...
His soul that was like a peacock in the garden of delight
became like an owl in the wilderness of unreality.
Like Adam, he was left far away from Paradise,
driving an ox on the earth for the purpose of sowing.
In pain from fear of losing his faith again, he begs the king to kill him, and–
after several parables considering suffering that befalls the just–the king
awakens from his state of self-effacement to discover that his arrow has
found its mark in the boy’s throat. The king, the boy’s slayer, mourns for
him as he is also his next of kin. Nonetheless, he goes unscathed to the
beloved.
Although he laid hold of the Emperor’s saddle-strap,
in the end he was admitted by the eye whose glances kill.
And the third was the laziest of the three:
he won completely–the form as well as the reality.
The poem paradoxically suggests that the best relationship with form or
image is not that of seduction or prohibition, but that of neutrality: utter
laziness that enables God to work on behalf of creation. In the next story,
about a king who leaves his kingdom to the laziest of his three sons:
The gnostics are the laziest folk in the two worlds,
because they get their harvest without ploughing.
They have made laziness their prop
since God is working for them.
The vulgar do not see God’s working
and never rest from toil at morn or eve.^90
The fortress emerges as the many-layered world of images which is simul-
taneously necessary and a distraction from the purpose and yearning of
life: union with God. This image of the lazy inheriting the world contrasts
the valorization of labor embodied in the so-called work ethic, often
identified with the same Protestant Christianity underlying the seculariza-
tion of art history. In contrast to capitalism, where labor to create and
circulate goods comes to signify not just worldly success but moral worth,
this emphasis on laziness valorizes disinterested interaction the world,
celebrating the fruits of God’s labor.
(^90) Rumi, 1934 : 522 (4778–4779, 4785–4786, 4875–4876, 4887–4888).
The Ambivalent Image 219