The Unreal Business of Poetry and Fairy Tales
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast that covers the side of business that cannot be automated through digital technology. Over the last several weeks, this podcast has had some harsh things to say about the present condition of business culture. I could summarize them now, but if you’re interested in hearing these critiques, you can listen to the previous episodes yourself.
From this point forward, I want to focus on the positive contributions humanity can bring to business. This week will focus on the strange insights offered in the form of poetry and fairy tales.
What poetry and fairy tales share that makes them evocative, and yet threatening, is that they are true without being true. If this sounds like unsuitable ground for any business to be built upon, consider the nature of data, the form of information that is dominant in business culture today. Data is often depicted as absolutely, unquestionably true. Data, we are often told, is made up of facts, and facts cannot be disputed.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is a distinction between data and the reality that it claims to represent. Data doesn’t exist naturally out there in the world. As artificial intelligence specialist Twain Liu has reminded us, data is a human invention, a cultural artifact that represents a particular social perspective. Data is ideological.
Every particular system of data is built upon a series of cultural presumptions, some acknowledged, but many others taken for granted. For the sake of making quantitative research practical, data is collected on a specially reduced model of reality. These presumptions and operationalizations are culturally formalized performances that are designed to gain the favor of social gatekeepers. So, data is a tool for telling stories about the world, for human purposes. All those numbers are actually used as symbols to represent ideas that are, inevitably, wonderfully, humanly, weird.
The point is that businesses are already reciting poems and telling fairy tales, every time they craft an analytics dashboard or look at a spreadsheet. What I am proposing in this episode is that people in business could benefit by developing the expertise of poetry and mythic storytelling in the classic sense, as well as in the analytic cultural tradition.
The current reality of business culture is deplorable. To be honest, I’m struggling with this. I’ve been working for a quarter century to try to support the conditions for business reform, only to watch things get steadily worse. It breaks my heart to see companies who could do truly wonderful things aim for the quick and cheap over and over again.
When things are as bad as they are right now, the last thing we should do is allow ourselves to become mired in the facts that already exist. In times like these, we need to escape the trap of what is by summoning the strength to imagine what could be.
Let’s start by considering what business could get out of crafting a fairy tale. The first season of this podcast contains an entire episode on storytelling, and I encourage you to listen to that episode. A fairy tale, however, goes further than a simple narrative structure or general approach to storytelling can. Matthew Burgess, in his work establishing creative spaces in television production, has identified a couple of the things that set this higher level of storytelling apart.
Matthew Burgess:
When you’re setting out to tell a story, you think you know what the story is, and then you go and speak to the people who are telling you the story, and then another story can emerge from that, and so you’ve got to be open to that possibility that you are not just shooting something word for word that you know already. You are setting up a loose foundation and here’s the kind of balanced point here that it’s got to be fluid enough, to be able to shift, and so that if the story that you don’t think is there is there, you’ve got to find what story is there. So, that involves some fluidity.
Language I think is the key, is when you are operating in a realm of ambiguity, establishing a common language. I suppose how it works in all sorts of subcultures and things like that is that you have a language which describes the things that other people might find impenetrable but you have a familiarity with.
Jonathan Cook:
Fairy tales aren’t just any kind of story. They are stories of the entry into realms of ambiguity, through the crossing of borders that are otherwise impenetrable. When in the world of faery, the human traveler becomes temporarily fluid, able to shapeshift into new identities that would in ordinary settings be unimaginable.
Do you suppose that business doesn’t believe in fairies? Take a look at the communications from Silicon Valley, and you’ll find all manner of fantastic beasts, including sentient robots and artificial intelligences that flow like ether, without physical bodies but able to control physical reality around the world nonetheless.
Let’s be clear about this: There is in reality no true artificial intelligence. There are no armies of conscious automatons ready to take human jobs. All that actually exists are complex machine learning algorithms that, as advanced as they are, break down routinely without substantial human assistance. The bots and cyborgs that are depicted by digital corporations as on the verge of actual development are in fact as remote and unreal as the mythical lands of the wee folk. They are technological make believe.
Anthropologist Yuliya Grinberg describes the idealized transhumanist covered in digital technology as a kind of imaginary, a folk creature that stands as a symbolic representation of the dreams of digital culture.
Yuliya Grinberg:
I think one of the mythologies that are being built around this image of a person who is going to be bedecked in wearable technology and supported by all forms of tracking tools and information monitoring systems.
I like to speak in the language of imaginaries, these kinds of ideas that are not necessarily visions of what the future will be like, but they’re reflections of what our current cultural anxieties and concerns are today.
Jonathan Cook:
Fairy tales are much more than stories told to children. They are maps to our relationship with the sense of magic in our lives. We don’t have to believe the magic that they speak of to be literally real, as if we were living in the Harry Potter universe. Magic is more a sense of unexpected possibility than something that comes out of the end of a wizard’s wand, and unexpected possibility is just what businesses need to break free from the trap of commodification.
Our understanding of where magic is to be found, however, is not stable. Traditionally, mythologies have been created over long periods of time.Rapid changes in dominant technology are now changing society at a faster pace than our folk wisdom can keep up with.
When he spoke with me about the search for meaning in commercial culture, the artist Mio Loclair remarked upon the impact of the startling pace of transformation in the machines that guide our behavior.
Mio Loclair:
No one is actually able to even be close to understanding the last 15 years. Not even close. Your phone is a dead stone like Narciss, a dead stone that you speak with. Not only because of the widespread lack of technical understanding, if you’re a philosopher, you can’t understand that. You can’t process. I can give you this phone and give you and your next generations of intelligent philosophers another thousand years to write beautiful myth about it to slowly try to capture this, but you won’t have this time. It will be not like this.
Jonathan Cook:
The idea that businesses can analyze and control the emerging stories of commercial culture is outdated. All the data processing power that we possess is inadequate to the task. If we engage the character of new technologies from a different angle that demands less control, though, the patterns of meaning may begin to spontaneously emerge.
The key is to let go of the idea of the story making sense on a first reading. A lack of knowledge, rather than a firm grasp of data, is the beginning of all good fairy tales. So, a fairy tale in business can begin with the simple act of asking: What if?
For example, what if Big Data was not an invention of our own time, but an ancient concept? This is the supposition behind the tale of Gwion Bach, a portion of the Welsh epic, the Mabinogion. It’s a fairy tale about the magic of poetry.
It began with three drops.
The first drop would hold the secrets of where he had come from, the second of where he was in the present, the third of where he needed to go.
This was the message the sorceress Ceridwen had received from her oracle, the Pheryllt, a book of poetry with more words packed together within its pages than anyone in the country had ever seen before. Mining the depths of the information it contained, she could discover the solution to any problem she faced.
In this case, the problem that she faced was her own son, Morfran. She had dreamed of sending him to Camelot to become one a knight of the Round Table, but the way he had turned out, she couldn’t imagine him ever being accepted by King Arthur.
The boy was hideous to look at. Even Ceridwen had to admit that. His face was like that of a wild animal, as was the coarse hair that grew all over his body. His voice sounded more like the croaking of a raven than that of a human being, and whatever he said seemed to be complete nonsense.
What Ceridwen didn’t know was that Morfran had been cursed by one of her rivals. He had a mind as beautiful as his appearance was ugly, and he composed brilliant verses representing wonderful ideas in clever form. However, under the dark spell cast against him, anything he said would be heard, understood, and then forgotten in an instant, replaced in the ears of his listeners with senseless babbling. So horrible had Morfran become as he grew that people in the court of Ceridwen had ceased even to speak of him by name, but only referred to him by the nickname Afagddu, Welsh for Utter Darkness.
Ceridwen refused to accept his condition. Consulting the Pheryllt, she learned of a way to magically change him from his current state into a beautiful, articulate and magically gifted young man.
Such a thorough transformation wouldn’t come easily, of course. To create the magical potion to give to Morfran, Ceridwen would have to gather all the right ingredients, and simmer them in a cauldron for an entire year. What’s more, only three drops of the potion would provide the desired effect. The rest of the brew would be a fatal poison. Along with the revelation of the magic formula came a warning: The cauldron will not cook the food of a coward.
A further difficulty was that Ceridwen couldn’t take an entire year to devote to this single task. She was an important noblewoman, and the wife of a big man, the Lord Tegid Foel. So, she outsourced the labor to a pair of nobodies: Morda, a blind old man too feeble to stand, and Gwion Bach, a young boy from a poor family with no social connections worthy of notice. While Morda kept the fire under the cauldron blazing, Gwion’s job was to continually stir the pot to prevent any portion of the potion from burning.
Gwion and Morda persevered in their duties for an entire year, but on the day when Ceridwen was to gather three drops of magic to bring to Morfran, a large bubble began to form at the surface of the liquid. As the boy leaned over the cauldron to take a closer look, the bubble burst, sending three drops onto the back of his hand. Without thinking, Gwion brought his hand to his mouth to cool the burn, and in doing so, sucked the entire magical essence of the potion into his body.
Instantly, all the brilliance and power that Ceridwen had sought for Morfran was given to Gwion. He found that he could see understand the past with more clarity, perceive present events beyond his immediate senses, and even grasp knowledge of the future. It all came to him with astonishing speed, as easily as taking in a breath of air.
The first thing that Gwion understood with his new insight was that Ceridwen was on her way to check on his work, and that when she arrived, she would be furious at the outcome of her project. So, he abandoned his place at the side of the cauldron, and began to run. Aiming for a hedge at the boundary of Tegid Foel’s compound, he bent low to the ground to obscure the view of any pursuers.
As he ran, a poem came to his lips:
Doubled on fours I count the earth
feet behind and feet ahead
tumbling into this unmeasured race
trackless across unhanded fields
the color of grass gone to seed.
As verse ran ahead of him, he found his arms extending, his thighs swelling, his ears stretching out behind him as he moved forward. He was, in fact, becoming a rabbit, using the potion’s powers of transformation for the first time. Faster than he had ever run before, he sped away into the brambles at the edge of the forest.
Not seeing what had happened, Morda kept adding wood to the fire, but without Gwion Bach there to stir it, the potion was beginning to thicken at the bottom of the cauldron, and held the heat of the flame in new, uneven ways. The imbalance grew until the cauldron cracked, and its contents flowed down into a nearby lake.
This flow of the ruined potion was so toxic that when Gwyddno Garanhir, a neighboring king, stopped an hour later to water his horses at a river flowing out of the lake ten miles away, his animals all immediately dropped dead.
When Ceridwen arrived at the cauldron, she understood right away what had happened, and she knew who to blame. Gwion was not the only one with magical powers of perception and transformation. Using her own gifts, Ceridwen saw where the boy had gone, and what he had become. Responding instantly, she changed herself into a greyhound and bolted into the forest, following the trail of scent Gwion had left behind.
She found him at the edge of a river, taking a drink of water to refresh himself. She was nearly upon him before he saw her. Turning his gaze to the rippled water’s surface, another poem came to his mind.
I have become a mouth
ever open in pursuit
speaking the truth of myself
in every wave through my body
drowning a cold scale in my buoyant return.
As these words hung in the air he fell into the water, not as a rabbit, but as a salmon, swimming with the current down toward the sea.
Ceridwen was not so easily eluded, however. She changed herself into an otter, and as fast as Gwion’s salmon swam, she was faster. At the edge of a waterfall, he felt her sharp claws feeling for his curved tail fin, and he leaped out of the river into the air. As he rose, his hooked mouth released another verse.
When I am bent out of this narrow gust
falling upward out of the world
I leave its curving course at my tail
where the water only thins.
I find it and beat my drink beneath me.
With these words, Gwion’s unending fall took him higher into the air changing his shape into that of a wren, soaring with the shape of his will.
Ceridwen changed shape to match him, becoming a falcon, beating its wings to rise up into the air. Turning, she saw her prey far below. She folded her wings tight to her body, and plummeted toward him at terrifying speed.
Gwion heard her shriek of excitement, though, and looking below him he saw a farmyard full of chickens pecking at the scattered grain left over from the harvest. Wanting nothing more than to disappear, he spoke these words:
Light in the light
plummets painlessly with the unrealization
that everything I have become
has been my undoing
planting me with a thousand sisters.
With this poem, Gwion transformed himself into a single grain of barley, and floated down to the ground to hide amongst the other seeds.
Ceridwen floated down after him, not as a falcon, but as a gigantic black hen, frightening all the other chickens away. Patiently, she scoured the farmyard, pecking up every single piece of grain, swallowing them with great hunger.
So it was that Gwion was finally consumed by Ceridwen, reduced to chicken feed. Her vengeance satisfied, Ceridwen changed back into her human form and began the long walk back to her estate.
Despite appearances, Gwion was not defeated.
Nine months after Gwion in the form of a grain of barley was consumed by the sorceress, Ceridwen gave birth to a boy whom she was certain was none other than Gwion Bach. For her entire pregnancy, she was determined to kill the baby, to finally accomplish the revenge she had begun the previous year.
When her new son was born, however, his identity as Gwion was simultaneously confirmed and preserved by his great beauty and wise eyes full of the understanding of one who had known and mastered magic long ago. During his gestation, Gwion’s powers had grown along with his new body, and as Ceridwen held a long sharp knife across the baby’s throat, the most delicious golden light emerged from within his face. Ceridwen gasped, dropped the knife, and was charmed. She was holding the fruition of her own magic in her hands.
Ceridwen could not bring herself to kill the baby, but her anger at the theft of her spell remained. So, she decided to abandon Gwion Bach to his fate on the waves of the Irish Sea. She placed him inside a leather bag, and cast the bag into the sea.
For nine days and nights, the baby in the bag floated on the salty waters, until Halloween arrived.
It was known in those times that Halloween was a day when fortunes might be reversed, when those who had bad luck might find a path into a more prosperous future. In particular, the people along the coastline believed that those who fished for salmon on Halloween would gather the best catch of the year.
So it was that Gwyddno Garanhir, still brooding from the poisoning of his finest horses, sent his son, Prince Elphin to tend the fish weirs along his coastline on the last day of October. Elphin was well-meaning, but every project that he touched turned to disaster, and his father worried what would become of the kingdom after his death. “Perhaps you will at least bring the people an ample meal, if you cannot serve them in court,” Garanhir told his son, and dismissed him.
All day and all night, Elphin wandered between the weirs, but found not even one fish. Only with the light of breaking dawn did he discover one catch: A leather bag snagged on one of his father’s traps.
Elphin opened the bag, hoping to find money or an object of worth that he could sell at market, but instead found a baby with a face that shone like a cloud barely concealing the sun. Newborn though it was, the baby spoke with a clear voice. “Prince Elphin, your worries will now cease. Do not be dissatisfied with your catch, for despair brings no advantage, and no one can see the true source of success.”
When Elphin arrived back at the castle, he hid the baby in his cloak, unsure of what others might think to see him with an infant in his arms. Thus, walking into the court, he earned the curiosity of all his father’s advisors.
“What have you brought me?” asked Gwyddno Garanhir.
“I caught no fish,” the prince admitted, “but I have brought something better to you.”
His father groaned. “Show me what you have,” he demanded.
So, Elphin unwrapped his cloak and showed the baby. The court erupted into laughter, and Garanhir hid his face in his hands.
“The depth of your ill fortune was never seen until now,” the king groaned. “Every year, we have had three days feasting from weirs at Halloween, but now we shall go hungry, thanks to your distraction with this baby, wherever it may have come from.”
Ignoring the uproar, Elphin lowered the baby to the floor, and it stood upon its thick legs, and walked forward across the cold stone to the feet of the king, silencing the entire court. Without a stitch of clothing on, the child stared into the eyes of the king, and declared in a voice that could be heard by all, “Though I am small, you shall find strength in me. On the foaming beach of the ocean, in the day of trouble, I shall be of more service to you than three thousand salmon, and I shall profit you more than any trap. My poetry was spoken from the cauldron.”
Then, from the baby’s forehead came a light so intense that it filled all the room with the feeling of standing on a hilltop above the wide open sea at noon on a summer day. The late autumn within the shadow of the castle walls gave way.
“Let him be named Taliesin,” said Garanhir, lifting the baby into his arms, “after the brilliance of his shining brow.”
From that day forward, Taliesin served as the top advisor to Gwyddno Garanhir, and to Elphin. He grew to become the greatest bard that England had ever seen, and ever would see, advising all the great leaders of his day, including even King Arthur, sitting at the Round Table.
Taliesin alone was unsurprised on the day when he saw, riding a gigantic steed through the gates of Camelot, Morfran the Utter Darkness, the other son of Ceridwen. Morfran had not only been invested with the honor of a knight of the Round Table, but became one of a special trio, the Irresistible Knights, named so because they could be refused nothing they asked for. Morfran had not become a member of the Irresistible Knights in spite of his awkward ugliness, but because of it.
Morfran had attained his status with no magical assistance from his mother whatsoever. After long years of being dismissed as a worthless fool, he had discovered his voice in the written word, persuading the powerful over a distance in space and time.
Years later, after the Battle of Camlan, in which King Arthur was killed by his bastard son Mordred, the Irresistible Knights were the only members of the Round Table to survive. It was Morfran who first committed the stories of Camelot to writing. To this day, we retell these stories, not really because King Arthur and his henchmen were so remarkable, but because the beauty of Morfran’s words made them appear to be so.
As for Taliesin, after that battle, he was never seen again, at least not in the shape of a bard.
The story of Gwion Bach is driven by Ceridwen’s hunger for transformation and acceptance. The emotions that fuel her drive to make her awkward son acceptable are familiar to anyone in business who has been faced with the task of revitalizing a failing brand.
Though the default in business is to push toward our goals in a straight line, the tale of Gwion Bach advises us to take a different path. Time and again, in times of great need, the story turns to poetry.
Poetry exists because, despite the immense number of words we have to describe and talk through our problems, our vocabulary is not enough to represent the subtle shadows that lie within our hearts. A business that seeks to practice true empathy in its designs should pursue the path of poetry.
Mykel Dixon, a bard of our own times, explains how poetry can provoke creative experiences that our rational minds can never summon.
Mykel Dixon:
It’s creating, crafting an atmosphere, an environment where they have no defense. There’s a guy called David Whyte. Have you ever come across his poetry? So, I’m a big fan. I was fortunate enough to tour with him up and down the east coast of Australia a few years ago. Lots of of quiet moments in cabs and before and after stage, and he calls good poetry language to which we have no defense, and this idea that when it’s that pure when the truth is so raw and revealing you cannot defend yourself against it. If we can create environments and experiences like that, most of the heavy lifting is done. The environment will work for you, and they will hear what they have been longing to hear.
Jonathan Cook:
The path to poetry in business is as indirect as poetry itself. Poetry isn’t something you can learn simply by sitting down and reading an instruction manual. In her own career, Fateme Banishoeib, who stands beside David Whyte as a voice of poetry in business, learned that poetry ferments over time.
Fateme Banishoeib:
My name is Fateme Banishoeib. I was born in Italy from a mixed family. My father is from Persia and my mom is Italian. I spent 20 years abroad seeking for what makes all of us human, my burning question, a question which I try to answer through poetry. How did I get to poetry? Well, that’s a long story. I think it’s the story of my life until now. My mom tells me that when I was a little child I would spend an entire afternoon just writing poems and I didn’t want to be bothered by anyone and I just wanted to be quiet, in solitude and in silence and writing. I was so little I could actually not know what poetry was. Of course, you know, parents and society, they start putting pressure on me and they start telling the story that you’re never going to make money with poetry, and I actually did forget. I literally did forget. Then I spent all my adult life not even remembering that I had this passion for poetry. I even did not read much of it. So forget about writing it. So growing up, I picked something that was as creative as poetry, and that was chemistry. So I became a chemist, a pharmaceutical chemist, got a PhD in an organic chemistry, and started my career in the pharma industry because I wanted to cure people. That that’s always been my core desire: Wanting to heal and cure people.
And then, I had a very tough moment in my life. That was a few years back, 2014. I was very close to a burnout if not fully into it. I had the job of my dreams, a very young executive a lot of authority, a lot of responsibility. I was actually living my dream, everything I had prepared myself to, and studied so hard, and I was not happy. Poetry somehow came back into my life. I started out of nothing writing again, like constantly every day. One day I actually went to a writing retreat, just for the sake of being in a quiet place, and on my flight back from this retreat actually wrote an entire book, my first collection of poetry: The Whisper.
I suddenly realized that I wasn’t living a life that I wanted, and through poetry I actually engage in a dialogue with my self and get deeper into my soul and all the parts of my soul that I had carved out until that point.
This whisper had to become a voice until I could speak it out loud, and then I remember one morning I was still in my corporate job I looked at myself in the mirror and just realized that I was right and told myself, “What are you waiting for?” I saw it. I saw it in my face that I was writing and that was the only thing I wanted to do, speak business in rhyme. That was the only thing I wanted to do and I wanted to do it full time.
Actually the last lie fell, the last illusion fell on the floor. I almost I had this vision. Yes, I’ve done a lot of work on myself on the inside. I needed the environment to change as well. Otherwise there was no point for me to get to that point. And then I realized that well, I need to help the environment to transform. I need to do something about it. Otherwise it’s just like a waste. And that’s when I said to myself, well, I’m ready now. This book can be published, and the rest is history.
Jonathan Cook:
Through her struggles, Fateme had learned that poetry isn’t just what we write. A poem transforms us through its creation as much as through its later performance. The importance of poetry comes from the way it brings experience from the world into shape as we write. The outcome matters, but the poem is the proof of the journey required to reach its strange insights.
Poetry is all about finding value in what is, in all objective analysis, false and misleading. It’s about holding multiple meanings in our minds, without choosing. It’s about silencing our professional minds to hear once again our most unrealistic desires and unanswerable fears.
Fateme Banishoeib:
I write from a very intuitive place, so I don’t sit actually there and say OK I’m going to write that many verses in that structure, in that form.
There is a lot of talking about creativity and innovation in business and the desperate need for creativity and innovation, and sometimes I wonder how are we going to do it, because creativity is not the process you can engage into just by saying or at will. It’s a practice, and poetry does support that. I had experience on myself and I see it every single time when I run workshop by the facts of engaging simply reading poems. So you can imagine what is the impact when people engage to the act of writing and poems. We literally tap into imagination.
It is often said when something is particularly beautiful that oh, it’s like a poem. When a picture is very beautiful, they say it’s like a poem or when something is particularly beautiful, we use it to associate it with poetry. I think that that’s what’s missing in business. We have lost the sense of beauty in business, and poetry brings it back.
To the ones who still resist them and say I’m not the poet, actually my answer is the same. I’m also not a poet. I’m a chemist. I have a PhD in chemistry. So, if I could do it, they can also do it.
Jonathan Cook:
People in business can become poets. In proof of Fateme’s point, at the end of last year I invited people in business to share poems reflecting their working lives. Their work was assembled into a book filled with the poetry of a new business.
It’s been said that talking about poetry is like talking about sex – not anything like the real thing. To close this episode, instead of continuing to talk about poetry, I want you to hear two of the poems from that book.
The first comes from Adam Smith. It is called Replaced.
In cold Chicago’s
dark before dinner December
I step swiftly down the street
to gather my groceries
at an automat
a cornerstore cleared of clerks
replaced at the register
by touchscreen tellers
Outside
I
stop
beholding a billboard by
Prudential proclaiming
“Robots can’t take your job if you’re already retired”
I stumble
It’s a joke
of course
a giggle for a generation
already at an age
to let go.
But what happens
after the Boom?
Fighting for gigs
we side hustle
nights without sleep
faking without ever making
our way out
of serial startups
our dreams drawn
leaner each time
we fail to sell
out to Google
until our bootstraps have broken
and we run out
of friends to kickstart
of angels to pray to
our elevator stuck
on the ground floor
held fast
by the sticky residue
of a thousand pitches
realizing too late
we have never played
ping pong in the office
never saw a unicorn
prance through the lobby
never grew to match
the ideas that scale
and have gathered nothing
for retirement
but a stream
of forgotten likes.
I look down
from the billboard to the blue
glow of the screen
I carry
with me wherever
I go
to discover
I have 36 new notifications
and
nothing
else.
The second poem is called Retention, written by Ricardo Soares.
I sometimes feel
as if I could
track the times
a heart raced
at the thought
of my bar code
upon the shelf
available on discount
for a limited time
only
generic
ticket price
peeling off
in the arid air
to reveal
the original
color
of the box
beneath
a reminder
of the illusion
at the heart
of my program
of customer loyalty.
This week, we traveled through some strange territory, but in next week’s episode of This Human Business, things get even more bizarre, as we explore the experience of time in the practice of business.
Thank you for listening, and as always, thank you to Meydan, who composed and performed the music that opens and closes each episode. The song is called Underwater, and it’s from the album For Creators.