all arts,”withholds praise and leaves to contemplate hidden wisdom. The
story continues:
And as the star-watcher took his place in the cask (khom) and followed the traces of
the spheres and the ways of the stars, he made a model of the sound of the
harmonies that he found there. As he discovered the proportions for each sound
on his lute, he began in his hiding place to weave the lute. For singing he laid the
leather over the gourd and unharnessed the strings, and after he had rubbed the
gazelle skin with musk, he brought wet sound out of the dry wood.
And so from his imagination and drafts did he create a form of organ...
Plato had discovered a music that nobody other than him knew. From dry wood
he elicits sounds that attract the spheres with their moisture.
When he moves hisfinger in one mode, all the animals fall immediately asleep.
When he then plays another mode, he brings them from sleep to wakefulness.^2
Alexander recognizes this music’s superiority as encompassing yet also
exceeding existing knowledge. His subsequent preference for Plato over
Aristotle incorporates the late antique practice of‘correcting’Aristotelian
materialism through the filter of Platonic and Pythagorean mystical
inspiration, and thereby modernizing earlier authorities.^3
Plato’s competitive advantage comes from the organ (urganon),
described by al-Farabi as made by stretching a gazelle skin perfumed
with musk over a gourd in which strings were set. Nizami’s selection of
this instrument over more common ones may pun on the Organon,
Aristotle’s six works on logic central to the institutionalization of Islam,
Judaism, and Christianity in the late tenth century.^4 Playing on the dream-
like transformation of logic into an instrument, Nizami’s Plato supersedes
reason by engaging the emotions of the pure at heart, represented by the
animals.
The story condenses themes of cosmology, sleep, and music encoun-
tered in theEpistle on Musicand al-Ghazali’sLightning Flasheswith Plato’s
Phaedo, where Socrates, awaiting execution by poison, deems philosophy
“the noblest and best art”(59–60), yet has a dream redefining philosophy as
music. Similarly merging inspiration with intoxication, Nizami’s Plato
seeks a meditative state in the solitude of a wineflask. Nizami’s conflation
of Plato’s post-philosophical music with intoxication builds on an associa-
tion, pointed out by Ahmad al-Ghazali, between audition (sama) and
poison (samm) based on their shared consonantssinandmim,“meaning
that the inner nature of audition is like poison which causes one to die from
the attachments of things which are other than Allah and causes one to(^2) Nizami, 1991 : 433–434. (^3) Walbridge, 2000 : 66; Fowden, 2015 : 132. (^4) Fowden, 2015 : 129.
80 The Insufficient Image