W5: Pillars of Star Creation. Double-click to enlarge. …Are we thinking Dante?
Gustave Doré’s 1855 illustration for The Divine Comedy: ‘Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean’.
‘How is that Power present to the universe?
…Conceive it as a power of an ever-fresh infinity, a principle unfailing, inexhaustible, at no point giving out, brimming over with its own vitality. If you look to some definite spot and seek to fasten on some definite thing, you will not find it. The contrary is your only way; you cannot pass on to where it is not; you will never halt at a dwindling point where it fails at last and can no longer give; you will always be able to move with it – better, to be in its entirety – and so seek no further; denying it, you have strayed away to something of another order and you fall; looking elsewhere you do not see what stand there before you.’
Plotinus, The Enneads, Third ed. Abridged, Trans. Stephen MacKenna. Penguin, London, 1991, VI.5.12
Imagine if someone inverted this philosophy, giving it a material basis – a basis in the objective world.
Marx did this. He stood it on its feet.
In doing so, he took this theory of knowledge to its most developed stage.
Now it must be taken further.
materialism, mysticism and art 
