What Is Honesty?

This is a definition of honesty that I've studied, from Eli Siegel's important work Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World:

Honesty is the whole desire of the self to have pleasure by seeing what it is and what other things are.--[The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #300]

In the comment to this definition, Mr. Siegel says:

There can be no honesty without knowing. To be honest is to wish to get pleasure by the facts of oneself and everything else: and this means the whole of the facts....Honesty....is a belief, a trust, a gaiety and exaltation in what is. In every one of us there is a desire to accommodate the motives or purposes of the self to what is; or a fear of doing so, which is equivalent to making what is, fit our desires prematurely, disproportionately, inaccurately.

I've seen that what I once and many people associate with honesty--saying things to others even if you know they'll be angered or hurt by what you say--is not a criterion. We have to be sure we're interested in the whole of the facts about that person--good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. The desire to know a person fully and respect them is often lacking.

Art, meanwhile, that is truly that, is honest--is always respect for the world. So I close my post with a work I love by Degas. She's a singer, the title tells us. She's in the shadow, somewhat; she's not flattered by Degas; the pastels have an edgy quality--blue-greens, oranges, and yellows. Degas has us see her depth, her struggle; he wanted to see her, to have pleasure by seeing what is.

A principle that is true

"All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." - Eli Siegel

This is a painting that has always stirred me tremendously and made me feel more composed or serene at the same time: Vermeer's "Young Woman with a Water Jug"

Serenity and stir, or rest and motion are fundamental opposites in reality, I have learned, that people are hoping to put together. All works of art that are honest--a poem, a Chopin etude, a dance including the best of hip hop, have both energy and repose in a beautiful and deeply satisfying way.

I have seen this principle to be true in my own life and in hundreds of instances of art and life--in the lives of the many women I've taught in Aesthetic Realism consultations for over two decades. We are going after what art has, and that's why it means so much to us.

At the Terrain Gallery's website you can read an important talk about this painting by Julie and Robert Jensen: Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Jug--or, What Men and Women Are Hoping for in Marriage.

They speak about another pair of opposites that Vermeer puts together so greatly, the domestic and the wide.

A motto from Shakespeare

"No legacy is so rich as honesty." - All's Well that Ends Well, Act iii, Sc. 5

This weblog proudly wishes to show this. There's new honesty in Aesthetic Realism about poetry, literature, the visual arts, and I want people to know it! 

For instance, I can mention a poem I care for very much is "The Dark that Was Is Here," by Eli Siegel. It begins: 

A girl, in ancient Greece, / Be sure had no more peace / Than one in Idaho 

This poem gets to the honest depths of what's felt by women everywhere. And, I've learned, through trying to see accurately our relation to other people, including those who lived before us, we will be more who we want to be. 

You can read the rest of "The Dark that Was Is Here" at The Poetry of Eli Siegel website, which has a selection of his poems on many diverse subjects, including nature, jazz, New York, history.

Here are some of the critics on Eli Siegel's poetry:


 Kenneth Rexroth, reviewing Hail, American Development (Definition Press, NY) in the New York Times Book Review, wrote of Mr. Siegel's "incomparable sensibility at work saying things nobody else could say....I think it's about time Eli Siegel was moved up into the ranks of our acknowledged Leading Poets....His translations of Baudelaire and his commentaries on them rank him with the most understanding of the Baudelaire critics in any language."

Selden Rodman reviewed Eli Siegel's Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems, writing in the Saturday Review: "He comes up with poems...which say more (and more movingly) about here and now than any contemporary poems I have read."

 And William Carlos Williams in a letter reprinted in Something to Say, ed. J.E.B. Breslin (New Directions), wrote: "[H]e did hit a major chord and from the first with his major poem Hot Afternoons ....Only today do I realize how important that poem is in the history of our development as a cultural entity....I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world. I make such a statement only after a lifetime of thought and experience, I make it deliberately."

 Of Eli Siegel's poems as such, Williams writes: "[He] has outstripped the world of his time....The evidence is technical but it comes out at the non-technical level as either great pleasure to the beholder, a deeper taking of the beath, a feeling of cleanliness, which is the sign of the truly new."