Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the final section of the great 1964 lecture we have been serializing: Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sensation. In this talk, Eli Siegel speaks about the senses scientifically, sometimes playfully, richly, surprisingly, always deeply. And as he does, he makes vivid in terms of our very own bodies this 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.” The means by which we hear, see, taste, smell, touch are always a making one of what’s outside us and what’s within our own dear being. Sensation is the oneness of the world-not-us and our intimate, particular self.

Science & Art, Seriousness & Delight

As in so many of Mr. Siegel’s talks, the combination of texts he uses is remarkable. Here, he quotes from works on psychology and neurology—and also from poems (Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes” and Baudelaire’s “Correspondences”); and along with some quite sophisticated scientific descriptions, he uses a charming passage from a high school biology book, about how the scent of peppermint crosses a room. Eli Siegel saw science and art as of each other. He saw real seriousness and real delight—even real humor—as inseparable. And through the way he spoke, he enabled other people to feel that.

The translation of the Baudelaire poem discussed in this talk is by Mr. Siegel himself, and it is beautiful. Kenneth Rexroth, in his New York Times review of Eli Siegel’s Hail, American Development, wrote: “His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language.”

And since Mr. Siegel concludes this lecture with a poem of his own, and since I’m quoting the Times review, I’ll include just a little more from that review. There is this, about Eli Siegel’s poems: “…all with the same incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say.” And Rexroth so rightly continues: “I think it’s about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets” (NY Times Book Review, 3-23-69).

His poem at the end of this lecture is titled “Sense Poem; or, Another Word for Sensation.” That poem itself, in what it says but also in the music of its lines, is a oneness of factuality and wonder. The statements in it are so definite, so matter-of-fact—yet one feels mystery. Take, for instance, the ninth line (which, of course, arises from the lines that came before it): “The difficulty was with the ammonia.” There is a humorous, poking little dance in the line through its rhythms and those short i sounds—yet there is also that culminating width, murmur, moan, and delicate traveling in the sound of ammonia: “The difficulty was with the ammonia.”

Beauty & Ethics

Commenting on the first part of this lecture, I spoke about what Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy to show: that there are both beauty and ethics in the very functioning of our senses. They have in their makeup and operation the purpose of our lives: to like the world honestly, to become ourselves through meeting with fullness and exactitude the world other than ourselves. The senses are in their very structure opposed to that thing which Aesthetic Realism has identified as “the greatest danger or temptation” of everyone: contempt, the “false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.”

To comment briefly on the senses as ethical, I am going to quote five maxims from Eli Siegel’s wonderful book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. The book contains over 800 of those pithy, graceful, lively, surprising statements which are maxims, and the five I’ve chosen are about the senses. In a heading before each maxim I’ll point to the sense concerned.

1. Smell

The aroma of an onion is in friendly competition with that of mignonette; if you look hard, you can’t distinguish the competition from partnership. [I, 38]

So we have odor, and the sense of smell—and we also have those tremendous opposites sameness and difference. Our olfactory sense enables us to meet and take into ourselves something of what an onion has and something of what that very different growing thing, mignonette, is. These call to our sense of smell “in friendly competition.” But the maxim says that the olfactory sense, as it deals with their difference, does not use difference for contempt. It does not—as contempt does—say, “This thing is my type, and I’ll look down on and despise what seems different.”

Whether contempt takes the form of racism, or snobbishness, or using one’s own country to look down on other countries, or feeling that people with tastes different from one’s own are to be despised—all contempt is a horrible use of sameness and difference against each other. But the olfactory sense says: I can distinguish differences, but I also see these differences as in partnership. This maxim is lovely: it has humor, neatness, nuance, music.

2. Taste

Coffee, drunk, meets the ego, the self, et cetera. [I, 94]

All the senses can be misused; that is, used unethically. For example, people can use the savoring of food to feel, “Now, as I have something pleasing in my mouth, I can at last forget about the rest of the world, get rid of it; also get rid of my questions, my thoughts.” The maxim says that this coffee, the taste of which pleases us, has to do with all of our self—and this all includes our relation to everything. We’ll use our senses either to try to put aside the world and what we wholly are—or to honor these. The senses are designed for the latter.

3. Touch & Sight

Soapsuds on a brute are still soft. [I, 241]

Here again, the senses are against summing up and lessening the world. Brutes exist. (Some are high in government.) And one can use their existence to feel, contemptuously, “This is what reality comes to—it’s brutal, hard, mean, crude.” Yet the maxim says—and its logic is indisputable—“Soapsuds on a brute are still soft.” The gentle, the delicate (which we can both see and touch in soapsuds) are just as real as this cruel person, and may be ever so close to him.

The music of the maxim itself is a oneness of hard and soft. There is hardness in the fact that the sentence is terse, succinct; yet how gentle it sounds. And there is a drama of soft ss and hard ts.

4. Sound

Leaves, when they rustle, nod approval both to the tree and to the earth from which they come. [I, 245]

Our senses come from the whole world, from millennia of evolution. Are they asking us to feel more truly the relation of anything they meet to the world itself? I say yes. We hear the rustling of leaves—a lovely sound. And the maxim tells us: this rustling is not isolated but is also a praise of that to which it’s related.

5. Touch

When you care for something truly, pat yourself on the back. [I, 58]

Patting oneself on the back is a tactual matter, though it has also become metaphorical for congratulating oneself. What should we congratulate ourselves for, touch ourselves approvingly for? Contempt says: “Congratulate yourself for being able to beat out others, look down on them, manage people and reality; touch yourself as a means of asserting your supremacy over everything.” But this maxim says: the greatest victory we can have is to value honestly the world other than ourselves; this is how we’ll come to like ourselves, be ourselves. That is what the senses are for. And Aesthetic Realism is the great, beautiful, logical honoring of what the senses are for.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

The Senses Are about Reality

By Eli Siegel

Sense is related to everything that can be said of mind, everything else that mind has. But I am presenting sense today in keeping with the definition I gave earlier: “Sensation is at once the getting to and coming within an organism of some instance of the outside world, or of some aspect of the organism itself which at the time is other than it.”

As exemplifying sense, and also the mystery of sense, a poem of Charles Baudelaire can be usefully read. His “Correspondences” is perhaps the most hinting poem about the senses. I have translated it, with an attempt to get to some of the poetry in it:

This is about sense. Baudelaire was much interested in what can be called the intellectual and sensual possibilities of sense, which were close in his mind.

The first two lines—“Nature is a temple where living pillars / Let sometimes confused words go forth”—are in keeping with the idea that the senses have to do with the beginning of the universe.

“Man passes here through forests of symbols.” A symbol can be seen as something standing for something else. It can be asked: does a sensation stand for something else? Baudelaire would likely say yes.

And Baudelaire says that man can, in nature, find symbols look at him familiarly: “Who look at him with familiar regards.” So we don’t just have sensations—other things can have sensations about us: their sensations have us.

“Like lengthy echoes which in the distance mingle / In a dark and deep oneness / …, / Perfumes, colors, and sounds answer to each other.” Sensations are related. Music, painting, and poetry are about how the sensations are related. As soon as relation is found among the senses, they take on more meaning.

Two Things the Senses Do

“…which in the distance mingle / Vast as night and as clearness.” The senses have two functions: they make things richer, more complex, and they also make things clearer. Sight can give one a sense (the word is here used in another way) of the complexity of this world. To know that the statue of General Sherman stands at the edge of Central Park, is something pretty clear; it’s very satisfying. But then, when you think of having a sensation from Sherman’s statue along with the grass, and maybe along with a squirrel a little further into the park, things get very complicated.

“Perfumes, colors, and sounds answer to each other.” The two “noble” senses, sight and sound, are here. But also in the line is the one that has been given mystery and the beginning of things, the sense of smell—with “perfumes.” Baudelaire is very bad on food, and he leaves that out of the poem. But smell, he’s very good about. About touch, he’s not complete but he’s quite good.

“There are perfumes fresh as the bodies of infants, / Sweet as oboes, green as fields of grass.” The complication of the senses, the mingling of the senses, has been a part of the music, art, and poetry of the last hundred years or so. For a little more than a hundred years, the motto of art has been Don’t let the senses alone—mix ’em up. And Baudelaire is one of the leaders here. This poem hints of sensation as meaning.

Neurology: From & To

I go now to a pretty standard work, An Introduction to Neurology, by C. Judson Herrick. The nerves must be for the senses to work, so neurology is in the picture. There’s a passage in this book that puts in prose what Baudelaire got into the sonnet I read. Meantime, an important thing is here: that to have a sense impression is a getting through of self to something, and also a coming through of something to self. The from and to are tremendously instant. This is Herrick:

We may conceive the body as immersed in a world full of energy manifestations of diverse sorts, but more or less completely insulated from the play of these cosmic forces by an impervious cuticle. The bodily surface, however, is permeable in some places to these environing forces…, one part responding to a particular series of vibrations, another part to a different series.

So the senses are a study in exclusion and inclusion. Every living being is a study in what it wants to take to itself and what it wants to leave out. And Aesthetic Realism is very much interested in having the leaving out as beautiful as can be, and also the taking to oneself as beautiful as can be.

Inside & Outside

Smell is a sense that has been related to the beginning of life, and Herrick has a passage about the olfactory system, or smell. He says the olfactory system has changed: “That [it] was originally an interoceptive sense seems clear.” An interoceptive sense would be one given to being affected by things from the organism in which it is. The exteroceptive is more interested in getting things from the outside. And Herrick says that “in all vertebrates living at the present time,” the sense of smell has become more importantly exteroceptive. In fact:

The sense of smell is the leading exteroceptor in many lower vertebrates….We have seen above that the sense of taste in some fishes has secondarily acquired exteroceptive functions; and in the case of smell this secondary change has been carried still further until the exteroceptive function has come to dominate the primitive interoceptive, though the latter has by no means been entirely obliterated.

Which would mean that a fish was interested in being of itself ever so many years ago—in being rather predominantly interoceptive, getting reactions from itself. The fish didn’t know any better. Then as fish developed, they would have olfactory sensations that were, more, from the outside world. The fish, it seems, are still unsure of themselves.

Concentration & Diffusion

I’ll read a passage explaining how odor spreads. The process is a wonderful study in concentration and diffusion, opposites present in all art. In a work of 1954, Exploring Biology, by Ella Thea Smith, there is a description of how the scent of peppermint oil reaches you—if it does reach you. Some persons are so unfortunate that they’ve never been affected properly by peppermint oil.

Pour a little oil of peppermint in a dish at the side of a room. Soon a person clear across the room will smell the peppermint….

Peppermint oil, like everything else, consists of molecules in constant motion. As long as the peppermint oil is corked in a bottle, its moving molecules cannot get out. As soon as the oil is poured into a dish, its molecules begin moving out into the air. More and more molecules move farther and farther….[They] move across the room and enter the nostrils of anyone there.

…The spreading of the molecules of peppermint oil through the air of the room is an example of a common process….The process is called diffusion.

The tendency to be concentrated and also to expand is very much concerned with the great chemical possibility of diffusion.

I’ll conclude with a poem of my own, showing that sensations happen in life. This is “Sense Poem; or, Another Word for Sensation”:

And so, Aesthetic Realism has looked at sensation.