Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing Things Are Likened to Each Other, a magnificent lecture that Eli Siegel gave in 1971. In it he explains that the seeing of things as like other things even as they are different is central to all art. “Wherever art occurs,” he says, “like and unlike—two of the beginning opposites of the world—are to be felt.”

Commenting on this lecture in our last issue, I wrote about the fact that all unkindness comes from the pitting of those opposites, likeness and difference—so central to reality and to our lives—against each other. Aesthetic Realism explains that every unjust act and thought—from a certain ordinary snobbishness and coldness toward another person, to racism in all its horrors, and centuries of economic exploitation—every injustice arises from contempt; and contempt is “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” In having contempt for a person, one uses one’s sense of difference from that person to feel superior to him or her—not to see that there is a deep and vital likeness too, not to see that he or she is as real as oneself, with feelings as large and a mind as existent as one’s own. Aesthetic Realism shows contempt to be the most hurtful thing in everyone, and in all of human history. And contempt is always a falsification of likeness and unlikeness, a fundamental lying about them.

In the early part of the lecture we’re serializing, Mr. Siegel uses a renowned French textbook: Leçons françaises de littérature et de morale, by Nöel and De la Place. It includes passages by noted authors, and Mr. Siegel discusses some of them, sight-translating from the French. These are passages which, in their French classicism, might intimidate a person. But as he shows how there is in them in various ways the seeing of likeness-in-unlikeness, they feel close to us: we feel the power and livingness within them; we feel the feelings had by their authors.

As a prelude to this section of the lecture, and as a means of placing it, I’ll quote from two other discussions by Mr. Siegel. These have to do with a person’s way of seeing his or her own sameness and difference.

What Does It Mean to Be an Individual?

The tremendous matter of Individuality is about likeness and unlikeness. We do see ourselves as unlike anything and anyone else; and of course it is true—nothing, no one, is just like us. Yet there is a terrific drive in people to feel we are crucially apart—not only from certain people, but from people as such, even those we’re close to, and from things as such. There is a tendency to feel that it’s our difference which makes us important, makes us an individual, and that if we have to see ourselves as really like other people, our importance, individuality, originality are wiped out: we’ve become just one of the crowd.

Aesthetic Realism shows that’s not true. True individuality is like art: an aesthetic oneness of sameness and difference, likeness and unlikeness. People knock themselves out trying to be individuals—but it happens that the more we see our relation to other things and persons, the more individual we truly are. There’s nothing more individual, distinct, just-itself than a work of art; and this distinctiveness arises from the artist’s seeing of the relation among things, and also feeling their relation to him- or herself.

It happens, too, that as we go falsely after making ourselves unlike what’s not us, one of the results is: we’re lonely. People have no idea that their notion of individuality, their inaccurate and contemptuous seeing of themselves as unrelated, is the cause of the loneliness they feel and cannot shake.

So I quote with love these sentences from Eli Siegel’s essay “Individuality as Aesthetic Sameness and Difference”:

The keenest, most dramatic, least describable thing in an individual is his difference, his permanent separation, his intimate mobile sequestered worldness….

While having this difference, this grandiose, subtle, elusive, permeating difference, a self is like all things. What thing is it not like? And a self yearns, pines, longs—dramatic verbs!—to be like other things. The self has a lust for multitudinous identification.

This difference and sameness in self, Aesthetic Realism maintains, is like the beginning of art. The beginning of art—to be found in reality—is the awful and sweet and constant and surprising and shocking difference and sameness of things.

Is individuality, like reality, a oneness of difference and sameness?…This is what Aesthetic Realism would like people to consider. [TRO 649]

What We Have in Common with Everything

The second passage I’ll quote is from Aesthetic Realism: Some Central Notions. It is a comment on the great Aesthetic Realism principle “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Like and unlike are themselves opposites. But what makes every thing and person in this world dramatically and truly like every other thing and person is that we all have in common such opposites as rest and motion, lightness and heaviness, freedom and order, unity and diversity, delicacy and strength. Mr. Siegel explains:

Every thing, let alone every person, says something about us, explains ourselves. The structure of what thing cannot illuminate our own structure? Does not a sheet of paper in its wideness and narrowness bring some essential likeness to us, to ourselves? Is not a twig, on or off a branch, in its simplicity and complexity, continuity and discontinuity, an abstract and tangible presentation of what we are?…A card is flexible and firm. We are flexible and firm, and we mean to do a better job as to the relation of these two adjectives….

Education, principally, is the pleasant finding out of how things can help us know who we are as we see them.

There is no knowledge in the world that can do more to defeat cruelty and loneliness than Aesthetic Realism. It is the beautiful knowledge that enables people to have true individuality—to be grandly, kindly, honestly ourselves.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Largely This

By Eli Siegel

The study of poetry is, largely, how things are made alike. Every poetic figure does that—metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, simile, trope. There are different ways of making things alike. For instance, one could say about a person, The flower of the House of Burgundy is withered. Somebody might respond, Who cares? Some likenesses get over, and some don’t.

A passage of Corneille is included in this book, and it is something to look at. In the work of Corneille there are likenesses and likenesses! In Le Cid, of 1636, there is a description of how Rodrigue defeats the Moors at the harbor. The Moors, for a while, don’t know what’s happening: they feel they see the city quiet, and think they’re going to have an easy time. But the soldiers of Spain have been purposely quiet—and suddenly the Moors see reinforcements coming:

This likening is better seen in the French: “Et, voyant un renfort qui nous vint secourir, / Changea l’ardeur de vaincre en la peur de mourir.” Ardor is changed into fear, and conquering into dying. That is one way of making a likeness—as in changed the hope of a happy wedding into the disappointment of a broken engagement.

In prose writing, something like likeness and unlikeness is gone after too. A famous statement in the American Revolution about General Gates is that he exchanged “Northern laurels for Southern willows.” That is, after a victory at Saratoga in 1777, Gates was defeated at Camden, South Carolina, in 1780. Much of the writing of the world is like that.

Voltaire Is Present

In this book there are some parts of the only epic of France that’s much thought of, even today (unless you call Hugo’s Legend of the Centuries an epic, which some have). But the one epic, along with the Chanson de Roland, is Voltaire’s La Henriade, of 1723. There is some very good poetry in it. In canto 8 a father and son fight, as they do also in Matthew Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” and the Persian work by Ferdowsi on which that is based. Here, in this passage of Voltaire, the elder d’Ailly doesn’t know it’s his son whom he’s fighting:

This has the likeness and unlikeness which is in drama, because if a mother is against her daughter, it’s more interesting than if a mother is against a stranger. That’s the first law in drama: if you’re like somebody and you get along badly, it’s more interesting than if you get along badly with a stranger in the subway. So, if a father fights a son, we have likeness and difference. And we have here Voltaire being intense and controlled, as he should be.

Then there is this, about the father:

In that last line, with its getting three things together that are different and the same, we also have an effect. He keeps away from all three—“Court, human beings, glory”—and they are made one through their all being renounced.

That has a romantic quality: he wants to conceal his pain “au bout de l’univers,” at the end of the universe.

Then, this has likeness and difference:

We have sunrise and sunset made one because he is moaning or crying his son’s name at both times. There’s likeness here, and difference. —This is some good poetry of the 18th century.

A Different Father Is Here

The writers of the book quote from Racine’s Mithridate, which is one of the most noted plays about a father. The father here is heroic. He’s Mithridates VI of Pontus (Mithridate, in French), a man of war, and has two sons. One, Pharnaces (or Pharnace), is no good: he takes the side of the Romans. Then, there’s another, Xipharès. It’s bad enough having a son who sides with the Romans. But difficulty comes also in the fact that there’s a girl, one of the famous heroines in French drama—Monime—who is cared for by Mithridate while his good son also cares for her. So it’s a rivalry between son and father. Racine is knotting the play: he’s engaged in a problem not of dénouement (which is French for unknotting) but nouement.

The dénouement is where Xipharès defeats the Romans and comes to the aid of his father. This is told about in act 5 by one of the good persons in the play, Arbate. At first, Mithridate is having a hard time. He is very affecting, rather old, combating the Romans. He says he doesn’t want the Romans to take him alive. Arbate feels that his side will lose—but suddenly Arbate sees the Romans are defeated because of the courage of Xipharès. Arbate says:

There is a change in feeling: one has a feeling that the army of Mithridate is going to lose—but it doesn’t happen, at least here. For things to go badly and then go well is a likeness too, because any change in narration makes for likeness of beginning and end, and also difference. As Racine tells it in French, there’s a certain jauntiness.

Like & Unlike in a Duel

Going again to Voltaire’s Henriade: in canto 10 two persons fight who are very different. There’s the modest and God-thinking-of Turenne and there is the arrogant d’Aumale, and they have a duel:

Then the spectators have a terrible pleasure:

Then we have a likeness: the duel, with its movement of sparkling swords, is compared to the sun going into the water, then coming out of the water. That’s a strange comparison:

You can accept the comparison or not. But this simile surprised me, in Voltaire.

Turenne wins, but d’Aumale, even as he’s dying, is very angry:

I don’t think that Voltaire did any reading of the Chanson de Roland, but that passage has a relation to it. Also, the process here, the similes that are here, the way verbs are used—there are different verbs—make for likeness and unlikeness. For instance: “Il se lève, il retombe, il ouvre un oeil mourant,” “He rises, he falls back, he opens a dying eye.”

Some Wild Closeness & Againstness

The last passage I’m going to use from this rather historic work is a very comic writing. It hasn’t been seen in its full comedy, even in France. It is by Boileau, and has a strange title, “Le Lutrin,” which means the lectern or reading desk. It’s about the fight between the head of a chapter of religious people and the chantre, the person taking care of the singing, whose name is Evrard. He has a lectern. The Prelate arranges for it to be taken away from him, and there’s a battle as to whether it’s going to be given back. Boileau describes a fight in a famous publisher’s place, or bookstore. Evrard throws a folio—a big work of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, Artamène; or, Cyrus the Great—at the sacristan, Boisrude.

One doesn’t think of Boileau and the Great Age as having this kind of thing in them. I’ll read a part of it, because there’s closeness here, a very great closeness, along with againstness. This is in the shop of Barbin, the most famous publisher of the time. (Sidrac, who’s also present, is another person of the church.)

There is a thickness, a huddle of detail here. But the large thing is, Boileau deals in very serious verse with a minor battle—who’s going to have the desk?