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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.”

20.
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.

 

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

 

I’m looking forward to this exciting seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation on Thursday, April 4 at 6:30 PM: 

Art Answers the Questions of Our Lives!

The speakers will describe what the philosophy Aesthetic Realism teaches as nothing else does: that the way of seeing that is in art is what we need to have in our everyday lives.  

Learn about the questions of your own life through discussions of Alexander Calder, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Duane Hanson.

For more information, you can print this flyer.

Here is a poem I love, written by Ellen Reiss, with whom I’ve studied for many years in the course The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry. As the world today is—and has been for so long—in turmoil about how to see the sameness and difference of people—in place, time, language, religion, culture, appearance, I am reminded of this moving poem about reality, which is introduced below with a brief note by the poet.

“The Shadows, Black” is about two different aspects of the world: an Arabian desert and New York, with its skyscrapers. The poem says that these two are of each other, inseparable—as a person needs to see different aspects of herself as the same person. —Ellen Reiss

To read more poems by Ms. Reiss, and by others, go to What Poetry Really Is: A Celebration. And read some of her critical writings, and also works by Eli Siegel, poet and founder of Aesthetic Realism, at On the Criticism of Poetry.

The Shadows, Black 

The shadows, dark, stretched across the desert sand,
Shadow-deep, shadow-thin,
Have the profundity of New York skyscrapers
Reaching toward blue.
A camel moves, pale against the large sun;
Feels the pulsing of the desert in his legs
Longs to curl up, puppy-like, beside a great tree:
He has known this life of winding caravans,
Of dark men shaded by white cloth.
The sand is grey now, the sun purely white,
The shadows black.
The camel drops his eyelids, trembles,
Remembering metal buildings soaked in rain,
The pounding of water on wide, dusty streets,
And he hears the tinkling of small bells echo over miles of sand
Made lovely by shadows.

©Ellen Reiss

A while ago, I learned that a wallet I’d lost decades ago as a college freshman had been found. I didn’t recall losing it, but when I saw a photo of it, I remembered the wallet—once ochre-colored embossed leather, bought, I think, at the kind of Indian clothing store popular in Greenwich Village at the time.

The contents were photographed too: a receipt from the campus health center, and one for room and board; a couple of stamps; a record of my summer job at a department store near my Brooklyn home; a picture of my best friend; a business card of someone in Japan that a professor of mine had put me in contact with.

Each of these items, and others, brought the past to me in a different way. Each stood for a different but very particular time in my life, and each meant something to me. Thinking about them, as they had been nestling together in a now-cracked, dried-out, grayish billfold, I was in awe of the meaning of time—both the distinct periods from which these pieces of paper came, each of which affected me differently, and also the meaning of right now.

Anyone who thinks of the past will have some mingling of regret and pride, a sense of what we wish we had done differently and memories of moments we look on fondly. What should we do with the past? How can it be useful to us now?

In an “Outline of Aesthetic Realism,” Eli Siegel writes:

“The past is what it is, but it can always be seen better. The past, seen better, can reasonably be regarded as changing. If we see what has happened to us better today, we give the past a more promising future. There is no limit to how well we can see anything in the past. This means the past can join the present and future, wisely.”

From the moment I first read this, I felt so hopeful about the possibility of making sense of the past. Though there is much I wish I had done, and much I wish I hadn’t done, I know the choices I made all led to my being who I am today. And today is a chance to be different, so that when I look back at the “right now” of late May 2015, I will see someone who was aiming to be more and more the person she hoped to be.