RT Article
T1 The Black Mirror of the Pupil of the Eye: Around the Eye that Sees and Is Seen: Ibn al-ʿArabī, Bill Viola
JF Religions
VO 14
IS 8
A1 Gonzalo Carbó, Antoni
LA English
YR 2023
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1854249312
AB The present article traces the symbols of the eye (Greek: κόρη [maiden, concubine, pupil of the eye]; Latin: pūpilla; Hebrew: īshōn bath ʿāyin (‘apple of the eye’ or the ‘pupil of the eye’ [lit. ‘daughter of an eye’], i.e., the feminine divine Presence [Shĕkhīnāh]); Arabic: ʿayn; Persian: chashm) and the black pupil of the eye (Arabic: insān al-ʿayn; Persian: mardum-i chashm) in Sufism, both—in the context of Andalusian Sufism, specifically in Ibn al-ʿArabī’s poem entitled ‘I saw a Girl…’, in whose dark pupil or abyssal blackness (Arabic: ḥawar; Hebrew: īshōn), pleasure of the gaze (naẓar) and repository of the secret (sirr), resides the Beloved—as in the medieval Persian gnosis of the followers of al-Sahykh al-Akbar—Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī and Maḥmūd Shabistarī—, and the mystical poet Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī. Ibn al-ʿArabī and Shabistarī have had an explicit influence on the work of the reputed American video artist Bill Viola (Queens, New York, 1951), specifically in his two video/sound installations—He Weeps for You (1976) and I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986), in which the common image of the mirror pupil of the eye summarizes the entire ancient Neoplatonic conception of the θεωρία (contemplatio, speculatio).
K1 inner vision
K1 mirror pupil of the eye
K1 Bill Viola
K1 Ibn al-ʿArabī
K1 Sufism
DO 10.3390/rel14080994