reach the unseen stations.”^5 Like drinking, music is forbidden. Yet even as
it poisons, it remedies the distance between human and divine. In
Phaedrus, Socrates’recognition of thepharmakonas simultaneously poi-
son and cure suggests that remedy is indivisible from toxin. Socrates uses
the myth of Thoth to discuss the proposition of writing as the remedy for
forgetting. Yet the remedy necessarily misfires: writing preserves the form
of speech but destroys the temporality through which discourse endures. It
thus becomes a poisonous cure, apparently enabling that which it
destroys.^6 In contrast, music, like speech, retains temporality. Unlike read-
ing or viewing, audition remains embodied in time. Yet its intoxication
also comes at a cost, poisoning those who approach the divine with
unprepared souls.
In Nizami’s poem, the heightened state enabled through the poison/cure
of the wine allows Plato not only to access the music of the spheres, but also
to balance contrasting elements such as dryness and moisture. The branch-
ing river surrounding Plato suggests the similitudes between nature and
music as a linchpin in the sequence of contrasts that his music harmonizes.
Similarly suggesting opposites, musk, the most valuable aromatic in the
medieval Islamic world, not only conjures eroticism by its aphrodisiac
function but also the death of the animals required for its harvesting.^7
Engaging the taste of wine, the smell of musk, and the sound of music, the
resulting organ affects the emotions so deeply that, like al-Farabi’sflute in
Chapter 2, it induces sleep. As al-Farabi noted, the resonant frequency
between world and cosmos plays on the shared nature of humans and
animals.^8
The Brethren of Purity similarly recognize music as playing upon the
soul of the listener:
It is also part of the musician’s skill to use the rhythms corresponding to [various]
moments according to the [different] moods that correspond to them, that is, to
begin at social invitations, feasts, and drinking parties with rhythms that reinforce
the moral qualities of generosity, nobility, and liberality, such as thefirst heavy and
the like, and then afterwords to perform joyful, gay rhythms...and when there is
dancing and ensemble-dancing...At the end of the session, if he is afraid that
those who are drunk might be noisy, rowdy, and quarrelsome, he should use slow,
calm, and sad rhythms that quieten people down and send them to sleep.^9
Likewise, Plotinus describes such sleep as an awakening from the delusion
of materiality normally miring the body:
(^5) Robson, 1938 : 103. For discussion of this form of analogy in Arabic poetry, see Akkach, 2018.
(^6) Derrida, 1981 : 70. (^7) King, 2008. (^8) Shehadi, 1995 : 62. (^9) Wright, 2010 : 161.
Plato as Musician in theIskandarnamahby Nizami of Ganj 81