Dear Unknown Friends:
We have been serializing
the great 1949 lecture Poetry and Unity, by Eli Siegel. And that
tremendous subject of both art and life — unity — is explained in this
Aesthetic Realism principle stated by Mr. Siegel: "All beauty is a making
one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going
after in ourselves." We each, for example, want to affirm and protect
the unity, distinctness, uniqueness, individuality of our self. There is
nothing dearer to us: we are we, a contained, precious entity. Yet
if our notion of our unity is not the same as the feeling that we are related
to everything, that the diversity of the world is inseparable from us,
that we need it to be ourselves — then our uniqueness is really loneliness,
narrowness, emptiness, meanness. This false unity is, at best, like the
unity Wordsworth describes at the beginning of his poem "Daffodils," only
not as pretty: "I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales
and hills." People unwittingly cultivate in themselves every day the unity
of that separate, superior, and therefore lonely cloud.
I comment a little
here, however, on one of the most beautiful instances of unity in human
history: unions. There are millions of people in America grateful to unions,
and many more should be. And there are persons, including in government,
who have been trying to destroy unions. But Aesthetic Realism is that which
shows that a union, a true union, is aesthetic: like a concerto,
a novel, a painting, it is a oneness of opposites. And its aesthetics is
its power.
The oneness of
opposites, the aesthetics, of a union is told of in a swift, playful, yet
important poem by Eli Siegel, "Lines on an I.W.W. Person." The I.W.W.,
Industrial Workers of the World, was founded in 1905 by, among others,
Eugene V. Debs and "Big Bill" Haywood. It aimed to be "one big union,"
in which workers of all industries would fight together in behalf of decent
wages and working conditions, and the just ownership of America. Some of
the true courage in American history was shown by I.W.W. persons, also
called Wobblies — for instance, at the Lawrence strike of textile workers
in Massachusetts in 1912. This is Mr. Siegel's short poem:
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| Lines on an I.W.W. Person
Being an individualist,
He sang "Solidarity Forever"
All day long. |
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These lines are about
two kinds of unity, which are deeply the same, but which people usually
pit against each other, with cruelty and agony ensuing. That is, there
is the unity of solidarity, of joining with others and making a one with
them. Then, there is the unity of individualism: the seeing oneself as
a distinct, indefeasible, sovereign unit unto oneself. And as I implied,
people have felt their individualism was equivalent to how little they
needed others, how much they were unlike them and superior to them. This
poem, however, says, Just because this person was an individualist,
he sang that union song "Solidarity Forever": just because he wanted
to be his ever so particular, complete, expressed self, he asserted proudly
that he was related to other people and needed them.
The Basis of a Union
That is the beautiful basis of a union. In
the first paragraph printed here of Mr. Siegel's lecture, as he describes
the principle of composition as such, he is describing too the principle
behind every authentic union. His description is great and new:
The idea ... is to relate things so as
to bring out power which, without the relation, these things would not
have ...[;] to show that something is more itself through being next to
something different from it.
For example, the
individual notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, separate, apart from each
other, don't mean so much. But unified by Beethoven, a tremendous power
has come to be: that of the symphony itself, rich in might and tenderness,
able to move people at their depths after nearly 200 years. The power of
a union is like that. Individual men and women, at the mercy of bosses,
compelled to work for wages that could barely keep them alive, and under
conditions that wrecked their bodies and made for misery, found that in
joining together they could force something better from an employer, which
he would not have given on his own in a thousand years. The power, for
instance, of all the workers in a factory leaving their machines and hitting
the streets, so that nothing could be produced until they were treated
more justly, is like the power of those opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony. Both are power through organization, composition, unity; and
both are, strictly, beautiful.
What Unions Stand For
It is not my purpose here to present with
thoroughness how Aesthetic Realism sees unions. No one loved them more
than Eli Siegel. And he is the person who most understood and described
their beauty and might. He showed that — with all their imperfections,
with the fact that some people in unions can be selfish, narrow, cheaply
ambitious
because they themselves don't believe enough in what a union truly is -
unions stand for this great fact, which he articulated with passion and
logic:
The most important thing in industry is
the person who does the industry, which is the worker .... Labor is the
only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw material
.... Every bit of capital that exists was made by labor, just as everything
that is consumed is. [Goodbye Profit System: Update, Definition
Press, pp. 39-40]
My purpose is to
say that there is a fight going on within every person which is also the
underlying economic fight. And unions represent one side, the beautiful
side, of that fight. Aesthetic Realism shows that every human being has
within himself or herself all the time an unspoken war between respect
for the world and contempt for it. Mr. Siegel defined contempt as
"the addition to self through the lessening of something else," and showed
it is the most dangerous thing in humanity. The contenders in the war within
each of us are the feeling "I'll get to the unity of myself, be myself,
through seeing as much value and meaning in things and persons as I can,
for I'm related to all of them," versus the feeling "The way to take care
of myself, be somebody, is to beat out, lessen, look down on, and also
exploit what's not me."
This fight, raging
though unarticulated in the private depths of each individual, is also
the fundamental matter in economics. That is, the big fight all through
history is not, as Marx said, "class struggle." It is between those two
huge desires of self, become ways of using earth, goods, other human beings.
For example, "I'll strengthen myself by strengthening others" made for
unions. And the profit system, with all its intricacy, is based on the
simple sheer contempt of the famous profit motive — the seeing of your
fellow human beings in terms of how much money you can get out of them,
including out of their labor.
This is the big
fight economically in the world now, and people need to know it, including
people in unions. It is the fight of individuality through relation and
justice, versus individuality through contempt.
It was unions — with their aesthetic oneness
of many persons and each person, of solidarity and individuality — which,
as the 20th century proceeded, ended sweatshops, made for salaries that
could give people dignity, made for legislation insuring conditions under
which people would not become diseased or lose limbs. Men and women in
unions put themselves in danger, got blacklisted, went to jail, died, so
that these decencies could come to people.
In 1970 Eli Siegel
explained that the profit system had failed as the century approached its
end; and he was grandly right. Profits for owners are harder and harder
to come by — for one thing, there is more competition throughout the world.
So in recent years, in order to have big money continue to come to bosses
and stockholders, who do not work for it — in order to have profit economics
go on — there has been a steady effort to undo all that unions achieved.
There has been a bringing back of low wages, long hours, sweatshops. Increasingly,
the jobs of America are miserably paying ones. When a person loses his
$16-an-hour union job and must work instead for $7 an hour, he should know
he's doing so to help keep the profit system afloat, to have some rich
persons continue getting money. That is why he is coming home bone-tired
from working two jobs, while his children don't get the kind of food he'd
like to give them.
Throughout the decades, bosses always complained
that unions were impoverishing them. A boss, asked to ventilate a factory
so people could breathe properly, would say if he spent money that way
he'd become so poor he'd go out of business! Mainly, it was a lie. But
in 1999 we have come to the following situation: in order for the profit
system to continue, fewer and fewer people can be paid decent wages. Most
people have to become poorer so a small number of people can make large
profits. And the question Americans now have to answer is one I have asked
here before: What should be sacrificed — decent jobs for millions of Americans;
or profits of individuals who didn't earn them, so that millions of people
can have decent, dignified lives? There can no longer be both. Another
question is: If no one were making personal profit from the work of others,
and everyone were making a good living and feeling expressed — would that
be good? Would that be beautiful? ethical? truly American? The answer is
yes!
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The Unity of Person and Job
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All this concerns unity, and unions. "The
Strike," "La huelga," is a very good poem by Pablo Neruda. It is an illustration
of that great statement by Eli Siegel "Labor is the only source of wealth,"
and of a related statement by Mr. Siegel, jocular, but crucially true:
"You can bring a hundred thousand dollars to a tree and no toothpick will
come." There is, deeply, a unity of two things: a person and the job he
has, the work he does. It is he who is needed for that work — no
amount of capital can do it — and the wealth he produces should come to
him. These are some lines from my translation of the Neruda poem. The man
told of is a striking worker who has walked out of the factory:
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When the man left the habitations
Of the turbine, when he unfastened
His arms from the fire...
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.
Out of the overwhelming energy,
There remained a pile of useless steel.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Nothing existed without that hammering
fragment,
Without Ramírez,
Without the man in the torn clothing.... |
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So Ramírez,
who has been made so little, a "fragment," with "torn clothing," is really,
in Mr. Siegel's beautiful words, "the only source of wealth": there
is only "useless steel" without him.
Eli Siegel was
resented by persons of the press because of his honesty and the immensity
of his knowledge. He is the person who showed most fully the dignity of
every human being: every person stands for the whole world. And
that world, he wrote, "should be owned by the people living in it."
— Ellen Reiss, Class
Chairman of Aesthetic Realism
Equivalent to the World
By Eli Siegel
The idea in composition is to relate things
so as to bring out power which, without the relation, these things would
not have. This is done in various ways. The principle, however, is continuous:
to show that something is more itself through being next to something different
from it — just as in marriage.
Sometimes unity
comes in a very bold fashion. One of the most popular anthology pieces
is a poem called "On a Girdle," by Edmund Waller (1606-87). He makes a
girl's waist a means of unifying the world. [A "girdle" is a belt.]
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That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind;
No monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this has done.
It was my Heaven's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer:
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move.
A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's
fair!
Give me but what this ribband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round! |
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We can see, first
of all, a relation of anything to any other thing. Next, we can also see
the whole world in anything. It is very interesting to see how sometimes
the whole sun appears in a puddle of water. It does. You don't, of course,
get the sun, but you see a representation of the sun which, as far as it
goes, is authentic. So everything can stand for the world; and in the meantime,
everything is related in a parallel way to every other thing.
In this poem there
is a showing of similarity; then a bold identification through a presentation
of symbol. "That which her slender waist confined/Shall now my joyful temples
bind." In other words, there is a girl who bound her waist; and he now
puts what she bound her waist with around his head, which I think is a
fairly agreeable occupation. There is a pun: pale means a corral
or fence, and deer has two meanings here. "My joy, my grief, my
hope, my love,/Did all within this circle move": everything was in this
girdle. If Donne had written about this, you wouldn't understand it — what
he would do with that girdle, and what Cowley might do! But Waller is pretty
simple.
Two of the most
noted lines in English literature are "Give me but what this ribband bound,/Take
all the rest the sun goes round!"
Rhythm is a sign
of sincerity. Sincerity is a sign of bringing together, or integration,
or unification. This has a very strong rhythm, and the directness of it
is a sign of its sincerity. There is a feeling that were this person had,
it would be equivalent to the whole world.
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