Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part in our two-part publication of that kind masterpiece, that down-to-earth yet philosophically mighty lecture, that needed-right-now and classic work by Eli Siegel: The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage.

He gave this talk in 1964, and the word aesthetics, so eminent in the title, is central to Aesthetic Realism. Mr. Siegel is the philosopher who explained that the questions of everyone’s life are aesthetic questions, answered in the technique of art: “The resolution of conflict in self,” he wrote, “is like the making one of opposites in art.” In this talk he shows that the anger so much in marriage exists because the persons concerned don’t see (for instance) assertion and yielding, welcoming and objecting, care for self and care for what’s not self, as having the same purpose.

Another Principle, and a Poem

I’ll mention another principle at the basis of this talk: The purpose of love—indeed, the aim of our very life—is to like the world through knowing it. This purpose is interfered with in people because there’s a competing desire in us: to have contempt—to feel superior through looking down on, putting aside, sneering inwardly (sometimes outwardly) at what’s not us. And “love” has been used in behalf of that sneering at the world, with the couple agreeing in various ways that the two of them are of a finer caliber than others. (Meanwhile, with all their devotion, each feels superior to the other, too.) From this joint contempt for the world have come anger, shame, and much confusion.

There is a poem by Eli Siegel that I want to include as we publish his lecture. A large reason is this: I want readers to feel how richly lyrical he is, along with his being so logical and clear. This poem is included in his collection Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. I surmise that he wrote it in about 1926. —Here is “Love, The Days”:

At the beginning of each of these twelve lines, we meet the word love or words connected with love. And through the way they’re chosen, and accented and lingered on (each differently), we feel the mystery of love and sometimes its ache or whirl. Then at the end of each line is a day, or are days, of the week. The day of the week can seem much more pedestrian and impersonal than the throb and stir of love. The day of the week is something we share with millions of people; it’s public; in a sense, it’s the world ruling us, making us accept a certain arrangement of time. Meanwhile, through the way sounds are present in each line, our inner beings bend toward the lines’ final words—and those public divisions of time, the days, feel personal, intimate, too.

Further, the words at the start of each line, which have the bewilderment of love in them, have a music that gives them firmness too, and poignancy, and resonance.

Self as intimate and world as exact and wide become one in the music (great music) of this poem.

Now, the Poem of William Blake

Since in this second half of The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage Mr. Siegel continues discussing Blake’s “The Clod and the Pebble,” we’ll quote that poem here, in its entirety. It has affected people for over two hundred years. But to my knowledge, Eli Siegel is the only critic who said that the Clod and Pebble stand not for different kinds of people but for two things within everyone, things we all need to understand and see as deeply one. Here is the poem:

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage

(part 2)

By Eli Siegel

“Love seeketh not itself to please”: Blake, in his first line, says that love is interested in the object, the loved person. “Nor for itself hath any care.” And in love, it is quite true, a person does want to dissolve that annoyance, the cold self. If we can’t dissolve that annoyance, the cold self, love has not achieved what it might: love, instead of being love, is, as an English schoolboy might put it, a bust.

There is no limit to how altruistic we want to be. We want to do everything for the loved one. We give up our best umbrella gladly for the loved one. That is very simple. But we will go on errands we wouldn’t go on even for a chorus of high priests, for the loved one. We’ll do anything for the loved one. Even today, there is a lot of courtesy going on—because lewdness as such does not destroy the desire to please somebody through courtesy.

So Blake says, “Nor for itself hath any care,” and that is a tall statement. But it goes along with the facts: people want to affirm themselves, take care of themselves, feather their nests (all of which have “Self” on the front door, or the front twig)—but at certain critical times, self can be a great nuisance. So there is that in us which would like to give up self, to be heroic and feel wonderful. Every young woman wants to be a heroine of selflessness; every young man wants to be a hero of non-self. And in the muddle which is love and marriage, self and non-self gyrate and gyrate as a high-class kind of Saint Catherine’s wheel.

“But for another gives its ease”: we are interested in another, we want to please that person, and even after thirty years of marriage a person would like to feel “I have pleased the lady.” In fact, if you can’t please the lady even after sixty years, you miss something. There is a desire to fetch unknown cups of water for unknown thirsts; and sometimes the unknown takes a tangible form.

“But for another gives its ease, / And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.” This would mean that a self was liking itself too much, was caught in its own sad telephone booth, and another self comes along and enables the first self, encased in its own telephone booth, to think it has met something it was hoping for. We rescue people from themselves when we care for them and they feel the care is good and “reciprocate,” as the word is.

On What Basis?

We want to do something for another. And what is that? First, we want that person to like us. We all of us have a sneaking desire to be liked, which can at any moment change into a blatant desire to be liked. We want to be liked secretly, semi-secretly, and with public glare. Politics is made up of people who want to be liked with public glare. So we are after being liked. And the question is: on what basis shall we be truly liked?

Aesthetic Realism says if you don’t encourage another person to like the world more, the like that the person shows to you will never satisfy you—because that person doesn’t believe in it herself or himself. A person likes us when, through us, that person is encouraged to like the world more. This is in keeping with what was said earlier: that our purpose, our most constant purpose, the purpose of purposes, and the purpose of purposes of purposes, is to like the world on an exact basis, which is also beautiful.

So we want to be liked by another person, and we shouldn’t mind being liked for thirty years, forty years, let alone for twelve hours. On what basis can we be permanently liked? The only basis, Aesthetic Realism says, is: that the person sees us as enabling him or her to like the world more.

And when a person can like earth, it takes on a quality of heaven. Heaven (as the word is used in this poem) is only earth liked very much: truly liked. So when Blake says “And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” he is talking sense. There is something like hell when a person feels, however dimly, that there are great goings-on in the world, great things in the world, which are going to leave one cold and untouched because in order to be oneself, other things have to leave one cold and untouched.

Love is a means of saying: “Dearie, sure you want to be for yourself! But in being for this, and this, and this—and very much for me, of course—you will be more for yourself.” This is put in the phrase I can make you happy, Mildred.

“So sung a little Clod of Clay, / Trodden with the cattle’s feet.” The implication is that the Clod of Clay, in believing in all this devotion, was, after all, only a clod, liable to be discomposed, liable to crumble; and if you’re going to have the notion that you’ll build a Heaven for some person in Hell’s despair—well, what you’ll get is that the cattle will tread over you.

We Need to Be Both

Trying to be tough and trying to be kind is something every married person has to do. To be kind and tough is an aesthetic job; it is a making one of opposites. And all marriages that have gone wrong have gone wrong because the toughness and the kindness that the individuals in the marriage had to go for were used against each other. In other words, most people, when they’re tough, don’t honor their kind possibilities; and most people, when they are kind, don’t honor their tough possibilities.

We are all of us tougher than we know; that is, we are all more brutal than we care to think. And we are all of us, also, trying to be kind and not feel we are taken in. Life presents us the aesthetic job of being tough and kind at once, and in marriage that job is made more intense, more insistent.

Aesthetics is asked for at every altar as two people consent, with whatever religion present, to be one as the state sees it. They are saying they will know how to be tough and kind at once. People do want criticism, which here goes along with toughness; and they also want kindness. They are saying that they can present toughness and kindness at once, and also that they know how to evoke it from another. Well, they don’t.

And when there is something that we don’t know, which gives us pain because we don’t know it, why shouldn’t we be furious? All the married persons in America, with all the reading about sex, feel their toughness doesn’t go along with their kindness; and both are needed for one person in the same hour, let alone the same minute.

As I said, when there is something we have to know and we don’t know it, and the woman of our choice or the man of our choice reminds us that we don’t know it, what should we feel but furious? I have a notion that even the clod would rise on its cloddy toes or feet and do a little glaring!

Be that as it may, in being kind we have a chance of not being appreciated. To be kind and not appreciated is to be like the clod trodden under the cattle’s feet. So we come to the pebble. We are all adequately clod and pebble. We all are weaker than we want to be, and we all are tougher, more stubborn, more obstinate, more stony, harder than we want to be. —Now we come to the pebble:

“But a Pebble of the brook / Warbled out these metres meet.” (It is fetching to see a pebble using metre; I think, though, it is allowable.) “Love seeketh only Self to please.” That love is not only out for the good of the loved person has been in ever so many novels. In D.H. Lawrence, for example, you feel that these persons huddled on the same pillow are also in some fight they don’t understand, like two dragons at the bottom of the sea wrestling without interval, and glaring as they say “honey.”

Two married people find out very soon that with all the devotion, the selves uttering the devotion seem to be interested in themselves. No matter how many errands have been run, how many kind words have been said, how many presents have been given, how many lips have quivered, how many thighs have caressed slyly and pleasantly other thighs—self is still there, doing business in behalf of the central firm. The purpose of selves is to do the business of selves, and all the altars in the world won’t change that economic condition.

So we find that people, with all they have said to us, are interested in themselves. This should not be alarming, because our purpose is to have “themselves” come into the harbor of time (which is a poetic phrase, but makes some sense, I believe) through our breezes, encouragements, and hopes. We do want selves to be happy; we’d never say that selves should be extinguished.

And it is a wonderful thing to be oneself and another self too. This may sound mystical, but it isn’t mystical; it is possible, and art shows that.

Another Aesthetic Question

However, the self is versatile. It can be itself; it can be something else. It can be indefinitely another person, it can be other persons, and it can be the source of things, because the source of things is in the thing that self is. Yet it has to be particular. And we come to another aesthetic question: How can the self be particular, and be something else, and also have a sense of everything?

In love there is a feeling that the world is going our way. When someone said for the first time, “Love me and the world is mine,” that person was talking sense, because if we feel another person cares for us, we can feel the world as such can care for us—if that person represents the world.

As to the matter of self: there is an aesthetic mix-up, which means there is bad aesthetics, in the business of being oneself and another self too, which marriage insists on. In ordinary terms it isn’t called being another self; but people do say, “You only think of yourself—you never think of me!” To think of another self is that much to be another self. The more the thought is good, the more that being is there.

So if “Love seeketh only Self to please,” marriage is going to have a difficult time.

The Purpose of Marriage

We come, then, to this problem: Is it possible to be at one with another self in such a way that the whole world is liked more? This is the purpose of marriage, as Aesthetic Realism sees it: to be in such a relation with another self that one’s care for the world is encouraged, is there more, is increased, and is believed in more. This is possible. But since there is a desire to have another self as an adjunct to oneself—no matter how pretty the talk is that precedes it—we find a self trying to annex another self. And sex at its worst can be called clumsy, unaesthetic annexing. We find that a self takes over another self and then, also, is robbed of its largest hope—which is to like the world that somehow became ourselves or made us, and made us what we are and gave us a chance to be where we are.

Mix-up

So self gets mixed up with self. All mix-up, of any kind whatsoever, is unaesthetic. The bad opposite of the organization that is in all art is mix-up, or opposites poking at each other, thinking they are touching fingertips but instead are poking elbows or tripping each other up.

“To bind another to its delight.” Wanting a person has to be looked at. We can want a person to join us—with ourselves as boss, of course—in the business we previously had. This can be disguised. If it weren’t disguised, there wouldn’t be as many marriages as there are.

“Joys in another’s loss of ease”—and because we see another person as a rival, we can have a satisfaction in seeing that we can pain another. In Aesthetic Realism lessons, person after person has said there is some satisfaction in being able to have another person worry, or to give pain to another. Causing worry is one of the greatest industries in the world. It is a greater industry than the movie industry and the auto industry combined.

“And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.” There was a possibility of liking the world on an aesthetic basis, but that possibility was not cared for, was not welcomed, so there is a “Hell in Heaven’s despite.” A definition of heaven is: aesthetics working in a natural way, without puffing and without pretense, as part of the reality which it has always been in.

I hope I have said some things showing that aesthetics has a place in marriage. And I hope I have given some reason for believing that if fury and boredom are to be less in marriage, aesthetics will have to be seen with more respect.