Dear Unknown Friends:

I am very happy that this issue of TRO includes a poem by Eli Siegel, written in 1930: “Between Rome.” There, musically, the world of history and everydayness is seen in a new way, a way which would become Aesthetic Realism.

We include, too, sections of a paper by Leila Rosen, from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled “The Fight in Women about Managing or Understanding—& the Beautiful Answer.”

That fight between the desire to manage and the desire to understand is a form of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the big battle in everyone: of contempt versus respect. It’s the fight about 1) going after importance through finding reality and humanity a shabby and also cruel piece of work, with oneself superior, versus 2) feeling, The more I want to see truly the meaning things and people have, the more I’ll be myself. That second purpose—while not something people may even know they have—happens to be the purpose of our very lives. Our opinion of ourselves depends on how true to that purpose we are.

Managing Is Personal & International

Managing, as the term is being used here (and elsewhere) is contempt taking an arranging, shaping, directing form. Ms. Rosen writes about the desire to manage in personal life, including as to love. Yet what we do personally, corresponds to what can go on nationally and internationally.

For example, there is the profit system: economics based on seeing and using people in terms of how much money one can make from them—from their labor and needs and lives. One tries to manage these human beings so as to aggrandize oneself financially. One does not try to see who they deeply are, know them truly, see them as being as real as oneself.

Then, there is that form of managing which is about how a nation should be owned, and run, and by whom. Every act of Congress and decision of the Supreme Court or by a President is based either on wanting to know what is true, or on managing the facts so as to have a nation that suits oneself and one’s friends. You can try to manage people and a nation by making persons unable to vote; also by feeding them lies.

Then, there is the managing that reaches a certain pitch of brutality, a national horrible fullness. I remember Mr. Siegel’s speaking in a class to a man who wanted to understand something in his past that he was ashamed of. He was from South America, and wanted to learn why, in his teens, he had been drawn to fascism. Mr. Siegel explained that it appealed to the thing in a person which felt, contemptuously, that the world was a mess, that people were stupid and irresponsible and dangerous and needed to be told what to do—and disciplined—and punished: that is, managed by superior persons like oneself.

There is a way of meeting things which has sometimes been called managing but which is utterly different from the managing now being discussed. The word has sometimes been used to mean a dealing skillfully with difficult material. For instance: The driver managed the car well on the icy roads. The singer managed well the transition from the low notes to the very high ones. The manager of the baseball team brought out and related well the strengths of the players.

Whenever a person composes things rightly, creates something authentic, it’s not the managing this TRO is looking at. It happens because the person is trying to be just; is proudly and humbly trying to know; is being affected oneself, welcomingly, very much. That is what, at its fullest, happens in art.

About “Between Rome”

This poem of 1930 has, as I said, a new kind of seeing—and a new kind of music. In it we feel, as inseparable, the historic might of Rome and that city’s everydayness. The lines have simultaneously grandeur and casualness. People known over the centuries, with Latin names, mingle with unknown people (some of whom had Latin names too).

A phrase that instances the poem’s beauty is this, in the 10th line: “The contented rester among tall white steps.” That phrase has, 4 times, the short, non-magnificent eh sound (in steps, rester, twice in contented). Yet those eh sounds, in their non-grandeur, brevity, are part of a phrase noble in its motion, rich in its music. They join with other sounds—with the wonder and firmness of the sounds tall white. —And that rester on Roman steps feels so individual, yet has been ever so many people over the centuries (including me).

In this poem, the ancient feels immediate, feels like now. For instance, we hear about a father in ancient Rome having a kind feeling about his small daughter.

The poem has rhymes, yet they are so far apart that one almost does not have a sense of them. But they affect us: they assist the sense of the difference-and-sameness of things, of the casual and the grandly symmetrical.

The last line is replete with prepositions. And prepositions are words that show a thing’s relation. Rome, that last line says, is related to so much.

The great principle come to by Eli Siegel—true, for instance, about the beauty of Shakespeare, Whitman, Baudelaire, Li Po, and the Roman Catullus—is true of this poem too: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Between Rome

By Eli Siegel

Managing or Understanding

By Leila Rosen

After an evening out with friends, my husband and I took a cab home, and were about to pay the fare. Credit card in hand, Alan looked at the touch screen for what seemed to me an unusually long time. “You need to put it in the chip card slot,” I said authoritatively. “I know,” replied my tech-savvy husband, who looked at me critically and proceeded to pay the fare.

Scenes like this go on every day. We can feel we just have to manage other people—otherwise they simply won’t do things correctly. But I learned from Aesthetic Realism that such a feeling is a form of contempt. And we can’t like ourselves if we see people contemptuously and want to manage them, because that way of seeing is completely against what our minds are for.

“To understand,” Eli Siegel explained, “which is the same thing as getting truth and organizing it, is [a person’s] deepest desire” (TRO 450). When that is our purpose, we don’t want to run people. We want to know and be affected by them.

Managing & Understanding, Early

As a child, I was thrilled when I began to understand, at Brooklyn’s PS 104, how individual words combined to make sentences. Later, I loved studying how flowers grow. I read about many kinds, including my favorites, petunias and tulips, and was proud of trying to understand these colorful, radiant things of earth. But my desire to understand people was sorely lacking.

Aesthetic Realism explains: we come to a way of seeing people and reality through how we use the first representatives of the world we meet. My parents, Barney and Edith Rosen, were changeable in a way that confused me. They’d be affectionate, then argue bitterly. They’d be pleased by things—as when my father danced jauntily, humming “Sweet Georgia Brown,” or my mother skipped with delight into the ocean at Coney Island. But my father could be explosively angry, and my mother sarcastic.

Like many children, I didn’t try to understand my parents—get the truth about them and organize it. I used those selected impressions to have contempt. As I saw it, they were crude, but I was refined and cool; they couldn’t manage their lives, but I could manage mine. Everything would be better, I thought, if I could just run things (tastefully, of course)—and I liked people who let me, and acted wounded by anyone who didn’t.

My mother was the chief person I tried to manage. Even as I was scornful of her, I thought she should be my solace in a world I saw as mean; I felt her life should revolve around me. But she didn’t cooperate. I resented whatever I felt took away from her care for me: my younger sister, whom I thought she preferred, my father, her friends, and later her job. I’m ashamed of this selfish purpose, which was against the best thing in her and in myself: the hope to be in a wide, proud relation to the world.

I could have been glad she cared for people and things, and I could have tried to know what they meant to her. Instead, I tried to run her by making her worry about me. For instance, when she went back to work, I’d often go to the school nurse claiming I was sick, so my mother would have to leave whatever she was in the midst of to come and pick me up.

In Aesthetic Realism Consultations

It was in Aesthetic Realism consultations that I began to see knowing people as the true self-expression it is. In a consultation I had when my mother was ill, my consultants asked this about how I was speaking: “As you talk about your mother, do you think you sound kind or unkind?” I sounded unkind, I realized: there was a hardness in the way I spoke. They continued:

Unkindness has to be the result if we’re not really interested in how another person sees herself and how that person is affected by the world. Would you like to be kind?

I wanted that very much. My consultants encouraged me to think about Edith Rosen as an aesthetic situation, having reality’s opposites in her. These opposites included past and present, because “to see what a person feels at any moment, you have to be interested in the person as a whole, including what they have felt.”

That explanation bore wonderful fruit. I thought about my mother in a new way—and therefore spoke to her in a new way too. I asked her questions with a desire to know. And she told me of her feelings when she was a young woman: her pride in learning bookkeeping; her liking to dance with Barney so much, she chose him over another man and later married him. And she asked me about myself. These conversations came from wanting to understand, not to manage. I’m tremendously grateful to Aesthetic Realism for the deep friendship we came to have.

Is Love for Managing or Understanding?

I had longed for love. But I also felt that if I deigned to care for someone I should be able to manage him. And in my mind, I pictured a man doing my bidding.

The summer before college, I spent time at a local pool, sunbathing, taking a dip now and then, and flirting with the lifeguard. Once, he casually mentioned his car, and I hinted he might drive me home. In my mind, he agreed—and after his shift, I waited. An hour later, I was still waiting. When I told him, the next time I saw him, about my waiting in vain, he said he didn’t remember offering me a ride. This kind of thing happened many times—with my being shocked that the picture I had created was so wrong.

I was hopeless about love until I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a woman’s purpose with a man has to be the same as her purpose in her whole life: to know and like the world.

When I began dating jazz pianist and music educator Alan Shapiro, Ellen Reiss asked me in a class what I wanted to understand better about him. I described what had seemed to me his being inattentive as we spoke on the phone. With each perceived pause, I had gathered another hurt. Ms. Reiss showed how differently I’d have met the situation if I’d really wanted to understand:

Do you want to see this as the insult supreme, or as instancing humanity? You could say, “I’m talking to a man. I want to feel I’m learning about reality through him—I want to see everything better. I want to have a good effect on his life. I want to see him better, and I want to have good will.”

She asked, “Does Alan Shapiro act as though he wants to be managed by you?” I said, “No!” and told of what happened after Alan asked me to help with a Thanksgiving dinner he was planning.

LR. He thought I was trying to manage him, and he really didn’t like it—but I wasn’t. I was very, very careful not to seem managing. I just felt certain things weren’t efficient.

ER. Does a person have to be so “careful not to seem managing” if her motive is good? It’s very important to be exact, because the thing in you that gets hurt excessively is a twin to the thing in you that wants to manage.

This surprised me so much! I hadn’t seen those two tendencies in me as related to each other. Now I was learning that both—an inaccurate sense of being insulted, and a desire to manage things—come from the feeling that the world is not good enough for oneself. And Ms. Reiss showed: the one purpose I could be proud of, with a man or anyone, was good will.

Eli Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” I’m proud to go after having this purpose in my marriage to Alan Shapiro, whom I love very much. I’m stronger, more myself, being affected by him—his energy and thoughtful desire to know the world and people; his love for music, humor, and more. I’m grateful our conversations have a desire to know and bring out the best in each other. Our study of Aesthetic Realism is giving us grand lives, and we want everyone to be able to learn what we are learning.