Ficino understood that imagination is not embellishment — it is a corrosive process, a kind of dying. What the literalness of an event means to us first, the face-value reading, the reaction we would report to a friend — that has to go under before anything else can emerge. This is not poetic license; it is the soul's actual economy. An experience remains inert as long as we hold it at the level where it first landed.

The Orpheus image is precise and unromantic if you follow it carefully. Orpheus does not go to the underworld to retrieve something and return it intact. He fails at that. What survives the descent is his voice — a capacity to sing of what was encountered below, not to possess it again in its original form. Moore is pointing at the same impossibility: you cannot bring the literal world back up unchanged. The descent metabolizes it. What you carry back is the image that replaced the fact, the perspective that opened when the first reaction was surrendered.

This is why Ficino locates soul between spirit and matter rather than at either pole. Spirit ascends and wants clean resolution; the literal world stays flat and inert. Soul is the middle region where things are neither transcended nor simply endured, but transformed — which is to say, lost in one form and found in another.