We’ve all been in meetings or workshops that had an “icebreaker” question right? My wife’s answer to that leans on her heritage. There are two towns with her last name in Alsace-Lorraine: one in Germany, one in France.
My answer was always my education: “I’m a trained medievalist.” And without fail, people would ask me about it afterwards or in sidebars. The thing is, it is true. I wrote two theses about it. The first was on Thomas Malory, Chretien de Troyes, the Gawain Poet and Geoffrey of Monmouth. My master’s thesis was about Malory alone: “Corporate Chivalry in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur: Chivalric Guidebooks and a Fifteenth-Century Chivalric Ideal“
The funny thing is that this is still relevant even after 500 years. Before Shakespeare, English was kind of weird. But somehow, I got it easily. My undergraduate advisor, Edwin Craun, took me aside after a translation test for my medieval English class in my sophomore year to tell the that my score was the best he’d ever seen in 20 years. I’m not sure that still holds because I know two brilliant people who took those tests after me.
I found meaning in the words that most couldn’t parse. “Whan that Aprill with it Showres Soote” and “Siþen þe sege & þe assaut watȝ sesed at Troye,” read like song to me. And I got it. I found meaning in what looked very complex (because it was).
Now let’s get back to the master’s thesis: corporate chivalry. At the time, I was talking about a corpus as a whole. The entire society’s image of what it should be, including those outside of it. But, that word has taken on a different meaning over time.
Now I look as corporations and organizations and how to make meaning cohere within them. Structure and Meaning still mean things for them, but they lose them in a lot of noise.
My route has taken detours, through Wordsworth, Keats, Whitman, and Yeats, and it always comes back to the same thing. Finding meaning. I’ve written about Keats and “negative capability” recently. But Whitman may be even more instructive when taken with Keats: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Keats gives the capacity to hold the center. A casual reading of Whitman does not. Most organizations err on the side of the casual reading of Whitman. And they don’t even realize that Whitman was talking about a corporal view of American society. They are complex. And that complexity shows in their communication. Nothing coheres.
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