Aesthetic Realism Foundation

141 Greene Street
New York, NY 10012

Autumn 2025

Dear Friend,

Amid so much worry in the world, there exists knowledge that can meet people’s hopes: a true, comprehensive, practical, enlivening education about the world, art, and our very selves. It is Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded in 1941 by the distinguished American poet and critic Eli Siegel. The basis of Aesthetic Realism is this principle:

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

I am Carol McCluer, honored to study in professional classes for consultants and associates, taught by Ellen Reiss, the Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education. I’m also a singer, actor, writer, daughter, sister, wife, mother, and grandmother. My gratitude is enormous that Aesthetic Realism is a means of understanding all these aspects of life, and so much more. Through years of careful study, I have seen that Aesthetic Realism is what people everywhere most need to know.

The Foundation presents this vital education in many ways. For instance, there are semester classes, taking place online, on such subjects as the visual arts, film, poetry, music, marriage, anthropology; and there is a great education class for teachers. There are magnificent consultations for individuals (I’ll say more about these). In our outreach program there are classes on architecture; musical performances with thrilling comment; and interactive talks at libraries and community centers. And there is more: you can read about it here, in our Mission Statement.

Every month, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation publishes a new issue of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical. TRO includes essays, poems, and serialized lectures by Eli Siegel—with his unprecedented understanding of the human mind, his wonderful humor and erudition. Also, editor Ellen Reiss writes commentaries—always vivid and wide—on subjects that are immediate, historical, and literary. Ms. Reiss continues mightily the work of Eli Siegel, and I love and respect her for it.

About Me—and All People

Early in my study of Aesthetic Realism I wrote about how my life changed through this education. What I described then, I feel even more passionate about now. And I thought that portions of it should be central to this letter to you. While about me, they’re about every person. They’re about the knowledge all humanity needs right now. So I’ll begin:

Through studying Aesthetic Realism, my life has changed—beautifully and dramatically. I once felt the most important thing about myself was the power I could have through how I looked, and I was self-centered and weary by the age of 25. I am so grateful to Aesthetic Realism that today I want to know and be deeply affected by the world: my mind was able to come alive.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that I came from the whole world and have the world in me. I learned I represented humanity in having an unlimited desire to like the world and an unlimited desire to have contempt for it, and these desires were fighting in me and others. I love Eli Siegel for explaining the human self, my self. In his great work Self and World he writes this about something everyone is in some way after, power:

Power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others. If a person’s power is only of the first kind, his unconscious will be in distress.

I learned that the way I wanted to be unaffected, while affecting others as much as I could, was a form of contempt, and it did make for distress in me. When I was able to see that I needed to be affected by the world and people in order to be myself, it made for a tremendous change: I began really to be able to learn, and to value my mind.

An Attitude to the World Begins

When I was growing up in Brea, California, my mother wanted our home to have a quiet, peaceful atmosphere. But I felt my parents pretended: things among us were not always nice and there was an insistence that they seem nice. I felt sad and had a glazed look in my eyes very early; I was demure and obedient. I also came to feel I could easily get my way with adults, especially my father. I remember his going out in the middle of a rainstorm late one night to get me a stuffed animal because I wouldn’t stop crying until he did. I came to feel my biggest power was in just looking lovely and being served.

I was happiest playing the piano and singing, as I practiced “Easy Piano Vocal Selections” from The King and I, Oklahoma!, and My Fair Lady. I felt the world was big and grand, and I had pleasure trying to give the music what it deserved. But even then I was in a fight between liking the world and using the world’s material to like only myself. I was enamored of the picture of myself playing and singing, and I would imagine people applauding me.

I felt I had an edge on my brothers and sister. My father called me “Carol Anne—my sweetheart,” and I felt he needed me more than anyone in the world. My mother was more critical of me, but I knew she wanted my approval, and I acted like a dreamy princess who might give it.

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked:

Did you come to the feeling that anything other than complete adoration of you is dull?—that unless someone acts like we are simply the most magnificent thing in the world, they’re cold to us?

Yes. Raging behind my demure exterior, I had the fight all people need to learn about in order to like themselves and for the world to be safe: the fight between our desire to respect the world, see meaning in it—and our desire to have contempt for it.

For instance, when I was about 8 I was riding my bicycle and Tommy Fremont was standing in our driveway. “Get out of my way!” I said to him. “No!” he said—and I rammed into him. He had recently had heart surgery, but that wasn’t real to me. I wouldn’t say I was sorry—my mother had to drag me down the street to apologize.

How could the sweet-seeming girl I was do that? It began with quietly robbing other people of their depths, their reality, and seeing them in terms of whether they made me important or comfortable. This is what people do every day and need to learn about. I knew I could be mean and selfish, and sometimes I prayed to God to help me be a better person. Years later I would learn from Aesthetic Realism what it alone shows: that contempt is the source of all injustice. Eli Siegel wrote:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.

As I grew older I worked to arrange my face to look composed even when I felt wild and anxious inside. I thought people who got too excited about anything were stupid and vulgar, and that I was in control of myself and so superior.

What I Depended on Most

By my teenage years, I felt the effect I could have through my looks was the most important thing in my life. But when boys or young men showed they were smitten by me, I thought they were foolish.

When I was 17 I won the “Miss Brea” contest; but instead of feeling victorious, I felt let down. I felt I had cheapened myself being in a beauty contest. Mr. Siegel explains in his kind, magnificent essay “The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl” (written, likely, around 1960):

If a girl has something of her, a belonging or manifestation of her, praised in such a way that the rest of her, the whole being of her, is diminished, she can feel disappointed and resentful.

I will be eternally grateful for his understanding of what a woman feels.

I was going farther and farther away from my deepest desire, to like the world through knowing it. The way I was using my mind to change the world to flatter and suit myself—often through exaggerating and lying—had increasingly painful consequences.

After high school I had a series of jobs in singing groups. I went from feeling I was on a cloud to feeling dull and disgusted with everything. I thought life was a crazy rollercoaster. Like thousands of people right now, I didn’t understand how I could do things I thought should make me happy, yet feel so despairing. I wrote in my diary:

I just wish I could be sincere instead of the flighty, sickening way I am. I wish I could cry or something, but I’ve got nothing to cry about really—just a hollow, windy place inside me.

With a vengeance, I went after getting work as a singer, thinking if I were more successful I would be happier. I worked as a back-up singer in Las Vegas, made television commercials, and toured South America with a disco group called Love and Kisses. I felt I had hit the big time—I also began using drugs almost every day. I did my own nightclub act and woke up the next day feeling depressed and empty, realizing with despair that I had done something I was sure would make me happy yet still felt horrible.

I had learned of Aesthetic Realism from my friend Bennett Cooperman (now an Aesthetic Realism consultant). And I respected so much what he told me about this philosophy. At last I decided to move to New York and study it. This was the wisest decision I ever made!

I Learn What Success Is

At my first Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked that beautiful question first asked by Eli Siegel in Aesthetic Realism lessons: “What do you have most against yourself?” I said I was afraid of success. And in the discussion my consultants explained: “One of the reasons you’re afraid of success, Ms. McCluer, is that you succeeded too much at things that didn’t totally represent you.”

   CMcC. Yes.

   Consultants. Mr. Siegel explained that we can succeed at many things, but we’ll feel deeply like a failure if our largest purpose is not seen by us. You’ve had so many false successes. . . . Do you think success in life is really to be able to respect something in this world in a way that matters?

I found the comprehension I’d been looking for all my life. In Aesthetic Realism consultations I began to see that no amount of praise was ever going to satisfy me because my deepest purpose was not to be praised but to know and like the world.

I studied this great principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” Opposites that had been tremendous and tormenting for me were softness and hardness: I could appear so soft and gentle though I felt hard inside. Now, studying these opposites, I was very moved when I saw a oneness of softness and hardness in everyday objects. I saw, for instance, on a street in New York: tires yielding to the pavement—and simultaneously supporting the weight of a car; the pavement, hard, which yet had been worn by traffic; the bodies of cars harder than the seats inside. Through the opposites the world seemed closer, friendlier to me, and had more wonder.

Even though I had loved to read when I was younger, by the time I was in my 20s I read less and less. My mind was becoming weaker, through having contempt for the world it was made to be fair to. It worried me that I didn’t remember things and often I felt so restless I couldn’t concentrate. I love more than words can express the way Aesthetic Realism sees and respects the possibilities in a person. My consultants asked me, “Do you think the way a person sees is central to her beauty?” And they said, “You’ve suffered because you haven’t felt it was so. You felt there was a beauty a person would see in you and praise, which wasn’t the same as the way your mind works.” I love Aesthetic Realism for valuing my mind even when I didn’t. Mr. Siegel’s respect and good will for people brought me to life. It can do this for humanity.

I eagerly began to read literature that I never would have, and it affected me so much—for instance, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady and George Eliot’s Adam Bede. Because of Aesthetic Realism dramatic presentations of Mr. Siegel’s lectures on many subjects, including plays, I read and studied with enormous pleasure plays by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Sheridan, Molière, and more. And it is an honor-of-honors to be an actor and singer with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, taking part in what I consider to be among the most important dramatic and musical events in the world.

And I’ll say simply this: from the beginning of my study of Aesthetic Realism, as my contempt was criticized and my desire to like the world strengthened, I had no desire for drugs and never again felt depressed and empty.

I Learn about Love

One of the largest sources of gratitude in my life is what I have learned from Aesthetic Realism about love. I had seen love the way I saw the world. I felt a man should make me the center of the univ­erse, superior to everything and everyone. Now I learned from Aesthetic Realism something utterly different: the purpose of love is to like the world itself through knowing a person, and through encouraging this person to see justly all people and things. That is: love, the real thing, is good will.

When I met Kevin Fennell, a student of Aesthetic Realism, I respected the logical and passionate way he wanted to see how the principles of Aesthetic Realism are true. And I respected the good effect he wanted to have on other people, and the way he was critical of inexactitude and superiority in me with both toughness and a sense of humor. This was good will. And—so differently from how I had been in the past—I wanted to know and strengthen Kevin. As Charlotte Brontë wrote: “Reader, I married him.” He has written important music criticism, in the field of rock ’n’ roll. And we both feel passionately that the great philosophy we continue to learn from every day is needed everywhere.

I’ll conclude with a video from an Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company cabaret performance. You’ll see and hear me comment on, and then sing, George and Ira Gershwin’s “How Long Has This Been Going On?” It’s a song I see as in keeping with the purpose of this letter.

With Alan Shapiro (piano), Robert Colavito (drums), and Tony Falanga (bass)

 

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