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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.

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.

It’s cold in New York. Very cold. Bitter, biting cold. Looking out my window yesterday, I watched as the East River froze over on the Brooklyn side, ice solidly covering more and more of the shore, and also floating upriver in lively dancing congregations of smaller ice floes. Here’s how it looks today, at a balmy 18°:

I know it gets colder elsewhere, and that New England has had record amounts of snow in the last few weeks. I’ve experienced a couple of Montana winter afternoons with sub-zero temperatures. It’s a cold, blizzard-filled winter—no doubt.

So I’m not saying all this about our cold snap to complain. Rather, as I’m glad to be able to stay warm indoors, I’m just musing on the forces of nature—and on how people in a city such as ours meet them.

I got to thinking of how things will be next week and in other days to come, when the sun is warm and the ice begins to melt. How often people grumble about slush! I’ve been among them, I admit.

But here’s a poem that has an attitude to slush that can have everyone see it as not just an inconvenient and messy phenomenon, but as a chance to wonder at the nature of reality, and the relation of slush to human beings going about our daily lives. Read “Sunlight in Slush, in Puddles, and in Wet Municipal Surfaces; or, Miracle on Eighth Avenue below Fourteenth Street,” by Eli Siegel.

   

I
It was a dying sun, too.
The sun did not have the energy it had two hours ago, nor in some days last June,
But it was the same sun, with the same distances.
—Was it the sun in black water
On an Eighth Avenue pavement?
What else could it be?
The sun was allotting itself to ever so many dark, watery surfaces;
I guess, being the sun, it could do nothing else.
But it was a miracle, a miracle being that you can look at, with amazement inhabiting what you look with….

Click to read the rest of the poem