| Dear Unknown Friends:
In 1953 Eli Siegel brought together, under the title "The Persistence
of Fabric," eight of his poems, all on the tremendous and deep subject
of fabric and emotion, clothing and human feeling. We are honored to publish
them here. He wrote six of these poems that year, the other two in 1926.
They are beautiful. They have the factual immediacy of cloth one can touch¾and also the mystery that can be in the feelings of people: the emotions
that whirl within us, or rustle in us, even as we put on a well-fitting
garment.
The word fabric comes from the Latin
word faber, to make or construct. And in the history of those made
things, fabrics and clothing, we see, big and persistent, the opposites
Aesthetic Realism shows to be at the basis of reality. "All beauty," Mr. Siegel wrote, "is a making one of opposites, and the making
one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." The fact
that human beings have been able to get cotton or flax from plants, wool
from sheep, silk from worms, lycra from chemicals; and have made reality—things
become something to enhance one's very personal body: this is a magnificent
oneness of the great opposites of Self and World, human lives and earth.
The way earth meets human self in the making
of clothing stands for the aesthetics in all production. However intricate
the making of any product is, it is sheerly a matter of those fundamental
opposites, Selves and Earth. Mr. Siegel describes this fact, with grandeur
and clarity:
The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry,
which is the worker. That is still true. It never can change. Labor is
the only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw
material. [Goodbye Profit System: Update, Definition Press,
p. 39]
Meanwhile, the agony of millions of people
has accompanied the manufacture of garments—has accompanied labor as such
through the centuries. This agony includes children working at looms; young
women jumping to their deaths during the Triangle fire because exit doors
were locked; sweatshops; bodies sickened from horrible working conditions;
lives spent in poverty. All this horror has arisen
solely because that beautiful, kind oneness of selves and earth which is
production has been forced to have as its basis the supplying of profit
to
some individuals.
The women about whom Thomas Hood wrote his
"Song of the Shirt" in 1843 were working, as people are working now, in
keeping with the nature of profit economics: They were paid as little as
possible and made to work as many hours as possible. The wealth created
by the garments they made with their tired bodies came not to them but
to an employer, who did not do the work. And so we have these famous first
lines:
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread.
Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt... |
The Cause Was Contempt
Profit economics, Mr. Siegel showed, is one of
the things in human history which have arisen from humanity's contempt.
He
defined contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of something
else." Contempt is the thing in every person that has us hope someone fails
so we look better; that has us prefer being "important" and comfortable
to being just. It is infinitely ordinary and infinitely ugly.
To see another's need for warm, good clothing
in terms of how much profit oneself can make from that life-need, is contempt.
It is shameful. And "only contempt," Mr. Siegel wrote, "could permit a
man to make money from the work of another—as man has done these hundreds
of years."
Beginning in 1970, he explained that at the
end of our century profit economics had failed, and would never recover.
By the 1970s in America, wages and working conditions had become much better
because men and women, organized in unions, had fought together, had sometimes
laid down their very lives, so that people be able to live with more dignity.
As a result of not being permitted to rob workers as massively, by the
1970s and 80s owners and stockholders could not make the profits of once.
And today, in order to use people successfully for profit—as the woman
of 1843 "with fingers weary and worn" was used—manufacturers are trying
to bring back those conditions of a century and a half ago. Clothing is
being manufactured in sweatshops again; and by brutalized "cheap" foreign
labor; even by children.
In this cry of Hood, we have fabric and selves:
O! men with sisters dear!
O! men with mothers and wives,
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives! |
The Only Way
The only way, Mr. Siegel showed, for economics to fare well in America
and the world now, including the economics connected with garments, is
for economics to be based on what it was never based on before: ethics
and aesthetics. Jobs, production, the ability to buy a product, have to
be based on the real oneness of those opposites human beings and earth.
The
people who make the fabric or garment by joining their hours, thought,
bodies, lives to the materials that arise from earth—should get the wealth
their work produces. They should own the earth, along with every other
human being. The U.S. economy can no longer afford to be brutalized and
to brutalize "human creatures' lives" with that thievery which is profit
for persons who do not work for it.
Two Kinds of Justice
There are two kinds of justice human beings urgently
need. One is economic justice. The second is that the depths of us be comprehended,
and we be able to understand the world we are in. No person in history
was more passionate about both kinds of justice than Eli Siegel; and in
Aesthetic Realism he provided the means for that beautiful second form
of justice to take place. He himself embodied it. His desire to know was
so complete, and his knowledge so full, that he was the person of thought
who understood the human self as such, and also understood the deep, delicate,
tumultuous particularity of individuals—including, I say with unlimited
gratitude, my own. I am grateful to comment (though necessarily briefly)
on the poems that follow, in which that thing of texture which is fabric
and the texture of human feeling are seen together musically; and the feeling
is so kindly understood.
1. In the first poem, "Not Muslin," the bewilderment
of a woman both rustles delicately and is presented with brisk clarity.
Muslin can stand for femininity as airy, innocent, hopeful—and a woman
doesn't understand how she got from that to something so bitterly different.
The three adjectives in the last line, with their assonance, make for a
music that brings together sharp distress and poignant wonder.
2. "Taffeta" is published in Eli Siegel's Hot
Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems. If something primitive
and apparently free, like grasses in wind, can change into a fabric associated
with a certain sophistication—can that help us (who may be Alexander) make
sense of the primal and cultivated in ourselves?
3. History is in the third poem, "Gingham."
And Eli Siegel saw gingham and women who wore it as being as much of history
as Washington crossing the Delaware. The hominess of gingham can seem to
be opposed in different ways by three things mentioned in the poem: Indians,
mystery, silk. Mr. Siegel shows the deep friendliness among them. And he
wants fairness to the Indians; and sees that British soldiers had inner
lives and puzzlement. Look at the beautiful music of (for instance) the
second line, with its recurrence of the in sound; and the seventh, where
the short i is delicately resolute.
4. "Child with Fabric" describes a great change
in a woman, in musical lines that have comprehending subtlety, yet bigness,
and caress.
5. "Putting on a Glove Did Something for You,
Anyway," is published in Mr. Siegel's Hail, American Development,
where his note to the poem includes these sentences: "A woman, like everyone
else, needs to be assured in a world not lavish with assurance. That we
can wear something that goes with us, covers us with trim appropriateness,
makes us think better of ourselves." In this poem we hear, as music and
structure, the hopes and uncertainties of a woman—through the writer's
justice to them.
6. "Matter Moves on the Avenue" (1926) is in
Hail,
American Development too. This short poem is philosophic and funny:
it is concerned with the relation of something and nothing, surface and
depth. And it has suspense.
7. 1 think "When Gossamer" is about sincerity,
which has the qualities of the two things mentioned in the poem. Sincerity
has sheerness, like gossamer (it is against cover-ups); and it represents
the depths of self, the heartbeat. And when there is sincerity, the poem
says, we should celebrate!
8. In "Moreover, Buttons," what is so touchable
and contained joins with, assists, the sometimes painful unboundedness
of people's feelings. And with tremendous quiet music, this short poem
says that possibility—"the might have been"—is never over for us.
Though the education Eli Siegel founded, Aesthetic
Realism, has been boycotted by persons of the press furious at its comprehensiveness,
grandeur, and honesty, this knowledge is becoming better known every week.
And through Eli Siegel's beautiful work, the good possibilities of people—the
kindness, intelligence, justice, art—can come alive and flourish at last.
The Persistence of Fabric
By Eli Siegel
Note. Emotion has been with fabric all through history. Garments have
a philosophic and mythological import, as Carlyle and many others saw in
their way. —E.S.
Why do they make such glorious shows with their scarfs, feathers,
fans, masks, furs, laces, tiffanies, ruffs, falls, calls, cuffs, damasks,
velvets, tinsels, cloth of gold, silver, tissue? with colours of heavens,
stars, planets: the strength of metals, stones, odours, flowers, birds,
beasts, fishes, and whatsoever Africa, Asia, America, sea, land, art, and
industry of man can afford? —Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part
3. Sec. 2. Mem. 2. Subs. 3.
1. Not Muslin
When a girl is
In muslin
On a lawn,
Of a spring morning—
She doesn't seem to be the woman
Going to a divorce court
Of a spring morning—
Angry, sad, legal. |
2.
Taffeta
If when those grasses
Tired of waving in sharp winds
Changed into georgette,
Crepe, taffeta, something,
As grass never has—
Well, Alexander, what would you say? |
3.
Gingham
Somehow the eighteenth century in
American history
Is a mingling of gingham and Indians.
The gingham won.
The Indians have yet to win.
Then, there are puzzled British officers,
Looking at gingham.
The mystery of gingham persists.
Silk explains gingham.
Gingham on the Appalachians,
And the Northwest Ordinance,
And Indians—
And the British officers, still puzzled,
Looking at their quietly puzzled men. |
4.
Child with Fabric
When a woman puts on
A stocking
After having had a child—
The stocking looks different—
The silk, the nylon, whatever the
fabric—
All looks different.
The child accompanies the stocking,
Is with the fabric. |
5.
Putting on a Glove Did Something
for You, Anyway
Not one glove
Protected a woman really
In the 1850s.
Gloves were put on,
And from Paris, too—
Some from London—
But the heart was as unknowing,
The blood was as uncertain,
The vistas of self as unclear.
Yet the putting on of a glove
Sustained a smile of victory,
Or amiable disdain,
Or just the smile for which it seemed
The moment had come.
You seemed to answer a question as
you put on a glove.
It had to do. |
6.
Matter Moves on the Avenue
Matter moves on the avenue,
Gowns stir;
Dresses advance. |
7.
When Gossamer
When gossamer is like the heartbeat,
And the heartbeat
Is sheer—
Canaan, egad! |
8.
Moreover, Buttons
Buttons punctuate,
In their neatly round utilitarianism,
And pierced somethingness,—
The weeping and the crying,
And the might have been;
Which hasn't forsaken us,
And which we have not forsaken. |
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