the basic youthful image was of you being this immortal boy, God scientist who would tell

00:23:16.000 everyone what was going on. And it wasn't long before I realized I knew, I knew very little of what

00:23:23.760 was actually going on. And that this place not only was way beyond what I could understand, but it

00:23:32.320 also terrified me. It terrified my scientific naming identity. And it terrified me as a, as an immortal

00:23:40.700 young man, because I was put in physical touch with death on a daily basis there, whether it was above

00:23:49.720 water or below it. And many times because we were living on this death dealing medium called the

00:23:57.020 ocean a day after day after day where things go wrong on a regular basis, you know, I felt that threat

00:24:05.740 against my physical person too. So, but I had unconsciously, I think, taken myself to that place in order

00:24:17.280 to emancipate myself into the understandings and qualities that would actually make me a decent

00:24:28.500 poet and, uh, and out of that, uh, a philosopher to a human philosopher.

00:24:34.720 Well, let's dig into this idea more about finding the right kind of peril, um, because in your book,

00:24:39.460 The How to Rouse, you have this great chapter where you do this mythopoetic exploration of the poem

00:24:43.980 Beowulf. Now, I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this, men who are listening to this,

00:24:48.640 they've, they've read that poem and it's something that it resonated with me. What's not to like about

00:24:53.000 it? You got these, you know, monseline monsters. You do this exploration of how this poem can be used

00:24:58.900 to help men in particular, I think, explore the fear of bringing soul into their work. So what do you

00:25:06.640 think, what insights can we get from Beowulf on how to bring more soul into whatever work we have?

00:25:11.580 Well, the particular story I work with is when Beowulf is called to the court of King Hrothgai,

00:25:19.260 Denmark, because, um, at night, you know, after the feasting is over at two o'clock in the morning,

00:25:26.680 after the gold and the silver and the horses and the land has been given out to all the champions and

00:25:32.600 families that are loyal to the king, something awful, green, monstrous and dripping comes out of the

00:25:39.680 local swamp, breaks down the stockade gate, fights off the guards, shatters the doors of the hall,

00:25:48.220 makes its way into the hall and carries off a young man and young woman every night back into the swamp

00:25:56.100 where it eats them alive. It's a very, very powerful image. And Beowulf invites himself

00:26:04.620 to confront this monster. So here's this warrior, this received understanding of what it means to be

00:26:13.040 a man. You know, when the, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. This is a John Wayne of the,

00:26:20.160 uh, of the sixth or fifth century AD, but it's also the threshold whereby Beowulf is now going to

00:26:29.640 step into his inner life. What rises out of the swamp is everything that has, is, has not been

00:26:40.160 confronted in the upper world. And it's really interesting that the story is quite specific,

00:26:45.900 that this monster who is known as Grendel carries off a young man and young woman into the swamp where

00:26:54.940 it devours them. So whatever has not been faced, whatever you have not spoken to, you know, as you

00:27:02.820 said, you know, you start off with this beautiful, precious idealism as a young doctor or a young

00:27:08.960 lawyer, and the weight of the world comes down on you and you say, it's not possible for me to have

00:27:14.800 that conversation. And in fact, that conversation makes me feel uncomfortable and I don't know what

00:27:20.620 to do with it. Therefore, I'm going to push it away. I'm going to ignore it. It's all very well during

00:27:27.740 the lighted hours of the day when you can use your willful strategic mind to keep those powers, uh,

00:27:34.480 underground, you know, under the water. But at two o'clock in the morning, and this is very specific

00:27:40.760 in the poem that it's in the early hours of the morning, which is, you know, from a medical and

00:27:46.920 scientific point of view is when your system and your, your psychological system and your immune system

00:27:54.180 is at its lowest ebb. That's when this powerful, monstrous form comes up and devours the young man and

00:28:04.640 young woman in you. It's in many ways, it's devouring your youthful innocence. So we tend to 0.98

00:28:13.180 think of innocence as something that is supposed to, through the processes of maturity, be replaced

00:28:19.360 by experience. Yeah. And we pride ourselves on once having been innocent, but now we're experienced here.

00:28:26.800 And so we don't get into so much trouble anymore, but you know, a sharper understanding, say William Blake's

00:28:33.660 understanding. He saw William Blake, the great poet and engraver of the early 19th century, the early

00:28:40.720 1800s. He saw innocence as a kind of faculty that was never supposed to be replaced by experience.

00:28:49.600 Actually, innocence was supposed to take on experience as a good servant to its initial

00:28:58.740 understandings of how it could perfect itself in the world. And so this is, you know, this is what is

00:29:07.480 most precious coming up from the swamp, you know, breaking in through our assiduously joined defenses

00:29:17.300 on the surface and carrying off the young man and young woman inside us. Yeah. And the way we feel that is

00:29:25.440 we lose our joy. We lose our sense of humor. We, we lose our ability to, to kick our heels together and

00:29:34.400 dance. Yeah. We've all seen the difference between a young calf, you know, in a field, or at least I have,

00:29:43.640 you know, having spent a lot of time out in rural England or a lamb, and then seeing the stolid cow

00:29:50.380 that it becomes or the stolid sheep, just chewing, looking vaguely off into the distance that happens

00:29:57.220 to so many of us as human beings. The fire that you had has been extinguished, but actually

00:30:06.020 you are the one who has extinguished it as much as any dynamic you've run to, run into it in the

00:30:17.340 world. Yeah. And part of it has to do with the closing off of our vulnerabilities. I do think that

00:30:23.180 the ability to understand our vulnerabilities, to live in them physically and not close them off is,

00:30:29.680 is intimately connected to our sense of robustness in the world. Yeah. When you're just an armored

00:30:36.260 personality trying to be right all the time and trying to smash everything that tells you that

00:30:41.940 you are, you might be wrong. We close off this innocent, invitational, intimate, uh, instrument,

00:30:53.560 you know, which is able to bring so much joy, not in only into our own lives, but into those

00:31:00.220 that we meet. Yeah. And poetry, poetry is meant to speak to this part of you and create a kind of

00:31:07.100 divine discontent. And I have a piece where, you know, it's, it's kind of addressing and inviting

00:31:14.200 this part of ourselves. It's called start close in, start close in, don't take the second step or the

00:31:21.300 first. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to take. Start close in. Don't

00:31:27.840 take the second step or the third. Start with the first thing close in, the step you don't want to

00:31:31.960 take. Start with the ground, you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin

00:31:38.800 the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people's questions. Don't let them

00:31:46.520 smother something simple. To hear another's voice, follow your own voice. Wait until it becomes an 0.91

00:31:56.220 intimate, private ear that can then really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step. You

00:32:02.720 can call your own. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Don't follow someone else's heroics. Be humble.

00:32:11.120 Start close in. Don't take the second step or the third. Don't take the second step or the third.

00:32:20.820 Start with the first thing close in the step you don't want to take.

00:32:28.480 And going back to the Beowulf, that's what Beowulf did. Like he, you know, something about that before

00:32:34.320 that entrance, before he gets to the lake, he, he's given armor, a helmet from, you know, the king. So here's,

00:32:40.520 this is going to help you. And he has to get rid of it because it's, it's no use down there when he

00:32:44.760 goes to kill Grindle and any weapon he had that was given no use. In fact, he had to find a weapon

00:32:50.900 down there that ended up slaying the monster. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And yes. So it's this

00:32:59.280 radical simplification and this going down to a place where you feel you can't breathe.

00:33:06.320 And it's interesting how the people of Denmark, you know, that we missed a part of the story where

00:33:11.800 Beowulf actually confronts Grendel when he comes out of the lake, defeats him, you know, and Grendel

00:33:18.340 stumbles back into the lake, leaving a bloody wounded trail behind him, you know, and then they hear his

00:33:24.380 death cries there. So they think they're all free. And there's this great party starts up and they

00:33:28.880 celebrate Beowulf and his great, uh, his great feet and all his previous feats, you know, and the

00:33:37.060 party goes on all night and then Beowulf and his men go to another room. They sleep all the rest of

00:33:43.800 the night. They sleep through the day and they come back and they find the hall has been devastated again.

00:33:50.600 Something else has come out from the swamp, fought off the guards, broken down the door, carried off

00:33:57.820 another young man and woman, Grendel's mother. It's not the thing you fear. It's the mother of the

00:34:06.460 thing you fear. So when, when Beowulf decides to go down to the lake, he's going down to wrestle with

00:34:13.620 the, the very root of the problem, not just the way that it displays itself on the surface, but the

00:34:20.300 very, the very actual jointure and foundation of where this dynamic has come from. And there's an

00:34:28.620 interesting dynamic because the people of Denmark don't want him to go down into the lake. They say,

00:34:35.460 you've done your work. It's been great. You'd be here, take your horses, take your gold, take your land.

00:34:40.800 You know, we don't need you to go down there. Very. Thank you very much. Well, this is a very

00:34:47.000 common dynamic for consultants. When you go into a company and you're asked to come in to deal with

00:34:53.040 a presenting dynamic and you, you work with that and it goes away because almost everything does when

00:34:58.820 you go away with it. There's lots of, of research that shows if you just turn, change the lighting in

00:35:04.680 a room. Then a lot of difficult things will go away temporarily. Yeah. As soon as you start to

00:35:11.900 get towards the original dynamic that's been causing trouble in the company, everyone gets really

00:35:18.100 nervous. And almost always the management will say, that's great. You've done your work. I liked those

00:35:25.200 little changes. We don't need to actually address this. You know, it's too scary. It's in the

00:35:30.680 psychological area where quite often managers do not know how, they don't know how to navigate it.

00:35:39.740 Yeah. They have not had the psychological apprenticeship to the vulnerabilities and

00:35:48.200 difficulties of, of the human beings trying to work together to do something difficult. Yeah.

00:35:55.560 So I work, I mean, when I'm in the workplace, I work a lot with what I call the phenomenology of

00:36:02.380 conversation, which is just a fancy philosophical way of saying what happens along the way when you try to

00:36:07.820 have one, when you try to deepen it. Well, these things happen, these five things, these seven things

00:36:13.620 happen. And when you run into it, and particularly when you run into any of these frightening

00:36:19.840 milestones or phenomena, there's nothing wrong with it. And so I, and I have hundreds of poems

00:36:25.440 memorized. So I, I bring poetry in that illustrates in a very real, very physical way in the room,

00:36:32.020 what this looks like and why you're scared of having the conversation. And it's incredibly liberating for

00:36:39.480 people. And I, it's actually incredibly liberating for men because women have more of an innate

00:36:46.820 understanding of how conversations work. It's just that the inherited hierarchy quite often doesn't

00:36:53.220 allow them to display that knowledge. But men in the classic sense have this inherited sense that

00:37:01.700 yes, women are better at conversations, but I don't know what they do when they're, 1.00

00:37:06.140 when they're doing them much better than I am. You know, so men think having a real conversation

00:37:12.380 is all vague and woolly. So it can be incredibly invitational to men when they discover, no,

00:37:20.880 actually you can understand the whole process by which you deepen a conversation. And here are the

00:37:28.260 illustrations. So Beowulf is a very magnified representation of what it's like when you get

00:37:34.040 down there into the difficult place. You know, there's, I mean, there's an incredible translation from

00:37:40.260 the 1960s from a man called Burton Raffel that describes the hard place where you have to go to

00:37:48.640 have that conversation. And it's in the image of this pool where Grendel and his mother have lived for

00:37:57.920 centuries here. They call the huge one Grendel. If he had a father, no one knew him. Or if there were

00:38:06.400 others before them, hidden evil before hidden evil, hidden evil before hidden evil, they live

00:38:11.880 in secret places, wolf dens, where water pours from rocks then runs underground, where mist steams

00:38:18.540 like black clouds and the grows of trees hanging out over their lake are all covered with frozen spray

00:38:25.560 and wind down snake-like roots that reach as far as the water and help keep it dark. At night,

00:38:33.760 that lake burns like a torch. No one knows its bottom. No wisdom reaches such depths. A deer hunted

00:38:45.600 through the woods by packs of hounds, a stag with great horns, though driven through the forest from

00:38:52.340 faraway places, refuses to save its life in that water, prefers to die on that shore. It is not far from

00:39:02.020 here, nor is it a pleasant spot. It is not far from here, nor is it a pleasant spot. I always say you

00:39:11.300 can you see the English were into understatement even 1200 years ago being recited. But there's the

00:39:18.480 image of that stag dying on the shore, refusing to save its life in that water. That's the image of

00:39:27.400 masculinity which refuses vulnerability. There's nothing more masculine than the image of the stag with

00:39:34.960 the great tines, you know, against the sky. This story is saying, you know, whatever powers you have

00:39:43.420 in the outer physical world, their writ will not run below the surface of this lake.

00:39:50.920 And the deer will, you will die on the shore pursued by hounds. But Beowulf has something else. Beowulf goes

00:40:04.140 beneath the water and wrestles. There's this other image which I found incredibly puzzling to begin with,

00:40:11.820 and then incredibly useful. And that's this image of the trees around the lake feeding darkness into the

00:40:19.760 water. And I remember it was a beautiful image when I was first reciting this poem. I remember I was

00:40:25.960 working at AT&T, actually, out in New Jersey. And I remember they had a lake there with a fountain in

00:40:32.900 the middle. And after I'd worked with this poem in the morning with these executives, because they had a

00:40:38.360 difficult conversation to have. So this was a way of teeing up that conversation. I took myself around that

00:40:45.040 little lake with a little lake with a fountain. And I said, what is this image with the roots feeding darkness

00:40:51.020 down into the lake? I said, what's above the lake? We're above the lake here. Quite often, when we don't want to

00:40:59.440 have a conversation, we will actually feed darkness down into that theme to give us the excuse not to go down. And we do it

00:41:10.120 by saying, if I have this conversation, this will fall apart. If I have this conversation, I won't be able to

00:41:17.660 make a living anymore. If I have this conversation, these people won't respect me. If I have this

00:41:25.000 conversation, I won't have the same answers that I have now. I won't know where to go with it. So we

00:41:32.440 actually feed a kind of obscurity down there to give us the excuse not to go below the surface.

00:41:42.120 Somehow, Beowulf has this mature form of masculinity, which is actually the masculine joined with the

00:41:50.420 feminine of being able to make a friend of the unknown and make a friend of the darkness and go

00:41:58.840 down there to wrestle with Grendel's mother. So another thing that's hard for men with work,

00:42:06.220 so right there, there's that fear of those hard conversations is a fear. So you have to just

00:42:10.880 take that first step, go towards it. But then another thing you write about too with work,

00:42:17.500 particularly for men, is that a lot of men, they type their identity in their work.

00:42:21.560 Yeah.

00:42:21.900 Because that's what you're just kind of told from a boy, that you are what you do. Whenever you meet

00:42:26.780 some guy for the first time is like, well, what do you do for a living? But there's a lot of men who

00:42:30.540 can reach midlife or even they're 10 years into their career and they realize either I haven't

00:42:35.620 accomplished that much as I hope I wanted to, or it's been a complete failure, or I'm even in the

00:42:40.540 wrong career in the figuring this out in their forties, fifties. What insights have you, do you think

00:42:47.160 poetry can provide men who have that sort of heartbreak or sort of that realization that

00:42:52.920 their aspirations they had didn't work out the way they thought, or are they actually

00:42:58.080 doing the wrong thing?

00:43:01.780 Yeah, very good question. I think first of all, we have to contextualize this image of the classic

00:43:06.920 male and work and labeling themselves, because it's actually very magnified in North America,

00:43:15.040 way beyond many other cultures. If you're in Ireland, it can be sometimes impossible to find out

00:43:20.500 what a person actually does. They won't mention it actually, and it's seen as being very, you know,

00:43:26.200 closing a conversation down to do it or to name things too much. So there are lots of conversations

00:43:33.200 around work that are not held in the way they're held in North America. But what you're describing is

00:43:39.220 very North American male, and I think it just had to do with the way that the psyche was formed over

00:43:47.580 the last few hundred years and the struggle that was involved, you know. And I think the armor that

00:43:56.500 had to be put on psychologically in all of the dark things that were done to make a new society in North

00:44:04.500 America. So all of this has created a kind of isolated masculine identity in North America that I do

00:44:15.720 believe is breaking apart now in that we're, and I do think, you know, this elevation of this malign form 1.00

00:44:23.080 of masculinity into the White House is like a last ghost dance of that masculinity. We're seeing our

00:44:32.820 flaws crystallized, you know. We're seeing what is what we don't want, you know, written across the

00:44:41.100 heavens so that we can recognize it. And so the ability to have friendships outside of the workplace

00:44:52.220 is really, really important. It's representative of a much larger musical chordal ability of the

00:45:02.020 masculine soul, you know. One of the things I noticed coming to North America from Ireland and England was

00:45:07.540 that, was that American men mediated their emotional life. I'm talking about heterosexual men now,

00:45:16.440 but American heterosexual men mediated their emotional life through their wives or their girlfriends,

00:45:24.700 actually. And though they had close friendships when they were growing up at school with other men

00:45:30.020 and close friendships in college, it seemed to be something that was discarded once you went into

00:45:38.760 the workplace. This is not the same dynamic that you find in Europe. You know, there is a much more

00:45:46.040 powerful thread of adult male friendship in Irish and British society and probably in a lot of other

00:45:53.500 European societies and other societies around the world. I'm just speaking about the ones I'm

00:45:57.400 really familiar with. Yeah. So there, out of that comes a kind of isolation for the American male,

00:46:07.000 the Canadian male too, I'd say too. A necessity to keep reinforcing this perimeter that they've made

00:46:16.560 around them. One of the invitations in a really good friendship is to a kind of sense of mutual humiliation.

00:46:26.140 Yeah. When you have a close friendship over years, you will always humiliate yourself before your

00:46:34.360 friend. And you will always have to pick yourself up and reconstitute the relationship and they will do

00:46:42.640 the same thing. The other thing is in a long friendship, you will always insult your friend.

00:46:49.540 You will actually say something to them that they didn't want to hear. Almost always accidentally on

00:46:58.100 purpose, something that you've wanted to tell them that you haven't been able to tell them.

00:47:02.660 And then they get insulted and they walk off. But because the friendship has lasted for years,

00:47:09.000 by definition, they came back actually, and they forgave you. And you would have had to have done the same

00:47:16.500 thing to them. A really close male friendship keeps you connected to your sense of forgiveness,

00:47:25.880 of mercy, and of vulnerability in the world. When we lose that sense of comradeship, and we all know

00:47:36.400 the way, you know, one of the great things about, I mean, men come under a lot of pressure and a lot

00:47:41.220 of criticism right now. And it's just our time to take it, you know, in history, because the shoe's on

00:47:47.040 the other foot now. So we just have to take it. But one of the great things about masculine company

00:47:53.160 and companionship is this beautiful, when it's done right, you know, not in a sense of hazing, but this

00:47:59.200 beautiful sense of mutual humiliation, of having to have a sense of humor about yourself.

00:48:05.820 Yeah. But the people who are humiliating you, if they're good friends, have your best interests at

00:48:15.820 heart at the same time. They're doing it because you're getting far from yourself. You're pretending

00:48:20.560 to be someone you're not. You're getting above yourself, you know. And they're trying to bring

00:48:25.500 you back to a more grounded relationship. They're also trying to bring you back to what your gift

00:48:33.860 might be that they haven't yet received yet, but that they intuit is there. So one of the great

00:48:41.540 things about male friendship is robustness, you know, the ability to take knocks, to be humiliated

00:48:48.560 in one another's company, and to forgive one another at the same time through the natural

00:48:54.440 difficulties and distances of friendship over time.

00:49:00.000 So it sounds like one of the ways you build robustness into the inevitable setbacks, failures,

00:49:06.820 heartbreaks you experience at work is to foster, to nurture those friendships outside of work.

00:49:13.000 Yes, exactly. And that's representative also of a greater friendship with the natural world too.

00:49:19.180 You know, one of the great tragedies and diagnostics of a narrowed work life is when you,

00:49:25.720 when you stop sailing, you know, when you stop going out and climbing or being in the mountains,

00:49:33.620 when you stop enjoying the sky or the trees, you know, when you stop adventuring because you don't

00:49:41.620 have time for it or you can't find that person inside you, you know. So friendship with another

00:49:47.060 person, if we've lost those friendships, it's almost always, I feel, representative of having lost a

00:49:54.060 greater friendship with natural creation at the same time.

00:49:59.140 Because you're, it's, you're going back to this idea of like, it's, you're, you're looking,

00:50:03.880 you're exploring the conversational nature of reality, and it's hard to have a conversation

00:50:07.820 with just yourself.

00:50:09.720 Yes. Yeah. And as we're coming towards the end of our, of our conversation here,

00:50:16.140 a real conversation always ends up with your physical and psychological breakdown. I always

00:50:25.020 say no one survives a real conversation in the manner to which, and it's why men won't have them

00:50:33.120 in a, in a relationship or marriage when they're young, because their identity is so connected to

00:50:39.100 the perimeter they've set up, uh, saying, this is me and this is not me. Yeah. Partly for evolutionary

00:50:45.660 reasons, you know, but the journey of a male into maturity is, is learning how to be broken down,

00:50:53.620 how to have a good sense of humor about it, how to know that there's always someone waiting for you

00:51:00.080 on the other side of that atomization, on the other side of that pulling apart. There's someone

00:51:08.040 calling to you and inviting you into a deeper understanding of what it means to be fully

00:51:15.160 male. Yeah. Which of course has to do with understanding the deeply feminine parts of 1.00

00:51:22.600 yourself that you've kept at bay. That's what Beowulf had to do. I'd say so. Yeah. Well,

00:51:29.160 as we end this conversation, is there a poem or a prose that we could end with that you think kind

00:51:34.080 of kind of touches on the themes we've been hitting, talking about today?

00:51:38.040 Yes. There's a poem called The Bell and the Blackbird. And this really has to do with the

00:51:45.420 unification of the inner and the outer worlds, you know, the bringing together of the masculine 0.91

00:51:51.060 and the feminine in many ways. And The Bell and the Blackbird is actually a, um, a kind of meme in

00:51:58.100 the Irish tradition. It comes from the story of a monk standing at the edge of the monastic precinct

00:52:04.520 back in, you know, there's a, a really remarkable form of Christianity extant in Ireland between

00:52:10.460 the fifth and the 10th centuries. It was called the Irish church or Celtic Christianity. And they had a

00:52:17.460 really incredible relationship with both their inner world and the natural world outside.

00:52:24.120 They didn't see the natural world as being competition to believing in, in their religion,

00:52:30.420 you know. So here's this monkey standing on the edge of the monastic precinct. He hears the bell calling 0.97

00:52:36.200 him to prayer. And he says to himself, that's the most beautiful sound in the world, which is the,

00:52:41.560 the call to the inner world, you know, to becoming more generous, a bigger person also, you know,

00:52:47.400 a large foundation. But at exactly the same time, because nothing's straightforward in the Irish

00:52:54.360 tradition, he hears the Blackbird calling from outside of the monastic wall. And he says to

00:53:00.960 himself, and that is also the most beautiful sound in the world, which is the world calling to you

00:53:09.320 just as it finds you. The physical world as it is with no changes, nothing. You've just got to meet it

00:53:17.400 as you find it, yeah. So this is the piece I wrote dedicated to that ancient Irish meme,

00:53:24.140 The Bell and the Blackbird. It's also the title poem of a collection I have of that name,

00:53:29.680 The Bell and the Blackbird. The bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating,

00:53:38.800 the sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field,

00:53:43.740 asking you to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell

00:53:53.640 still reverberating, or a blackbird, a blackbird calling from a corner of the field, asking you

00:54:01.580 to wake into this life, or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. Either way takes courage.

00:54:13.980 Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all. Wants you to walk to the

00:54:22.320 place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach

00:54:30.060 that is also the meeting itself, the approach that is also the meeting itself, without any meeting

00:54:38.380 at all. That radiance you have always carried with you. That radiance you have always carried with

00:54:47.180 you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world

00:54:56.260 crying hallelujah. Well, David White, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for your

00:55:01.880 time. Lovely. Thank you, Brett. Wish you well. My guest today was David White. He's a poet and

00:55:07.820 philosopher and the author of multiple books. They're all available on amazon.com. You can find

00:55:11.500 out more information about his work at his website, davidwhite.com. That's w-h-y-t-e dot com. Also,

00:55:17.220 check out our show notes at aom.is slash white. We can find links to resources. We can delve deeper

00:55:21.680 into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website

00:55:33.380 at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written

00:55:37.520 over the years. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on

00:55:41.420 Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free

00:55:45.960 month trial. Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you start enjoying ad-free

00:55:50.680 episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take

00:55:53.900 one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done

00:55:57.660 that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you

00:56:01.520 would think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support.

00:56:04.820 Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what

00:56:09.200 you've heard into action.

00:56:20.680 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - December 09, 2020

Bringing More Soul (and Poetry) Into Your Work

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript