Dear Unknown Friends:

In this issue we publish two short poems by Eli Siegel. And with them is an article by award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant Ken Kimmelman, from a paper he presented last month at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar, “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Husband?” In our last two issues we published articles by Ernest DeFilippis and Jeffrey Carduner, the other teachers of that powerful, kind, vivid seminar.

I’m glad to comment a little on something Mr. Kimmelman speaks of, something Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy to explain: Every person has an attitude to the world itself, and we will see a man or woman we hope to care for no better than we see the outside world. Further, there is a fight that goes on within everyone, and our ability to love depends on how that fight in us fares. It is between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for it.

In his definitive 1964 lecture The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage, Mr. Siegel explained in beautiful extemporaneous prose:

You cannot love a person, whether that person is called Ned or Edwina, is called Winnie or Jimmy, is called Edgar or Frieda—you cannot love a person unless you want to love the world, as a large and unlimited fact, but still a fact.

The purpose of marriage, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world—the world of human beings, objects, happenings. Yet what persons generally try to use marriage for is something very different: “To marry a person,” Mr. Siegel explains, “has been, in the history of love and marriage, the finding of a shelter against the world.” That, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, is why there has been such anger, disappointment, suffering: “People are furious with each other because in marriage…they have confirmed more the feeling that they don’t like the world.”

A Poem, Comic & Musical, about Marriage

There is a comic and musical poem of Robert Burns about disappointment in marriage. It’s called “Whistle o’er the Lave o ’t ,” which is Scottish for “Whistle over the Rest of It.” The speaker in the poem says that when he was courting Maggie, or Meg, she seemed wonderfully sweet. But now she’s so awful, he wishes she were dead. Here’s the first stanza (“spier nae mair” means “ask no more”):

It happens that Burns has some of the most sincere poems in praise of women—Jean, Mary Morison, Nancy, and more. And he has also poems describing wives as shrews, to be gotten away from in Scottish taverns. There’s the wife mentioned early in “Tam O’shanter”: “our sulky, sullen dame, / Gathering her brows like gathering storm, / Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.” He is authentically poetic about both kinds of ladies.

But what’s the relation between them? What happened to the couple in “Whistle o’er the Lave o ’t ”? The man says he’d been “beguil’d,” fooled into thinking Meg was sweet, and the poem ends with this statement about her (“Wha” is “who”):

The charm of this has to do with the way breeziness and the terrible, casualness and distress, are liltingly together: he wishes she were food for maggots, but he’ll whistle.

Things Change Because of How the World Was Seen

I don’t want to be excessively probing about a playful poem. Yet I’m using it because, despite the extreme language at the end, this man’s change from finding someone lovely to being furious with her is representative of what happens in many relationships.

When I was in my twenties, a man I was seeing turned out to be quite different from what I’d thought he was. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel explained my mistake: “You used Mr. D,” he said, “to make a world somewhat apart from the world Aesthetic Realism tries to honor.” I hadn’t been interested in how Mr. D saw the world—and who a person is is how he sees everything. I had been interested in how important he’d made me, his praise of me, devotion to me. Because I wanted to use him to put aside the world and be more important than the world, I did not see who he really was. I might have been, like the speaker in the Burns poem, “beguil’d,” but I was a collaborator in my own beguilement.

The speaker says, “First when Maggie was my care, / Heav’n, I thought, was in her air.” Women can certainly pretend to be nicer than they are, as men can. But if this Scottish young man were having Aesthetic Realism consultations, he might be asked: “Were you interested in how Meg saw everything, how fair she was to everything—or did you feel, ‘At last, here’s an angel who adores me, and with whom I can get away from this nasty world’?”

We don’t know just what happened within Meg after she married; this is a short lyric of Burns, not a long novel of Henry James. But we can infer that she was disappointed too: that the man she thought could take her away from a world she scorned, turned out to be like the world. We all are. We have the opposites of the world in us: hardness and softness, known and unknown, tumult and calm. And if we don’t want to understand and care for the world as a oneness of opposites, we’ll come to feel a person who’s part of that world, who has its structure of opposites, is an enemy.

So if we were turning Burns’s lyric into something longer, we might see that Meg and her husband, like millions of people, used each other to get away from the world. Since doing so was antithetical to what both deeply hoped for, it brought out the bad qualities in each of them: perhaps the desire to manage in the wife, and thoughtlessness in the husband. And they both became, as Mr. Siegel explained, furious, because they’d used each other to dislike the world, not like it.

Poetry Is Care for Reality

Meanwhile, good poetry, Aesthetic Realism shows, is always like of the world. That’s so even if what the poem tells about is contempt. Take the terrible lines “Wha I wish were maggots’ meat, / Dish’d up in her winding-sheet.” As sound, as music, these lines are a oneness of fierce grip and swift dance; they are intensity at one with grace; they are simultaneously stuck and free. Whether we know it or not, through them we’re liking the world because we’re hearing reality’s structure, the oneness of opposites, and feeling it’s beautiful.

There are the two poems by Eli Siegel published here. In the first, a person’s anger with the world is given order and wonder. The second poem, in free verse, is about some of the results of being unjust. In both, there is what Mr. Siegel had always: a tremendous oneness of exactitude and compassion.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems by Eli Siegel

What Is “A Good Husband”?

By Ken Kimmelman

In the following sentences from his lecture Mind and Husbands, Eli Siegel lays the groundwork for what a man needs to know to be a good husband:

The first thing a man should think about…is whether he knows the person he’s thinking of as a wife. If he thinks he can do a skimpy job in knowing the woman—simply decide she’s the angel for him and she’ll make him a good wife—then whatever he may get in the way of pain later is not wholly undeserved. [TRO 634]

Men have suffered and given pain, thinking that we knew a woman when we really didn’t have a clue, and didn’t want one. I used to feel, “What is there to know?” A woman should be lively, pretty, intelligent (to a point), be impressed by me—my artistic ability and wit—and should comfort me and give me pleasure. I had the nerve to think I was a good catch. This way of thought is, I later learned, ordinary ugly contempt: getting importance by lessening another human being.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to use a woman for consolation against what I saw as a cold, unfriendly world. I would flatter her by acting as though she were the warmest, most needed thing. There was, for instance, a woman I lived with for several years: whenever I had a tough day at work—impossible deadlines for a film I was working on, changes asked for by a client, disagreements with the producers, or sometimes even mistakes of my own—I would come home at night, complain in a miserable, whiney way, and expect her to reward me for what I had endured, with soothing words, a good meal, and sex. I was appealing to her weakness: encouraging her to dislike the world and feel superior to it. That made her furious and me deeply ashamed. But when she objected, I felt betrayed and would accuse her of being unsympathetic, of not giving a damn about me, and of being cold and heartless.

It wasn’t until I met Aesthetic Realism that I learned what would have me really succeed in love. There’s no greater purpose for a husband than to use knowing his wife as a means of knowing and liking honestly the world itself, and to encourage her care for reality. This is what I’m very happy to be experiencing in my marriage to Marcia Rackow.

Two Opposites in Love

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson at a time when I was thinking about marrying a woman I’ll call Sandra, Mr. Siegel explained:

ES. The two opposites that have to be present in marriage and love are to please and to make stronger . Marriage is aesthetics, and one phase of aesthetics is being pleased and being stronger. Say we read a book; if our purpose is just to pass the time away, there’s something amiss. Do you think that’s true?

KK. Yes.

ES. Anytime we’re friendly to someone and our purpose is not to please and make stronger—even if it’s a tenth of a second—we’re hurting ourselves….Either we’re going to make a split between our being pleased and being stronger, or we’re going to think that the two do exist together.

I asked what it would mean for the two desires to be together, and he explained that they both always are in us, but we need to see them clearly.

ES. The point is that there are two desires. Sex and food are quite the same in this: you go to food in order to get fuel and nourishment and nutrition, and very often you also feel you can have a good time. It’s not as fierce as sex. It happens you don’t have sensation magazines called Food.

He said that “if one felt one was going to have a good time and at the same time one was going to weaken oneself,” one wouldn’t go for it: “For instance, somebody says, ‘It will be a wonderful time, but you’ll wake up with a broken leg.’” We won’t want that “once it’s clear. Only it’s not as clear as a broken leg. Usually when we’re hurt we don’t know it.”

To please and strengthen another is part of good will, which Aesthetic Realism describes as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful” (TRO 121). I came to see that I was hurting myself in wanting to exploit a woman, to please her on my terms and get pleasure from her without thinking about what would make her stronger.

In the lesson Mr. Siegel described my state of mind when he said: “One of the things people hope for in marriage is that all criticism will come to an end. Love, Kisses, Devotion, and Illusion.” I saw there was something so much better, more pleasurable, and this made it possible for me to have real happiness and pride in being close to a woman.

I’m very grateful to be married to Marcia, who is an artist and Aesthetic Realism consultant. I passionately want to please and strengthen her: to encourage her art, and her relation to the world. She deserves it. And she has good will for me as a man and filmmaker.

A necessary part of being a good husband is for a man to like needing his wife and to welcome her thought. For example, when I was working on What Does a Person Deserve?, a public service film against homelessness and hunger, I asked Marcia to help me research and select the photos, and her fine artistic perception was invaluable. We were both deeply affected seeing thousands of images showing the extent of homelessness in our nation. And our visit to the Food Bank of New Jersey , one of the endorsers of the film, stirred us both. What we saw made for greater passion in us to have Aesthetic Realism—the knowledge that can end homelessness—be known.

And when we’re intimate, I feel so different from once, when I felt sex was in a separate world. With Marcia, it feels like the same world that has in it movies, French toast, art, an election, and people we want to be fair to. And there are conversations that make for a deeper relation of mind and body, and increased care for each other.

A Representative Husband Is Learning Now

A man I’ll call Peter Saladino, a computer analyst, began having Aesthetic Realism consultations in his third month of marriage. He was in turmoil, and told his consultants, “I’m concerned about my relationship with my wife. We can’t communicate.” He said his wife, Vanessa, angered him by criticizing him for keeping his feelings to himself and not showing warmth to her. He felt she was making too much of this. “What does she want from me?” he thought.

That is a very good question. Like me of once, he wanted “Love, Kisses, Devotion” from his wife, and that “all criticism will come to an end.” And he was in pain.

“Is the world good enough to see your real feelings?” we asked him. Mr. Saladino paused, and said, “I’m not sure.” “Is anyone good enough?” we asked. “Vanessa is,” he said.

Meanwhile, we pointed out, “it’s Vanessa with whom you can’t communicate.” I told him what Mr. Siegel said to me: we cannot see a woman any better than we see the world itself. “Are you interested in knowing your wife?” we asked. “Yes,” Mr. Saladino answered with a shrug of his shoulders. We told him:

Consultants. Aesthetic Realism says that we have two selves. One self wants to honor the world, and the other wants to make less of it, have contempt. As you answered “Yes,” your shrug showed you wanted to take it back at the same time. Does your wife ever say you shrug things off too quickly?

PS. Yes, actually she does!

We encouraged Mr. Saladino to want to know his wife: to see that this woman—whom a few months earlier he’d been so fervently for—represented the world itself in its variety and richness and mystery. And the more he wanted to see her in relation to that wide world, the more both of them would be pleased and strengthened. Here are some questions we asked:

1. Does Vanessa have opposites, such as repose and energy, grace and seriousness? The same opposites that a beautiful piece of music—say Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony—puts together?

2. Does she feel the energy you use at work is the same kind of energy you use at home with her?

3. Do you think the thing your wife objects to most in you is your hope to find things wrong as a means of making yourself important?

4. Do you think the way a good novelist, say Charles Dickens, sees the characters in a novel—with depth and tremendous interest—is the way a woman wants to be seen by her husband?

We were encouraging Mr. Saladino to see that trying to know his wife would be a deep and delightful adventure, not a vexing burden. In his next consultation he told us excitedly, “I had a conversation this week with my wife, and the questions I asked her affected her so much she cried. She was so happy!” Through Aesthetic Realism, he’s learning how to have good will for a woman—which means learning to be a good husband.