Dear Unknown Friends:
This issue contains an essay—historic—describing what all art is at its very center. The essay, by Eli Siegel, is “The Aesthetic Center,” and the basis of Aesthetic Realism is in it. It was published first in 1962 in the journal Definition, where the following note also appeared:
Does art begin with the world itself, with the way it is, is made? Are the opposites the everlasting, lively structure of the world, lured into art by the agog, seeing, individual minds of earth? The Aesthetic Realism answer is Yes.
In that prefatory note I think one can feel something of the largeness with which Aesthetic Realism sees art and reality—and something also of the simultaneous delight, loveliness, pleasure in this way of seeing.
The essay is a rich illustration of the following Aesthetic Realism principle: “In reality opposites are one; art shows this.” In “The Aesthetic Center,” Mr. Siegel is speaking about the philosophic opposites of being and change, and the various forms of those opposites, including unity and diversity, rest and motion.
The place of this essay in the history of art criticism is very high. In identifying the central matter in all art, and the relation of that matter to reality itself, Mr. Siegel does what no other aesthetician or critic succeeded in doing. And then, there are his vivid descriptions: I love the way he writes in this essay about eight different arts and how the “aesthetic center” is in them. He writes about each briefly— yet with such deep and honoring exactitude. In each instance, we feel that particular art, its texture, its livingness.
Our Lives Too
The opposites central to art are, Aesthetic Realism shows, central to our lives too. And often people go through turbulence and pain about them. Those philosophic opposites being and change are present not aesthetically, not as one, in the frequent feeling, “Things just drag on; one day seems too much like another; nothing surprising, fresh, new happens.” That means a person feels his or her life has too much undiversified being, uniformity—and inadequate change, lack of variety.
Then, a person (maybe the same person) can feel, “Things seem to be coming at me from all angles; I spend my days being tossed from one thing to another. I feel so agitated! And it all doesn’t seem to come to anything.” This is about change without a sense of unity; manyness without composition, without that oneness which is meaning.
Aesthetic Realism is the study of how to see the world aesthetically, as art sees, so that reality’s opposites, which art puts together, can increasingly be one in us.
Aesthetic Realism is also the study of the thing in self which most interferes with our lives. That thing is the desire for contempt, “the lessening of what is different from oneself, as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Aesthetic Realism shows that contempt is the anti-art, anti-science, anti-justice force in humanity. As we have contempt, we cannot make unity and diversity, being and change, one. If we see things and people as to be managed by us, conquered by us, scorned by us, we won’t be looking for what art looks for and finds: a composition—a lively unity-in-diversity—among them. With contempt we’ll be wrong about both opposites. On the one hand, we’ll see an individual thing we have to do with—a situation, person, happening—as disconnected from anything large, meaningfully comprehensive, but as essentially an item for us to subjugate, dismiss, or use for personal glory. On the other hand, we’ll lump things together, make them into a false unity, a distasteful conglomerate. Fortunately, though—and powerfully—the art way of seeing is the true way and is, as I said, beautifully learnable.
A Loved Poem
In this TRO, we are joining “The Aesthetic Center” with a poem by Eli Siegel that seems so different from the essay but is really on the same subject. It is the much loved “Somewhere This.” It is included in his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, and was written in 1925. As Mr. Siegel explains in “The Aesthetic Center,” the technique of all art is a oneness of diversity and unity—but here those opposites can be seen as the poem’s subject as well. There is a certain grand obviousness, as well as rich subtlety and pervasiveness, in how they’re present.
Each, nearly, of the poem’s 56 free verse lines contains a separate individual happening, or a separate individual utterance of someone, in the city as night arrives. So as line follows line, the separateness of things, change, manyness, are put before us. Then, there is a happening that recurs, and brings that manyness together. It is the presence of an elevated train in the New York of then—“The elevated comes roaring by.”
The idea is wonderful, bold, and deep. But the idea by itself is not what makes the poem great. It is great because it is so musical. It is through the music that we feel an organic, profound joining of those distinct line-by-line happenings. Music is in the way syllables meet, words meet, in each line. It is different in each line, and has us feel the particular thing told of there. Yet the music is continuous too: it has us feel that each line, each happening, is related to the others, even as each is distinct. This music is always deep and pointed, wide and lovingly immediate.
So we have “The Aesthetic Center,” preceded by a magnificent instance of it.
—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education
Somewhere This
By Eli Siegel
Trees standing in rain;
Footfalls on the pavement, feet crushing leaves;
A little girl leaving her house;
The moon, barely to be seen, shining dully in the gray sky;
A cry from somewhere;
A man scolding his wife, and being heard outside;
A man going into a library;
A shout from somewhere.
“Chicken I want,” says someone near.
“O, what do I care,” says a girl.
“He loves me, I’m sure,” says a girl.
“What the hell do I care,” says a boy.
“What did he do then?” says a man.
The elevated comes roaring by.
Rain falls quietly.
It is cold.
It grows darker.
In the library nearby are books of history.
“My, my, what shall I do?” asks a girl.
“That’s what he died of,” says a young man.
“He was in the war,” says a girl.
“She’s the prettiest girl I know,” says someone.
The elevated can now be hardly heard; it is roaring elsewhere.
Water falls from the trees.
“O, what do I care,” says a girl.
“I love her,” says a boy of a girl.
“Whoo, that’s rich,” says a young man.
A good dirty story is being told.
A man worries about the money he has.
The elevated comes roaring by somewhere else.
“O, hell, no!” says someone.
The moon now can hardly be seen.
“I like poetry,” says a girl near the library.
“O, what do you care?” says a girl to a girl.
“It’s such a long time,” says a girl.
An elevated goes roaring by.
O, my, my, what shall I do?” says someone.
The elevated goes roaring by elsewhere.
“Isn’t he crazy?” says a young man.
“No, I didn’t see the newspaper this morning,” says someone.
“He better had pay me,” says someone.
“Who put out the lights?” asks a man.
A boy and a girl are together.
What is that girl thinking of?
What are the meals in that house, with the lights on in the first and fourth floors?
Lights come up in the second floor, too.
The lights in the second floor of another house are out.
Men and women, boys and girls, are on the streets and in houses.
It is later now; it is after seven.
It is raining very thinly.
It is cold.
The elevated goes roaring by and it is later still.
The moon can hardly be seen.
It is later,
O, it is later.
The Aesthetic Center
By Eli Siegel
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
—Blake
Reality is that which is and changes. According to Aesthetic Realism, that aspect of reality which does not change, but just is, is the absolute; that which changes, is the relative. All reality, then, has the absolute in it. This, according to Aristotle, was felt by Parmenides:
For what is different from being does not exist, so that it necessarily follows, according to the argument of Parmenides, that all things that are are one and this is being. [Metaphysics, III]
And, surely, Aristotle tells us how Heraclitus accented the flux of things, or the changing of things. Reality can please both Parmenides and Heraclitus. It may be said that when reality is seen as pleasing both the Parmenidean in us and the Heraclitean, it has become art. Art as action is the showing of reality seen wholly and keenly.
All this means that art has both the absolute and the relative in it. There is no exception to this: a successful miniature has the everlasting and changing in it, as does a cathedral, or a poem.
Persons may be indisposed to see the absolute in a single instance of art, for, in their minds, the absolute is associated with the unthinkably gigantic. This need not be so. From an ordinary point of view, there is something “more absolute” in a half-inch cube of steel than in a mighty moving snow field. The idea of permanence has nothing as such to do with size. Once a thing is, its isness aspect has the absolute about it. All isness is absolute, once we grant this isness, or being.
Uniformity & Variety, & Other Pairs
It has been felt in the history of aesthetics that art was a oneness of uniformity and variety; such a belief we can find, for example, in Francis Hutcheson’s Enquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). It happens often in aesthetics that a basic idea is put in different ways, so that for a moment it seems that quite different things are said. The pair uniformity and variety are deeply similar in meaning to absolute and relative, rest and motion, universal and particular, being and change. Now, a work of art, every work of art, has all these pairs in it. For example, we could find all of them in Michelangelo’s Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici and in Hamlet. We could also find them in Herrick’s “To Dianeme,” in a short story by Balzac, in a fugue by Bach. How absolute and relative, uniformity and variety, rest and motion, universal and particular, being and change, and so on, are in a particular work, is another matter.
A Term
I have thought of some way that would be just to all the philosophic opposites mentioned and somehow integrate them. It was necessary to remember that a work of art has its largest meaning; and also is a specific object. A term was needed that was philosophic and vivid. The best that I could come to is this: In Art, Things Are-and-Change. I have used hyphens to point to the fact that the being and changing go on at once. (In the phrase “go on” there is the simultaneous presence of absolute and relative.) To say that in art, things are and change, is to say that the sameness of things and the difference of things have been made one.
It is well to take the arts as wholes to ascertain the validity of the description given.
Architecture
In architecture, there is clearly a central something, which has detail. The idea of a building as a whole is that which is; the details represent the idea of change. If there is, as there should be, a relation among arch and roof and pillar, this relation is that which is making one of the “change” experienced by apprehending arch and roof and pillar separately. The experience of architecture as art, then, is an experience of isness, or being, and change at once. If a pillar or a dome in some architectural work affects us as art, it is because change and sameness have been experienced. Space in architecture represents sameness; material represents change. However, this is not the place to examine every happening or situation in architecture to see whether something is and changes all the time. I hope that I have said enough to make it clear that isness and change are essentially present in architecture as art.
Sculpture
To feel, in sculpture, that the shapes or forms are changing while they cohere, while they make for oneness, is to experience change and sameness. Composition, itself, in any art, involves the idea of change and sameness. To see something in common between foot and head, shoulder and fingers, outline of figure and material, attitude of figure and line, is to experience something which is or remains while, changingly, it takes on variety.
Painting
In painting, the relation of color, form, planes, volumes, expression—and other things too—is that aspect of painting going towards sameness or the absolute; color seen as different, a line seen as apart, or a volume thought of by itself, goes towards change or difference. In perception, generally, there is the presence of both isness and change. A painting brings the possibilities of perception as having sameness and change into greater intensity and richness. That which is put on canvas by a painter who is just to art, is an indefinitely opulent assemblage of forms standing for motion and forms standing for being, or rest; and the relation among these forms has something of the tranquility of the absolute, while the forms themselves are disparate, on their own, different.
Music
Music, changing in time, insists more and more as it goes on, on the stability, justification, permanence of what it began with. Harmony is that which imposes on the differing and transitory that which will make them coherent and permanent. The pleasure from music can be put in this exclamation: “As those notes go on, and change, how something I looked for is being heard by me!” Rhythm is any instance of change and sameness seen at once.
The Dance
The dance consists of many motions having one source and going for one purpose. The oneness of the source and purpose imposes coherence, organization, on the separate instances of motion in the dance. Both a ballet and a “modern” dance consist of an absoluteness of purpose imposed on, made one with, a variety of manifestation, a relativity of detail.
Poetry
Poetry is an assembling into a one of sounds, pictures, ideas, and the source in mind of all of these. As the poem goes on, the difference in it and the continuity should be seen or can be seen if the poem is art. Every poem is a making one, in musical, visual heterogeneity, of the absolute and relative.
The Novel
In the novel, distinct persons, happenings, places, thoughts make a one. The happenings are relative; the novel as a whole, insofar as it is good or successful, corresponds to the absolute.
The Play
The play has in it things and people who are, who are while they change. They meet, may disagree, plan, suffer, cry, giggle—and so represent difference; but there is the informing idea, there is that which brings everything in the play together: this is the idea as beautiful oneness or delightful absolute.
In Art & Reality
Things are and change, then, in art. They do so because reality is that which is all the time and becomes different all the time. This essential of reality, as shown by art, is that which is the Aesthetic Center, the essential thing in art. This it is which delights us when, in a detail or in a large whole, we see it. Reality has been seen rightly, and we have come into our perceptive own. Blake’s “World” and the “Grain of Sand,” in art, become really close; and “heaven” and “a Wild Flower,” becoming the same, are seen with new, correct meaning.