How Can We Be Composed?: Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow

"Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel

I love this painting, “Hunters in the Snow” by Pieter Bruegel, the great Flemish painter of the 16th century. Bruegel shows a vast, snow-covered landscape. We see a valley full of ponds, a winding river, steeply roofed houses and steepled churches, many people skating, many trees and hills, and some of the sharpest mountain crags ever. Down below on the right there’s a mill with its wheel frozen, and people working near it — to the left there’s a blazing wind-blown fire with a family working around it. There are magpies perched, observing in different directions on the tree branches and one flying with wings outstretched. And there are the three hunters returning with their pack of varied dogs. With all this diversity and activity, surprisingly, a person feels composed looking at this painting — and in this talk I’ll try to show why.

Eli Siegel, the great American poet and critic who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, describes in his essay, “Art As Composition,” what this painting has and every person wants:

“The mind of man wants to see reality in two ways: as reassuringly continuous, and as delightfully surprising. If a person knew how much sameness he wanted to see in reality, he would be astonished; if he knew, too, how much difference he wanted to see in reality, he would be astonished. Man wants to see reality at once as the same and different: through art he can do this…”

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Love & Criticism: Is There Any Relation?

Alan Bates and Mary Ure in John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger"

[With a section on John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger"] In an Aesthetic Realism class when I was 28 years old, Eli Siegel asked me a question concerning a man I was in turmoil about that every woman interested in love can usefully ask herself: “Do you want to conquer him, or understand him?” I said, “Both,” and Mr. Siegel asked, “Which is predominant?” I answered “I’m not sure” — but the truth was that my desire to conquer was predominant. “Has it torn you apart?” he asked.  Yes, it had.  And this is why I was in such pain about the men I’d had to do with.
      Studying Aesthetic Realism enabled me to change: to see how grand, cultural, wonderful it is to understand a man, and learn to be a true critic of myself and of him.  “Contempt is what ruins love,” explains Ellen Reiss in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known,issue 1447, titled “The Desire for Criticism”: 

We want criticism of our contempt, criticism that enables us to understand it so we can choose not to have it!…A friend is someone who cares enough for our life so that he doesn’t butter us or collaborate with us, but really wants what is hurtful in us to be less. 

We Need to Be Critics of Our Purpose …more

Wangari Maathai, 1940-2011, a Courageous Woman

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai, who died last week, wants us to use her death to like the whole world more–the Earth and its people she cared for and fought for passionately. She wants us to do all we can to know and be fair to all its living beings and its resources–not exploit them!

      In honor of Dr. Maathai’s courageous life and work, I quote from the issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known current at the time of her death last week, titled “To Exploit or to Know?” :

Eli Siegel explained that what is ending the profit system is “the force of ethics” working in the world. Part of that power of ethics is the fact that people throughout the world have more knowledge. A huge result of the increased knowledge is what Mr. Siegel called “more competition with the American product…. America is not the only country now with industrial know-how.” But another result is that people in other countries are more educated—and therefore increasingly less exploitable.

Read the entire issue at http://www.aestheticrealism.org/tro1805.html.  

      You can also read here a paper I presented publically in 2010 with a section about Wangari Maathai’s  life & work .

How Can a Woman Be Both Serious & Lighthearted?

Letting go on the dance floor!

I remember in my late teens feeling that other people’s efforts to be light­heart­ed were silly. I tended to be sad, even grim….I did many lively things as a girl in the village of Glendale, Ohio—coasting on my bike down Gunny Hill, dancing and singing with my friends to rock ‘n’ roll music, turning cartwheels on our front lawn, running with Chippy, our dog. But by my mid-teens I was already losing my sense of fun. I preferred novels that were tragic. I avoided reading Dickens because I’d gotten the impression he was a humorist….   In Aesthetic Realism consultations, which I began to have at age 27, I learned a way of seeing the world that is beautifully serious, and that enabled me to be increasingly proud of how I saw people, including men….

My consultants asked me, for instance: “Would you say there is a disposition in you, even as you have to do with people, to be removed and just by yourself?”

Nancy Huntting:  Yes.  
Consultants: So even when you devote yourself to a person, the other self is working?
      This surprised me, but I began to see it was true. When I told my consultants that my father, Donald Huntting’s, manner was more “reserved” than my mother’s, and when she got very angry he just didn’t respond, one thing they asked was: “Did your father tease your mother?”

NH:  Yes.
Consultants:  And have you teased the world? Do you think you are too good for the world?
Yes, I did.  As I reconsidered that opinion, a certain heaviness and lethargy ended.  Through studying Aesthetic Realism I saw something thrilling: both I, and the men I’d had to do with, were trying to put reality’s opposites together. Being energetic didn’t have to knock a person out, seriousness was not depression! Energy and repose, lightness and heaviness were meant to be in a beautiful relation as they are in music, or a good sentence in a novel.   more

Sheldon Kranz (1919-1980): A true poet

Sheldon Kranz is one of America’s true poets and important writers. In classes with Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism,  Sheldon Kranz learned what made him, authentically, a poet, and Aesthetic Realism enabled him to see new meaning in literature. As a result, in the 1970s he taught a course based on what he was learning, Literature and the Self.

       Read selected poems; short stories “My Mother Was a Girl,” and “The Betrayal,” which is about racism;  and  other works by him at SheldonKranz.com!

The Fight in Every Woman Between Selfishness & Generosity

Martha Gellhorn, American journalist (1908-1998)

Like many people, I wanted to be generous, but was selfish in ways I tried to make look noble.  In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #114, Eli Siegel describes the two directions we all have:

Man is a being given to self-interest simultaneously with his having a mind inclusive of everything and unable to separate itself from a regard for all life, all reality. …The first lack of good sense in man is his failure to see that he has two directions; and to see what harm two directions have done to him. The great harm, Aesthetic Realism shows, occurs when our interest in ourselves makes us contemptuous of the world we are born to know and like.

To solve the fight in us between selfishness and generosity — this is what we most need to know! Tonight I speak about my own life and what a woman is learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations, and about aspects of the life of the writer and journalist, Martha Gellhorn; born in St. Louis in 1908, she died in 1998 at the age of 89. . . . She is the only journalist ever black-listed and barred from returning to South Vietnam because the articles she wrote were so passionately critical of our horrible bombing and napalming of men, women and children. We can learn from the fight in her — and the way her life shows the most truly selfish purpose is fairness to the world.  More 

What’s Best in Us–& How Can We Be True to It?

When I came to New York City from where I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, I didn’t know what was best in me–but even so, I felt I wasn’t true to it. I’d gotten a lot of praise from my parents and teachers, yet  in high school I wrote to my best friend that I thought I was a failure.

“What’s the greatest desire in woman,” Eli Siegel asked a few years later in an Aesthetic Realism class I had the honor to attend,“to be complete–or seemingly happy?” And he asked me then, “What is your complete self?” Though I certainly felt I was incomplete, I had never thought of asking this. I said, “a person wanting to know.” “Can you put it another way–’My complete self wants to like the world’?” I felt respected deeply as Mr. Siegel spoke to me; he had me value my own possibilities of mind. I now know that I, and every woman, cannot settle for less.

In this class Mr. Siegel used Pride and Prejudice to have me see myself and men more truly. “What did Elizabeth find in Pride and Prejudice?” he asked me, and he explained:

Darcy was too proud, Elizabeth was too. As the work goes on Elizabeth finds Darcy also has feelings, is thoughtful, and not just a pleased aristocrat; and Elizabeth sees her own haughtiness. Do you…think a man wants very much to be kind?

The answer is yes–it’s the best thing in every man and he’s hoping a woman will encourage him to be true to that hope. more