God’s daisy chain

I hate the stuff myself — glad to see I’m not alone in my dislike of Gibran. It’s pre-digested and it actually gives poetry a bad name –when recited at weddings — because everyone comes away with the impression, well that was easy!

“I’m astonished by the revelation that people still read Gibran. I haven’t heard that name since the mid-80s”

Hadn’t you heard that Rumi has taken over Gibran’s old corner office? Rumi may quite possibly be a great poet in his own language, but in English reads like the bastard child of Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama.

If I attend another wedding in which that sappy Gibran piece is one of the readings — you know which one I mean — I swear that I’ll walk out. That’s all. Five is enough, thank you.

Yes, you are.

(First google result for ‘gibran wedding’.)

The fact that “the more specific demands that a real religion might make” can be equated by someone as intelligent as Henry with “going to church on Sundays” seems to me to say something highly significant about the state of religion, and of thought about religion, these days.

(Or maybe Kierkegaard was complaining about the same thing, way back when…)

I apologize for the multiple postings. I got an “internal server error” message the first couple of times I posted my comment. So I assumed they hadn’t worked.

I don’t know much about Gibran but I do know that that kind of stuff isn’t likely to get much of a sympathetic reading with the hairy-chested intellects in the blog-eat-blog world.

I think a lot of the popularity of Gibran is driven by the fact that you’re not allowed to have anything from the Bible at registry office weddings in the UK

Ah, that’s a thought, though I’ve actually heard it in Anglican and RC church ceremonies where one of the partners isn’t ‘of that ilk’, and it appeared to be a sop (with the consent of a trendy vicar/priest) to the non-devout.

First time I heard it, it was quite affecting. Fifth time? Not so much. Doesn’t bear repetition well. And I can’t help thinking that there’s a viral effect: hear something new and outside the liturgy, and, ooh, you’ve got to have it for your own ceremony.

At least when you get 1 Cor 13, the other mainstay of wedding services, you have the luxury of two or three different versions, and, with luck, someone brave enough to go for the KJV and ‘charity’.

Hadn’t heard the Gibran thing before.

Having just read it, I’m glad I’d never heard it before…

“Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf…. And stand together yet not too near together”

I can’t read it without hearing a Pythonesque-voice (“blessed are the cheesemakers”)

“Share among thee but fully consumeth not the small kumquat or other citrus fruit of desire,
rather, plant the seeds beneath the flowering hyacinth of contentment and harvest thy love, or perhaps a small cheesecake…”

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

A professor of mine back in the day referred to Gibran as “cheap deep”. I still think that pretty much applies.

Back in the 60s Paul Krassner said that guys quote Gibran to get laid. I would guess that has not changed.

Next on Crooked Timber: Joyce Kilmer – Not All That Good When You Really Think About It!

The Justice of the Peace who married us back in 1978 insisted on Kahlil. Not my choice, but we survived.
We loved each other enough that we probably would have survived Rod McKuen, followed by a solo dance to ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’ Fortunately, there were things up with which we didn’t have to put.

At least Gibran didn’t claim a consistency with quantum mechanics, or use words like ‘dehydroepiandrostenedione’ to leaven his wit.

Next on Crooked Timber: Joyce Kilmer – Not All That Good When You Really Think About It!

I will certainly offer a much less lukewarm defence of “Trees” – Ezra Pound said it was “Blakean” and much better than most of the other crap that Poetry published and he was right.

Bucky, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about here. What’s your evidence that Irwin (or I) are dissing Gibran because of our own insecurities, rather then purely and simply because we think he spews inane, trite crap? Are we not allowed to have tastes on the matter? Irwin clearly prefers another popular writer who doesn’t get much critical kudos (Wodehouse) to Gibran, and I agree with him – Wodehouse, unlike Gibran, writes gloriously well. (and for what it’s worth, I’m with dsquared on “Trees” – a fine little poem).

Henry, meet Alan Bostick.
–
I was going to praise dsquared’s defense of Kilmer overtly too, but I thought an attempt at standing up for the less easily defensible Bach might serve.
Like I said it’s not my personal cup of tea, though my own literary heirarchies have less to do with erudition and intellectual complexity than human warmth – in fact if you’re offering Wodehouse, I’ll take Jerome K. Jerome every time. And some H.E. Bates if you have any.
Irwin:

“Nevertheless, every element in his thought can alternatively be traced to Western sources, including Blake, Nietzsche, Emerson, Maeterlinck, Whitman and Ouspensky.”

I’m thinking any element in anyone’s thought, especially on metaphysical themes, could be traced to that bunch eventually. That’s an agenda at work. Irwin’s a scholar okay. An expert in his field. Gibran’s a flim-flam artist and treacly. But his popularity isn’t explained by Irwin, just reviled, disdained, dismissed. It needs to be pointed out that the credulous minority who actually read Gibran are symmetrically positioned vis. fundamentalist Christians, at least in the US. That’s pretty important right now.
(I have to say it’s amusing me to be in this position – I’ve simulated nausea using The Prophet as an emetic more than once)
But it’s a strange, trying time for metaphysics generally, and “eastern” metaphysics specifically. Irwin’s either beyond contemporary things entirely, or he’s ellided them in his piece.
Dissing non-Judeo/Christian spirituality at this moment, even lame pseudo-spirituality, is loaded with potential for harm. And a kind of complicity. I think agenda was too strong a word maybe, and maybe Irwin just needed the extra check the review brought him, but it’s a spooky moment as regards mysticism of any kind, again especially the “eastern” kind.
Irwin:

“…a version of science that is no science at all, in which modern physicists are allegedly only just catching up with the precepts of Ancient Wisdom. Equally silly claims are made about Oriental spirituality, as contrasted with Western materialism…”

Agenda, sort of. And wrong.
I’m arguing more from the intuitive here, but I think the people who have espoused Gibran in Irwin’s and your lives and others are mostly responsible for the disdain. It’s the Gibran-o-philes, and their fuzzy optimism, that’s egregious. Gibran takes heat for inspiring it. Without his espousers Gibran’s just another couple of books in the library. Not much of a threat to anyone.

Henry – Yes I knee-jerked the anti-Arab bias, which Irwin obviously doesn’t have. Alan Bostick’s point about anti-Islamic bias isn’t addressable, because as he points out, Irwin’s praising the pre-Islamic poets.
It’s the timing. Antonin Scalia really did say this week that the separation of church and state is a mistake. That didn’t create, but it certainly illuminates, a cultural landscape in which paranoia exists now only as an inaccuracy or misapplication, not as whole-cloth fantasy. The US sees a lot of public examples of inexcusable gloating bigotry directed at Arabs and Muslims.
It’s not so much letting that climate of fear and violence intrude into the reading of a book review, as it is, in my case at least, being unable to keep it out. Things are getting mighty parochial ’round here.
I hear you though, and did some looking; and I found some beautiful calligraphy by Al-Shanfara, who Irwin mentions positively.