Ten years ago this month I linked from this blog to an important essay by Aesthetic Realism associate Lynette Abel. In it she describes a class given by Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, about a play titled The Miracle at Verdun, by Hans Chlumberg.
Chlumberg was a lieutenant in an Austrian cavalry regiment during World War I, and God knows what he must have witnessed. He wrote the play, which was banned by the Nazis, about French and German soldiers killed at Verdun, coming back to life twenty years after the outbreak of the war. They find they are not welcomed.
Ms. Abel quotes Eli Siegel:
- "I'm reading this so the cause can be tested. This play is all about contempt--with the living having contempt for the dead, and the dead for the living. At the same time contempt as a universal presence is not seen. I think Chlumberg couldn't have said that the purpose of the "mad pestilence" was to get to the quietude of contempt. There wasn't a feeling that a quiet thing like contempt, which everyone enjoys, could be the cause of the Somme and Verdun."
Now, with the world in turmoil and war devastating the lives of millions of people, it is more urgent than ever that contempt as a force in every single person be studied.
Contempt, I have learned, is the building up of oneself by making less of the world, including people. I have seen in my own life it's the thing in me that made me unkind, oblivious to the feelings and thoughts of others—as well as ashamed and cold. And I've seen it is a good thing that we can never get away with contempt, though we may seem to, and may not even know we are having it. Studying contempt, instead of having it, is both a national emergency and the most liberating, life-encouraging personal education one can experience.
