Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is part 3
of the magnificent lecture Poetry and History, which Eli Siegel
gave in 1949. It is being published as we approach the 21st anniversary
of his death. And that event itself, of November 8, 1978, and all that
led to it, so searingly immediate, is now of history too, with the deaths
of Lincoln, Caesar, Shakespeare, Keats. I shall speak of it historically
as this issue of TRO goes on.
In his Definitions,
and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Mr. Siegel defines history
as "shown feeling about the past." And he writes:
History is about every single thing. History
aims at the grand, inconceivable inclusiveness of existence. History is
therefore about the development of shirts, the attitudes to idols, transactions
on South American savannahs, and about history itself. History should include
dead infants and disappointed maiden ladies. It should include the possible
boredom of the year 412, and the excitement of the year 1649. Whatever
has been is history’s field.
The thought in this paragraph, and also the
might and tremendous tenderness of its prose, stand for Aesthetic Realism.
They represent that respect for reality which Mr. Siegel had, and embodied
in the philosophy he founded.
A huge question
historians have been concerned with is: is there any structure in
history? Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744) thought all societies developed
in a cyclical pattern, in which theocracy gave way to aristocracy, which
in turn gave way to democracy. And there is Benedetto Croce (1866-1952).
When the Oxford Companion to English Literature tells us Croce "asserts
that History is always the history of freedom," it is saying Croce sees
the desire for freedom as a unifying, organizing force in history.
What Eli Siegel
showed is that yes, there is a structure in history — and it is
an aesthetic structure. Though that structure has, as its material,
facts and centuries and billions of people, it is like the structure of
music or poetry. It is described in this Aesthetic Realism principle: "The
world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness
of opposites." Thus far in Poetry and History, Mr. Siegel has
been speaking about history as a oneness of disorder and order; of personal
and impersonal; of particularity and relation. He speaks in the present
section about history as the stirring and alive oneness of known and unknown.
All those very
opposites, Aesthetic Realism shows, make up, too, the intimate life of
everyone. For example, we can shuttle painfully between feeling disorderly
and feeling there’s too much order — our life is routine. We can be fearful
of the unknown and bored by what’s familiar, or known. Through our seeing
these opposites in history, they become friendlier, better joined, more
beautiful under our own skin.
Mr. Siegel showed
too that the chief struggle in history is the struggle going on within
every one of us. It is between contempt for the world and respect
for it. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as "the addition to self through
the lessening of something else." And no contribution to the understanding
of mind and history is more important than his showing that contempt is
the cause both of mental weakness and of all cruelty. A person’s lessening
what’s different from himself is the reason he feels nervous, depressed;
it is the reason for his self-dislike. And it is this contempt that has
made for racism, wars, and economic exploitation.
1978 and History
Part of 20th-century history is the history
of how Eli Siegel was met year after year, and fatally in 1978. It is the
history of persons’ having tremendous — in fact, unbounded — respect for
him, yet resenting that respect. It is the history of press people, literary
people, and others, including his students, resenting Mr. Siegel because
he was so honest, knew so much, and because one needed to learn and keep
learning from him. There has been anger at his passionate, logical respect
for the world, because it is such a criticism of one’s own thirst for contempt.
William Carlos
Williams, in his 1951 letter to Martha Baird, writes about this anger as
he observed it when Mr. Siegel won the Nation poetry prize for "Hot
Afternoons Have Been in Montana." Williams says, "That single poem, out
of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place
in the cultural world," and he calls Mr. Siegel’s poetry "the truly new."
Then he writes, "The other side of the picture is the extreme resentment
that a fixed, sclerotic mind feels confronting this new. It shows itself
by the violent opposition Siegel received from the ‘authorities’ whom I
shall not dignify by naming."*
The reasons I
have described are why the press, decade after decade, boycotted Mr. Siegel’s
work, keeping Aesthetic Realism from humanity. Even today, as Aesthetic
Realism is becoming known, members of the media are livid at the largeness
and integrity of Mr. Siegel’s thought. They are furious that he and Aesthetic
Realism would not do what they do: make ethics less important than
flattery and publicity.
There Are Precedents
There are precedents for the punishing displeasure
Mr. Siegel underwent; and I and others have spoken of them. There was the
fury, for instance, at Galileo, at Darwin, Socrates, Keats, at the abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison. Yet the scope of Mr. Siegel’s accomplishment is
larger than theirs; and the rage he incurred from egos determined to maintain
their contempt and fake supremacy, was larger too.
We come, then,
to May 25, 1978. On that day, Mr. Siegel underwent a "simple" prostate
operation, which doctors insisted he must have, and which he said he would
rather die than have. My own role in the matter is shameful. I have described
it many times, and shall continue to. Mr. Siegel, unsure what to do, asked
that the opinion of several of his students be gotten concerning the operation;
and we all said, quickly, he should have it. I find hideous my own swiftness
of response, my lack of desire to understand Mr. Siegel’s feeling, my absence
of thought about the person who had thought so beautifully about humanity
and me. I was frightened by the doctors’ statement that Mr. Siegel would
die without the surgery; I was enormously worried for his life. But I see
that I also had a horrible hope: to be superior to Mr. Siegel at last,
to feel I had found something weak in him — that he didn’t know how to
take care of himself, and I did.
The operation
was performed at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Manhattan, by Dr. Joseph De Filippi.
After it, Mr. Siegel’s life was ruined. It was performed — as such surgery
usually is not — under general anesthesia; and three months later, in response
to questions, the surgeon admitted to me and others that he had been afraid
of the respect he had for Mr. Siegel. Writing in August about "the operation
so disastrous to me," Mr. Siegel said, "I have lost the use of my feet,
which now seem to work separately from the rest of my body."
Those months of
summer and fall 1978 were the most terrible in Eli Siegel’s life. He felt
that death was near; and yet the historical documents show the continued
grandeur of his thought and purpose. For example, there are tape recordings
of the lectures he gave in those months — lectures that are definitive,
clear, glowing, even funny, on, for example, Shelley, Scott, the drama,
the difference between good poetry and bad. There are tape recordings of
lessons he gave to individual men and women, explaining the largest questions
of their lives, even as he felt his own life was destroyed.
People 200 years
from now will hear Mr. Siegel’s voice in recordings of three decades of
classes; and that sound of complete, constant sincerity, such as I have
heard in no other voice, will come to their ears too. But to have been
his contemporary and his student, to have learned from him in the flesh,
to have heard him explain poems, economics, historical happenings, and
the depths of a person he was speaking to, including one’s own — I see
as the greatest thing that can happen to a human being; and it happened,
richly, to me.
I can never make
up for my brutality to him. But it is the happy pride of my life that the
Aesthetic Realism taught now is his Aesthetic Realism. Some persons
tried to corrupt it, turn its beautiful ethics and scholarship into something
more palatable to their cheap egos; they tried to make Mr. Siegel’s lifework
something they could manipulate. I am proud that they were not permitted
to — nor will anyone be; and a few of those miserable individuals are still
trying to get revenge for that fact.
There is the question
of Eli Siegel’s place in history. There is the question of whether the
various superlatives I and many others have used about him — superlatives
like "the greatest person of thought" — are historically correct, supported
by the documents. I love this question, and feel quite at ease about its
answer. There is a passage I care for, by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.
She is writing on the poet Pushkin (1799-1837) and the prestigious people
of his day who made less of him. I quote this from Amanda Haight’s Anna
Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage (Oxford University Press, 1990). It
sheds light on how history will place Eli Siegel:
The whole epoch little by little ... began
to be called the time of Pushkin. All the society beauties, ... high-ranking
members of the Court, ministers, generals and non-generals, began to be
called Pushkin’s contemporaries and then simply retired to rest in card
indexes and lists of names ... in studies of his work.
He had conquered
Time and Space.
... In the rooms
of palaces where they ... gossiped about the poet, his portraits hang on
the walls .... People say now about the ... estates that belonged to [the
powerful]: Pushkin was here, or Pushkin was never here. All the rest is
of no interest. [P. 84]
There is much that has happened in the 20th
century, but it will be said that nothing was more important than that
Eli Siegel lived and worked and founded Aesthetic Realism in this century
of ours — and gave Aesthetic Realism to the people of all time.
— Ellen Reiss, Class
Chairman of Aesthetic Realism
|
| |
Facts and Poetry
By Eli Siegel
|
The relation of wildness and causality
in history is like the relation of freedom and order or structure in a
poem. When I say that history is the poem of time and space and self, I
don’t mean to be looked on as making a portentous statement. One can see,
in history, poetry occurring. The only difference is that in poetry there
is such an arrangement, through words, that music occurs.
I take now a fairly
popular history — I remember it was popular many years ago when I got it
from a Baltimore library. It’s The Story of Russia, by W.R. Morfill
(London, 1890). On page 3 we have the following:
Russia has the command of abundance of
waterpower. Her lakes ... are intersected by rivers and canals. Ládoga,
the largest lake in Europe, contains many islands. The great rivers are
the Dniester, which empties itself into the Black Sea; ...
A river like the Dniester emptying itself
into the Black Sea! It looks romantic. It is romantic." ... the
Dnieper, which enters the same sea by Ochákov and Kinburn; the Don,
which flows by Vorónezh; and the Volga, the largest river of Europe,
which empties itself by seventy mouths into the Caspian." What an organization!
Napoleon crossed this river in 1812 to
invade Russia. Its basin is occupied by the Lithuanians .... Siberian rivers
are the Obi, the Tom, the Irtysk, the Yenisei, and the Lena ....
There’s a mighty
jumble here of lakes and rivers, the Don, 70 mouths, Lithuanians, what
Napoleon did, the date 1812; and here it looks pretty simple. As these
names, which are compounded of known and unknown, reach one, the poetic
thing happens; because whenever the unknown is dealt with solidly, or the
known is dealt with as if it were freely running into unknown places, we
have poetry. If it is affirmed, and known to be affirmed, there is the
music which is in poetry.
Take another little
collection of facts:
For some time the Russians were confined
to Archangel on the White Sea .... Ivan the Terrible made many efforts
to extend Russia to the Baltic, but this plan was not realized till the
days of Peter the Great. The latter monarch took Azov, thus getting an
outlet to the Black Sea; but his possession of the town was only temporary.
[P. 2]
So from the point
of view of 1890, we can look at what happened to rivers, towns, kings,
peoples, and single people, and out of it all can come an arrangement in
sentences. The arrangement, of course, is not just imposed on what happened:
it is found to be in it. In art, the creator doesn’t plaster on something:
he, as creator, also finds what was there. His creation consists of finding.
If we look at
this pretty carefully, something like poetry comes through. And it is like
the poetry which has been acclaimed as poetry quite often. Milton, for
example, uses names. Some of the greatest things in Paradise Lost
are collections of names that are somewhat historic yet have the redolence
of the unseen, unperceived, unknown. These names are aromatic with pleasant
misunderstanding. I read now from the first book of Paradise Lost:
... and what resounds
In fable or romance of Uther’s son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptized or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabbia. |
Those names get you. Very few people really
could say what Aspramont is, or Montalban, or even Trebisond. It is all
spatial and definite, and it seems to be running through time and giving
forth the incense of the years.
*Something
to Say, ed. J.E.B. Breslin (New Directions, 1985), pp. 250-51. |
