Dear Unknown Friends:
One
of the biggest reasons humanity needs to study Aesthetic Realism is that
people don't know what it is in them that weakens them, interferes with
their intelligence and happiness, has them be cold and unkind, has them
dislike themselves; and they also don't know what the best thing in them
is — that which makes for strength, largeness of mind, kindness, pride.
In terms of history and culture: people do not understand what in the self
has made for "the best that has been known and thought in the world," as
Matthew Arnold put it; and what in the self has caused the brutality present
throughout the centuries — has caused what Burns called "man's inhumanity
to man." The explanation is in Aesthetic Realism. And it is in the great
1950 lecture by Eli Siegel that we are serializing, Aesthetic Realism
and Nature. Never before had nature been talked of as it was that evening
fifty years ago.
Aesthetic
Realism explains that the thing in us which weakens our minds, interferes,
often ruinously, with every aspect of our lives, and makes us mean is our
desire for contempt: the desire to get "an addition to self through
the lessening of something else." The best thing in us, the source of all
kindness, intelligence, and art, is the desire to respect reality,
to
like the world honestly. We are using everything we meet — whether
a lake, a movie, an article of clothing, an embrace, a happening in the
news, or garbage on the sidewalk — either to respect the world, or have
contempt for it. As I tell of this explanation here, I feel with new wonder
its might, its grandeur. This knowledge, presented by Eli Siegel, of our
two defining purposes, is as much a turning point for civilization as the
coming to be of the alphabet.
Sex and the Internet
Let us take a matter that seems
so unlike the subject of the present lecture. An article in the New
York Times of May 16 had the headline "Cybersex Gives Birth to a Psychological
Disorder." "Fully a third of all [Internet] visits" the article informs
us, are
to sexually oriented Web
sites, chat rooms and news groups .... Experts in the field say that the
affordability, accessibility and anonymity of the Internet are fueling
a brand new psychological disorder — cybersex addiction — that appears
to be spreading with astonishing rapidity and bringing turmoil to the lives
of those affected.
The
so-called "experts" do not say, because they
do not know, what causes
this misuse of sex — in fact, what makes it misuse. Technology may
bring into one's home or office a certain kind of temptation (to use an
old-fashioned word). But technology did not create that in a person which
is appealed to, and impelled, or compelled.
The Criterion
The thing that makes the use
of another's body wrong — be it in a brothel in the 14th century or through
images on the Web in the 21st — is the same thing that makes the use of
anything wrong, including, as Mr. Siegel describes here, a blue sky, leaves,
clouds. Also, what would make sex right is the same as what would make
one's enjoying clouds, sky, leaves right.
People
want to be pleased. And the question, Aesthetic Realism explains, is: will
it be through respect for the world and other human beings, or through
contempt? With sex, something so explosive, so comprehensive takes
place as to one's body, that there is the opportunity to feel you have
made the whole world something that exists to please you. There can be
a feeling of having the world at last on one's own ecstatic terms through
another human being. The complexities of reality and people have been annulled;
you do not have to think, try to understand anything. Through someone's
lavish intimate attentions, through someone's seeming to give himself or
herself over to you utterly, you make insignificant all those people who
confused you, and turn the world into a fleshly servant of yourself.
It
is this contempt to which "cybersex," and pornography as such, appeal intensely.
Meanwhile, people can also have contempt through the most customary sex
in the sanctity of the marriage bed. The only thing ever wrong with
sex, Mr. Siegel explained, is the contempt and selfishness in it. And the
two big questions about cybersex, and any sex, are: 1) Are you respecting
the person whose body you are looking at or thinking about or dealing with;
or are you having contempt for that person? 2) Do you respect the world
more through these sexual thoughts and happenings, or do you have contempt
for it?
The
only real answer to the allure of contemptuous sex is for people to see
knowing as tremendous pleasure; to see respect for reality as luscious.
While people don't like the world, they will want to have the world punished
and serving them — through sex, likely, and other means: perhaps through
food, greed, the managing of other human beings, in the family and out.
For cybersex to be a draw no longer, people also need to see what Eli Siegel
describes in his great essay "Obscenity Weakens; Art Strengthens":
A person having a choice
between weakening himself and being pleased in some accented way, would,
if he saw the matter clearly, choose not weakening. We are for sex
very much, but we are for not being weaker even more. [TRO 900]
People need to see that sexual
conquest via the Web weakens them — and not only because, as the Times
indicates, it interferes with their marital lives. They need to see it
weakens them because it is sheer contempt and against what their minds
are for, and therefore it makes their minds less whole, less keen, less
deep, less organized, less alive.
Sex Can Be Respect
Aesthetic Realism is magnificent
in explaining that sex can be respect for the world — as listening to music
can be, and admiring the flight of a bird can be. The reason sex, or anything,
is right, can be found in this Aesthetic Realism principle: "All beauty
is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we
are going after in ourselves." The largest opposites in our lives are
self
and world. And Mr. Siegel was speaking of them when he explained
in passionate, logical sentences that I love:
There is only one thing
that is immoral in the world: liking oneself too much and the outside world
too little .... Once you feel what is owing to yourself is more and what
is owing to other people is less, you can rob people's purses, tell lies,
keep back things that would do good to people, start wars.
Sex has had this disproportion,
but doesn't have to. Sex can be a means of feeling one is taking care of
oneself lavishly through finding value in what is not oneself: the world,
as represented by a person one respects and treasures. Sex can be a means
of saying, "This is a world I don't want to keep away from, hide from -
it is a world I want to give myself to fully. This is a person — and a
world — I want to know richly, and be known by richly." And then, sex is
kind, and proud.
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We go now to Aesthetic Realism and Nature. Eli Siegel himself loved
nature. And he has been speaking about a person whom he respected, the
writer Richard Jefferies (1848-87), and explaining the deep trouble in
his life, which no one else understood. Jefferies, Mr. Siegel shows, unknowingly
used his ardent care for nature against people — to care less for them,
not more.
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| There was in Jefferies
a tremendous love for nature. When I say tremendous love — he makes most
nature writing going on in the world right now look like thin milk, too
much warmed over. He had the inside of nature. One thinks all the
fields are in him. But he could not see that nature was also London and
the hurly-burly, though he was interested in London. He suffered a good
deal. He died early.
I read now
some passages from this very intense book of Jefferies, The Story of
My Heart, which was published in 1883:
Moving up the sweet short turf,
at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling ....
The very light of the sun was whiter and the more brilliant here. By the
time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances
and the annoyances of existence.
Good. But what is in that word forgotten?
I felt myself, myself .... The
view was over a broad plain, beautiful with wheat, and inclosed by a perfect
amphitheatre of green hills .... Woods hid the scattered hamlets and farmhouses,
so that I was quite alone.
This is good
to see. But if Jefferies had said, "All the people whom I've seen were
made by the same force that made these beautiful sights, and therefore
some of the meaning of all this is present in them too — in perhaps a father
who didn't understand me, some relative who was unjust to me" — then Jefferies
would have been using this beauty in a true fashion. I'm not sure that
he did. I doubt it, in fact.
This is
some of the most intense nature writing in all literature:
Lying down on the grass, I spoke
in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond
sight. I thought of the earth's firmness — I felt it bear me up; through
the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth
speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air — its pureness, which is
its beauty; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke
to the sea: ... I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory.
Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and
brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race .... The rich blue of the
unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested.
I commend this.
I think it is fine. I also know that it can be used for a purpose that
is not good. When Jefferies says, "The rich blue of the unattainable flower
of the sky drew my soul towards it," that in itself is most praiseworthy.
But having known people who have looked at the blue sky not for the purpose
of understanding their neighbors or relatives or others, I can say that
the beauty of the sky can be used for a wretched purpose, for a purpose
that is false to the heart of man and false to his very purpose in being.
The blue sky then joins such things as morphine, gambling, some of the
lesser and even the more terrible aspects of fascism—;all the things that
are used to say that the world is a bad place and the only way to deal
with it is to conquer it or to get away from it.
Now,
Jefferies was in a dilemma which he didn't understand. He wanted to like
people, but already, in being so involved with nature, he had a solution
that did not involve the full understanding of people. That is why, in
his writing, when he deals with people in everyday action, he is not so
good. — But going on:
Touching the crumble of
earth, the blade of grass, the thyme flower,... holding out my hand for
the sunbeams to touch it,... thus I prayed that I might touch to the unutterable
existence infinitely higher than deity.
What He Wanted to Feel
Jefferies was not a religious
man, but he does use the words prayer and soul. He doesn't
say what he means by prayer. Real prayer is the desire to feel that whatever
the world wants is the same as what we want, and the desire that the world,
in its power, go along with a true want. Prayer, where it's good, has as
its objective the desire to see this: that whatever the world is, whatever
the world does, is in keeping with our wishes. We pray, in other words,
that not only God be on our side, but that we be on the side of God — which,
as Aesthetic Realism would put it, means that not only the machinery of
the world work to please us, but that we feel we're on the side of the
deepest machinery of the world. And the soul of man is the same thing,
in the long run, as the unconscious of man where it's going for something
good that we don't see clearly enough. The unconscious as having good force
is the soul of man. There is also an unconscious that has a bad force:
that's contempt, which is likewise conscious.
We
have that word pray, and Jefferies doesn't say what it means. But
he did want to feel that the whole world, including the world of cities,
was on his side.
With all the intensity of
feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth,
the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean — ... with
these I prayed.
When
one thinks of all the people on Sunday who will be on the beaches, and
will put sand over their heads, and will sometimes get face-down on the
sand if they can manage it, and will put themselves in postures in which
they will be taken for mounds and protuberances of earth; and when we think
of all the people, likewise, who will lie face-down on the grass, and will
sometimes lie on the grass and lose themselves in the sky — I can say this
is all, from one point of view, quite nice; but from another point of view
it's a hellish business.
Looking
at the sky, and lying face-down on the earth, and getting oneself in a
whole canopy of sand-all those things look decidedly innocent. But they
go along with the desire which people use in sleep, in going to the bathroom,
in sometimes not wanting to talk, in sometimes eating too much, so they
can't move. This tendency is present: the desire to have a fort around
oneself, to cover up oneself. It can be done with gaiety, apparently. But
still, contempt, the desire to despise the world, is on the job. When I
think that this tendency on the part of people to assert themselves by
making a separate universe of themselves can use anything, I think of all
the people who will bury themselves in the sand tomorrow at Coney Island
and think themselves great boys in doing so (or great ladies, or great
girls), and I say, Well, the thing in you that you were born to make less,
you are now making more.
A Good Way
It could be done in a good way.
I'm not against lying face-down on the grass — if one says, "I'm doing
this for the purpose of knowing," and that means not knowing just one thing,
but knowing what things are about.
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