Aesthetic Realism podcast

I've just seen the new Aesthetic Realism podcast, "Toughness and a Feeling Heart-- Can a Man Have Both?" The answer, consultant and actor Bennett Cooperman shows, is yes. It was a moving experience to witness this podcast. If people felt what is shown here -- that being moved by the world is also a tough thing, not weak -- would they be unjust to someone because their skin colour or their features are not just like their own? I don't think so. I used to pride myself on being able to remain unaffected. I thought feeling was a weakness. At the same time I longed to have sweeping emotions and cursed myself for being cold. This podcast has the answer men, and women too, are yearning for.
And if, like me, you're a Jack London fan, you're in for a real treat!

"The People of Clarendon County"

Check out this great event last month in Washington DC at the Capitol Visitors' Center:
"The People of Clarendon County”—A Play by Ossie Davis, & the Answer to Racism!"

The Great Fight of EGO vs. TRUTH

This coming Sunday, August 23 at 2:30 PM, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City there will be a matinee of songs -- Gilbert and Sullivan, doo-wop, spirituals, Broadway show tunes, and more -- that will move us and teach us about the most important fight going on now in America and under our own skins -- between ego, lying about the world to please ourselves, and truth.

Every person, of every ethnic or national background, religion, sex, has this battle, and it's raging in America, with lies about the British and Canadian health care systems and President Obama's proposals all over the media. The comments to the songs in this matinee explain what is going on.

The fight between ego and truth is constant, both nationally and personally, including in love. One of the songs in this matinee is about just that subject, as a young woman tells us defiantly and complacently, "Don't Say Nothin' Bad about My Baby!" Then there are songs that are about real love; about how, through caring more for one person, the whole world can look good to us. How the battle of ego vs. truth goes in us will determine how love fares in our lives.

I've learned that every beautiful song puts together opposites -- heaviness and lightness, for and against, pleasure and pain -- in a way that we need to in our daily lives, at work, with friends, with our family, in our thoughts to ourselves. In every good song a composer was doing justice to the aesthetic structure of the world -- the oneness of opposites. "The world, art, and self explain each other:" Eli Siegel stated, "each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." Learning and studying this has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Music can really help us be the people we want to be; proud, at ease, happy!

Here is the announcement:
The Great Fight of EGO vs. TRUTH!

"They Look at Us," by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism

Here is a poem about two of the men I respect most:

They Look at Us

Martin Luther King
Is with John Brown.
Look up: you'll see them both
Looking down--
Deep and so wide
At us.

You can read Eli Siegel's note to his poem at the Aesthetic Realism Online Library.

"The People of Clarendon County"

Journalist and Aesthetic Realism associate Alice Bernstein has done a wonderful thing in resurrecting the dramatic and moving Ossie Davis play about the 1954 landmark Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision. The People of Clarendon County I first learned of Rev. Joseph DeLaine and those brave men and women of Clarendon County, South Carolina, when I was teaching government classes in New York City. We were studying the Brown case and I was interested in the fact that the Supreme Court decision was about five separate cases that had been filed under an umbrella suit. This play is about the people whose heroic actions really started that case. It was written by Ossie Davis. And as the book flier says: "It was performed just once, in 1955, for an enthusiastic audience of union brothers and sisters at Local 1199’s Bread and Roses Cultural Project in New York City. The young actors were Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier.
"In her Introduction, journalist and Aesthetic Realism Associate Alice Bernstein tells of conversations with Ossie Davis in 2004 which led to her discovery of “The People of Clarendon County” and her idea for this book. With Mr. Davis’s encouragement, she gathered documents and photographs by and about these unsung heroes, which make history come alive, and essays by authorities on the education that can end racism: Aesthetic Realism, founded by philosopher and poet, Eli Siegel."
I've seen as a teacher and as a person that Aesthetic Realism really can change the prejudice, the conceit and ignorance of racism, into a true appreciation of the value of people different from oneself.

Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

This week's issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known is about education. The understanding of children and of the subject of education here is new, kind, very hopeful, and true. It is completely anti-prejudice.
In it, editor Ellen Reiss writes:
"Aesthetic Realism explains that the purpose of education is “to like the world through knowing it.” And the fundamental interference with learning, the thing that has a child not want to learn, or be unable to, is a dislike of the world which has gone deep in that child. Eli Siegel has described the world as all “that begins where our finger tips end.”

I see this as true about every child I've ever taught; and as true about myself of once. As a child I had difficulty with chemistry, advanced mathematics; and I even had trouble remembering facts about history on a test I had "aced" just the previous day. My accuity did not go deep because with all my brightness and high scores on tests, I had a dislike of the world as such.

There is so much more in this journal. It is light years ahead of anything I learned in teachers' college. It should be the basis of every class for teachers. For instance, Ms. Reiss writes:
"Take a boy of 8, whom we can call Marcus. In his short life he has come to feel that what's-not-himself will likely hurt him, is something he should be suspicious of and hide from or try to fool. Then Marcus is in a classroom, and every subject presented to him is an aspect of that outside world. Arithmetic is that world taking the form of numbers. History, plainly, is about the world—the world as past. Letters and books were created by strangers—they're ambassadors of that wide external reality.
"Though Marcus hasn't made the decision consciously, he has made it deep within: he doesn't want the representatives of a disliked, distrusted universe to get inside him, lodge within his mind. Therefore he has a “learning difficulty.”

One more quotation from the commentary:
". . . persons who speak about improving education in America but aren't interested in having every child own justly the wealth of America, are hypocrites."

As a teacher for over twenty-five years -- of which most of that has been teaching in the inner-city, I saw "Thank you, Ellen Reiss. This is the education America needs."

Rock 'n' Roll, in its technique, opposes racism

I've just had the honour to take part in the greatest tribute to Rock 'n' Roll that I know of. It is "Rock 'n' Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes -- A Celebration!"

With songs from 1954 up to this very millennium, we present what Aesthetic Realism explains; that all art is for justice, for life, and against cruelty.

Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism, gave a lesson in the 1960's to a rock musician, and in it he explained the meaning and purpose of rock 'n' roll. A person's private, often painful, thoughts are made public, made into a rip-roaring celebration of organised (and often wild!) sound. A purpose of rock 'n' roll, he said, is to shatter what he called "The Ordinary Doom" -- the feeling in every person that what we feel to ourselves will never be known.

This presentation shows that rock 'n' roll by its very nature is ethical. Singers and instruments join with each other, add to each other's meaning -- they don't diminish each other, even when they conflict; the purpose is to bring out meaning, to show this is a world with a structure that makes sense. This is so different from what happens in racism, where one person builds himself/herself up falsely by making less of another.

Do not miss our next performance: Sunday, September 28, at 2:30 pm. Call ahead for reservations to be sure of a seat: 212 777 4490.

For more on how Aesthetic Realism sees the great subject of Rock 'n' Roll, see:
Ellen Reiss on the meaning of music, including the Rolling Stones
Kevin Fennell on the life and art of Elvis Presley
My article on The Beatles' "She Loves You"
The Opposites in Music class taught by Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, and Edward Green

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known

The current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, which is titled "People, Literature, & Evolution" includes another section of Eli Siegel's magnificent lecture, "Poetry Is of Man." There is also a very funny, very ethical essay by Carol McCluer, actress and writer.

Every section of this journal opposes racism. For instance, the opening commentary by the editor, Ellen Reiss, takes three famous characters from literature and shows how each is described as aesthetic; that, I have learned, is what every good novelist does.

"The one effective opponent to the having of contempt for people," Ms. Reiss explains, "is aesthetics. It is to see that reality's opposites—such as rest and motion, high and low, mystery and everydayness, hope and fear, wildness and containment, complexity and simplicity, history and the moment—are richly, vibrantly, inevitably in every person we may meet or hear of, from our uncle, to a stranger on the street, to a person with a different skin tone a continent away."

Isn't that fine?