People, Pets,
and Poetry
by Alice
Bernstein
With Photographs
by David M. Bernstein
| As a person who loves
animals, I am happy to be seeing that everyone’s pets: a puppy named Skippy;
Luciano, a cockatoo; Fluffy a gerbil, Cleopatra a pony, and a cat named
Snowflake -- so dear to us, and whose fur or feathers we can fondly
pet --stand for nothing less than the world itself. Learning this from
Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded by America’s great poet and educator,
Eli Siegel, is a source of knowledge and pleasure that I cherish and want
you to have, too. |
|
Alice Bernstein with Rosetti
a peach-faced Lovebird (left), and Senny, a Senegal parrot
|
|
I
study in the course “The
Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry” taught by Class Chairman
Ellen Reiss. With thrilling faithfulness and originality, she continues
what Eli Siegel began teaching in 1938: "Poetry...is the oneness of the
permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual." Describing this
course, taught at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, Ms.
Reiss states: “Eli Siegel is the critic who showed... that poetry — because
it is fair to the whole world and oneself at the same time, because it
is logic and feeling as one thing, because it puts opposites together —
answers the questions of every person's life.”
I
tell now of one class in which Ms. Reiss discussed poetry of many centuries
to show that the meaning we find in animals can be used to know what we
are after, and also what poetry is.
.
Man and Cat |
“People
have looked for in an animal,” Ellen Reiss explained, “what poetry shows
the world itself has. We want to feel that the world is close and strange,
the same and different, even personal and impersonal....Every animal, meowing
and barking, neighing and baaing and doing all the things animals do, is
saying: The world is what you really want to like, and don't stop with
me somehow — Ruff ruff!, Meow meow!” |
Beginning
with ancient Greece, we met Argos, perhaps the first dog ever written of.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus, who was thought to have died in the
Trojan War, returns home in disguise after 20 years. No one recognizes
him except his dog, a puppy when he left -- now old, outcast and ill. In
the Butcher and Lang prose translation, Homer writes:
| “And
lo, a hound raised up his head and pricked his ears, even where he lay,
Argos, the hound of Odysseus, of the hardy heart, which of old himself
had bred [before] he went to sacred Ilios....There lay the dog Argos, full
of [fleas]. Yet even now when he was aware of Odysseus standing by, he
wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he
had not now the strength to draw. But Odysseus looked aside and wiped away
a tear.” |
| Homer,
we learned, and we heard it in the lines he wrote, wants us to feel there's
bigness to Argos even as he is now so weak. Ms. Reiss said, “The poetry
has that relation of closeness and largeness; of specificity and wonder
that an animal can stand for.”
I
loved hearing Homer describe the feelings of a dog and man in the 8th century
B.C., bringing them close to us through the centuries and warmly into our
hearts. |
Wesley and Helios
. |
William
Cowper, the 18th century English poet, writes about his pet rabbit named
Tiney:
Though
duly from my hand he took
His pittance ev'ry night,
He
did it with a jealous look,
And, when he could, would bite. |
“The
way this stops and continues is beautiful,” said Ellen Reiss. “Every animal
has stopping and continuing differently. The way a cat has continuity is
different from a dog.” And she also pointed out that “If you see a greyhound
in motion, there seems to be great continuity — different from a terrier.”
Cowper writes in another stanza:
His
frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But
most before approaching show'rs,
Or when a storm drew near. . |
Commented
Ms. Reiss: "His frisking, has something immediate. And then the sound of
evening hours, is so different from the sound of frisking. It's hard to
think of any two sounds more different than frisking and evening hours.
You feel the immediacy of a creature, and then the strangeness of the world.
If an animal can have that, we should see if we can find it elsewhere.
Can every person — including a person we may disagree with — stand for
the world as immediate and strange?”
My
husband David and I had the happiness of sharing our home for many years
with Rosetti a peach-faced lovebird, and Senny, a Senegal parrot. I was
tremendously moved by the way Ms. Reiss commented on Matthew Arnold’s "Poor
Mathias" of 1882, about his canary who died. She explained, “It begins
with a kind of couplet [whose music] has some of the motion of a bird using
its feet, strutting about delicately”:
Poor
Matthias! -- Found him lying
Fall'n
beneath his perch and dying?
.
. . .
Poor
canary! many a year
Well
he knew his mistress dear;
.
. . .
Vainly
warm him in your breast,
Vainly
kiss his golden crest,
Smooth
his ruffled plumage fine,
Touch
his trembling beak with wine. |
And
Ellen Reiss, whose scholarship is unequaled in the world today, explained
that this little bird stands for the great theme in Matthew Arnold’s poetry:
that even people who are close don’t know or understand each other’s feelings.
Speaking as if she were Matthew Arnold talking to Matthias, she said: “We
didn't even know you were dying. We gave you seed every day and said how
beautiful you were, and didn't see what was going on in you." She
read these lines with the poet’s courageous, musical criticism of himself:
Birds!
we but repeat on you
What
amongst ourselves we do.
Somewhat
more or somewhat less,
'Tis
the same unskilfulness.
What
you feel, escapes our ken --
Know
we more our fellow men?
Human
suffering at our side,
Ah,
like yours is undescried!
Human
longings, human fears,
Miss
our eyes and miss our ears. |
“There
are these short couplets,” Ms. Reiss said, “and there is music, a kind
of quiet grandeur.”
I
know that it’s a huge thing when an animal dies. We recently lost our dear
Rosetti, and one of the things that comforted us most was knowing this
poem and its useful, kind message.
I
am proud to conclude with a poem by Eli Siegel which appears in the international
journal, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #345. I am thrilled
by the way it puts together the cozy and the large, immediacy and the eternal:
Any
Star and Shakey
By
Eli Siegel
If
there is any star
To
be named after a pussycat,
I
nominate Shakey,
Now
on my lap.
For
it is good to think of a star
As
close as one’s lap.
It
makes distance more friendly,
More
what it is.
And
it makes pussycats (the thought does)
More
functional, more there,
In
an endless world,
Swarming
around us. |
I
love learning that all living creatures are a means of knowing myself,
poetry, the “endless world, swarming around us,” and to be a kinder person.
Aesthetic Realism can encourage this in you, too, dear reader.
To
learn more about this needed, beautiful education, contact the not-for-profit
Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene St., NYC 10012, 212-777-4490;
www.AestheticRealism.org
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