Dear Unknown Friends:

It was on July 10, 1964, in an Aesthetic Realism class, that Eli Siegel gave the talk he titled The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage. Then, shortly after, the Terrain Gallery published it very simply, yet tastefully, in mimeograph form. Many people consider that great lecture a classic (I certainly do), and many more will. It has been out of print for some time, and I’m very glad that it is now being published here in two parts: in the April and May numbers of this periodical.

In that beautiful, vivid talk, Mr. Siegel explains what interferes with love—with an emphasis, here, on married love. The explanation has in it the very basis of Aesthetic Realism, the principle “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” From one point of view, this great talk is fully philosophic, strictly logical—but oh! it’s not one bit academic or dry. It’s tender; often humorous; warm as it’s exact; utterly kind as it’s critical; wide as it meets, at our center, each of us in all our individuality.

The Purpose of Love

In the history of thought, Eli Siegel is the person who has made clear the purpose of love. It is, through valuing another human being, to see the world itself more truly; to like the world on an honest basis; to be fair to other things and people through knowing closely a particular person. That is the purpose of love and marriage because to like the world honestly is the purpose of our very lives.

Mr. Siegel is also the person who explained what in us interferes with that central purpose of life and love. The interfering thing is contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

Contempt takes many forms in the field of affection, all totally inimical to love. Contempt includes being in a team with the chosen one to feel superior to other people, to look down on them. But it also includes wanting to manage the loved one, delicately or not so delicately seeing him or her as inferior to oneself. Many years ago in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel explained to me and the man I was seeing that the anger between us came because we both “wanted to shape another without full regard for the other. When people suffer,” he said, “they don’t see how imperialistic they are.”

Gratitude, Love, and a Poem

I will speak quite personally now, because I am sure that what I’ll tell of has meaning for humanity too.

Preparing The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage for publication here, I’m more thankful than ever for my Aesthetic Realism education, including about love. And I am grateful without end for my marriage to Timothy Lynch, who died ten years ago. The two decades we were together were beautiful because of the principles that are in the lecture you’ll soon read.

In the months and years after Timothy’s death, I wrote a number of poems about him, myself, and how Aesthetic Realism enabled us to see. The one I’ll include here is about what’s called “loss,” certainly. But it’s principally about the fact that the person one cares for is related richly, through the opposites, to the world itself, and this is true even in death. The feeling about that fact is love and also, in a fashion, consolation. I wrote the poem in September 2017. I imagined Timothy coming back, for a time, to join me as I was seeing what was around me. In the poem’s second part, he speaks to me. The title is “I Meet Timothy in September”:

This is a thankful comment on Aesthetic Realism and marriage.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage

(part 1)

By Eli Siegel

As one hears this title, two words are important and have to be looked at. One is the word aesthetics, particularly in relation to marriage, and the other is furious.

We know that in history fury and love have been very close; and fury is present in marriage. Fury is also present in aesthetics, since aesthetics, while trying to present a frozen lake or an unusually calm peacock, is also given to honoring the intensity, the fury, and, if need be, frenzy of the world and frenzy in an individual.

We know that there is pain in marriage. And we know that people who deeply intended to show themselves at their sweetest to someone they chose to live with and to be ever so close with—that these people, intending sweetness, have somehow fallen into doubt, morosity, boredom very often, and occasionally fury. A loved one is one with whom we can, more than with someone else, be furious. This is one of the messages of the history of love and marriage.

A person is not furious unless he or she is disappointed, and most husbands and wives feel that something they hadn’t bargained for is going on. There has been this question about marriage: Why does the devotion, the sweetness—really the sincere sweetness that a person wants to have, and does have for a while—why is this changed to something else?

Aesthetic Realism, being about reality, does have what can be called an answer. Marriage is an important thing in reality, and Aesthetic Realism is interested in marriage, because, with birth and death, it occupies the lives, in one fashion or another, of about everybody who knows he or she is alive.

So what has Aesthetic Realism to say that hasn’t been said? Marriage has been a very popular subject. It has been talked about, written about; it has had things printed about it in gorgeous, unlimited quantity. So what has Aesthetic Realism to say?

The First Thing

The first thing, perhaps, that Aesthetic Realism has to say is this: 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. Aesthetic Realism says it is impossible to satisfy a person of your choice unless you see loving what is different from yourself as the same as loving yourself.

And here we come to the opposites. Two opposites of importance in the history of art are Sameness and Difference, which can be put also as Thisness and Otherness. An “I” is a this. When a person says “I,” he is thinking of this; when he says “you,” there is a that; and when he says “he” or “she,” there is more of a that. Art is about the oneness of sameness and difference, or thisness and otherness, or thisness and thatness. And so, when a person is married, he is saying that the this which is his own tender, encyclopedic, and unknown self can become a one with something other: a that. Aesthetic Realism, then, says he has an aesthetic question. (To live as such is an aesthetic question, but we shall leave that for the while.)

The point is that in caring for someone, you have to care for yourself too. When anyone says, “I’ve given up my whole life to someone else,” it may sound like uninterfered-with idealism, but it also sounds insincere; and it may be foolish. We cannot give up our selves to anybody. We’ve got our selves to keep on having them. We have the self we have in order to hold on to it. So we have to hold on to our selves as we care for someone else. This is a job. And the fact that the word furious in our title seems justified shows that the job has been attended with a great deal of pain, sighing, anger, fury.

What Does It Mean?

Well, what does it mean, then, to take care of yourself and to take care of, or be honestly devoted to, another?

When something aesthetic takes place, the world is present. In aesthetics, if a painter is painting wet grass or waving grass or stubble in October on a mountainside, the world as present in the wet grass or waving grass or stubble is what he or she is looking for. This is what gives the painting of grass in any one of its conditions significance. If you see only the grass, you are a bad painter; if you don’t see the grass, you may be even worse—anyway, you are a bad painter. You have to see the grass and see the meaning in grass, visually speaking; and that meaning is the world. What is fair to the visual dealing with grass is fair to a person you are supposed to care for. You are supposed to see that person—definitely that person, not some cute creation of yourself, or dim creation of yourself—and you are supposed to see meaning.

When meaning runs out, boredom begins. No person was ever bored with whom meaning was present. He may have been frightened, but he didn’t find things tedious.

In order to see a person, we have to see that person as representing more than that person; and the world can be described as more than any person while being present in any person. This matter of seeing the world as present may be looked on as strange, idealistic, mystical; but the students of Aesthetic Realism, in actual lessons—of which there have been scores and scores and scores, and some people say there have been hundreds—know that this makes sense. Aesthetic Realism is about as little flossy as a railroad track or an engine of an airplane. Aesthetic Realism says we are in the world and this is not a passive thing. We are in the world to have the world do its stuff too: the world is working in us; we are not just softly, generally, in the world. The world is an active proposition.

The purpose of every individual is always to like the world, which can be defined for the moment as what you are in, and the sum of all that can affect you. What we are in, and the sum—which includes the source—of all that can affect us, can be liked. It can be shown that anytime we like anything, that much we like the world that thing is in.

Our Real Hope in Loving Someone

So in caring for someone, in loving someone, in marrying someone, our hope is to like the world. That person whom we marry, however, is likely like ourselves: most people in America and elsewhere have a disposition to care for a person as a means of consolation for the fact that one hasn’t liked the world so far.

To marry a person has been, in the history of love and marriage, the finding of a shelter against the world as unpleasant. We hope better terms from a person loving us than we have got from the world so far, or from other people, who haven’t seemed to love us, and whom we haven’t loved.

Love, in other words, can be a means of shelter from an unkind world, a world not too interested in us; or it can be a means of intensifying, affirming, extending, subtilizing a care for the world.

Aesthetic Realism says that married people are furious with each other because in marriage they have confirmed more the feeling that they don’t like the world. Love is used as a means of intensifying the previous dislike of the world as different from oneself. So we have Edgar looking at Winifred and saying, “Winifred, you worry more about me than anybody else in the world, perhaps more than my immediate family; but at the same time, your ways, with all their devotion, are not a means of my coming to authentic terms with the world.”

The Aesthetic Realism approach to marriage depends on the fact that a person, in whatever situation of love, including the most carnally complete, is at that moment either trying to like the world or trying to say: “The world doesn’t care for me, but do I have somebody who does and is willing to do everything I want, and can she (or he) do it!”

This situation has to be considered: Is it possible for a person to have a triumph of a biological kind and still be further from the liking of reality? Is it possible to have a person complaisant, acting as one wishes (at least for a while), and still be further from one’s deepest desire?

Aesthetic Realism is different from other ways of seeing a person because it says that no matter what one is doing—lighting a match, or thumbing a telephone directory, or looking rather boredly at a menu in a restaurant, or answering a telephone call, or sitting on a couch with the person whom one most wants to sit on a couch with—one is trying to like the world. If this is not so, everything that I have said so far or might say is nugatory, and is worth listening to because of phrases and clauses and words, but not because it says anything worth hearing very much.

Aesthetic Realism defines a successful person as one who likes the world on honest terms. The only like of the world that is possible, Aesthetic Realism further says, is on an aesthetic basis. And if a person, after much trying, or a little trying, marries the woman of his choice and then feels somewhere (because the unconscious does exist, even at 3 PM) that this person he has longed for so much is not a means of his liking reality more, he is displeased with that person and also he is displeased with himself. And we have a beginning of the terrible and permanent two, Guilt and Anger.

A Poem by William Blake

The main thing in the matter of marriage was put down in a very simple poem by William Blake, given the title “The Clod and the Pebble.” It appeared in his Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794. This poem has in it the aesthetics of marriage:

Blake was a careful writer, as is known these days. He is particularly careful in this poem.

In looking at the poem, we come to why there is fury in marriage. There is the title, “The Clod and the Pebble.” The clod, very clearly, is different from the pebble. We all think at times that we’re a clod: we can crumble, and we’re got together too loosely. And in caring very much for someone, we can think, with all our satisfaction, that we are weaker than when we said, “I care for nobody, and I thump the pavement a free man,” or “my heels hit the pavement a free woman.”

The clod, then, is a part of ourselves; and it is aesthetic because there is no limit to how much we want another person to affect us. Shakespeare has Antony use these words: “I am dying, Egypt, dying.” But a person can say, as a happy clod might: “I am crumbling, and I feel good!” We do want to crumble because we don’t want to be stern always, we don’t want to imitate iron. We want to be able to extend ourselves, not to be hard, to go out into space. And a clod, when it crumbles, may in time even change into air—who knows? Many clods began as clods but ended as pure atmosphere, and worse than that: space.

We all want to crumble, extend, be airy in time; but we also are pebbles. A pebble, quite clearly, is not as courteous as a clod. If you step on a pebble, particularly if your soles are not very thick, you may even feel a little uncomfortable. But a clod usually gives way.

Blake is saying that we are clod and pebble. Now, should a person, who is clod and pebble, marry someone, the clod part and the pebble part ought to come to terms. In wooing, we act very much like a generous clod. When, however, things are safe, our pebble character appears, both in man and woman. After marriage is usually the time to be hard, though if you don’t know how to be hard before marriage, there will be no marriage.

The clod and the pebble are not two different beings; they are possibilities of ourselves. And it is because the clod and the pebble are not aesthetically one, either in man or woman, that we have what we have in marriage.

(To be continued)