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menu qui sommes-nous? sci – contact us home poetry, complaint, & baseball posted on december 4, 2016 in blog poetry, complaint, & baseball we are proud to publish a group of 17 short poems by eli siegel, which he wrote in 1977 and titled simply “some poems.” they are beautiful. many are playful, have humor. all are musical. and in them is that way of seeing which eli siegel always had: he saw, and enabled people to see, the freshness, surprise, wonder that are in things as such. the poems are scientific: they state something factually, sometimes critically. and they show, as aesthetic realism itself does, that science and beauty, exactitude about the world and love of it, are the same. this is what people most want to know. we also print portions of a paper by barbara mcclung, from an aesthetic realism public seminar of last month titled “the ethics of complaint; or, do a woman’s objections make her proud?” mrs. mcclung teaches 3rd grade at ps 184 in manhattan. the matter of complaint, our showing we object, takes in a child’s whining over breakfast, and protests on the streets of a city; a wife’s scorn for her husband’s shirt, and the declaration of independence. it can be right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. on october 11, it was present in a way that shocked people and made them ashamed, in the third game of the american league championship series between the new york yankees and boston red sox. what can we learn about ourselves from that violent inter-objection which included boston pitcher pedro martinez’s throwing at karim garcia’s head; garcia’s then trying to hurt todd walker with a hard slide past second base; and 72-year-old yankee bench coach don zimmer’s trying to punch martinez, and weeping with shame later? the fight which mr. siegel showed to be constant within every person is present in us as to sports too. it is “the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality” (tro 151). not understanding this fight, people, including at baseball games, cannot distinguish between respect and contempt in themselves. sports, like art, aesthetic realism explains, give form to the world: they make a one of reality’s opposites. the known and unknown are one in a baseball game: we know its rules; we know the arrangement of the field with those four symmetrical bases — yet amid what we know, is such surprise, heart-thumping uncertainty, suspense. and expansion and contraction are together: the same ball that hurtles through much space is made to nestle snugly in a catcher’s mitt. people have felt reality as beautiful through baseball. the love for it has been a respect for the world. meanwhile, there has also been a use of sport to have a sneering victory over the world, to think well of oneself by despising what’s not oneself. this mix-up of respect and contempt can be in both players and fans. people are confused about their lives, and they would like to have ethics simplified: be able to be utterly against something and utterly for something and not have to think anymore. one way is to love your team and ferociously, stupendously hate the other. further, people want to like themselves; and a seemingly easy way is by having something which stands for you beat something which stands for all those outside things that confuse and oppose and don’t appreciate you. the desire to feel you’re somebody by despising and defeating what’s different, gets into people’s feelings about a game. it’s contempt, and it’s not the same as loving what baseball is, or soccer, or basketball. there is a big tendency to divide the world into that which belongs to you and is good, and that which doesn’t and should be defeated and sneered at. this tendency is very ordinary, but horrors come from it. the feeling you’re important if you can belittle or crush or humiliate people you see as different from “you and yours,” is what makes for racism. it had germans welcome hitler and take part in horrible brutality. but the same desire has made for riots at soccer games; for parents’ coming to blows at their children’s sporting event; and for the recent viciousness at fenway park. red sox fans’ hate of the yankees has been monumental and ongoing. the fact that the red sox year after year did not win a world series while the yankees won many, can be taken to stand for all the ways one hasn’t gotten what one deserves from the world. so there is a desire to have utter anger and contempt for one’s supposed humiliator, and in that way put an enemy world in its place. can sports be played and enjoyed without contempt and ill will? can you be for your team yet want to respect the other players, and have tremendous pleasure doing so? the answer is yes. on march 29, 1925, eli siegel, at age 22, wrote about a marathon race in his column for the baltimore american. in the following sentences from it, we see the deepest, proudest feelings people have about sports. and we see, very early, the beautiful, kind thought of eli siegel himself. (he uses, in 1925, the word men to mean, of course, women too.) all persons who show the power of men well should be liked and wondered at. and the reason we are thrilled at hearing of a running record broken, or a broad-jumping one, is because it shows how powerful we also, who are men, can be. … [people] want to see man in general made greater and nobler. they like to see a man do something great, for every greatness of men, taken as individuals, adds to the greatness of men taken together. in this issue we begin to publish a lecture important in american history: we are unrepresented, by eli siegel. it is one of his national ethics reports of 1968, and he gave it on october 11th of that year. as background, i mention the following: the vietnam war was going on, and there was more and more anger about it across the land, more and more feeling that this war did not represent the american people — that it had nothing to do with protecting america or making anybody free. there was to be a presidential election, and lyndon johnson had announced he would not run for a second term. he claimed it was because he wanted to concentrate on leading the nation; but it was really because the objection to him throughout america and the world had become so tremendous and so intensely expressed. the democrats nominated vice president hubert humphrey to run against richard nixon. so the american people were given a choice between two justifiers of an increasingly hated war. in this lecture, mr. siegel explains a huge feeling in america — not only about the war. and he places it with the meaning of representation and non-representation in history as such. our nation today is different from the america of 35 years ago. but americans still feel that what goes on in elections does not represent them. in fact, the feeling is even more intense, widespread, and explicit. and the distrust of politicians has never been larger. in keeping with aesthetic realism itself, mr. siegel looks at the subject of representation as something not essentially political but ethical and aesthetic. and so, as a prelude to the first part of his great lecture, here are some notes about representation. 1) representation is an aesthetic matter; that is, it concerns opposites which, as one, make for beauty. representation is always sameness and difference. when we feel anything or anyone represents us — whether it is a senator, or a team we root for; whether it is our union, or a song we love — we feel that something not ourselves, something different from us, is the same as ourselves too and embodies our feelings and who we are. we need very much to feel this. unless we can feel that things and people not ourselves can stand for us, we will feel locked in ourselves and apart. 2) aesthetic realism explains that there is no limit to how much we can feel what’s not us represents us. this is because everything in the world has a structure of opposites akin to ours. we can feel that the ocean,
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