Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue of TRO we begin to serialize the very surprising and important lecture Hamlet and Questions, by Eli Siegel. It was given in November 1976.

Questions can be beautiful or ugly, kind or cruel. And I have seen that in Aesthetic Realism itself, the most needed authentic, kind questions—scientific, artistic, humanity-honoring, thought-clarifying questions—are magnificently articulated and asked.

Aesthetic Realism arose from Eli Siegel’s desire to know—and central to knowing is the asking of questions. In his quest to know, he asked—with sincerity, logic, depth, and immense pleasure—questions about what reality is; what makes for beauty; what the deepest desire of a person is, and what in the self of everyone interferes with our deepest purpose. The material of his thought was centuries of human knowledge in every field, and it was also objects, events, and people. His scholarship was tremendous, in extent and depth. He also was unlimitedly interested in people, all people. He wanted to understand a person of centuries ago, and someone to whom he spoke in a New York afternoon. All this knowing depended on questions, asked of oneself and sometimes others.

1925 and Beyond

In an article in the Baltimore Sun (9-24-44) Donald Kirkley describes Eli Siegel in 1925, when he won the Nation poetry prize for “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana”:

Friends close to him at the time will testify to a certain integrity and steadfastness of purpose which distinguished Mr. Siegel….He refused to exploit a flood of publicity which was enough to float any man to financial comfort….He wanted to investigate the whole reach of human knowledge, past and present….He thought “all knowledge was connected—that geology was connected with music, and poetry with chemistry, and history with sports.”…He wished to find something, or some principle, unifying all the various manifestations of reality.

Eli Siegel’s desire to know, his questioning, gave rise to the great principles of Aesthetic Realism: 1) “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites”; 2) The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest basis; 3) The most hurtful thing in the self of everyone—the source of all injustice—is contempt, the feeling that we are more through the lessening of what’s not ourselves.

Aesthetic Realism, then, has answers people have looked for over centuries. It also asks questions that people unknowingly thirst to be asked, or to hear asked about the world. The exact asking of questions is in Aesthetic Realism in ever so many ways. It is in Eli Siegel’s landmark 15 Questions, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? It’s in “Aesthetic Realism Asks 35 Questions about Mathematics.” It’s in many poems.

Included in this TRO are two very short poems by Mr. Siegel. Both are beautiful. The first is titled “How Much?” and it has, in the music of its two lines, a simultaneous neatness and wonder; clarity and a buzzing richness.

The second poem, “Hell, Questions, Answers,” is reprinted from Eli Siegel’s book Hail, American Development. It is accompanied there by an author’s note, and we publish that too. The poem itself has simultaneously humor and terror. It has both of these snappily; also poignantly.

The author’s note is a masterpiece. It explains what a false asking of questions is—and what a true asking is. And it shows how our aliveness, happiness, ability to be really ourselves depend on our honest asking of questions—depend on that in all our minutes and years.

The Most Important Question

Here I quote, with very much feeling, what Mr. Siegel said was the most important question for our time. When people honestly ask and answer it, there will be at last a successful opposition to the cruelty that is so much with us. Justice as pride and kindness will finally win. This most important question is: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Hamlet and Questions

By Eli Siegel

Anytime you read anything, you hope to find out more about yourself. And if you truly like a work, you find out a great deal about yourself. So every book is a means of answering the question “What am I?” And there’s the other question, which, for an individual, is the same thing: “What is reality?” A book also tries to answer that—and “What is the meaning of things?” A great work is one that asks questions so deeply that it takes the rest of time to answer them.

In poetry and in music, the unknown and the known are always together. If you saw everything that a musical composition was saying, you wouldn’t want to hear it again. It is the mystery which is also obvious that makes for art—and Shakespeare’s Hamlet has succeeded more than any other play in mystifying people.

So the question “What is reality?” is something every work of art, every poem, tries to answer. And if you ask yourself “What is reality?” you’ll find you’re in rather wide territory, somewhat difficult.

Then, there are questions like “Where were you fifteen minutes ago? I looked for you. I looked for you in the back room. What were you doing? Napping somewhere?” That’s the kind of question that, tomorrow, employers will ask, if they have the nerve and there is no union. “Where were you between 11:05 and 11:20? Were you tending to your job or doing something else?”

What I mean is: there are some questions, like “What is your name?” and “How much money have you got?,” that are fairly simple. When a truck driver asks somebody who doesn’t move, “Why don’t you get a move on—is your father a glacier?!” it’s a simple question.

So a question can be like a toothpick: one thrust, and if it’s a good toothpick it does its job. But it can also be like a question that’s always asked: “What is all that?” or “What am I?” And there are questions in between, like “What is America going for?” That’s not a philosophic question. It’s historical and sociological.

Every person has an unlimited number of questions, and I would say that most persons have not really asked the questions that they themselves represent. A purpose of Aesthetic Realism is to remind you that you’re just chock full of questions, most of which you don’t even know you have to answer.

The Play Begins This Way

Hamlet begins with a question that harried householders ask very often: “Who’s there?” The scene is “Elsinore. A platform before the Castle. Francisco at his post. Enter to him Bernardo.” Then:

That question is a little irregular, because Bernardo is trying to get somewhere—to where Francisco is. Usually, if you’re already in a place and someone is trying to enter, you’re the person asking “Who’s there?” But the beginning of Hamlet is about questions that are rather simple. The dialogue of Bernardo and Francisco continues:

That phrase happens to be a watchword. Then—a question:

Francisco has asked a very common question. You could ask “Priscilla?,” “Grace?,” “Henry?,” “Henrietta?” Bernardo gives one of the best answers. If he were really a roughneck, he’d say “Him.” But he says “He,” which shows that even though he seems to have an Italian name he knows good Danish.

A very common question is “What is the time?”

And I am sick at heart.

That’s a little more elaborate than “Who’s there?” Francisco answers with a metaphor:

So Hamlet begins with questions, and I read that rather pedestrian beginning of the play to show that there are ordinary questions leading to a very big not-ordinary question that has lasted all these years.

There Is Paradise Lost

It has been pointed out fairly often that the great epics—Homer’s Iliad, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid—begin with the authors’ saying they want to answer the question of how did all this happen in the first place? That is so of the work which has been accepted as the large epic in the English language. Milton, in Paradise Lost, follows Virgil and Homer by asking about what caused the matters he’s dealing with—how did it all begin? Also, even though he’s a good Christian, he invokes the Muse, who is part of Greek mythology. Milton knows he can’t answer this himself, so he asks the Muse to tell him how it all happened.

In the first 33 lines we have Milton asking for information and also giving a great deal. I’ll read some of those lines. If you begin to read an epic, you might ask what is this about? Milton anticipates that question and tells in his opening lines what his poem is about:

Here, and as the opening lines continue, Milton is saying he’s going to try to answer some important questions. Among them will be the very deep question how can you think God is good with all that’s happening; how can you justify the apparent indifference of God? That’s in a famous phrase, in line 26: “justify the ways of God to men.”

Milton gives something of an inventory of what he’s going to talk about. “Of man’s first disobedience—” That’s a very cute way of implying there are going to be other disobediences. Well, the line is metrical; and it’s poetry.

“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world—” Milton is going to follow the story arising from statements in the Bible: sin came to be because there was a tree in Eden that the serpent persuaded Eve to eat from, and she persuaded her husband. Some persons would object to that, and say it wasn’t the fruit; death comes for another reason—chemistry and physiology, and so on.

Milton takes Christianity for granted. A greater man than Adam will “restore us, and regain the blissful seat.” Today, the question What is Christianity? was thought about in ever so many places. There were differing answers, but people were busy with the question.

As happened in the Renaissance, persons who were fond of the Latin and Greek classics and also of religion got the Muses and Moses mixed up together. The Muses are supposed to be Greek women, and they’re not supposed to inspire Moses. Moses is supposed to be inspired by God directly. Also, in these lines, the Muse, instead of being near Parnassus in Greece, gets to Oreb, or Sinai—and that’s only by Milton’s desire. And Milton says this shepherd, who apparently is Moses, was inspired by the Muse to know about something scientific: “how the heavens and earth / Rose out of chaos.”

What He Will Do

Milton says to the Muse:

Milton is saying he’s not going to be moderate about this. He’s going to soar above the Aonian mount but good. And he does—because this is the one epic that has lived in English.

Then Milton changes from the Muse to Spirit:

This, I think, means that Milton feels, with Luther somewhat, and with Wesley, that more important than being in the right temple is having an “upright heart and pure.” It’s your feeling that matters in religion, not how often you go to the place of religion—the synagogue or church.

“Instruct me, for thou know’st” is the imperative way of saying one wants a question answered. Tell me this and Do you know that? and What is that? are related ways of saying something.

This is a way of saying that Nothing came to be Something. The image is very strange, but this is a description of creation: that out of nothing, something that has meaning came to be.

That says: along with answering questions or telling me things I don’t know, make me clearer.

That is a mighty job. It has in it the great question of explaining evil, how evil came to be.

But I’m reading these early lines of Paradise Lost to show that a question can be all about how the world came to be and what evil is.

Two Poems by Eli Siegel

From Eli Siegel’s Note to “Hell, Questions, Answers.” There is the hell of insufficient life. The central thing in life is our questions and answers, and the manner of our having and getting these. If we are not interested in some questions, life is mild, not having its full effect. And if a possible answer does not move us, we also are citizens of the tepid and burghers of torpor.

The fact that knowledge is in the world is an indication that the world can be asked about, maybe even wants to be asked about. A person is uneducated, the intensity and force of whose impersonal questions are too below the intensity and force with which he has questions about his own life, only that. The world was made a world, or is a world, to stir one into the desire to know and the desire to organize and make powerful what one knows. Consequently, if the questions we might have are not asked or are asked often but with an absence of adequate interest, are asked by a mildly fluttering unconscious, a kind of hell is present: the hell in which life goes on, but life doesn’t wholly welcome or admire life.

In man, life does look at life and has an opinion of it. If, then, life asks questions, but dully and half-heartedly, the answers will not be satisfactory, will not be lively. The absence of life through something narrow, exclusive, ego-given in a living being, is the presence, as was said, of some kind of hell in that living being. Certain cantos of Dante’s Inferno accord well with the notion of the infernal being self-chosen diminution of life by a person. If we, through conceit, make our lives less, we are requesting hell and, likely, getting it. At this time, our questions are incomplete, and the answers we get are not whole.

The being doomed by our choice to a lesser, curtailed, flatter and more fearful existence, is what the idea of hell begins with….Hell was asked for when ego made the world less, and less engaging than it is….All the while, questions and answers were not as stirring as they could be.