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Aesthetic
Realism seminar:
How Do We Want to
Express Ourselves?
with a
discussion about Horace Greeley
By Michael Palmer
I
am grateful to have learned from Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism what
it means to express ourselves, truly, honestly. In his great
lecture, Aesthetic Realism and Expression, Mr. Siegel said:
- To express ourselves…would be to do that which our selves would be most pleased with and most benefited by.
He showed that the expression that pleases
and most benefits us comes from our deepest desire to know and like the
world, be deeply affected by it, and to want to use what we are to add
to the world. And he described the greatest opposition to true
expression—the desire in every person to have contempt for the world—to
lessen the meaning of things and people for the false glory of
oneself. This has made for emptiness, for the ordinary pain
people experience in their lives every day, and for the greatest
horrors including racism and war.
Here I discuss what I have
learned from Aesthetic Realism about my own life, and about aspects of
the life of the famous American newspaper editor of the 19th century,
Horace Greeley. As editor, Greeley welcomed what could have a
good effect on people’s lives. He was passionately for, he said,
that in the world which would, “improve the moral, intellectual or
social conditions of mankind.” And he tried to be true to this in
ways important in American history.
Two Ideas of Expression Begin Early
In Aesthetic Realism and Expression, Eli Siegel explained:
- We have to be impressed before we can express ourselves. Part of the being impressed is the being stirred.
As I was growing up in the Bronx, I felt most stirred and expressed
through sports, especially baseball. My father and older brother
both cared for sports and I got the feeling that’s where life was most
exciting and interesting. I memorized statistics about players
and the history of sports and I would practice doing play-by-play
descriptions of games, hoping to become a sportscaster.
But I didn’t know then, what
Aesthetic Realism explains, that my deepest desire was to like
the whole world and, like many boys today, I used my care for
sports against everything else. For instance, when guests came to
the house, I chose often to go to my room and stay there alone
listening to games on the radio. I saw people’s lives and their
interests as dull and thought it best to keep to myself. This, I
learned, was contempt, which stopped me from seeing meaning in other
people, learning from them, and being useful to them. This
contempt made impossible the deep feeling and expression that I
desperately wanted.
When I learned this great principle of
Aesthetic Realism, I began to see what I was hoping for in caring for
sports, “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of
opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” I began to
see that baseball has a structure that is aesthetic, a oneness of
opposites. For instance, on the baseball diamond, there is point
and width. You begin at home plate and go out, all the way to the
far reaches of the outfield. In my life, I was a lonely home
plate, hoping all would center on me, and I hadn’t wanted to reach out
widely to people and things. Baseball is also a rich relation of
the opposites of one and many. In a game there are nine
individuals, all working together for one beautiful purpose—to play the
game well and it is thrilling.
But not knowing I needed to
use baseball, as everything else, to like the world, I instead used it
to glorify myself. As a teenager, I played on a Police
Athletic League team. We had won the borough championship
and were going for the City title. In the semi-final game against
Brooklyn, I intentionally ignored a sign from my coach to lay down a
sacrifice bunt. I wanted to impress, among others, my
cousin who had come to the game, so instead of bunting, I swung away
and grounded out, killing what could have been a big
inning. The coach took me out of the game. Hurt and
embarrassed, I expressed myself by sulking and rooting inwardly for my
team to lose. This was tremendous ill will. I didn’t care
about my teammates and all the work it had taken to get us where
we were. Fortunately, my team went on to win the City
championship, but I was deeply ashamed of how I had been.
As the years went on, I
cultivated a “nice guy” exterior, wanting to be liked, but I was pretty
cold inside and mean, not interested in knowing or strengthening
anyone. I felt my life was empty and didn’t know why. I was
so fortunate to have met the kind comprehension of Aesthetic Realism
and began to learn what it would mean to be truly
expressed. In an Aesthetic Realism class I attended with
Eli Siegel in 1972, through questions asked me, I began to see how I
had been stifling my expression. He asked me:
Do you think you hope people be as good as they can be?
- MP. I think I can have better hopes for people.
- ES. Do you like the way you see any person here? Do you like how you see Bill Jones [a student in the class]?
- MP. I haven’t thought about it.
- ES. That’s right, you’re not enough interested. And he said,
- “A human being, according to
Aesthetic Realism, has an infinite possibility of being related to
other things, an infinite possibility of conscious
relation…{There is} the line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”—‘I am a
part of all that I have met. ‘ But Ulysses could also say, ‘I am a part
of all that I haven’t met.’ Do you want to come into your
heritage? Your heritage is all reality besides yourself as seen
by you.”
I love Eli Siegel with all my heart for
teaching me how to come into my heritage by wanting to be just to
people and things in the world. This is an ongoing wonderful
adventure and has made for new life in me with emotions and expression
that I treasure.
To
Part 2, click here
© Michael
Palmer
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