The Gift of Gabe
by Brian Joseph
ISBN: 1-59330-266-5
Reviewed by Jim Curtiss
Every now and then a
book comes along and grabs you. For the reviewer, The Gift of Gabe, by Brian Joseph, is just such a book. Even though one can recognize that Joseph’s writing style is still developing, the story he has to tell is arresting to say the least, and is made even more so because it’s loosely based on reality.
The gist of the story is that Joseph accidentally meets an old man named Gabe, who lives in a forest cabin. Gabe, it turns out, is a philosopher of sorts, and through a series of visits he leads Joseph to reconsider the nature of reality. Gabe goes about his teaching slowly, introducing Joseph to new books, poems and concepts, as well as playing music from a variety of artists, the most notable of which are the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Actually, it is primarily through Gabe’s radical interpretations of the mentioned songs that one tends to become convinced of his perspective’s veracity.Gabe often tells Joseph about “the language”, a manner of speaking about the nature of reality which allows listeners to understand that the artist in question has achieved a sort of
illumination. For Gabe’s purposes, illumination refers to realizing the basic interconnectedness of the universe. Once this is achieved, he maintains, the illumined person in question feels compelled to communicate what he or she has experienced. And due to the constraints of the human mind, “the language” is a more or less uniform way of communicating that illumination.
Gabe tells Joseph a story which nicely illustrates this idea: imagine a town located in a valley in the middle of a mountain range. The citizens of this town are content in their valley – it provides them with everything that they need – and they do not see the merit of climbing the surrounding peaks. When and if an individual decides to climb the mountain for a look-see, the town’s inhabitants discourage this individual in one way or another. Because of this herd mentality, most individuals do not undertake the climb. But those who do climb the mountain are simply amazed at what they see when they reach the peak: they notice that their town isn’t all of life, that many other peaks lie beyond theirs, and if they look really hard, they can see other people on other peaks waving back at them.
For his part, Joseph is candid about his uncertainty: from the beginning, he is unconvinced about the concepts Gabe presents, but is nonetheless curious about his approach. By reading the books that Gabe lends him and by critically listening to dozens of songs that he had heard many times before, Joseph slowly comes to grant credence to what Gabe has to say. In fact, Joseph’s progression through skepticism, doubt, reluctant acquiescence, guarded belief and finally acceptance, is one of the concepts that the book so wonderfully captures.
Joseph begins the book with a note to the reader: “Ideally this book would come with a soundtrack. That is not possible at this time. The reader may be familiar with some or many of the musical/poetical compositions mentioned. For the reader who chooses to explore further, it is recommended that the songs be heard during the course of reading. Many other books are mentioned within the text of this book. All are recommended as further reading for those who are so inclined.”
Because the reviewer happens to have a number of the mentioned music tracks, he was able to follow Joseph’s advice and listen to them as they came up in the book: this was very helpful in illustrating the concepts that Gabe and Joseph explore. Indeed, one of the reviewer’s main criticisms of the book – aside from Joseph’s sometimes ambulatory prose – is that it would greatly benefit from an appendix containing the mentioned tracks.
For those interested in the
interconnectivity of What Is, or even just plain intrigued by how radically different others might view the world, The Gift of Gabe i