Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 4 of Is Hope Worth Money?, a definitive, very lively, deep, surprising, kind 1969 lecture by Eli Siegel. It’s about those huge matters in people’s lives, fact, value, and emotion. And behind the understanding in it is this Aesthetic Realism principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”

In the present section, Mr. Siegel comments on a poem of Matthew Arnold that describes two different possibilities about the world’s creation. One is that it arose from a purpose, from a plan; the second, that the world arose by chance. As we know, these two views have been much argued about over the years, sometimes fiercely. And Mr. Siegel, without “taking sides” here, shows that in either instance it is a world that has Meaning.

In relation to that tremendous and beautiful matter which is meaning, I wrote in our last issue about something that Aesthetic Realism explains and that people need—vitally—to understand. I’ll say a little more about it now.

In Every Person

There is a fight going on in everyone between the desire to see meaning in things and a desire not to see meaning—a desire to diminish, even expunge, the value of people, things, reality itself. This fight is a form of the biggest fight in everyone, between respect for the world and contempt for it.

One can tell oneself that all one wants is to find meaning in the world, meaning in one’s life, meaning in love. This, however, is not so. It is what part of us wants, the deepest thing in us. But there is something else in us, very active, that feels the way to have meaning ourselves, to matter, to be important, is to lessen what other people are. That thing in us, contempt, has us feel: “The more value, the more meaning, I can see in another person, the more I am diminished. My importance comes from feeling superior—and so the value of somebody else takes away from my value.”

That goes not only for how we see people but for how we see the world itself. Our not seeing meaning in things makes us feel the world is empty, and emptiness is painful. However, there is something in the self that revels in this emptiness. That something feels, “I’m superior to this miserable, meaningless world I’m in. I am royalty, too good for this world—and its emptiness is evidence it’s not worthy of me.”¹

Further—though making things empty of meaning is a victory of contempt, the feeling of emptiness is also a punishment for contempt. That is: when you rob things, people, reality of meaning, you feel your life itself is empty. Then you look for ways—false ways—to take away that emptiness. People use alcohol or drugs to provide a substitute for meaning. People may eat too much; or make too many and foolish purchases; or be increasingly driven to beat out others in various fields. All those substitutes make one more empty and agitated than ever. That is because we were born to see real meaning in the outside world—a world to which we are infinitely and richly and so meaningfully related.

“Sunlight in Slush”

In this TRO there is, too, a poem by Eli Siegel, written in 1966. “Sunlight in Slush” is published in his Hail, American Development. Every instance of art shows the world has meaning. But this poem is a particularly vivid pointing to meaning, as it has us see that something ordinary and unattractive can glow, have grandeur, be even glorious. In the free verse lines of the poem, through both their statements and their music, we feel the casual and the wondrous as inseparable. Throughout, and ever so much in the final section, I hear Eli Siegel’s deep, wide, and oh so warmly exact kindness.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Both Ways There’s Meaning

By Eli Siegel

I ’m going to read some lines of a poem of Matthew Arnold titled “In Utrumque Paratus,” which means prepared for either possibility.

If we see the world as having sense, structure, purpose, we have an emotion about that. If we see it as all by chance, casual, having no purpose, there is another emotion. However, it happens that there is a value in both possibilities, and in his way Arnold hints at this. No person has lived without getting a value from both the orderly and disorderly.

In the first part of “In Utrumque Paratus,” Arnold is writing about the possibility that the universe has a purpose, and that it arose from God. Then later in the poem he writes about another possibility: that the world just happened by chance and is a “wild unfather’d mass.” This is the poem’s first stanza:

In this poem of 1849 Matthew Arnold does not have the lucid mode of expression which elsewhere he has. I would say the poem has a good deal of trouble. But his desire is to say that either way there’s a meaning. Whether the world came to exist by chance—came to exist as a sly moment in chaotic procedure, or non-procedure—or whether it did have a purpose, there is meaning. The matter is still with one.

When things are seen as having order under a microscope, when animalcula are seen as having symmetry, and when the paramecium is seen as being a little bit like the Parthenon, all of that makes one feel the principle of order gets to the teeny-weeniest thing, and the most microscopic thing. Which it does. It happens that germs, for example, under a microscope, look very often quite shapely. And the shapes of molecules now interest the scientists. Molecules do have shapes. The chemist Kekulé found the latent desire for structure in organic chemical existences.

In the stanza I just read Arnold presumes something very interesting: that God, after being alone for a while, felt, About this time, I should create a universe. All that is seen under a microscope would be present: we can be pretty sure that on the first day of such a creation the microscopic would be present, because the microscopic is present when the non-microscopic is present. If you look at a grand piano closely enough, you’ll find the microscopic. That is so if you look at a great tree closely enough.

“If, in the silent mind of One all-pure, / At first imagined lay / The sacred world—” So the first possibility Arnold presents is that a creator knew what he was doing right from the start. As I say in a poem in Hail, American Development—

Or we could put it a little more dully: God said: I’m no fool— / I knew some day there’d be the molecule.

Qualities Cause Emotion

In keeping with what Arnold describes as he presents that first possibility: the creator would also be aware that things would have various qualities, all of which make for emotion. Things have something called weight, which is usually obstructive. Take a refrigerator: if you run right against it, you’ll hurt yourself. Matter can be decidedly against one’s comfort.

“From those still deeps, in form and colour drest, / Seasons alternating—” Arnold, describing that first possibility about the world, is saying its creator would have been aware that objects would have form and color.

It happens that form and color have made for great value. The two have done things to people, and are still doing things. If you have, for example, red merging into gray, something happens to you. It happened a long time ago. People watched cherry trees with dusk falling and saw the red of the round cherries meeting the quiet activity of twilight—and they felt something. Form and color are what everything has—form, color, weight. Then there’s such a thing as size, with whole and part. These are in objects. Locke wrote about them. They’re still there. Objects have form and color; they have weight; they have size; they have whole and part; and very often they can move. With that equipment, they can still do surprising things.

“Seasons alternating, and night and day.” Arnold is not sculptural, nor is he painterly. The sense of the solidity of objects, which came to Cézanne in the 1880s, was not Arnold’s exactly, though in various poems you see that he does have a feeling for the solidity of objects. In “The Scholar-Gipsy,” Arnold has those bales at the end of the poem: they are unforgot—the way the Tyrian trader uses those bales.

Where Is Value?

The question is: Do things as such have value? And how do they have it? Does form, which is in a thing, have value? Does color? Does weight?

Weight, the effect of weight, is a very big thing in music, because all sounds are heavier or lighter than others. Words are heavier or lighter. But music comes, in every instance, from the arrangement of matter. Matter can be made percussive; it can be made a wind instrument; or a stringed instrument. Every musical instrument is a cunning arrangement of matter. A piano is an arrangement of matter. A tuba is. A cornet is. A violin is. Whatever the kind of instrument, it is matter. We can have these lines:

An orchestra brings out what matter has in it.

“Seasons alternating, and night and day, / The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west, / Took then its all-seen way.” We’re still with the first possibility Arnold describes. It is that reality arose from the intention of “One all-pure.” It would be this creator who created the directions, “north, south, east, and west,” and the creator’s “long-mused thought” used all of them.

Our Thought Can Go Back in Time

Arnold was interested in how the world, as we now know it, came to be, with all its diversity and its cunningness and its subtlety. It does have many things in it. But the idea in the first part of the poem is that the diversity of the world arises from the “all-pure,” as the colors do from white. Purity gave rise to the impurity that is interesting. That’s the history of the world.

We can go in our thought from what we have now to the beginning of things. If we care to, we will stop midway. That’s where archaeology comes in. Archaeology is midway between nothingness and the present. Also, the prehistoric is there. Arnold says:

Matthew Arnold was not much of an anthropologist, but he was aware that once people had lived differently from the way they lived in London in the 1840s. He is aware of “pastoral huts”—and also of stars, which are in the next lines:

Here Arnold shows that interest he has in everything’s being alone. Everything is separate—that’s a theme in his poems. But if a thing is separate, does it have a purpose in being separate? And if it also wants company, does it have a purpose in wanting company? It seems that objects have two purposes—for instance, branches rustling. Each wants to be the branch, but also wants to say hello to other branches. And that’s called rustling.

But Maybe It’s All Chance

Then Arnold presents the second possibility: that the world came to be by chance, without a purpose:

So Earth had no purpose. But it must be said that Arnold presents Earth, with this groaning, as a woman about to have a child. If that’s so, though she has “throes” she does know what she’s doing. —Then:

This poem is Arnold saying, Try to be aware of the world as having sense as its cause, some order, some meaning, and also as having chaos as its cause.

That is what is necessary. It happens existence is the most cunning simultaneity of messiness and order. There is a value in both, and a preference for both.

Reality is always a dance of preferences, an interaction and separation.

Sunlight in Slush, in Puddles, and in Wet Municipal Surfaces; or, Miracle on Eighth Avenue below Fourteenth Street

By Eli Siegel