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The human heart cries out for help;
the human soul implores us for deliverance;
but we do not heed their cries,
for we neither hear nor understand.
But the man who hears and understands we call mad,
and flee from him
—Kahlil Gibran, The Voice of the Master1
One of my dearest dreams is this—somewhere, a body of work, say fifty or seventy-five pictures will be hung together in a large city, where people would see and perhaps love them. Oh it feels so good and so warm when ever I think of that.”2
Kahlil wrote these words to Mary Haskell early in 1913. Unbeknownst to him, Kahlil was on the threshold of his notoriety as an artist and writer when he returned from Paris. In New York City I decided to first visit the famous, now infamous and closed, Knoedler & Co. gallery on East 70th Street on the Upper East Side. Founded in 1846, it was one of the oldest galleries in the United States. During Kahlil’s time it was located on Fifth Avenue, and there he held his second major exhibition in New York. It was the most notorious gallery then to show his art. Centaurs, dancers, mothers, and children were his chosen motifs.
I had written the gallery director ahead of my visit, highlighting the fact that Kahlil had exhibited at their gallery in 1917, explaining I was writing a book on Kahlil and inquiring into the possibility of looking at their archives. I never heard back from the director and so decided to drop in unannounced.
The day of my visit, the gallery was in the midst of an exhibition of “The Red Paintings (1962–1963)” by the late Jewish-American artist Michael Goldberg, an abstract expressionist painter. A contemporary of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko, Goldberg came into prominence in the 1950s. It was quite a spectacular solo exhibition, his ten canvases large and rich in texture. I recall the prices ranging from $80,000 to $225,000.
While there I asked to see the director but was told he was unavailable. The attendant didn’t seem interested in the fact that their gallery had exhibited Kahlil’s work. I found myself perplexed by the lack of attention. Unbeknownst to me at that time, the gallery had already become a center of controversy in the art world and would soon shutter its windows and permanently close its doors amid rumors of selling forged paintings. Three former clients of the gallery ended up suing it for more than forty million dollars, arguing that they were duped into buying forged paintings that were attributed to renowned artists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Not long after his return from Paris to Boston, Kahlil began working on the manuscript for his first book in English, The Madman. After the grand scale of artistic stimulation in Paris, Kahlil soon found Boston stifling. Although not wanting to leave his sister Marianna, in 1911 he started to visit New York for long periods of time.
Kahlil’s spirituality continued to mature as he explored creative and moving ways to communicate through his writing. While pursuing his passion for painting, he continued to publish his work in Arabic, releasing a compilation of short stories and poems in 1914 titled A Tear and a Smile. “A Vision,” one of his moving short parables from A Tear and a Smile, describes a bird that has died of thirst in its cage near the banks of a stream. In a very real sense, Kahlil is discovering his own wings, realizing what is holding him down and searching for a way to communicate life and freedom to others with the gifts he was given.
In a short story called “Before the Throne of Beauty,” he wrote:
You fear the God of all gods, and attribute to Him envy and malice.
Yet what is He if not love and compassion?3
While Kahlil worked on The Madman, he began to demonstrate his natural gravitation to and admiration for eccentric individuals, artists, writers, and spiritual leaders, those often perceived as having alternative visions on life and spirituality—those “outside the norm” in the way they saw the world and communicated what they saw. In a letter to Mary, Kahlil wrote, “And what can I tell you of New York? . . . I have met many people [with] a saintly respect for art—people who are hungry for the beautiful and the uncommon.”4 During this time Kahlil met Irish poet and playwright and future Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats. Kahlil painted his portrait; Yeats’s friend, Lady Gregory, was impressed with the portrait and sat for him as well. Their paths would cross several times over the coming years.
With continued financial support from Mary and introductions to friends in New York, Kahlil was eventually able to move into a building in Greenwich Village at 51 West 10th Street, said to be the first in America to be built exclusively for the use of painters and sculptors. The building is no longer there and has been replaced with a modern and quite drab-looking apartment building. As I stood outside the entrance looking up at the structure, a couple came out to walk their dog and asked if I needed assistance, as a number code is required to enter. I responded by asking them if they had ever heard of Kahlil Gibran. The woman lit up, saying, “Of course; I have The Prophet upstairs!” However, they had no idea he had lived there and seemed astounded to learn that where their building now stood was once a hub for many of New York’s greatest artists.
It was a time of artistic stimulation and opportunity for Kahlil as his creative expressions developed. The arts and cultural life of the city inspired him. During the first part of the twentieth century, Greenwich Village itself was the heart of progressive, artistic, and political movements in the United States. In keeping with the theme of “the mad or reclusive monk,” he called his studio apartment “The Hermitage,” perhaps foreshadowing his increasingly solitary life as his best work began to emerge.
While he worked on The Madman, the world itself seemed to go mad. Weighing heavily on his mind were the tensions in Lebanon under the Ottoman occupation as the First World War loomed ahead. Kahlil began to see himself as somewhat of a “revolutionary” during this period. Through his writings he urged his people to remove the Ottoman yoke from their homeland. Later, during the war, he composed a public letter to Arab Muslims in which he implored Arabs, both Christian and Muslim, to combine forces against the oppressive Ottoman Turks.
One of Kahlil’s neighbors was a portrait painter named Juliet Thompson. Her father had been a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, and she herself was a devoted follower of the Baha’i faith. She lent Kahlil some of the works of Baha’i founder Bahá’u’lláh. Resonating deeply with his message of unity and spiritual truths held in common across religions, he told Juliet it was “the most stupendous literature that ever was written.”5
Having been to the beautiful Baha’i temples in New Delhi, India, Haifa, Israel, and Wilmette, Illinois, I can well understand what Kahlil felt. Each is seen as a house of worship for all peoples. The Baha’i faith believes in the unity of all people and faiths under God. Many around the world have been attracted to a faith that believes we all belong to one race, that all faiths share a common source and aim, and that God’s long-awaited peace is within reach. While I was living in Egypt, one of my neighbors was of the Baha’i tradition. Sadly, the Baha’i were seen as a threat to governmental, Muslim, and Christian leadership. Despite the fact that they were monotheistic, the government denied the Baha’i legal registration status as a religion.
Juliet hosted `Abdu'l-Bahá, the oldest son of the founder and the leader of the Baha’i at that time, when he visited the United States. She often referred to him as “the Master” and introduced Kahlil to him, asking him to do his portrait. Juliet loved Kahlil’s artwork and described it with appreciation:
His drawings were more beautiful than his paintings. These were very misty, lost things—mysterious and lost. Very poetic.6
The morning the Titanic sank on Tuesday, April 15, 1912, Kahlil, although deeply disturbed, kept his appointment to draw `Abdu'l-Bahá. He later wrote to Mary:
I went to sleep at 3:30 this morning. The air was so charged with the horrible sea tragedy that I was not able to go to sleep earlier. At 6:30 I was up. Cold water and strong coffee brought light to my eyes. At 7:30 I was with `Abdu'l-Bahá.7
As `Abdu'l-Bahá sat for Kahlil, they struck up a friendship. Kahlil later wrote of him to Mary:
He is a very great man. He is complete. There are worlds in his soul. And oh what a remarkable face—what a beautiful face—so real and so sweet.8
Later Kahlil told Juliet that when he worked on his book Jesus the Son of Man, he thought of `Abdu'l-Bahá throughout his time of writing.
In 1913 Kahlil met and drew Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, whom he came to admire, and was introduced to Jung’s analytical psychology. About this time Mary introduced Kahlil to the poetic writings of that year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. She gave him Tagore’s Song Offerings, a collection of devotional poems to the Supreme. Kahlil was much impressed with the deep-rooted spiritual essence of the work and its Eastern flavor. Tagore, whom Kahlil would also have the opportunity to meet some years later, was an imposing figure, with a long white beard and wild eyes, wearing robes, a sort of “ethereal Rasputin.”9
I have visited Shantiniketan in Bengal, India, the ashram founded by Tagore in 1901. Under Tagore’s leadership, it became India’s first university township and eco-commune. Today the lush greenery and beautifully designed campus is witness to Tagore’s vision for Shantiniketan to be a place of knowledge and universal spiritual brotherhood. Tagore profoundly believed that one’s sensory encounter with the environment was as significant as the mind’s inquiry into the world’s inner mystery. He entrusted the task of creating an aesthetic setting, reflective of this vision, to the then-renowned artist Nandalal Bose. As I walked through the property, passing mud-brick buildings, tree-lined streets, and frescoes, I sensed a distinct spiritual aura to the place, enhanced all the more by its profound simplicity. It was hard not to imagine, in the mystical quietness of the place, the great poet-seer himself, that Tolstoyan figure, walking among the banyan trees.
When The Madman was first released, literary critics and reviewers often compared Kahlil to Tagore, as a sort of Middle Eastern counterpart. The Madman was a concerted effort with Mary’s editorial assistance. It was again an example of how, together, they were able to touch sacred ground. The frontispiece of the book, titled The Three Are One, symbolized the actualization of their cooperative efforts.
As a child, growing up in the Qadisha Valley, Kahlil had visited one of the monasteries near his village where the “mad,” those believed to be possessed, were housed. Alexandre Najjar, the Lebanese novelist and contemporary biographer of Kahlil, writes, “The most striking spot in this valley is undoubtedly the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qoshaya, known for having one of the first printing presses in the East and where it was, until the last century, common practice to chain madmen to rocks in a deep, dark cave at the entrance of the monastery in the belief that their demons would be exorcised.”10
During my own childhood in Senegal, I remember seeing les fous (madmen) roaming the streets. They were often dirty, with matted hair, and usually stark naked. They seemed strange and dangerous to me as a child. Ironically, in popular African folklore, they are often viewed as seers, reminiscent of that wild biblical seer John the Baptist, who we are told looked as wild as the wilderness itself. Rodin, in a deeply moving sculpture that Kahlil no doubt saw while in Paris, captures the roughness and rawness of John the Baptist—wild-eyed, lean like a desert cactus, in picturesque costume on the bank of the Jordan River.
The childhood images of these outcasts stayed with Kahlil, and he once told Mary of an incident in which he admired the wisdom of a madman.
Once when I was riding with a companion we came upon a madman who was well known in all the country round as mad, but harmless. It was the time of year when all the people were busy, getting in the harvest. But he was standing on a rock—twenty or thirty feet above the road—where we were riding.
I called out, “What are you doing there?”
“I’m watching Life,” he said.
“Is that all?” said my companion.
“Young man, isn’t that enough?” said he. “Could you do better? I am extremely busy. I have spoken.”
Then he spoke no more. . . . I was thrilled through and through.11
In the midst of polishing The Madman to present to a publisher, Kahlil was also painting furiously for a December exhibition at the Montross Gallery on Fifth Avenue, a rare opportunity. Yet he felt a new phase of life was awaiting him. He wrote to Mary:
Early tomorrow morning I must help hang the pictures. In the afternoon there will be a crowd. Everybody wants to know if I am to be there. Perhaps I shall have to be there for an hour or so. But I shall not go again! I have finished those pictures and I am finished with them. They belong to the past. My whole being is directed towards a fresh start. This exhibition is the end of a chapter.12
Most encouraging to Kahlil at this exhibition was the presence of the reclusive sixty-seven-year-old American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Ryder was an eccentric best known for his poetic and metaphorical work and seascapes, and Kahlil admired his work and longed to meet him. The previous April he had written to Mary:
The big person in this country is Ryder. There is so much in what he has done. The man is the great thing. He’s very hard to see.13
Through some creative networking, Kahlil sent Ryder a prose poem written in his honor as a thank-you for taking time to see the work of a younger artist; this led to an opportunity of Ryder sitting for a portrait by Kahlil. Kahlil also mailed copies of this poetic tribute he had written in English to some of his friends. The rector of the nearby Episcopal church on West 10th Street, Church of the Ascension, even read it from his pulpit one day.
During the years of the First World War, Kahlil became active in raising relief funds to assist those starving from the famine and suffering resulting from the destitution that had befallen Lebanon. He also began hosting a weekly gathering of Arab literary friends, which they called “Arrabitah” (The Pen Bond), providing an opportunity for younger writers to discuss modern Arabic literature. The group became a prominent proponent of the Arab literary Romanticism movement. His lifelong friend Mischa, who would be his first biographer, arrived in the autumn of 1916 to join the young Arabic literary movement in New York. Later, Mischa and Ameen Rihani both became known for their significant contributions to the developing of Mahjar, the Arab immigrant literature movement.
The Madman, the first of what would be called Kahlil’s “little black books” to appear in English, was published in 1918 by Alfred A. Knopf, founder of a new publishing house in New York City. In recognizing the appeal of Kahlil’s aphoristic style, its publication inaugurated a new literary career for Kahlil, and he began drawing attention in the literary world. The Poetry Society of America read two of the longer pieces in The Madman, which led to a new admirer, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, a sister of former president Theodore Roosevelt. This in turn led to Kahlil attending and participating numerous times in poetry readings she held in her home.
As previously seen in the short story “Yuhanna the Mad,” the theme of madness resurfaces in The Madman, albeit this time with a new purposeful force. Kahlil portrays madness metaphorically, like a veil of protection as a result of not being understood on a deeper spiritual level. This veil of sorts can also be seen in many of his drawings, which are cloaked in mystery, subjects frequently with eyes closed, symbolizing spiritual blindness or the invitation to look beyond the superficial layer of life. Sometimes his artworks continue off the page, conveying in an imaginative sense that the full story lies beyond the surface of apparent vision. When someone asked him, “What is a mystic?” Kahlil is said to have smiled and replied, “Nothing very secret nor formidable—just someone who has drawn aside one more veil.”14
In a letter to Mischa in 1921 he wrote:
I say that madness is the first step towards divine sublimation. Be mad, Mischa. Be mad and tell us of the mysteries behind the veil of “reason.” Life’s purpose is to bring us nearer to those mysteries; and madness is the surest and the quickest steed. Be mad, and remain a mad brother to your mad brother.15
Spiritual freedom comes from within, never from without.16
As I looked at the many books that made up Kahlil’s library, now all on display at the Gibran Museum in Bsharri, Lebanon, it was clear that he remained fascinated with the theme of madness and its spiritual imagery. On the shelves were Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic The Idiot, Leo Tolstoy’s The Story of Ivan the Fool and Memoirs of a Madman, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and works of the great Russian authors Pushkin, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Bulgakov, all of whom explore the theme of madness in their writings.
Prince Vladimir Odoevsky’s great work of essays and novellas, Russian Nights, sits prominently on one of the shelves, containing that provocative query about “insanity.”
Isn’t the exalted state of a poet, or an inventor, closer to what is called insanity than insanity is to an ordinary animal-like stupidity? Isn’t what we call common sense a highly elastic term, a term used by an ordinary person against a great man who is incomprehensible to him, and also by a man of genius to cover up his reasonings and not to frighten an ordinary person with them?17
Kahlil owned numerous books on William Blake, whom he saw as his mentor through his art and poetry. One book in particular that I picked up and opened, The Art of William Blake, was obviously gifted to him, inscribed on the title page, “To Kahlil Gibran, 1926.” A passion for the “heart of the matter,” and living from within, is infused into all Kahlil’s work, reminiscent of Blake, yet whose work is more apocalyptic in nature than Kahlil’s.
I shall be happy when men shall say about me what they said of Blake: “He is a madman.” Madness in art is creation. Madness in poetry is wisdom. Madness in the search for God is the highest form of worship.18
Blake was widely seen by most as mad when he died in 1827. The primary reasons for his being labeled “mad” were the bizarre visions he received and his habit of speaking quite naturally of spiritual visitors. Blake would offhandedly mention in a conversation that he had been speaking to Milton, or another dead poet or king. And he said he experienced romantic visions, such as sculptures of sheep in the middle of a field.
Blake actually had these visions as a child. When he was four years of age, while playing he claimed to have seen God put his head up against the window to look at him. A few years later he saw angels perched on the limbs of a tree. He never outgrew these visions, and they inspired him to spiritual and artistic heights. Hence his work is seen as esoteric and mysterious; he claimed to see things in the spiritual world and painted what he saw.
Following Blake’s death, his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, dedicated a whole chapter of his Life of William Blake to this theme, titling it “Mad or Not Mad.” As he looks at Blake’s life and work, he redeems Blake’s reputation in defining the “special faculty” of his imagination and defends his spiritual sanity, attributing Blake’s visions to the peculiar power of a mystical and creative genius, a power of which he was in full control. Echoing Kahlil’s view on those considered mad, Gilchrist praises Blake’s creativity by asking, “Does not prophet or hero always seem ‘mad’ to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world?”19
The great early-twentieth-century English writer and humorist G. K. Chesterton came to a similar conclusion in his excellent biography of Blake. Chesterton directly addresses whether Blake’s genius was clouded by madness or whether his unique vision on the world was the secret of his spiritual and artistic success. One of my own mentors, Malcolm Muggeridge, like Kahlil, saw sanity in Blake’s madness. In his book taken from his BBC television series The Third Testament, Muggeridge shares his spiritual admiration for Blake:
Blake’s work is, to me, one of the great expressions of sanity that exist. Nor does it in the least surprise me that, for this very reason, he was in his time considered mad, and would today certainly be subjected to psychiatric treatment, with a view to drugging or psychoanalyzing and shocking him into what passes for sanity. . . . The faculty whereby Blake saw into the reality of things he called Imagination, and this is what he remained true to, from the beginning to the end. . . . In the end Blake came to see that the only true freedom is spiritual, achieved through the imagination. . . . Was Blake in this sense mad? . . . Mad? I should say sane to the point of sublimity.20
Kahlil’s fascination with madness reminds me of another English writer, Colin Wilson, whose first book, The Outsider, published in 1952, I found profoundly revelatory. Wilson, a twenty-four-year-old homeless writer at the time, wrote the book in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He explores the whole concept of “the outsider,” of “human alienation” in society, by looking at the lives and works of numerous great artists, such as H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and G. I. Gurdjieff. I have run into numerous people who feel it is still one of the most important books they have read.
The theme of madness, whether real or perceived, intrigued Kahlil. He often portrayed the madman as saner than others, forcing readers to look beyond superficial assumptions. In The Madman, Kahlil introduces his series of short parables and reflections based on Lebanese folklore by describing a madman who has been freed from the masks of life that were binding his soul.
Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.21
“God,” the first prose poem in The Madman, reflects Kahlil’s belief in the omnipresence of the Divine. It is about a seeker who climbs the holy mountain promising devotion, servitude, and obedience to God but receives no answer. In an obvious allusion to that seemingly crazed biblical prophet Elijah’s experience with God on the mountain, God first passes by like “a mighty tempest,” then like “a thousand swift wings,” and then like “the mist that veils the distant hills.” The seeker’s last attempt addresses God not as an unreachable being but as an integral part of the sacred order of life:
And after a thousand years I climbed the sacred mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “My God, my aim and my fulfillment; I am thy yesterday and thou art my tomorrow. I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.”
Then God leaned over to me, and in my ears whispered words of sweetness, and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her, he enfolded me.
And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.22
One of Kahlil’s most moving drawings in the book accompanies his reflection titled “War.” It is a depiction of the Crucifixion with Jesus’s arms freely stretched out to touch the whole world in a sign of empathy and blessing. While the world’s religions are visibly represented by intertwined figures, the people themselves are pictured as bent, twisted, and trapped under the weight of the world’s oppression.23
In contrast to Kahlil’s writings that precede The Madman, there is a definite reordering of his orientation from being primarily against the “wrongs of the world” toward an invitation to contemplation, harmony, and spirituality. His poems and parables are meant to stir reflective questioning. In his parable “The Good God and the Evil God,” he imaginatively makes his point, addressing the absurdity of common misperceptions on the spiritual realities of our world.
The Good God and the Evil God met on the mountain top.
The Good God said, “Good day to you, brother.”
The Evil God made no answer.
And the Good God said, “You are in a bad humour today.”
“Yes,” said the Evil God, “for of late I have been often mistaken for you, called by your name, and treated as if I were you, and it ill-pleases me.”
And the Good God said, “But I too have been mistaken for you and called by your name.”
The Evil God walked away cursing the stupidity of man.24
However, perhaps of all the stories in The Madman, the one that most clearly illustrates Kahlil’s view of “madness” as seeing beyond the veil, seeing what others don’t see, is called “The Eye.” It is one of my favorites in this collection, and its profound simplicity sums up the heart of Kahlil’s understanding in seeing the deepest dimension of spiritual reality.
Said the Eye one day, “I see beyond these valleys a mountain veiled with blue mist. Is it not beautiful?”
The Ear listened, and after listening intently awhile, said, “But where is any mountain? I do not hear it.”
Then the Hand spoke and said, “I am trying in vain to feel it or touch it, and I can find no mountain.”
And the Nose said, “There is no mountain, I cannot smell it.”
Then the Eye turned the other way, and they all began to talk together about the Eye’s strange delusion. And they said, “Something must be the matter with the Eye.”25