Henry Corbin and the Missing Ingredient in Our Culture of Images

[Triton]

Recovering a Visionary Geography:

Henry Corbin and the Missing Ingredient in Our Culture of Images


by Ptolemy Tompkins



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.