Dear Unknown Friends:

From Eli Siegel’s landmark series of lectures on the relation of art and science, we continue publishing here his Art Is within Science, of 1969. And we have arrived at part 3 of this remarkable talk.

In Art Is within Science, Mr. Siegel is showing—in a gracefully casual way, even a playful way, and always in an accurate and deep way—something huge: that these two human fields, art and science, which have been felt as so apart from each other, are richly and vitally of each other. Further: the opposites in our lives and minds that correspond to art and science—the opposites of value and fact, feeling and knowing, emotion and logic—need not war within us. They are not, as we so much take them to be, at odds. The following central principle of Aesthetic Realism certainly includes them: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

On This Date

The publication date of our present issue is May 25, 2022. That is the 44th anniversary of the operation that ended Eli Siegel’s life. The surgery—which he so much did not want— changed him physically in such a way as to make his life an agony to him; and it led to his death in November of that year, 1978. Over the decades I have written very much about the operation and its effects. But in a TRO published on May 25, I cannot let the terrible and so meaningful anniversary pass in silence. So I shall say some things briefly here.

It was to be a so-called simple surgery for benign prostatic hyperplasia. When Mr. Siegel objected strongly to having it, the doctors said that without it he would die. Mr. Siegel said he would rather die than have it. Then the viewpoint of a number of his students was sought—and I and all the others said rapidly that we thought he should undergo the procedure. He yielded; and it was performed at St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York, by surgeon Joseph De Filippi.

Speaking for myself: I have described over these decades how—yes—I was frightened by what the doctors said, but how I also had within me something ugly and cruel, which Mr. Siegel met in ever so many people throughout his life. It was present ferociously, viciously, in various persons of the literary establishment, and other “establishments.”

The American poet William Carlos Williams, in his famous 1951 letter to Martha Baird, writes about what Mr. Siegel met from “the ‘authorities’ whom I shall not dignify by naming.” Williams describes the largeness and beauty of Mr. Siegel’s work: Eli Siegel, he says, “has outstripped the world of his time”; the seeing in his poetry is “truly new.” Then Williams writes: “The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received.”*

Aesthetic Realism has identified the most hurtful thing in the human mind. It is contempt: “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Aesthetic Realism shows that the desire to have contempt, to look down on what’s not oneself, to feel scornfully superior, has made for every cruelty—from snobbishness, to racism, to war in all its brutality. The desire for contempt, and the fury at not being able to have it, has been the source of what Williams called the “extreme resentment” directed at Eli Siegel.

Because Mr. Siegel’s seeing—as poet, philosopher, critic, human being—was always deep, wide, scholarly, fresh, exact, and passionately keen and kind, those people who have thought they should be able to sneer at and feel superior to everything have been furious at him and his lifework. There are still persons today who—for that same reason—are furious with Aesthetic Realism. They resent terrifically the fact that Aesthetic Realism, in its logic and principles, in its rich and vivid respect for reality and people, is the fullest opponent of contempt—the contempt these resenters hold so dear.

Meanwhile, in May 1978 there was this terrible fact: the persons who were most for Mr. Siegel, we who were his students, also resented our respect for him. We too were angry that we couldn’t feel superior to him. And we had the horrible nerve to be angry with him because we respected so greatly someone who wasn’t touted by the “right” people. I have seen with clarity and burning regret that this resentment was in me. I see it was the reason I didn’t think with any real depth about Mr. Siegel when he so needed people’s honest thought. It was the reason I didn’t want to ask why he felt he should not have the surgery; it was the reason I, along with others, said so hurriedly that he should undergo it. I have seen that I wanted to feel finally superior to him: to feel I and others knew, and he did not, what was best.

The Aftermath

After the surgery, as the weeks proceeded, Mr. Siegel was aware increasingly that his body had been undermined, profoundly weakened. Writing to Dr. Samuel Sverdlik, he called it “the operation so disastrous to me,” and continued, “I have lost the use of my feet.”

The surgeon, De Filippi, contrary to customary practice, had chosen to perform the operation using general anesthesia, with Eli Siegel rendered unconscious before him. When questioned by me and others some weeks after it, De Filippi said that, yes, he had resented his large respect for Eli Siegel.

In the summer and early autumn of 1978, Mr. Siegel, despite his worsening physical condition, continued teaching Aesthetic Realism. He gave powerful lectures: on poetry, on noted historians, on drama and the novel. When he could no longer use his hands to write, he dictated issues of this periodical, and poems. He gave Aesthetic Realism lessons to people, which enabled them, through the years after, to have lives with a self-knowledge and happiness they could not have had otherwise.

An issue of TRO, composed and published in September 1978, when he was suffering very much, contains a series of epigrams by him. As I remember, they were come to as follows: he asked visitors to suggest subjects, and in each instance he then composed an epigram, spontaneously. They have humor, in various ways. I will quote ten of those 58 epigrams here. One reason I’ll do so is: they stand for the fact that, even under huge and frightening duress, his beautiful way of seeing the world continued. The other reason for quoting them here is: they are so very much in keeping with the subject of the lecture we are serializing: science and art. That is, each is a vivid—and musical—oneness of accuracy and feeling, fact and imagination, strictness and charm:

Tears

The bitterest tear is somewhat shapely.

 

Coleridge

I once saw Coleridge on a mountain in Devon explaining just who Christabel and Geraldine were, and just what they meant to each other; however, Coleridge was talking to himself and I was not close enough to hear him.

 

Trouble with Learning

It is better to have a prolonged trouble with learning than an easy, superficial victory over something else.

 

Mark Twain

The white suit that Mark Twain favored in his last years—1908, and the year before his death—covered one of the most bitter and yet funniest men in America.

 

Need

There is a need in every person to be a little different from what she was yesterday; and if she accepts this need with grace and thankfulness, happiness awaits her.

 

Forever

“Forever” is a lovely word, explained humbly by “sometimes” and “never.”

 

Boredom in Marriage

Possession is the greatest aid to being bored in marriage.

 

Shoulders

Somewhere in the year 18,000 B.C. in a little province of what is now Africa, shoulders and arms joined each other pretty much as they do now. Fingers looked on with approval.

 

The Rocky Mountains

The Rocky Mountains are unfit toys for children to play with.

 

Passion

It has been said that everything should be seen with pleasing passion, and this statement has not yet been disproved by the most pessimistic philosopher.

Eli Siegel did see everything “with pleasing passion,” passion that was the same as the desire to know. And I am sure of this: a passionate desire had by humanity to see Aesthetic Realism itself with justice will make people proud, intelligent, truly kind and happy.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Charged with Significance

By Eli Siegel

Note. From a 1957 catalogue for an exposition by the Société des Artistes Indépendants, Mr. Siegel is translating and discussing descriptions in a list of styles in painting.

In the list by Henry Valensi, we come to the symbolistes. Somehow, symbolist painting doesn’t seem to be very notable—the term is mostly used in relation to French poetry. However, M. Valensi has this about symbolist painters:

Those who express a moral idea or story through the employ of persons or objects charged by tradition, or by the artists themselves, to suggest another thought than that depicted by the immediate work.

Valensi says a symbol often has something to do with a “moral idea.” If you have somebody looking handsome with his foot on somebody looking evil, you have a symbol: The Victory of Virtue. This was represented by the angel Michael over a squirming Devil, which was an old-time symbol. You know that everything’s going to come out right. Then, to have a dove fluttering around a large oak was also a symbol, meaning that virtue never gives up. And then, to have a pure sheet of paper shone on by the sun means that the soul of man is in fairly good shape. That’s a symbol.

We have the phrase “charged by tradition.” The word charged means made solid and intense, as a battery is charged. Chargé, in French, means there has been an intensification, a solid intensification. That has to do with science. If there is an electric charge, if a thing is electrified, something has happened to that thing.

What we should inquire into is whether there’s anything that isn’t charged with significance. Also—can there be two things anywhere without their telling a story? I tried this. I once took a leaf from a backyard and put a button next to it, and I asked, “What does this mean?” I felt there were two things: either the victory of mechanism, or the defeat of mechanism. The leaf was beating the button, or the button was beating the leaf. Then, also, we could call it The Friendship of Mechanism and Nature. I’d settle for that.

Art Is about Likeness—& Change

Next, there are those artists called les naïfs. We have this description of them:

Those who paint rejecting any knowledge gotten in a school. But this term is extended to those who work with a meticulousness as to the smallest detail concerning a portrait, a scene, a landscape, in such a way as to reproduce these without any artifice.

So there are two kinds of naïf. The one accented here is the person who tries to get a likeness, who feels the purpose of painting is to take something home like what you saw: a portico is a portico, and you take the portico home with you.

“…who work with a meticulousness as to the smallest detail concerning a portrait, a scene, a landscape—” Some of that has been around in relation to postage stamps. It happens that, in stamps, the U.S. government has gotten to a little symbolism lately, but the old-time stamps were rather in the naïf field. The tendency was to have a hero, and the hero was very recognizable; or you’d have a building, and the building was recognizable; you’d have the chief thing in the Chicago Exposition of 1893. And it was all not disturbing. But symbolism has gotten the stamps too. There are stamps now—you can’t understand them; you know that they’re good for postage.

Change Goes On—& Is about More & Less

Then there are the expressionnistes. These don’t seem to be major in French art either. They are mostly with Germany somehow, or Central Europe. There are Kokoschka and Beckmann, and some others. But the expressionists are on the stage too. Some of the American expressionist plays don’t have any acts, and as soon as you don’t have any acts, you tend to get symbolic; meanwhile, you’re an expressionist. This is M. Valensi on the expressionnistes:

Those who, instead of reproducing a model taken from nature as it is, wish to exaggerate the expression, the form, or the color, going finally to the invention of certain details or certain figures.

Whenever a person looks at something, he or she does something to that and changes it. If we see the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s we, us, ourselves, seeing the Brooklyn Bridge. And we can change something we see. In expressionism, that seeing something and changing it can have a technique. Let’s say a person has a black button, and you deal with that button so as to make the mid-center of the person very definitely black. To have a person walking about with a foot of sheer blackness in the middle of his body is expressionist. Or, in expressionism, the ears might be made to go out from the head. To have an ear that would, let’s say, get to a bookshelf—I don’t know if that’s surrealism or expressionism; it worries me. But in terms of the way people see, something like expressionism came first: as soon as there was subjective audacity, there was expressionism.

“Those who, instead of reproducing a model taken from nature as it is, wish to exaggerate—” Here we have a relation of art to science. In art you either mute or you exaggerate. But if a thing changes it has to change quantitatively, so a touch of computing is present. Caricature is always a subtle duality, both a muting and an exaggeration—as, let’s say, a person has not too wide a brow, so the brow is made very slender. Or cheeks are a little fallen and you make a pit where a cheek should be. There is always a heightening or lessening, exaggeration or muting.

However, all art does exaggerate or does lessen. You take a twilight and accent everything that’s still, and then call it the Hudson River School. Or you take a sunset and accent everything that’s energetic, and call it the Barbizon School. It’s neither really. But the point is, you exaggerate or mute, and those things correspond to add and subtract, quite clearly.

Then, there is also equivalence. These are three logical terms: more than, less than, equal to. They’re in computing, and they’re present in expressionism. In expressionism, for example, instead of having a person walking, you might have a thigh bone on pavement. That’s a good deal of muting.

The Abstract & Objects

Another description is of the non-figuratifs et abstraits— non-figurative and abstractionist painters:

Those who create works from which are excluded all figures, images, or reproductions of objects or subjects existing in the exterior world. They produce works which reproduce nothing that preexisted their own creation.

That is fairly true. It happens that most shapes that are possible are not yet associated with a specific object—although in looking at any shape whatsoever you can, if you work hard enough, get to this looks like something. You get a certain shape, and you say, This is half a watermelon with a scoop in the middle. Or you can say it’s a bean shape. But most shapes are still looking for their specific objects, which means that a lot of things can be drawn about which it’s not easy to say, “I have seen something like it.”

The abstract is present in everything that’s representative. Within a circle, technically, every shape is to be found, including those that are completely non-representative. And an eggshell, with its ellipse or oval, can bust—can break—in every kind of delightful possibility. And a circle can. The capacity-for-busting of a circle is infinite. The meaning of this is that all of these shapes are geometrical. On the one hand, nothing just like them existed before, and then, they correspond to certain eternal things like the triangle, ellipse, cone, cylinder, oblong, rectangle square, cube, parallelepiped.

The Thing to See

The thing to see is that these can make for emotion, but quite clearly they are in the field of science. One could ask, To what study does the study of shape belong? On the one hand, it seems it belongs to art. But on the other, shape is also a scientific thing. It is also a logical thing.