ere is the third part of the lecture by Eli Siegel that we have been serializing: Beginning with Psychiatric Terms: An Aesthetic Realism Consideration, of 1966. And we print part of a paper by Michael Palmer, sportswriter and Aesthetic Realism associate, from a recent public seminar titled “What's Real Intelligence about the World and Ourselves?”

     In his lecture Mr. Siegel is discussing an alphabetical list of terms put out by the American Psychiatric Association. While “beginning with” them, as the lecture's title says, he is describing the self as such, as Aesthetic Realism explains it.

The Central Question

he central question is whether, in the various forms of mental ailment—from nervousness, to depression, to the “hypochondriasis” Mr. Siegel speaks about here—there is contempt for the world , and also a person's punishment of herself or himself for having this contempt. That is what Mr. Siegel, in many lectures and writings, made clear, and what no one saw before him. Further, the fight between our deepest desire, to like the world, and our desire to have contempt is the big, continuous fight within everybody.

     Contempt is the “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” We go for it in thousands of ways. And, because the self is ethical, we unknowingly punish ourselves for our contempt in many ways too. When the choice for contempt is steep enough, inclusive enough, a person gets to one of the states of mental difficulty described in the psychiatric glossary.

     I wrote last month about the fact, not seen by the psychologists of now, that we are always criticizing ourselves, however unconsciously and unclearly. This criticism we give ourselves usually takes forms that are not so efficient—like nervousness, sleeplessness, a deep unsureness; but it is always about how fair we are and whether we are trying to respect the world or have contempt for it. And we long for a means to criticize ourselves clearly, logically, kindly, and efficiently.

     There are many illustrations of that fact in the literature of the world, but for now I'm going to comment on a poem by a person I quoted recently.

In the Mind of Everyone

consider “The Waste Places,” by the Irish poet James Stephens (1882-1950) one of the important poems of the last century. It is authentic in its presentation of something that goes on in the mind of everyone. And it is authentic as poetry: it has the music that arises from the oneness of large exactitude and large feeling.

     “The Waste Places” of 1915 is an allegory. What is it about—this narrative of a man walking through a barren landscape and being watched constantly by a lion, whom he fears? The poem consists of seven quatrains (4-line stanzas), and begins:

As a naked man I go
Through the desert sore afraid,
Holding up my head, although
I am as frightened as a maid.

The couching lion there I saw
From barren rocks lift up his eye,
He parts the cactus with his paw,
He stares at me as I go by.

     We have that in us which looks at us, questions us, pursues us, saying, “You haven't been fair, Jake. You've been unjust, selfish, dishonest, Samantha. You've made less of things and people—of this world that you were born to know and care for. And it MATTERS. And you can't get away with it.” We have that in us which wants to hide from—which trembles at—this thing in us that looks us over critically.

     “The Waste Places” is about the fact that the self has what Mr. Siegel called an “ethical unconscious ”; and about the fact that we won't be at ease until we want to see what we really think of ourselves and meet our own criticism of ourselves.

A Landscape of Our Thoughts

“...I go / Through the desert sore afraid.” Mind has often been described as geography: our thoughts are in motion; they travel, cover ground, take paths, have directions. The desert Stephens writes about, these waste places, are a certain landscape that people make themselves go over, sometimes as they lie in bed at night and can't sleep, but at other times too: the waste places are dislike of self become terrain.

     “Holding up my head, although / I am as frightened as a maid.” Can we want to act as though we're so sure of ourselves, so at ease with ourselves, when we are really very ill-at-ease? James Stephens was interested in the fact that people disliked themselves, yet could act as though they were very self-satisfied.

     So much of social life, political life, and business life consists of people putting on a show of “all's well” (“holding up [their] head”)—when they're really agitated, tremulous, and self-disgusted. One person looks at another and thinks, “I wish I had the self-assurance he has.” Meanwhile, that second person looks at the first and says inwardly, “Look how at ease he seems. Why can't I feel that way?” Both act confident; both are deeply and mightily unsure. Both feel they're trying to evade something—and they try to put that feeling aside.

Who the Lion Is

n the second quatrain we meet the inner critic everyone has. That critic is represented by the lion. This stanza has humor, both visually and in its music: the lion is presented as fearsome, but the raising of his eye and the motion of his paw are rather delicate. The music has suspense—but is also jaunty:

The couching lion there I saw
From barren rocks lift up his eye,
He parts the cactus with his paw,
He stares at me as I go by.

The sound of the third line—“He parts the cactus with his paw”—through the way it has both heavy thrust and thoughtful pauses, makes us feel the movement of a large yet placid paw. Then:

He would follow on my trace
If he knew I was afraid,
If he knew my hardy face
Hides the terrors of a maid.

     Yes, we try to fool, not only others, but ourselves. We try to fool the critic in us and put it off the track. We put on a show for ourselves. As we get the feeling we're questioning ourselves, even accusing ourselves, we try to convince ourselves not to. We tell ourselves, “What are you questioning me for?—I'm a good guy. It's the fault of all those other people—you know that. I'm fine. In fact, I'm really quite wonderful.” That's the “hardy face” which “hides the terrors of a maid.”

The Critical Self in Motion

n the 4th and 5th quatrains we have various motions of this lion, presented musically:

In the night he rises, and
He stretches forth, he snuffs the air,
He roars and leaps along the sand,
He creeps and watches everywhere.

His burning eyes, his eyes of bale,
Through the darkness I can see;
He lashes fiercely with his tail,
He would love to spring at me.

     The way we look critically at ourselves can be seen as having motions; and that is what happens here. For example, we both doubt ourselves and accuse ourselves; but doubt and accusation move differently. We insinuate our self-criticism; we leap at ourselves with it; we eye ourselves; we keep track of ourselves; we lash out at ourselves. These stanzas are a choreography of self-suspicion and self-dislike.

     Meanwhile, as often in the poetry of Stephens, the writing here, the musical statement, has at once a naiveté, an innocence, and such a sense of evil.

     The sixth quatrain has might—and is also accurate about the self:

I am the lion in his lair,
I am the fear that frightens me,
I am the desert of despair,
And the nights of agony.

Yes. All this is in every person: the questioner of oneself; the fear of the questioning and the effort to evade it; the pain which is the punishment we give ourselves because we've tried to get away from our own criticism.

A Friend

Here is how Stephens concludes:

Night or day, whate'er befall,
I must walk that desert land,
Until I can dare to call
The lion out to lick my hand.

This is beautiful, and it is true. It says we will go on in fear and trouble until we want to welcome what the lion is—to welcome our own ethical unconscious, our criticism of ourselves. And when we do welcome it, we shall find that something we wanted to see as fearful is really kind to us. The lion will “lick [our] hand”: our inevitable self-questioning is really our friend; indeed, is really love.

     Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge that enables people to articulate our criticism of ourselves so we can be the persons we truly want to be. The poem on which I've commented is an illustration of this important sentence in Eli Siegel's Self and World: “No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.” * In the Aesthetic Realism consultations now taking place, men and women standing for America are seeing with great pleasure that that statement is true.

— ELLEN REISS, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

You Punish Both
By Eli Siegel

he next term is quite different from the two we just looked at, fugue and hypnosis:

Hypochondriasis: Persistent overconcern with the state of physical or emotional health, accompanied by various bodily complaints without demonstrable organic pathology.

What's Real Intelligence?
By Michael Palmer