Aesthetic Realism: Life, Love & Learning

Leila Rosen, English Educator & Aesthetic Realism Associate

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What Satire Really Is: a report of a lecture by Eli Siegel about Satire, by Sheldon Kranz

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Like nearly every teacher of literature, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with my students about satire. Crucial in the study of satire is seeing that there is a huge difference between the kind of mockery that goes on in ordinary life and the kind that comes from wanting to have the world and people be better. I learned very much about this from a report by poet and critic Sheldon Kranz of the lecture by Eli Siegel. Here are two paragraphs from the report:

Satire at its best, [Mr. Siegel said,] has three forms: satire of one person, as we find it in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt; satire of a group like the Rotarians or the D.A.R. Gilbert and Sullivan in their operetta Patience were satirizing the aesthetic movement of the 1890s; and third, there is a satire of mankind in general. Here Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the best examples in literature.

In all of these, Mr. Siegel went on, it can be seen that satire is always about pretense, about how persons will choose what is false in order that their vanity be undisturbed. We have a picture of ourselves which truth will destroy; and so to protect that picture of ourselves, we will accept what is untrue and unimportant. Satire changes a bad thing into a good thing, an untrue thing into a true thing. Satire makes us laugh to make the ugly more apparent.

Read the whole report here.

Opposing Racism & Prejudice through the Study of Rhyme: What I learned from Aesthetic Realism

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Along with all the excitement there is in beginning a new school year, we begin this on at a time of intense anger in our nation. A large part of that anger is about racism and other forms of prejudice against people one sees as different from oneself. Whether we see it clearly or not, every young person in a classroom is affected by this atmosphere, and it is so easy for them to use it to feel the world is unfriendly. Meanwhile, I learned from Aesthetic Realism that it is the same world that’s in every subject we teach. Can there be kindness, justice, in how people see each other? And how can learning the subjects in the curriculum be a means of opposing prejudice in all its forms, and having greater respect for all people, and for the world itself?

That was what I was hoping for when I taught the 9th grade English lessons, I describe in the following article. Based on the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, these lessons enabled the NYC students I describe here, who’d had great difficulty reading and had met anger and prejudice in their young lives, to change deeply, in a way that moves me to this day. Not only were they more just and less angry, but they came to love reading as they’d never imagined they could.

Lessons on Rhyme, Using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

“This Summer Morning Mariana Has” — a poem by Eli Siegel

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How richly can our thought linger on ordinary things we might see on any given morning: a leaf; a twig; a rose; the sun; a butterfly; woods near us in summer; our own feet and hair and clothing? Anything in the outside world we might meet, no matter how small or everyday, has the possibility of affecting us deeply, and more than we often realize. That is why I love this musical poem by Eli Siegel. It’s good to read on a warm summer day—or any day.

This Summer Morning Mariana Has

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.”