Dear Unknown Friends:

We continue to serialize Things Are Likened to Each Other, by Eli Siegel. This 1971 lecture, which has Mr. Siegel’s scholarship, ease, depth, style, kindness, is about what art centrally is. What he explains is something we need tremendously to know now.

Mr. Siegel is showing that the very basis of art is the seeing that things different from each other are, at the same time, like each other, related to each other. That is in keeping with the central principle of Aesthetic Realism, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Earlier in the lecture he spoke about passages of poetry by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire—of the 17th and 18th centuries. Now he looks at a poem by Théophile Gautier (1811-72), and speaks about the fact that a thing and the possibilities of that thing are a relation of sameness and difference. He speaks too of Gautier’s having one feel a likeness between splendor and evil. Toward the end of this section Mr. Siegel reads his own magnificent translation of the Gautier poem.

Right Now in America

Sameness and difference are the very center of art; but they are also central to our nation—and to what will happen to it.

Right now in America two huge things are occurring. One is the terrible pandemic of Covid-19. The other is the protests, determined, beautiful, and overwhelmingly nonviolent, against racism. Both are making vivid the need for our nation to have a just way of seeing people, of behaving as to people. That just way will make a one of the individuality, the distinctness, of every human being and the fundamental likeness we all have—our magnificent and urgent relatedness.

The great documents of the United States are about sameness and difference. There is, for example, this from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” There are these words from the Preamble to our Constitution—having persons, in their diversity, be joined as one: “We the People of the United States.” The beauty of the phrases I have quoted is equaled only by the need to take them seriously at last. Those phrases do stand for the true purpose of our nation—even as they have been betrayed, flouted, undermined, falsified, made a mockery of by many people for hundreds of years.

The demonstrations of these months of 2020 have been saying: the betrayal must continue no longer.

The dishonesty about, violation of, attack against people’s real relation of sameness and difference, has largely taken two forms in America. One is racism. The other is economics based on profit: on using the labor, needs, lives of millions of people for the financial aggrandizement of a few.

With the raging of Covid-19, there is an intensification in America of joblessness, poverty, hunger, homelessness. And millions of Americans worry that soon they too will be without a job and income, unable to put food on the table, unable to pay their mortgage or rent. These horrible situations did not begin with the coronavirus. They existed before; are amplified now. And Americans are clearer than they ever were that an economy which permits these things is wrong, evil, un-American, and must be changed.

People want—are clamoring for—the US economy with its production, distribution, and consumption, to be based on what Eli Siegel described: “What does a person deserve by being a person?” That question honors the sameness and difference of people. It says that every person is as real, as fully a human being, as every other; yet each is “a person,” in his or her distinctiveness. So let’s begin giving some of the answers to that question, answers I believe are in the feelings of Americans now with a certain immediacy:

1) Every American deserves—simply because he or she is alive—to have enough food, a home, an income that enables him or her to live well. These are aspects of what the signers of the Declaration of Independence called “certain unalienable Rights.” With intensity, Americans want their government (in the words of the Declaration) “to secure these rights.”

2) I believe the following feeling is large in Americans now: a person deserves to have his or her skills be a means of strengthening others—not of providing big bucks to some employer. They feel their ability to work should depend on usefulness, not somebody’s profit. Wrote Mr. Siegel in 1976:

Only contempt for other people could bear the idea that another might work only if oneself were the means of his employment. That one’s employment or usefulness should depend on another person! [TRO 166]

3) Every person, by being a person, deserves equally to have an education. The idea that one child can go to college because her parents have lots of money while a child of poorer parents can’t go to college or has to incur massive debt to do so: this difference was once taken for granted. It’s now increasingly felt by Americans to be unacceptable.

And though the following is not a matter of money, I can’t write about education without saying, with much feeling: every person, by being a person, deserves the great and needed knowledge that is Aesthetic Realism.

4) We have to see what people do not deserve in order to see what they do deserve. There is an ever clearer feeling in America that no one deserves to be seen as less a person because his or her skin is a different shade than one’s own. Similarly, there is the increased feeling that no person deserves to be seen in terms of profit by another. No one deserves to be looked on this way: “I hope you are desperate for work so I can make big profits by paying you as little as possible,” and “I hope you, as buyer, are so desperate for my product that you’ll pay me whatever I ask, though you can’t really afford to.”

The objection people feel to this way of seeing includes a fury about healthcare and medicine. I remember Mr. Siegel speaking with passion decades ago about the fact that healthcare was a human right; that the idea of a person’s having to worry about money for healthcare was barbaric; that to see a person’s ailment as a source of profit for oneself was completely uncivilized and hurt everyone involved. All this has to do with the sameness and difference of oneself and another.

The Strongest Thing in the World

Since Mr. Siegel speaks, in this section of his talk, about a poem of Gautier, I am going to quote his beautiful translation of lines from another Gautier poem—perhaps the greatest lines of that writer. In these stanzas from “L’Art,” Gautier says that art is the strongest thing in the world. He is right. And the reason (not given by Gautier) is that art is a certain fullness of justice by a person to that thing which is different from him- or herself: the world, as large and immediate at once. So Gautier says that while a city of long ago has disappeared, the art of long ago endures. And while an emperor of long ago thought he was so powerful, he’s gone; yet a coin that has his face on it endures in its metallic workmanship—and may be discovered any day now. This idea has meaning for any time, including ours—because, while various people may go desperately and unscrupulously after power, they’re no match for the greatest, most enduring power, of justice itself, and art.

So here is Eli Siegel’s rhymed translation. It is a musical oneness of strictness and grace, quietude and triumph. He gave it the title: “Two Stanzas from Gautier’s ‘L’Art,’ Showing the Oneness of the Temporary and Permanent”:

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A Thing & Its Possibilities

By Eli Siegel

We go to another phase of likeness and difference. In 1852 one of the best known works in French poetry was published, Émaux et camées, Enamels and Cameos, by Théophile Gautier. It has some of the best formed verse in French. The poems, which had appeared separately, affected Baudelaire—and there’s a touch of ornateness and also some evil in the poem of Gautier I’ll speak about. The sense of splendor and evil, of something decorative and something sinister, is in the poetry of the French Parnassians, and also in Baudelaire, and later writers, because the sinister and the decorative are a good pair. Sometimes they are like each other.

Gautier wrote two poems under the title Études de mains, Studies of Hands. One was about a person he saw as a lady of beauty, charm, and love. The other was about a murderer. I’m going to look at the first, the poem called “Imperia.” I’ll read, to begin, a translation in verse, a fairly good translation of 1903, by Agnes Lee*:

Beginning with the hand, seeing a person and also possibility: that is a journey into the possibility of likeness. We begin with something, and evoke something.

I am going to translate literally and comment. Then I’ll read my more careful translation. In the first line there is a word about likeness: “Chez un sculpteur, moulée en plâtre.” “Chez un sculpteur” means at a sculptor’s place, or with a sculptor. Here the word chez is closeness and difference, between the place and the sculptor.

Translation: Languages as Like & Unlike

“Moulée en plâtre,” “moulded in plaster.” I couldn’t use the word plaster; it would make for a bad association. One had to say clay, as Agnes Lee does.

The second line is “I saw the other day a hand,” “J’ai vu l’autre jour une main.” Since I used clay, I couldn’t translate jour as day, because you’d have a huddle of rhyme.

In the third line there are two women of ancient times, and there’s a great deal of difference between them: “D’Aspasie ou de Cléopâtre,” “Of Aspasia or Cleopatra.” Aspasia is of the 5th century bc and Cleopatra is of the 1st century bc. I dare say Aspasia read more books, because she was the advisor of Pericles. She was a noted friend of one of the leaders of ancient times: Pericles, the leader of Athens.

“Pur fragment d’un chef-d’oeuvre humain,” “Pure fragment of a human masterpiece.” Gautier, I think, did see this hand, and it was a formed hand, a moulded hand. But then he went toward possibility.

He thinks of whiteness:

It was like a white poem, this hand. And it gave forth its beauty, flourished, blossomed (s’epanouissait). It’s hard to translate that with a word that’s not too fancy; it showed its beauty.

Gautier was taken, as the Romantics were, by the relation of paleness and brightness. So we have:

Those, of course, are opposites, slender fingers and heavy rings—yet there is likeness. What can you do? It’s Gautier. That’s the way he wanted it.

Then there is the line “Une cambrure florentine,” “A Florentine shapeliness.” The word cambrure (shapeliness) is both abstract and exceedingly, well, of this world.

The Poem, Translated

Now, after giving that more or less easy version of some stanzas I’ll read my translation of the poem.

A Study of Hands: Imperia

The Whole Subject Is Likeness

That poem helped to bring about Baudelaire, and hinted of the evil to come, which is important. And it is a true poem. It’s not the greatest poem of Gautier, but it’s a poem worth knowing. And it has likeness for the whole subject.

That is: you begin with a sculptured hand, and you get to a person—and then what this person may have meant, what she may have done. In the meantime, you’re looking at the hand and thinking of human history, ornate human history.

In conversation things are likened, sometimes without one’s knowing it. A person, asked by another for a referral, says: “Do you know a certain company that has recently enlarged its facilities?” “What is this company?” “It’s the Tarasso Brass Company, which is occupying quite a few acres in Wisconsin.” The other man says, “If you recommend it, I’ll give it a whirl.” Why giving a thing a whirl means trying it, accepting it in a sense, is hard to say, but somewhere it does. The unconscious is very much concerned in this matter.

So we should look for it wherever it is: the tendency to liken one thing to another. It is present in all thought.