Dear Unknown Friends:

It is an honor to publish here a great, kind, very surprising and utterly logical essay by Eli Siegel. It is one of many essays he wrote in (I surmise) the late 1950s and early 1960s. And its title is “Why a Man Gambles.”

In Aesthetic Realism is the understanding of ever so much in human life—in the feelings and tumults of people—that had not been understood before. The present essay is an instance of that comprehension—wide, particular, sometimes humorous.

Throughout History

The drive to gamble has been throughout human history. And it does seem that, all in all, people have not been proud of having such a propensity. They might joke about it, or try to present it as part of a dashing lifestyle, but they have not been proud.

In the online Encyclopedia Britannica there are these sentences:

Gambling is one of mankind’s oldest activities, as evidenced by writings and equipment found in tombs and other places. It was regulated, which as a rule meant severely curtailed, in the laws of ancient China and Rome as well as in the Jewish Talmud and by Islam and Buddhism….European history is riddled with edicts, decrees, and encyclicals banning and condemning gambling, which indirectly testify to its popularity in all strata of society.

The point at the moment is not whether gambling should be banned. The point is that all these thousands of years, why a person gambles has not been understood. It is understood in the present essay.

A word about the title. If Mr. Siegel were writing the essay today, in our age of verbal “gender neutrality,” it’s possible that the title would have been different. Certainly, women gamble also. And we know that using the word man to include all people is now rather frowned upon—though such usage is in hundreds, even thousands, of the finest sentences in English literature. But whatever Mr. Siegel might have used as a title today, the title as we have it is musically beautiful. There is, for example, the gentle, exploring, and puzzled sound of Why followed soon by those ms and as which are in both the words Man and Gambles; and there’s the quiet moving-along of the second syllable of Gambles. The title, “Why a Man Gambles,” like the style of the whole essay, is direct, practical, firm, down-to-earth, and has simultaneously reach, nuance, and wonder through its verbal music.

The Principle Behind This Essay

The understanding in this essay comes from the understanding that is in the principles of Aesthetic Realism itself. In the preface to his book Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains:

The large difference between Aesthetic Realism and other ways of seeing an individual is that Aesthetic Realism makes the attitude of an individual to the whole world the most critical thing in his life. [P. 1]

We have to do, certainly, with particular things and people in our lives. But we have to do, all the time, with something more inclusive, of which those things and people are representatives. We have to do with the world itself—all, as Mr. Siegel put it, that begins where our fingertips end. And we want to feel this world is for us.

Though we don’t articulate it, the feeling that the world is for us is something everyone goes after. And we can go after it in a legitimate way or illegitimate way. The legitimate way of feeling approved of by reality is to want to know, to see justly, deeply, widely, what is not oneself. The illegitimate way is through contempt in its many forms. And contempt, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the most hurtful thing in the human self: the feeling, If I can look down on what’s different from me, I’m important; besides, I’m superior just because I’m me, and reality should, in some fashion, acknowledge that fact.

I am not writing with any fullness here about what Eli Siegel showed to be the central fight in self: between respect for the world and contempt for the world. But it happens that the reason a person feels ashamed of gambling, is the same as the reason people feel ashamed (for instance) of lying, or even of fishing for compliments: they’ve tried to have the world on their terms not through knowing it, valuing it truly, but through a contemptuous shortcut.

I’ll mention one more thing in relation to Mr. Siegel’s magnificent essay—something it’s likely unnecessary to point out; but I’ll do so in behalf of utter clearness. When Mr. Siegel relates gambling to religion, it is not because he sees them in any way as ethically alike. He saw honest religious thought as in keeping with art and science: respectful of reality, impelled by the desire to see, know, be just to the world.

And There Are Poems

Following “Why a Man Gambles” are three poems by Eli Siegel. These, like all true art and poetry, have in them the great alternative to the drive toward gambling—and to contempt in its everydayness and enormity. In every good poem, Mr. Siegel showed, a person has wanted to see the subject with such deep justice that we hear as music the structure of the world itself: the oneness of such opposites as tumult and calm, the everyday and the strange, logic and feeling.

The first poem we include is “Moments,” written in 1958. Do our moments ask something from us? And what do they ask? Is what they ask, good for us? This way of seeing moments is so different from the way people mainly see—whether one is a gambler or a librarian, or both, or something else. The poem is serious and playful. The music has (among other things) strictness and caress.

“Many Plains” was written thirty years earlier, in 1928, and Aesthetic Realism as philosophy had not yet come to be. But Eli Siegel, in his thought, study, and seeing, was working toward it. The idea that there is a relation among all the things of the world is in this poem. And here the sun, I believe, is made to stand for relation. As different from each other, even wildly different, as the things and people in this poem are, there is a rightness to them—which, were the occasion different, I’d try to describe. But the sweep, variety, and exquisiteness of the music has us feel both strangeness and rightness.

“Nothing’s at Fault, but Dust Is There” is a poem of 1967. It is about cause and effect—and mystery. It makes for respect for the three main characters—floor, dust, and air—even as there’s an upshot one probably doesn’t like. The poem is funny and honoring.

So here are an essay and three poems, all arising from the beautiful, kind, exact mind of Eli Siegel.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Why a Man Gambles

By Eli Siegel

Vincent Twiggs gambles because he wants to like himself. You can’t like yourself unless you somehow have the world on your side, and a person can feel he has the world on his side when he wins on a horse or at poker. Vincent Twiggs, like everybody else, doesn’t know what luck is; but even while he doesn’t know what it is, he wants it with him. He doesn’t know that he has a feeling about luck like the one he is supposed to get at church. So far he doesn’t want to connect his betting on horses, and playing for money at poker, with his going to church fairly often. His Methodist church has talked of having bingo games to get funds with, but Vincent Twiggs hasn’t seen bingo and God as close.

If Mr. Twiggs were told he wanted to win on a horse because he wanted to feel God was with him, he wouldn’t like it. That was no way to talk about God. When Vincent Twiggs bet on a basketball game, he’d just as soon have God forget about it.

Some Unknown Force

Yet Mr. Twiggs, like so many others, thinks he’s in relation to some unknown force when he bets or plays. He just hopes that unknown force is nice to him. Once, indeed, he prayed under his breath for the right card at a poker game; but he doesn’t remember this, and doesn’t choose to. Never did he hear anything like a recommendation to pray for the right card at poker from the minister, Mr. Snell. Vincent Twiggs’ wife would look disapprovingly at him for praying on such an occasion; she might even snicker unbearably.

So Vincent Twiggs goes to church and gambles, and doesn’t connect the two. Yet, if you asked him what he was looking for in his gambling—and kept on asking him—you might get to some strange things. Suppose we have a person talking to Mr. Twiggs, called Mr. Inquirer, or Mr. I.:

Mr. I. So, Mr. Twiggs, why do you find it so necessary to bet on the horses?

Mr. T. Oh, to pick up a few extra dollars, but I don’t so often.

Mr. I. And that is all you want, the extra money? That’s why you take the chance of bothering your wife?

Mr. T. What else is there? These days money is something.

Mr. I. Well, when, say, Daisy V., your horse, comes in, don’t you feel a little smarter, a little better?

Mr. T. So I do, but it’s still the money.

Mr. I. So if you got the money another way, would you stop betting?

Mr. T. Try me. I think I would.

Mr. I. And you would feel just as good getting the thirty dollars you won on Daisy V. from an uncle?

Mr. T. You don’t get thirty-dollar presents from uncles.

Mr. I. But if you did, would you feel as fine as you do when you get it from Daisy V. or Miss Hampshire, horses you picked out?

Mr. T. You sure keep on asking. Maybe I do feel a little better when I get money from a pony I back.

Mr. I. You feel warm, don’t you? You feel things are going your way?

Mr. T. Now, that’s getting too deep. Horses are horses, and money is money.

But Vincent Twiggs, when he won thirty dollars on Daisy V. and sixty dollars on Miss Hampshire (great days), felt a way he couldn’t describe. He felt that the unknown world was shaking his hand, slapping his back, saying he was all right.

In religion, what a person goes after is to have the unknown cause of the world approve of him or her. Our purpose, selfish and beautiful, is to have the universe nod with a smile towards us, even say, “I’m glad you came. I like the way you do things. I’m better off, now you’re here.”

Luck, for Mr. Twiggs, is the universe either smiling or frowning at him. Luck has been made a feminine goddess in the phrase Lady Luck. Fate, though, has always been given a feminine appearance, because there is something feminine in the eternal unknownness, quiet grandeur, of this idea of cause. Unknownness is related to the beginning of things.

We Want Signs

Logically, clearly, to feel that we deserve to have the world good to us is hard. We don’t want to traffic with the world as such. We have enough to do dealing with the things coming our way, the people about us. But there is that in us which wants signs that the Unknown Everything is for us.

Once Vincent Twiggs got the feeling he was approved of when his wife, Betty Glosson, showed signs of wanting to marry him. When Betty smiled, Vincent felt a benign divinity was saying yes to him. Women have a way of making a man feel at last he’s somebody; at last things are going his way; at last the forces and the trends and the powers are on his side. When Betty looked with deep favor on Vincent, and acted in keeping with her look, Vincent Twiggs felt, as so many enthusiastic males have put it, he “was on top of the world.” Through Betty, a dim frown of the world had come off; and its tendency to be in his way had stopped.

But it didn’t go on. Betty showed she could do other than smile and approve. When Betty was critical, Vincent Twiggs felt Mrs. Twiggs was unhappy; and for his wife to be unhappy was a defeat for him. His regard for himself was not so strong. And as Betty frowned or made unkind—now and then withering—remarks, Vincent Twiggs felt, too, that the forces behind the world weren’t so much for him as they used to be.

Now, Vincent couldn’t say to the forces of the world, “You should approve of me. I’m good. I deal with things right. I know what I should know. How wrong it is of you, O unknown forces, to frown at me, to be so ungentle to me.” Mr. Twiggs hasn’t made this speech; but then again, he has.

Once, Vincent put a nickel in a slot machine and won. The slot machine gave him what his wife wasn’t giving—approval. That some force should arrange things so that he, Vincent Twiggs, could get a prize from a slot machine—this was divine. It was divine, O Vincent Twiggs. Fate showed she wasn’t a stranger; nor a growling neighbor, either.

Mr. Twiggs, however, found the slot machines not enough. He needed something more animate, and more continuous. So he made love in his mind to the horses. It is true his loves were many, and his love wavered. But when he definitely had decided to put two dollars, or five dollars, on Buzz-buzz, or Zigzag, or Miss Normandy, or Purple—for that while he felt this lithe, lissome, fast animal was to get him to benevolent, favorable divinity. A horse was to be the means to the universe’s kind word.

All of us feel that the world, or Fate, should approve of us. If we felt it didn’t, we couldn’t stand it. As much as we feel the world doesn’t approve of us, we have to change, or hide. We can’t be sure that the world will like us unless we like it, and to like the world isn’t easy. It is the most necessary thing there is, but it isn’t easy.

The Only Way

Vincent Twiggs doesn’t know that the only way he can be sure the universe (or Luck) likes him is for him to know it and like it. He must like the cause of the universe, which can be seen as God. We must like, at least, the world through which God appears. I cannot say that Vincent Twiggs succeeded here, for he himself is not satisfied. Not satisfied with how he likes the world, and not sure, therefore, that the world likes him, Vincent Twiggs has to have samples of the world’s liking him. These samples he gets through gambling—through winning on the horses or at poker.

When Vincent Twiggs loses, at least he feels he may win later. He doesn’t like it, but it isn’t as if maybe the world won’t like you forever. As a gambler, Vincent Twiggs likes it a bit even when he loses. For if Luck doesn’t like a man, why force it? Luck didn’t like you, and it was good for you to know it. The absence of happy Fate is pungently instructive.

And Vincent Twiggs thinks Luck is fairer to him than Betty Twiggs is. When he loses at poker, he thinks he has got down to first principles. Chance, something tells Vincent Twiggs, is as fair as Justice. But he feels Betty Twiggs doesn’t get down to the unknown, quiet, though irrational depths of the world. He feels there is something personal, peevish, and not so deep in Betty’s doings and attitudes.

So Vincent Twiggs is using the horses and poker as a means of coming to terms with the world. He must see the world as liking him or punishing him. There perhaps is another way. But until Vincent Twiggs knows it, he will go after Fate’s smiling or castigation, its acceptance of him or reproving of him, through the mysterious operations of a pony in the afternoon or a card in the evening.

Three Poems by Eli Siegel