The way men are decisive and indecisive has confused and even tormented us—it did me. I learned there can be a good kind of indecision in a man that comes from his desire to know, the thing in him that doesn’t want to sum things up in a quick way.

But I had an indecisiveness that was troubling. I could agonize over important decisions like whether or not to take a new job, and also about seemingly small things like what to choose from the menu in a restaurant or even what pair of shoes to put on in the morning. Once, I stood in front of the closet for ten minutes not knowing what to wear, feeling like I was in a whirl and also stuck.

The education of Aesthetic Realism understands the cause of this debilitating indecisiveness. In a class for consultants and associates, Ellen Reiss, the Chair of Education, explained:

The big reason people have trouble as to indecision is the underlying indecision as to which represents them: respect or contempt. People don’t want to make up their minds about that. And while you don’t, you can have all sorts of casualties—you can decide and not decide in bad ways.

I am very thankful for what I’ve learned on this subject because it changed me centrally and made me so much more sure of myself—something that’s possible for every man.

The Biggest Decision

I learned that the biggest decision we make is about how to see the whole world. Our deepest desire, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world, to respect it on an honest basis. But there is a fierce drive in people for contempt, the desire to make less of everything, and we think this will make us important.

Growing up in Miami, I wanted to respect things as I did a science experiment for school comparing household disinfectants. I followed the teacher’s instructions, carefully sterilizing petri dishes, growing the same kind of bacteria in each one, and then seeing how various disinfectants worked on the bacteria. Every day I noted down any changes and took photographs to document what I saw. I felt proud as I tried to be exact.

But I had the debate Eli Siegel described in a lecture:

At any moment, no matter what it is, we are deciding whether we are going to see the fact that we are surrounded by ever so many things we don’t know, as good for us or bad for us. We may not be aware of this…but…we are deciding at any one time whether it is good for us to be angry, to be sulky, to be uninterested…to think things are dull.

I remember countless Saturdays moping around the house, wasting the whole day not deciding what to do. My mother would suggest one thing after another: “Why don’t you call your friend Matt and see what he’s doing?” “No, I don’t like Matt any more,” I answered in a kvetching, miserable tone. “How about Rusty?” “No, I think he went to the movies already.” I ended up doing nothing except tormenting my mother, and didn’t know something in me actually preferred being in this murky, indecisive state. With all my complaining, I was having the victory of contempt, feeling nothing could make me happy.

Indecisive Men: Because We Have Two Minds

“Do you think making up one’s mind is a delightful process?” Eli Siegel asked in a lecture. And he continued:

Just watch people making up their minds what movie to go to or where to go for the summer. It can be very difficult…The result is that we come to have two minds, because a mind that hasn’t been made up is a mind in two…you can’t give your entire self to either side: part of you goes this way and part that way.

This explains a crisis I was in at Syracuse University in 1973. I was a theatre major and had always wanted to be a good actor. This, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, came from the desire to respect the world: An actor tries to get inside the feelings, the hopes and fears of a character different from himself, to take on the way he moves and speaks.

I was offered a part in a new play that would premier at the repertory theatre in town, with the hope that the show would go to New York, and I was thrilled. But the play would open at Christmas-time, and that meant I wouldn’t go home to Miami for vacation. I began to feel a tug: How could I pass up the approval and presents I would get during the holidays? I also worried, could I really play the part? With every day I felt more and more indecisive. Three times I went back and forth between telling the director yes, I would take the part, then, very agitated, saying I had changed my mind. Finally, in desperation, I called and said I just couldn’t do it. I went home that Christmas, utterly ashamed of myself, feeling like half a man.

That decision haunted me for years—I felt searingly that I had been untrue to myself. Through Aesthetic Realism I learned about the central fight in me and every person, which this instance represented. One part of me wanted the width, the respect, the care for what’s different from oneself that acting stands for. Another part wanted to love just myself, to be flattered and made important just because I was me, which was contempt.

In Aesthetic Realism classes, Ellen Reiss has asked me questions that have educated me so deeply, such as: “Do you think everyone has some fight between whether they should see great meaning in what is outside of them or they should be made much of?”; and “Do you think as you show real care for what is not yourself, something in you says, ‘Come home, come home’—the ego Lorelei?”

Something in me did say that, and I am so lucky to know about it! That is the wonderful thing the education of Aesthetic Realism provides—it enables us to articulate what is impelling us in any specific decision, enables us to ask, “Will this have me like the world? How? What in me might interfere?” Asking these questions cuts through the murk a person can feel, giving him new clarity and pride.

A Classic Movie about the Biggest Decision

In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the chief character, George Bailey, played with beautiful rawness and depth by Jimmy Stewart, comes to be in the fight of his life about the biggest decisions: Is this a world we can honestly like? What should I value most in myself and other people? This film has been loved since 1946 because it gives dramatic, outward form to the interior struggle, the indecision in people about those questions; and it also presents, with toughness and true sentiment, a vivid fight between the desire in a person to have good will and the ill will which can be encouraged by economics.

The film is a mingling of the everyday and the supernatural. As it begins, we learn that George Bailey of Bedford Falls is in a desperate state and needs help. He is assigned a guardian angel—Clarence Oddbody—who is shown George’s whole life through a series of flashbacks. We see George as a boy, saving his younger brother from drowning when he falls through thin ice on the pond; then, working at the local drugstore, George boldly stops the elderly druggist, Mr. Gower—who is distraught and has been drinking— from accidentally sending pills with poison to a sick patient.

Right from the start, George is undecided about what represents him. He wants to be kind, but also has big plans to travel and make lots of money, and when he talks about it he gets puffed up and has contempt for what he sees as the hum-drum Bedford Falls. “I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet,” he says when he’s a young man, “and I’m going to see the world.”

George works at the Building & Loan company his father founded, which enables people with modest incomes to buy homes. But George feels this is small-time and won’t make him a success. Just before he goes to college, he says to his father:

GEORGE: I couldn’t face being cooped up for the rest of my life in a shabby little office…I want to do something big and something important.

That night, George’s father has a stroke and dies, leaving the fate of his company to the board of directors. One of them is Mr. Potter, a vicious, rich man who wants to disband the company because it is competition for the decrepit homes he rents for high prices. George is ready to let the business go under.

But when Potter talks with blatant contempt about George’s father and the people of Bedford Falls, George makes a beautiful decision, saying:

GEORGE: Now, hold on, Mr. Potter…my father was no business man. I know that…But…he did help a few people get out of your slums…Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter…they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community…People were human beings to [my father], but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a richer man than you’ll ever be!

The board is swept, Potter is voted down, and the Building & Loan will survive—with one hitch: George must be its president. Reluctantly, he takes the job, never going to college, and in time a community of beautiful homes is built where people can live with more dignity.

What Men Learn in Aesthetic Realism Consultations

Michael White is a 22 year old actor living in New York City. He told his consultants he wanted to learn how to see his father and his girlfriend better, and also to understand why, as an actor, he felt he couldn’t get deeply within a character—he “just scratched the surface.” As he learned to have more respect for the world, he felt something new. He was proud as he told us:

Michael White. The last few hours I had a really great time studying for an audition I have tomorrow…I saw some things in my own past that relate to the character I’m going for. It feels good.

Consultants. What is the principle behind what you did today?

Michael White. I’m not sure.

Consultants. Well, do you think you’re trying to see as deeply as you can the relation between your own experience and something that’s completely outside of you—the character? Do you think whenever you act it’s always you and not you?

Michael White. Yeah, it’s got to be.

Consultants. It’s self and world coming together in a pretty elemental way?

Michael White. Oh yeah—that hits me in the center.

Later, Mr. White said he was troubled by how he could be itchy to fight with people. “I have these little scenarios in the subway or at work,” he said, “pictures in my head of arguing with someone.” Mr. White had that “underlying indecision” Ellen Reiss described about what represents us—respect or contempt. His consultants said:

Consultants. You have to see the pleasure a person can get from fighting something. It can seem painful, but there’s a tremendous pleasure if a person can beat out the world.

And we asked:

Consultants. Do you think you’re having too much feeling these days? And the other self is saying “You’re liking things too much. You’re giving yourself to the character. You’re having more feeling for your girlfriend, and your father.” Do you have to get back and show that you’re in control?

Michael White. Yeah!

Consultants. There’s an enormous pleasure being able to despise, kick, beat anything we want. And then there’s the pleasure of having the world inside of one and trying to be fair to it. This fight goes on in mankind, it goes on in you. And we’re trying to describe it so you can make better decisions.

Michael White. Thank you—I want to!

Nothing Is Good Enough to Have You

A big place I was indecisive was in love. I was elusive and teasing, and, although I wouldn’t have put it this way, mean. I would be in relation to a woman who, at first, I saw as wonderful. But soon I worked to find a flaw that began to loom large, and I had doubts if this was the girl for me.

What was behind this, Ellen Reiss explains in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1279, as she describes an Aesthetic Realism class discussion in which a man said he was troubled by indecisiveness. Ms. Reiss asked:

Do you think if you decide on something you are saying it is good enough to have you, and you would like to feel nothing is good enough to have you?

And I felt described from within by what she explained next:

A person can feel he has given himself to the world above and beyond the call of duty by having to do with people at all, maybe marrying someone, giving careful thought at work; and you have to put your foot down somewhere! So people put their foot down against a world they dislike by not making decisions—by not commending the world through solidly accepting something in it.

In the film, George Bailey has this fight, and we see it when he visits Mary Hatch, played movingly by Donna Reed. He cares deeply for Mary who is lovely, smart and also a good critic of him. But George sees her as a small-town girl who will tie him down to Bedford Falls forever. In a sulky mood, he goes to her house, walks by, hesitates, comes back again—and all the while Mary is watching him from her bedroom window above:

MARY: What are you doing, picketing?

GEORGE (stops, startled, and looks up): Hello, Mary. I just happened to be passing by.

MARY: Yeah, so I noticed. Have you made up your mind?

GEORGE: About what?

MARY: About coming in.

Mary is glad to see George, runs downstairs and opens the door.

MARY: Well, are you coming in or aren’t you?

GEORGE: Well, I’ll come in for a minute, but…(he goes in).

MARY: Would you rather leave?

GEORGE: No, I don’t want to be rude.

MARY: Well, then, sit down. (He sits, uncomfortably.)

George looks at his watch and is about to leave when Mary’s mother leans over the banister and asks what does George want.

GEORGE: Well, I…

MARY: What do you want?

GEORGE (indignant): Me? Not a thing. I just came in to get warm…You know I didn’t come here to…to…

MARY (rising): What did you come here for?

GEORGE: I don’t know. You tell me. You’re supposed to be the one that has all the answers. You tell me.

MARY (terribly hurt): Oh, why don’t you go home?

GEORGE (almost shouting): That’s where I’m going. I don’t know why I came here in the first place! Good night!

Once when I was seeing a woman but felt, as I put it “hesitant,” Ms. Reiss asked, “What is pushing you toward the lady?”

Bennett Cooperman: Me.

Ellen Reiss: Do you like that? Do you make it clear that something is driving you to be in her company and you like it?

Bennett Cooperman: No.

And then Ms. Reiss asked this question which had my life in it:

Is Bennett Cooperman on this earth to use himself to honor things or to be urged, sought, with him aloof?

That question has so much in it. The desire to be aloof had always made me ashamed of myself, and learning about it through questions like these freed me to see what I really want. It makes me very proud to say today that I love my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, so much. Meryl’s keen, wide perception of things, her kindness, her humorous and friendly criticism of me—including where I can be wrongly indecisive—make me so happy.

In the movie, George storms out of Mary’s living room, but just then the telephone rings. So they both can hear the conversation, in a famous scene Mary holds the phone between herself and George. It’s Sam Wainwright, who tells George about a job in plastics in Rochester that could make him rich, saying, “I’m letting you in on the ground floor.” But standing so close to Mary, George’s real feeling begins to emerge, and the more Sam talks the less George hears him. Finally, he drops the phone, grabs Mary and says:

GEORGE (fiercely): Now you listen to me! I don’t want any plastics! I don’t want any ground floors…I want to do what I want to do. And you’re…and you’re… (He pulls her to him in a fierce embrace).

George has made up his mind—he needs Mary to be more himself.

And a decision that will affect their whole lives takes place on their wedding day. On the way to the train for their honeymoon, George and Mary see crowds of people outside. There’s been a run on the bank, and Mr. Potter, knowing the Building & Loan is on shaky ground, has offered people fifty cents on the dollar if they take their money out of it. George jumps out of the cab and speaks passionately to the worried men and women who say they need their money to live.

Then Mary holds up a roll of bills—her and George’s honeymoon money—and calls out:

MARY: How much do you need?

GEORGE: Hey! [we] got two thousand dollars!…This’ll tide us over until the bank reopens…How much do you need?

The Building & Loan is saved! George and Mary never take their honeymoon cruise, but we see the pride they feel because they made this decision in behalf of fairness to people.

Later that night, when George opens the door to his home and sees his new bride, she has such a radiant look of deep sweetness and loveliness, it takes your breath away.

The Main Decision: Can We Like the World?

George Bailey never gets to do the things he felt he wanted so much, travel and make a lot of money. And so all through the movie he doesn’t really make up his mind: Has the world given him what he wanted or rooked him? Did he take care of himself by being kind to the people of Bedford Falls? Should he be grateful for his life?

A showdown occurs when, through various mishaps, the Building & Loan is about to collapse. It is Christmas eve, and at his wits end, George goes home to Mary and his four children. He is tortured, and here, Jimmy Stewart’s acting is at its height—he shows George’s desperation with sheerness and subtlety. I believe what he does in this scene, and often throughout the movie, is explained by what Ellen Reiss writes in The Right Of:

Decision and indecision are opposites that may torment people in their lives, but in every work of art they are one and make for beauty. They take the form of sharpness and vagueness; that which is firm and that which wavers; the definite and the tremulous.

You can see that relation of sharpness and vagueness, the firm and the wavering on Jimmy Stewart’s face. One moment he is furious, the next he’s shaky, ready to give up, and these things interchange with great sincerity. Stewart, as actor, didn’t “decide” what the emotion should be in a way that would be two-dimensional. He lets the emotion take him, affect him—it’s ephemeral, wavering, the way people really are.

George Bailey goes to the bridge, ready to throw himself into the water and end it all. But just then, a mysterious and friendly forces intervenes, and he is stopped. And as he looks at the world around him, and sees the familiar town and faces of people, he is tremendously grateful. As the film ends, we feel he sees his life has real meaning, that he’s had a good effect on many people who love him for it, and that this is worth everything.

That is what Aesthetic Realism can enable people to feel on a completely logical basis. It’s what Michael White felt when he wrote to us, “I’m extremely excited by the world that’s opening up to me, or I should say that I’m opening up to. I feel very fortunate to be studying Aesthetic Realism, it’s enabling me to see so much more than I saw before.” What’s the best decision anyone could make?— to study this great, kind education!

The post Indecisive Men — What Is the Cause? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Aesthetic Realism says that a good anger has like of the world in it, has respect for the world in it; and a bad or hurtful anger has dislike of the world in it, or contempt for the world in it….what differentiates a handsome anger from an ugly anger is whether the anger is narrowly personal, is all for the advancement of ego in its separation, or is for something beautiful and just, sustained by space, time, and history.

Aesthetic Realism teaches a person to distinguish between these two angers, and to criticize the “narrowly personal” anger that weakens us. And through this education, people learn what it means to have anger in behalf of respect for reality, making us proud and strong. That is what happened to me and it’s what now to teach men in Aesthetic Realism consultations.

I am going to speak about what I have learned, and about aspects of the life and work of one of America’s most loved entertainers, who, on The Honeymooners gave humorous form to a puffed up, narrow anger and also showed how much a person wants to change: Jackie Gleason. He was a true artist, but he suffered tremendously because of the unjust anger he had at the world and people.

Anger and How We See the World

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we have an attitude to the whole world—is it our friend or an enemy? In his definitive lecture, “Aesthetic Realism and Anger,” Mr. Siegel writes:

The desire to be angry comes from the fact that we feel, very early, that what is going on in this world is not what suits us. And the thing that we can do then is to say that the world is a bad place for us, or we can try to find out why it doesn’t suit us. This is not an easy job. To understand is difficult. And yet it is the only thing that will save us from carrying on an anger day after day.

Growing up in Florida, outwardly I did not seem like an angry person. I tried to be cheerful and there were things I honestly liked, such as going to my neighbor’s house to see the new litter of puppies their dog had. But inside I often had that feeling Mr. Siegel describes—that the world was a bad place.

I felt this very much in my family. The Coopermans had many things people want—a nice home, vacations every summer. But the way we cared for each other and then could be distant made me angry. Going out to a restaurant or to a friend’s house, we looked like an affectionate family, but I knew that wasn’t the whole story. At home, my mother and father sometimes seemed bitter and resentful. But I never tried, as Mr. Siegel says, to “understand” what my parents felt. Instead I had contempt—felt their lives were messy, the world was bad and I better keep to myself.

My angers as a boy were personal and vain. Once I went with my mother and father to get my first suit. In the store I hated every suit I saw—they were the wrong color or they didn’t fit right, and there was nothing I liked. But my parents said I needed a suit for a bar mitzvah I was going to, and they bought me one. I threw a fit. Sitting in the back seat of the car I sulked the entire way home. Finally my father stopped the car and my mother turned around and screamed at me “What do you want from us!”

The telling thing is what happened the next week. I put on the suit and I loved it. I couldn’t figure out why I had hated it so much just a few days earlier. One large reason, I learned, is this: I wanted to be displeased and angry. Aesthetic Realism has seen that this contempt drive is in everyone—the hope that nothing will please you. The self can prefer to be disgusted and angry because then you feel superior to everything; but this undermines our lives because it is against our deepest purpose, to like the world.

Jackie Gleason grew up so differently from me. Early he met things that were hard to bear. He was born in Brooklyn in 1916. In The Great One, biographer William A. Henry describes young Jackie as “plucky and adventurous,” yet he lived in grim circumstances—his parents were poor. Jackie Gleason grew up in a way people today are being forced to endure. His own later description of his family’s apartment sounds a little like that spare set of The Honeymooners:

The surroundings were dismal, just a round table and an icebox and a bureau that everything went into. The light bulbs were never very bright and the rooms were always bare.

When he was three Jackie’s sickly older brother, Clemence, died. His parents began to drink and they grew apart. One day, just before Christmas when Jackie was almost ten, his father left work and never came home. He was never seen or heard from again. This affected Jackie Gleason tremendously. I think it solidified the feeling he had early that it was a tough world and he better be tough himself—that a certain kind of aggressive street smarts would take care of him rather than thought about the world. Jackie became rebellious at school and dropped out. By eleven he was hustling pool in his neighborhood.

The place where life seemed best to Jackie Gleason was at the vaudeville house. Henry writes:

The little boy was certain that nowhere was there such happiness as he had seen in the Halsey Theatre. He begged to be taken back again and again. At home he imitated the funny dances he saw and the funny way the actors fell without hurting themselves.

The world at the Halsey did suit Jackie Gleason—it had surprise and order, slapstick and structure. In his teens Jackie was invited to emcee the Halsey’s amateur nights because of his “spontaneity, his ability to be funny off the cuff.” Henry tells how one night Gleason decided to “skid deliberately into some seltzer that had been spilled on the stage and take an extravagant windmilling pratfall.”

I think Jackie Gleason felt throwing his whole self into funny ways of using his body had the world seem likable—he was free. That’s what you feel in that lovely phrase of his that later became so famous—”And away we go!”—the self on the brink of going out of itself.

When Jackie Gleason was 19 his mother died. Now essentially alone, he moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in show business.

The Anger of Art and of the Ego

In his lecture “Poetry and Anger,” Eli Siegel made this surprising and important statement:

All art, in a sense, is anger, because you are taking a situation which doesn’t have form, and you are changing it, that is, destroying the formlessness of it, to make form.

I believe this is what Jackie Gleason unknowingly tried to do as a comedian and actor: give form to what could seem sprawling and formless, to find structure in a world that had seemed ill-made.

In 1950, at age 34, he emceed a show called Cavalcade of Stars on that new thing, the television. With his vibrant personality and his big, graceful body which, when he’s dancing, is like what Eli Siegel once described in an Aesthetic Realism lesson—”To have a mountain skip would be…delightful”; and with his keen instinct for what would honestly entertain, such as the 16 June Taylor dancers, Jackie Gleason filled that small screen.

Gleason did come to a form, a composition new to television: a mingling of reccurring sketches and music, of “pathos and…the broadest baggy pants comedy” as one critic put it. He brought this new form into people’s living rooms, and became an overnight success, soon known as Mr. Saturday Night.

But with all his success Jackie Gleason was troubled and angry. His first marriage was, at this very time, failing. He worried constantly about ratings and could not sleep. He overate, then checked into a hospital to lose weight. And Gleason’s carousing became legendary, as did his excessive drinking. Jackie Gleason did not know his deepest purpose in life was to like the world—that, as Eli Siegel writes in his essay “Alcoholism; Or, You Got To Find the World Interesting,” he needed to see “in the ordinary universe a zip, a tingle, a blandishment.” Instead, Gleason wanted to beat out the world through being a tough show business success. He was competitive and very often mean.

This is vivid in the contemptuous way he treated his writers. His biographer describes how Gleason seemed to get a thrill humiliating them, making them grovel as he passed judgement on their work. He short-changed them on money, and most reprehensible of all, he refused to give them credit for creating the characters that made him famous for decades. All the characters Jackie Gleason played, except for Ralph Kramden, were created in the first shows by his writers—but Gleason insisted he created them himself.

Leonard Stern summed up what most of Jackie Gleason’s writers felt when he said:

I think he resented us because we did something he knew he needed and couldn’t do for himself.

That is a tremendously important statement. Jackie Gleason preferred to be resentful and angry rather than grateful for where the world had been of use to him. The desire to be ungrateful makes us mean and miserable and only Aesthetic Realism explains why. Men learn about this in consultations, to the everlasting benefit of their lives, through hearing questions such as: Would you rather be pleased by the world or resentful of it? When do you feel stronger—when you’re grateful or when you’re angry? If the world did come through for you, are you sure you would only like it?

Jackie Gleason suffered greatly because he did not hear questions like these. I believe unknowingly he didn’t like it that the world had been good to him in such a big way, enabled him to have success in his career—it blew his case that the world was a place that hurt him. What Eli Siegel says in his lecture “Aesthetic Realism Looks at Things: Discomfort” describes Jackie Gleason—that a “problem…drinker” is one who “maintains his anger.”

Anger and Sweetness

In his lecture “Poetry and Anger,” Eli Siegel speaks about opposites every man is trying to put together:

The energy which is our anger ought to find a form which goes along with our benevolence, our sweetness, our warmth.

These opposites are what we find in the various characters Jackie Gleason played—anger and sweetness, toughness and sentiment. For example he played The Poor Soul who is described as a “saintly, wide-eyed innocent…his button eyes as imploring as a beagle’s. Then there is Reginald van Gleason III:

That devil may care playboy [with] a top hat tall enough for a stovepipe, a cape as sweeping as draperies… he drinks relentlessly…He can be as rude as he likes to whomever he wishes to abuse…Reggie wants to be alone with his hostility, his anger oward the world.

A beagle’s eyes and a hostile playboy—that is sweetness and anger. And he didn’t know it but through his work Jackie Gleason was trying to make sense of his two attitudes towards the world: where he wanted to be sweet to it—though even in the sweet characters there was a bent towards being hurt; and where he wanted to stick out his tongue at everything and be a tough guy.

In the movies he played Minnesota Fats, the steely pool shark in The Hustler; and then the title role in the movie Gleason wrote—Gigot, the mute, gentle street person of Paris, abused by ruffians and loved by the cats and dogs, who takes in the child of a prostitute and cares for her.

I think the anger and sweetness of Jackie Gleason are most successfully one in his lovable, irascible bus driver, Ralph Kramden, who shows these two feelings as he clenches his fist and says to his wife, “To the moon, Alice!”; and then says at the end of so many episodes, “Baby, you’re the greatest.”

In his life Jackie Gleason had a purpose that weakened him terrifically—he wanted to conquer the world through show business and he cultivated acquaintances with persons in power like then President Richard Nixon. Yet even when he did get all the trappings of success—fame, money, the affection of America—Gleason felt like a failure to himself. He once said to an interviewer:

You can be ruined by success…Believe me, pal, I know. You no longer have the incentive to give your best. You no longer mix with people who are living real, struggling lives. You are out of it, and life takes its revenge…Success ruined me.

Jackie’s fellow artist on The Honeymooners, Art Carney, once said: “It used to make me miserable to see how little joy he got out of everything he had achieved.” Jackie Gleason needed criticism of his contempt.

There were times he did have an anger that strengthened him. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes: “When we have anger which comes from an awareness of ugliness, injustice, this anger we are proud of. It integrates us.” Once Gleason was on a promotional stop of a train taking the cast of a show to the South. In the cast was a black dancer, Mercedes Ellington. When photographers began taking pictures and saw her, one shouted demeaningly, “What are you doing here?” Gleason was furious. He proudly pulled Mercedes Ellington to his side and stood with her for the entire shoot—forcing photographers to take her picture with every one they took of him.

Why Are Men Angry in Love?

In Self and World Mr. Siegel writes: “The purpose of love is to feel closely at one with things as a whole.” But if a man is angry at the world it will interfere with how he sees a particular woman. That is what occurred with Jackie Gleason, who was married three times.

His first marriage to dancer Genevieve Halford lasted 40 years, though they lived as man and wife for only a few. When they first met, Gleason was taken by Genevieve’s soft, pretty appearance and her outward serenity—he was more jagged and rough. Jackie Gleason told friends he was seeing a “serious girl” and he pursued her vigorously. They were married in 1936 when he was twenty.

But Jackie Gleason did not want to think about who Genevieve Halford was. One writer says “He wanted a woman he could.enshrine.” A woman you enshrine is not a real person—she is a possession you use to glorify yourself. From the outset the marriage was rocky. Genevieve Halford was angry with Jackie Gleason, too, because he was clearly more interested in his career than in her feelings or those of the two daughters they had.

Jackie Gleason said plainly that he felt like a failure as a husband and father. Speaking about his late-night partying and his frequent infidelity to his wife, he once wrote, “I have no legitimate argument for my conduct.”

I feel so fortunate to be learning from Aesthetic Realism about love. Jackie Gleason and I are very different, but like him, when I didn’t get my way with a woman I would get angry.

Once, when a woman I was interested in had some criticisms of me, I was furious. In an Aesthetic Realism class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, taught me what a woman wants most—good will. She said, “You felt a woman should go along with any plan you had. The large question is whether you had good will for the lady.” I said, “I don’t think I did,” and she then asked, “So what right do you have to be angry?”

Ms. Reiss asked as the discussion went on, “Have you thought about what it would mean to strengthen her?” I hadn’t, and Ms. Reiss said humorously, “He who doth not have a purpose he is proud of, ought not to complain. Do you think you need to see women better? “Yes,” I said, and she asked, “Is that such a terrible thing?” No, it wasn’t. I felt so encouraged when Ms. Reiss said, “This is a local stop—go on to becoming a better person.

I am so happy to say that because of Ms. Reiss’ good will that is exactly what happened. She taught me the purpose men need to be proud in love: to want to know a woman, to think about how her life could be stronger. Learning this enabled me to fall in love with the woman who is now my wife of ten years, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. I feel grateful and proud for the privilege it is to know Meryl, what she’s hoping for in her life.

The Opposites, The Honeymooners and Anger

I think some episodes of “The Honeymooners,” with the superb ensemble work of its principle actors—Jackie Gleason, Art Carney, Audrey Meadows and Joyce Randolph—are art and illustrate this definitive principle stated by Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

The show at its best puts together fury and tenderness, thick and thin with those bodies of Ralph and Norton, humor and seriousness, ordinary people and universal emotions. Life itself seems to get into that lovely, plain kitchen. The show has a good roughness, and at times you feel something like what Eli Siegel once said in describing the French stage of the 17th century with the comedies of Moliere: “It must have rattled with the pranks of merry bodies, weighing something.”

At some point in almost every episode Ralph gets steamingly angry. Jackie Gleason gives no-holds-barred form to the ego strutting and then enraged when its plans are foiled—he makes anger look ridiculous. In “Aesthetic Realism And Anger” Mr. Siegel writes: “The worst kind of anger is the quiet kind, the kind that is…smooth disappointment.” Ralph’s anger is anything but quiet—it’s all out. Yet Gleason was good, too, at giving outward form to the slow burn. But the crucial thing is this: Ralph inevitably sees his anger was wrong and he is ashamed, and as the show ends he’s sweeter and stronger.

In the episode “On Stage” Ralph and Alice are going to be in a play at the Women’s Auxiliary of the Racoon Club. Ralph, sure he will be discovered by a Hollywood director who will be in the audience, gets very pompous, talking with an affected “actor’s” voice. He is to play Frederick who is in love with Rachel, played by Alice. But Rachel loves Hamilton, whom Norton plays. Scripts in hand, the three rehearse, and when Norton hits a certain word the sparks begin to fly.

Later the play is performed, and afterwards the Hollywood director comes to Ralph’s dressing room, but says it is Alice he wants for his next movie, not Ralph. He leaves and Ralph’s bubble is burst, but just then Alice comes in and speaks to him so movingly, he see’s what really important in life.

I want people everywhere to know the one education that changes unjust anger in us, making us proud of ourselves and happy—the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel.

The post Jackie Gleason & Two Kinds of Anger appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

To be strong and get what you wanted, I felt you had to be strategic and smart. In seventh grade, on the morning of the election for class president, I passed out candy thinking this would boost my chances for victory; but my classmates saw through my obvious scheme and I went down in defeat.

Aesthetic Realism explains the purpose that enables a man be strong and kind at once. It is good will, “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” When a man has real good will he is at his keenest—he’s using his mind, his intellect, to have a good effect on people. I was thrilled to hear Eli Siegel’s conviction when he said in a lecture that kindness is “the most avant-garde virtue of them all!”

Kindness Is Relation

In his lecture Mind & Kindness, Mr. Siegel explained that the idea of “kinship” is in the word “kind.” He said:

Deep in the meaning of the word kind is a feeling that through being born there is a relation to everything… To be kind means that you want good things to happen to what is like yourself. The next question is, is there anything that is in no way like ourselves? I would say there isn’t.

I grew up in Miami, Florida and used our family’s good fortune to be a terrific snob—to feel unrelated to people, better than them. We had a Cadillac in the driveway; other families had “ordinary” cars. I was convinced my mother—and our family by extension—had the best taste in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, I had no clue that my father was often in agony about finances and providing for a family of five.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the very thing I thought would make me strong—building myself up thinking I was better than others—was contempt. That is exactly what makes a man weak, because our deepest desire is to like the world, to know other people and be fair to them. When a man doesn’t have that purpose, he pays the price, and I did. I often felt separate from people, agitated, and even as a boy had a lot of trouble sleeping.

A place I felt at my best was in dancing. Each week, children went to dancing classes where we learned the fox trot, the cha-cha, and one of my favorites, the waltz. Holding a girl in my arms, I felt I could have a good effect on her, could be both firm in taking the lead, and also thoughtful of her as we turned gracefully around in that beautiful 1-2-3, 1-2-3.

But my usual notion of strength was very different. I thought everybody was out for themselves, and while trying to appear like a nice guy, inwardly I thought you had to be calculating and shrewd to get your way. Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss described accurately and humorously my approach when she said I was “Bennett-what-will-benefit-me.” When a man is looking at other people with that purpose, he cannot like himself.

Strength and kindness are related to other opposites in men, such as toughness and feeling. These were in a stir in me when the Aesthetic Realism Theater Company was rehearsing some years ago for a production of Eli Siegel’s great lecture on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. I had a pronounced tendency to play Huck as a tough kid. When I asked about this in a class, Ms. Reiss said about Huckleberry:

He doesn’t want the wool to be pulled over his eyes and at the same time he wants to be true to everything romantic. Do you have a hard time putting the two together? Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of awe.

That was true. Then Ms. Reiss put in a sentence the two things that had fought in me: “You are a keen, sharp person, but you also want to see a sunrise.”

Again, so true! In this discussion, I also learned about strength and kindness in love. I was seeing Meryl Nietsch and I was very taken by this lovely woman from Long Island. The more we talked, the more I wanted to be with Meryl. But then I would focus on what I perceived as a flaw in her. Ms. Reiss asked:

Ellen Reiss:  Do you think your suspicion of Miss Nietsch is at one with your big feeling about her?

Bennett Cooperman:  No. An instance of where I was suspicious–the other day we were talking on the phone about Ms. Nietsch’s budget.

ER:  The way you say that, everybody’s trembling.

BC:  I was sure she didn’t want to see something. Then that night when I went to her house, she opened up the door and handed me the budget all typed up. I couldn’t believe it.

Ms. Reiss then asked this crucial question: “Have you hoped to be suspicious of Ms. Nietsch?” The answer was yes, and I’ve seen that determination in a man makes him cruel. You cannot be kind when you’re on the hunt for something not to like in a person. It makes love impossible, and always ends up making a man feel mean, wobbly, uncertain—anything but strong.

I’ve gotten an education about strength and kindness from Aesthetic Realism that is real gold and it’s changed my life profoundly. That includes my marriage to Meryl, who is now an Aesthetic Realism Consultant and whom I love very deeply. I cherish talking with her, trying to know her and learn from her, holding her in my arms.

Strength & Kindness in a Song & Dance Man

I speak now about aspects of the life and work of George M. Cohan—singer, dancer, actor, song writer, producer—because he can have us understand better what real strength and kindness are, and what interferes. From the early 1900s, Cohan had one hit after another on Broadway. Writes Ward Morehouse in George M. Cohan, Prince of the American Theater:

Into the new-century picture came the bounding and brassy George Michael Cohan…with a tempo and style all his own…George M….prepared to show Broadway and the whole wide world that he was the smartest little guy…who ever did the buck and wing and climbed the proscenium arch.

The noted drama critic Alexander Woolcott said Cohan’s “abiding purpose is to entertain royally,” and that’s just what he did, including through writing some of the most loved songs in the American songbook, including: “You’re a grand old flag, you’re a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may you wave…”; and “Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square…”; and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle, do or die. A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, born on the Fourth of July…”

Eli Siegel defined kindness as “that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased,” and this was, I believe, an intense impulsion in Cohan when it came to the theater, where audiences were thrilled by the pizzazz and depth, comedy and sentiment, raucousness and grace in a Cohan show.

But all his life, that kind impulsion in Cohan battled with a false, aggressive notion of strength that made him mean, and, I think, caused him to have great sadness. “He was a lone-wolf,” writes Morehouse, “a brooder.”

George M. was born in 1878 into a theatrical family, making his stage debut at four months old with Jerry, his father, Nellie, his mother, and his sister, Josie. They became known as The Four Cohans, troupers in the vaudeville circuit.

A moving account shows the little boy, George, wanted to be kind. “He wept at the sight of beggars or the infirm,” writes biographer John McCabe. His mother, Nellie, tells how George would put all his coins in his pockets:

He would start up the street for a walk…thoughtfully but observant. ‘What are you looking for, Georgie?’ we would ask him. ‘Poor old people,’ he would answer. If he saw any, he divided…his money among them.

That impulse came from something so different than what developed in Cohan over the years. In his early teens, he became the bane of theater owners and stagehands with whom he fought ferociously about every aspect of a show, convinced he was right and everyone else was wrong. He sometimes caused such a scene that he got his family fired. Morehouse says he was cocky, pugnacious and belligerent throughout his life.

Men have equated fighting with being strong, and sometimes a fight is necessary. For example, life in vaudeville was tough and performers were often treated badly. Cohan felt he had to be combative to take care of his family. He said of his father:

His quiet, gentle manner, and the way they used to take advantage of [him]…taught me that aggressiveness was a very necessary quality…

But the question is—and this goes for men today—did something in him relish doing battle in a way that went beyond what was necessary? Did he equate strength with beating out others? I believe he did, and this made him greatly unsure.

George M. eventually achieved his dream of bringing The Four Cohans to Broadway. And he became one of the earliest to create a new form: The full-length musical, with songs that were integral to the plot. These shows had a new speed, a new snap. At the turn of the 20th century, Cohan’s shows began a shift on Broadway from elegant operettas and European entertainments with a dignified pace to musicals with bustle and energy, a feeling of New York life. There was a new relation of opposites in a Cohan show, opposites akin to strength and kindness: assertion and tenderness, force and grace. There were comic scenes, banter that poked fun at politicians, lively dances; and then lyrical ballads with honest sentiment—and audiences loved it.

What a Man Learns in Consultations

David Hughes leads a team of IT developers who work on new software. At 27, he’s gone far in his career, yet, he said, “A lot of things are going on in my life.”

In a recent consultation, he said he preferred not to think too much about other people. “It’s a lot easier that way. Like, I don’t want to be bothered with that,” he said. We asked:

Consultants:  What does a person get by having feeling, being kind to other people?

David Hughes:  I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s something I’ve never spent much time thinking about.

Cons:  That’s right. Most people feel the answer is “nothing.” “I’ll get things by working on my own behalf—period.”

DH:  I don’t think you can always see something tangible out of caring for others. And I am very results-driven.

Mr. Hughes’ girlfriend, Jenny, has a large interest in social justice, and she’s criticized him for being selfish. He was pretty courageous when he said plainly, “It’s hard for me to care so much about random people I don’t know who can’t provide me with anything.” We asked:

Cons:  Do you think one of the things you would get would be self-respect?

DH:  Yeah.

Cons:  Do you think every person is judging himself all the time?

DH:  I know I am.

Cons:  That’s right. We have what Aesthetic Realism calls an ethical unconscious. Something in you feels you are making a mistake in how you see the world. There’s a self in you saying, “This is not going to work. It’s not in behalf of your strength.” You may have a great job, you may have good health, a good family, a nice girlfriend, but something is missing. Do you feel that?

DH:  Yes.

Later, we asked Mr. Hughes whom he admired in history:

DH:  I would say Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Muhammad Ali.

Cons:  Good. What quality did they have that you care for?

DH:  Um… their ability to get things done.

Cons:  That may be true, but do you think the two people you chose are right on the subject we’re talking about? Do you think both of them had feeling for people in a big way?

DH:   Definitely. Those are two perfect examples.

Cons:  It’s so interesting—you’ve been talking about not wanting to feel too much about others, and you picked those two.

DH:  It’s ironic!

Cons:  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born very fortunately. He never had to do anything. But he said the hell with that, I’m going to use my life to take care of the suffering of people. And in his presidency, he created many programs that helped people. We still have Social Security. He had flaws like everybody, but there was a feeling for people.

DH:  Yeah.

Cons:  Muhammad Ali didn’t go into the Viet Nam draft because it was against his principles. That was really a saying, “I won’t let myself be used in behalf of unkindness to people.” As a sports fan, you know he missed years as a boxer when he could have been great. He was courageous.

DH:  He was.

We asked Mr. Hughes:

Cons:  Do you judge yourself on the same basis as you judge them?

DH:  Well, I’d like to think it’s on the same basis, but it’s probably different. I judge them for definitely caring for others and I don’t judge myself at all with that.

Cons:  Yes, you do! And that’s the best thing in you. When you’re trying to have a good effect on another person, that’s when you are most successful.

Strength & Kindness in Love

George M. Cohan was married twice, first to Ethel Levy, a singer and comedienne he met at 21. She was a critic of him and “stood up to George if she thought he was wrong, and this was not infrequent,” says Morehouse. I think, like men today, Cohan wanted a woman to soothe and serve him, and the marriage ended after seven years.

Cohan’s second marriage was with Agnes Nolan, a chorus girl in one of his shows. Agnes quit the stage after marrying Cohan and remained with him until his death in 1942.

From accounts I’ve read, it seems Cohan wasn’t comfortable thinking deeply about a woman, didn’t see it as strong to try and be kindly within the depths of who she was. He’s often described as a “man’s man,” and it was said “men got to know him better than women ever did.”

Cohan’s way of seeing women affected his work as a playwright, too. Morehouse says his women characters “were usually on the sappy side—superficial, sugary, and in contrast with some of the vital and crackling roles he wrote for men.”

I feel very lucky as a man to have heard questions from Ellen Reiss about love that changed my life. Some of them are:

• Where do you feel stronger, being swept by Meryl Nietsch or feeling you can take her or leave her?
• Which would you rather be lost in, the television or Miss Nietsch? There’s the line from Tennyson’s poem The Princess—“So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip / Into my bosom and be lost in me”—do you like that idea?
• As I was thinking about a woman she said I should ask: “Am I interested in this person in order to have her life stronger? What does that mean?”

Strength, Kindness, & the Actors Equity Strike

A huge happening in the American theater was the Actor’s Equity Strike of 1919. Before this strike, actors were required to give hundreds of hours of unpaid rehearsal time, and contracts could be broken at the producers’ will. Actors paid for their own travel and costumes. Once a show opened and was a solid hit, actors were let go and replaced with less expensive talent.

In 1919, the professional theater was the fourth largest industry in the nation. And so, it was a tremendous event when the actors walked out on the evening of August 7, closing more than half of the shows in New York. Musicians, stagehands and others joined them, and the strike spread to other large cities.

The loudest voice against the strike was that of George M. Cohan. He took it personally that the strike closed a hit show at his Cohan Theater, and immediately co-founded and became president of the anti-strike Actors’ Fidelity League. “I’m going to fight everybody who’s against me,” he said. Morehouse writes that Cohan was determined “to defeat the friends of a lifetime, his fellow actors.”

Cohan’s notion of strength, which he had all his life, led him to make vicious choices at this time. Although he was known to pay his actors well and treat them decently, he felt he was the man in charge of his shows and no union was going to tell him what to do—ever. “His argument,” writes Morehouse, was “with the entire idea of unionism.”

Unions, I’ve learned, are a beautiful oneness of strength and kindness because they fight to have people treated fairly. A large part of my education has been performing in Ethics Is a Force! Songs about Labor—a show The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company has presented at union events around the country. It has been the honor of my life to be in the cast of these historic presentations, standing next to the American labor leader and my dear friend, the late Timothy Lynch, President of Teamsters Local 1205. I learned then and still do from his passion and logic, his joie-de-vivre.

The Actors Equity strike was settled in one month, with the actors getting everything they demanded. But Cohan remained an “Equity-hater” for the rest of his life. He split from his partner of 15 years, Sam Harris, who was on the side of Equity. Morehouse says the strike “changed…his outlook on life immeasurably” and that though Cohan performed for years afterward, “His withdrawal…from life itself…began at the time of his overwhelming defeat by Equity.”

We can ask, why—why did this affect Cohan so centrally? I think his own choices, to squash kindness in himself and make himself tough, hard, and immovable, affected him greatly. “He lost more than the Equity strike in 1919,” writes John McCabe. “He lost heart.” I take that to mean he lost the thing in him which stood for feeling, for real kindness.

My inspiration for writing about Cohan was hearing a tape-recorded lecture in which Eli Siegel discussed poems by the American entertainer George Jessel. One was a soliloquy of Sam Harris, Cohan’s partner. Mr. Siegel felt the lines were close to being poetry and he did a “linear reworking” to make them truly poetic. Here are some of the lines:

One night, in Chicago,
I met George M. Cohan,
The greatest talent of all.
We became partners.
He wrote our plays; acted
In our plays.
I attended to
The business things…
What I added
Was my love for him.
There was hit after hit for us.
We went together everywhere…
When he married
An Irish girl with loveliness,
Look, I married her sister.

Then the poem shifts to the break up:

All of a sudden,
We were friends no longer.
In 1919,
The actors went on strike…
I couldn’t convince him
They were right,
And we should be with them.
He couldn’t see they had been abused
By unfair managers…
God, I missed him!
How it hurt
Not seeing him,
Not talking to him—
Not to be in the sunshine
Of his great talent.

A Song with Good Will

That great talent, and a beautiful oneness of strength and kindness, is in perhaps Cohan’s most popular song, “Over There.” When America declared war against Germany on the morning of August 6, 1917, Cohan “sat down at his desk, took a pencil, and began [writing]. There was a new melody in his head.” Within an hour, he had written “Over There.”

The song was immediately being sung all over the country and it gave courage to the troops. Though the justice and rightness of World War I can be questioned, this song has good will because it’s a saying that what is not oneself, what is “Over There,” is something we should encourage, strengthen. Here is George M. Cohan himself singing “Over There” in a 1936 recording.

Men everywhere deserve to know the education that can make them strong, kind, and happy.

The post George M. Cohan: A Man’s Big Question—Can I Be Strong & Kind at Once? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

The pleasure we are proudest of, the emotion that is largest, arises from knowing the world as it is, wholly as it is, exactly as it is, tremendously as it is, poetically as it is, scientifically as it is, personally as it is.

That impulsion to know the world “as it is” makes for the large feelings men want most, and is in behalf of what Aesthetic Realism shows is our deepest desire, to like the world. It is also in steep competition with another desire Mr. Siegel asks about as he continues: “Do we get pleasure from how the world is, or because we use it cleverly for ourselves?” Using the world cleverly, manipulating people to do what we want and having victories over them, is contempt—the thing that stops a man from having the feelings he most wants.

Aesthetic Realism teaches men to distinguish between these two drives, enabling us to have the size and kind of feelings that make us proud, integrated, stronger.

The Debate in Miami Shores

I grew up in south Florida, the youngest of three boys. We had the kinds of things people think will make them feel good: a house with an indoor pool, new clothes each school year, summers at camp in the Carolinas.

Yet, with all this, most of the time I felt dull, contained and lonely. I was an average student, squeaking by in school with as little effort as possible. I didn’t know what Aesthetic Realism explains: there is an active drive in a man not to have feeling for anything. It’s based on the false ego logic that feeling for something else takes away from us—from what Mr. Siegel once called our “unconscious bank account.” In a class, Ellen Reiss asked me a great question on the subject: “Are you in competition with anything that might move you?” Yes I was.

As a boy, one time I was honestly excited was through an experiment for science class, comparing household disinfectants. I sterilized petri dishes in our pressure cooker at home, prepared a gelatin base in the dishes and learned how to grow the same bacteria in each one. Then I tested disinfectants to see which worked best, documenting the progress by photographing the dishes each day. Doing the experiment, I was in the midst of reality’s opposites—sameness and difference, potency and weakness, even good and evil—and I had a large feeling of pride.

But mostly I felt locked in myself and agitated. I had great difficulty sleeping, and never felt sure that my friends really liked me. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that these were payback for ways I had contempt. For example, I used my family’s good fortune to be a snob, feeling we were better than our neighbors. Feeling superior is attractive, but it is diametrically opposed to our hope to see meaning in the world.

I was a spoiled child and went pretty far with the feeling things should come to me, not from me. When I was 11 I wanted a new bike with a fancy metal-flake finish. My father said my bike, though an older style, was still in good shape and I could wait. This made me very angry. One day, I went behind one of the homes where there was a canal. I threw the bike in the canal, went home and said it had been stolen.

I got my new bike and felt triumphant. But to this day I feel very ashamed of what I did. My father worked hard to make money for a family of five, and went through a great deal about finances. Throwing that bike in the canal was like sticking out my tongue and saying, “I’ll get what I want and you can’t stop me!” That feeling is something no man can like himself for.

Steve Jobs, Modern-Day Innovator—What Kind of Feelings Did He Have?

I am going to speak about aspects of the life and work of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who revolutionized a number of industries: personal computers, desktop publishing, music distribution, mobile devices. Steve Jobs oversaw the creation of products people love and I am one of them. He had a large feeling and a true instinct for how complex technology could be made easy to use. Yet, for all his achievements, Jobs was a tormented man whose feelings were a roller coaster of highs and lows. He was in a ferocious battle between respect and contempt—and contempt too much won out.

Steve Jobs was born in 1955 and was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, who raised him in Mountain View, California. Paul Jobs loved cabinetry and refurbishing cars, and “even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see,” said his son. Paul gave his young son his first taste for careful craftsmanship and electronics “and I got very interested,” said Steve.

I am quoting from the 2011 biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, who tells how Jobs grew up in the heart of what later became known as Silicon Valley, where companies were developing advanced electronics. In high school, Steve joined the Hewlett-Packard Explorers Club, students who met in the company cafeteria one night a week when engineers discussed their latest projects. “I was in heaven,” he said:

I saw my first desktop computer there. It was called the 9100A, and it was a glorified calculator…It was huge, maybe forty pounds, but it was a beauty of a thing. I fell in love with it.

That early wonder about electronics came from the best thing in Jobs. Said Mr. Siegel, “Every science is a repository of feeling.” Yet right along with it, Jobs was making choices of a very different kind, which ran him his whole life. He knew he was bright and used it aggressively to look down on people and feel that most were incompetent at best. Isaacson quotes Jobs telling this boyhood memory:

“It was a very big moment that’s burned into my mind. When I realized that I was smarter than my parents, I felt tremendous shame for having thought that.”… This discovery [says Isaacson] made him feel apart—detached and separate—from both his family and the world.

The question is why did Jobs feel “tremendous shame”? The implication here is that shame was the inevitable result of thinking he was smarter than his parents, but I refute that. Another child might realize he had a certain intelligence and, using it to be kind, wouldn’t feel shame. It wasn’t the intelligence, it was the fact that he used it to feel disdainfully lofty and better than others. That’s what caused the shame and feeling “separate…from the world.”

There is a direct line from this early memory to what his later business colleagues describe. Jobs raked people over the coals mercilessly for perceived ineptitude, even trained himself to stare at people without blinking to make them squirm. Joanna Hoffman, who was on the team that developed the Mac, said:

He had the…capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe…Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval.

When a man is after that kind of power, he has to loathe himself. There is a clear, kind logic Aesthetic Realism has articulated: If you build yourself up looking for the weakness of others, you cannot have feelings you’re proud of.

The Fight about Feeling

Michael White, a young New York City actor, handsome and amiable, had banked on his ability to charm people. Meanwhile, he was worried he didn’t have enough feeling about things, and wanted to stay on the surface. He told us he hoped to be a serious actor, and said he needed to see his father and girlfriend more deeply.

Aesthetic Realism shows that the purpose of acting is to see other people in such a way that one, in a sense, becomes those people; it shows that “you don’t have to be fettered to yourself.  There is no limit to how much you can become other people!”  Acting, we told Mr. White, is a way of liking the world itself by seeing the feelings of people with depth and accuracy.  This idea thrilled him.  And one day, some months later, he told us, “I had a really great time studying today for an audition,” because he got into the feelings of the character in new way. And where once he had told us, “I have doubted myself so much in love…my biggest fear is to be found out to be a fraud,” he now said he was having big feelings for his girlfriend Leslie Rae.

But he was puzzled, he told us, because “I have these scenarios in my mind when I’m on the subway or at work, and I get into arguments with people.” We asked:

Consultants: Do you think you’re having too much feeling these days? And the other side of you is saying, “You’re liking things too much. You’re giving yourself to the character in auditions. You’re having more feeling for Ms. Rae and your father. You have to get back in control.” Because somewhere you think having all this feeling makes you weak. Is that true?

Michael White:  Yeah.

Cons. And do you think these pictures of arguments come up just because you’re having more feeling about the world? Is it coincidental, or is there cause and effect?

MW: I think there is. I think it probably has happened throughout my life and I haven’t been aware of it.

Cons. This tears people apart. It’s torn actors apart—why was I able to have that big feeling yesterday on stage, and I can’t feel anything today?

MW: Yes, I’ve felt that.

Cons. There’s an enormous pleasure in being able to despise, kick anything we want. And then there’s the pleasure of having the world inside one and trying to be fair to it. This fight goes on in mankind. We’re describing it so you can make better choices.

MW: Thank you.

Through Aesthetic Realism, Mr. White’s life flourished, and so did his acting. The feeling I have in bringing this education to a man is one of tremendous pride. I’ve seen before my eyes, men like Mr. White feel comprehended, changed, relieved and happy.

Technology, Feelings & the Opposites

Steve Jobs’ temperamental fits as a manager were notorious, but he had a different purpose—and feelings—when he spent days and months thinking about the smallest detail of a product in development and how it could be friendly for non-tech-savvy consumers.

Eli Siegel stated: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” This great principle is true about successful product design and explains some of Apple’s best sellers.

For example, the original Macintosh launched in January 1984. It was the first mass-market personal computer and it debuted two features to the general public, championed by Jobs, that are still in use today: a mouse and what is called a “graphical user interface” which, rather than being limited to horizontal rows of letters on a cathode display, allowed for playful icons, like a trash can, and free-form designs—like the “hello” you see.

This first Mac was a new oneness in technology of the personal and impersonal, the animate and inanimate. Jobs insisted that it should look friendly, and as the design evolved it came to look a little like a human face, a being. At the product launch, he took it out of a canvas bag, turned it on, and in an “endearing electronic deep voice…[it said] ‘Hello. I’m Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.’” So an inanimate object was given feeling.

In an issue of The Right Of, Ellen Reiss writes something about computers that explains the success of the dear 1984 Mac—and the feelings of people booting up today:

The term personal computer itself is a oneness of opposites: in it, the word compute, which stands for impersonal mathematics, for strict, disinterested, cool calculation, becomes personal, warm; this important thing is in one’s home and is a means of furthering one’s so particular life.

A notable way the Mac was “personal, warm” was that it was the first computer to offer people a variety of beautiful fonts to choose from. Jobs had studied calligraphy and typefaces, and oversaw the selection of each one.

There was a new relation of surface and depth in the iMac of 1998, a “spunky appliance” with a translucent blue-green casing that let you see the components inside. 2001 saw the iPod, a dramatic relation of richness and compactness in a media player the size of a deck of cards (small at that time) that held an unheard-of 1,000 songs. And the 2007 iPhone was an industry landmark of simplicity and complexity, joining in one device a mobile phone, media player and web browser—with a touchscreen interface that felt natural for all three.

Jobs and his team made what had seemed like complicated, even cold technology feel welcoming. But right with it was Jobs’ own coldness and brutality as a corporate CEO. For example, he frequently refused to credit colleagues, including his top designer Jonny Ive, who worked themselves to the bone to get these products right, instead basking in the glory for himself at product launches where he was treated like a rock star.

Then there is the cruel way products by Apple and other companies are manufactured by Chinese workers at Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and other cities. Wrote The New York Times:

Workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions…Employees work excessive over-time, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell…Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products.

In 2010, with Jobs at the helm of Apple, 14 Foxconn workers jumped to their deaths from the roof of the Shenzhen factory.

Like other companies today, Apple outsourced manufacturing to China because it couldn’t make products in the U.S. and reap big profits through cheap labor. Underlying this is the feeling: “I see you, employees, as a means of making money for me.” When that is your purpose, you can be brutal. Jobs was evasive and viciously cold to the torment of those Chinese workers. He once said with fake naiveté:

You go in this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals…and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice.

Jobs did not want to have feeling for those workers. It would have interfered with his ability to make profit from them.

What Kind of Feeling in Love?

Men want to have big, sweeping feelings in love. We hope through knowing a woman, talking with her deeply, being close to her physically, the whole world is closer, more exciting.

That is in competition with another feeling—“this woman should make me feel like a king.” We’ve wanted a woman to flatter us, hang on our every word. We’ve also wanted to manage her. I learned about that in an Aesthetic Realism class when I said I got angry with my wife, Meryl, because I thought she wasn’t using our computer properly and she didn’t seem to welcome my series of lectures on the subject. Asked Ms. Reiss:

ER: How much time should she do in prison for this?

BC: It was a stiff sentence. I got very mad.

ER: You’re still a little mad…Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning never argued about the computer.

Then Ms. Reiss asked about a feeling which has caused trouble in many homes and marriages:

ER: Do you think, Mr. Cooperman, you have used this computer to base your self esteem on in some fashion?

BC: I think so. I love the Mac.

ER: Even a wonderful thing like a computer can be used for bad importance. Do you think in some way you have had a second marriage to this computer? It can annoy one, but if one is adept at it you can manage it better than your spouse?

That was amazing—and true! I believe it’s central in the “computer widow” phenomenon, where men get engrossed in their computers and pay more attention to them than their wives. “A computer is easier than a woman, isn’t it?” asked Ms. Reiss. And then she put into words, in the form of a question, a feeling I aspire to to this very day:

ER: Do you think you are more important managing Meryl Nietsch or feeling, “She’s more complex than any computer, she doesn’t understand herself, but she has the whole world in her more richly than a computer does and I will spend my life trying to understand her”?

Yes I will! I love Meryl very much, a feeling that has grown with every one of the nearly twenty years of our marriage. I respect tremendously her careful study and high opinion of the education we present tonight. I count on her good will in wanting to know me, and am proud to feel I want to do the same in return.

In 2003, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with cancer. Over the next years, he met and spoke with people from the early days of Apple.  Talking with Ann Bowers, you get a hint that he felt some regret:

 …he looked at her and asked, intently… “Tell me, what was I like when I was young?”

“You were very impetuous and very difficult,” she replied. “But your vision was compelling.”

“I did learn some things along the way,” [he said.] Then a few minutes later, he repeated it, as if to reassure Bowers and himself. “I did learn some things. I really did.”

Steve Jobs died in October 2011. He never heard the straight criticism and radiant clarity of Aesthetic Realism and its explanation of the best and worst feelings in him, in men. He needed to know what Michael White was learning in his consultations. And so I end with a few simple sentences Mr. White wrote to us, which stand for what every man can feel: “Thank you for these consultations. I’m coming around. And I want to express my gratitude to Eli Siegel for this information, which is helping me in every instance of my life.”

The post Steve Jobs — How Much Feeling Does a Man Want to Have, and What Kind? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

In an Aesthetic Realism class discussion, the Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked about these two things in me, “Do you have a hard time putting them together? You are a keen, sharp, nobody-is-going-to-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes person, but you also want to see a sunrise.”

I felt “That’s really me.” I learned that the solution to the conflict in men about these two aspects of ourselves is in this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Men want to be factual, “nuts and bolts,” and we want to have large feeling, honest wonder. And wonder, which I’ll speak about tonight, is an important aspect of idealism, which Mr. Siegel defined as “thought about the world at its best.”

Wonder & What Gets In Our Way of Having It

In a 1948 lecture titled “Poetry and Practicality,” Mr. Siegel said “Reality is both practical and wonderful. Starlight shines on subway stations. What are you going to do?” And in a commentary to The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, which serialized this lecture, Ms. Reiss wrote:

The desire to see wonder in things is part of what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the deepest desire we have, the purpose of our very life: the desire to like the world. That is why, when a young child looks with wonder at a pussycat or blowing leaves, we feel something right and beautiful is taking place.

I had that wonder as a child when, near the end of summer in Miami Shores, all the mango trees began to be heavy with delicious, ripe mangoes — red, orange and plump. There were so many, my friends and I would go around the neighborhood with a very practical tool we invented and called “mango-getters” — a broomstick with a looped wire hanger at the end — so we could reach up into the trees and get the mangoes before they fell to the ground. All the children brought them home for our families to eat, and I was in awe that something so succulent and sweet was growing all around us.

But the big competitor of honest wonder Ms. Reiss also explains in her commentary:

Our contempt…has us inwardly define as wonderful that which makes much of us, or makes us superior….We want to see ourselves, however secretly, as the most wonderful thing in the world; and to see real wonder elsewhere would jeopardize our notion of ourselves as the most sensitive and precious treasure of all.

I remember once setting the dinner table for my family, carefully placing every utensil and plate in just the right spot. It’s good to have practical know-how about setting a table — but that wasn’t my intention. When my parents came in and said how nobody could set a table like Little Ben, I basked in what I saw as the tremendous glory of it, and felt vastly superior to my two older brothers who just didn’t seem to get the significance of what had occurred.

I wanted to see myself as the ideal boy, better than most, and got annoyed at anybody who didn’t treat me that way or was critical of me, feeling they were mean and had poor judgment. Meanwhile, I often felt flat and bored, stuck in myself, and was worried that I couldn’t be excited by things.

Aesthetic Realism shows with practical, urgent logic that our contempt makes it impossible for us to have a true idealism, a belief, with all the facts present, in the best possibilities of the world. Instead, we look for the flaw, hope that people are insincere fakers so we can be superior. We may think we are keen, but we recklessly undermine the best thing in us.

As I grew older, the rift between myself as savvy and practical, and wanting to be stirred and have feeling showed in many ways. I could go from a morning in corporate America, working for a financial services company on budgets, databases and computers, to being moved to tears within moments when, on my way to the cafeteria for lunch, I stopped to hear a chorus sing Christmas carols. The two things felt so different.

This rift affected my work as an actor, too. Once, as part of the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, I was preparing for a presentation of Eli Siegel’s lecture on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. But as I read the part of Huck, who, Mr. Siegel says has sentences that are “aromatic with wonder,” I had a noticeable tendency to play him as a tough city kid. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss said:

ER: Huck Finn doesn’t want the wool to be pulled over his eyes, and he also wants to be true to everything roman-tic. Do you think your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is at one with your sense of awe, the grand feeling?

BC: No, it’s not.

ER: Do you think this matter of wonder you are at ease with?

BC: No.

ER: Huck Finn is a boy, he has comedy, there is some toughness, and then he says some of the most beautiful sentences in the English language. Can you benefit in terms of your whole life from questions this raises?

Then Ellen Reiss asked about how I saw the woman I was coming to care for, Meryl Nietsch.

ER: For instance, do you think your desire to be suspicious of Miss Nietsch is at one with your big feeling about her?

BC: No, it’s not.

ER: Does that make you angry?

BC: Yes.

ER: She’s got some nerve. You think you’ve got her number, and then you should have a large feeling about her? — something in you feels it should be one or the other.

Then she said something true for any man: “Bennett Cooperman wants to have two things together — sweeping feeling and he has never been more accurate.”

Practicality & Idealism in a Diary of the 1600s

I’m going to discuss passages from one of the most famous and lovable diaries of all time: The Diary of Samuel Pepys, who lived from 1633 to 1703 in London. Pepys kept the diary for nearly nine years, from 1660 to 1669, ending it only, and with great regret, because his eyesight was deteriorating. Eli Siegel said that Pepys was “one of the most attractive persons in any literature.”

Pepys’ diaries are a delight to read — the entries have such vigor and life. And they are relevant to our subject because as they tell about practical doings of life in the 1600s — what he ate, where he went, squabbles with his wife about money — and about large events in the 17th century that he lived through, such as the Black Plague and the Great Fire of London, they are written with energy and depth, and you feel they have size, honest wonder.

For instance, take this brief account of one of the most ordinary, practical things men do nearly every day — yet for Samuel Pepys in 1664 it was new:

Jan. 6 — This morning I began a practice which I find by the ease I do it with that I shall continue, it saving me money and time; that is, to trimme myself with a razer: which pleases me mightily.

This was new for Pepys because until then, he went to the barber’s to get a shave. Here we see him practical — this new method is easy and saves time and money. And yet he gets such enjoyment from it and even wonder — “it pleases me mightily” — that you feel it was a happening. It was, because this shave of 1664 was a microcosm of the ideal every man today is going for: that he and the world can work well together.

When he began the diaries, Pepys was 27, had been married five years, and had a promising young career as a principal officer in the navy administration. Pepys was, one website says, “a practical man of business but also had a wide-ranging appetite for knowledge.” He was an accomplished musician, loved books, and was an avid theatre-goer, often recording his impressions of early performances of plays by Shakespeare and others.

A diary entry from 1660 begins with practical matters, and then shows a man trying to stick to his ideals. Pepys was rising in his profession and knew others were aware of it. He writes:

Mar. 22 — Up very early and set things in order at my house…I went forth about my own business to buy a pair of riding grey serge stockings and sword and belt and hose, and after that took Wotton and Brigden to the Pope’s Head Tavern in Chancery Lane….Strange how these people do now promise me anything; one a rapier, the other a vessel of wine or a gun, and one offered me his silver hatband to do him a courtesy. I pray God to keep me from being proud or too much lifted up hereby.

This is admirable because it shows that Pepys didn’t want schmooze and gifts, and knew he had a danger, as we all do, of getting puffed up with his importance. His worry here is both a very practical one for a man’s life, and also shows that Pepys wanted to have integrity, a high ideal.

In March of 1658, he underwent a dangerous operation to remove a gall bladder stone. On each anniversary of the date, he gave what he called a “stone-feast,” a banquet for friends to express his gratitude for his healthy life. In fact, Pepys had a glass case made for the stone which he had preserved, and brought it out as part of the celebration. Here is the entry from 1662:

Mar. 26 — Up early. This being, by God’s great blessing, the fourth solemn day of my cutting for the stone…and am by God’s mercy in very good health, and like to do well, the Lord’s name be praised for it. To the office and…all the morning about business. At noon come my good guests, Madame Turner, The., and Cozen Norton, and…Mr. Lewin of the King’s LifeGuard …I had a pretty dinner for them, viz., a brace of stewed carps, six roasted chickens, and a jowl of salmon, hot, for the first course; a tanzy [a pudding made with a special herb]…and cheese the second; and were very merry…talking and singing and piping upon the flageolette. In the evening they went with great pleasure away, and I with great content and my wife walked half an hour in the garden, and so home to supper and to bed.

This entry brings up the question: how practical is gratitude, and does it stand for an ideal, something every man wants to feel on a factual basis? I learned from Aesthetic Realism that there is nothing more important, because when we are grateful, it means the world has done us good, made us stronger, and we’re glad to say so. Aesthetic Realism itself is immensely practical and kind in teaching men about this, and also about that in us that doesn’t want to be grateful to anything, and even resents it. Knowing about this fight enables a man to make choices that strengthen his life.

Practicality and Idealism: In Marriage and a City

Samuel Pepys was married to Elizabeth St. Michael, and while there are many accounts of happy times between Mr. and Mrs. Pepys — they took singing lessons together, decorated their home, went to the theatre — their marriage was often turbulent. Pepys had a roving eye, and acted on it. Though his wife didn’t have firm evidence of this for many years, she suspected it, and Pepys was immensely troubled about it, as his diaries show.

And in their day-to-day life at home there were the fights and disagreements that are frequent in marriages today, about matters that seem only practical, but that arise from something larger — one’s purpose, one’s ideals. For example, early in 1665 they fought about money:

Jan. 28 — Come home, I to the taking my wife’s kitchen accounts…and there find 7 [shillings] wanting, which did occasion a very high falling out between us, I indeed too angrily insisting upon so poor a thing, and did give her very provoking high words, calling her beggar, and reproaching her friends, which she took very stomachfully and reproached me justly with mine, and I confess…I cannot see what she could have done less. We parted…very angry, and I to my office to my month’s accounts, and find myself worth £1,270 for which the Lord God be praised.

First Pepys gives it to his wife, thinking, as many men have, that he is the superior budget keeper. Then, feeling guilty and unsure because he was mean, he has to puff himself by counting his fortune alone in his office. This is classic male ill will and obnoxiousness, and I know about it first hand.

Pepys couldn’t have known what Aesthetic Realism shows: a man can have an honest ideal to care deeply for a woman who stands for the world that adds to him, but he can also look to find weaknesses, even villainies in order to make less of her because he feels it’s an insult that she’s affected him.

When Meryl and I were seeing each other and thinking of living together, we talked one day about our budgets. Afterward, I was convinced I needed to instruct her about money — though I was no maven on the subject — and prepared in my mind for the second installment in my series of lectures when I would see her that night. But when Meryl opened the door with a smile, she had a thorough Excel spreadsheet of her entire budget in hand, gave it to me in a matter-of-fact way, and went to make dinner. My jaw hit the floor.

I told about this in the same Aesthetic Realism class I quoted earlier, and Ms. Reiss asked:

ER: When you wanted to talk with Ms. Nietsch about your budgets, was your beginning purpose like bringing her a bouquet of roses? Did you feel there was a deep closeness?

BC: Yes.

ER: When there is a discussion of money, it is a deep thing. People so much don’t trust each other on this subject — for example, there are pre-nuptial agreements. Why did you want to show her your budget?

BC: Because I care for her.

ER: You didn’t say that. Somewhere you are embarrassed that you care for Miss Nietsch so much.

I cannot say enough how thankful I am for the practical, life-changing education I’m receiving from Aesthetic Realism about love. Meryl makes my life richer and stronger and I cherish our very happy marriage. I need her energy and depth, the way she criticizes, with straight good nature, my tendency to irritability and brooding. Meryl has a deep desire to have a good effect on people, including in her work as part of the Aesthetic Realism teaching trio There Are Wives, and I love her for it.

Along with domestic doings, Samuel Pepys tells about two of the largest occurrences in 17th century London, both of which comment in a terrible way on the relation of practicality and ideals in how people are seen and a city is run.

First was the Great Plague of 1665, which, at its height, killed more than 6,000 people in one week. The germ of the Plague was carried by fleas on rats that infested the impoverished areas of the city. Those with money got out of London as fast as possible. But because of a horrible situation — unclean slums in which thousands were forced to live — a city of 93,000 lost nearly a quarter of its population within a matter of months.

The second tragedy is really the only thing that stopped the first — the Great Fire of London a year later in 1666. It began in one house, and within hours spread among the cramped, thatched-roof homes of, again, the poor inhabitants of London. Soon the fire jumped to warehouses containing oil, tallow, hemp and other highly flammable materials. A strong wind carried sparks everywhere, and the city went up in flames. Here is a contemporary painting of the time, showing the Great Fire.

Pepys’ first-hand account is one of the few that exist. It reads in part:

Sept. 2 — It began this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding Lane…Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters [boats] that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down…

The wind mighty high and driving it into the City; and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches…

People all almost distracted…and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops…and saw the fire grow…in a most horrid malicious bloody flame…it made me weep to see it.

I respect Pepys’ feeling for all those people, his city, and even the pigeons. And don’t both of these events have a terrible meaning right now in light of what people all over the world saw happen to the poorest people of New Orleans when disaster struck their city? Economic injustice, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, makes for cruel impracticality because it arises from cruel ideals — the using of some people for one’s own gain, and not giving a damn about their lives.

What Men Learn in Consultations

Rick Durbin, a young man of Metuchen, N.J., works with a social agency to oppose economic injustice in the metropolitan area. His work is in behalf of a more ideal world, and yet to do it he’s got to be practical and tough, fighting unfair labor practices and the cynicism he can meet in people.

In his consultations, it became clear that, like many men, he’s had a tendency to see his work life as very different from his life at home with his wife — which he’s felt was a refuge, an “ideal” place of comfort and rest.

So it was a shock when, as a new home owner, he had to learn practical aspects of maintaining a house. He told us, “My father in law came over and handed me a power tool, and I looked at it like ‘what is that?!’”

To have Mr. Durbin relate his life at work and his life at home, we asked him to write about five people at his job and how each could have him be deeper about his wife, Sandra Durbin. These are two of the points he wrote:

1. Greg DeMarco is president of the metropolitan region. I have seen that Greg is trying to put together toughness and sweetness. He needs to be tough, especially when dealing with management. He has also shown sweetness when dealing with agency members. As I saw these opposites in Mr. DeMarco, I thought about how Sandra is also trying to put these opposites together. Sandy can be very sweet, for example, when she is caring for the plants and flowers in our home. I’ve also see her be tough when she has been critical of me, especially when I get annoyed too quickly. I know Sandra wants to feel that when she is tough, it is for the same purpose as when she is [kind or] sweet. Seeing these opposites in another person had me think more deeply about how I can encourage them to be one in Sandy.

And then:

2. When I attended a rally by workers and spoke to the president, Eleanor Tierney, I saw the passionate feeling people have that they be respected. One of the biggest issues workers are concerned about is not just wages, but whether they are treated with respect. Seeing this feeling in people had me be deeper about Sandra. I had more feeling about how important it is that she feel that I want to respect her as much as possible.

Mr. Durbin told us, “I’m grateful for this assignment, because it had me put together the work I do and wanting to know who my wife is. I feel my job can really have me be a kinder person and friend to Sandy.”

Rick Durbin stands for the beautiful, practical reality Aesthetic Realism makes possible in a man’s life: that he grows stronger, wider, deeper and kinder with every year.

The post Samuel Pepys Shows Men Can Have Both Practicality & Idealism appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The thirst for authentic criticism of ourselves can be seen in the lives of men throughout history, and it is comprehended magnificently by Aesthetic Realism. Because of this my life today is happy and strong. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, titled “Looking For Criticism,” Mr. Siegel wrote:

Every person who has ever lived has wanted to know what the voice of the world might tell him. Man needed a critic of himself that stood for everything.

Aesthetic Realism sees criticism in a completely new way. It is not, as I once thought, laying someone out with your most scathing observations, telling him everything you don’t like about him. It is an aesthetic, intellectual procedure, impelled by the hope that someone’s life be better. Writes Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss in The Right Of:

While men and women maneuver for flattery and lap it up, they also despise the person who gives it. That is because a friend is someone who cares enough for our life so that he doesn’t butter us or collaborate with us, but really wants what is hurtful in us to be less. When we see someone not care about that…we feel he is our enemy. We may not say so; we may flatter him while he flatters us; but our suspicion, emptiness, and sense of pretense will go on. And so will the ache for honesty.

The Desire for Flattery Comes from a Way of Seeing the World

Aesthetic Realism shows that when a man wants flattery from a woman, his family, his boss, it comes from an attitude he has to the whole world. Our deepest purpose, Eli Siegel explained, is to like the world, to respect it as much as possible. But every man also has a hope to see the world as an opponent he has to vanquish, and this, I learned, is contempt.

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson he gave, Mr. Siegel was speaking about this when he asked a person, “What is a danger, if one feels the world is against one?” And he explained:

You look for a remedy. If a person feels the world is against one, he looks for someone who will be utterly for one…If one feels the world is mean, the anodyne is…flattery.

Growing up in suburban Miami Shores, Florida, though there were many things I liked, such as going down the block at dusk to Biscayne Bay with my friends, often I felt the world was mean. And this feeling began early. At six, when I went to the Honey Bun Kindergarten, I remember feeling that the other children were harsh, they played too rough at recess, and that things seemed much safer and more soothing at home.

My parents made a lot of me. They told me how cute I was and made me feel I was more sensitive and mature than other children my age. “You could charm the wallpaper off the walls,” is something I heard at home, and I loved it.

Once in the 60’s when I was twelve, my parents came home from a trip and gave me a present of the newest high-tech watch—along with the time, it told you the day of the month. But I had found out in advance what the gift was, and said in my most boyish, naive and carefully planned way as I opened the box, “Oh my—what boy my age has a watch like this!” I got just what I wanted when they beamed at me like I was the most adorable thing on earth.

“If you’re looking for flattery,” said Mr. Siegel in the lesson I quoted earlier, “the first order of business is to respect the flatterer. When you get flattery and don’t respect the flatterer, there’s trouble.”

I didn’t respect the flattery or the person giving it, and there definitely was trouble. I knew I didn’t deserve it—I was competitive with my brothers, ambitious to be liked by people, and could be scheming and mean to get ahead. That included my flattering other people in order to get things from them. Years later, when I had my first meeting with a boss who was new on a job and she asked me “So how’s the morale around here?”, I answered in a greasy way, “Oh, I think it’s much better now that you’re here.” I didn’t even know this person, who turned out to be a corporate shark—but I sure tried to butter her so she would like me and give me a promotion.

The way I wanted people to make a lot of me while I had contempt for them had huge consequences: often I felt lonely, empty and like a mean faker who pretended to be a nice guy. I didn’t feel I deserved to be honestly cared for by someone.

Meanwhile, deserve it or not, I thought a woman should praise me, not criticize me. At Syracuse University, when I took singing lessons with Sue Hammill who was very pretty, she told me in a very matter of fact way that I had a pleasant voice, but that no one would know it because it didn’t project beyond about 10 feet from my mouth. It made me angry, and try as I might I couldn’t seem to charm her, and in lessons she kept insisting that she couldn’t hear me. “What’s wrong with this lady?!” I thought—”maybe she has a hearing problem.” But she was right, and the criticism she gave me I was to hear again and again as my acting career continued.

Love Is Criticism

If you asked me years ago whether criticism and love had anything in common I would have said “No way.” I thought criticism was the opposite of love.

To me, love was having a woman in a tizzy about me, and treating me like the prince I was sure that destiny meant for me to be. The problem was no woman would go along with that scenario, and like many men, I had a lot of trouble in love.

Through Aesthetic Realism, I wanted to learn about my motives with women so I could be proud of my purpose in love. In one class, I was speaking about difficulty I was having in love, and Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked:

Ellen Reiss.  Do you want a woman to be as good as she can be or to serve you in some way? Serving is praise. Do you think a woman would feel you’re more interested in her serving you or you making her stronger?

When I answered vaguely, “A woman would have to worry about that,” Ms. Reiss said:

Ellen Reiss.  You’re teasing now. Do you think to have a woman worry about you is a form of praising you? Are you “You’ll-never-be-sure-of-me” Cooperman?

Yes, I was! I tried to have a woman unsure and then took it as flattery that she was in a stir about me. It made me ashamed, and discussions like this enabled me to change.

Flattery and criticism, I learned, are related to opposites that confuse people very much in love: how to be both for and against someone. Good will, Aesthetic Realism teaches, puts these together. It is, Mr. Siegel writes, “a true mingling of kindness and exactness or severity.” And he says:

The first thing…in our attitude towards someone we care for is that our criticism go for the same purpose as our encouragement. What usually happens is that when we criticize a person we are taken to be a different person from the time when we praise…Criticism and love can be one—if when we encourage what is good, we have the same purpose as in discouraging what is bad.

When I began to see Meryl Nietsch, the woman who is now my wife, I was very taken by how beautiful she was and also the way she was a serious student in classes we attended. Meryl made it clear that she wanted my criticism of how she saw things, and she was a critic of me, too. The more we talked, the more I felt I needed her to be myself.

At the time, in my work as an actor I was preparing to play the part of the villain, Iago, in a production here of Eli Siegel’s magnificent lecture on Shakespeare’s Othello. But I was having difficulty getting into the role of this evil man who is called “honest” many times in the play. Ms. Reiss spoke to me about it in a class, asking: “Do you want to take every bit of evil in you and have people see how it maneuvers? What would you get out of showing it?”

Meryl was excited by this discussion. One night she invited me to dinner, and as we sat down she said she had written “A Soliloquy of How Bennett Cooperman is Like Iago”—11 specific points about how I saw things that had an Iago-esque state of mind. Each one was so on target about me, with style and humor, that I was astonished. I quote from three points:

Naivete—When I want to find something out I can be very naive, so naive and innocent, just like I was with my parents, hardly anybody suspects me—I’m so good at it. Then I’ll use what I find out to my advantage.

I’ll pause, and say this is just what Iago does in Act III when, so seemingly innocently, he plants the seed in Othello’s mind that Desdemona was unfaithful to him with Cassio, which is a lie and leads to tragedy:

Iago.  Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love?
Oth.  He did, from first to last. Why dost thou ask?
Iago.  But for a satisfaction of my thought; no further harm.
Oth.  Why of thy thought, Iago?
Iago.  I did not think he had been acquainted with her.
Oth.  O, yes, and went between us very oft.
Iago.  Indeed?
Oth.  Indeed? Ay, indeed! Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest?
Iago.  Honest, my lord?

Near the end of the play, when Iago’s wife, Emilia, tells the truth about his villainy, he tries to shut her up, saying: “What, are you mad? I charge you get you home.” Meryl’s next point was:

Criticism From Women—Who does she think she is criticizing me? I’m Bennett Cooperman and I don’t take this from any woman…I’m the one that’s in control here! I am the lecturer, the scolder. I like putting a woman in her place…

And about another way of both Iago and me, Meryl wrote:

Changing the Subject—This is a very good way to get out of something that doesn’t make me look good, and I do it so well. I can act very concerned about something and just slip right out of the hot spot. This is where my casual manner comes in very handy.

As Meryl read through the points, I never experienced anything like it. It was clear that she really wanted me to do well, and to have a good time knowing myself. I was tremendously affected, head to toe, and when she finished I jumped up and hugged her. Some weeks later, with everything I was learning, I was able to get to a portrayal of Iago that I’m proud of.

I came to feel I could count on Meryl to be a real friend—not to schmooze me, but to be honest—and I wanted to do the same for her for the rest of our lives. We have been married for twenty years, and I love her more with every year. And I’m so happy we can learn more each day what real love is.

Consultations—the Criticism Men Are Thirsty For

Eli Siegel wrote:

According to Aesthetic Realism, a person is critical of himself all the time, and one of the things which would be success in life for him, would be if he could put that criticism in conscious, sober, non-complaining language and be proud of how he expresses it.

That is what men learn to do through Aesthetic Realism consultations, and one such man is Gary Bauer, a 29-year-old musician living in New York City. Mr. Bauer wanted to understand a deep change that occurred in him when he was about 14.

Before that, he said, he was a good student and had a sense of humor. But then, as he told us, his parents began arguing a lot and, “sometimes I thought they would break up.” At the same time he became ill, and also had to begin wearing very thick glasses. He said:

Gary Bauer.  So I didn’t really like myself. Actually it was very, very bad—I didn’t like myself at all.

He said he felt other children were making fun of him.

Gary Bauer.  At school I never raised my hand because I would just think if somebody mentioned my name, I got so tense and I thought everybody was looking at me…I thought the whole world was against me.

In time, Mr. Bauer became more withdrawn and had, as he said, “zero confidence.” Clearly he had suffered, but we knew Mr. Bauer needed to understand and criticize what Aesthetic Realism explains—the victory a man has feeling the whole world is out to get him. “Why did you made that decision,” we asked, “to feel everybody was out to make fun of you? What in you leapt to that?”

Gary Bauer.  I think I wanted to protect myself.

Consultants.  Aesthetic Realism says there is a relation of contempt and respect in everyone—it’s a ferocious battle. And do you think if there’s a hope to find the world a filthy, evil mess, and then you get a little evidence, you go “Aha!” You’re miserable, but do you think you were also triumphant?

Gary Bauer. Yeah, I was—right!

Then Mr. Bauer saw something he had never seen before. We said:

Consultants.  You felt everybody was looking down on you. But did you look down on everybody?

Gary Bauer.  Yes, I felt people were superficial.

Consultants.  Aesthetic Realism shows we have an ethical unconscious, and when we are not fair, we punish ourselves by being unsure, being nervous because we don’t think people should like how we see them. Doesn’t that make sense?

Gary Bauer.  Yes, it does!

Mr.  Bauer’s life is blossoming, he is getting more sure of himself, and it’s a privilege to see. He told us:

Gary Bauer.  I feel much better about myself because of Aesthetic Realism. I started a new job and usually I would feel inferior to the other people, my boss or something, but I’m much more relaxed.

Consultants.  Why do you think—is there a principle here?

Gary Bauer.  Yes. Aesthetic Realism taught me to look at people more deeply.

Criticism, Stanislavsky, and the Art of Acting

I am going to discuss briefly two passages from the book My Life in Art by the great 19th century Russian director and theoretician of acting, Konstantin Stanislavsky. He developed what came to be known as “The Method,” an approach that encourages an actor to get within the inner life of the character he is portraying, using his own life experiences to do so.

The Method was an important new point in theatre and a criticism of the more formal, declamatory style of acting that had been fashionable.

When I went to Syracuse University as an acting major, I had four years of training based strictly on Stanislavsky’s Method, and I loved it.

In the book, Stanislavsky tells one criticism after another he heard as a young actor—and he does it with such relish, depth and delight. I believe it is because he wanted to criticize himself so trenchantly and with pleasure that he was able to come to something new and more honest in acting technique. Mr. Siegel said in his lecture “Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting” that the Stanislavsky way “puts together opposites again and again,” and is in behalf of liking the world.

I give two examples from My Life in Art, both of which illustrate this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

1) The first is called “dropping tone,” which is like what my teacher, Sue Hammill, had criticized me for. A technical matter in acting is how to maintain a volume loud enough so you can be heard throughout the theatre, while not screaming or seeming unnatural. Stanislavsky tells about acting in a play called The Lucky Man by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko:

I would flame up and then suddenly die down. This made my speech and action become energetic and then my voice could be heard, the words sounded clearly and reached the audience—or all would grow dull and I wilted, my voice would begin to murmur, my words could not be heard, and the spectators would cry “Louder! Louder!”

In actors’ parlance this is called “dropping tone.” Of course I could force myself to speak loudly, to act energetically, but when you force yourself to be loud for the sake of loudness…without any inner meaning and inspiration, you feel ashamed on the stage…And side by side with me were real true-to-goodness artists…Something seemed to hold them at the same temperature of heightened energy and prevented them from sinking.

Here, Stanislavsky admirably criticizes himself for a bad relation of loud and soft, and this has ethical meaning for men in our lives, too—in our marriages, at work. We want to meet the world with energy and also be thoughtful; we want to affect and to be affected. But a man can either be pompously assertive with his wife, or, feeling he’s too good for the world, retreat and be aloof from her. Both arise from contempt, and in order for a man to change as he hopes to, he needs criticism, not flattery.

2) Stanislavsky also speaks about how he would, as Hamlet warns the actors not to do, “tear a passion to tatters.” Sometimes, he says, “I made as much noise as an unconnected belting in a factory while the machine which it is supposed to run is stationary. The belting works, but there are no results.” For instance, in a comedy he played a man who leaves the room and comes back more drunk each time. He writes:

I learned…to copy drunkards to perfection, and I felt myself to be so good…on the stage that I could not restrain the inner joy and palpitation which I mistook for inspiration…With each of my entrances I tried to give stronger and stronger expression to what boiled within me. But the audience criticized me.

The more excited [I was], the more the audience criticized my rapid patter, my incoherent diction, my hoarse voice…my strained and exaggerated efforts.

At a third performance I was reproached…for grimacing and the absence of a feeling of true measure, without which everything I did seemed inartistic and unnatural.

This is about the opposites of passion and then control—which is what I believe Stanislavsky means by “a feeling of true measure.” And these, too, are opposites every man wants to do better with in his life. We all want to be able to let go, be unrestrained, and also have a sense of reason, control. Being told we’re wonderful will never get us there.

In one passage, as Stanislavsky writes about actors, I believe he is talking about the deepest hope of every man. He says:

The actor is caught in the quicksand of flattery and praise. That which is pleasant is always victorious, because one wants to believe it. One listens to the compliments of charming admirers and not to the…truth. Young actors, fear your admirers! You may pay them attentions, but…learn in time, from your very first steps, to hear, understand and love the…truth about yourselves. Find out who can tell you that truth.

The education of Aesthetic Realism does just that for a man, making his life happy, educated, rich and strong. It has done that for me. That is happening, too, to Gary Bauer in his consultations, and I close with something he said recently: “I feel very grateful for my consultations. Every time I come, I feel 50 minutes—every minute is valuable to me. I know I am in the right place.”

The post Flattery or Criticism: Which Do Men Truly Want? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a man will be rightly sure of himself when his purpose is to try and be fair to people and the world itself. This is good will, and it’s not a soft thing. Good will is a beginning, organic drive in a man, and if he is untrue to it, he’ll be deeply unsure no matter how much he swaggers and tries to cover it up. Eli Siegel has defined good will as “The wish of a person that good things happen to things—things include people—with the desire to know what those good things are.” And he explained:

The having of good will as not contrary to logic or care for self, is the greatest mental attainment that is possible. This is a corollary of the Aesthetic Realism belief that liking the world on an honest basis, without smooth deception of oneself, is the purpose of man and of life.

Many of the ways I tried to be sure were against that purpose. I wanted to be better than other people—smarter and more savvy. This, I learned, was contempt, and I’ve seen that what I really wanted was so different.

Knowing the World Versus Using It

As a boy and young man, I loved studying singing and dancing. Later at Syracuse University as an acting major, some of the times I felt best were working on a role, trying to understand a character. I liked thinking about what the character’s life was like before we see him in the play, how did he move and talk?

In my freshman year I was cast in Bertholt Brecht’s play Galileo as a crippled man dressed in rags in a large street scene with many people. My legs were tied behind me, and, lying on the ground, I had to pull myself along with my hands begging for food, trying not to be stepped on or hurt. Though it was a small part and seemingly lowly, I loved it and had a certain confidence during rehearsals. I liked trying to become this man whose life was so different from mine, who was forced by circumstances to be humble.

But in my everyday life, I went after another kind of sureness, based on arrogance. As the youngest of three sons in suburban Miami Shores, Florida, my parents made a lot of me, and I came to feel I was the best boy in the neighborhood—better than my two older brothers.

I was the “good” one and I milked it. Also, I was sure that the Coopermans were one of the better families in Miami Shores. We had money, my father had a Cadillac, and I thought of us as the Jewish Kennedys. By the time I was six or seven, I walked around feeling like a prince—smugly convinced that my place in life was above that of most people. Though I wouldn’t have put it just this way, I equated being sure of myself to looking down on other people, having contempt for them, and this had terrific consequences.

I often felt agitated, bored and very separate. And from as early as I can remember, I had great difficulty falling asleep—something that did not change until I studied Aesthetic Realism. Sometimes I secretly took my mother’s sleeping pills to knock myself out. Then when I did sleep I often had nightmares, and remember once yelling out for my father to come to my room, because I was practically frozen in bed with fear, convinced someone behind the chair was trying to get me.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that you cannot have contempt without a kickback. In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Ellen Reiss explains:

The underlying doubt, the underlying uncertainty that we can have, unarticulated yet poking and sometimes gnawing and thrusting within us, in relation to any aspect of our lives is this: Am I liking the world more through this thing I’m in the midst of—or am I using it to dislike the world? People haven’t known that this unspoken question is behind the nervousness or unsureness or perhaps sudden sinking they may feel.

When I graduated from college and needed a job, I worked as a condominium salesman for my father and brother who owned a retirement development in Sunrise, Florida. Once I began I was ambitious to be a hotshot salesman. So while acting affable to the retirees who came to look at the apartments, I was conniving in my thoughts, seeing each one as a potential sale who would make me money and also make me look good. I remember laughing it up as I told my father and brother how I pounded on the walls in the model apartment to show one elderly couple how solid they were. I thought I was so clever, and they were so gullible.

I saw no relation between this contemptuous way of thinking about people and the fact that I hated my life. I was living alone in one of the model apartments, and was excruciatingly lonely and unsure of myself—so much so that I often smoked pot in the morning before I went into work, feeling I couldn’t function otherwise.

A college friend had told me about Aesthetic Realism, and one sunny afternoon in 1976, from the sales office I called the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and asked to have consultations. I told the young woman at the other end of the phone that I had to learn to like myself first, and then I would feel at ease and confident with other people. She said Aesthetic Realism explains it’s just the opposite—you have to like the way you see the world and other people first, and that will have you like yourself. The logic made such sense, but I had never heard anything like it before.

Soon I had my first consultation, and was asked at one point: “Are you an agonized mingling of sureness and unsureness?” Yes, and hearing that put into words I felt understood.

I remember, too, that soon after this consultation was the first time I actually saw I had contempt. I was in the Broadway/Lafayette subway station and asked someone for directions. The directions turned out to be wrong, and I muttered under my breath, “God damned New Yorkers.” A second later I thought “That’s it!—that was contempt—you just panned a whole city of people because one man made a mistake.” Seeing this I wanted to jump for joy!

Learning how contempt worked in me, and also getting a tremendous education in what it means to respect people, to have a wide interest in the world, I began to feel a sureness I never had before. Just a few months later I wrote in a letter to Eli Siegel: “We have never met, and yet you have changed my life…I am more comfortable in my own skin…Thank you.”

“The Apartment” Can Teach Us about Sureness

The 1960 movie “The Apartment” by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond shows the fight in a man between going after what he thinks will make him confident—a big promotion at work—and having a purpose that makes him truly sure of himself: to know and strengthen other people.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. “Bud” Baxter, an accountant in an insurance firm who, though seemingly compliant and mild, is ambitious and calculating. Like me of once, Baxter looks at people in terms of how he can use them to get ahead. In a lecture, Mr. Siegel explained:

The economics of the moment says: get yours. It is hard to see how a deeply tranquil attitude towards other people can arise and be maintained while a person is driven to be in constant economic combat with those people.

Baxter is anything but “tranquil.” Jack Lemmon, the late, very fine actor, plays him wonderfully as a mingling of nervous agitation and a pervasive flat, dull ache. He is cocky and arrogant one moment, wobbly and unsure the next.

When we first meet Baxter he’s working in the towering home office of Consolidated Life of New York, desk #861. He often stays late because, as he says, “I have this little problem with my apartment.” The problem? Four of Baxter’s supervisors are using the apartment to have rendezvous with lady friends, stringing him along with promises of a promotion.

For instance, Mr. Kirkeby uses the apartment one night, leaves, and Bud finally goes home. But Kirkeby returns for something he forgot, and there is this dialogue:

Bud.  Mr. Kirkeby, I don’t like to complain—but you were supposed to be out of here by eight.

Kirkeby.  I know, Buddy-boy, I know. But those things don’t always run on schedule—like a Greyhound bus.

Bud.  I don’t mind in the summer, but on a rainy night…

Kirkeby.  Sure, sure. Look, kid—I put in a good word for you with Sheldrake, in Personnel.

Bud.  (perking up) Mr. Sheldrake?

Kirkeby.  That’s right. We were discussing our department — manpower-wise—and promotion-wise—and I told him what a bright boy you were. They’re always on the lookout for young executives.

Bud.  Thank you, Mr. Kirkeby.

Kirkeby.  You’re on your way up, Buddy-boy. And you’re practically out of liquor.

Bud.  Yes, Mr. Kirkeby. You still owe me for…two bottles.

Kirkeby.  I’ll pay you on Friday. And what ever happened to those little cheese crackers you used to have around?

Here we see Baxter alternately inflated as Kirkeby talks of his being an executive on the rise, and then yanked down with the request for “those little cheese crackers.” But Baxter puts up with it from Kirkeby and the other supervisors, in fact he thinks it’s smart. He says later about one of them, “[He] wasn’t using me—I was using him.”

Also working at Consolidated Life is Fran Kubelik, the elevator operator, played by Shirley MacLaine. Fran is lively, pretty and smart, and Bud likes her. One day he gets a call to go up to the office of Mr. Sheldrake, Director of Personnel, and Bud thinks it’s his big day—he’s going to be promoted. As he gets on the elevator he says boastingly to Fran:

Bud.  Drive carefully. You’re carrying precious cargo — I mean, manpower-wise…I’m in the top ten—efficiency-wise—and this may be the day—promotion-wise.

Fran.  You’re beginning to sound like Mr. Kirkeby already.

So Fran is a critic of Bud, and she is kind.

In the meeting, Mr. Sheldrake makes it clear he wants to use Bud’s apartment, too, and Bud hands over his key. Little does he know that Sheldrake, who is married, plans to use the apartment to be with Fran Kubelik.

A Man Learns How to Be Rightly Sure

Steve Kelson is a college student who lives in Manhattan. He has a sociable manner, but told us he felt unsure within, especially with women. In one consultation, he said he’d just come from a coffee shop and, as he put it:

Steve Kelson.  I was sitting there and at two tables there were very pretty women. And I was getting really tense. I didn’t feel comfortable.

Consultants.  What do you think is the cause of this?

Steve Kelson.  I’m not sure about that. If they wouldn’t have been so pretty I probably wouldn’t have cared so much.

“Do you think pretty women are people?” we asked. And then we asked something that Aesthetic Realism shows can have a man more sure of himself as he thinks about women:

Consultants.  Do you think they have questions that are the same and different from your own?

Steve Kelson.  No, I didn’t think that—I just thought they were pretty and they looked confident.

Consultants.  Could a person look at you and say, “he looks confident,” and not know all the things that go on inside you?

Steve Kelson.  Yes.

Aesthetic Realism explains that for a man to be honestly sure of himself, he needs to have a good kind of unsureness, to question himself: Is my purpose to respect or have contempt? Consultations meet that hope in a man centrally, and it is a privilege to see the effect they have on a man’s life.

In a class some years ago, at a time I was feeling very unsure in relation to a woman I was seeing, Ellen Reiss articulated questions I could ask myself as I thought about her: “Am I interested in this person in order to have her life stronger? What does that mean? As I think about her, do I feel deep and sweet and strong?”

It makes me very grateful to be able to learn more about that each day in my marriage to Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. Knowing Meryl, how she meets the world and her perceptions about things, including me, makes me more myself, and I love her.

In the consultation I’ve been quoting, we told Mr. Kelson:

If you really want to know a person, and want her to be stronger, you will feel more at ease, more sure of yourself, and the reason is that you’ll be trying to have good will.

Sureness and Unsureness about Love

In “The Apartment” Bud Baxter gets his promotion and his own office. He buys a new bowler hat, the “junior executive” model, and thinks he’s on his way to the top. But Baxter is still unsure—he’s embarrassed to wear the hat, and walks around like a lonely shell.

In a class some years ago, when I spoke about how I was driven to make money and buy things for myself that I didn’t really need, Ms. Reiss asked:

If a person made a lot of money but wasn’t kind, would he feel sure of himself? Will a person ever feel sure of himself if he doesn’t have good will?

The answer I have seen, is no, because what Aesthetic Realism shows is the ethical unconscious in a man won’t let him get away with anything less than being fair. All the goodies he buys for himself will never fill the void.

A dramatic turn of events in “The Apartment” brings up a debate that Eli Siegel describes when he writes:

Two possibilities of man may be in a deep and intense fight. We all of us can find ambition and love at odds in ourselves. The desire for [love] can be hostile…to a desire to make a lot of money. Our possibilities do clash.

Fran Kubelik is with Mr. Sheldrake one night in Baxter’s apartment, and when he leaves, she is very distressed and against herself for seeing this married man. She finds sleeping pills in the bathroom and takes them. Bud comes home, thinks Fran has fallen asleep on his bed, and angrily tries to wake her up, telling her to get out. But realizing the gravity of what has occurred, he runs to get a neighbor who is a doctor, and they work through the night to save her life. When Fran wakes up she tries to get out of bed, and says:

Fran.  I’m sorry, Mr. Baxter.

Bud.  Miss Kubelik—you shouldn’t be out of bed.

Fran.  I’m so ashamed. Why didn’t you just let me die?

Bud.  Miss Kubelik, you got to promise me you won’t do anything foolish.

Fran.  Who’d care?

Bud.  I would.

As they talk, Bud finds himself wanting to have a good effect on her, and you feel he really cares about someone else.

He prepares dinner for Fran and himself, and in a memorable moment, takes a pot of spaghetti off the stove, picks up a tennis racquet and uses it to strain the spaghetti, humming happily all the time.

Later in the movie, we see that Bud’s earlier dream has come true—he’s risen in the company and has a cushy office. But when Sheldrake tells Bud he’s going out with Fran Kubelik again and will need his apartment, Bud refuses. Sheldrake says:

Sheldrake.  Baxter, I picked you for my team because I thought you were a bright young man. You realize what you’re doing? …Normally it takes years to work your way up to the twenty-seventh floor — but it takes only thirty seconds to be out on the street again. You dig.

Bud.  (nodding slowly) I dig.

Sheldrake.  So what’s it going to be?

Bud reaches into his pocket, pulls out a key, and drops it on the desk—but it’s the key to the executive washroom.

Bud.  The old payola won’t work any more. Goodbye, Mr. Sheldrake.

When Fran learns what Bud has done, she runs to be with him, and as they sit on the couch together, you feel Bud has a happy confidence that’s new.

Through the study of Aesthetic Realism men everywhere can learn to have one of the most valuable things in life—an honest, deep sureness.

The post How Can a Man Be Rightly Sure of Himself? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Can we have both toughness and big feelings, can we be strong and tender, even sensitive? I’ve seen the answer is yes, and the thing that makes it possible is the purpose Aesthetic Realism shows is our deepest: to know and like the world.

When we have a steady desire to see the facts, it makes us keen, intellectually solid, and it is also the very thing that enables a man to be moved, affected, to have the feelings he wants. And “the greatest feeling,” Eli Siegel wrote, “is the feeling that we are getting along with the world in general.”

That is in fierce competition with the drive in a man to see the world as an antagonist he has to beat. This is contempt, and it makes for a kind of toughness that’s dangerous and hurts our lives tremendously. Mr. Siegel described where this begins when he wrote:

It can carefully be said that people are in a constant contest between the desire to feel more and the desire to feel as little as possible. It happens that with every disappointment in life, there is some desire to feel less…According to Aesthetic Realism, there is a great tendency to get distinction from the fact that the world is not on our side.

Friend or Enemy?

I grew up in Miami Shores, Florida, down the block from Biscayne Bay. And all the time I had the debate Aesthetic Realism shows is in everyone: between feeling the world was a friend, something to care for and have feeling about, or an enemy against which I had to make myself tough and hard.

One place the world seemed friendly was at the home of the Henrys, a couple from England who lived on our block. I loved to hear them talk with their British accents. They had five dogs, and one became pregnant. When the puppies were born and I got the call to come over, I was so excited, and felt a sense of awe seeing these little beings who, hours before, were inside the mother, now outside, whimpering and with their eyes closed. I was amazed, too, that the mother knew instinctively just what to do to take care of her babies.

Right along with that feeling of wonder, I often felt something else: the world was a cold place and people would rook you if they had the chance. Once, a friend in the neighborhood, Jimmy Bickow, wanted me to teach him to climb a tree, which I could do well. I asked him to hold onto my pack of gum, and when I got up into the tree, I looked down in disbelief as Jimmy ran off with my gum. “Creep!” I thought, and later I had a smug victory when Jimmy opened his front door, and my mother and I were there to reclaim my precious gum.

That stands for many choices I unknowingly made to feel that people were out for themselves, and you better be damn smart and tough if you weren’t going to be a sap. Though I cultivated an outward “nice guy” manner, inwardly I was calculating. At work, I plotted very carefully how to have a boss depend on me more than my co-workers, and saw myself as pretty tough in navigating the treacherous corporate waters.

Aesthetic Realism shows there is a crucial distinction about our toughness: is it in behalf of justice, like the toughness of persons who fought the Nazis in World War II? Or is it in behalf of putting someone in his place, so you can be superior? The second always weakens us.

Toughness and honest wonder were in a stir in me some years ago when, for a dramatic presentation here of Eli Siegel’s great lecture on Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, I was rehearsing for the role of Huck. I had a noticeable tendency to make this young boy from Missouri, who sometimes speaks, as Mr. Siegel said, in sentences that are “aromatic with wonder”—I made make him sound like a street-wise teenager from the Bronx.

When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss said: “Huck Finn doesn’t want the wool to be pulled over his eyes, and he also wants to be true to everything romantic. Do you have a hard time putting the two together?” Yes, I did. Ms. Reiss continued, and what she said described my whole life: “Your toughness, street-wiseness and calculation is not at one with your sense of awe, the grand feeling.”

Hearing this described so clearly, I began to know myself better. “You are a keen, sharp person,” she said, “but you also want to see a sunrise.”

At the time of this discussion, I was seeing the woman who, I’m very grateful to say is now my wife of ten years, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. After having a lot of feeling about her, I would find myself becoming cool in ways I didn’t understand. Ms. Reiss asked:

Ellen Reiss.  Do you like the idea of feeling wonder about Miss Nietsch?

Bennett Cooperman.  I think I’m too suspicious.

Ellen Reiss.  You should be suspicious of it’s warranted. But Mr. Siegel was intense about a person hoping to be suspicious. That is always ugly. Have you hoped to be suspicious of Miss Nietsch?

Bennett Cooperman.  Yes.

I’ve seen that it is urgent for a man to know about that hope to be suspicious. It’s what has him hunt like a detective for the flaw in the very woman he loves, thinking he’s tough; has a husband focus in on the dish she left in the sink, and then not know why he later feels flat and ashamed. It ruins love, and Aesthetic Realism is kind and necessary in having us learn about it, so we can criticize it and change. That’s a good toughness—being able to criticize cheapness in oneself straight, and be different.

“The Call of the Wild”

The Call of the Wild by Jack London puts together movingly rugged toughness with a feeling heart in many ways we can learn from. First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903, the novel helped to make London, according to one website, “the most popular American author of his time.”

I believe the book brings up what Mr. Siegel said in a 1949 lecture, “Poetry and Strength,” explaining that when a person feels he is “sensitive”:

The first thing he wants to say is “Oh, I’m sensitive; therefore I’m not strong.” One might as well say that if an eye sees a lot it isn’t a strong eye, or if an ear hears a lot is isn’t a strong ear. The question is: what is the purpose of a human being? Is it to feel, and if sensitivity is allied to feeling, then certainly to feel is to be strong.

The Call of the Wild is about a powerful dog, Buck, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog. Jack London writes from Buck’s point of view with depth and subtlety, and presents such a rich inner life, that we feel he is like a person. Buck has been stolen from his comfortable home on a California estate and sold into a rigorous life as a sled dog in the Arctic. He becomes a masterful animal, “his muscles…hard as iron…he grew callous to all ordinary pain.”

Buck comes to love his spartan life and is proud of what his body can do. But then he is sold to a new master, Hal, who stands for a brutal kind of toughness. Hal relentlessly drives Buck day after day, while not feeding him enough, and within a few months Buck is greatly weakened and near death. One day at the campsite, Hal begins to beat Buck with a club. Another man, John Thornton, see this, and London writes:

Suddenly, without warning, uttering a cry that was inarticulate and more like the cry of an animal, John Thornton sprang upon the man who wielded the club. Hal was hurled backward, as though stuck by a falling tree…
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak.
“If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say in a choking voice.
“It’s my dog,” Hal replied, wiping the blood from his mouth…”Get out of my way, or I’ll fix you.”

But John Thornton prevails, and after Hal leaves:

Thornton knelt beside Buck and with rough, kindly hands searched for broken bones…John Thornton and Buck looked at each other.
“You poor devil,” said John Thornton and Buck licked his hand.

Here we see a beautiful toughness in John Thornton, at one with warm, deep feeling.

In an Aesthetic Realism class of 1985, Ellen Reiss discussed The Call of the Wild, particularly the chapter following John Thornton’s rescue of Buck, titled “For the Love of a Man.” Saying the book is “an important work of art,” she talked about it in relation to these sentences by Eli Siegel from The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known: “To be able to love any person is a beautiful achievement; ever so deep and ever so inclusive…You cannot love a person until that person is a means of loving the world itself.”

Ms. Reiss said that while the story is about great feeling between dog and man, “all love is related to all other love.” Through the dog Buck, we can see what men hope for too, and it’s in what she asked: “Is the greatest achievement to be able to value truly something not oneself?”

Buck comes to live at the home of John Thornton, who has other dogs, too. London writes:

As Buck grew stronger they [the other dogs] enticed him into all sorts of ridiculous games, in which Thornton himself could not forbear to join; and in this fashion Buck romped through his convalescence and into a new existence. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.

Asked Ellen Reiss: “What is the relation of ‘new existence’ and ‘love for the first time'”? And she explained they are synonymous. Through John Thornton, Buck has a new sight of the world, a world he can care for, and this makes for a feeling of genuine love—love that was, as London writes, “feverish and burning, that was adoration.”

A beautiful oneness of toughness and feeling is in the passage Ms. Reiss read next, and I never forgot hearing it. London writes how John Thornton:

…had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace…and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body, so great was its ecstasy. And when, released, he sprang to his feet, his mouth laughing, his eyes eloquent, his throat vibrant with unuttered sound, and in that fashion remained without movement, John Thornton would reverently exclaim, “God! you can all but speak!”

Why is that so moving? And why do we—and Buck—know that calling him ill names is really a way of showing affection? Ellen Reiss explained something so deep about the aesthetics, the opposites everyone is looking for in love, and it’s a oneness of toughness and feeling:

There’s the desire to meet the hope of a person to be criticized, to be against and for, simultaneously, in the field of love. This way of showing affection between Buck and John Thornton has the desire to be criticized and encouraged completely and simultaneously.

I’ve seen that in loving a woman, a man hopes to have his narrowness and selfishness lessened, criticized, and the best in him encouraged. We want both true care and tough opposition. That is entirely different from what you read in magazines and hear on TV talk shows, which promote the idea that love is being accepted utterly. It means everything to me that Meryl and I are in the midst of learning about this, and can try to meet that hope in each other for a oneness of feeling and toughness that is the same as kindness. It makes for romance and trust between a man and woman.

Can a Tough Man Be Grateful Too?

Dan Martello, 35-years old, lives in southern New Jersey. In consultations, he has spoken often about his job with a social services agency. His manner is affable, but on the job he’s got to be tough, trying to oppose the apathy and cynicism he sometimes meets.

In one consultation, Mr. Martello told how some friends at work had recently shown care and even affection for him—yet as he spoke, he seemed uncomfortable. We asked why and he said:

Dan Martello.  I have a sense of myself as noble, like “I don’t want people to be thinking about me—there’s other things people should think about, things going on in the world.”

Consultants.  How do you feel about the fact that you matter to other people—do you like that idea?

Dan Martello.  Not enough, no. I have an unease with it.

Consultants.  Why? Do you have any sentimentality in you?

Dan Martello.  Yes.

Consultants.  Do you lead with that, or do you keep it under?

Dan Martello.  Nah—I keep it under.

Consultants.  Real men aren’t sentimental?

We spoke about what we’ve seen studying Aesthetic Realism—if a person shows an honest care for you that’s deserved, it means the world itself has come through for you, and do you want to be grateful? It’s a blow to the case a man can have that the world and people are indifferent and cold, and you have to toughen yourself against them. Something in a man doesn’t want to be honestly appreciated because he doesn’t want to be grateful.

Dan Martello has also been learning about the drama of feeling and toughness in him, in his marriage to Grace Martello. He’s spoken with a great deal of feeling about Mrs. Martello, how much he respects her desire to have a good effect on people, including him. She’s been a critic of him and encouraged him in his work, “like when we talk about economics and what people have to go through worrying about affording a place to live.”

Yet Mr. Martello, like other men, could go from being grateful to his wife to getting narrow and tough. “I can have big feeling for her and then I have looked to be disappointed.” We said what we’ve seen:

The desire to be displeased in the face of good news—it’s hard to say how big a danger, how destructive it can be. We would like you to be against it utterly. If you can be a critic of this, good things will happen.

A Heart That Feels Makes One Beautifully Tough

In the class on The Call of the Wild, Ellen Reiss spoke about Jack London’s artistry, saying he is “very good at writing a sentence that seems the quietest thing, and then there’s all this motion.”  As an example, she read this, about Buck passing the days with John Thornton–it has the motion of great feeling:

He would lie by the hour, eager, alert, at Thornton’s feet, looking up into his face, dwelling upon it, studying it, following with keenest interest each fleeting expression, every movement or change of feature.  Or…he would lie farther away…watching.  And often, such was the communion in which they lived, the strength of Buck’s gaze would draw John Thornton’s head around, and he would return the gaze, without speech, his heart shining out of his eyes as Buck’s heart shone out.

That last phrase, “his heart shining out of his eyes,” puts together the opposites we’re speaking about tonight in a way that is great.  Clearly there is large feeling, but it also takes courage, bedrock sincerity for a man to show in this simple, straightforward way what is in his heart.  Men have often felt it was wiser, tougher, as Shakespeare’s Iago says, not to “wear my heart upon my sleeve/For daws to peck at.”

Toward the end of the book, Buck is put to a test, “one that put his name…high…on the totem pole of Alaskan fame.”  At the Eldorado Saloon, someone bets $1,500 that Buck cannot, by himself, pull a sled loaded with 1,000 pounds of flour. Thornton needs the money badly, and “[Buck] felt he must do a great thing for John Thornton,” writes Jack London.  Buck is put into the riggings of the sled:

He was in perfect condition…and the one hundred and fifty pounds that he weighed were so many pounds of grit and virility. His furry coat shone with the sheen of silk. Down the neck and across the shoulders, his mane, in repose as it was, half bristled…with every movement, as though excess of vigor made each particular hair alive and active.

Buck jerks the loaded sled from side to side until it breaks free of the ice, and then with all his might, pulls it to the finish line.  London writes:

Thornton fell on his knees beside Buck. Head was against head, and he was shaking him back and forth. Those who hurried up heard him [speaking to Buck] long and fervently, and softly and lovingly.

When a man offers to buy Buck for a large sum:

Thornton rose to his feet. His eyes were wet. The tears were streaming frankly down his cheeks. “Sir,” he said…“no, sir.”

    The onlookers drew back to a respectful distance; nor were they again indiscreet enough to interrupt.

The most beautiful oneness of toughness and a feeling heart that I know was in Eli Siegel.  It’s in every lecture he gave that I have the privilege to hear or read, it’s in his poems, in the lessons he gave to people.  And Aesthetic Realism can teach men how to have these two things in us in a way that makes us strong and happy.

That’s what is happening to Dan Martello. Because of his education, very good things are happening in his richer, ever-happier life. He wrote to us:

I feel so fortunate to have a beautiful and scientific method to meet any new situation, whether it is on my job, how I see my wife, domestic issues, and my own questions. I am one of the luckiest people in this world.

The post Toughness & a Feeling Heart—Can a Man Have Both? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

In his Definitions and Comment: Being a Description of the World, Eli Siegel defines kindness as “that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased.”

To please a person rightly, I learned, doesn’t mean doing “nice” things—it means using our keen, critical mind to have that person be in the best relation to the world. Aesthetic Realism shows with solid logic that true kindness is strength because it is equivalent to a human being’s deepest desire: honestly to like the world. Learning this changed my life.

Relation Makes Us Kind and Strong

In his lecture “Mind and Kindness,” Mr. Siegel explains:

Deep in the meaning of the word kind is a feeling that through being born there is a relation to everything which is also born or existing. That is where kind in the sense of generous has something to do with kind in the sense of class…I mean by kind, a proper awareness of all things that are in any way like you.

Growing up, there were times I felt happy to be in relation to things. For instance, when I was eight I won a glass bowl with two guppies in it at a carnival. I took care of the guppies, read about how to feed them, what temperature their water should be.

Then, I was thrilled when one of the guppies was going to have babies. I learned that the babies had to be separated from the parents as soon as they were born, to protect them. Every day when I came home from school I checked on them to see how they were doing. I had some of what Mr. Siegel describes, an “awareness of…things” other than myself, thinking about how these beings could be strong, and I was proud as many baby guppies were born.

And though as a child I usually felt separate from people, a memory that stands out because I felt related to people in an exciting way is of sixth grade when we learned square dancing. I didn’t know then that we were affected by aesthetics, the opposites.

Square dancing has strict rules—and as you obey them, you feel free. When you do-si-do, you go towards your partner and then away, both for a good purpose. Swinging your partner, you are anchored as you link at the elbows, and also abandoned as you go around. Strength and kindness are in the very technique: you have to be strong as you swing your partner—a weak swing is no good—but you also have to be considerate. The opposites are why in square dancing I felt proud of myself: both strong and kind.

But like every child, I was in a terrific fight between kindness and contempt—the desire to make less of people and things so we can feel superior. People think contempt makes them tough; but it makes us weak, because it undermines our relation to the world. It makes us unable to have big feelings and large thought.

As a boy, I used my family’s good fortune economically to be unkind to other people. I remember when I was seven walking every day with my mother to the construction site as our new house was being built—and feeling as we passed the other homes that we were going to have the most beautiful house in Miami Shores. I felt that the electricians, carpenters and construction workers were all there to serve us. Never did I think about who they were, what their lives were like, nor was I interested at all in the actual work they were doing. In the process of falsely aggrandizing myself, I made myself narrow and small.

I often felt agitated and lonely. And the reason was in this question Ellen Reiss asked me years later in an Aesthetic Realism class: “Will a person ever feel he cares for himself if he doesn’t have good will?” The answer is no. Mr. Siegel defined good will as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” I have seen that having good will is the only thing that will make a man sure of himself.

A Young Man Learns To See Kindly

Nine-year-old Tony DeMarco, who studies Aesthetic Realism in consultations, had a debate about what would make him strong: kindness or being a tough guy. He had told us he was upset about his fights with his older brother; and in one consultation, we studied these sentences by Eli Siegel from his lecture “Mind and Kindness”:

Is there anything that is in no way like ourselves?…Any person who thinks he has nothing in common with a grain of dust, or a bat, or a leaf, or a pen, let alone a person or a dog, is a person who doesn’t know himself or herself.

Mr. DeMarco told us he likes to study rocks. And we told him that Aesthetic Realism shows, what we have in common with any specific thing is the opposites. We asked, “How are you like a rock?”

Tony DeMarco.  Yes.

Consultants.  You think you have that too?—how tall are you now?

Tony DeMarco.  4’4″

Consultants.  You have a shape of 4’4″ in height, and then you also have weight. When you are looking at a rock, you also see what—the outside, right? What’s that called usually? Surface?

Tony DeMarco.  Yes, surface.

Consultants.  What’s the opposite of surface?

Tony DeMarco.  Underneath.

Consultants.  That’s right. Depth.

Tony DeMarco was very interested in these opposites, and told us:

Yesterday on my front porch I took some rocks and a hammer and I broke ’em up to see what’s inside, and I found this white one, and it has a black oval line through the middle of it inside.

Then we asked a question that surprised him very much:

How is your brother like a rock—does he have surface and depth? Is there a lot of inside which is covered by the surface? Sometimes you see a rock that’s smooth on the outside; then when you break it up you see it has all this roughness on the inside—did you ever see that? Tony DeMarco.  Yeah!

Consultants.  Could your brother be that way?

Tony DeMarco.  Maybe he is!

Tony DeMarco is learning to see a person as representing the structure of the world—not as an enemy to beat.

Kindness and Strength in “One of the Great Characters of the World”

In James Fenimore Cooper’s powerful 1840 novel The Pathfinder, there is the character Pathfinder who appears, with different names, in the other novels in Cooper’s Leatherstocking series.

Eli Siegel said he is “One of the great characters of the world.” And part of his greatness, I feel, is that he has a beautiful, intense oneness of kindness and strength, from which every man can learn. Cooper writes of Pathfinder’s “unerring sense of justice” and says “his fidelity was like the immovable rock.” Crucial in Pathfinder’s strength is his desire to criticize himself, to see where he could do better.

Eli Siegel saw the tremendous value of James Fenimore Cooper’s work as no literary critic has. In a 1931 review for Scribner’s magazine he said that Cooper was one of the “thirty or so great writers of the world of all time.” He said Cooper was a “force” who “had America in his blood corpuscles,” and that “One of the words for Cooper in the history of the art of literature, is indispensable. He most utterly belongs to the history of creation.”

This book is set in the lush frontier of upstate New York near Lake Ontario in the 1750s, during the French and Indian War. “Cooper is a great writer,” Mr. Siegel explained in a class of 1963, “because he felt two aspects of the world as alive…water and land.”

Pathfinder, a rugged American guide whose keenness and bravery are legendary, assists Mabel Dunham, a young woman, and her uncle through the forest to the garrison where Mabel’s father is stationed. As the book opens Mabel and her party come suddenly upon a precipice with an expansive view, and Cooper writes:

Truly, the scene was of a nature deeply to impress the imagination of the beholder. Toward the west…the eye ranged over an ocean of leaves, glorious and rich…and shaded by the luxuriant tints that belong to the forty-second degree of latitude. The elm, with its graceful and weeping top, the rich varieties of the maple, most of the noble oaks of the American forest…mingled their uppermost branches, forming one broad and seemingly interminable carpet of foliage that stretched away toward the setting sun…. It was the vastness of the view…that contained the principle of grandeur.

Cooper has us see and feel the richness of the world, its massiveness and delicacy, its broad sweep and many details, and it is magnificent. As a writer he is kind and so strong because he shows us the world as it truly is.

In the comment to his definition of kindness, Mr. Siegel says “kindness is accuracy,” and that is what Pathfinder is going for. He wants to be fair to the world and people, to be accurate about what is good and what is bad in himself and those around him, including the Indians—Mingos, Delawares, Tuscaroras. Pathfinder illustrates what Mr. Siegel writes:

To be kind, we must have the imagination arising from the knowledge of feelings had by others. This knowledge comes from the seeing of ourselves as like other people, while humbly recognizing that there is otherness, too.

One of Pathfinder’s dearest friends is the Indian Chingachgook, who Eli Siegel said “represents the virtue of the world.” He assists Pathfinder in his work as a guide, and Pathfinder affectionately calls him “The Big Sarpent.”

At one point, Pathfinder, Mabel, and Jasper Western, a young man of their party, are in danger. It is dark and they are stranded on the shore of a river; Chingachgook is presumed lost, and enemy Indians—the Mingos—are all around. Suddenly, Jasper sees what seems to be a deer swimming across the river. But as this being gets closer, Cooper writes:

“The Big Sarpent, as I live!” exclaimed Pathfinder looking at his companion and laughing until the tears came into his eyes…”He has tied bushes to his head so as to hide it…and has come over to join his friends.”

“‘Chingachgook—my brother!’ said the guide,” writes Cooper, “…a tremor shaking his voice that betrayed the strength of his feelings—’Chief of the Mohicans! my heart is very glad.'” Pathfinder feels a sense of kinship with a person very different from himself. He sees that Chingachgook is trying to make sense of himself as powerful and kind, and says to Jasper:

Now, you see [his] eye, lad, and it is the eye of a chief. But…fierce as it is in battle…I have seen it shed tears like rain. There is a soul and a heart under the redskin, rely on it.

Pathfinder’s seeing of strength and gentleness, hardness and softness in his friend is beautiful. The ability to see another person deeply as both the same and different from ourselves is crucial in being kind and also strong.

In his consultation, Tony DeMarco insisted that his own brother is only different from him. For example, he liked to dance and his brother didn’t. We asked, “Do you think that means you’re better than he is?” And we asked: “Do you think people can wrongly think they are better than someone else simply because they look different—their skin is a different color?” “Yes,” he answered. We explained: “That kind of contempt is not so different from the everyday contempt that can go on between two brothers: ‘Because my style is different from his, it means I’m better than he is and also I don’t have to see what he feels inside.’ Do you see that?” Tony DeMarco, much affected, said “Yes.”

True and False Kindness in Love

Aesthetic Realism explains what true kindness is in love, and I’m learning. In “Mind and Kindness” Mr. Siegel says:

The only kindness, as Aesthetic Realism sees it, that exists, is the desire for the other person to be more complete, more organized, stronger…All other kindness is a fake.

In The Pathfinder there is a character who has that fake “kindness.” Davy Muir, the Scottish quartermaster described by Cooper as always smiling and having “a tongue that is out of measure smooth,” thinks what a woman wants is flattery and compliments. He is like many men, including myself of once, and shows that this purpose makes a man both mean and also inept.

Muir has been married three times, and he wants Mabel, who, Cooper says, is “modest but spirited,” for his next wife. Seeing her alone on a hilltop admiring the view, he seizes the opportunity to ply his charms, unprepared for what he will meet:

“You’re a beautiful fixture, in a beautiful spot, Mistress Mabel,” said David Muir, suddenly appearing at her elbow, “and I’ll no engage you’re not just the handsomest of the two.

“I will not say, Mr. Muir, that compliments on my person are altogether unwelcome,” answered Mabel…”but I will say that if you will condescend to address to me some remarks of a different nature, I may be led to believe you think I have sufficient faculties to understand them.”

“Hoot! Your mind, beautiful Mabel, is polished just like the barrel of a soldier’s musket…Were you the fourth [Mrs. Muir], all the others would be forgotten, and your wonderful beauty and merit would at once elevate you to the first. No fear of your being the fourth in anything.”

“There is consolation in that assurance, Mr. Muir,” said Mabel, laughing…so saying, she tripped away, leaving the quartermaster to meditate on his want of success.

Davy Muir’s greasy “kindness” is really the hope that a woman be weak about him, a purpose which Cooper shows is utterly inefficient.

Like Davy Muir, I hoped a woman would be silly about me, and this made me neither kind, strong nor successful in love. In Aesthetic Realism classes, I learned the purpose I needed to have to be proud of myself. In one class Ms. Reiss said I needed to ask about a woman I knew: “Am I interested in this person in order to have her life strong? What does that mean? As I think about this person do I feel deep and sweet and strong?”

I am so happy that is my purpose now with my wife of ten years, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, whose important letters about how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia ended permanently in her life, have been published in the mid-West and in New York State. I cherish the opportunity to know Meryl, to learn from her about music, Long Island, myself, the relation of depth and radiance, strength and delicacy in a woman. Meryl’s perceptions of the world, her criticism, her humor make me stronger, and I want to do the same for her. We are so lucky to study Aesthetic Realism. It is new civilization on the subject of love, and I’m so glad I know it!

One of the moving things in Cooper’s novel is the relation between Pathfinder and Mabel. Mabel’s father has told Pathfinder he would like him to be his son-in-law. When Pathfinder meets Mabel, who is twenty years younger, her loveliness, intelligence, and kindness affect him very much; she, too, comes to respect and admire him greatly. Yet all the way through Pathfinder questions himself. He is not sure that he, a rugged woodsman, would be the best husband for Mabel, whose life has been so different.

Pathfinder puts kindness first—he wants Mabel to be happy rather than tohave her, and says to her father:

Sergeant…she is young and light of heart, and God forbid that any wish of mine should lay the weight of a feather on [her] mind…or take one note of happiness from her laughter.

He confides to Jasper:

Ah’s me…I can follow a forest path with as true an eye, or read the stars when others do not understand them. No doubt, no doubt, [with me] Mabel will have venison enough, and fish enough, and pigeons enough, but will she have knowledge enough, and will she have ideas enough, and pleasant conversation enough, when life comes to drag a little and each of us begins to pass for our true value?

Through her father’s persistence Mabel consents to marry Pathfinder, though in her heart she cares for Jasper Western, and he for her. In a tremendously moving scene near the end, Pathfinder learns of Jasper’s interest in Mabel and he has good will. He sits the two of them down on a log and insists they all be honest with one another. “Pathfinder!” says Mabel, “You forget that we are to be married, [this is] improper as well as painful.” In his reply, Pathfinder is strong and kind:

Everything is proper that is right, Mabel, and everything is right that leads to justice and fair dealing…I ask you again, Mabel, if you had known that Jasper Western loves you as well as I do, or better perhaps…would you then have consented to marry me?”… I do believe…the boy loves you, heart and soul, and he has a good right to be heard. The sergeant left me your protector, and not your tyrant…Stand up, Mabel therefore, and speak…freely.

Mabel does so, and tells of her love for Jasper.

Pathfinder’s honesty is beautiful; he shows that kindness, wanting to be fair to the world and other people makes a man strong—gives him integrity and power.

That is what Aesthetic Realism makes possible in a person’s everyday life.

The post Does the Desire to Be Kind Make a Person Strong? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

For example, in 1973 I was cast in a play at a summer stock theatre. I had always wanted to be an actor, and this desire, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, comes from a generous impulsion: to see meaning in the feelings of someone not yourself—the character—and try to be fair to him. But in rehearsals I began to feel a deep reluctance to give myself to the part. One way it showed was that people could barely hear my voice as I said my lines.

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Eli Siegel explains, with deep comprehension of all humanity and some of the most beautiful prose I ever read, the two directions in people:

Man is selfish; but being, in his fashion, the oneness of opposites, he is also magnanimous, noble, altruistic, large. Man is a heel who can write of the stars. Man is a mean creature who can measure oceans. Man is an instance of cheapness who can be honestly moved by a Hallelujah of Handel. It is all trouble and opportunity.

Aesthetic Realism taught me that the most truly generous thing in men and women is equivalent to our deepest desire, to like the world—this desire has us see value in what is not ourselves. The most grudging thing in us is contempt, the hope to make less of people as a means of building ourselves up. Contempt makes us narrow and contracting, and it’s the biggest interference in a person’s life.

I’ll speak about what I learned about generosity and grudgingness, including the central, kind things Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, has taught me, about a young man having Aesthetic Realism consultations, and about a great novel of France—The Red and the Black—written by Stendhal in 1830. The main character, Julien Sorel, about whom Stendhal once said “Julien is myself,” comes to have a tragic life because he cannot make sense of himself as grudging and generous, both loving and fighting the world.

Does Generosity Pay?

People think if they’re generous they will be dopes who only give of themselves. Eli Siegel saw, with terrific logic, that real generosity is the one means of getting what we want most. In Self and World he writes:

We cannot be whole beings if we are not fair to what is not ourselves…To be selfish is to be the whole self; to be the whole self is to have a sense of otherness.

I learned that “to have a sense of otherness” is what we’re born for, to see meaning in the world. But most people decide early that what is “other” is against them, something one has to fight and have contempt for. This feeling most often begins in the family, as is the case with Julien Sorel, who is described at the beginning of The Red and the Black as handsome and intelligent:

A short lad, about eighteen or nineteen years of age…His…black eyes…revealed a thoughtful, fiery spirit.

Julien’s family lives in the small French town of Verrieres. They are poor and run a water saw-mill. Julien loves to read, and one day his father catches him reading his most cherished book, about his hero Napoleon, instead of minding the saw. He hits Julien gruffly, knocks the book into the river and swings him around. Stendhal writes:

Julien’s big, black eyes, brimming with tears, found themselves confronting the old carpenter’s little grey ones.

Poverty has encouraged anger and unkindness in Julien’s father, and Julien uses this to feel the whole world is against him, to have an early “grudge” against it.

A person fortunate to be learning about this near the beginning of his life is Billy Konrad. In his second consultation, when he was 6-1/2 years old, we were teaching him what it means to have a generous and exact way of seeing people: to have good will. Mr. Konrad was outwardly very cheerful, but when we asked where his father could do better with him, he became quiet and said sometimes his father yells at him. We knew he needed to try to see, from within, how his father feels: if he has a lot on his mind and loses his temper does he like himself? We asked Billy Konrad to imagine that he was Samuel Konrad, and we asked:

Consultants. Sam Konrad, do you think you can get too angry too fast?

Billy Konrad.  (as Sam Konrad) Yeah.

Consultants. Angrier than maybe you should?

Billy Konrad.  Yes.

We explained that to have good will, a person has to think as deeply as he can about another—even someone he feels hurt by. This includes thinking about where the person might be hurting his own life. We said: “The criterion is this: is it good for the person who is doing the yelling to do the yelling? If your father yells at you…ask “Is it good for him that he’s yelling at me, or is it not good for him?” And Billy Konrad said, “Not good for him.”

Billy Konrad is learning to be kinder. He is not making the choice Julien Sorel makes, beginning with his father to see the whole world as an enemy to beat.

In The Right Of Eli Siegel writes: “Julien Sorel is one of those figures in fiction that have a battle with the world they know.” A chief way Julien battles the world is through being fiercely ambitious. He decides, against his father’s wishes, to become a priest, and in this way to get ahead. A “magnificent” church is being built in Verrieres, and Stendhal writes:

All at once…[Julien] announced his plan of becoming a priest, and was constantly to be seen…committing to memory a Latin Bible which the cure had lent him…In [the cure’s] company Julien made show of none but pious sentiments. Who would have guessed that his…face, so…gentle, concealed an unshakable determination to undergo a thousand deaths rather than fail to achieve success?

Growing up, I was more financially fortunate than Julien Sorel. But what Eli Siegel writes in The Right Of was true of both of us: “Getting ahead is the purpose of every spry youth from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” I, too, could appear gentle while I was ambitious as hell. For example, in seventh grade I represented my class in the Miami science fair. But once I was there I was hardly thinking about science. I was wrapped up in how I could get the reporter from The Miami Herald to take my picture so I would be in the paper.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that we were born to like the world different from us, not to manipulate it and have contempt for it. If we’re not trying to be fair to the world, we’ll feel nervous and empty. That is what I felt, and in the class I quoted from, Ellen Reiss explained why, as she so accurately and kindly put into words what had been my way of life: “I don’t see myself as existing to treasure something, give myself to something. I exist to get things from people.”

Generosity and Grudgingness in Love

In Self and World Eli Siegel writes: “The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.” If a man has a battle about generosity and grudgingness as to the world, the battle will go in him as to a woman, too. That is what occurs with Julien Sorel.

Julien is hired by the rich mayor of Verrieres and his wife, Madame de Renal, to be a tutor for their children. Madame de Renal treats Julien—a peasant—with a kindness and respect he is unaccustomed to. At their very first meeting he is swept. Greeting him at the front door she says:

“What brings you here…?”

Julien turned around sharply and, struck by the very gracious look on Madame de Renal’s face, partly forgot his shyness. Very soon, astonished by her beauty, he forgot everything, even why he had come. Madame de Renal had to repeat her question.

…Julien had never met anyone so well-dressed, especially a woman with such a dazzlingly beautiful complexion, who had spoken to him gently.

“What, sir” she said at last, “so you know Latin?”

“Yes, madam,” he said.

Hearing himself…addressed as ‘sir’, quite seriously too…was far and away beyond all Julien’s expectations.

Through Madame de Renal, the world seems kinder to Julien, and he is very much affected. But right away he makes the mistake many men have made as to a woman—he thinks about what he can get for himself, and he is after conquest. Madame de Renal is married, but Julien does not care about this, he does not want to think about her life. Stendhal writes:

There and then the bold idea of kissing her hand came into his mind…he was saying to himself: It would be cowardly of me not to perform an action which may be of service to me.

And Julien does kiss her hand.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a woman stands for the world different from a man, and there is that in a man which does not want to be moved by anything—the grudging thing in him feels this takes away from who he is. That is what Julien feels, and so rather than simply being grateful to Madame de Renal for showing the world as kind to him, Julien is driven to either possess or dismiss her. His thoughts become turbulent, and he tells himself all these feelings will make for trouble in his job as tutor in her home:

Julien found Madame de Renal very beautiful, but he hated her for her beauty, seeing in it the first reef on which his career had nearly foundered. He spoke to her as little as possible, in the hope of forgetting the ecstasy that had moved him, on the very first day, to kiss her hand.

Julien Sorel is angry that Madame de Renal has affected him at all. I learned about this very same thing in an Aesthetic Realism class some years ago.

I was seeing a woman, and without being wholly conscious of this, didn’t like the fact that she affected me so much. I would feel swept and then cold, and didn’t understand why. Ellen Reiss asked me what I thought of having “depth of feeling” for someone, and I answered, “It’s a tremendous thing to feel about another person.” “Are you for it or against it?” she asked. I said, “I’m for it.” And Ellen Reiss then asked: “Only for it? Do you think in the height of passion a person can say inwardly ‘It is I whom I should be loving’? Do you think a person can feel, ‘I’m swept and it’s not by me? The hell with this!’?”

What I learned about myself in this discussion and others enabled me to care for a woman in a new, larger way—Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, who, I am so proud to say, I am married to. Knowing Meryl, her perceptions about the world and about me, has made me a stronger, wider man and I’m grateful to her. It makes me so happy to be studying together in classes taught by Ms. Reiss, learning about ourselves, humanity, art and happenings in the world today.

To Be Swept or to Calculate?

Two things which correspond to generosity and grudgingness in the self are being honestly moved by something, and being calculating and scheming.  Julien often has large emotions–he bursts into tears at seeing injustice to someone, or at hearing a beautiful song at the opera.  In TRO #74 Eli Siegel writes:

The great thing in Stendahl’s novel is that we can discern a hope in Julien Sorel to love the world without being deceived….what it means to like the world can be studied in Le rouge et le noir

One way this can be seen is in Julien Sorel’s fervent care for people at his time in French history who showed great courage and integrity–Napoleon, the revolutionary leader Danton, the poet and revolutionary Béranger.  Julien’s feeling about them and the justice they fought for is intense and unarranged, and he is proud.

But then so often Julien is a schemer, and calculates: if I show this emotion, what will it get me?  Stendhal uses the word “calcula-ting” about him often, and Madame de Rênal’s friend once says, “I feel very suspicious of that young tutor of yours…He seems…to be always turning things over in his mind.”  Ms. Reiss has spoken to me about this very thing, asking me once in a class: “How much is there a calculation [in you]–will this feeling pay off?”

Julien decides he must have Madame de Rênal, and he calculates.  Stendhal writes:

Julien looked at Madame de Rênal in a very curious way when he met her the next morning; he was taking stock of her as of an enemy he had to fight….Why can’t I devise some clever manouevre, he thought, and force Madame de Rênal to show me those unmistakable marks of affection?

He devises a plan and writes it down.  The plan succeeds–Julien spends the night with Madame de Rênal, and with all his calculation he is, nonetheless, tremendously affected.

But Julien Sorel never resolves the battle between generosity and grudgingness in him.  Reading about him makes me even more grateful for what I have learned from Aesthetic Realism, the ques-tions I’ve been so lucky to hear from Ms. Reiss, and for the pain I have been spared.

Economics Can Encourage Grudgingness

One of the biggest fields for trouble about generosity and grudgingness is economics. In a chapter of Self and World titled “Psychiatry, Economics, Aesthetics,” Mr. Siegel writes:

The economics of the moment says: get yours. It is hard to see how a deeply tranquil attitude towards other people can arise and be maintained while a person is driven to be in constant economic combat with those people.

This is a blazing matter at the time in history of The Red and the Black—1830s France. The French Revolution had taken place and there was more justice to people. Yet still there were the excesses of the wealthy nobility and then peasants who struggled simply to eat. Julien Sorel was born a peasant, and in The Right Of, Mr. Siegel writes, “Julien Sorel wanted to go high in the world and also to be happy.”

Being at the mayor’s home, Julien comes to know the rich people of Verrieres. He has new and fine clothes, and has learned the mannered ways of the wealthy. He is selfish, yet Stendhal shows he is fiercely against himself; he is out for himself, but often has passionate emotion for the suffering of others.

For example, one night Julien has dinner at the home of Monsieur Valenod, a rich man who runs the town prison, which is next door to his home. The meal is sumptuous and the guests are fancy, yet they begin to hear the prisoners next door singing a bawdy song. Many of these prisoners likely were forced to commit crimes simply to eat. M. Valenod has them stopped—”I’ve had the beggars reduced to silence,” he says. Stendhal writes:

These words were too much for Julien—he had the manners but not as yet the mentality of his present position…he felt a big tear stealing down his cheek.
…Julien’s conscience was telling him: There you see the filthy riches you’ll acquire…Possibly you’ll get a post worth twenty thousand francs, but then, while you are gorging yourself with meat, you’ll have to stop some wretched prisoner singing; you’ll give dinners with the money you’ve stolen from his miserable pittance—and while you dine he’ll be unhappier still! Oh, Napoleon; how sweet it was in your day to climb to fortune through the risks of battle!—but to add so meanly to some poor fellow’s misery!

There is in Julien deep generosity of mind, real feeling for those men. It is so different from Julien the social climber, the schemer.

Unlike Julien here, I once didn’t care a bit if I added to a person’s misery or happiness. The way I saw money was representative of many people: I was excessively generous to myself, buying expensive clothes and items, while I was grudging about what other people deserved.

Once, on a trip to Mexico, I haggled over the price of a wicker basket, priding myself on how I beat out the store-keeper, who was very poor, for a cheap price. I didn’t know that the state of mind that had me act that way also made me hate myself and feel I was a fraud who pretended to be a friendly guy. In a class, Ellen Reiss has asked me questions about money, such as: “Do you think money should be used to make you lordly?” and “Do you want to honor the value of things through money?” Thinking about this has enabled me to change—to feel I’m honestly trying to be kind.

In The Red and the Black there is a danger of Julien’s affair with Madame de Renal being found out, and he must leave Verrieres. She is greatly distressed at her infidelity to her husband, and turns to religion to try and gain some peace of mind. Julien comes to be the personal secretary to the immensely wealthy Marquis de la Mole at his home in Paris, and he feels he’s getting ahead.

There he meets the Marquis’ daughter, Mathilde, who is the toast of Paris, and he has the same purpose with her as he did with Madame de Renal. Julien is affected by Mathilde but he resents it. There is a turbulent relation, a contest about who will show more care than the other, and Julien has this grudging strategy—”Keep her mind occupied all the time with this grave doubt: Does he love me?” Yet his ill will makes him miserable; he is constantly gloomy and feels “despair.”

Mademoiselle de la Mole becomes pregnant. Her father, though furious, agrees she and Julien will be married and he gives Julien land, a title and a great deal of money. “Julien was intoxicated with ambition,” writes Stendhal. But just then, Madame de Renal, at the insistence of a priest to whom she confessed, writes a letter to the Marquis de la Mole saying Julien is merely a fortune hunter and the marriage should not take place. Furious, Julien wants to get revenge on Madame de Renal and almost succeeds, wounding her with a pistol.

Julien is imprisoned and will stand trial. He insists to the magistrate, “I am guilty,” and refuses to take any line of defense—he is determined to die. I believe that Stendhal has an important message in this—Julien Sorel feels guilty for having lived a largely selfish life and feels he should be punished. Before he dies, thoughts of regret insist in him: “[Am I] really unkind and heartless?” “Have I loved much?”

I want people every where to be able to study Aesthetic Realism, so they can have the honestly generous, proud emotions they were meant to have.

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