Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the very important 1972 lecture We Approach Poetry Variously, by Eli Siegel. This issue includes a short section of it, in which Mr. Siegel, commenting on a text he has been using, speaks about Experience.

How personal our experience is—it is almost equivalent to our particular life. And people are very confused on the subject. We certainly know things have happened to us; we talk about some of them. But just what do our experiences take in? What do they mean? How have they affected us? And what should we do with what we’ve met—how should we think about our experience?

The Opposites Are There

The basis of this lecture and of Aesthetic Realism itself is this great principle: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” As Mr. Siegel speaks about that human thing, experience, he shows that the opposites of reality as such are in it—that our own intimate experience has at once width and depth; clarity and unclearness; the personal and the impersonal. And earlier in the lecture he described experience as simultaneously immediate and continuous: an experience of ours is something that happened—yet its meaning goes on. Through this talk and Aesthetic Realism itself, we can see that what is most personal to us is related to everything. In any experience, whether of joy or misery, excitement or apparent dullness, we have to do with the world itself: its opposites are ours.

Also in the present issue is an article by Aesthetic Realism associate Lynette Abel. It is from a paper she presented last month at a public seminar about What in ourselves stops us from being happy? As she answers that question, she is commenting, too, on experience. She writes about her own experience, and about how Aesthetic Realism enabled her to understand her experiences, place them rightly, use them to have her life stronger and happier. We see something of that tremendous experience which is the study of Aesthetic Realism itself—in my opinion, the most exciting, beautiful, logical experience there is.

The subject of experience is so big, so close to everyone, that for now I’ll comment on it through a list of statements to which ever so many more could be added.

Statements about Experience

1) There is a feeling in millions of people that they have not had the kind of experiences they most long for—though they’re not clear just what those experiences might be. Such a feeling is had even by people who have succeeded in careers and social life, who have travelled, climbed mountains, parachuted from planes, gotten academic degrees.

2) The experiences we want are those that will enable us to have, simultaneously, emotion that is deep and large and knowledge that is accurate and wide.

3) The big interference with how we think about and go after experience is contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” To a large degree, people judge an experience contemptuously: on whether it makes them seem important—not on whether through it one can see more value in the world.

4) A result of contempt is: while people want to have big experiences, they also don’t want to be affected, stirred, changed by the outside world—because one cannot feel superior to a world that stirs one deeply.

5) One’s contempt can make the experience of seeing a blue sky meaningless.

6) The desire for contempt makes one resent the experience of seeing value in another human being.

7) People have used painful experiences to want to forget, be unaffected, rid their minds of the outside world. One result of this desire is that a person can become increasingly unable to remember things.

8) Are the experiences of other people as real as our own? Do we want to see them that way? Or do we feel the only experiences to which we need to grant full life are ours?

9) Does every person have rights as to certain experiences? That is: Does every person have the right to experience good healthcare without having to worry about paying for it? Does every person have the right to be paid respectfully for his or her work? Does every person, regardless of one’s skin tone, have the right to be treated with complete good will? These matters and others, insistent in America today, are about what all people have the right to experience.

10) People do not know that we want to see any experience, pleasing or painful, in a way that will enable us to be a better person, fairer to everything. One of the terrible things in human history is that millions of people have used painful experiences to be unkind themselves, colder to the lives of others. I remember an Aesthetic Realism class in which Mr. Siegel spoke to a man who had fought in World War II and seen some awful things happen to bodies and lives. In the discussion Mr. Siegel was clearly and deeply sympathetic—and at a certain point he asked, Did you use what you saw to be kinder or less kind? The man, affected mightily, said Less kind. He was very grateful, because now he could make a different choice.

11) As I wrote earlier: part of the magnificent experience of studying Aesthetic Realism is that through its principles one is able to see one’s many experiences accurately, in a way that makes for pride. The following 6 points are about the experience of studying Aesthetic Realism.

12) It is the experience of meeting principles that are true about everything—and the experience of testing them and seeing that they are true.

13) It is the experience of seeing, through those principles, that “the world is the other half of yourself”—that you are related, fundamentally and richly, to everything and everyone.

14) Studying Aesthetic Realism is the experience of finding out what in you interferes with your own life, and what has interfered with human life throughout history: Contempt. It’s the experience of being able to understand and criticize your contempt, so you can have a life you like.

15) It is the experience of being truly understood.

16) It is the experience of learning that your deepest desire is the art desire, ethical and immensely practical: the desire to like the world on an honest basis.

17) It is the experience of meeting a person who was honest all the time. That person was Eli Siegel. I met his beautiful honesty, knowledge, and kindness firsthand: I studied with him. People of the future will meet these in his written work and the recorded classes he taught. And the philosophy he founded will be grandly fundamental to every person’s experience.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Looking at Experience

By Eli Siegel

In the first chapter of Sound and Sense, the editor, Laurence Perrine, talks of poetry in relation, somewhat, to novels and plays. All art is supposed to do something good to your life, and your life has in it what is either remembered or not remembered, retained or not retained. What you retain is your experience. And books, plays, music, poetry—art as such—are supposed to organize and add to your life or experience. In this first chapter, Prof. Perrine says the concern of plays, poems, stories is with experience:

We all have an inner need to live more deeply and fully and with greater awareness, to know the experience of others and to know better our own experience.

That is quite true. And how can it happen? We also must ask, and keep on asking, What does it mean? What does it mean to “know better our own experience”? And is that desirable? Many persons would say, We already had the experience; the idea of knowing it any better is impossible. But, as I said earlier, Prof. Perrine brings up the right questions. Some of them are very technical, and some are in this field—what can poetry do for you? A further sentence:

Literature, in other words, can be used as a gear for stepping up the intensity and increasing the range of our experience, and as a glass for clarifying it.

This means that there are three things in life that literature can help. One is intensity. That is the same as sharpness and liveliness. Then, range. That is wideness. And then, with “glass” and “clarifying,” clearness. Is it good to have keenness, sharpness, intensity of experience, range of experience, and clearness of experience? And we come to the question What is clearness of experience?No person who ever lived has completely gotten away from muddle. There’s a great deal of unclearness in every territory of the world.

These statements of Perrine are sober. And a further sober statement about literature and poetry concerns how does literature make for “greater awareness”?

It can do this in two ways: by broadening our experience, that is, by making us acquainted with a range of experience with which, in the ordinary course of events, we might have no contact, or by deepening our experience.

The thing to be seen in this sentence is that experience is a little like a cube, or like something high and low in space. It is something like a geometrical form. He uses the phrase “by broadening our experience.” If our experience can be broadened the way a county may be, or a city, we should know that. Broad is the same as wide, really, and is a term used in geometry.

Then we have “or by deepening our experience.” The term shallow —as in the statement that he or she is a shallow person—has been used very often. That idea too, although it’s not geometry, has to do with geometry. There can be a shallow form; that is, one that is not deep enough for something.

Both broadness and depth are valuable things. And they go along with the idea of self and world. We can say the self is that which is deep, and the universe is that which is broad. These two dimensions are present in every poem. Every poem is a oneness of depth and width. It is a little bit like geometry that can smile, kiss, and scream.

If anyone says I’ve had a deep feeling or a deep experience, it is already assumed that the feeling is large; that there’s a great deal of pain or pleasure in it. If you don’t say anything more than I feel this deeply, we already presume there is a great presence of pleasure, with some notion of pain possible. Pleasure and pain are both deep and wide.

Happiness, and My Experience

By Lynette Abel

At age 20 and in my last year of college, instead of feeling happy anticipation about things to come, I had a feeling of doom. Nothing held my interest for long. I had changed my major three times, dated a number of men, and felt weary of life and very cynical about happiness.

I’m tremendously grateful to be studying Aesthetic Realism, which has enabled me to have the happiness I longed for. And this happiness grows fuller and deeper with every year. I learned that the only way a person can have real happiness is through wanting to know and honestly like the world, see meaning in it. And Aesthetic Realism explains, too, what in ourselves stops us from being happy: our desire to “get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself, which lessening is Contempt.”

As a child, I felt happy listening to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. That the sounds of different instruments could actually convey the qualities of a boy, his grandfather, a cat, a duck, and a wolf, thrilled me. And I was excited when at age six I learned to sing “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” I loved its melody and sentiment. Through caring for music, I was having the happiness of seeing more meaning and beauty in the world.

But I also thought I’d be happy if I could get approval and feel I was better than other people. I used the praise I got, especially from my father, to feel I didn’t have to care more for things. When, at his urging, I sang “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” for guests, I so much loved the praise I got that I became reluctant to learn new songs—because I’d made such a hit with that one.

In school, my desire to be the center of attention made for trouble. My 4th grade teacher wrote on my report card: “[Lynette] talks constantly, which disturbs others, and ignores class rules. She does not accept criticism and does only what she wants to. [She] must…consider the rights of others.”

In a great lecture about happiness, Eli Siegel explained, “To give oneself to things is the only way to be happy. But to give oneself to things is protested against from the very beginning” (TRO 721). I came to feel I was too good to give myself to anything for long—piano lessons, chemistry classes, the French language, and the feelings of other people. I didn’t know this was why I often felt miserable and hollow. Writes Ellen Reiss:

People unknowingly think that contempt will make them happy—that they’ll feel good if they can put aside enough, feel superior enough, have the world serve them enough. Contempt, Eli Siegel showed, is the source of all cruelty; but it also causes the person having it to be unhappy. [TRO 1012]

Flirting & Power Are Not Happiness

Like many women, I felt I’d be happy if I got as much approval from men as possible. I saw love as what I wanted most, and I felt love depended on the right person’s making much of me and taking me away from a world I didn’t like.

For some months while attending college, I worked part-time in the record department at Sears and Roebuck. At work I felt like the belle of the ball. I flirted with men from the TV department, the furniture department, the lighting department—bringing, as I saw it, excitement to them. But later at home, my buoyancy ebbed and I felt both empty and agitated. The reason why was described by Eli Siegel when, in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, he spoke to a person who wanted to understand flirting. He said that in flirting, the pleasure you get comes from

showing to yourself that the other person is interested in you and you yourself are less interested. It is a way of establishing a personality that doesn’t work. The thing that makes flirting bad is, it has ill will in it.

This explanation is so important: having ill will in any form always makes us feel bad—because our happiness depends on how fair we are.

When I began to date a man I’ll call Tom, I was affected that, like me, he loved rock ’n’ roll and going to the beach in Fort Lauderdale. But the great attraction was Tom’s seemingly unconditional approval of me. I was flattered when he jealously asked once if I’d looked at any men on my bus ride home from work. I seemed to mean the world to him. Wasn’t this love? But why, I wondered, did I feel so cold and unhappy? We went together for two years and even got engaged. But as time passed, I felt desolate and incapable of love, and ended the relationship.

Several years later, Eli Siegel asked me in a class: “Should one use a person to see the whole world better or to glorify oneself?” And he asked: “Would you say you are interested in understanding men?” No, I hadn’t been. He continued:

If you don’t want to understand the man you know, you’ll never be happy. If your desire to be happy in the world runs ahead of your desire to understand it, there will be disaster….I believe that understanding is already equivalent to the beginnings of happiness.

I am very thankful to have seen that the approval I once went after is so paltry compared to the desire to understand. Aesthetic Realism has made authentic romance a reality in my life. I am happy trying to know and feel closer to everything through a man: my husband, Michael Palmer.

The Study of Good Will

I want to give another instance of the knowledge about myself, love, and happiness that I met in classes taught by Eli Siegel. At the time I began to study with him I had just broken up with a man and felt despairing. Mr. Siegel asked a question that both surprised and relieved me: “Do you like your motive in love?”

LA. No.

ES. What is it—to have a good effect or to have distinction?

LA. I think it is to have distinction.

With critical compassion, he continued: “Is something in you sick and tired of old motives?” “Yes!” I replied. I was tremendously moved. Mr. Siegel criticized the worst thing and believed in the best thing in me, and wanted it to flourish. With humor, he asked: “The idea of love as something with good will—do you think it’s a corny thing?”

Aesthetic Realism sees good will as the strongest, most intellectual thing in the world. “When you have good will,” Mr. Siegel explained, “there are two desires: 1) to know without limit; 2) to have a good effect, be useful to a person.” That describes Mr. Siegel’s own unflagging purpose with every person.