Dear Unknown Friends:

Published here is the second part of the magnificent lecture Art Is within Science, which Eli Siegel gave in 1969. His series on the relation of art and science—a series to which this talk belongs—is definitive about a matter huge in human thought and in the everyday lives and confusions of people. Art and science have represented one of the big divides for people. Each is important without end. Yet mainly, even those persons who care for both have not felt, as they studied higher mathematics or dealt with a problem in engineering, that they were the same persons who were swept by an aria of Verdi or a painting of Monet.

Further, as I wrote in the last issue: within every person there is something corresponding to the art-science battle and rift: a warfare, discrepancy, division between knowing and feeling, between truth and imagination, between wanting to be accurate and wanting to be stirred and swept. It is such an ongoing division that we can seem to accept it: our imagination, we can seem to take for granted, is here and our logic there; our feeling is in this part of us and our intellect in that. Yet the division weakens everyone. These opposites, along with others, constitute our very lives. What we want—what we’re living for—is told of in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” We want to have large emotion that is also exact; we want our logic—somehow—to be warm, to have feeling. The great, kind means to this is Aesthetic Realism.

A Poem on a Scientific Subject

I am going to comment on a very short poem by Mr. Siegel that is overtly on a scientific subject. It is about sensation, a matter that belongs to biology—more specifically, to neurology. For a scientific matter to be expressed as poetry—real poetry—is already evidence that science and art are of each other. The poem is in Eli Siegel’s Hail, American Development.

All sensation, Mr. Siegel showed in discussions of the matter, is a oneness of the two big opposites Self and World. In every happening of the senses, our individual self meets some representative of the world (here, a piece of paper), and there is an effect. These opposites, self and world, are central to every aspect of our lives—whether tactual or seemingly intangible. Self and world are in a baby’s sensation as her mother holds her—and they are one in thought of the largest kind, whether Newton’s, or Shakespeare’s, or Kant’s. Our whole lives are a matter of how we each, as self, meet the outside world, how we think and feel about it.

And, Aesthetic Realism explains, the big unarticulated fight within us is: should the way we meet the world be with respect—the desire to see meaning in what’s not us—or should we have contempt, the feeling that we make ourselves important through looking down on and managing other people and things? From the desire to see meaning in the world come both true art and true science. Contempt as impetus makes for things that parade as science or art but are bogus, empty, even cruel.

In the author’s note to “Seem to Do Most,” there are these sentences explaining the two last lines and the title:

Sensation takes place in many ways. It is clear that if a cold wind comes to our face of a November night, we don’t have much to do with it: we are just the recipient of the cold wind and have the appropriate sensation. However, when our thumb presses paper there is a sensation, and we seem to do most of the sensation work.

The note concludes with a sentence I see as beautiful and thrilling, and also urgent:

The poem is a bit of propaganda for the best part of our unconscious: the feeling or possibility of feeling that our life is a particular, loving conquest of reality.

What does that surprising phrase “loving conquest of reality” mean? To live is to want to assert ourselves and affect what’s not us in some way. To affect is to have a conquest of some sort. We’ll either try to conquer the world through manipulating it, looking down on it, dismissing it—or we will feel that the way to conquer reality is through knowing it, having its meaning get within us, and in this way have the world become ours as we give ourselves truly to it.

An International Matter—& a Poetic Line

While the phrase “loving conquest of reality” has enormous meaning for everyone’s personal life, it also has international meaning. In the lives of nations—all nations—as in one’s personal life: unless one sees respect for things and people as a victory for oneself, unless one sees the desire to know as a victory for oneself, there will be another kind of conquest one goes after: the conquest that is contempt, with all its cruelties.

Science is the proud and humble work of yielding to what things are, to what is true, and therefore it is a “loving conquest of reality.” So is art: for, Aesthetic Realism shows, in all true art—whatever the subject—the structure of the world itself, the oneness of opposites, has been gotten to by a person and is alive in his or her work.

Let us take the first line of the very short poem by Eli Siegel that we’re looking at. We can see that in the line “Thumb on paper” there is a sound that has the tangible, that has pressure. There is pressure in the sound of thumb—it presses and keeps the gentle pressure going for a while through that continuing m sound. Then there’s a little, quiet drama: after that staying-put of the first word, the phrase “on paper” moves rather swiftly. The swift ps in paper bring us a feeling of the assertively tangible, but it’s a tangibility different from the thickness and stillness in the sound of thumb. As “Thumb” is followed by “on paper,” we feel, we hear, reality’s rest and motion, stolidity and vivacity, in the line. (How different it would be if the line were “Thumb on sink.”)

We also feel the world’s separateness and togetherness, sameness and difference. The line’s three words are together; they’re wed; they’re of a piece. Yet (for instance) the long but sharp a sound in paper is so different from the vowel sound uh in thumb.

The line has definiteness—material definiteness—and also wonder. The way the word paper bounces into space a bit, even as it stays put, makes for a feeling of wonder. And the line’s terrific succinctness helps that wonder: change the line to “Pressing your thumb on a piece of paper” and the wonder is gone; indeed, the poetry is gone.

I have been pointing just a little to reality’s opposites: rest and motion; the tangibly definite and wonder; separateness and togetherness. We feel, we hear, in that very short line, what the world is. I could say much more about the line, and about the poem it’s of. The poem, in all its brevity, is art: it is words become musical. The music is that oneness of opposites which is reality itself.

In the Lecture

In the lecture we are serializing, Mr. Siegel uses as text the catalogue of a 1957 Parisian art show: the Exposition de la Société des Artistes Indépendants. In the catalogue is a list, by Henry Valensi, describing various artistic styles, and Mr. Siegel comments on the descriptions, translating them. His own style as he speaks is a oneness of rich seriousness and the playful; exactitude and ease. The lecture has the justice-as-beauty that was always his.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

How Much Brilliance?

By Eli Siegel

Next, we have M. Valensi’s description of the réalistes. The realist painters are like the classical painters, in keeping with his earlier description of a classique as a “painter who reproduces faithfully that which exists”—but the classiques are more selective in their subject matter. That is, once you got a “good” subject, the classic didn’t mind being realistic about it; for instance, a classic saw Apollo Belvedere realistically. But the realists would see anything, or nearly. And we have realism today. A favorite subject of realist painters is the liver of a steer, or some such thing—the esophagus of a raven. Realists feel anything can be looked at. The classic is realist with a great deal of discrimination, a great deal of leaving out.

The word realist obviously merges science and art. Every scientist considers himself or herself a realist. The description by M. Valensi of the réalistes is as follows:

Every painter who tends, before all, to a reproduction that is the nearest possible to reality, perhaps with vigor and brilliance, perhaps going toward a scrupulous truthfulness.

We have, then, the problem of how much brilliance, or (to use Valensi’s word) éclat, reality has. And the delightful question is: is all reality brilliant? Since dullness succeeds in its purpose of being dull, is it brilliantly successful? Since spaghetti succeeds in its purpose of being viscous and sinuous, is it brilliant? Insofar as a thing succeeds in being that thing, it can be seen as brilliant—it has éclat.

Valensi has the phrase “the nearest possible to reality.” What is that? This is both an artistic question and a scientific question. Picasso would say, “I go after reality—my reality, but reality.” Darwin wouldn’t say “my reality,” but he would say, “I go after reality, and that reality includes me.”

There have been various styles or approaches using the word realism. There is no school—I think there should be—called infra-realism, which means something-less-than realism. But such a name would mean that any failure would belong to art, because whenever art has failed it can be called infra-realism.

We do have surrealism. And we have magic realism. Then, there has been neorealism. Other possibilities are here, and the phrase that forms the name Aesthetic Realism is one of them. The question is: is aesthetics equivalent to reality? That’s a subject which will never leave. Then, there can be anti-realists, who are close to the infra-realists and are realists but deny there being reality at all.

Surrealism Had These

We come to a description of les surréalistes. With surrealism we have the question of whether the unconscious, the dream, the nightmare, the vision, free association, help to present reality more deeply. The misuse of that idea is the tendency of persons to feel that if they’re in a reverie and feel a little bad, somehow they’ve got the secret of reality. M. Valensi describes the surréalistes this way:

Those who take as real every dream, vision, nightmare, occult transmission, etc. In this manner they conceive a surreal world, painted as if it were a real world, but without taking into account any rational coordination among the objects represented.

A word used here brings us to reality as containing relation: the word is coordination. Valensi says surrealist artists don’t take “into account any rational coordination among the objects.” Yet coordination in a painting could mean there’s a slice of green outside that is coordinated with a square of green on a tablecloth, and then a curve of green on the wall. Such effects were gone after: there was a color recurrence, color likeness, color contrast. And all of these things have to do with mathematics, and have to do with science.

Within a dream picture, coordination could be found. Let’s say a watch was bending as a river flowed: you would have the bend of the river as the watch also bent. It was a new effect—Poussin didn’t have it, in terms of what a dream can do. The point is that we have in dream pictures certain relations among the ingredients, or constituents, or instances of content.

Coordination means a likeness of shape, a likeness of spatial tendency, a likeness in motion. This is in the field of logic. The purpose of logic is to find a truth among a set of things, present in that set of things, though not seen right away—yet through the arrangement of the set of things, to have that truth evident or acceptable.

“Those who take as real every dream, vision, nightmare—” Well, scientists generally take these as real. If there were a treatise on hallucinations, the scientific world wouldn’t gasp. There are such things as treatises on superstition, and there is a work, which was very popular in late Victorian times, called Illusions, by James Sully. Part of psychology is how you make something bigger or smaller through what is called optical illusion. There are other kinds of illusions. Science has studied what the eye does.

What about Nightmare?

Valensi mentions nightmare. But if the surrealists can deal with nightmare, the scientists can too. There are various kinds of nightmare; there can be a list of things that you don’t like but which can happen to you. One is being in a glue field and not being able to get out—or quicksand: the not being able to extricate yourself. Then, there’s the nightmare of having a bit of paper—and you can’t let it go but you can’t really make out the number on it, which is very necessary. Frustration happens to be a big scientific fact. There’s the nightmare of being in company with a number of people who you know are your enemies and they’re not telling you what they’re going to do with you—in the meantime, the travel looks ominous. There’s the nightmare of wanting to call out and you can’t. And there’s the nightmare of having something in your mouth that you can’t get out.

When what you don’t want is predominant, there is the beginning of nightmare—when it’s endless. There is the nightmare of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the pendulum is getting closer to the person. That is like the old-time sawmill in the cinema, with the saw getting closer to the heroine.

The nightmare can be classified, because the intolerable has a system. It’s quite various. And there is preference: whether you’d rather have a chunk of granite in your mouth you can’t spit out, or be in a pond you can’t get out of.

Then, in Valensi’s description, there is the word occult, and that has had a relation to other things. For instance, in the Home University Library there’s a work by Barrett called Psychical Research that looks like all the other books in the Home University Library: looks like Banking, by Leaf; looks like a work called Ancient Greek Literature, by Bowra; looks like a work called Canada, by Bradley.

More about Coordination

Valensi has the phrase “without taking into account any rational coordination.” Again: coordination is very much a matter of both science and art. In a poem or novel or short story, we may have details that seem to be flabby and listless, like tired persons of a Sunday afternoon not knowing where to go—the taverns aren’t open and they don’t want to go to church. There is an effect of listlessness, and it makes for not such good reading. The writing doesn’t grip you. The purpose of a story is to grip you, and then to be suggestive and atmospheric. This has to do with coordination—which includes continuity. A thing is continuous when it is felt that the detail following a previous detail continues that detail, though different. And that is a kind of coordination. Coordination implies a similarity in difference. We would have, then, in surrealism, if there were coordination, something of a scientific nature.

But the phrase Valensi uses is “rational coordination.” An artist would object to that. Coordination is any relation among things in which the things intensify each other. If a bell makes the color green more intense, there’s coordination. If one color brings out another color, or a shape brings out a color, there would be coordination. And if it’s coordination, the artist should say it’s rational.

In Science Too

C ontinuity with intensification is what art goes after. But the explanation of any fact has that in it too, because as we get to a conclusion there’s a relation among the details that is like continuity with intensification. There are two modes, then, of coordination. One is 3-6-9-12, or even 12-6-3-9: you feel 3 is lurking somewhere. But there is also coordination when colors, shapes, sounds, occurrences are related—as, let’s say, there’s a nymph diving in the water in Greece in 600 bc, followed by an orchestra crash, and there’s a feeling that the nymph diving and this orchestra crash say something to each other. Coordination is a big thing and, in the deepest sense, is always rational. But there are two kinds of rational: one, with which you can say Here is how it occurs; and the other, with which you feel there is a fitness though you may not be able to point to one thing after another as if they were the four buttons of a well-made jacket.