In the great 1966 lecture we are serializing, Animate and Inanimate Are in Music and Conscience, Eli Siegel has been showing that technical matters in music correspond to the largest matters — also the most everyday matters — in conscience. He is the philosopher who showed there is no rift between aesthetics and ethics: what makes for art is exactly the same thing that makes for justice — and happiness. "All beauty," he wrote, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." In the section of the lecture published here, Mr. Siegel speaks, for example, about the ethical meaning of dissonance. And we print too part of a paper consultant-in-training Alice Bernstein presented recently at an Aesthetic Realism public seminar titled "Strategy or Justice: Which Will Get a Woman What She Truly Wants?" 

     I comment here on a matter of ethics which affects people inwardly every day, which they don't understand, which causes them grief — and which Aesthetic Realism magnificently explains. It is this: even as men and women long to feel close to someone, want to have real friendship, yearn for love, they do not see that they also have a big desire to be hidden. And the desire to have a hidden self — feelings and thoughts that no one can get to — makes real love, friendship, closeness impossible. 

     To speak about this tendency in humanity to be deeply apart from people, even as one gossips in the office, laughs enthusiastically at a party, is in an intense embrace, I use a poem by Christina Rossetti titled "Winter: My Secret. " A contemporary of Miss Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, is, Mr. Siegel has said, the poet who presents most richly the painful feeling that the depths of one are not seen by others. But in this exceedingly lively, charming, musical poem of Christina Rossetti, we have the triumph people get from being hidden: a triumph they themselves are usually not aware of, but which stifles their lives. The poem begins: 
 

     Miss Rossetti says we wear a mask, pretend, to feel warm. And the reason is: there is a cozy superiority seeing ourselves as too big a treasure for others to know. Meanwhile, we can have fun fooling people and managing them. If we let people see our feelings, be within us, we won't be able to manipulate them. But this "warmth" and seeming power that hiddenness provides, makes us feel deeply alone, even as our lips touch another's, even as we are in the midst of the family. It makes us feel we are frauds. It makes us dislike ourselves very much. 

     In his great essay "The Ordinary Doom," Mr. Siegel explains: 

     Meanwhile, the thirst not to be hidden never dies. We can't completely kill our own desire to have the depths of ourselves be in the world's sunshine. Miss Rossetti hints at this fact at the end of her poem, in lines both coy and yearning, "Perhaps some languid summer day,/ When drowsy birds sing less and less,/ ... /Perhaps my secret I may say,/Or you may guess." 

     We need to feel that the victory of knowing and being known is greater than the victory of managing reality while being unhad by it. I love Aesthetic Realism for enabling a person to feel this, with logical conviction. Though members of the press and others have been furious for decades at Eli Siegel's beautiful complete honesty, his tremendous scholarship, his courageous uncompromisingness — through the philosophy he founded people can know at last that the depths of themselves and this wide world are not competitors but friends. 

A person who stands for modern music in a way that has affected people is Alban Berg. And the matter of separation and junction is in a statement about him by Erwin Stein in the Chesterian, October 1922. The diatonic is more separate; the chromatic is more joined. The going for atonality at the same time as polytonality is a desire to have difference or separation at one with junction. Stein says: 

     Berg says, "You know, you think this, but you also think that, and I'm going to put it into the scales. You think this is what you feel — but look, this is another note! You don't know what's going on in this chord — just as in yourself." 

     There is a note of jeering in the dissonance. There's also a note of saying, "You can't do anything about it, so take it easy. Evil was around long before you were born, so enjoy this looking like melody which isn't." What is being said is, "Subtly come to know what evil is in you. And these notes should help. Don't be so excited about yourself, for one thing." 

     This is in Wozzeck and it's in Lulu. I hope to talk more about it. The unconscious is busy now, and it is showing itself in the arts. It's showing itself in music. 

All over America women are trying to get what they think they want — a man's adoration, advancement in a career, a good time — and are devising strategies to do it. Yet even if they are successful, there can be an awful, gnawing sense that something is wrong. Aesthetic Realism is the greatest friend to women for explaining that we depend either on strategically maneuvering and manipulating to have our way (which is contempt) or on justice — using ourselves to know and be fair to the world. 

     I had the tremendous good fortune to begin studying Aesthetic Realism early in life, and to see in Mr. Siegel himself how beautiful justice is. 

     I had no idea that my contempt for people, my hope to lessen them, was what caused me to feel lonely, and so fearful that I couldn't enter a room by myself or be in the dark without feeling terrified. It was the reason I was afraid to go to sleep at bedtime. 

     In an Aesthetic Realism lesson I had the honor to attend with my parents when I was 10, my mother told Mr. Siegel she felt terrible when I wouldn't talk. He asked me, "Do you think a mother can think no matter what you do she has to forgive you and love you? — you've got her in your power and she can't escape you?" "Yes," I said. Mr. Siegel so compassionately explained that my trouble sleeping had to do with my shame about running people and fooling them. He asked, "[When] you go to bed, do you feel like you've had an honest day?" 

     No, I said, I didn't feel honest. Crucial to my changing was an assignment my family did: each day each of us wrote, or asked my father to write down for us, 3 things we liked, 3 grievances, and 3 sentences about an object, trying to be precise about what we saw and felt. Sometimes we read aloud what we had written, and I remember my excitement discovering what each person felt. I was learning to express myself honestly instead of holding people hostage and outsmarting them — and one tremendous result was that my agony about the dark and about sleep ended.

     When I was 18, 1 was flattered that Ben Fletcher, an abstract artist, divorced and older than I, was affected by me. Yet I wasn't interested in asking, "What does this man hope for as an artist and person? How can I encourage him to be in the best relation to the world, including people?" 

     For example, I saw a date at the Botanical Gardens as a means for myself to stand out from the landscape: I wanted all the beauty of trees, birds, water to exist solely as my backdrop. My strategy was to lessen the world to which Aesthetic Realism shows all love needs to be just. While I got the embraces I was after, I felt small and cheap, and our relation was stormy, painful, and short-lived. 

In a lesson for which I will be grateful always, Mr. Siegel criticized my way of seeing through a medieval story he made up: 

... There was a knight, Donneghal, who sojourned with the lady [Evelyn] in the Forest Perilous. And the knight got very angry with the lady, because she acted as if all the pleasure came from her. — Do you want to be an enhancer or an intoxicant?

     What Mr. Siegel taught us is crucial for every marriage. He asked, "Do you want David Bernstein to be present everywhere you are? How many No Trespassing signs do you have?" I answered, "I don't know — there are a lot. " And he said, "The hillside is riddled with them. It happens every person would like to be secret, sequestered, do things for oneself; and every person wants to be loved without limit. Unless we are at home in the very deepest part of another person's mind and we know what it is, we can't feel wholly comfortable." 

     Our immensely fortunate education has enabled us to see another's mind as territory for respectful, happy exploration. And this has made for romantic love that no clever strategy could ever achieve!