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Anurag Chauhan
The Prophet: Kahlil Gibran on Love, Life and Death in the Spiritual Journey of Humanity
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face. But you are life and you are the veil. Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Almost 30 years before, when Rabindranath Tagore compiled and published his Nobel-winning collection of poems “Gitanjali: Song Offerings”, which proved critical in fanaticizing the Orientalist perspective in the imagination of the west, a child was born in Bsharri, Lebanon who was about to revolutionize the language of poetry and the stream of philosophical thought in the coming years.
Gibran Kahlil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), simply referred to as Kahlil Gibran, was a born genius who mastered the fields of art like writing and painting starting at an early age. As a child, he came to Boston from Lebanon with her mother and settled there before going back to his homeland in 1898 for two years to study Arabic Literature at al-Hikma College in Beirut.
Gibran’s first works appeared in Arabic, which are seen as central to the development of modern Arabic Literature. From 1918, he wrote mostly in English and managed to transform the language of poetry in early decades of the twentieth century. His first book, Al-Musjqa (1905), was about music and was followed by two collections of short stories and a novelette in 1912.
"The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran
Artistic distinctiveness of Kahlil Gibran, relative to the other great poets, led him to thrash the walls of conformity and let the gentle breeze of a new kind of creativity flow into the evolution of art.
“The Prophet” (1923), Gibran’s most famous work that has been breaking the shelves of bestsellers since it was published in the last century, is a book consisting of 26 pieces of poetic prose. The Prophet, who has spent his last 12 years on a faraway land of Orphalese, feels a heavy heart as he now has to sail for his homeland. His steps to the ship are obstructed by the people of the town, who implore him to enlighten them on various aspects of life and the human condition.
He expounds on the subtleties of socio-political structures of human civilization, aesthetics and the spiritual nature of reality. And the emotional surface of the human mind and the breadth of the soul of the universe. And on the fundamentals of what constructs the existence of man and on how he perceives himself as a part of it. On love, life, and death.
Let not the waves of the sea separate us now, and the years you have spent in our midst become a memory. You have walked among us a spirit, and your shadow has been a light upon our faces. Much have we loved you. But speechless was our love, and with veils has it been veiled. Yet now it cries aloud unto you, and would stand revealed before you. And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Kahlil Gibran’s craft as a writer and a painter, exudes the light of his finesse to great stretches of space and time in his ability to first dissect and comprehend the complex anatomy of the human mind and soul.
And then, cloth it up in the majesty and the beauty of his language, which looks like a small brook of the elixir of life and beckons us to “some great reservoir of spiritual life which was so potent, powerful, and universal” as Claude Bragdon puts it.
I am a stranger to myself. I hear my tongue speak, but my ears find that voice strange. I may see my hidden self laughing, crying, defiant frightened, and thus my soul begs my soul for explanation. But I remain unknown, hidden, shrouded in fog, veiled in silence.
- "The Lonely Poet"
The Prophet: On Love
Gibran’s pen worked like a needle which sewed the tatters in the fabric of human thought and refined its colors to pop up in the heart of man’s conscience. His wit and wisdom enabled him to hone his hand in coating the bitter truths of life with the sweet sugar of emotions.
In “The Prophet”, his creative spirit draws enlightening speech on love that Al-Mustafa gives to the people of that city who are eager to know about it.
When love beckons to you follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.
…
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning. Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun, So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth. Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself.
Khalil Gibran talks about the nature of love and how it finds itself within the soul of man. He preaches to go upstream in the river of love despite the hardships it comes with.
Enclothed in his magical expression, Gibran quotes the same sense what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he said, "The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell."
The personification of love, that Gibran instils in his writings, allows us to feel closer to love as a quality of being and comprehend its subtle integration within our life, the way Freud refined our understanding of the origins of religion and man’s place in this vast frame of time and action.
He threshes you to make you naked. He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness. He kneads you until you are pliant; All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.
Kahlil Gibran, through Al-Mustafa, goes into the depths of clarity on the existence, perception and morality of love that is prevalent in man’s conception, and his extreme simplicity and understanding make his words like honey which lure everyone to taste that sweetness of wisdom.
Gibran’s wisdom and reasoning on love make us feel like being in extreme vicinity to it when observed closely, but at the same time, seems too far to even look at and recognize its shape and color.
He talks about the same sense of illusion that man observes within himself and the people around him. That great puzzle that takes many their whole life just to realize its existence and faint possibilities to solve it out.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love. When you love you should not say, ”God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.” And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
On the purpose of love, Kahlil Gibran talks of first dropping the conception of oneself and the identity of “I”. And making oneself eligible for the grace of love, for love is nothing but finding a corner in the heart of God itself.
The greatness of love is such that it subsumes everything it touches and transforms them into the boundless souls of compassion and selflessness. And it is not just about the selflessness in action, which becomes the consequence eventually, but first in the sense and sensibility of man’s heart too, that makes one perceptive to the greater details of life and creation.
“But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:”
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love; And to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and thanks for another day of loving; To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy; To return home at eventide with gratitude; And then sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
The soothness and serenity in Kahlil Gibran’s words enact as catalysts in the reaction of a love affair that goes in our minds while observing his art. The mere act of witnessing his work makes one fall in love with everything around them, and that is exactly what he preaches in the last part of the Prophet’s words on love.
That is to desire to blend oneself with the reality around, with what one comes in touch with every day and every time. To erase what we made as the boundaries between “ourselves” and the world around us, similar to what Rabindranath Tagore furthered as the philosophy of “universality and oneness” through his work and art.
To break away from the sense of superiority of our psychology and blow away the clouds of our thoughts from our eyes, so that we can realize the opportunity that we have got in the name of another day to meditate on love’s ecstasy and thank God for this gift of life and feeling of love.
The Prophet: On Death
Kahlil Gibran reflects on the human condition and the various fundamentals of life and death as people keep pulling up their curiosity from the echoing depths of their hearts.
As if it is the last day of their life, they want to know everything and set ablaze the blank paper of their mind with the fire of his knowledge before Al-Mustafa goes aboard the ship destined for his home.
Yet this we ask before you leave us, that you speak to us and give us of your truth. And we will give it unto our children, and they unto their children, and it shall not perish. In your aloneness you have watched with our days, and in your wakefulness you have listened to the weeping and the laughter of our sleep. Now therefore disclose us to ourselves, and tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death.
Then Almitra spoke, "We would ask now of Death.”
Gibran juxtaposes death with life with a salient peace and says that we may know death only if we peep into the heart of life. He calls death a secret, but in the sense as if it is a letter of truth eager to be opened, that it just has to be looked at with intense longing and in the right place.
You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
…
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
He quotes that life and death are not different entities but one, like the two faces of the same coin. One has to first dive into the sea of life to behold the beauty of death.
Kahlil Gibran also sheds light on the nature of human aspirations and desires when he says, “In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond…”. That our future plans are so fragile and short-sighted that we miss to recognize and see what is their eventual culmination, which is nothing but failure in the name of death.
They are all like the protective peels of the human heart that, as long as man is in the world, accompany him. But once he passes over to the next stage of life, or death, he has to shed off every dream and desire that he always lived and grew old with.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour. Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king? Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?
…
For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
Gibran explains with the analogy of a shepherd when he is being honored with the title of knighthood that his fear clouds/fogs up his vision and obstructs the light of truth from reaching his eyes. He sees death as nothing but a mark of the ultimate honor that we receive from the king of the universe, nothingness.
He delineates the nature of death as the state of being naked by letting the clothes of self-preservation fall away and letting our soul breathe into the elementary wind of life.
And to let this body of our characters that are nothing, as August Strindberg puts it, but excerpts from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, pieces torn from festive garments which have become rags - just as the soul itself is a piece of patchwork, melt away into its original form of beauty under the sun and dissolve into the heat of light to transpire the drops of new life.
To cease breathing, Gibran says, is to break the dam that resists the breath from flowing away into the grand ocean of infinity and become one with that endless glimpse of God.
Khalil Gibran further illustrates that,
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Gibran’s aesthetics beautifully carve out the incongruity between man’s beliefs and truth’s laws and how they contradict each other at every turn of man’s life. Death poses a matter of contradiction for man, which Gibran resolves with his knack for articulating distinctions between illusion and truth.
Perception of death, and so life, finds new paths to tread after listening to him. His simplicity of language and intensity of thought makes us more conscious about the obviosities in our life. It is like illuminating the dark corners of our minds with his light of wisdom.
Singing becomes meaningful, Gibran says, only when it echoes from the depths of silence; only when it dives into stillness, does it come out dynamic.
That when we achieve everything we want in our lives, and reach the peak of our desires and aspirations, we then start to climb into the gates of eternity.
And when we become devoid of our chariot, that is the body, the lord of the chariot, the soul, leaps into the battlefield and rains arrows in the open sky to claim its victory over life and death.
Read and contemplate on Francis Bacon's empiricist dissection of love in his essay "Of Love", and the experiential depth of love in the letters of John Keats that he wrote in his unfortunately short life.
Get your own copy of Kahlil Gibran's “The Prophet” from here.
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