Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance,
identify body with real being andfind assurance of truth in the phantasms that
reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who, like dreamers, take for
actualities thefigments of their sleeping vision. The sphere of sense, the Soul in
its slumber; for all of the Soul that is in body is asleep and the true getting up is not
bodily but from the body: in any movement that takes the body with it there is no
more than a passage from sleep to sleep, from bed to bed; the veritable waking or
rising is from corporeal things, for these, belonging to the Kind directly opposed to
the Soul, present to it what is directly opposed to its essential existence.^10
Both Ahmad al-Ghazali and the Brethren suggest a similar transition from
perception of forms to a suprasensory image-impression in the soul. Al-
Ghazali says:
If you seek to open a comprehensive gate, verify the realities of the phenomena of
every place. Then divest yourself of looking at thefigures [ideas] whence comes all
that constitutes the purest faith...The farthest point reached by earthly lovers in
their deserts is but the starting-point of the lover [i.e. the mystic] and of him whom
realities enclose.^11
Similarly, the Brethren portray an imaginary assembly of philosophers at a
court discussing the relative merits of sight and hearing. They explain:
When rational souls are free of thefilth of bodily desires, abstain from natural
pleasures, and are untarnished by materiality, they intone plaintive songs, recalling
their exalted and noble spiritual world and yearning for it. But if [their instinctual]
nature hears that [same] melody, it will reveal itself to the soul in the beauty of its
forms and the splendor of its colors, in order to draw it back.^12
In its ideal function, music affects the soul rather than simply pleasing it. It
transcends materiality. The absence of music becomes equivalent to abso-
lute annihilation in its intoxication. Without a body, there can be neither
poison nor cure.
The paradoxes of the story enable its instructive function. Nizami’s
rendition of Plato as living in aflask identifies him with Diogenes of
Sinop (412–323 BC), who divested himself of material goods, lived in a
flask of the sort often used for wine (pithos) at the market of Athens, and
mocked conventions of all sorts, including the reason of Plato and the
power of Alexander the Great. Diogenes’ witty remarks had been(^10) Plotinus, 1991 : 196. (^11) Robson, 1938 : 100.
(^12) Wright, 2010 : 167. Considering the Arabic, I have revised Wright’s translation with
“instinctual”for animal (neither of which is in the text, but is an insertion of the translator), and
“plaintive”for“sad”(hazinet).
82 The Insufficient Image