Dear Unknown Friends:
We begin to serialize
Poetry and History, a 1949 lecture by Eli Siegel. I love this lecture.
I think the way of seeing history that it presents is tremendously beautiful
— and true. It is a way of seeing the world, human beings, and the past
which is central to Aesthetic Realism.
Mr. Siegel wrote
and lectured much on history. His scholarship in the field was immense.
And — whether he was speaking about Wat Tyler or John Adams, the French
Revolution or the Spanish Civil War — the events and the feelings of the
time became real to those who heard him, as close to you as the
very clothes you were wearing. As Mr. Siegel spoke on history, you had
a sense always (it’s in the lecture we’re serializing) of largeness — you
felt the bigness of reality — yet you also felt this largeness was warm.
Further, Mr. Siegel’s comprehension of events in history was so
great, so clear as to be, in my opinion, unprecedented: he enabled you
to see the meaning of the happening discussed — including its meaning
for now, and for you.
Aesthetic Realism
is based on this principle, stated by Mr. Siegel: "The world, art, and
self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." In
the lecture we are serializing, Mr. Siegel shows how history is a oneness
of opposites. And as I have indicated, when he himself spoke about it,
the opposites of knowledge and feeling were always one. He saw facts with
love and sheer scrupulosity; he had great feeling about them, and enabled
them to cause big, accurate feeling in others. And he saw the feelings
had by people of the past as facts.
"Look on the Past Passionately"
Aesthetic Realism is based on the idea that
in order to be ourselves, not go through our lives falsifying ourselves,
we need to see the multitudinous outside world as something eagerly to
respect and know. That world, as Mr. Siegel says here, includes the past.
One of his earliest published writings is about history: "The Middle Ages,
Say" appeared in the Modern Quarterly, December 1923, when he was
21 years old. Toward the end are these sentences:
We need to look upon the people living
then, as men — there were "individuals" and "personalities" and "egos"
in the Middle Ages too — like our friends, our enemies and the people we
meet on the street we don’t care about much....We should look on the past
passionately; we should see all reality passionately, not only the part
we have right under our noses or nearly that. Our feelings should have
no limits in either extensity or intensity .... Then we shall see the Middle
Ages, that man-made division of reality in time, as having along with monks,
kings, wars, Charlemagne, Battles of Hastings, Catholicism, ignorance,
guilds, Thomas Aquinas, serfs, feudal systems, Marsiglio, Battles of Tours,
and all, all the rest of such things — to be found in some text book or
other every one; complexes, moonlights, moments for every century, creative
instincts, repressions, amœbae, dirty stories, pains and pleasures, individual
aspirations, desires, frustrations, adrenal glands and the others, ravishments,
deaths for every person with the death pangs for each person, named and
unnamed, love with all the details of love, and lastly, possibilities.
In this excited yet
very careful prose there is the beautiful respect for people and reality
which Mr. Siegel always had. Part of that respect was the seeing that history
is not only about someone like Charlemagne, but is about, for instance,
a little girl living in a French village in the year 799 and what she felt
about her mother, her supper, her doll. And he made clear: we need to see
both such a girl and Charlemagne — and also people living now — as being
as real as we are. But every person, Aesthetic Realism also explains, makes
the awful mistake hour after hour of giving other people less reality than
we give ourselves. That lessening of the reality of others is part of contempt,
and is the beginning of all the unkindness and brutality that has ever
been.
In Poetry and
History, Mr. Siegel mentions his "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana";
it contains, he says, the Aesthetic Realism way of seeing history. To give
some idea how that is so, I quote several early lines of this majestically
kind, enormously musical 99-line poem, which won the Nation poetry
prize in 1925:
...Here, once, Indians shouted in battle,
And moaned after it.
Here were cries, yells, night, and the
moon over these men,
And the men making the cries and yells;
it was
Hundreds of years ago, when monks were
in Europe,
Monks in cool, black monasteries,thinking
of God, studying Virgil.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Indians, Indians went through Montana,
Thinking, feeling, trying pleasurably
to live.
This land, shone on by the sun now, green,
quiet now,
Was under their feet, this time; we live
now and it is hundreds of years after.... |
Eli Siegel saw all
reality as related — not in some vague, general way, but with terrific
specificity. Medieval monks, and Indians warring in Montana fields, are
usually not thought of as together, as of the same reality, deeply commenting
on each other. Mr. Siegel says they are; they do: the scholarship of a
monk and the shout of an Indian in battle are the same world, the same
humanity. The poetry with which he says this is beautiful. For example,
that short line "And moaned after it," through its musical ache and strength
and tenderness, goes within the feeling of the battling men.
Eli Siegel sees
the Indians not just in their activity but in their humanity: they are
"Thinking, feeling, trying pleasurably to live." Musically, that line is
firm; yet it also feels, with its l sounds, like a caress of comprehension.
And there are wonder and drama in our relation to these Indians:
"we live now and it is hundreds of years after."
History Is Respect and Contempt
In my opinion, the necessary means for understanding
the ethics of any historical happening and also for understanding ourselves,
is what Mr. Siegel describes in the following statement: "The greatest
fight man is concerned with, is the fight between respect for reality and
contempt for reality." That, he says, is the "large fight" in "every mind
of once, every mind of now" (TRO 151). The question for every moment of
our personal lives is: Am I trying to respect what is not myself, see it
justly — or am I after contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening
of something else"? And that is the question as to every historical happening:
how are respect and contempt in it; which is the preponderant thing?
For example, Mr.
Siegel was passionate about the fact that the French Revolution was in
behalf of respect for people. The Reign of Terror, of course, could not
be praised; the use of the guillotine was sickening, awful. But that did
not change the fact that the French Revolution as such had France owned
more justly, by more of the people; it had human beings be seen with more
dignity, and be more able to get that which they needed for their bodies
and their minds.
He was also passionate
about the fact that the US’s role in the Vietnam War was sheer contempt.
We bombed and napalmed earth, hospitals, children; we sent our citizens
to kill human beings there and be killed; and the purpose was solely to
stop the Vietnamese from having their land owned the way they wanted it
to be — by all the people. All the burning and maiming and dying were solely
to have an Asian land be owned the way real estate in Texas or a business
in New York is owned: on the basis of profit for a few persons. No matter
how many years go by, America will be hurtful to ourselves and others until
we see, state, and regret clearly the deadly contempt we had.
Here, now, is
Eli Siegel, presenting a way of seeing the world which is not only beautiful
but true, not only true but necessary for civilization to be sane and kind.
— Ellen Reiss, Class
Chairman of Aesthetic Realism |
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Poetry and History
By Eli Siegel
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As Aesthetic Realism sees it, history
is poetry with the facts—which are seen by Aesthetic Realism as adorning
and completing the wonder of things, rather than opposing it. When we think
of history as a means by which the past is more and more seen as if it
were present, it seems to be a relation of remoteness and immediacy, and
a relation of the unknown to the known. A person must make some kind of
beautiful relation between his present and the past; and history is a means
of keeping, in a deep fashion, the past alive.
The first thing
that poetry wants to do is to be just to what’s real. Not to be just to
what’s real is a crime against yourself, and profound foolishness in the
bargain. It also makes you feel bad. There is a deep desire which says,
"Be fair to all that!" What is all that? All that
is the world; and the world includes the past. There is an abstruse and
subtle kind of selfishness which makes one want to say that the past is
not of one’s concern. To a degree that is true about everyone, because
it seems that we have our hands full or our minds sufficiently occupied
in dealing with what seems to be the present. Yet there is a desire to
see the past.
It is true that
the past can be used in a bad way. It can be used to interfere with and
disfigure the present. But the past can be used to explain the present.
It can be used as if it were the present. It is a way of giving completeness
to reality, because reality does consist of what has been, what is going
on, and what will be; and when these three things are seen as one, we are
being beautifully sensible.
So if we are to
be just in the largest sense, we must feel that we are fair to the past.
Every person in the past asks this of us. The sight of epitaphs in graveyards,
the sight of records, the propensity in everyone to be remembered, is an
acknowledgment of the fact that everything wants to belong to everything.
And, quite sentimentally, Aesthetic Realism sees the people who died three
thousand years ago as wanting to be around. They prepared what is now,
and they should be acknowledged. Our best way of acknowledging them is
to know about them. So if the past is seen as indispensable, and also as
beautiful, and furthermore, as definitely existing—well, we are on the
way to being just to it.
The writing through
which I am still best known, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana," is
essentially the making history poetic. It is a way of saying that reality
through what it has been, adorns what is.
The Feeling That Has Been
One way that history is poetry — and of course
aesthetics — is this: when we think of history there is a disposition to
think of trends, institutions, periods, organizations, dynasties; then,
there is a disposition also to think of people. Everybody is in history.
Not many persons get into textbooks or printed records, but everybody is
there. And, as much as possible, we should feel the feeling that
has been in the past. The purpose of history, in the long run, is to feel
the feeling that has been. When we say we want to understand the past,
it means we want to see the past from the inside. There is a kinship between
understanding the past and understanding a person.
The Duality in HIstory
When we see that the past consists of such
things as the Eighteenth Dynasty, the feudal system, monasticism, 18th-century
laissez-faire, 19th-century dynastic turmoil; and then, when we think that
along with all these general ideas or general situations, everybody was
one person and there were individuals everywhere—we see that duality that
is in history. A man like Carlyle would say that "History is the essence
of innumerable biographies." Then there are persons like Marx and Buckle
who, though politically speaking they were different, say pretty much similar
things: that is, that the individual is not the big cause of history—there
are general ideas. Whereas Buckle would accent geography, climate, ways
of economics in general, and Marx would accent the means and the control
of production, there is a similarity.
Some people have
gone at history as if it consisted of movements. Others have wanted to
deal with individuals. Some have seen history as a series of periods, of
conditions. Others have looked upon it as narrative. History itself is
a compound of specific individuals. Whether those individuals were in the
Eighteenth Dynasty, or in the period of monasticism, or in the period of
monarchic turmoil of the 17th century, or in the 18th, or in the 19th,
they were single people. Nobody yet has really outgrown the restriction
and also the glory of being a self: that is, of being one self—no more
and (it may be said with some reservations) no less.
History is Relations
So history has been a necessary seeing of
individual and of institution. It has been a necessary seeing of that which
was a situation, and that which went on—a happening or narrative. Furthermore,
it has been in its deepest sense—something making it nearer to poetry—a
collection of musical relations in time. By this I mean that when a person
writes history, what he tries to do is to give the truth of a situation
and yet place it in such a way that there is a likeness to the way notes
are placed in music, objects or forms in a painting. There is no falsifying—there
is a presentation of the whole reality.
Suppose a person
said of Lincoln: "In this talk he had some of the religious fervor of Oliver
Cromwell." Let us suppose this was true. Cromwell would be likened to Lincoln,
and there would be a mingling of the two civil wars. Let us say that there
was a relation found between something happening in 1843 and something
happening in 1883; further, that there was a place put together with a
person. Then, while all this was true, there would be a disposition of
elements that would make for a heightening of reality.
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