Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 3 of the stirring, educating, vivid, imaginative, scholarly, often humorous, immensely serious yet delightful lecture The Renaissance Shows Self, which Eli Siegel gave in 1970. The philosophy he founded, Aesthetic Realism, has in it the true understanding of the human self—knowledge philosophers have sought and that every person, longing to make sense of his or her own self, has thirsted for.

Mr. Siegel showed that our dear and puzzling self is an aesthetic matter: our great need is to put opposites together—and notably the constant opposites of self and world. He wrote in 1942:

There is a…duality facing every human being, which can be put this way: How is he to be entirely himself, and yet be fair to that world which he does not see as himself? [Self and World, p. 91]

However unaware of it we are, our deepest need—to take care of our own self and simultaneously be fair to all that’s not us—is insistent in everything we do. Even as we may be untrue to it, that insisting aesthetic need is present whether we’re kissing or voting, learning or arguing, whether we’re by ourselves or in a crowd.

In this lecture, Mr. Siegel is discussing poems from the book English Renaissance Poetry, edited by John Williams. Williams sees the English Renaissance as present from about the start of the 16th century through the early years of the 17th. And Mr. Siegel speaks of the selected poems in terms of what they show about the ways of the human self—about people’s confusions, hopes, tumults.

A Little Girl Is a Self

As a prelude to this section of the lecture, I’ll comment on poems by Mr. Siegel himself. But first I’m going to quote from an Aesthetic Realism lesson he gave, at which I was present with my parents when I was six years old. I am looking at the handwritten notes of that lesson, taken by my mother, Irene Reiss, so many decades ago. And I see that in them is the matter of what the self is: the fact that it needs to make opposites one—care for oneself and justice to what’s not oneself. A girl of six is a self. And the self that each of us was at six is present in our self of now.

Mr. Siegel spoke to me about my grandmother—whom I disliked because she was quite ill-natured. She was part of “that world which [I did] not see as [my]self.” And Mr. Siegel was showing me that I would be really myself through trying to be fair to her. This being fair did not mean glossing over what was not good, or simply giving hugs. It meant wanting to understand her, seeing her as having feelings—feelings as real as my own.

One can read in my mother’s notes that Mr. Siegel asked me, “How do you see your grandmother?” I said I didn’t get along with her and I thought she wasn’t nice. And Mr. Siegel said that what was important for me to do was: “Ask how a person feels.” Then there are these statements and questions, as Mr. Siegel explained:

The first thing that is necessary to get along with people is to ask what they feel. Do you think people feel bad because they don’t know how the other person feels? Do you think your grandmother feels lonely? Maybe when she is not nice to you, she doesn’t feel so good herself. If she sometimes does the wrong thing, you can ask her if she feels good.

The not wanting to see another person’s feelings, the making our own feelings more real than his or hers, goes on constantly. There are two reasons why, and usually they exist together. First: a child, or anyone, doesn’t know what Eli Siegel was teaching me—that we have a need to be interested in another’s feelings. Second: our un-interest in, and lessening of, people’s depths arises also from contempt: the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.”

Contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the most hurtful thing in the human self. It can be a child’s summing up a person, and thereby feeling superior to the person. But with enough intensity and power, contempt for persons standing for the world different from us can become the largest of cruelties. It can become racism. And it can become a nation’s brutalizing and killing of human beings. In his book James and the Children, in one of the most important statements about the human self ever made, 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. These three things come out of the insufficient awareness of another person or another thing. [P. 55]

Mr. Siegel was teaching me, when I was six, about the aesthetic nature of my self: my need to be me by being aware of what was not me, the fullness of another person. This is the knowledge humanity needs most, needs burningly, now.

As I say this I say too, Eli Siegel himself lived what he taught: In all the years I studied with him I saw him impelled unstintingly to be fair to reality in its fullness. This beautiful, deep, lively, subtle, thrilling justice was what he gave to people, ideas, words, art, history. It included justice to a little girl of six and her grandmother.

A Musical Understanding of Children

I have been speaking about the fact that a child can represent self, the human self, and I am going to quote four short poems by Eli Siegel on the subject. They are from his “Twenty-one Distichs about Children,” in Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. A distich is a couplet, two lines that rhyme; and distich 10 is about the fact that every person is born out of nothing less than the whole world. This fact makes for the grandeur of every self. And so:

This distich, like the other twenty, is tight, firm, in its two rhymed lines. Also, this distich and the others are richly warm and have wonder. In their structure and thought and music, they embody the hope of every child and self: to be seen as firmly individual—and warmly, glowingly related.

Each self, of whatever age, is, Aesthetic Realism shows, illimitably related to the world because the opposites that are in everything are in us too. That is illustrated with rich concision in distich 11:

Then, there is the first of these distichs. It can be seen as illustrating the following sentence from the lecture we’re serializing: “The self is an object that has an opinion about the world as object.” Parents can represent the world to a child; and what a child wants most from them is that they show her the world is a friend. The first line of this distich is agog, almost gasps, with hopefulness; the second has width and tender concern:

I’ll conclude, for now, with distich 20. It too is about the self’s unending relation to the world. Here that relation is between a very young self and literature at its height:

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Equanimity & Discontent

By Eli Siegel

The desire of the self to be happy has been present all the time. A good deal of the writing of Cicero is a telling people how they can be happy when it seems one wouldn’t expect to be, or when there weren’t favorable conditions. And the Stoics tried to work out some way they could be, in a fashion, happy all the time. The desire to have the self not crumple, not give in, not be too sad, was around. One of the purposes of religion is to comfort, to sustain the otherwise frail and swaying and falling self: “From whence cometh my help?”

The poems that are sustaining are very early. Chaucer worked all his life, it seems, studying and translating Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which is a mingling of wisdom, sustenance or comfort, and religion. And Chaucer himself has what can be called inspirational poems of the Edward III period.

Persons are trying to look good to themselves and others, and one of the things we find very early is the idea of honor, which is for the sustenance of self. Also, there’s a telling oneself how to maintain one’s equanimity—I lost my money, but I retained my equanimity. A favorite Latin word was aequanimitas. A poem about equanimity was written by a person Shakespeare quotes in Hamlet: Thomas, Lord Vaux. He wrote few poems, but they were chiefly good. He wrote the words that the Gravedigger uses in Hamlet, and they’re very good words. Shakespeare knew. But I’m reading Vaux’s “Of a Contented Mind.” It’s written in a long line, and begins:

I daresay some people of then would have disagreed with Lord Vaux. The English explorers would never have gotten to America that way. Drake wouldn’t have gone around the world if he felt his best time was spent in thinking. But often in the 1557 anthology Songs and Sonnets—Tottel’s Miscellany, as it was called—we have poems like this. The desire for a quiet mind is general. It happens that there’s another desire, the desire to be important. So people are for tranquility and also supremacy, which means there’s a big mix-up.

“When all is done and said, in the end thus shall you find, / He most of all doth bathe in bliss that hath a quiet mind.” At that time, Charles V had gone to his monastery, given up the Holy Roman Empire, and he affected people. Also at the time, the great retreat of people who wanted to be by themselves and unbothered, the monasteries, were just dealt with crudely by Henry VIII. It was felt he had economic reasons, and maybe he did, but he sure did away with those monasteries—where you could be alone.

Along with the large religious feeling of some people, the desire of others to get away helped make for various religious orders. They all were different—the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Dominicans. But in all of them there were people who wanted to get away. Then in time Loyola showed you could really be busy in the world and still religious—and, for some people, still feel you were alone: you could become a Jesuit. Well, I think that’s very rough ecclesiastical history. But the 16th century is the time of the Jesuits. The earlier orders continued, yet they weren’t what they had been. And there were military orders, in which people, though military, still acted as if they were monks—the Templars, the Hospitallers.

A Penchant for Being Troubled

Meanwhile, human beings have a self given to meditation, punctuated by being disagreeable and ambitious. And the self has a great penchant for being troubled. One can see that in the Renaissance, and one can see signs of it in the documents of the Middle Ages. The desire to counter the being troubled is very strong. The poem of Vaux continues:

The feeling that one could be detached—the desire to separate one’s mind, and one’s sense of self, from things—has been in this world, east and west, from the beginning. It seems our minds are our own; we should be able to do what we please with them. However, we find we can’t do what we please.

“Whenas the mind, which is divine, runs never to decay.” There was a feeling that the soul or mind is of a nobler substance and shouldn’t take part in the body’s brawls. In other words, there was a feeling your soul should be elsewhere, that you may be quarreling with your relatives but this doesn’t mean your soul needs to take any part in it. However, it’s quite difficult to tell the soul to stay away from the body and make a clean job of it.

In that stanza we have some of the verbal awkwardness of the mid—16th century. “For many have been harmed by speech; through thinking, few or none”: early, there was a feeling that people can’t get anything on you just because you look a certain way—but for God’s sake, don’t talk. And if you have to write, use a code of some kind.

“And he speaks best that hath the skill when for to hold his peace.” Here the subject has changed from having the meditative life to prudence.

“Our wealth leaves us at death; our kinsmen at the grave”: that is a speedy line on a very mournful subject. “But virtues of the mind unto the heavens with us we have.” That’s awkward. The best poem of Lord Vaux is in what the Gravedigger in Hamlet quotes. The Gravedigger had wonderful taste.

“Wherefore, for virtue’s sake, I can be well content / The sweetest time of all my life to deem in thinking spent.” The self had a solution here, of a sort. I don’t think it was entire, but it should be known, because one way of knowing what the self is and, for that matter, knowing what the world is, is to see what troubles people have had. The troubles of a self are documented in literature. Triumphs of self and the uncertainties of self are all in literature.

There Is Barnabe Googe

I ’m going to read a poem by Barnabe Googe, who lived from 1540 to 1594. His book of 1563—when he was 23—is called Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, which is an informative title. Men of the time tried to have the “quiet mind,” and tried to have happiness and pleasure from women without getting too disturbed. It was rather unavailing; I cannot say they succeeded. Barnabe Googe tries to tell himself to have less lust because it’s going to make for trouble. He puts this in a poem that is very carefully constructed. It sounds logical. It’s a series of “logical” statements. It’s been given the title “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”:

This is the kind of poem that John Donne, I feel sure (I cannot prove it), decided to offset and counter, because this kind of crude objection that looked so clever, he felt wasn’t the thing. When Donne writes about his objections in love, there are such complications to being uncertain, complaining, and even exulting. And Donne brought in another factor as to love: telling people to keep out. But Donne would feel that this kind of crude poem, by Googe, is something the latter part of the 16th century should get away from.

“The rarer seen, the less in mind.” There’s been a big dispute in the world as to whether that’s so—that “the rarer seen, the less in mind.” “The lesser pain, less grief I find.” That is one of those tautologies.

But this poem is done well, and it is poetic. It is simpliste; it’s naïve. But it is well constructed.

The reason I’m reading it is, it gives one a sense that there is discontent. You do feel the poem came out of life, plainly. I don’t think Googe would write it as an exercise—it’s got too much of the curled lip in it.