Recovering a Visionary Geography

Henry Corbin and the Missing Ingredient in

Our Culture of Images

by Ptolemy Tompkins

(Reprinted with permission of Lapis Magazine)

It's no great secret that ours is a culture obsessed with images. From the Internet to the octoplex to the endless barrage of advertising that half-consciously guides so many people through their day, to be a citizen of the modern world is to be immersed within a constant rush of pictures: an appealing, strident, yet ever-evanescent parade of things that aren't really there, but which are always threatening to become more important than the things that really are.

On the surface, and all the familiar complaints aside, for a long time we have been happy enough with this situation. Most of us are so used to existing amidst this image orgy that even those of us who claim to hate it would probably miss the spectacle were it suddenly taken away. Yet there are signs that we are becoming dissatisfied with the bargain we've struck up with the manufactured image that we are tired of being endlessly titillated, lulled, amused ...and nothing more. All the feigned excitement about increased gigabytes, virtual sex, interactive movie screens, and so forth, is really little more than evidence that our ambiguous relationship with the manufactured image has finally soured. We are coming to the point where we want such images to do more for us than they have so far.

If there is any truth to this suggestion that the magic has started to go out of our relationship with the manufactured image, it makes sense to ask whether there was ever a time when the situation was different when the manufactured image really delivered in some way that it now doesn't. On the surface, it seems like such an inquiry could only stretch back a century or two to the beginnings of photography and mass production. But if we are willing to transcend the technical aspect and see the manufactured images that surround us today as essentially visionary, or imagined products, one can travel further back. Taking the human imagination, rather than simply the camera or computer, as the generating device, a whole added realm of inquiry opens up.

Is it possible that long ago, before the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction, there was a relationship between the observer and the imaginatively generated image that didn't carry the component of disappointment, of failed expectations, that it does today? Was there, perhaps, a time when the imagined image actually delivered something—some mysterious fulfillment—of which the vague but persistently promised pseudo-fulfillments offered today are a vague echo?

A fascinating, but so far little heeded, answer to this question has been given by the French Islamicist Henry Corbin (1930-1978). Focusing on religious visionaries from the Persian and Arab world, Corbin uncovered a lost tradition that shows that our modern cinema-and-cyber-culture is hardly the first one to be endlessly preoccupied with disembodied images. More importantly, it also suggests that this preoccupation was once, at least for a select group, a far more fruitful, mysterious, and satisfactory one than it is now.

In his studies of Sufism, Shi'ism, and the pre-Islamic religions of Persia, Corbin rediscovered a vast body of lore about a visionary landscape existing above and beyond the three-dimensional world of ordinary experience. This landscape goes by various names in his work, depending on the specific culture and philosopher in question. It is the mundus imaginalis, the barzakh, the interworld, the earth of Hurqalya. But whatever the term used to describe it, this domain appears in Corbin's writings as a categorically real place—a dimension accessible to the penetration of human imagination, but not contained by it. Terms like real and imaginary, "inner" and "outer," lose their hard and fast meanings there. It is not simply the interior world that everyone enters in sleep; not an "imaginary" place existing in contradistinction to a more real physical world that swallows it up when one awakes. Instead it is a dimension that secretly encompasses the physical world, and in contrast to which the latter is placed in a radically new and larger perspective.

One of the most significant characteristics of this realm is that within it the things that one encounters—and they are very specific things indeed, ranging from rocks and trees to buildings and entire cities have about them a distinctly personal character. As Corbin says, the pronoun best used when describing the specifics of this dimension is not "what" but "who." The imaginal dimension, he wrote, is "a universe for which it is difficult in our language to find a satisfactory term." It is "an ‘external world,’ and yet it is not the physical world. It is a world that teaches us that it is possible to emerge from measurable space without emerging from extent, and that we must abandon homogeneous chronological time in order to enter that qualitative time which is the history of the soul."

Corbin was a scholar first and foremost, and because the lore surrounding this dimension he worked so hard to bring back into the light was so removed from the sober world of academia, he seems to have felt called upon to keep the weight of the scholarly apparatus he brought to his investigations in sight at all times. But Corbin's interest in the Iranian and Arabic esoteric traditions that make up the bulk of his subject matter was nonetheless a deeply personal one. For him they were not simply the remains of some intricate but outmoded tradition of philosophical systems, but fragments of an actual lost geography.

Some of Corbin’s most impor­tant work on the imaginal dimension focused on the 12th­ century philosopher-mystic Ibn ‘Arabi. In his book Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, Corbin includes a story related by Ibn ‘Arabi about one Quays al-Majnun, a mystic-contemplative who was in love with a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood woman named Layla. In its compressed and quirky way, this story encapsulates the entire message that Corbin's philosophers hold out for us.

In the story, Quays is lost in contemplating the image of his beloved Layla on the imaginal plane. In the midst of this contemplation, his reveries are interrupted by a knock on the door. The real-life Layla, it turns out, has come to pay him a visit. Quays, the story reports, asks her to leave at once, "for fear that the density of her material presence should deprive him of that other presence, of that delicate and subtle imaginative contemplation, because the Layla who was present to his active imagination was more suave and beautiful than the real, physical Layla."

Though it comes from a time long before the invention of the camera, much less the Internet, this story has an oddly modern feel to it. Who, in these days of artificially generated visions and technology-dependent visionaries, hasn't had the strange experience of preferring a picture of reality over reality itself? So potent a mediating device has the manufactured image become for us that we naturally sympathize with Quays' dilemma.

Yet there remains the obvious and crucial difference. For Quays, the dimension in which he is contemplating the disembodied Layla is not some electrically generated hallucination, but a real place. The Layla that Quays was lost in contemplating was not some cyber-doll floating in a virtual dimension of electronically generated pixels, but an entity who was actually more substantial, in her manner, than the three-dimensional Layla who knocked on his door. It was, to use the language of Corbin's philosophers, her celestial self--the larger aspect of her being that existed above and beyond the limitations of her physicality. All humanity, Corbin's philosophers maintained, possesses this "celestial" dimension. That was why to enter the imaginal realm was in effect not to lose one’s humanity but to rediscover it—to become the complete creature that one always secretly remembered being before entering the limitations of the material world. To perceive and to be perceived on the imaginal plane was to remember who one really was—to become whole.

Corbin well knew that the Persians and Arab mystics he devoted himself to studying were not the only ones to have had access to this heightened dimension of experience. From the archaic shamanic cultures down through all the hidden visionary streams at work to one degree or another in every civilization, that landscape has been described in a thousand different yet subtly related ways. And the experience it delivered to those who approached it correctly has also always been this experience of wholeness—of recovered personhood.

It is precisely this sense of wholeness, of entrance into a saving larger geography, that is missing from our modern romance with the image. Because of this absence, the disembodied faces and figures that haunt our media, cinema, and most especially our cyber-worlds are no more than sad and homeless phantoms: shadow entities that for all the seductive beauty they may possess, can never do more than beckon to us emptily. Unlike Quays and Layla and their equivalents in other genuinely visionary cultures, the creators of today’s image technologies are stuck in a machine-generated half-world whose attractions consistently render them less rather than more human, and less rather than more able to cope with the challenges and limitations of the world of ordinary daylight when they finally emerge back into it. The authentic visionary landscape nourished and strengthened those who gained momentary entrance into it because it offered not an "escape" from regular human life but a larger perspective that made the disappointments and burdens of that life more bearable. The same cannot be said of the artificial landscapes entered by today's image junkies.

In his characteristically dense but prophetic way, Corbin said just as much years ago. "We are no longer participants in a traditional culture," he wrote in The Imaginary and the Imaginal. "We are living in a scientific civilization, which is said to have gained mastery even over images. It is quite commonplace to refer to our present day civilization as the ‘civilization of the image’ (to wit our magazines, motion pictures, and television). But one wonders whether—like all commonplaces—this one does not also harbor a radical misunderstanding, a complete misapprehension. For, instead of the image being raised to the level of the world to which it belongs, instead of being invested with a symbolic function that would lead to inner meaning, the image tends to be reduced simply to the level of sensible perception and thus to be definitely degraded. Might not one have to say then that the greater the success of this reduction, the more people lose their sense of the imaginal and the more they are condemned to producing nothing but fiction?"

Corbin’s books aren't very inviting reading. But embedded in his dense and intricate exegeses of long-neglected Persian visionaries and dreaming Arab metaphysicians is a message of tremendous importance for a culture that, like ours, is more in love with, yet more estranged from, the magic of the disembodied image than any in history. For it is really that older, larger universe, and the expanded dimensions of human experience therein, that the I-Max, the Internet, and all the rest of it really hearken back to, in their limited and ultimately impotent manner. The bigger and more possibility-laden the creators of all those images and image technologies tell us the world around us is getting, the more suspicious of their promises we should in fact become. If the image is ever truly to lead beyond itself again if image-making is to recover, in other words, a genuine symbolic capacity will be found not in the "consensual hallucination" of cyberspace (as William Gibson, the coiner of the term, called it in Necromancer), but in another, larger realm of which the whole mythology of cyberspace is really a dim memory in modern clothing. Corbin's books point the way to it.