Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator

Blog: Literature & Life

More Maxims by Eli Siegel from Damned Welcome

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Two weeks ago, I pointed to several Aesthetic Realism maxims by Eli Siegel from his book Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims. These statements—many of them swift and pithy—are, he wrote, “meant to bother into appreciation.” I find myself thinking of some of these maxims as I try to make sense of what’s happening in our confusing time.

So here are others that encourage me very much.

“If you have time, remember it’s a privilege.”

“The universe, being clever, has given scientists trouble.”

“Let us not be angry at the way we’re angry.”

“It hasn’t yet been scientifically proved that any lovely thing is really over.”

“We are of the world; our job is to be fair to the preposition.”

Aesthetic Realism Maxims by Eli Siegel

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As we’re all looking to make sense of a world that has beautiful spring flowers and a terrifying pandemic, we need the way of seeing that’s in the study of Aesthetic Realism. A means to this is the wonderful maxims by Eli Siegel in his book Damned Welcome. In the preface to the book, Mr. Siegel writes:

These maxims are…in behalf of a world too often seen as unkind, dull, and just too bewildering for anything. It is better to be bewildered by an Aesthetic Realism maxim about things than by things themselves….

The present maxims…are on the side of a reasoned gaiety, and a spontaneous, bubbling seriousness. They are meant to bother into appreciation.

Here are some that I love, and feel are relevant to our time. More will follow!

“Our loveliest memories can be helped by our most fundamental hopes.”

“Sighs should be efficient; if not, we should long for their departure.”

“A person is courageous who is comfortable in larger territory than is usual.”

“When we don’t want people to get the hard facts about ourselves, we are not in favor of these three things: the facts, people, ourselves.”

“Only a person who loves people can be alone rightly.”

“Being oneself is a lifetime job, not to be shirked when we sleep.”

Eli Siegel’s majestic poem “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana” on film

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Aesthetic Realism itself began with Eli Siegel’s seeing of the relations among all the things reality has. It showed through his early writing in poetry and prose. He later wrote: “It was these thoughts that, becoming passionate and musical, took the form of “Hot  ‘Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.'” This grandly sweeping poem of relation—relation in time and space, the relation among the outward doings of life and the inner thoughts of people, the relation of the inanimate world and living beings—won the Nation magazine’s poetry prize in 1925.

The poem begins:

Quiet and green was the grass of the field,
The sky was whole in brightness,
And O, a bird was flying, high, there in the sky,
So gently, so carelessly and fairly.

Award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant Ken Kimmelman made a film of this majestic poem. Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “Ken Kimmelman’s reproduction, on film, of Eli Siegel’s magisterial poem, is an extraordinary achievement. It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel’s words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art.”

You’ll be stirred to your depths by this great combination of words and visual images. Now, more than ever, we need to feel that beauty is just as real as the things that can frighten us. I’m grateful to be learning that from Aesthetic Realism. I hope this film encourages everyone else to feel it too.

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: film

A lesson on viruses, based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

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At this critical time, as people all over the world are worried about the power of a virus, I want to share with readers this important article by my friend and colleague Sally Ross. She taught her high school biology students about viruses in a way that we can all learn from, including as to how to see what’s different from ourselves. The lesson is based on the great Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, which was also the basis of my English classes for many years.

“What Marriage Is Really For”

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I recently read again a poem I feel is sweepingly beautiful: “A Marriage,” by Eli Siegel. In its free verse lines—many of them grand, some of them seemingly simple—it is about that meeting of one self and another, and that meeting of selves and the outside world, that are the essential thing in love. In Ellen Reiss’s commentary to the issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, in which Mr. Siegel’s lecture on this poem begins to be serialized, she explains:

Self and world are the biggest opposites in everyone’s life. And our deepest desire, Aesthetic Realism makes clear, is to like the world through knowing it. We become ourselves in proportion to how much we want to be fair to the world, have it of us. That is the reason for education, why people are impelled to learn. And it is the reason people are impelled to love.

Further: the pain about love, the letdown, the bitterness, why two people who thought they’d love forever now look at each other with fury or dullness, all arise from how the world has been dealt with by the people concerned. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson years ago, as he explained why I came to feel displeased with myself and a man who seemed to love me, Mr. Siegel said: “You used Mr. M to make a world somewhat apart from the world Aesthetic Realism tries to honor.” I find that sentence beautiful, and the explanation true. The very thing recommended by therapists, counselors, buddies, BFFs, and many thoughts of one’s own—to get away from the world with someone—is against what love really is!

Here is the last section of the poem, which is pulsatingly beautiful, which stands for love and marriage, and which shows the great meaning of what Ellen Reiss describes as the hero of the poem: “a word.”

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Eyes and mind together,
In thunder a hand lying on a hand.
Wheels whizzing to reach an active page, a learned page—a word.
And a hand lying on a hand,
And a cloud on a cloud,
And a mist over ocean,
And flower going off towards dazzling planets,
And a word meeting a word,
And a word meeting a word,
And a word meeting a word,
And North Carolina, Washington, Baltimore,
And a hand lying on a hand,
And a word.

Read the rest of this issue here.

 

“Heard”—a Poem by Ellen Reiss

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Who has not been thrilled hearing the cry of a newborn baby? The new life in it, humanity-in-little, always stirs people, and I’m among them. So I point to this poem on the subject, by Ellen Reiss, which shows the grand meaning in that first sound:

http://beautyofnyc.org/Reiss-Heard.html