Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part 2 of the important 1975 lecture What Was Going On, by Eli Siegel, one in his landmark Goodbye Profit System series. In those talks he showed—with rich, vivid, wide-ranging evidence from history and human life:

There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries.

Now it is many decades later. Over these years, Americans have been told often that we’ll soon be in, or are in, or just slipped out of, an “economic recovery.” But anyone can see that the economy has not recovered. There has been, since the 1970s, that ever-increasing terrible division: fewer and fewer persons own the vast proportion of our nation’s wealth; more and more live in poverty. People who call themselves middle class are in lines at food banks to get nourishment for themselves and their children. (And that was so before the coronavirus pandemic.)

In recent issues of this journal, I’ve written a good deal about the atmosphere and happenings in America these days, and the feelings of people. In this issue I’ll comment on five paragraphs by Eli Siegel, from the preface to his second book of poetry, Hail, American Development. They are about America, what she deeply is and how we should see her. These paragraphs can seem, and are, philosophic; yet they have in them how Americans must see ourselves and each other and our nation if America is to be herself and true to herself, and if democracy is to be safe in this land—and real, and complete. They are the opening paragraphs of the preface. And their basis is this principle of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The First Paragraph

The first paragraph is one sentence. It is a great sentence, in its surprise and quietude:

If the sameness and difference of America were to become musical, it would be poetry.

Eli Siegel loved America. He saw its oneness of sameness and difference as magnificent, and as embodying ethics. America has perhaps more geographic differences than any other nation, with (for example) its soaring mountains and flat plains; its southern heat, and its ice and snows; its rivers, both slow and speedy, and its desert land; and the often wild crashing of two oceans onto beaches of smooth sand. These are things so different from each other. Yet they’re of the same country, and can be felt as calling to each other, saying: “We’re not only different; we’re of each other, akin.”

A big part of the aesthetics of America, her oneness of sameness and difference, is her people. It’s still true that people of more different backgrounds constitute the United States than make up any other country. This fact is beautiful, though persons’ conceit has kept them from liking that beauty.

We need to see what the sameness-and-difference makeup of America means, and why it matters so much. All art, Aesthetic Realism shows, is sameness and difference felt as one thing. Every shape in a painting is just itself, particular; yet if the painting is art, these different shapes say to each other, “I am like you too, inseparable from you, as I am just me.” That occurs in a good poem. Every phrase, idea, word, while having a rightness as itself, joins with, is inseparable from, the other phrases, ideas, words. And through this inseparable difference-and-likeness, the poem is alive: it has music.

“It Would Be Poetry”

The American people need to go after the seeing that is in art: we need to see ourselves as distinct from and like each other at once. Nothing else will do. The problem is very personal as well as hugely national. For instance, a person can feel that her self under her skin is so different, so apart from even a friend, a spouse, a family member; and in this sense of unrelated difference, she can feel both superior and lonely.

Then, there is the national matter of race, ethnicity, one’s background, and these have been a field for a horrible dealing with sameness and difference. Racism and all prejudice, Mr. Siegel made clear, come from contempt, the ugliest thing in self. He defined contempt as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” For prejudice to end, we need to understand contempt, including in ourselves. And further, we cannot simply praise diversity; we have to see, really see, difference and sameness as one. We have to feel, “I am more myself through seeing you, who are different from me, as like me too.”

Some years ago in this journal I wrote the following, under the heading “What Must Replace Racism”:

What needs to replace [racism] is not the feeling that the difference of another person is somehow tolerable. What is necessary is the seeing and feeling that the relation of sameness and difference between ourselves and that other person is beautiful. People need to feel, with feeling both intimately personal and large, that difference of race is like the difference to be found in music: two notes are different, but they are in behalf of the same melody; they complete each other; each needs the other to be expressed richly, to be fully itself. [TRO 1264]

That is still true, and people can learn to see each other that way through the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism.

The economics of the world has been driven by an unaesthetic, contemptuous severing of sameness and difference. That severing is in the profit motive itself. With the profit motive, a seller thinks of a buyer in terms of “How much can I get this guy to pay?” An employer thinks in terms of “How low a wage can I make this guy work for?” Thinking that way, one does not see the other person as like oneself, with feelings as real as one’s own.

So we have looked a little at the first paragraph, this kind, amazing sentence: “If the sameness and difference of America were to become musical, it would be poetry.”

The Second Paragraph

The second paragraph consists of two short sentences:

Every fact has music in it. The poet looks for it.

How does “every fact [have] music in it”? Every fact has in it the structure of the world, the oneness of such opposites as continuity and change, delicacy and strength, junction and separation, motion and rest. And when a poem is good, it’s because the writer, however unconsciously, got to, felt, conveyed those permanent opposites. Let’s take a line by as truly American a poet as any, this mighty line of Walt Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” In the line we feel terrific firmness and also nuance; we hear pride and humility; we hear richness and simplicity: we hear these as music.

Arising from that second paragraph, and using words from it, is this: Americans need to look for the music in each other. Such a statement may seem theoretical and soft. Well, it’s completely practical and urgent. That is: Americans need to see that every person has the structure of the world, the permanent opposites, in him or her. When you see that someone is trying to make sense of strength and gentleness in him- or herself, of high and low, tumult and calm, for and against—and yes, hope and fear, logic and feeling—you can’t be cruel to that person.

What Is History Looking For?

Here are the third and fourth paragraphs of Eli Siegel’s preface:

The visual, solid, historical structure of things in America looks for its or their music. Let us see that things in America get their music, the music which is themselves.

Every city, town, place in the United States is a study in history, crowded history, and aesthetics. The cities and towns of the United States have undergone the recent history of the land, a history not so representative of what America means.

Mr. Siegel wrote this preface during the Vietnam War, and the last sentence quoted above refers to it.

Those two paragraphs are about history, geography, and more. Today there is larger interest than ever in U.S. history and the geography of this land, and that is good. Yet what is the meaning of “Let us see that things in America get their music, the music which is themselves”? To see that the opposites, the permanent aesthetic opposites, are present in all that has happened in America is, I think, to begin to have American things “get their music.” Part of that music—which is also justice, and logic—is for the United States to be owned by all its people, not by only a few. This would be in keeping with America’s manyness and oneness, sameness and difference—and with truth itself.

Here is the fifth paragraph of Eli Siegel’s preface:

America is difference and sameness trying to be seen as justice; and justice as warmth is love. Should the permanent in America be seen in the hours of a day, that would be a tremendous development.

In the first of these sentences, America is given a purpose as to its difference and sameness: to have them be seen as justice. Usually, people associate being different from someone with being superior, and see being like others as an expunging of one’s own personality. We have to do much better than this. And the needed better, Mr. Siegel made clear, is aesthetics. I’ve been commenting a little, a very little, on what that means.

I think the phrase concluding that sentence—“and justice as warmth is love”—is sweepingly beautiful, utterly kind, and strictly true. It is what I saw Eli Siegel show all the time.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

A Hoping America

By Eli Siegel

Note. Mr. Siegel is discussing an article in the bicentennial issue of Fortune magazine.

We’ll look at this article of Thomas Griffith, “Reshaping the American Dream.” The title itself is somewhat nebulous. The American dream is a phrase that has been used a good deal; it has to do with hope. We all have hopes, and we don’t know wholly what the hopes are. The article begins:

Not long ago a handful of middle-level executives…found themselves all agreeing with one of their number who said, “I think children born fifty years ago could look forward to a better future than my children can.” On the face of it, that’s a pretty shocking observation, for a basic ingredient of the American dream is that the members of each succeeding generation shall be further advanced than their parents in the pursuit of happiness.

It is still shocking.

The chief quality of this article is that it’s not precise. What is it that people are hoping for? People are hoping to have things and also to be loved or respected. The combination has been hard to get at. It’s usually: if a person possesses a great deal—as, say, with the first Rockefeller—other people look upon him or her with suspicion. This was so in England too; one can see it in Nicholas Nickleby. Again, what is it we dream or hope for? And what is the relation of the individual dream to the governmental or national dream, or even the world dream? That is hard to say, because why humanity is on Earth at all is a hard thing to say. I suppose one answer is: humanity is on Earth so Earth will collect not only trees but books.

The phrase the American dream is vague, but no one would say that the American dream is making more profit than anybody else in such a way that you get other people envious. —Mr. Griffith continues:

These executives were themselves middle class….[They were] talking about the kind of world, the kind of America, their sons and daughters would inhabit. They were not speaking in the put-down vocabulary of our times in which a phrase like “the American dream” can be used only in irony, but from the despair about these times felt by those who are not themselves cynical.

With the statement “These executives were themselves middle class,” we’ve come to a possible institution, which economists have written about, and which is important: what are classes? This has been debated from the beginning. Are there classes in America? Well, it seems that there is a difference between a person who owns a house and a person who doesn’t. And people unconsciously see themselves as in a higher class than other people. There are all kinds of evidence showing that there are classes.

The Difference

The difference between Aesthetic Realism and the way of seeing in this article is deep. Thomas Griffith says that America is truly in a crisis. But what was said here in 1970, based on Aesthetic Realism, is that the bad ethics of the world and of America in terms of economics has at last shown its inefficiency and its inability to succeed in the world of now. It took hundreds of years, thousands of years, but at last this economic way has shown not only that it’s unethical, but that it cannot meet the tangible, external, or material needs of people, let alone their desires for something which has to do with value or beauty.

This writer tries to have it both ways. He talks about despair, but acts as if it were dreamed, this despair, and implies that when one has all the new facts it will be shown that America will go on its way just as it did in the past:

Yet the despair seems, at the least, to be premature. A persuasive case can be made that if the American dream is dead, or dormant, it is because the dream of the fathers has been mostly realized, while the dream of the sons has not yet been successfully formulated.

There are many sons and daughters who come to feel that carrying a portfolio or briefcase all for the purpose of putting on a show and making lots of money, is not the best vision of the future one can have. A good deal has been written about that feeling, and how much it is had is still something to ascertain; but that is felt more. The question How you doin’?—about making money—is not asked the way it used to be asked. —Then there’s this:

Like all dreams, the American dream has never been easy to describe in the cold light of day.

Mr. Griffith should be asked, What is the difference between the American dream and the dream of Wales, or the dream of the Isle of Wight, or the dream of the Pyrenees? Everybody has dreams. One of the uses in reading Balzac is to see that when a woman had her thoughts—for instance, the daughters of Père Goriot—they were pretty much like the thoughts of somebody on Riverside Drive or, let’s say, one of the more commodious establishments of Queens.

In its traditional form, it [the American dream] included both our purpose as a nation, embodied in such propositions as “liberty and justice for all,” as well as the personal goals that echo in the familiar phrase, the land of promise.

But if there are going to be millions of persons who don’t have work, they’ll have a tendency to say, America is the land of promise, but only that. That won’t sound too happy.

Every statement I’m making could be sustained by a good many things from American historical documentation and American histories. One can see that the question of “the land of promise” was present when Horace Greeley had to say, “Go west, young man,” because there was a lot of land there and industry hadn’t been built up so much at the time. Of course, no one today sees the American outlook in just the same way as, say, right after the American Revolution, or right after the Civil War when there was a feeling that now America could expand again.

There are these sentences, which some people would question:

To all but the most cynical, it will be seen that liberty does extend from sea to shining sea…; that justice is now more evenly shared, even by minorities, than at any time in our history; and that the land of promise has proved to be so, not universally, but for successive generations in the millions.

Griffith uses the word justice. It is well to distinguish between an idea which is of the world, large, like justice, and the institutions that are supposed to take care of it. The courts are an institution which, in America and elsewhere, are supposed to take care of justice. A law can be seen as an institution.

“The land of promise has proved to be so…for successive generations.” The history of America has been various. One of the persons quoted in this issue is Emma Lazarus, with her feeling for people oppressed elsewhere: “Give me your tired, your poor.” The way it is now is often: Give me your tired, your poor, and I’ll send them to another town.

Questioned

The way of economics has been in question now for hundreds of years. If you read More’s Utopia, of the early 16th century, you’ll see it questioned. You’ll see it questioned in Chaucer. When I discussed Piers Plowman I think you saw it questioned there. You can read St. Chrysostom and see it questioned.