Dear Unknown Friends:

With this issue we begin to serialize the lecture Things Are Likened to Each Other, which Eli Siegel gave in 1971. It is about—magnificently about—what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the largest subject in the world: Sameness and Difference. From an authentic relation of these opposites—from their oneness—come all beauty, kindness, authentic science, love, justice (including economic and racial justice), learning, and true imagination. From these opposites used falsely come every unkind and unjust happening and way of seeing, including racism, cruelty, economic exploitation, selfishness, insincerity, bad “art,” bad “science,” government that’s unfair to people, and conceit, both everyday and massive.

“All beauty,” explained Eli Siegel in a central Aesthetic Realism principle—“All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” No opposites are more fundamental than sameness and difference, and in the present lecture Mr. Siegel is showing that the desire to make these one is constant and crucial in art. So this talk is a means of knowing what Aesthetic Realism explains: that aesthetics is urgent—that in order for us to have the lives we want, for human beings to get what they deserve, for the full success of what people now are demanding in America’s streets—we have to see how sameness and difference are made one in art.

Love Is about These Opposites

Let’s take the great and vexing subject of love. Whenever there has been a feeling of love that is big and true, the following has been in it: This person is different from me—how widely, wondrously, excitingly different from me he or she is! Yet I feel this person stands for who i am, my very being!

There has been so much trouble about love, including about love that seemed to begin well. And all the trouble has come because people do not see in a clear way that sameness and difference can really be one. A tremendously frequent mistake about love is to make the loved one an adjunct of yourself—see the person as yours, feel the main thing about the person is his or her relation to you. This is making a false sameness to yourself—it’s a wiping out of the chosen one’s infinite, vital relation to the world different from you. Then, you’re angry when the person shows plainly a difference from you: has the nerve to disagree with you, or has a quite different way of doing something from how you would do it, or shows in some other fashion that he or she is not under your control but is an independent, distinct person.

In the Preface to his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, Eli Siegel writes:

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things….The technique of poetry aims for the intensification of a thing through showing the likeness of what is in that thing to something else—to everything else, as different.

The unkindness (also the unintelligence) throughout history has come because people don’t feel that their relation—their likeness—to all that’s different from them intensifies them and makes them important. In fact, what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the most hurtful thing in the human self is based on a contrary feeling. That most hurtful thing is contempt, and contempt is “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Contempt, which works in people hour after hour, is a sleazy and untrue sameness-and-difference. It’s the feeling, I make myself big by looking down on what’s different from me. If I have to see myself as really like what’s not myself—my individuality will be squashed, and my glory and self-importance will go down the drain.

We need to see clearly the opposites in aesthetics—in what is beautiful—to be fully convinced that our kinship with others enhances our individuality, doesn’t lessen it. We need to see evidence, vivid and wide-ranging, that the oneness of sameness and difference is beautiful, is art, is what’s behind every instance of important expression and perception. That is what the lecture we’re serializing is about.

Take that horrible thing, racism, and its persistence. As I have described in this journal, and as Aesthetic Realism makes clear, all racism is sheer contempt. And certainly I am for strong policies and laws to combat it. Yet for racism to end fully in the minds and feelings of people, humanity needs to see, consciously, what can really replace and render unappealing the cheap victory of contempt within oneself. That is, we need to see the aesthetic victory and know what it is: the oneness of sameness and difference; the feeling, “I’m me, individual, even glorious, as I see I’m in a vibrant, deep relation of sameness and difference with all people—in fact, all things.”

There Is Economics

Then, there is that thing, the ugliness of which people are more keenly aware of as the days pass: the profit system. It is ugly because it, like racism, is based on a phony, contemptuous relation of sameness and difference. Its basis is the profit motive. And the profit motive—to extract as much money as possible from the work and needs of a fellow human—cannot function if we see that person as like ourselves. We cannot swindle or exploit a person whom we see as having feelings as real as our own, needs like ours, hopes and fears like those we have ourselves. Similarly, when, a century ago, a manufacturer made a lot of money by having children work in his factories, he had to see those little boys and girls as of some different species than his own darling children, whom he’d hold on his knee and to whom he’d bring gifts.

To feel that some people deserve to own very much of the world’s wealth and others very little, is an artificial, unscientific, unaesthetic relation of sameness and difference. Along with being false, it is loathsome. And, as Eli Siegel showed in 1970, it has also come to be increasingly and hugely inefficient. As a result, such a way of seeing, and the economics on which it is based, are being objected to more with every week.

How Related Are We?

In the lecture we are serializing, Eli Siegel is showing that the seeing of simultaneous likeness and difference among things is the very basis of literature. I will preface this first section with lines in which a writer speaks explicitly about himself as at once particular and like other people. The writer is Walt Whitman, who begins his “Song of Myself” with a statement as thrusting of his own individuality as can be: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” And yet the whole poem is about his relation to ever so many things and people.

There are these lines from section 16: “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise” and “Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion.” Then, in section 33, he writes about a slave trying to escape to freedom:

This is the terrible, described beautifully.

Earlier there was the following line, in which Whitman relates himself utterly to a person; I first heard it decades ago, when Eli Siegel spoke of its greatness: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.”

Whitman’s feeling of his likeness to other people does not make him dull, unimportant, a non-individual, a sheep. It makes him mighty.

The last thing I’ll say for now on this big, urgent subject is: I believe the person who most fully related himself to other people, who most used himself to be fair to them, was Eli Siegel. For example, in Aesthetic Realism lessons, when he spoke to someone about herself or himself, the person felt—I felt: “He knows me. He sees, really sees, what I feel to myself, inside.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Things Are Likened to Each Other

By Eli Siegel

I call today’s talk Things Are Likened to Each Other. There is no phrase more important as to art than that, because the whole matter of art, including poetry, is about like and unlike. And there the arts and sciences are exactly the same: the meaning of like and unlike is sought for by both.

The best way of seeing the subject is through that rather deep thrill which any true gathering of like and unlike can make for—that pleasure which is in art. Wherever art occurs, like and unlike—two of the beginning opposites of the world—are to be felt. Everything in poetry has those two in it.

I am using a book that can be seen as having to do with what is central to culture, and to poetry. It was the most popular rhetorical or literary text for French children before, say, the advent of Napoleon III, or before about 1850. Leçons françaises de littérature et de morale is a collection of French and other literature, and there are also passages of criticism. The editors, MM Noël and De la Place, who did very well with their book, have, in the volume given to poetry, an opening section called “Precepts of the Genre.” It is a means of seeing some of the permanent matters of poetry or art.

In an early paragraph we get to the idea of likeness and unlikeness. The Muses are mentioned, and we can ask, Why was it that various arts or ways of thought should be called by the names of women? For instance, one Muse is Clio, who stands for history. The Greeks saw fit to say, through her, that there’s a likeness between history and a woman, and maybe also history and the sound Clio. Another Muse is Euterpe—she represents lyric poetry. There are nine, including Calliope, Erato, Polymnia, Terpsichore, and they’re all women. The changing of a way of feeling or thought into a woman is a likeness.

This likening occurs in ever so many ways, because everything that one does in the world, or that is in the world, is about likeness and difference. A person says, There stands the oak of our organization—Mr. Willingham. Or someone says about another person, He is a frail reed and is just tossed about in the wind—that’s Mr. Williston. The like and unlike matter is where logic and poetry are the same. Science goes after similarities and differences. Logic does. And so do poetry and the other arts.

Likening Is Here

The passage the editors use for “Precepts of the Genre” is from a very popular book of the 18th century, one of the most popular: Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (Voyage of the Young Anacharsis). The main character, Anacharsis, roams the ancient world, particularly Greece. And in the meantime the book gave readers some idea of Greek poetry and art. In the passage quoted from it, first there’s something about poets being in the “ideal world,” and then we have this paragraph, which I’ll translate:

It is there [in the ideal world] that they gather their verses in the gardens of the Muses, that reposeful streams flow for them with milk and honey, that Apollo comes down from the skies to give his lyre to them, that a divine gust, extinguishing their reason suddenly, throws them into convulsions of delirium, and compels them to speak the languages of the Gods when they are only the agents.*

That passage is very surprising. What we have first is that these poets are gathering “their verses in the gardens of the Muses,” which seems to be a rather tame way of being poetic. Then reposeful streams flow in their favor with milk and honey. That is, again, a likeness: why should the coming to be of poetry be inseparable from milk and honey? Perhaps because it is felt that milk and honey, as in the Bible, are sweet and also nourishing.

Then we have a picture of Apollo coming down to give the poets his lyre. A lyre has stood for poetry, and still does. The word lyrical comes from it. Thus far, what’s been told is very sweet. But right after, there is a “divine gust”—and it, “extinguishing their reason suddenly, throws them into convulsions of delirium.” So we have two things represented as of poetry: one is the quietness, the sense of contentment which every poet, no matter how disturbed, has had somewhere. As I once put it: “Rimbaud / Wasn’t always so.” He also was quiet. And we have the other thing—that poets are taken by something: “the divine gust…compels them to speak the languages of the Gods.”

The two ways of poetry are expressed by Barthélemy through something allegorical or metaphorical. We know what it means. It means that the poets for a while are very quiet and thoughtful, and then something comes upon them and they show the other side of art. But there’s likening here.

A Famous Statement

Barthélemy quotes a very famous statement. It has been given to others, but he gives it to Simonides. This is a likening with antithesis:

According to Simonides, poetry is a speaking painting, as painting is a quiet [or mute] poetry.

Likening is of ever so many kinds. A likening can be very implicit—as, say, we can have the phrase venomous note: the note, then, is compared to the secretion of otherwise innocent serpents or reptiles. But we could go even further: the faintly toxic odor of what was obscure in his message. There, the language is a little fainter: it’s not venomous; it’s the faintly toxic odor. And it’s not just a message but what was obscure in his message. That is the seeing of a likeness which is rolling about unheard. Likeness and unlikeness are much more subtle and elaborate and strange than has been thought.

Boileau Compares

Early in this book there is a text that all French children who studied anything were familiar with, Boileau’s “Art of Poetry,” “L’Art poétique.” And in itself it is good poetry. In the passage given here, Boileau says poetry has to have good sense, and he calls good sense a “chemin”—that is, a “road.” Already, we have a likeness: there is the road of good sense. Also, he admits that the road is “slippery and hard to hold to.” Then he says: “Pour peu qu’on s’en écarte, aussitôt on se noie,” “As soon as one gets away from it, immediately one drowns.”

That is a likeness. If you’re confused, if you go away from the road of good sense, you don’t know what you’re saying, so you’re drowned in your own thought.

Then Boileau says: “La raison, pour marcher, n’a souvent qu’une voie,” “Reason, in order to walk, has often only one way.” Reason here is compared to a walk, and also a road. That is a comparison of thought to walking and proceeding. And there is music in the line.

A Passage—Bold, Awful, Great

Early in this book, Racine’s Phèdre is quoted from. The lines here are about the death of Hippolytus through something arising from the water and scaring his horses—which is an unusual way of having something sad happen to you. But that is the way Racine chose, in keeping with the Greek myth. It is a famous passage in French literature. This is about the horses:

This is the French:

Racine is rather bold in saying that the horses went along with the sad thought of Hippolytus: they knew his sad thought and they lowered their heads and weren’t haughty as they once had been. They changed the pride of their steed-dom and conformed themselves to his “triste pensée,” his “sad thought.” That, of course, is likeness.

Hippolytus is dragged by the horses, and we have this line:

That is a bold thing, the saying his body has become one wound. It’s a way of saying that his body was mangled, which it was.

This section from act 5 of Phèdre ends with the lines

That is, Hippolytus was so changed that his father couldn’t recognize him. That has likeness and difference in it.