Dear Unknown Friends:

This issue of TRO is about the vast and intimate, historical and everyday, worldwide and personal matter of Power. We include a paper that art educator and sculptor Donita Ellison presented at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “Power & Kindness: Do They Have to Fight?” And we begin with maxims about power, from Eli Siegel’s book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. They are playful, delightful, yet mightily serious. They have one feel there is sense to the world.

A struggle about power is taking place intensely in America now. It’s about: should this nation, including its wealth and opportunities, belong to all citizens or only to certain persons? As those in behalf of the second try to have the unjust power they want, they’re also trying to have power over truth itself. That is: they’re lying, ferociously, massively, and continually.

Mr. Siegel defined power as “the ability to change things.” The power Ms. Ellison discusses here is mainly the power people have gone after in social life and love. But whether in economics, love, sports, politics, academic pursuits, or conversations, there can be good power or bad power. And Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy which, after centuries, explains definitively the criterion for distinguishing between these. The distinction arises from the two large desires battling in everyone. These, Aesthetic Realism explains, are 1) the desire to respect the world, see meaning in it, and 2) the desire to have contempt for the world, feel superior to it. Good power arises from the first, and (in keeping with the subject of Ms. Ellison’s paper) good power is always kindness too. Bad power arises from, and is, contempt: “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”

What Art Tells Us about Power

In order to see truly the subject of power, the study of the following Aesthetic Realism principle is an emergency (besides being thrilling and happiness-giving): “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Opposites central to power are self and world and affecting and being affected.

How we go after power in any aspect of life depends on how we see the world itself—how we see that which, in Mr. Siegel’s words, begins where our fingertips end. Is there a power in things as such? If so, how do we see that power? Do we welcome it, want to know it, want to be fair to it? Or are we in competition with it? The terrible mistake people constantly make is the feeling that for us to be powerful, other things have to be less powerful—that our power is a showing of our superiority, our ability to surpass and even extinguish the power of what’s not ourselves. This way of seeing power is not only untrue and cruel—it makes oneself ill-at-ease in the world, and ashamed. Further, this notion of power happens to be grandly refuted by all real art.

Art, Aesthetic Realism shows, arises from the fact that there is power in every instance of reality—from a flower to a sound to a word to a motion—and an artist wants to be affected, with fullness and accuracy, by that power. An artist wants to feel the power, value, meaning of what is not him- or herself, and wants to show it, have it live and affect other people. The power of an artist is the way he or she feels and shows the power of things, of the world itself. The artist, Eli Siegel writes, “has come to power by undergoing the might of things and giving them form” (Self and World, p. 280).

The very basis of the Aesthetic Realism education is that we need to see the way art sees. It is education, for instance, in putting together the opposites of one’s individual self and the world, of affecting and being affected. Without this education, the way people have gone after power has been pretty much hit-or-miss: occasionally a person goes for power that’s good, and at other times the same person goes for having an effect in ways that weaken others and oneself. But hooray—Aesthetic Realism is here, for humanity to study, for the good of every life and our turbulent nation!

Fourteen Maxims

Here now are fourteen maxims by Eli Siegel from Damned Welcome. Each, in a charming, profound, and musical way, is about power—power in things, or art, events, a person, reality.

The power of Eli Siegel’s own work is great because he wanted so greatly, so continuously and fervently, to see the power, the value, of what exists in this world—and that includes people. A result of his matchless “undergoing the might of things and giving them form” is Aesthetic Realism itself.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Power—in Reality, Art, & Life

Maxims by Eli Siegel

1. A ship is a certain way of bringing out the possibilities of waves. [1.121]

2. To find something that in no way can make one happier is so difficult. [1.146]

3. When nature makes both whales and bees, and makes them well, it isn’t just showing off. [1.164]

4. Events rebuke us, and we shouldn’t mind. [1.49]

5. A bore is a person who tries to interest you without having your interest at heart. [1.214]

6. Only those who have tried know how hard it is to find something not informative whatsoever. [1.284]

7. Imagination gives warmth to If, and makes the abstract fact. [1.293]

8. An unsure person, when truth makes a point, is too often stabbed, not inspired. [1.303]

9. A person, caring for another, can do nothing more affectionate than making beauty in general more intimate for the loved person; he or she does this because general beauty has been welcomed in the parlor. [2.26]

10. The world will never stop making demands on you; if it did, it would let you down. [2.212]

11. It hasn’t yet been scientifically proved that any lovely thing is really over. [2.296]

12. Music tells sound how to behave. [2.349]

13. Art can make the old surprising, and the new and sudden soothing. [2.378]

14. Facts are always whispering, uttering, and shouting advice. [2.387]

Must Power & Kindness Fight?

By Donita Ellison

I once felt, like most people, that my desire to be kind and my desire to have power were as different as oil and water—they didn’t mix. Then I began to learn from Aesthetic Realism: the only way we’ll feel that power and kindness don’t have to fight is by wanting other people to be stronger through how we affect them, and through having that purpose in every aspect of our life—in love, at a job, with the family. In Self and World Eli Siegel explains:

The self does not want to be strong by the weakness of others. It wants to be strong by what it is, rather than by what others are not….The fundamental, unremitting drive of every person is to be at one with things as a whole. To be at one with things as a whole carries with it some idea of power. And power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others. [P. 276]

The Mix-up Begins Early—& Goes On

Growing up in Missouri, I liked music very much. On Saturday nights, my grandfather and I watched gospel quartets on television, and I thought that the way the distinct voices of four men—from the low bass to the high tenor—blended was beautiful. I wanted my voice to affect people well, and I took voice lessons, sang in the school chorus, and performed musical skits for my parents in the summer with my girlfriend Donna. My care for singing, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, arose from my deepest desire: to like the world.

But I also was competitive. In 7th grade chorus I compared myself to other students: “Jane’s better than me, but I’m better than Cindy.” I wanted them to be less good so I would shine. Meanwhile, I felt so unsure of myself that when I was asked to sing a solo for a school assembly, I couldn’t.

I didn’t think that being kind made me important. Having a big effect on people while feeling superior and unaffected was a fast thrill that I increasingly preferred. At 12, when my Grandmother Ellison gave me her credit cards, I felt powerful telling the salesperson to “charge it.” I bragged to friends that my family owned their own business, a nursing home. Yet in my mind the important thing wasn’t the care of elderly residents or the working conditions of employees, but the fact that a portrait of me at age 10, in a floor-length yellow chiffon formal gown, hung in the entryway for all to admire.

When I became a young woman I was a flirt. To affect men, I practiced how to have the most imploring look, how to toss my hair in that nonchalant way. But I wasn’t interested in the hopes and worries of men, and never thought of them as having feelings and concerns. I felt triumphant when I’d call college fraternity houses, ask for Michael (there was always a Michael), pretend, as we spoke, to be interested in him—and then hang up.

There are two kinds of power, Mr. Siegel explained, good and bad:

When you affect a person…and you respect him more because there is this effect, the power you have is good….Power, therefore, had by yourself has two consequences: you respect the person yielding to that power; or you have contempt for him. In the second possibility lies much of the social misery of America and the world.

One night, passing the barbecue grill at an apartment complex where I lived, I said in an alluring voice to a man cooking steaks, “Apartment H15, medium well.” At 1 am he showed up at my door, and later there was sex. The advice I got from the women’s magazines I read was to be liberated and join the sexual revolution. They didn’t tell me why the next morning I felt so cheap and why as I looked at myself in the mirror I wanted to break it.

The Education I Longed For

When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I began to learn—and I love it with all my heart for teaching me this—that the reason I didn’t like myself was: I wasn’t true to my deepest purpose as a human being, to be fair to the world and people. Instead, I was going after power that was based on contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” In an early consultation I spoke about a man whose attentions I was desperate to get, and said, “I would like to just deal with a man on a level that’s not this game business.” My consultants asked:

Consultants. What in you stops you from being able to talk to a man in a way that you’re proud of? In social life, people are either flirting or they’re honest. Which are you?

Donita Ellison. Well, sometimes—either—both.

Consultants. Is there a kind of mental cruelty in flirting? You show a man that you’ve affected him—and that he has affected you and also hasn’t. Is flirting about power?

Yes. And, referring to my care for the art of sculpture, they asked, “What is the difference between the way you see men and the way you see sculpture? Do you flirt with stone and wood?” I began to learn that the power of art is always kind, because its purpose is to be fair to an object, to see it with respect and form.

And I was being educated about what kindness truly is when my consultants read this definition by Eli Siegel: “Kindness is that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased.” Commenting on that definition, he writes: “A person is kind who feels a sense of likeness to other things; who accepts accurately his relation to other things.”

In order for me to see men, power, and kindness better, I was given assignments to write (for example) “Do I See Men Accurately?,” “Ten Men I’ve Known and What They Really Think of Me,” and “What I Can Learn from Men.” I studied men in literature who have been respected and loved for their strength and kindness—like the title character in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Sydney Carton in Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. I began to see that what a man most hopes for is like what I or any woman wants: to have a purpose, with the world and people, for which he can like himself. For the first time, I felt it was possible to be deeply affected by a man and have a good effect on his life.

I’m proud and happy that today I’m studying Aesthetic Realism together with my husband, Jaime Torres, learning more with each week what it means to be truly kind. Jaime, who grew up in Puerto Rico, is a podiatrist. I respect enormously his conviction that the basis of healthcare in America must be good will—and his work to have that happen. Eli Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” Jaime strengthens my life every day, including through his deep and kind humor.

But before I met Aesthetic Realism, the sort of power I was after crippled my ability to love a man. Many women have the notion, as I did, that love means being the most important thing in a person’s life. This is what I felt in a previous marriage, which ended in divorce. When I married the man I’ll call Jim Travis, he was a sophomore in college majoring in economics. I respected him for his studies, but I also wanted to have my way. At a time when finances were tight, I talked Jim into using money he’d saved for a truck he needed, to buy instead an antique roll-top desk that I felt I just had to have. Determined, I told him it was “a steal,” a chance of a lifetime. I also said what women have used for centuries to have power: “If you really loved me you would want me to have it.” We got the desk, but I felt awful. I was worried about how narrow, selfish, and cold I’d become.

After college, when Jim got a management job with a trucking firm, I felt we were flying high as we dined in fancy restaurants on the company expense account. Then Jim got fired for objecting to the company’s decision to fire a man close to retirement. The company claimed the man’s age was slowing down work, a view Jim saw as unjust. Instead of showing how much I respected Jim for doing the right thing, I gave him the message that my life was ruined and it was his fault. Bitterly, I wept about whether we’d be able to afford our lake cabin and how to tell friends the humiliating news.

I didn’t know that to see a man rightly I had to care about justice to other people, including economic justice. The situation I just described illustrates how little I cared about that. And there was the time my father declared he’d crush any attempt of his nursing home employees to join a union. I didn’t object, even though I saw how hard those employees worked for minimum wage with no benefits. I didn’t want anything to interfere with the checks I regularly got. While I hadn’t done a thing to earn that money, I felt it was my due. I am so very grateful now to have passionate feeling about economic justice for people!

Beauty Is Both Kindness & Power

Early in my marriage to Jaime Torres, at a time when he was doing important research, I found myself feeling, “Where am I in all this?” And when he asked me to accompany him to an appointment without profusely saying how much it would mean to him for me to go, I jumped at the chance to feel I was being taken for granted, unappreciated. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked me if I was sure Jaime Torres had been so inconsiderate. I wasn’t. She asked whether I might be looking to feel hurt—because I’d been respecting people, including my husband, more than I’d bargained for, and was hoping to reestablish my sense of superiority. “Do you feel,” she asked, “persons should come to you on bended knee and then you will be gracious?”

That described what I felt! Seeing this made it possible for me to have a different purpose—one interesting aspect of which was a desire to study Spanish, partly in order to communicate with Jaime’s family in Puerto Rico. Ms. Reiss asked me whether in learning Spanish I felt closer to Dr. Torres. Yes, I said.

And in a discussion of the opposites in beauty, she said something I’m so glad to see as true: “The more you like beauty’s meaning a lot to you, and the opposites’ meaning a lot to you, the more you’ll like Jaime Torres’ meaning a lot to you.”

Now I’ll comment briefly on an instance of beauty—one of the most beautiful examples of power and grace in the history of sculpture: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Power, writes Mr. Siegel, in a statement I earlier quoted, “is likewise the ability to be affected or changed.” This work, of 190 BC Greece, has moved people all over the world. We see Nike, the goddess of victory, striding forward with wings massive and outstretched. She is forceful, but also affected by a force: we feel the power of wind as her garments swirl energetically.

So different from the way I once tried to be statuesque, wanting to have an effect while remaining secretive and intact, she seems affected to her very center, as that diaphanous garment reveals the delicacy of skin, womanly curve, the power and tension of muscle. And all of this is carved magnificently in marble. She is yielding and strong, forceful and responsive. I believe she represents the aesthetic victory that every person hopes for: “All beauty,” explained Eli Siegel, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”