Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO is about Freedom—as a recent issue, TRO 2067, was, and as many others in various ways have been and will be. Freedom, after all, both in history and in everyday thoughts, has some of humanity’s largest feeling with it, most intense longing, and also some of people’s biggest mistakes.

In the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold there is the famous and beautiful line “Yet, Freedom, yet thy banner, torn but flying.” Byron wrote that in 1817. There had been the victory of the American and French Revolutions, and he saw that throughout Europe, people, including “ordinary” people, wanted what those revolutions stood for: they wanted a freedom that they were coming to see as their birthright. It is the freedom to live in this world without wearing one’s life away merely to get some kind of food and shelter; it is the freedom to partake in a nation’s opportunities on the same basis as any person—because we are all equally human beings. Byron passionately wanted this fight for freedom to win. And he hated the vicious unremitting effort to put it down, by those who felt one’s nation should be owned only by certain favored persons. So, he says, the banner of freedom has been torn by massive efforts against it, and yet—and yet—it is still flying! The line has in it a music of struggle and then, at the end, a proud release, a sound that is free.

Whenever

Whenever a true freedom has been opposed (including through political brutality and weaponry), its opponents have been trying to protect or establish a fake, ugly “freedom” of their own. For example, in 1775 George III and the British aristocracy felt they should have the freedom to use the American colonies for their own financial aggrandizement. And in 1861 and later, the Confederacy presented itself as fighting nobly for freedom: we, they said, should be free to maintain our treasured institution of slavery—we won’t have our right to it trampled and our lifestyle wiped out by that tyrant Abraham Lincoln!

How can freedom be, on the one hand, beautiful, and on the other, tremendously ugly? The means to understand freedom and to distinguish between good freedom and bad, is in the principles of Aesthetic Realism.

For example, Aesthetic Realism explains that the big and constant fight in every person is between the desire to like the world honestly, value it truly, and the desire to have contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Contempt is the basis of all bad, or fake, freedom. It is the largely unarticulated feeling, I don’t have to try to know, to see what is true—I’m free to hate as it suits me, to agree with what suits me (no matter how false it may be), to praise or destroy as it suits me. The basis of this freedom is what suits me, which means what makes me feel comfortable or important. There has been a very great deal of this contempt-as-freedom in history and everyday life. Lying, of course, is based on it. The fight between true and false freedom is tremendous in America now.

To understand freedom, we also need this 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.” One opposite of freedom is justice; another is accuracy. And I state swiftly here this urgent, magnificent fact: all art shows that the only real freedom is freedom that is justice too, accuracy too.

Women & Poems

We publish in this issue an article by Aesthetic Realism associate Leila Rosen. It is from a paper she gave at a public seminar titled “What’s the Freedom a Woman Wants Most?” Ms. Rosen, a much respected educator, taught English in New York public schools for 29 years.

And it is an honor to include four poems by Eli Siegel that have to do with freedom. The first and third are from his book Hail, American Development, the second and fourth from his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems.

1. The person told of in “Ode on the Death of a Racketeer,” Dutch Schultz, died in 1935. And Mr. Siegel wrote the poem shortly after. He uses Schultz to comment, with humor and full seriousness, on a term having to do with freedom. The author’s note itself is definitive—for all time and our own.

2. “The Proud Turtle” is about an ordinary aspect of the freedom of contempt. We have the “freedom” to look down on anything, consider it unimportant and not worth our interest. Without knowing it, we use some form of that freedom hour after hour. However, in this short narrative, a living being counters that way of seeing—with effectiveness and charm.

3. “Intactus; or, Nothing Doing” is based on a famous poem of W.E. Henley, once much more popular than it is now. Henley’s “Invictus” begins:

“Intactus” satirizes a contemptuous freedom precious to people: the freedom to be “intact,” to stick to one’s own narrow way of seeing and be unstirred by what’s not oneself.

4. “2 p.m.” is a poem of 1926. It is, in its four lines, great. It is great in its rhythm, and more. What does the message of this poem have to do with freedom? There are three main objects in it: auto, tree, moon. Are these objects freer because each, while itself, is related to the other objects? Yes! Are we free because we can conquer or dismiss things different from us, or because we can see them in their difference as adding to us? The latter!—as auto and tree, in this poem, both seem to feel the moon adds to them.

As I wrote earlier: in the technique of all art, opposites corresponding to freedom and accuracy are one. That is so in these poems. Each individual line with its music puts together freedom—in the form of motion or hubbub or tumult or ripple or surprise—and the accuracy that is structure, firmness, living organization.

Every true artist is free because his or her purpose has been to do justice to a thing and to the world it stands for. That purpose, to be just to the world, was Eli Siegel’s all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems by Eli Siegel

Author’s note: The check on free enterprise or laissez faire—as it used to be called—is ethics. Government, supposedly representing ethics, has often restricted free enterprise—for instance, in the field of child labor….Yet free enterprise has often been talked of as if the word “free” were clear and virtuous. Free enterprise does go for racketeering or the absence, say, of minimum standards. The freedom of once has been seen later as injustice, as ugliness. Where do the ugliness and injustice of free enterprise begin? —The poem says that free enterprise must somewhere have injustice in it, for offhand all that Dutch Schultz was doing was carrying free enterprise to its free-est….Perhaps then we should change a well-known term to Free-and-Accurate Enterprise; or, perhaps, Free-and-Just Enterprise; or, even, Free-and-Beautiful Enterprise.

Author’s note: The poem Invictus, of W.E. Henley, is a good poem—perhaps his one unquestionable poem. Despite the poem’s goodness, it has been used to place ego in a bad relation with what is not it: that is, the external world with all its unlooked for, not likable behavior. There is no limit to how much we can find earth, world, universe unsatisfactory….But ego or self can likewise be inefficient in felicity, beauty, act. Intactus is a poem asking that we be fair in the criticism of what is not ourself and what is. The world is unkind—but we may have gall. The universe is harsh—but we may not want to learn. The world causes fear—but our desire not to know it is a desire with contempt for the world often in it. —And our method of protecting ourselves from the world, asserting our apartness, may not be so handsome. —Well, this supplement to Henley’s poem, or this Something Else, seemed necessary.

The Freedom We Want Most

By Leila Rosen

In my senior year of high school, I spent weeks poring over the Barron’s college guide, looking for schools that 1) had all the subjects I was eager to study—speech science, Japanese, microbiology, sculpture—and 2) were far enough away to liberate me from what I considered my annoying family, shallow acquaintances, and unsophisticated hometown of Brooklyn.

I didn’t know that these two goals stood for two ideas of freedom that were utterly opposed. The first, the desire to know, came from the feeling Eli Siegel describes in his lecture Education and Feeling Good:

“I want to make this, which is not myself, myself.” It’s a kind of love….The world consists of things to be studied, known….Without knowledge,…there is no freedom. [TRO 1758]

The second came from the worst thing in me and everyone: contempt, the feeling that the way to be important is to “disparage,…be disgusted with,…be superior to” what’s not oneself (Self and World, p. 362).

I was to learn from Aesthetic Realism that my desire for contempt made me feel, not free, but stuck.

For example: At Kent State University I was glad to get the courses I’d asked for. But in class, as I looked at my fellow students, I felt scornfully aloof from them, often mocking them in my mind. I preferred my own company—told myself I was freer that way. But I had trouble focusing and couldn’t complete my work. I felt more trapped than ever.

Some years later, in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, I would be asked: “Have you felt you were most sure of yourself when you could mock?” I had. But, I learned, because this “sureness” was based on something I couldn’t respect myself for, I was increasingly unsure as time went on.

Notions of Freedom in Brooklyn, NY

Mr. Siegel defined freedom as “the being able for a thing to be as it wants to be, while changing as it wants to change.” We’re impelled to go after this from birth. As we know the world—through light, color, sound, words, people—we change, grow, become ourselves. This began for me at 302 Marine Avenue in Brooklyn. I loved how the sun came through our tiny bathroom window, how graceful ivy vines climbed to the ceiling on our kitchen wallpaper. It was there I met books, listened to our recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite so much I wore it out, and, with friends, acted out adventures from Mickey Mouse Club serials.

It was there, too, that I heard my parents speak disparagingly about people—especially each other’s first family. I also remember feeling hurt that they showed I wasn’t the only thing that mattered to them. I made up a world inside my mind, where I ran the show and mocked people. I felt I was made of much finer stuff than my parents, and I was defiant—especially of my father.

“Did you build a character for yourself out of defying your father?” I was asked in my first Aesthetic Realism consultation. I had. I felt driven to be scornful of him, but I also was very troubled about it. My consultants said: “We’re going to be an individual either by defying as much as possible, or through how much we want to know other things. So, do you think you could feel like an individual knowing your father?”

This was new—and I wanted to find out. As I asked my father questions, I learned of his family’s poverty during the Depression, and his shame at having to get shoes from government relief. And I learned of his care for mathematics, baseball, and unions, for which I respected him. Our conversations had me see him, for the first time, as a person. I had always had a knot in my stomach when I heard his key in the front door; now it was gone—and I began to feel liberated!

Love—& Women’s Confusion about Freedom

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that my notions of what would make me free affected how I saw love and men. To me, love meant a man’s showing devotion passionately while I remained essentially aloof and superior. Seeing this way, I unknowingly caged myself, was incapable of really caring for someone, and I despaired about love.

I went through what I called my “what the hell” period, when I was determined to break free from my enclosed self. I told myself I wanted a sincere, meaningful relation with a man, and though I acted “liberated,” inside I felt nothing of the kind.

Studying Aesthetic Realism, I changed very much. I met and fell in love with Alan Shapiro, jazz pianist and music educator, who wanted to know me deeply and was learning how to as he himself studied Aesthetic Realism. I felt happy and free and said “Yes” when he asked me to marry him.

But soon, as I saw I needed Alan to be more myself, I became resentful, and when he asked me questions about what I felt as to many things, I pulled back. I had associated my freedom with being hidden and keeping the world out. Besides, I misused the fact that I was a teacher to see myself as the person who should instruct others. So I put up roadblocks to Alan’s knowing me, and he objected.

In an Aesthetic Realism class discussion about life and knowledge, Alan said he thought I should want to know myself more, and talk about myself. Ellen Reiss asked me, “Do you think Mr. Shapiro can really be useful to you?” “Yes. He has been,” I answered. And Ms. Reiss asked: “Has it been in spite of you, or with you? If a man is married to a woman who doesn’t want to show herself—the raw self—deeply to him, can he feel lonely?”

Yes. And I saw that I had robbed myself of both sweeping emotion about Alan and a chance to know myself better. Ms. Reiss asked, “Do you want Alan Shapiro to know the real you, the Leila of Leilas, or be satisfied with what you ration out? If he saw the real you, do you think he would like you more or less?” I said, “When I have shown myself, he’s said he respected me more.”

A big reason I love my husband is that he encourages me to know, to be as I truly want to be, and change as I hope to. I am grateful we study together in the great professional classes taught by Ms. Reiss. Because of Aesthetic Realism, our lives and marriage are deeper, our minds freer, with every year!