Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

Everyone imagines—about people and things we see, meet, remember, make up. But what is the purpose of imagination? Are there two kinds—good and bad? How can we distinguish? Read “How Do We Want to Imagine?,” the kind, thrilling new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We are serializing the important—also exciting and delightful—lecture Imagination—It Gathers, which Eli Siegel gave in 1971. And here too is an article about imagination by architect and Aesthetic Realism consultant Dale Laurin. It’s from a paper he presented last month, at a public seminar titled “A Man’s Imagination: What Makes It Good or Bad?”

That title has in it something of the greatness of Aesthetic Realism. People haven’t known that imagination, with all its vast diversity, is of two kinds. Eli Siegel is the critic who showed it is, and made clear the distinction between these. There is the imagination which—even when it deals with the grotesque or ugly—is based on respect for the world. That is good imagination, good for the person having it and for humanity. The other imagination is based on contempt for the world; it is bad imagination, is always hurtful, and (as I wrote in the previous issue) is behind every human cruelty, from snobbishness to racism and fascism.

This Aesthetic Realism principle is true about every aspect of art and life, including imagination: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Imagination, Mr. Siegel showed, is always a joining of the biggest opposites in our lives, self and world. We take something from the outside world, and do something with it in our mind. (Even our imaginings about ourselves are about us in relation to what’s outside of us.) In a sense, our imagination changes the thing it deals with, and the changing includes what Mr. Siegel speaks of here: gathering. That is, through our mind we join this thing with other things; we also find things, sometimes very surprising, within it. If the imagining is good, what we do to the thing, how we change it, is in keeping with what it is: honors it, is true to it and the world.

These Tell of Imagination

As a prelude to the present section of Imagination—It Gathers and to Dale Laurin’s article, I am going to comment on four sentences by Eli Siegel from a much quoted work of his: Damned Welcome: Aesthetic Realism Maxims….. Read More