Assilban

The title of this blog comes from one of my favorite characters in all of literature. The character, Paul Assilban, is a little known character in a little known short play in a little known collection of works by the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran. The fact that this character, his play, and the collection (Spiritual Sayings of Kahlil Gibran) are so little known is a wonder to me. According to the Internet (that paragon of truth and infallibility), Gibran is the third best selling poet of all time (behind only Lao-Tzu and Shakespeare.) His prose is always beautiful, and always simple, which I find endearing in a poet. His most popular work, The Prophet, is one of the best selling books of all time. To be fair, it had a 30 year head start in publication over Spiritual Sayings, but in terms of beauty (which is the only stick I can measure his work by) The Prophet is far surpassed by it's younger brother. 

(That reminds me, Madman Across the Water is Elton John's best album. If you say Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, we can fight.)

Assilban takes place in the Beirut home of Yousif Mussirrah on an evening in the spring of 1901. Yousif (a scholar), Helen Mussirrah (his sister), and Khalil Bey Tamer (a government official) sit about discussing the effects of Western culture on their own Lebanese culture. Khalil is an isolationist and "foresees evil in the influence of Western culture," but Yousif argues that "Old cultures that fail to revitalize themselves by the production of modern culture are doomed to intellectual death." In the middle of their conversation, Salem Moward (a lute player) and Paul Assilban (a well-known singer) enter the room. Salem is intent to tell the story of what happened the night before, a story Paul does not want him to tell. At the insistence of Salem and the comforting of Helen, Paul (sort of) concedes to let the story be told.

According to Salem, the previous night both he and Paul attended a party at the house of a dignitary, and were  treated as very special guests. Paul, having a certain amount of celebrity attained from the beauty of his singing voice, and Salem for being his only choice for accompaniment. Salem began to play, and Paul began to sing. After singing only one verse of Al Farid's poem, though, he stopped and refused to sing another word, insisting that he had a sore throat. The "beautiful ladies" came and begged him to continue, then the dignitaries, but he refused. Jalal Pasha, the host, resorted to giving him "a heap of dinars" as a last resort to coax him into singing, but Paul responded by throwing down the dinars and "said in the tone of a conquering king, 'You insult me. I did not come here to sell myself; I came here as a well-wisher.'" and stormed from the house. 

From leaving the party, Paul went across to the house of Habeeb Saadi, a man who "likes to drink, sing, and dream" and who is a great admirer of Paul's art. After a few drinks, Paul opened all of the windows in Habeeb's house facing Jalal Pasha's house, handed Salem his lute, and proceeded to sing toward the house "in the full range of his voice."

(This next part has to come directly from the text. If I try to paraphrase it, I'll ruin it.)

SALEM: I have known Paul for fifteen years. We went to school together. I have heard him sing when he was in a happy mood and in sadness. I have heard him wail like a widow bereft of her only child; I have heard him sing like a lover and chant like a victor. I have heard him in the silence of the night voicing whispers that enchanted the sleepers. I have heard him sing in the valleys of Lebanon in unison with the distant church bells and filling space with magic and reverence. I have heard him sing a thousand times and thought that I knew all his powers. But last night, when he faced the Pasha's home and sang, I said to myself, "How little I knew about this man's life!" Now I begun to understand him. In the past I only heard his tongue sing, but last night I heard his heart and soul...

Paul sang one verse after the other. I felt that lovers' souls were hovering over our heads, whispering, recalling the distant past, unfolding what the night had covered, of humanities hopes and dreams. Yes, gentlemen, this man (pointing to PAUL) scaled the ladder of art to its highest rungs last night, and reached the stars, and did not come down to Earth until dawn.

After this, Salem tells of how all of the party guests came out of Jalal Pasha's house and received his music with mixed emotions; some praising him, others cursing him.

When Salem finishes the story Yousif passes his judgment, presenting his scholarly definition of the "artist," and his poetic metaphors describing the enigma of the life of an artist. Khalil condemns Paul's behavior, and attributes "this freedom" to the European influence he mistrusts so much. In his opinion, the Lebanese "inclinations, customs, and traditions" don't allow for that kind of freedom. Helen, keeping her opinions close, asks Paul to speak and give his own defense for his actions.

Paul again asserts his reluctance and unwillingness to dwell on the story, but decides to speak his mind since he is "now under criticism." According to Paul, it is in his character to act the way he did. It is his "independence which refuses to be sold or seduced by flattery." He rags on the other artists, professional men, religious men, and beggars for all foregoing their independence and "selling their voices" for money, only to be displayed by the rich like signs of wealth. To Paul, these people are no more than slaves, or "talking machines of sorrow and joy." He blames the artists themselves for letting themselves be taken advantage of, and for "not preferring death to humiliation."

Paul explains that he was unable to perform for all of the rich people at the party because they were simply incapable of actually hearing his music. 

(Again, from the text.)

PAUL: Music is the language of the spirit. Its hidden current vibrates between the heart of the singer and the soul of the listener. To those who cannot hear or understand, the singer cannot offer the contents of his heart. Music is a violin with taut and sensitive strings. If the strings loosen, they cannot function. The strings of my soul became loose last night when I looked at the guests in the Pasha's home. I saw naught but the false and the shallow, the stupid and the barren, the pretentious and the arrogant. They besought me to sing because I turned from them. Had I acted like the paid frog-singers, no one would have listened.

Paul says that he went over to Habeeb's house to "pour out his heart's content and to blame the night, Life, and Time." He asserts the nature of art as a spirit, unchangeable by man, and that the artist should respect himself for the precious gift he holds. Yousif praises Paul as an artist and resigns himself as no more than an admirer, and Khalil refuses to be convinced. The maid calls them to eat, and all leave excepting Helen and Paul.

(The final scene, from the text again)

HELEN: 

(Whispering) 

Did you know that I heard you sing last night?

PAUL: 

(Surprised) 

What do you mean, Helen dear?

HELEN: 

(Bashful) 

 I was at my sister Mary's home when I heard you. I spent the night there because her husband had left town and she was afraid to stay by herself.

PAUL: 

Does your sister live at Pine Park?

HELEN: 

No, she lives across the street from Habeeb's home.

PAUL: 

And did you really hear me sing?

HELEN: 

Yes, I heard your soul's call from midnight until dawn. I heard God speaking through your voice.

YOUSIF: 

(Calls from the other room) 

The kanafe is getting cold.

(HELEN and PAUL leave the hall.)

CURTAIN

...

So there's that. It doesn't hold a candle to actually reading the script (which is only 15 pages so, come on), but it at least puts in context what I'll say about it.

How I Feel About Art Right Now, Today 

(With Special Regard Given to the Above Text, along with Some Other Things I've Read)

by Joseph W. Rebrovick

The following no doubt contains fallacies in reasoning, gross generalizations, contradictory statements, and lies.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then.... I contradict myself;

I am large.... I contain multitudes.

 -Walt Whitman

The central theme of Assilban, no doubt, is the nature of art. 

At the center of the play there is Paul, the subject of most of the first half of the play, and the speaker of most of the second half. Paul is art in its pure form. Paul's art simply cannot exist in the company of those without the ability to hear it. 

"I will not make images to show to the blind, or utter the sounds of my soul to the deaf."

In a preface to his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee spends a solid page and a half demanding his reader not to classify what he has written as "art." To Agee, what often gets classified as art is simply raw fury, and "The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor."

This passion, this raw fury that Agee surely felt in his work, is often lamentably titled as art. I tend to agree with him. It seems to me a sort of sin to in any way confine something that, by its very nature, can not be confined. 

Paul Assilban cannot be confined in that room full of rich people.
Imagine that scene.
Here is Paul, minding his own business, at a party to enjoy himself (as much as someone of his melancholy is able to), when suddenly he is implored to sing. Being a singer, and a well known one at that, his first reaction is simple. "Of course I'll sing. Why not? I'm a singer after all." His friend, Salem, begins to play the tune of an old standard, and Paul begins to sing. As Paul begins to sing, he feels his art beginning to undress him.
His soul is leaving his body, and he's giving it to these people. 

Paul is an artist. He can't fake it. 

Suddenly he is overcome with emotion, so much emotion, in fact, that it affects him physically and makes his throat sore rendering him unable to sing. These people listening to his music, they're only halfway there. There's no doubt these people enjoy the sounds he's making. They've heard the poem. It's a good one. But they aren't able to take all he's giving them. Their eyes are shifting to the woman across the room with the diamond necklace, the man nonchalantly flaunting his new European coat, all posturing, all posing, all watching, all calculating, all fidgeting, all trying. 

Shortly after Shakespeare's death, a riot broke out at the Blackfriars Theatre in London during a performance of Macbeth. A nobleman, having paid the extra few pennies to get a seat right on the stage and become a part of the spectacle, saw a friend of his enter and walked right across the stage directly in front of the action to greet him. An actor called him out, the nobleman slapped him, and it was all downstage from there.

Can you imagine?
There's Richard Burbage on the stage playing Macbeth. It's the end of Act II Scene ii. He's just murdered Duncan in his sleep. A ghostly knocking is sounding through the hall.

"To know my deed,
Knock.

 'Twere best to know myself.

Wake Duncan with thy---"

"Is that you, Sir Henry? 'Ello chap! How the devil are you?!"

(They fight)

Paul Assilban's soul was leaving his body and, once gone, found that it had nowhere to go. Paul felt this. A person knows when his soul is lost.

Agee instructs his readers on how to enjoy art. He tells them to get the loudest sound system they can find, get a copy of Beethoven's Seventh symphony, get down on the floor as close as possible, turn it up as loud as it goes and listen. No eating, no drinking, no smoking, no moving. "You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it." 

Agee got it.

When someone gives you a gift, you take it. If the gift is a chocolate bar, you look them in the eye, you put out your hand, palm up, and give them a place to put the gift they got for you. You say thank you.
And mean it.
Don't you?

Why wouldn't you? 

You wouldn't say "Ok. Put it over there. Maybe I'll eat it later." and continue on your business? Would you?

Why would you?

Paul Assilban was giving these people a gift. They said "Maybe later." and continued to posture, pose, watch, calculate, fidget, try. They didn't deserve the gift.

Paul went across the street to Habeeb's house. Habeeb, this man who likes to "drink, sing, and dream" no doubt had his ear to the speaker, motionless on the floor, as loud as it would go. 

Habeeb got it.


The nature of art.


Khalil Bey Tamer, the government official, remains unconvinced. Khalil is a nationalist, a law-enforcer, a good old boy. Khalil, no doubt, has a "God Bless Lebanon" sticker on the back of his  pickup. He dislikes European culture for no other reason than because it's European. Yousif points out that Khalil's clothes, his kitchen utensils, and his chairs are all European, and he in fact reads more Western literature than he does Arabic books. Khalil (a fine representative of redneck pride) throws this to the wayside as if it doesn't matter. What matters is custom, tradition.

YOUSIF:

 Old cultures that fail to revitalize themselves by the production of modern culture are doomed to intellectual death.

Near the end of the play, Yousif kindly steps out and explains exactly what purpose he serves: 

(to PAUL) 

"You are a real artist, but I am a seeker and admirer of the arts. The difference between us is like the difference between old wine and sour grapes."

Yousif is one of the people that would have been at the party. (In fact, there's no reason he shouldn't have been invited. I suspect foul play.) He is an "admirer," admittedly, strictly on the outside of art. An academic, he does not have the eyes or the ears for art and he knows it. His approach is one which he is familiar with. In fact, in the first line of the play we learn that he has just recently published "an article on the Fine Arts." He is a scholar, and his approach to art is scholarly. His lines are wrought with definitions, theories, laws, and metaphors generally befitting a scholar. He probably wears a lot of tweed.


I like to imagine that Kahlil Gibran had a friend when he was a kid named Salem. Salem was probably a lovably precocious brat (think Eddie Haskell). Elsewhere in Spiritual Sayings he tells the story of Salem Effandy, who drops his Plato to proclaim himself the product of all of the great men to have walked the earth, before passing out drunk and snoring "upon his filthy bed." Although in Assilban Salem's last name is Mowad, I don't think it's a stretch to think of these two as the same person. In fact, his name could just as well be Autolycus. He is surely the type of artist that Paul is so fed up with. He will easily sell his soul for a bottle of wine, and fancies himself a sort of martyr deserving of thanks and praise for giving up the beautiful women and food and drink at the party to follow Paul when he left. Salem certainly enjoys himself, and is good at playing the lute, but he has lost touch with his art. He sees it, no doubt, in Paul's voice at Habeeb's house. His recalling of that part of the story seems to be the only time in the play that the fast-talking, proud, devil-may-care Salem slows down and actually appreciates beauty, only to be caught back up in a good story and continues to make fun of his friend. Like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, Salem is a rogue, but will do no harm. He'll peddle his songs for any price and by any means.


Autolycus.

Come to the peddler:

Money's a meddler

That doth utter all men's ware-a.

(IV.iv 355-358)

In that same act (one of the longest in all of Shakespeare), Polixenes gives his opinion of creative botany, and if I were writing about creative botany I would expound on that. In the same speech, though, he gives credence to nature itself being the basis of art. That I can expound on. I'll let him tell you:

Say there be,

Yet nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean:so, over that art,

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scion to the wildest stock,

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art

Which does mend nature--change it rather--but

The art itself is nature.

(IV.iv 104-114)

Perhaps for Paul Assilban, this is the nature of his art. "The art itself is nature." In fact, Paul goes on to say that "Art is a bird that soars freely in the sky or roams happily on the ground. No one can change its behavior. Art is a spirit that cannot be bought or sold." In Harold Bloom's chapter on The Winter's Tale from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he points out that "Perdita is not interested in an art that mends or changes nature, she cries out instead for an unfallen nature that would be its own art."

There is beauty in nature, and "art" that is a product of strictly human effort (for money) is swimming upstream against the supreme art that is nature, or nature, which is its own supreme art. Art exists on its own, and it is presumptuous to try to better what is already perfect, according to Perdita. Perhaps according to James Agee too. He does warn against classifying, enclosing, and stifling that natural fury that is labeled as art. Perhaps according to Paul Assilban too. He knows that his art is nature. His body is nothing but a steward. In his own words, an artist is a "vase filled with divine wine." A beauty as big and as perfect as nature can't fit inside a room, and certainly not in a room where it doesn't feel welcome.

I prefer the final scene of the play, though, between Helen and Paul.

Khalil has railed against the terrors of Western culture, the "foreign infection" that is the cause of Paul's insubordination, the European influence that is ruining Arabic culture.

Yousif has explained in learned detail all of the reasons that an artist does what an artist does, what makes an artist, where art fits, what purpose it serves, and liberal political views about how art must crossbreed to survive and thrive (similar to what Polixenes says about the flowers.)

Salem has gawked at his friend giving up all the beautiful women and wine in favor of something as base as simple art.

Even Paul, feeling like he doesn't need to explain himself, explains philosophically what art means to him and what he thinks the purpose of art is, if only to defend his actions.

Helen has hardly says a word the whole time, only ever assuring Paul that they are all on his side.

Finally, once everyone has left and taken all of their opinions and philosophies with them, Helen reveals that she heard him sing. She heard his "soul's call from midnight until dawn." She heard God in his voice.

Maybe that's the nature of art, for it's certainly the most persuasive argument in the whole play. There are no facts, there's no postulating.

Paul sang, and Helen thought it was beautiful.

It was beautiful.