the inner twelve year old

Raiders Of The Lost Artifacts

Perspective: Raiders of the lost artifacts:

"The museum is the archaeological repository for all artifacts from excavations in Iraq. It contains, or did contain, hundreds of thousands of objects covering 10,000 years of human civilization: tablets, reliefs, weapons, seals, pottery, musical instruments, statues large and small. The collection is made of gold, clay, stone, metal, bone, ivory, cloth, paper, glass and wood.U.S. troops had protected the museum, but they left to engage insurgents in another part of the city." 

So that washes American's hands? What a coup for Biblical Fundamentalists, helping to erase all that came before their standard true and accepted version, all that remembers that god was originally named ELOHIM, a plural: the gods. 


I am the lord they god, thou shalt have no the gods before me. So who was he talking to? Bit of saber rattling. 


Go back to the earliest Genesis myths, some 1000 years earlier than the expected true and accepted version. It was all about water, water marrying, male and female, gods in their act of creation. No fire there, either. The Enuma Elish (also: here).


Written in Akkadian,, the Enuma Elish dates back to 1800 BCE, the carriers of this tradition originally from Arabia. Preserved on 7 clay tablets, this text from ~1200. 


"The Akkadian script was used until about the 1st century AD and was adapted to write many other languages of Mesopotamia, including Babylonian and Assyrian."

meta-ortho-para-Platonic

[conversation. walking. at night.]

Actually, just comment and response

Bad Means, Bad End

How Private Warmongers and the US Military Infiltrated American Universities Important article. Thank you. I think the connections here with the Fundamentalist Christian Right should be followed. Even when interests differ, the goal is the same: Power. So who leads who? The Messianic movement is a way to control Israel. People, peace, religious freedom, the health of the world. All at risk.

The Umbrella Man

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/11/21/opinion/100000001183275/the-umbrella-man.html

The vision and solutions offered here are all things President Gore wanted to address

The Death of the Fringe Suburb

No difference between parties? Oh, hunny. Don't go buying that.

Healing the Past, Creating a New Future: Jews, Germans and the Legacy of World War II

The Compassionate Listening Project warmly invites you to join us for: 

Healing the Past, Creating a New Future: Jews, Germans and the Legacy of World War II June 15-21, 2012

Occupy Democracy 2

The Single Most Important Robert Reich Clip You Can Share Today

opus 1 excerpt (wonkish)

A cultural era is not defined by the contentof the ideas it conveys but by its interpretive filter...the hidden threads that link ideas to the invisible will of the time.~Ioan Couliano.

Elliott felt for his coat in the darkness.  Slowly, he slid it on, arms numb and cold, and crept out. Turning down the corridor, he made his way to the tower. 

Soon he was at the very top of the winding staircase, and pushing open the hatch, he hoisted himself to the tower roof.  He stood atop the great stone cylinder, alone with the night, high in the windy sky.  The moon shone brightly down, a day short of being full. 

He walked to the edge and looked down.  Nothing but blackness.  The wind whipped around like chanting spirits, calling to him.  Standing on the brink, he felt them egging him on, pulling his body toward the gloom. 

At the bottom of these thoughts was his logic: he would consciously give his life for his son, consciously sacrifice his soul.  Claire would understand this act of willful penance.  How else to break the cycle?  If the angel returned with the cup, he would drink whatever it held. 

First, he must strike the bargain with God, the Devil, whoever cut these deals.  Looking around the dark sky, he called to them, knowing they would come—because now he truly believed in them.  How could they hide from one who had the mist fall from his eyes?  One who knew what it was to drink of the golden cup, to swim as the sea, to soar as the wind.  He knew lifetimes and lifetimes, and what it was to do unspeakable things.  To love a woman unto death, to participate in the darkest depths of magic-- What was there that he’d not done?  Darkness from one who had once been part of a living Chain of Light. 

"Come to me," he called.  "Come, take my soul.  Anything, only leave my son free.  Burn me for eternity, I don’t care.  Just let this be the end.  I accept the Knowledge.  I’ll not turn away." 

The wind answered—nothing—and Elliott prepared to step off. 

My God.  What if the children find me?  Maybe better to go down to the water and quietly swim into oblivion.  But he would wash up on the shore.  He pictured Phoebe coming upon him, his bloated, gray remnant.  He couldn’t do that to her.  The thought hit him like a slap, sobering him. 

Why on earth call to the Devil?  Darkness had been his companion for centuries, and it never bargained.  The truth was, it didn’t want his soul.  The truth was, he could only bargain with life. 

"Chiaro! What must I do?"  His words echoed back, and he knew that falling through the darkness would not settle that score.  He sat down by the edge, his head in his hands, and wept like a child. 

There was a cough.  Elliott looked round and saw the strange but now familiar corpulent woman materializing near the hatch.  Enthroned in an overstuffed chair, she was sucking in on her cigarette, the flame glowing red and gold.
"For a moment, you looked like you were really going to do it." 

"You.  And you would let me fall?" 

She gave him an incredulous look.  "Well, I certainly wasn’t going to pop up when you were calling up the Devil." 

Getting to his feet, he walked toward her.  Was she solid? Dream? What did it matter. "How do I know you’re not the devil?" 

Smoke poured from her nostrils.  "Because devils don’t exist.  They’re something made up.  Something to pin the troubles on.  Of course, the prayer goes, and lead us not into temptation, and it’s the Deity they’re addressing.  Not the devil.  I suppose that oversight never occurred to anyone." 

"Blame God for my error?" 

She smiled.  "Error is the work of Karma.  Hate is the passion of fools.  Mercy is the might of the righteous—and—all the rest of it."  She crossed her arms and took a long drag, mumbling to herself. 

"But I must make amends.  It was my pride that caused this tragedy.  My pride.  I caused the murders, the burning of the books." 

"Oh, sins, pride. Why take it personally?"  She looked at him skeptically.  "Let it go." 

"And how can I ever do that?" 

"Well, I think you’re on your way, now.  You’ve brought it all to the foreground.  You’re conscious of what happened.  You’re willing to expand your reality enough for the rest to be effected." 

"The rest.  What rest?" 

She sighed and pulled one of her feet up to rest on her opposite knee.  Coughing a bit, she took another long drag.  "You see, this is the trouble."  She looked at him.  "Take Chiaro.  All this business with his Soul. Dangerous little alchemy wasn’t it?  But that’s Art for you.  Twisty, turny, always changing, moving things along.  By the way, you do have to see to Chiaro, since you served as the catalyst in his troubles.  You must finish the wedding.  Make them one.  Atone." 

"How?" 

"Just continue the work.  Write it." 

"But that won’t bring back the books, the Knowledge--" 

"Oh, stop. They’ll be digging it up in the desert, finding it in caves, drainage ditches, for centuries to come.  It needs to keep being rediscovered, to make people question, grow.  Create."  Her face softened and she seemed touched by his concern.  "What happened with the Heart’s Rose was supposed to happen.  It was part of the times.  You see—humans tend to cleave things into black and white if you let them.  They become complacent, stagnant, when they lose their sense of mystery—of possibility.  Their minds get locked into one way of seeing.  These little revolutions are course corrections. They come when the time is ripe.
"Basically, an imbalance is necessary for creation to endure. An energy gradient.  Without it, there’s no flow.  No passion, no choice, no growth.  In fact, no time, space, Becoming." 

She began to search around in her lap until she found a small pouch.  Opening it, she laid out a cigarette paper and poured in a careful quantity.  "Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination. Blake, wasn't it? Through conscious Imagination, Eternity moves into the field of time, that’s all.  It balances out all of the rapturous transcendence through art and Beauty."  She exhaled a cloud of smoke, smiling beatifically.  "You have a question." 

The whole time he’d stood staring.  "What—what is the Midst?" 

"The Midst.  You mean the Centre? I’ll give you a model.  Think of all existence at any moment, anything within a given time and space, as a great sphere.  Existence, the temporal, must by its nature move.  That’s the torque, the gradient, I mentioned.  But at the very heart of the sphere, in the midst of all this movement, there is a Stillpoint, where nothing moves.  From which all things flow, to which all things return. 

"Existence came out of that.  It created a point of imagination.  And fell into it: BANG.  The Cosmos.  Well, this particular Cosmos. A realm of opposites, opposites which continually seek and move one another.  It’s a sort of game:  The shards seek to be One again." 

From the ground below, they heard people calling his name.  She nodded her head in their direction.  And chuckled.  "Oh, listen.  They think you’ve gone over the precipice again." 

Elliott went to the side of the tower, looking downward just as Peter looked up. 

"And now I must go," the woman said. 

"Wait!"
Her image began to fade. "No, no.  Just do your work.  Reach for the unseen hands and all the rest of it."  She faded from view in her cloud of smoke, her hand raised in a salute of benediction.  Then it began to rain. 

The hatch popped open, followed by the concerned face of Peter.  "Just be still, Elliott," he said, stepping out on the roof.  "Jumping won’t solve anything."  With a lunge, he had Elliott by the wrists. 

"Peter, for godsake, let go.  You’ll kill us both." 

Now Tom and even the doctor had climbed up.  "Keep hold of him, Peter," the doctor said. 

What next?  Would they tie him to a chair?  He began to laugh as they grimly followed him down. 

#

The doctor was the last to go, and as he reached to pull down the hatch, he was surprised to see a burning cigarette there on the roof beside it. 

---

extra credit
readings: 
The Accidental Universe

Dante Alighieri Paradiso, XXXIII

Paper (50 pts.) (no wiki!): Compare, contrast the following statements with the theoretical physics of their time:

"The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint." ~Sir Edward Burne Jones

"It is impossible to see the angel unless you first have a notion of it." ~James Hillman

("Damn you, expanding universe." ~ Dr. Who)

_____________________
 added later --
from Peter:

 I was reminded of http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html when I read this.

 ______________________

Exactly. & more to come. They can't bomb it all away. (And here, for instance.) For origins of the Western Tradition, I like Peter Kingsley  (and here), Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung.

Also -- haven't seen this DVD yet, but have the book. The Bible Unearthed

Um. This is a college class?

This. I picked up a TIME magazine for the fist time in years, and it was like reading a grammar school Weekly Reader. Well. Explains a lot, America. Life is good: Buy those trinkets! Dancing With The Stars! High Heels! Aftershave! Hummers! -- Oh wait...

Brian. At work.

rising

"You say to somebody, you shouldn't go to work before you're what, 14, 16 years of age, fine," Mr. Gingrich said. "You're totally poor. You're in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I've tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they'd begin the process of rising."

“You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Occupy

Occupy is about making and learning how to make community. People meeting and sharing face to face, taking back control to meet the needs of living. We're tired of trinkets, a future of children cleaning Newt's toilets so he can buy another tennis bracelet to enjoy another (oh, properly consecrated) shag. Or whatever it is that moves his ample loins. America is weary and damned tired of watching fake people's fake lives from behind glass screens. We want to live.

Lobbyists target Occupy Wall Street

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

feet on the ground

Someone informed me that universal moral principles, world community, and justice are all dubious concepts.

Oh.

This Dubious-ity. Why not apply it equally to cities -- as long as we're considering worldly communities (along with peace love and understanding) dubious. I suppose cities are indubitable -- certain and real -- because we delineate them in space and material planes where we can cut them up as property, thus granting them the magic essence of indubitability. But all we're really talking about is the headache of making agreements -- agreements that we have to have for concepts such as human rights, treaties, and points of law, all the dubious things we might need -- because like it or not, we are one world, certainly one vast marketplace, like it or not, and we better have some understanding, some ground rules, some dialogue that attempts a delineation of this (ever-expanding) playing field.

In many ways, communities and these intangible dubious things are the only things really real to the psyche, the place where we spend most of our time storing the me inside our body. They're not dubious at all when they're the basis for understanding law and protocol and heritage and even the shared shadows of our dreams.

What is a world community but this organic, interdependent web of life? It's "what is," not what one wishes or what "should" or used to be. Through community, small and large, we learn to understand the grace of aging, the need for neighbor, father mother brother daughter grandparent, and how they fit and work together; the flow and rhythm of life, of birth, of death, and why one shouldn't steal and lie and kill (it hurts another person: somone you love). It's the ground where we learn to grok other dubious notions, such as honor and humanity, even politics, negotiation and how and why to listen or speak out; that you are not a world or law unto yourself, and that other people are like you with the same needs and desires; that knowing one great truth does not make you know the mind of god. All such understandings are extrapolated from the experience of living in communities, communities that link in ceaseless points.

This living web is what is disturbed, broken, lost in cultures that are cut off, invaded, taken over by outsiders. Alien leaders, dependence, strange ways -- what's left for them but Pax Romana. Praetorian Guards. All meaning becomes forced.

How to build community -- in any world, even one that thinks it's free, self-determined, meets its needs , has strength and power (dubious concepts, all) -- when its people don't meet face to face? When human contact takes place behind glass shields -- cars and offices, even our food comes this way, our leaders televised, our news scripted, our friends and lovers but perfect two-dimensional strangers.

Such questions are being raised by the Occupy Movement.

There's a polarity that keeps coming back. We have the Koch factor: individuals with unimaginable power to influence things who also feel they've been selected by God to do his work. And what God is this? There's the question, one which I think "God" in whatever form it takes should be allowed to answer in each of us through the heart-dialogue of our living. Wisdom just can't be inflicted, no matter how good the intentions. (Scripture -- God inspired? Sure, in the same way Keats was inspired. In the same way you love your child. But an insistence on the inerrancy of scripture has no basis in historical fact.)

The other pole of this model is the lack of trust that so dominates an individual that it becomes confused with liberty.

Occupy isn't about throwing away the last few hundred years, all that has worked. Occupy is about learning to create community. We want to gather the momentum, the steam generated by all this stirring anger and enthusiasm, as something to build and heal. Sleeping in parks might help cool a person's anger and let them be heard. Because they aren't being heard. But uniting individuals in spontaneous community -- learning first-hand, immersed in the messes of life -- how can that be bad?

"It Is Dominion We Are After. World Conquest"

Link 
Knowing this about the Republican Fundamentalist base makes their actions -- let the economy hang, defeat Obama at all costs -- make sense. Doing god's work, scripture the law of the land... and the world.

---

There's more than just John Hagee involved in the politics of Israel.

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/evangelizing.aspx

http://calebcompany.com/pdf/12-07-In-defense-of-Israel.pdf

http://jewishisrael.ning.com/profiles/blogs/messianic-attorney-calev-myers-speech-nixed-at-durban-3-protest

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/messianic_truth_in_advertising_20080625/

grow, baby, grow

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

Taibbi, Rolling Stone:

[...]

The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.
 This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.
It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.
People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-ows-protests-20111110#ixzz1e09jr5go

the taxpayers own the park, but what country are they really paying to own it?

"The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale." What? Read an excerpt from Taibbi's Griftopia.

the real social insecurity

matt taibbi, from his blog seconds)

1. 
   

   Matt Bai's Post-Partisanship -- RollingStone.com

...the insane Bush tax cuts, and paired up with this is the recent return of that unkillable Beltway cliche, the notion that Social Security is going broke and that the solution to the nation's deficit reduction problems lies there.

Let's be clear about what's going on here. Social Security was never the cause of the nation's debt problems. This issue dates all the way back to the Eighties, when Ronald Reagan hired Alan Greenspan to chair the National Commission on Social Security Reform, ostensibly to deal with a looming shortfall in the fund. Greenspan's solution was to hike Social Security tax rates (they went from 9.35% in 1981 to 15.3% in 1990) and build up a "surplus" that could be used to pay Baby Boomers their social security checks 30 years down the road.

They raised the SS taxes all right, but they didn't save the money for any old Baby Boomers in the 2000s. Instead, Reagan blew that money paying for eight years of deficit spending and tax cuts. Three presidents after him used the same trick. They used about $1.69 trillion in extra Social Security revenue (from the Greenspan hikes) to pay for current-day goodies, with the still-being-debated Bush tax cuts being a great example. This led to the infamous moment during Bush's presidency when Paul O'Neill announced that the Social Security Trust Fund had no assets.

Well, duh! That is what happens to a fund, when you spend 30 years robbing it to pay for tax cuts for Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. It will tend to get empty. But of course this wasn't presented to the public as being the consequence of too many handouts to wealthy campaign contributors: this was presented as a problem of those needy goddamned old people wanting to retire too early and being just far too greedy when it came to actually wanting their Social Security benefits paid out.

And so in all seriousness none other than Alan Greenspan proposed back in 2004 that the "social security problem" be rectified by means of reforms that should sound familiar to those reading the news of late: raising the retirement age and cutting benefits.

I wrote about this in Griftopia , but there's one more key fact here. Social Security taxes are capped, which means that above a certain level (I believe it's $106,000 this year) there are no additional taxes. Which means that Jamie Dimon pays a disproportionately small amount of Social Security tax -- an arrangement that makes sense, if that money is only going to one place, i.e. back, later on, to the person who paid the taxes, in the form of Social Security benefits. ...

read avoo

pay attention: It's the Inequality, Stupid

Thank you, Mother Jones.

If the Democrats don't embrace the 99% soon, we're in danger of a third party candidate and a repeat of the Florida miracle (sleight of hand) of George W Bush and his handlers. One thing I find talking to kids, even some embracing Occupy, is that they don't get the urgency to vote. They still don't see their part in not voting last fall in bringing in the disaster of the Theocratic Libertarian anti-union Tea bagging House and a slew of little Cromwells to the states, effectively blocking all paths to rational action. Obama, your time to speak for us is now. Democrats -- now or never. This is the issue. Those who will fault Obama for executive order won't vote for him anyway. Act now. And the rest of us, get the people to the polls.

A Look at How Protesters Are Building a Global Movement

It’s time to occupy our democracy

"I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else… but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent." ~Tony Judt

 *********

 ... the individual as the only carrier of life and existence is of paramount importance. He cannot be substituted by a group or by a mass. Yet we are rapidly approaching a state in which nobody will accept individual responsibility any more. We prefer to leave it as an odious business to groups and organizations, blissfully unconscious of the fact that the group or mass psyche is that of an animal and wholly inhuman. What we need is the development of the inner spiritual man, the unique individual whose treasure is hidden on the one hand in the symbols of our mythological tradition, and on the other hand in man's unconscious psyche. CGJUNG

"A country that sees itself as chosen by God for a 'unique destiny and role in the world' is one that imagines itself having been granted license to play an outsize role."

This should scare us. If only for its lack of reverence.

____________________________

The Midas Formula

By The Sea

Science, murder, sex and Victorian secrets... Delicious, yes?

book excerpt VB&B

She closed her eyes. So many feelings were knocking around in her, things that were at war. She was getting a cold; she was exhausted. As the car turned corner after corner, queuing at stoplights, she felt she might be sick. A horn honked, followed by another. They were in the financial district. It was still Ashton Locksley’s, this part of the world. Here, by fate and destiny, he’d moved mountains of money. Yet these modern materialists made his mountain paltry.

She wondered, how many Millionaires in America? A dime a dozen, weren’t they? And they moved their mountains invisibly, with a click of a button.

All these anonymous investors feeding all these invisible schemes. If they fed malice, unbalanced fate, raped the very earth, they wouldn’t know it. Some made it their philosophy not to know or care; it was their right, their dominion over whole planets.

Progress. Ashton made the world of steel and light from living souls and living blood. And now? Bright lights, cars like tanks steaming in the rain, everything encased within emblems of status. All of the arrogance, the bombastic luxury, the endless gray buildings made of things that never lived. Everything that touched the flesh was synthetic, and sometimes, the flesh was too. The important eyes she looked into often seemed like shards cut off from all that sprang from timelessness, the timelessness that meets us in dream.

Can there be a future if we don’t first imagine it, hope for it? A future beyond us? Who had hoped for this?

What you should know about the Messianic movement

http://calebcompany.com/pdf/12-07-In-defense-of-Israel.pdf

http://jewishisrael.ning.com/profiles/blogs/messianic-attorney-calev-myers-speech-nixed-at-durban-3-protest

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/messianic_truth_in_advertising_20080625/

http://www.jewsonfirst.org/evangelizing.aspx

about that common good...

while watching Charlie Rose

Thank you, Occupy Chicago...

for standing up for our children. Our nation. The things people have fought and died for. Symbiosis is the principle of things that endure. Scott Walker is a cancer.

I love it

Occupy Mordor without leaving the Shire!

legal stuff

and on the back of the Cap One envelope --
"0016542323019 isn't just MY PERSONAL "Customer locator code", it's YOURS TOO!!!"

Oscar. At work.

  Car Plows into Crowd of Occupy D.C. Protesters in Northwest: MyFoxDC.com

more: press conference

TPM link

wapo's Tim Craig twitter feed

Desire Is Holy

New book out about Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Review here.

Publisher's blurb, via Amazon:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century.

Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names - Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta - and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them.

This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience. 

Italics mine.

"Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality." Have to read the book. But I do know Mr. Rossetti rather well--and for him, sexual desire doesn't begin to contain him. When he says Hand painted the Soul, he's speaking of serving big L libido -- which is life force itself, Beauty as harbinger, lo! emanation of the Good. Religion of Art? Oh yes. And I tend to fancy him (a whole book's worth, to what green altar, O mysterious priest) as Corbin-style Sufi by way of an occult Dante, magician philosopher in the old style roots of Western tradition -- saying in Heart's Hope

For lo ! in some poor rhythmic period, Lady, I fain would tell how evermore Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

Maybe someone should buy the book for Ken Russell.

That odd, punishing nature. Rossetti had no understanding of it.

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

White peacock. Pure alchemy.

Size Matters

But it isn't everything.