that the world which this type of individual visits is hidden behind the act of sense
perception and has to be sought underneath its apparent objective certainty. I t is
for this reason we most definitely cannot qualify it as being imagined, as understood
in the current usage to mean fanciful, unreal or nonexistent, indeed, this imaginal
world is ontologically as real as the world of the senses and that of the intellect
(Corbin, 1972:17).
Writing some years before Adams, Harold Bloom penned his beautiful
description, resonant in the Sufi sense, of “ ... the unbroken web” and also that, “...
Qaf is an emerald mountain surrounding our world” (Bloom, 1996:149). Qaf is the
holy mountain of I slam, behind which God resides, but interestingly, it is also the
place of the origin of that mystical language, the ‘language of the birds (Chavalier &
Gheerbrant, 1994:590). I t is worth noting that David Malouf sometimes alludes to
the language of the birds, for example in Fly Away Peter (Malouf, 1982:28, 124).
I n his introduction to Corbin’s Alone with the Alone (1969) Bloom suggests
that Corbin’s I maginal Realm, this unbroken web, is portrayed more fully and vividly
by William Shakespeare than by the Sufi sages, and not only in visionary dramas
like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pericles, and The Tempest. Rather, Bloom opines,
it is the cosmos of the high tragedies – Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth where one
becomes aware of the intermixing of the empirical world with a transcendental
element, one that cannot be identified with normative Christian ideas of order or of
the supernatural (in Corbin, 1969:xv). I t is, Bloom suggests, “ ...the world through
which spirits are embodied, and bodies spiritualised” (Corbin, 1969:xiii). This is a
world possessing extension and dimension, figures and colours, but these features
cannot be perceived by the senses in the same manner as if they were properties of
physical bodies; these dimensions, figures and colours are the object of imaginative
[ I maginal] perception, or, of the “ ...psycho-spiritual senses” (Ring, 1992:220-221).
The medieval Persian philosophers called this world the Alam al-Mithal, or I maginal
Realm, Kabbalists called it the Olam Hademut, which means the same thing (Moss,
1998:108).
The same ancient mythological idea is restated by Schopenhauer in a way
that suggests that we are figures in the field of a universal dream, dreamed as it
were, by a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters dream too, so that
everything “ ... interlocks and harmonizes with everything else” (in Campbell,
1973:7). That idea is represented in the Hindu image of the god Vishnu asleep on
the waters of the cosmic ocean, dreaming the dream of the universe. Laurens van
ron
(Ron)
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