Dear Unknown Friends:

Here are two poems by Eli Siegel; and with them—“A Good Husband: What Does That Mean?” by Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner, from a public seminar of last month.

In order to understand the tumult, hopes, disappointments in love and marriage—in order for love fully to succeed—we need to understand what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the biggest fight we have: between the desire to know and the desire to own. That is another way of putting what Mr. Siegel described as “the greatest fight man is concerned with,…the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality” (TRO 151).

As a prelude to Jeffrey Carduner’s dealing with marriage, I’m going to comment swiftly on how that battle between owning and knowing is the central matter in three other aspects of life.

1. Truth

It’s of course not wholly correct to call truth an “aspect” of life, since our very lives depend on whether we’re just to it. Meanwhile, the question for everyone about truth is: do you see the facts—about people, happenings, yourself—as things for you to know as fully as possible and be fair to? Or do you see the facts as things to be twisted to suit yourself, tailored to conform with your wishes, changed to expedite your plans? That means, do you see the truth as something you can own and therefore manipulate?

As a presidential election year proceeds, one can be sickened seeing various politicians and radio personalities create a “truth” to suit themselves, to make someone look bad to the American public. Yet there’s a tendency in most people to change the facts when convenient. Lying is popular, which means the feeling that one should own and manage what’s so is popular.

Yet this is a tribute to the ethics deep in everyone: if we see the truth, not as something to know, but as something that’s ours to kick around, we’ll feel ourselves to be a failure, no matter how we pretend and how much praise we get.

We’ll also be a failure in love. We can’t do better with a person close to us than we do with truth. We won’t see him or her as to be understood, but as existing to make us important. In his book James and the Children, Mr. Siegel writes: “When you think you have the right to do something to truth, the right goes on to include doing things, to suit yourself, with people” (p. vii).

2. Food

The preference to see the world in terms of what one can own, have, manage, rather than seeing it as something to know more and more, is behind people’s misuse of food.

Eating is a wonderful thing. It is, Mr. Siegel has described, a oneness of opposites—self and world: it is the world showing its friendliness by literally becoming yourself. But eating is often used to feel that you at last have the world on your own terms, that you’re its master.

Let’s take a person we can call Alex. He doesn’t like the world much; it confuses him, seems often to thwart him. But when he can get that chocolate cake between his teeth, he feels he’s got the world giving itself over to him at last, existing to please him. It—chocolate cake as reality—seems to say, “You can forget about everything, wipe out everything, despise everything, while I, your gastronomic servant and possession, soothe and gratify you.”

We should enjoy food as a means of honoring the world from which it comes. We should feel, “Perhaps I can find it luscious to try to know a world that can provide such lusciousness.” But the desire to be important through (however secretly) subjugating and grabbing, has driven people to be excessive visitors of donut shops and their own refrigerators, and to deal with ice cream conqueringly, as Genghis Khan dealt with places in Asia.

3. Economics

As Mr. Siegel made clear, and as I have described in many issues of TRO, the biggest question in economics is: Should the world’s wealth be seen as ownable by a few people—or should it belong to everyone, so that everyone can be in a position to know and be strengthened by what is in the world? The economic cruelty of the centuries, and the economic failure America is in the midst of, have come because economics has been based on the first: seeing reality as something to grab, and one’s fellow humans as things to use in behalf of one’s grabbing. Wrote Mr. Siegel in Self and World:

The world was meant to be known, to be felt, not to be parcelled out into huge segments or lesser segments for the complacent but deleterious delectation of some and the domination and manipulation of others. [Pp. 279-280]

It happens that people have objected to the profit motive in economics who have unknowingly had that motive with a wife or husband: you are mine, to make me comfortable and important.

Poems about Domestic Life

The two poems by Eli Siegel published here were written thirty years apart, and both are about domestic life.

He wrote “Many Dishpans” in 1927, at the age of 25. And the object in it, the dishpan, was then a part of nearly every American kitchen. In this poem, Eli Siegel says a woman who was usually and wrongly taken for granted, hemmed in by her domestic life, should be seen as having largeness, mystery. He says she is “fit subject” for a work of literature.

The second poem, of 1957, is autobiographical. It’s about a black and white pussycat, Shakey, who was part of the household of Mr. Siegel and his wife, Martha Baird. He sees this being, so domestic, as saying something about the structure of the world, and ancient mythology too.

The music of the two poems is different. But in each there is the feeling, the sound, of the immediacy of things and wonder, largeness, scope.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Poems by Eli Siegel

A Good Husband: What Does That Mean?

By Jeffrey Carduner

It was a beautiful spring day and I had just said, “Yes, I do,” to the rabbi’s question, “Do you take Devorah Tarrow to be your lawful wedded wife?” I knew I wanted to be a good husband. I had fallen in love with this very pretty, lively, intelligent girl from San Antonio, and I wanted to be close to her for the rest of my life.

Yet while I felt lucky to be with Devorah, I also felt she’d gotten some package: a Carduner—first son of a well-to-do mercantile family, with broad shoulders, a slim waist, crinkly Clint-Eastwood-type eyes (as I saw it), curly brown hair, and a hail-fellow-well-met air. This way of inflating myself was opposed to what it means to be a good husband. And it had begun long before I said “I do.”

A Man Has an Attitude to the World

Like most men, by the time I was in my twenties I had already come to see the world as a difficult, messy place. Money had to be made, work was hard, and people often didn’t see things my way. I felt that what I needed to like my life was to get the right amount of approval from people, including women. But though I dated various women and there was sex, I often felt hollow inside. And I felt I’d had a bad effect on the women I was close to. Meanwhile, I wanted to think my pain was because the world was tough and I hadn’t met the right girl. I felt a woman’s job was to provide an oasis and to approve of me when others didn’t.

These feelings were in me as I walked into a real estate office in Greenwich Village. I was looking for a place to live. But as Devorah Tarrow, a college student working there for the summer, showed me apartments, my thoughts of real estate became dim. I asked her if she’d like to go out Saturday night and when she said yes, I felt, “I’m on my way!”

So what to do? Dinner, a show, a ride on my motorcycle (I always kept an extra helmet for times like this), and then back to my apartment. However, Devorah asked me if I’d like to meet at the Terrain Gallery, where there would be a dramatic presentation of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, and we could go out afterwards for coffee with some of her friends. I was very surprised, but I agreed to meet her. Little did I know that I would find the knowledge I’d been hoping for all my life, including about love!

Getting Her to Say Yes Is Just the Beginning

But my way of seeing the world affected how I saw Devorah, love, and, later, marriage. Eli Siegel explains in his lecture Mind and Husbands:

Husbands think that once they have seemed to capture a woman, that is all….We marry people; and a person happens to have millions of blood cells and hundreds of aspects. We marry complete representatives in miniature of the flourishing universe. We don’t marry consolations. [TRO 634, 638]

Devorah didn’t want to be my consolation. She was an individual with a keen mind and ethical ambitions, and I found early in our marriage that she would not become an annex of me and cater to me. I’m sorry to say, this made me very displeased.

In an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel explained my displeasure when he said,

Every person would like to get the green light from another, to be praised. We marry to say, “Although the world is severe, you at least are nice to me.” But Ms. Tarrow doesn’t deliver the laudatory goods. Do you want to use her to like the world or have her show how much she likes you? People think the most important thing is: she should like you. The reason you suffer is that you don’t use her to like the world with. That is the big mistake made by man and woman.

That day I was put on the road to being a better husband. I began to see that I hadn’t been after love: I’d been after owning a woman and making myself big.

An important point in my education occurred a few months later. Devorah, who had studied sociology, became very interested in taking part in politics. This surprised me, and I regret it didn’t make me happy. I felt it took away from her devotion to me. Mr. Siegel asked me, “Do you think there’s a new seriousness in Ms. Tarrow?”

JC. Yes.

ES. Do you like it?

JC. I hope so…

ES. I hope so too. Would you rather be grateful or recede?—which is better for you? If Devorah Tarrow can understand people of all ages, she will be useful to all America.

Mr. Siegel was encouraging me to love the depth of thought in my wife. I saw that the fight I was in as to her, between respect and contempt, was hurting her and my own ability to love. He made sense of this fight and enabled me to make a choice for which I could respect myself, and which was in behalf of real romance!

I learned that part of being a good husband is being able to hear criticism in a way that can get a wife’s respect: not trying to justify ourselves, not changing the subject, but really listening and learning.

For example, Devorah said that the way I treated objects was not respectful enough, that I had a habit of pushing things away dismissively when I’d finished eating, such as a bowl of soup. And this, she said, was related to how I could be abrupt with a person. I knew she was right, and I was grateful.

Five Requirements

The following are five requirements for being a good husband:

1) A man needs to have good will, which Mr. Siegel described as the hope that good things happen to a person, with the desire to know what those good things are. The word know here is key.

2) A man needs to learn how to be an accurate critic, including of himself, and needs to welcome criticism.

3) A good husband is one who is passionately interested in how his wife sees the world and who doesn’t assume he knows—no matter how many years he’s been married. Never take for granted you know.

4) Do not fall for the ownership-discard tendency: thinking a woman is an annex to you, whom you can dismiss whenever you choose.

5) Welcome the fact that the way your wife sees things is different from your way, and that it can add to and enrich your own way of seeing.

I’m glad to feel that trying to see what Devorah is hoping for strengthens my life and makes me happy!

An American Husband Is Learning

Dan Garson* is an executive at a large nonprofit corporation. He is a thoughtful young man who has a large feeling about economic justice for people. Meanwhile, in his everyday life, he had a tendency to be somewhat reserved. Then he met Madeline Rogers* and was swept, and after an intense courtship they were married. However, several months later he and Ms. Rogers were getting into fights over seemingly small things. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation he told us about an argument involving the alarm clock.

DG. When the alarm goes off in the morning, I pop up and turn it off. Madeline says, “Could you please let it go on for a while?” I say, “It’s very loud and I don’t want it on!” I feel I’m being talked down to. I say to myself, “Who does she think she’s talking to?”

Consultants. Do you think you’re too ready to see her as against you?

DG. Maybe. Yes, I think so.

We saw that the alarm clock controversy was about a deeper matter. Was he interested in knowing this young woman he’d married? In Mind and Husbands Mr. Siegel explains:

Men are conceited and can decide they know a woman. Besides, they can think knowing isn’t so important—…is a luxury. A woman…most wants that she be known. I say this definitely. There isn’t a woman who doesn’t resent a husband’s not wanting to know her. [TRO 634]

We asked, “Do you feel, after all the work you put in to make for the marriage, ‘Now that I’ve got her, the work is over’? Many men think they have reached the pinnacle getting married, and now it’s rest time.”

DG. I have a feeling you’re on to something.

Consultants. Are you looking to have less emotion about your wife? After having great feeling, it’s “payback time” for that large emotion? How much have you wanted to know Madeline, really?

DG. Well, I ask her how her day was, maybe talk about the news. But what has really affected her—I’m afraid to start a really deep conversation.

Consultants. Are you afraid you’ll lose something of yourself?

DG. Yes!

We wanted Dan Garson to see that to have good will would be to ask, Who is Madeline? How can I have a good effect?

DG. I will ask that. Thank you for this. I needed to hear something straight and I heard it today. I’ll tell Madeline about this as soon as I see her. We’ll start again.

They did. And Dan Garson told us that as he criticized himself and saw his wife more deeply, the alarm clock controversy (among other things) resolved itself. He saw that his wife really had a right to see differently from the way he saw. Instead of resenting her way of seeing, he began to find it interesting, see it as adding to him!

He is fortunate to be learning what it means to be a good husband. Every man deserves to have this knowledge.