Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the conclusion of the lecture by Eli Siegel we have been serializing: the great We Approach Poetry Variously, of 1972. Here too is an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner, from a paper he presented at a public seminar titled “What Is Most Powerful for a Man—Understanding a Woman or Owning Her?” Mr. Carduner writes courageously and definitively on male injustice to women, and as he does he explains that form of it which has been the subject of intense publicity at this time. As you’ll see, Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that makes clear the source of this unkindness and what its relation is to any cruelty, and what a man truly thinks of himself for it.

The Explanation

It has been necessary for a long time, vitally necessary, for people to learn from Aesthetic Realism. It is ragingly necessary now. One reason is: Aesthetic Realism explains what makes for injustice, and what can end it. That is so whether the injustice is of a man feeling entitled to deal with a woman however he pleases; or young people in a schoolyard bullying another child; or a boss paying an employee very little; or the brutality of looking down on a person of a different skin tone; or lying; or the assumption that a person close to one should be managed by oneself; or the taking for granted it’s all right for some people in a nation to be very rich and others very poor. Aesthetic Realism shows—and humanity needs achingly, screamingly, to learn—that the cause of every injustice is contempt: the desire to get an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Mr. Siegel explained:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fullness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

And Aesthetic Realism shows there is another desire in us, opposed to contempt: to like the world, see it truly. Because that is our deepest desire, because it’s the purpose we were born for, our being untrue to it makes us ashamed, agitated, empty. But what is it that can make this deepest desire—which is the same as justice—do at last what it so rarely does: truly, glowingly, solidly win?

The answer is, people need to see that justice, having respect for what’s not oneself, is not merely “right” and “moral”—but is powerful, luscious, immensely interesting, exciting, and terrifically self-enhancing. Otherwise, they may praise justice, speak favorably of it—but they won’t be attracted to it, tinglingly attracted. They won’t see it as the thing that gets them where they want to get, gives them the glory they hope for.

That’s why the seeing of what poetry is and art itself is, is so necessary. This seeing is the very basis of Aesthetic Realism, with its principle “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Eli Siegel is the critic who showed that in every true poem a person is expressing him- or herself through being just to the immediate subject and to the world itself. This justice is in the fact that every line of a good poem contains—and brings to us—what reality is: the oneness of opposites. We hear this justice, as poetic music. We hear activity at one with calm. We hear exactitude that is also wonder. We hear freedom inseparable from order. We hear width and pointed immediacy. And again: we are hearing what the people of our nation most need to see, that a person is expressed, is truly, gloriously oneself, through being fair to what’s not oneself.

With Our Whole Self

So let us oppose injustice wherever we see it—and let us know that to do so fully, with our whole self, we need to learn from Aesthetic Realism. We need to learn what Jeffrey Carduner describes himself as learning, and what he and other consultants teach in Aesthetic Realism consultations.

For instance: We, and our government representatives, need to see that each citizen of this land, whatever one’s background, has the whole world’s opposites in him or her (and so does every person hoping and fearing at our border). Each of them, like us, is trying to put together their individuality and all that’s not themselves. Each is trying to make sense of high and low, pride and humility. Each wants to be, like a tree, both expansive and contained, free and rooted.

I believe justice has in it this too: Since every person comes from the world and has the world in him or her, every person deserves to own that world as fully as anyone else.

In Eli Siegel I saw, year after year, a person always resplendently honest. He embodied the fact that justice is the greatest intelligence, expression, and grandeur.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Opposites Continue

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel has been using as text the anthology Sound and Sense, edited by Laurence Perrine.

The next poem we come to in this book is Keats’s “To Autumn.” Its last line is a famous line, with manyness and oneness, and the use of the word twitter:

There are other things, to be sure, in the poem, but why is that the most esteemed line? Does it have both soothing and stirringness? And is twittering soothing and stirring at once?

Mocking & Sadness, Sameness & Difference

We have some prose quoted by Perrine too. Occasionally, mocking and sadness meet in prose, as they do in poetry, and in a section on irony there’s a passage by Washington Irving about the Indians. What it comes to is: We took away so much of theirs that they didn’t need—shouldn’t they be pleased? That kind of irony is part of poetry. The being able to say something that is different from what effect you want to have is a sign of the opposites’ being deep in human thought. The irony of Irving is in a question that Prof. Perrine quotes:

Have not the Indians been kindly and justly treated? Have not the temporal things, the vain baubles and filthy lucre of this world, which were too apt to engage their worldly and selfish thoughts, been benevolently taken from them? And have they not instead thereof, been taught to set their affections on things above?

There is irony there. And it concerns Native Americans very much now. Irony, with its sameness and difference, should be thought of as much as can be.

Sadness—Told of with Vibrancy

The next thing to see is a poem of Shelley, which is a complaint. There is also a touch of anger present. It is seen as one of the greatest lyrical outbursts in the English language or in any language. And it is that. It is called “Dirge”:

This feeling isn’t the only thing in Shelley. But there is a feeling possible looking at the world when the sky is overcast—or when there’s a kind of wind that scares one, it’s so sad—also when one can see cliffs in Arizona in twilight. The Grand Canyon in a certain hour of the evening is not exhilarating. Shelley had such a feeling. In the poem the world is saying that it too is sad—the world as meteorology and geology and geography, also astronomy.

“Sad storm, whose tears are vain, / Bare woods, whose branches strain.” If the woods are impelled by the wind, you can feel them going for something and not getting it: Will I ever reach this? Will I ever reach this?

“Wail, for the world’s wrong!” The sadness of the world is presented at its beginning. Yet this is lovely.

In relation to sadness: the greatest poem of its kind, Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is tearful but stirring, Jupiter-size stirring.

I have said I don’t think any person who does not respect poetry should be an Aesthetic Realism consultant. He or she is just not equipped. Why I’m saying this, why the being truly interested in poetry is a requirement for the understanding of a person—that will be told of more and more.

A Man’s Real Power—What Is It?

By Jeffrey Carduner

It had been a hard day: I’d been teaching 5th grade and couldn’t get the class to listen. But I’d been looking forward to the party at a friend’s house that night. There, I saw a very pretty young woman with the most beautiful blue eyes. I said to myself with determination, “I WANT the girl with those eyes!” I didn’t know this thought came from a very unjust thing in me and would make for pain for both of us.

The question in the title of our seminar is crucial for all men: “What Is Most Powerful for a Man—Understanding a Woman or Owning Her?” How we answer begins with how we see power as such. “Are there,” Eli Siegel writes,

two kinds of power, the first that makes us more important and the meaning of reality less; and the second that makes the world or reality seem greater and ourselves greater because we see the world as greater?

Men have a choice: to be “powerful” by making reality less, and that includes a woman; or to be powerful because we want to value truly the world and a person—and that means wanting to understand them. The first way is contempt, and it is why men suffer and cause suffering, very much in relation to women. What we most deeply want is the second kind of power, the desire to understand. I thank Aesthetic Realism with all my heart for showing this.

A Fight about Two Kinds of Power

As a young man, I did have a desire to understand. I loved trips to Revolutionary War sites, and learning, for example, about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Without realizing why, I felt honestly stronger and bigger wanting to know what the colonists felt and respecting their passionate objection to tyranny.

But I didn’t know there was something like tyranny in me. Like most men, I saw the world as an inimical place where I had to get my way, and essentially I felt that would be through having money and getting a young woman to do my bidding, to adore me.

There was my Bar Mitzvah. The main thing to me wasn’t learning the Haftorah, a beautiful reading from the Bible. No, it was the party afterwards—where people, many of whom I didn’t even know but who were business associates of my father and grandfather, handed me envelopes of checks and money. Though outwardly I accepted these with modesty and a thank you, inside I was grabbing those envelopes greedily and couldn’t wait to see the cash.

I grew up, like most boys, hearing a disrespectful way of talking about women. When I was a teenager, my father carefully explained that women could do everyday things, but when it came to large ideas, they just didn’t have the mind. I soaked it up. That was how I saw my mother, both grandmothers, my five great-aunts: they were on earth to serve us. Later, I felt that having women affected by me, very much through sex, made it worthwhile to get up in the morning. I didn’t feel it was powerful to try to understand people. And even with the seeming victories I had, I didn’t like myself and felt empty all the time.

I was driven to have power in a way that was mean. For instance, soon after we met I took Jessica, “the girl with those eyes,” to a ski lodge and, in what I considered the most romantic of settings, we had sex. As our relationship continued, I felt we didn’t have to talk, and when she’d try to tell me about her job as a social worker, I’d change the subject. Then one night, to my shock and horror, she said she didn’t want to see me anymore. She made it clear that I hadn’t wanted to know her: “You never ask me a thing about myself—like my work and how I feel about my clients.” I was stunned. What about the chalet, the theatre tickets and dinners, everything I’d done for her? She owed me! But underneath my bluster, I felt she was right—something was really wrong in how I was.

I was so fortunate to meet and begin to study Aesthetic Realism. I heard lectures by Eli Siegel that had enormous comprehension of and respect for the minds of women. There was The Novel Speaks of Poetry; or, George Eliot, in which he said of this 19th-century woman, one of the notable writers of the world: “George Eliot did a great deal to make understanding seem as important as it is.” I began to read her novel Middlemarch. I loved it, and loved Dorothea Brooke, the woman of deep thought and feeling who is its heroine. A new world was opening up to me.

I saw that, because of the width and depth of Eli Siegel’s kindness and scholarship, I could ask him about what had so pained me: how I saw women and sex. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson he said, in response to what I’d written:

The field in which people can despise the world most fully is through sex; and doing that makes people feel bad and feel guilty. You wrote a document in which you tell about yourself, and the thing which is most salient is that you could use sex to despise the world with.

This was new to me—that the reason I’d felt so bad was I’d been against my own deepest hope and the deepest hope of another, to like the world, be fair to it!

ES. So, do you think you’ve used sex for contempt?

JC. Yes. I’ve been learning that contempt is lessening a person for my victory. And I have used sex that way.

ES. Most men do. Would you say the state of mind in sex is beautiful?

JC. Oh, no.

ES. There is a thing in sex called aggression. Do you think a man could be afraid of it in himself?

JC. Yes.

I thought about a night when my girlfriend Whitney said she didn’t feel well and preferred not to have sex. I was angry and hinted that if she kept this up I might not be around too long. We did have sex, but afterwards she cried and left. I saw she felt awful, and I was so ashamed I felt as if the earth had opened and swallowed me up.

Now, some years after, as Mr. Siegel spoke to me, I was seeing the cause of how I’d been with Whitney, and the terrible effect I’d had—and what would make such a thing never happen again. Mr. Siegel explained:

ES. There is a form of cruelty which begins by not giving complete feelings to a person; and not giving complete feelings is a form of contempt. The more you don’t grant feelings to people, the more you feel you can go ahead to suit yourself.

JC. Yes!

ES. I say that if people cared how other people felt, cruelty would diminish very much right from the beginning.

In the lesson, Mr. Siegel also spoke to me and Devorah Tarrow, a young woman whom I was coming to care for, and he said, “As I see it, Ms. Tarrow and Mr. Carduner should ask honestly: Can Aesthetic Realism enable us to respect and understand each other more and ourselves more?”

This criticism and encouragement freed me. I began to see I’d used sex to own—to conquer a world I had contempt for. I’d lessened the importance and depth of an entire sex.

The Power of Understanding

In a lecture, Mr. Siegel said that to understand something is to see “a thing in itself and the thing in relation to all things.” I began trying to see who Devorah was in herself and how she was related to all things, and it was thrilling. Mr. Siegel explains in his Preface to “The Ordinary Doom”:

To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth.

I began seeing Devorah was “the universe on two feet”: as we sat for many hours over jasmine tea at a café, I was seeing that, as Aesthetic Realism explains, a person is trying to put the universe’s opposites together. Devorah had surface and depth: with good looks and liveliness, she was also scholarly. She wanted to have a good time, yet she was serious. And I was moved to see that a woman could, like a man, be against herself—for instance, be tormented by not being able to put together mind and body.

It began to matter to me that other people respect themselves—that Devorah respect herself. I felt it was more important to know her and do all I could to make her stronger, than to have my way. In fact, that really was my way. A better power began to work in me: I was able to have bigger, kinder thought and feeling about what another person deserves.

I’ve seen that the power of understanding far outstrips the contemptuous victory of owning. It makes ownership look like the puny thing it is. And I’m so happy, with my colleagues, to teach other men what I’ve learned.