The story of the cave also suggests the need for a symbolic space for
retreating from the material world to understand it. This may be the
practice of scholarship itself, as we retreat into the caves of archives and
libraries, and into the virtuality of our own heads and computers to engage
in the solitary plenitude of writing and reading. This may also be the
challenge of recognizing ourselves, as intellectuals, in a world of economies
in which our work, along with art, comes to be evaluated more through its
immediate market fungibility than through its internal coherence and
longevity. In this world, we enter theghurbaof the literary, perhaps even
of the literate. Unable to retreat into a cave, we must learn to function as
refugees, in which all places are equally home because all places are equally
exile. It is precisely this estrangement pregnant with the power to persist
and to resist that gives us the will to harbor the real-life, non-metaphorical
refugee as we would harbor ourselves. This power comes by letting go of
the idol, of the image, of the method, of the discipline, even of the object
itself, not destructively or dispassionately, but with equanimity. The ensu-
ing will to treasure content above form may become the greatest protection
of all.7.4 The Ambivalent Image
In poetry, the image often functions between dream and reality. Whereas
art history considers only the physical image as real, poetry reflects an
understanding of the dream world as a real space of divine mediation.
Oneiric and physical images often function interchangeably. Working in
the complementary genres of romantic and religious poetry, Nizami and
Rumi offer complex meditations on the potentially attractive, blinding, and
apotropaic functions of disappearing and dream images.7.4a Nizami’sShirin and Khosrau
An artistic theme wending through Nizami’sShirin and Khosraudepends
on the image’s facile transition between the dream and physical worlds.
Elaborating the historical mythology of seventh-century Sasanian rulers,
the story begins with a celebration of the royal birth and physical and
intellectual education invested in Khosrau Parvez, son of the just King
Hormizd. The young man squanders this birthright by allowing the prop-
erty of the poor to be trampled by his careless hunting companions. He is
punished, then pardoned. He dreams of his grandfather Anoushirwan,204 The Transcendent Image