Michael Palmer, Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
Many people are troubled by their lack of intensity, by their feeling flat and thinking nothing is worth getting excited about. That was certainly true of me. I thought showing intensity about most things—except sports—was beneath me. Then there were times I showed a great deal of intensity, becoming suddenly angry in a way that made me ashamed. I couldn’t make sense of these conflicting ways in myself until I met and studied Aesthetic Realism. What I learned changed my life.
Issue 1877 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, titled “Intensity, False & True,” is about the crucial difference between intensity that is inexact and dishonest, and intensity that is fair to the world and has us like ourselves. It includes a powerful commentary by Ellen Reiss and a thrilling essay by Eli Siegel, about the need for honest intensity, both in life and in art. What’s in this issue is more urgent today than ever.
Ms. Reiss’s commentary begins:
We are honored to publish “Reflections on a Certain Lack of Intensity,” by Eli Siegel. This great essay was written, it seems, in the early 1950s, and what Mr. Siegel describes in it has to do very much with the literature of that time. Now, more than sixty years later, various ways of literary expression have changed; but the matters, the troubles, the mistakes that he explains—magnificently explains—are with us still, both in art and in life itself. I’ll mention some of those troubles about intensity as they’re present in lives of men and women day after day.
Mostly, people are intense in ways that make them ashamed—so much human intensity is anger that’s inexact and selfish. One result of this inaccurate intensity is: since people are ashamed of having it, they try instead to be unruffled, unaffected, cool. Meanwhile, people, often the same people, also feel bad because they lack intensity: they’re not for anything passionately; things don’t have wide, sharp meaning for them; they have the flat, flaccid, empty “is that all there is” feeling. So in the streets, homes, cultural establishments of America and the world, people are ashamed of both their intensity and their lack of it.