Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

In love, how important are conversations? Does a couple judge each other on how fair their conversations are to the world and people? Is there anything more central to love than the way two people speak together? For the very needed and hopeful answers to these questions, read “Love—& How We Talk to Each Other,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing a beautiful, definitive lecture that Eli Siegel gave in 1964. In it, he discusses his 1930 poem “A Marriage” and how it preludes what Aesthetic Realism explains about love. With enormous pleasure and gratitude I say: Aesthetic Realism is that which makes clear what love really is, and also what the big interference is—the huge mistake people have made about love for centuries and are making right now.

The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism shows, is “to feel closely one with things as a whole”—to like the world itself through one’s closeness to a person. And the mistake—the immensely popular mistake—is to use a person one says one cares for to get away from the world, lessen it, feel superior to it together.

“A Marriage” is a poem in 20 sections. It is musically sweeping and vivid, logical and throbbing. And our current issue has Mr. Siegel’s discussion of sections 2 through 5. He is showing that any two people, however alone together they may be, are always related to the whole world, and have the world in them. Even the troubles in marriage—for instance, the way two people can go from sweetness to rage—have their inexpungible likeness to outside reality.

Always There: The Opposites

Love and how it will fare begin with what the nature of the self is, and the nature of the world. And these are described in a central principle of Aesthetic Realism: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” A person we see ourselves as caring for has the structure of the world in him: reality’s opposites. We may be taken, for example, by the way he is intense yet gentle. But intensity and gentleness are also in the way rain may fall, sunlight may come to us on a spring day; they’re in the music of Chopin, brightly colored silk, the sudden but friendly laugh of a stranger. We can’t truly love those qualities in a person we’re close to, if we spurn the world those qualities are of, and the people and things that have them…. >>Read more