Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge

Innocence and Experience in Corporate America

The soul’s journey, even in the most faceless corridors of a large corporation, is the winding downward path into a depth of experience where our aloneness and intimacy with others are held to be indivisible.

Photo: © David Whyte

“If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.” —William Blake

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Whenever we try to speak up in the organization we reveal the precarious balance of innocence and experience in our voice. Too much innocence and we are sensed as “dangerous idealists,” too much experience and we may sabotage everything we touch with a practiced cynicism. The corporate world is a marvelous touchstone for the troubling subjects of innocence and experience. Corporations trigger many of the struggles we experienced in youth with regard to our parents. In corporate life, innocence has to do with making our own way in the world, whatever the odds stacked against us; experience has to do with learning and understanding the power relationships that dominate our organizations. The organization is at once the larger body that allows the individual to achieve things that are beyond his or her powers alone and the parent who tells the child exactly how things are going to be. The organization both dispenses power to the individual and renders that same individual powerless. What kind of creative life can hold a bridge between the two without caving in to the engulfing parental system or leaving in anger to find supposedly greener pastures?

This is not a question confined to modern work life. Men and women have been riding out the contrary seas between the passions of innocence and the seductions of security for millennia. There are many old stories and much poetry that deals with this dilemma. At the heart of the dilemma is the way we set up our younger passionate selves against our older knowledgeable selves and our hard-won wisdom against the innocence that revealed that wisdom to us in the first place.

One of the finest stories grappling with the balance between innocence and experience comes from the Irish tradition. It was told from generation to generation for almost two thousand years in the great halls of the Gaelic nobility, but I have also heard it told breezily, almost conversationally, as if it all happened yesterday, in a small rundown pub in the west of Ireland—the story of Fioon’s strangely idyllic boyhood and his coming to maturity through his eating of the Salmon of Knowledge.

The Alienation of Innocence: The Soul at Risk

Fionn’s father, Uail, had been killed by his hereditary enemies, the sons of Morna. Now they wanted to put an end to Uail’s line and began the hunt for Fionn himself, Uail’s only son. That is how Fionn came to be raised by his mother’s two sisters, far from human dwelling, in the wooded wilds of the west of Ireland.

If we are discouraged by the alienation of the contemporary workplace, we might take comfort from a long-held belief that the soul’s journey begins when it realizes the true nature of its aloneness, that it has in effect been orphaned and must discover its true parentage. Amid the pressures and politicking of the corporation we ask the same questions: How did I get here? Do I really belong? What inner vision and purpose (or lack of it) brought me into this company? Realizing we are orphaned, we also come to terms with our need for the parental embrace of the corporation.