Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the lecture Eli Siegel gave on October 17, 1975, a landmark in both literary criticism and the understanding of people—every person. Mr. Siegel speaks about Henry David Thoreau and James Russell Lowell, whose essay on Thoreau he discusses before looking directly at Thoreau’s own writing. And he describes how these two writers stand for two aspects of everyone, for the opposites of one and many: the desire to be an individual, apart, and the desire to be social, have to do with many people.

We may accent one or the other, or fluctuate between them, but most people have the deep confusion and quiet pain and shame of feeling, I’m a different person alone, a different person within myself, from the person who acts among others. Yet Mr. Siegel is showing that these and other opposites—intimate to each of us—are made one in the technique of all good art, including literature. In this lecture, then, we’re studying the principle at the basis 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.”

Here too is an article by Sally Ross, from a paper she presented at a recent Aesthetic Realism public seminar. The subject was “We Want to Feel Truly Expressed—but What in Us Interferes?” It is a tremendous fact, some of the biggest news in the world, that Aesthetic Realism explains what in every person interferes with the well-being of his or her life. That thing is contempt, the desire “to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.” The very contempt that people use to feel powerful makes them fundamentally unsure. It interferes with their ability to love, learn, have the emotions and knowledge they long for. It makes them dislike themselves. It also is the source of every injustice—including that horror which both Lowell and Thoreau wrote against: slavery.

So Eli Siegel, in the philosophy he founded, explained: what beauty is; the relation of art and everyone’s life; and that in the human self which is most hurtful. He also identified our deepest desire: to like the world honestly, through knowing it. One reason I’m now mentioning some of Mr. Siegel’s historic achievements is that, in the section of the 1975 lecture included here, he comments on success. He’s speaking about that outward success which is fame, as he looks at a statement of Lowell on the subject. And while Mr. Siegel’s comments are jocular, he is passionately sincere.

About Success

To place a little what you’ll soon read, I’m going to quote from his Definitions, and Comment. One of the 134 definitions is of Success; and it is: “Success is the coming to be of one’s purpose.” The comment includes these sentences:

A self either goes after purposes representative of it, or it doesn’t….Therefore, the first purpose of a self should be to have a purpose adequate to it. If a person doesn’t have this, he from the start is that much welcoming what isn’t success. He can be said to have reached China in a blaze of glory, when he intended to get to Australia; he can be said to have shot a bird, when his purpose was to hear a bird sing….To do something else than what we want to do, is to be off the track, even though the path we choose has banners on both sides of it. [TRO 319]

Since the lecture we’re serializing is much about American literature, I point out that the passage just quoted is one of the finest in that literature.

And since the lecture is about two American writers, contemporary with each other, I am going to quote a statement about Eli Siegel by one of his contemporaries, born 19 years earlier than he. The poet William Carlos Williams is as well known as Lowell and Thoreau and at least as important. In his famous 1951 letter to Martha Baird, he gives what he sees as the reason for Eli Siegel’s inadequate outward success. First, Williams says about Eli Siegel as poet, “He belongs in the very first rank of our living artists,” and about his “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana”:

I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world. I make such a statement only after a lifetime of thought and experience.

Then, after describing how Eli Siegel’s poems make for “great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the breath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new,” Williams continues:

The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself by the violent opposition Siegel received from the “authorities” whom I shall not dignify by naming and after that by neglect.*

Today

I agree with Williams. Even today some people viciously resent the integrity of Eli Siegel—integrity present richly in all his work. They feel his ethics and knowledge show them up. There is resentment in some people of the need, which they know they have, to learn from Aesthetic Realism.

All this is about success. Eli Siegel could have had enormous outward success, popularity, acclaim, had he done what he refused to do: had he buttered people, been less honest, watered down Aesthetic Realism to suit certain egos. But then—Aesthetic Realism would not be the great, thrilling, infinitely kind, scintillatingly logical thing it is. In the true sense, there has been no intellectual and human success greater than that of Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Ethics, Style, & the Opposites

By Eli Siegel

In his essay on Thoreau, Lowell speaks about Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle affected New England very much. When Emerson visited England in the 1830s he saw to it that he met Carlyle. And Thoreau wrote an early essay on Carlyle. But in 1865, the year the Civil War was ending, Carlyle was seen no longer as a mystic but as a scold. He, generally, seemed to feel that many things could be said for a person like Frederick the Great and not so many for persons who didn’t seem strong enough. So Carlyle is seen by Lowell, writing in 1865, as not the thing:

The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold.

But Carlyle remains as a writer, and some of the finest sentences in English prose are his. A mingling of intense vision and humor are in some of these sentences.

Order & Disorder

With Carlyle we come to another phase of self which takes the form of style, also life: we’re all orderly and disorderly. A waltz is orderly, and a cakewalk is. But then there are other dances—like the tango, or what used to be called the big apple, and the lindy hop. Any dance in which a woman is roaming around a man’s neck on high is a wild dance, and there are dances like that. They used to be called acrobatic dances. Conduct is elegant and wild, and style is that way.

Music is that way. Ravel was seen as a pretty decorous composer up until the time of the Bolero, which astounded the world. But he’s gotten back to being seen as decorous, now that people just as often think of Daphnis et Chloé as they do of the Bolero. So style, which is a representation of self, is wild and sedate, or tame.

In relation to the opposites we began with, many and one: wildness stands for manyness. It’s impossible to do just one thing and be wild. You’ve got to do a few things and show there’s no connection—then you get wild. It’s quite clear that if you’re disorderly you’re honoring manyness, while if you’re orderly you’re honoring oneness.

Carlyle’s style was disorderly. And it can be mentioned that Thoreau’s prose style can be almost classical and that his verse is somewhat unframed. It is not as elegant as it might be. It doesn’t have the symmetry of a snuff box, of a well-behaved moon, of a happy reposeful pussycat. Thoreau’s verse is real poetry—it’s better than the poetry of Lowell—but it could be less disorderly, have more continuity.

We Are Subjective & Objective

This is Lowell again, on Thoreau:

He seems to me to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself.

Thoreau tells people how to conduct their lives, and Lowell apparently didn’t like it. But with that sentence of Lowell we come to another aspect of self, present in everything we do: subjective and objective.

The self is always aware of itself. To live is to be aware that it’s you who are living, not somebody else. You’re not aware, in the same way, of the life of Scipio, or Alexander the Great, or Tecumseh. So whose life are you aware of? Yours—though the life that is yours can have relation with every life that has ever been and, for that matter, will be. But Lowell says Thoreau had too much confidence in his impetuous subjectivity. We not only have the courage of our opinion sometimes, but a little rashness. Thoreau has made many statements that can be looked at questioningly.

In the meantime, this essay of Lowell was seen as too carping, and missing the great value of Thoreau. In another sentence about subjectivity, Lowell says that if Thoreau doesn’t have success he makes it seem that “it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose.”

The question of success is still a large matter. One can call success the second most desirable thing in the world. Without being moony, it’s not the most desirable thing. The most desirable thing, as was said by Addison in Cato, is to deserve success. And to have success without deserving it may send one to a practitioner. Still, success is a very good thing. Aesthetic Realism is, well, somewhat successful, a little, but it deserves success at least fifty times more than it has it. However, in a choice between success and deserving it, Aesthetic Realism, being hopelessly idealistic, prefers deserving it. The only thing Aesthetic Realism has is what people need. Outside of that, it’s a failure. (That’s a joke.)

Expression, False & True

By Sally Ross

What Aesthetic Realism says about expression is new, and it happily revolutionized my life. We cannot feel truly expressed, I learned, unless we want to like the world we’re expressing ourselves to. That in us which interferes with our expression is our desire to have contempt for the world.

I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut, the third of six children. As a girl, there were many ways I welcomed being affected by the world. I liked school, especially science and music. I was fortunate to have piano, gymnastics, and sewing lessons, and through these activities I felt expressed in exciting ways.

In his lecture Aesthetic Realism and Expression, Eli Siegel explains that expression “begins with our thoughts to ourselves. That is where we decide on who we are.” I’m tremendously grateful to have learned from Aesthetic Realism about some of the false ways we can use our thought. One is: we can want to see ourselves as hurt by people in order to feel we should be against the world—that it’s mean to us and we’re too good for it. This is what I did.

I used the fact that my mother was busy raising six children, shopping, carpooling, and participating in community events, to feel she wasn’t interested in me and didn’t give me the care I wanted. My father was a chemist who worked long hours as co-owner of a plastics business and later as an administrator at Yale. I wanted to be the central thing in my parents’ lives—definitely more important than my brothers and sisters. And I used not getting this false importance to have a case against the world: to think I was right to be hurt and angry.

I didn’t see that my parents were full human beings, with inner lives: that they had feelings, confusions, hopes and fears as I had. Instead, I used my biased impressions of them to feel, “It’s better to keep myself to myself and hide,” while outwardly arranging myself to get approval. I was arranging false self-expression.

When I was two my sister Martha was born, replacing me as the baby in the family. I resented her. Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel asked me whether I’d seen the people in my family in terms of competition—and taken my mother’s giving birth to Martha as against me? I had. I took her existence as an insult: how dare my parents not stop with me?! I didn’t want to see who my sister was, or the possibility that we could add to each other. I bossed her around, called her names, and tried to take her friends away when they came to play. In Aesthetic Realism and Expression Mr. Siegel said:

There is no true expression except that which you are proud of. Throwing a stone at somebody or calling somebody a name which that person doesn’t deserve is not expression….Anytime part of the self is expressed and the whole self is not, we are saying, Unhappiness, come to me.

And it did. The reason was: I was untrue to my deepest desire, which Aesthetic Realism shows is to like the world and be fair to it.

Worrying Too Much: Its Cause

I was given to worrying. There are legitimate reasons to worry, but I was excessive. Nothing was too small to be fodder for worrying.

For instance, on day one of 3rd grade I got “unsatisfactory” on my arithmetic paper because I was talking to my friend Cindy instead of working. But rather than criticize myself, I was convinced the teacher was against me and I’d never get to 4th grade. I worried myself sick on Sunday nights so I wouldn’t have to go to school. (This only worked once.) I was so anxious, my parents sent me to a psychiatrist, who said, when I told her why I had come, “Oh, so you’re a worrywart.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew what warts were and it sounded bad. Many years after, when I told Mr. Siegel about this, he composed a limerick-style poem:

This taught me something refreshing: inaccurate worrying is contempt. You see the world as an enemy; you curse it, annihilating any good it can do you, and through this you make yourself superior to everything. Aesthetic Realism rescued me, through exact principles, from being trapped in a contemptuous way of seeing the world, a way that hurt my mind, expression, and life.

Exact—or Popular?

A big thing that interferes with true expression is the desire to be liked. What will they think of me? has stopped many people from seeing and saying what they felt. This was so of me. I was often insincere, guarded in conversations, strategically hiding or showing my opinions—about books, films, current events—in other words, changing the facts to try to win people’s approval. In 8th grade, during the Cold War, we had a debate about whether the US should send wheat to Russia when their crops had failed. I felt we should, but when it came to a vote I saw only Jon Lee raise his hand for that position, so I changed my mind.

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson Mr. Siegel asked me, “Which would you rather be, an exact girl or a popular girl?”

SR. A popular one.

ES. That’s a good confession. At a certain time your love for truth could change into a love for approval?

SR. Yes.

ES. When we think that, we’re not sure of ourselves. We’re all for approval, but we have to ask what we may give up in order to get it. In every conversation in this world, if you serve any other purpose but to care for the truth more, you are falsifying yourself.

Mr. Siegel had such good will! He described what had tormented me, made me insincere and so unsure of myself: my thinking I’d express myself by cleverly managing the facts. What I heard stands for what people throughout our country, including in high places, need to hear. Aesthetic Realism has encouraged my love for truth and enabled me to be myself. This includes some of my proudest expression: teaching high school biology in New York City public schools for 29 years, using the Aesthetic Realism teaching method—where my purpose was to enable my students to like the world on an honest basis, through the facts of science.