Dear Unknown Friends:

We’re honored to publish here two poems by Eli Siegel. And with them is an article by Ernest DeFilippis: “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Husband?” It is from a paper Mr. DeFilippis presented last month at a public seminar on the subject; and he and the other Aesthetic Realism consultants conducting the seminar—Jeffrey Carduner and Ken Kimmelman—are authorities on the questions, hopes, worries, lives of men.

The fact that men and women are confused about sex and can be foolish about it, is something everyone is aware of. But the trouble made front-page news recently, through the revelation that the now-former governor of New York was (in the words of the New York Times) “linked to a sex ring as a client.” I’m going to comment a little on the turmoil of Eliot Spitzer, as a means of commenting on the fact that Aesthetic Realism explains the human self, the self that is our own.

I have heard television commentators say that why the governor jeopardized a promising career by patronizing high-priced courtesans is something that can’t be explained. But Aesthetic Realism can explain what impelled the former governor—and what impels every person in our rightness or wrongness, wisdom or foolishness, kindness or cruelty.

How We See the World

Every person, Aesthetic Realism explains, has an attitude to the world itself. Everything we do, including in politics and sex, arises from this attitude to the world.

Before I comment further, it’s important to have perspective. Eliot Spitzer’s dealing with ladies of the night was reprehensible and perhaps illegal, and I think he was right to resign. But in American history, persons in government have done things much worse than frequenting prostitutes. Sanctioning wars that were unnecessary, through which people were killed and maimed, is vastly worse than being a “john.” Politicians who tried to maintain segregation—and there were ever so many—were infinitely more immoral than Mr. Spitzer. And so were and are the politicians who have worked to break unions and to keep people poor.

We won’t understand either New York’s former governor or ourselves until we understand the fight which Aesthetic Realism shows to be constant in everyone, the fight at the center of our attitude to the world. It is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for it. It’s the battle between 1) wanting to understand the world, see value in it, be just to it, and 2) trying to conquer it, defeat it, make it yield to and be subservient to us.

In relation to that second purpose, contempt—I remember a lecture in which Mr. Siegel mentioned politicians who were involved in sex scandals. He explained that someone who goes after a certain false personal power in one field (politics) may also go after it in another (sex).

Eliot Spitzer was a mingling of wideness and narrowness, of kindness and self-serving. More than in many politicians, including those who are now gloating, there was a desire in him to have humanity better off. But there was also a desire to show one’s scornful supremacy, trounce other people, have the intoxicating victory of leveling someone, bringing a person low. The first desire is respect, the second contempt.

The two can mingle. We should fight for justice with a toughness—and in various ways, Spitzer did. However, there can be, intertwined with but very different from this true fight, the thrill of: “Look how I can be supreme, humiliate people, show I’m running things!” That mingling was in the former governor. He called himself a “steamroller,” accompanying the term with an adjectival obscenity. He didn’t see that the desire to “steamroll” as a victory in itself—the desire to have his way, not because it was right (which it may have been), but because it was his —was a desire that weakened him. He didn’t see that he was ashamed of it, that it was ugly.

And it is that same desire which drove him to hire high-priced courtesans.

Sex Is Always about the World

What is the state of mind when one buys a woman’s services for thousands of dollars a night? There is the feeling that the world in the form of an attractive woman is serving you, doing whatever you want it to do. There is the feeling that the world is humiliating itself for you. You hold the reins. You call the shots. The heady, explosive feeling that the world has been made to acknowledge one’s supremacy, that one is able to do whatever one chooses with it: this contempt victory can be gone after both through political battling and through sex.

A former New York governor had, then, two purposes in politics. But his corporeal adventurism was not, as people have thought, in a different world from his career: it was impelled by one of those very purposes he had in politics.

Aesthetic Realism explains that our desire for sex will come either from a desire to see value in the world, to honor and be affected by its meaning; or from a desire to have a victory over the world. That is always true: sex is about how we see the world, and a person we may want to touch represents the world. When we can learn about this from Aesthetic Realism, there come to be kindness, sanity, and pride about sex at last.

Meanwhile, the makeup of the world, the opposites, is in us always. The opposites will either fight in us or, if our purpose is beautiful, make a one. We can see opposites, awry, in the former governor’s arrangements to have a woman come to him for pay at a Washington hotel. There was such seeming cleverness, the sense, “I can manage this; I know what I’m doing”; and at the same time there was such an intense being driven, being out of control. Contempt is a drive. When you go after power in a spurious way, a contemptuous way, getting it will never satisfy you: you’ll be driven to get more, and perhaps in other fields, and more intensely.

Comprehension & Confusion

In 2006, Eliot Spitzer was elected governor by a landslide. As attorney general, he had prosecuted various exploiters of labor, and, most famously, Wall Street lawbreakers. “He also,” writes the New York Times (March 11), “initiated popular attacks on subprime mortgage brokers.” His popularity arose from the deep and enormous feeling people have against the profit system. His fall does not show that his campaigns were wrong, as various opponents would like to say. It shows he didn’t see that he had the profit system way of mind, the Wall Street way of mind, in himself: the feeling reality and humanity exist to make me important.

That way of mind is in everyone, and we need to understand it so we can criticize it, effectively. When we do, through the study of Aesthetic Realism, things in us we may have despaired of changing change.

The world can confuse a person; women can confuse a man. We will either want to understand the world and people, or feel offended that we need to, then turn the offender into something we can resoundingly conquer. Sex has often been a way of showing we don’t have to be subject to confusion, to the sense that there’s so much we don’t know: through sex a man (for example) can simplify a woman—“I don’t have to think; she’s here, pleasing me.” Through the woman called Kristen, the world seemed to say to a governor: “You don’t have to question yourself or try to comprehend anything. You’re the most important thing there is. And I’ll do anything you want!”

The fall of Eliot Spitzer stands for the quieter, inner fall that can take place in every person every day: we sabotage the best possibilities of ourselves because we go after contempt. The study of Aesthetic Realism enables contempt to lose and the best in a person to win, grow, blossom.

The following short poems by Eli Siegel are musical presentations of confusion, the need to understand, and hope.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems by Eli Siegel

What Does It Mean to Be a Good Husband?

By Ernest DeFilippis

A good husband is one who has good will for his wife—and good will, Eli Siegel wrote, is “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful” (TRO 121). A good husband is one who wants to value his wife’s mind, who is interested in knowing and being affected by who she is, how she sees the world. Having this purpose makes for the real love and passion both husband and wife are hoping for.

To have good will, we need to be a critic of our desire for contempt. And contempt includes the feeling we’re superior to our wives, who need to be instructed by us. Of course, we dare not express this feeling, but I know we can sure have it.

In his lecture Mind and Husbands, Mr. Siegel explains:

Husbands should know, first of all, that wives want to be known the way mathematics is known, or logic, or New York State. Knowing is knowing, nothing less. It means that what goes on within the woman, what her relations are, what she hopes, what she fears, what she doesn’t know she feels, should be a subject of eager interest for the husband. [TRO 639]

A Husband’s Mistakes Begin Early

Very early in life, without realizing it, I was preparing to be a bad husband. I liked school, liked having my mind engaged in solving geometric equations and learning about American history. I loved learning to play baseball and how to build a dog house. But I didn’t see what went on within people, particularly women, as “a subject of eager interest.” In fact, it wasn’t a subject at all. I wrongly used my mother’s devotion to feel that what a woman needed most was simply to be in proximity to me.

Many years later when I spoke about my family in an Aesthetic Realism class, to my surprise, Mr. Siegel described a mistake my father had made as to my mother:

He felt if he showed her affection it was enough, and your mother wanted someone who would keep her mentally stimulated. There is no limit to how much a person wants her mind stirred.

He also said, “There isn’t a woman who doesn’t resent a husband’s not wanting to know her.”

Mr. Siegel related how I saw women to my father’s way of seeing, and that of many men, when he said about a woman I was dating: “There are certain questions you don’t ask Ms. Stevens that she would see as mentally useful.” And he asked, “Which do you appeal to, the strength of women or their weakness?”

The idea that there was such a thing as strengthening or weakening a woman was completely new to me. I felt I just wanted to make women happy, give them a chance to be with me and have fun—get away together from the demanding, harsh world, go dancing, skiing, take in the changing of the leaves in the fall, and have sex. But every time I thought I’d found my ideal woman, she’d inevitably “develop” some “problem,” as I saw it. Her dissatisfaction would creep in and spoil everything. I’d feel hurt and unappreciated, thinking, “What the hell does she want?!” I’d try to have her forget her troubles through sex, but it would make her more distressed.

As much as I tried to blame the woman, I’d feel disgusted with myself and call myself a cold, selfish bastard. I felt something had to change in me, but what it was I didn’t know.

Then, in my mid-twenties, in classes taught by Eli Siegel, I learned what it was, and what it means to care for a woman. For example, he asked me: “Which are you more interested in now, knowledge or happiness?”

EDeF. Happiness.

ES. When our desire for happiness outruns our desire for knowledge, there will be pain.

About Linda Stevens, whom I saw as being excessive in her demands and failing to recognize my good points, he asked: “Do you see Ms. Stevens the way she sees herself? Do you think you see what concerns her?” The answer was no. He asked, with humor and also exactitude: “She’s not subject to your influence sufficiently?”

EDeF. No, she’s not.

ES. Ms. Stevens is engaged in finding out who she is. The trouble with her is: she’s an individual, not just a woman….Are you irritated because you feel you have certain rights that are being questioned?

That’s what I felt. And Mr. Siegel explained: “Ms. Stevens has taken for granted that you want her to be delivered to you without your going through all the critical work necessary, all the work of your getting her love or esteem. Will your desire to win be greater than your desire to understand? Will your desire to understand be greater than your impatience?”

To the second question, I answered, “I hope so.” And Mr. Siegel said: “It is more important that Ms. Stevens believe in you than that you win, more important to have good will for her and be proud of having it.”

A Woman & the World

Aesthetic Realism enabled me to change. And when I met and fell in love with Maureen Butler, it was who she is that I was affected by: her ethics and keen mind along with feminine beauty, energy, and good nature. As I try to understand what Maureen feels, I have a pleasure and wonder I never dreamed I could have about a woman. And as we go dancing, take a ride in the country, or are physically close, I feel light-years away from the self-disgust and aching dullness I once felt in relation to a woman, because with Maureen I feel closer to the world and other people.

A good husband is one who wants to see his wife as having to do with the whole world. I’ve learned that my wife, like reality itself, is a oneness of opposites. For example, one afternoon while at Governors Island , I was very much taken by the huge iron hinges holding the massive doors of the old fort. They were strong and also delicate, as the five-foot long triangular flange tapered into a graceful, thin curl. Amazingly, these same opposites, strength and delicacy, are in Maureen, in a way that affects me very much!

What a Man Is Learning Now

Cal Jenkins, who teaches art in a community college, is having Aesthetic Realism consultations, and at one he said he wanted to speak about a disagreement he and his wife, Sue, had about sex.* He said they had not been physically close for a while and the subject was causing pain between them. We respected him for wanting to understand what was really going on. “She thinks I don’t want to make love to her and I say, ‘You’re wrong. I want to be close to you but you don’t want to. So you decide and let me know.’” This is male ego, a man hurt and angry that he can’t have his way with his wife. We asked, “Do you want to know what criticism she may have of you?”

CJ. Probably not.

Consultants. If she says you don’t want to be close, couldn’t you ask, “Sue, dear, why do you say that?” Sweetly—not “What’s the problem now?! Here’s my calendar. Make an appointment when you’re ready.”

The idea that a wife may actually object to her husband’s purpose is not real to most husbands. It was what we wanted Cal Jenkins to see. We asked, “Do you think the way you see this situation is insulting to Mrs. Jenkins? What is she supposed to feel—she’s got some ‘hang-up’?”

CJ. Yes, you’re pretty close.

Consultants. Mrs. Jenkins is affected by things. There are things she doesn’t understand about herself, about you, and about sex. Are you interested in her questions?

CJ. She says I’m not interested in them.

Consultants. Is that important? Who is it you want to be close to—the self of Sue Jenkins or some picture of who she is that suits your ego?

Mr. Jenkins was more thoughtful as he was seeing his coldness and what effect it was having on his wife. We asked, “How much does it mean to you to have a good effect on Sue Jenkins? Do you want to feel that through you she’s a better person?” “Definitely,” he answered; “I want that!”

Cal Jenkins is becoming a kinder husband.

Aesthetic Realism can teach the husbands of America what they most want to learn. It provides the thrilling, grand study of what it means to know and really love the woman with whom we chose to spend the rest of our lives.