The Dark Side of a Creative Artist

Robin Waterfield's persuasively argued, human-all-too-human, biography of Gibran is like none of the other hagiographies I’ve read of the revered author of The Prophet . In fact, it is curiously reminiscent of another biography of a very different man --Jame's Miller’s Passion of Michel Foucault. Both books, with authoritative confidence, paint a portrait of their subjects quite unlike what people expect, carefully exploding the myths surrounding, and created by, the philosophers in question. In reading these works, I'm reminded of these wise words by yet another philosopher, Pascal:

Man is neither angel nor beast. And, it is his misfortune that he who seeks to play the role of angel acts most like a beast.

Of particular interest to me is Waterfield's presentation of the formative influences on young Gibran. Certainly, Gibran was a Romantic (to a fault, perhaps) and yet, while the author asserts that the Lebanese artist/poet was a ‘tabula rasa’, the biographer still allows for a certain temperamental leaning towards this peculiar response to life and art. Of equal interest is the excruciating tension Waterfield portrays between the man and the myth as well as the thought-provoking notion of life as literature.

“I am a false alarm” he has Gibran cry out in the book's Overture.

In this I hear an echo from another writer I admire and who, like Gibran, I consider to be a formative influence, Kafka. “You overrate me. Your trust oppresses me … I am no burning bush … I am no light. I have merely lost my way among my own thorns. I am a dead end.” Gustav Janouch has Kafka say this in distress -after presenting him with a bound copy of 3 of his stories.

Likewise, the number of times Nietzsche despairs, and/or doubts himself, are only matched by his (just as often) violent attempts to assert, or over-compensate, himself. I make these parallels because I wish to emphasize the gulf between the person and the persona, which Waterfield references, as well as the gulf between the human and the enormity of his self-imposed task. Yet, in the uncharacteristically cautious words of Freud, I also realize that: before the creative artist, psychology must lay down its arms.

That said, Waterfield makes some sobering observations in his biography, such as when he writes of Gibran's: “monomaniacal and exploitative selfishness that he shares with creative people”, or his inability to empathize, his narcissism, manipulativeness, etc… all in the interest of his self-preservation. Ultimately, what emerges is, at once, a more real and complex character than has been previously permitted.

Most distressing for me are Gibran’s alternately pathetic, ridiculous and (perhaps) pathological ‘untruths’: “Should one tell a lie which does not hurt you nor anyone else, why not say in your heart that the house of his facts is too small for his fancies, and he had to leave it for larger space?” This Gibran confesses in his wonderful book of aphorisms, Sand and Foam.

To readers unfamiliar with Gibran's oeuvre, I recommend they counter the troubling effect of this biography with Gibran's elevating aphorisms in order to remember the intoxicating Higher Self and larger space that Gibran longed to inhabit. Longing, according to philosopher Heidegger, is the agony of the nearness of the distant. And, whatever his faults, Gibran certainly longed to cover that distance, between the real and Ideal, throughout his life and art. In fact, longing might be one of the most frequently used words/recurring themes throughout his body of work.

In the end, despite Waterfield's problematic relationship with the man Gibran, he concludes on this high note that we might all benefit from:

Would that we all turn our complexes … into sources of creative energy and strength!

Image: Kahlil Gibran, The Head of Orpheus