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.

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.

The post Generosity Vs. Grudgingness in Men appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

And the answer, I’ve learned, is yes. The deepest purpose of every person, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world. That emotion—like of the world on an honest, factual basis—is what men look for in every particular thing we do, whether it’s reading a book or holding the woman we care for in our arms.

But unknowingly, men also go for emotions that arise from a very different source. Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, has explained that source—it is contempt, the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.” In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled “The Emotion Hoped For,” Mr. Siegel writes:

There is a fight going on every moment in the minds of persons as to whether to respect the world and be grateful for its existence or to see the world as senseless, disorderly and deeply to be angry with it. This…is the largest matter in man’s unconscious.

In this paper I’ll talk about what I learned about that fight in me, and how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, I have emotions now that make me so happy. I’m very thankful for my education because I was a person who went for small, selfish emotions, and felt more numb and miserable with every year.

I’ll speak too about a contemporary book that is representative of the men’s movement, The Warrior’s Journey home by Jed Diamond.

Emotion Is For and Against

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known Mr. Siegel explains the elemental structure of emotion: “Emotion at its beginning is a feeling of for or against the world.” I learned that from the day we’re born we are making unconscious choices about being for and against the world itself—is it a friend, for us, something we should know? Or is it an enemy we have to beat, get what we can from and be aloof from?

That is the debate I was in growing up in Miami, Florida in the 1950’s and 60’s. There were things I definitely felt “for,” such as roller skating every Saturday when a bus picked up many children and took us to a huge roller rink. Roller skating has been popular for years because it puts opposites together.

The very technique of roller skating puts together for and against—you push against the floor in a steady rhythm, and that’s what enables you to be so free. Rounding a corner, you have to crouch down and lean in—when you get the right angle you can really fly, and the relation of tightness and expansion is very satisfying. I liked going fast, then gliding to a graceful stop using the rubber stopper on the tip of the skate. And at the rink there were surprises—you never knew when the announcer would say “all skate” or “couples only” or announce a limbo contest. I didn’t know I had such pleasure there because I was affected by reality’s opposites—precision and freedom, power and grace, surprise and continuity.

But very often I felt against things, angry. I saw my parents as existing to make me comfortable and important, and when they didn’t I got mad. And I was political. I would act like I was for my mother and try to console her because I knew she would buy me things. Then, I would try to be very friendly with my father, and go to football games with him. I used one against the other, and having that small, contemptuous purpose with the first representatives of the world I knew made it nearly impossible for me to have large, kind emotions about anything else. Very early, I felt I didn’t like myself.

In his 1994 book The Warrior’s Journey home, Jed Diamond speaks about men and their parents. Praised by leaders in the men’s movement such as John Gray, who says the book is “a must for men who want to heal their wounds,” Mr. Diamond says the purpose of his book is to “explore…the ways in which men lost the primal connection with their masculine selves.” He explains that this began 10,000 years ago when “we stopped being hunter-gatherers…Our relationships…came to be based on competition and domination rather than cooperation and partnership.”

Diamond says men now must find the “warrior spirit” of the hunter-gatherer within, and one feels throughout the book a man who is mixed up about the way he is angry and then trying to be kind. He romanticizes the hunter-gatherers, as though one hunter-gatherer never got up in the morning and was grouchy with another, or had a competitive thought. Meanwhile, that he is dealing with opposites that trouble men is clear, as is the fact that he has been affected by Aesthetic Realism when he writes, “The New Warrior…is wild and gentle, tough and loving, fierce and perceptive.”

But Jed Diamond’s book is extremely harmful because essentially it encourages men to feel hurt by the world. He does not see what Aesthetic Realism is beautifully dogmatic about and what I am grateful I learned: the chief thing stopping a man from having emotions he likes is his own contempt.

This hurt-by-the-world approach is vivid when Jed Diamond writes about how a man’s emotions are affected by his parents:

Although we are born perfect, most of us come into a family in which our basic needs for safety and security are not well met. We come to believe that something essential is missing in us…Believing that we are damaged goods, we come to despise ourselves…If we are hurt by our parents, we assume that it must be because we are so horrible…we [go] through life as wounded children.

This is very soothing to hear, but it represents a tremendously hurtful approach being foisted on men in the last years. Certainly there is criticism of parents, but Diamond encourages dishonesty and evasion—emotions men cannot like themselves for—when he has us blame the feeling that we despise ourselves on our parents. The chief reason men despise themselves, I learned, is because they have cheap purposes with people. I did. If we have good will for people—which Eli Siegel described as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful”—we will never despise ourselves. In “The Emotion Hoped For” Mr. Siegel writes: “We cannot like ourselves unless we can say: ‘The way I see the world and what I hope from it looks good to me.'”

Jed Diamond furthers a picture of the world and parents as hurting one when he writes about how civilization has made it nearly impossible for boys to grow into complete men. He praises tribal cultures where “boys are removed from their mothers and connected with the adult men of the tribe” and says we need to do something like that now—separate from our mothers and get the “support of a few good men.” He writes:

We need help in separating from the force field of the Woman or we will never make it to manhood. Her gravitational pull is too strong to resist on our own. Older males must be there to exert an even greater pull or we will always be afraid of being sucked back in to our mother’s orbit.

This is high-powered writing, but it brings up something much more ordinary that concerns a man’s ability to have large emotions. One of the biggest “pulls” a man can feel about his mother is something Diamond writes about as good—the feeling that no matter what you do or say you are “loved unconditionally.” In the discussion I quoted earlier, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Do you think you got the feeling that big emotion should be about you, not from you? Do you think you used this against other things?” That is what I was after, and though I didn’t know it, it made it nearly impossible for me to have feeling for anything else.

What Kind of Emotions Are Men Looking for in Love?

In the issue of The Right Of titled “The Right to Large Emotion,” Mr. Siegel writes: “Everyone has the question of whether it is better to have one’s principal emotion stemming from contempt or from gratitude.” That is a tremendously important statement. There is that in every man, I learned, that would like to have contempt for everything, even what he has cared for, so that he can have the victory of feeling the world is a rotten place, and there’s nothing to be grateful for or have feeling about.

I’ve seen studying Aesthetic Realism that the emotion of gratitude makes a man strong, has him like himself and feel he deserves to be cared for. In Aesthetic Realism consultations, my colleagues and I have asked men questions like these:

• When do you feel you are stronger, tougher—when you are grateful, or when you’re angry?
• Do you get angry that there are things in your girlfriend you don’t understand? Could you see these as opportunities to know her better instead of interferences?
• Do you hope to care for the world and other people more? And is the woman you are close to a means for that?

In “Love and Reality”, a chapter of Self and World, Eli Siegel writes about what a man hopes most deeply to feel in love as he asks about the feeling Jim Haskins has for Edith Ritchie:

What is that for which the self or body of Edith Ritchie stands? Where are the boundaries of the thing represented in Jim’s mind by this one person? Does it end with a state or a country or a family or an ocean or even the sky? There is no ending in Jim’s mind of the thing represented by Edith, for she stands for everything…The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.

That is the beautiful, practical purpose we need in love—through a woman “to feel closely one with things as a whole,” to like the world. It is the one purpose that has love fare well, enables a man to have the emotion he’s looking for. Otherwise, love will go wrong in all kinds of ways.

For instance, Jed Diamond writes that men “develop excessive attachments. Afraid to get hurt, on the other hand, we keep at a distance. Our relationships often alternate between obsessive attachment and detachment.”

That is the opposites gone awry because a man’s purpose isn’t to use a woman to like the world. So he’ll concentrate on a woman at the exclusion of everything else, or he’ll be aloof from her and get rid of the world that way. Both mistakes—which I’ve made—stops a man from having large emotions.

In another passage, Diamond writes:

Most men know the perplexing feelings of loving, needing, and caring for a woman at one moment; then hating, hurting, and fearing her the next…Uncovering the roots of our ambivalence…is [a] task of mature masculinity.

But Diamond has no idea how to “uncover the roots.” Something so important I’ve seen studying Aesthetic Realism is that a man can feel insulted that a woman means so much to him, causes such great feeling in him. That’s the “root” of the ambivalence men feel about women, and I have learned about it in myself in classes with Ellen Reiss. Once, she suggested humorously that I write a handbook, and collect pointers from my friends—”How to Be Sane on the Subject of Love.”

In the class I have been quoting from, Ms. Reiss spoke to me about what in me objected to having large emotion about the woman I had come to love and who, I am very grateful to say, is now my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. It was clear I had big feeling for Meryl, but I was uncomfortable and sometimes would act cool. “Do you think if you showed a tremendous emotion that you would feel foolish?” asked Ms. Reiss. I had, and she said:

Ellen Reiss.  The important thing is accuracy—it isn’t just sweeping emotion…but accurate emotion. And if there is that in the world that deserves great emotion, the only accurate thing to do is to give it. Then there is what is a person born for? A person is being born right now. Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?

Bennett Cooperman.   Great feeling.

Ellen Reiss.  If you could feel, “I’m using my senses. I’m keen and boy, what I see makes for tremendous feeling!” Is that a victory or a defeat?

Bennett Cooperman.   It’s a victory.

That is what I am so happy to feel knowing Meryl. Living with her, talking with her, has me feel every day I know people better, myself, I know the power and grace, the keenness and friendliness of a woman; I know music better, and so much more. I love studying with her in classes with Ellen Reiss, where we learn about the world and ourselves so deeply, and have tremendous emotions every week—including as we hear the honesty, intellect and kindness of Eli Siegel studying the tape-recorded lectures he gave.

“Annie Laurie” Has What Men Hope For

In this class, Ms. Reiss spoke to me about a song I was studying to sing, and having difficulty with, a song which has been loved for nearly 300 years. “Annie Laurie” stands for the kind of emotion every man wants to feel about a woman, and, I learned, about the world itself. “Do you think there’s great reverence in it?” Ms. Reiss asked me. “Tremendous,” I said. “Do you like reverence or does it embarrass you?” she asked, and I replied, “I think the second.”

The words to “Annie Laurie” in their first version were written as a poem in the early 1700s by the Scotsman William Douglas of Fingland, and the music is by Lady Scott. In his lecture “Poetry and Love,” Eli Siegel said the words “are great”, they are “tremendously physical and most unlimitedly sentimental.” The words of this song makes a one of what you can touch, and expansive, deep feeling. It begins:

Maxwellton banks are bonnie
Whar early fa’s the dew;
Whar me and Annie Laurie
Made up the promise true.

“‘Maxwellton banks’ sounds pretty definite,” Mr. Siegel comments. But each stanza ends with the lines, “And for bonnie Annie Laurie / I’d lay me down and die.” “There is the feeling of the infinite,” he explained, “of permanence.”

The second stanza of William Douglas’ poem, which Mr. Siegel said is greater than the revised words most often sung to “Annie Laurie,” definitely accents the physical. Taking it up line by line, Mr. Siegel explained:

“She’s brackit like the peacock” means that from the front she is like the peacock. Now, people in drugstores can think that way; many men have…”She’s breastit [breasted] like the swan”—how physical! “She’s jimp [slender] about the middle.” After the dolefulness, the sweet dirgelike quality of the first stanza, we have all this symmetrical alluringness of the physical.

“This poem,” Mr. Siegel said, “is a way of saying, ‘Yes, there is something mysterious about you, like the night wind going over the banks of Maxwellton. Even so, I know there is a body concerned, and somehow body and fidelity, the physical and the sweet and infinite, have joined.'”

The music of this song is so beautiful. It puts together other opposites that torment people in love—pride and humility, melting and assertion, high and low. I learned about this in the class when Ms. Reiss spoke to me about what the music does technically, and about how I see love.

Like many men, I have had a division between feeling I should have my feet solidly on the ground, and then having sweeping feeling. The song puts the two together throughout, including in the very first notes. It begins with four low, meditative notes, and then it soars. “The careful thoughtfulness in “Annie Laurie’ makes for that soaring,” said Ms. Reiss. I was thrilled by this! I had thought having great feeling was utterly different from being a smart person who takes care of himself. But Ms. Reiss showed me that the two can and need to be the same. “Reverence should be sensible,” she said, “and should go along with being a good critic. If there’s a feeling of big size, is it good for oneself?” she asked.

I am so happy to say that I am seeing the answer is “yes.” And here is “Annie Laurie”:

Annie Laurie

Maxwellton banks are bonnie
Whar early fa’s the dew;
Whar me and Annie Laurie
Made up the promise true.
Made up the promise true,
And never forget will I;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and die.

She’s brackit like the peacock,
She’s breastit like the swan;
She’s jimp about the middle,
Her waist ye weel micht span.
Her waist ye weel micht span,
And she has a rolling eye;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and die.

I love Aesthetic Realism for teaching me what it means to have accurate, big, ever-growing emotion. People everywhere are desperate to have the kinds of emotions this education can make possible in their lives, and I want them to know it.

The post What Kind of Emotions Are Men Looking For? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

In a good anger we are fighting for the beauty of the world. In a bad anger we don’t give a damn about the beauty of the world. The anger that is good is really an anger that is the desire to be pleased. But the anger that’s bad is the desire to see the world as bad.

That desire to see the world as bad is contempt, and when it fuels a man’s anger, though it has him feel decisive and tough, it also makes him reckless and mean. It undermines a man’s life because it is against his deepest desire—to like the world.

Anger in the Sunshine State

I was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and I worked very hard to not show myself as angry. In fact, I prided myself on being an easy-going guy. What Chairman of Education of Aesthetic Realism, Ellen Reiss, once said about me humorously was true—that I presented myself as “the most affable youth that Florida ever produced.”

But inside I was angry—for instance, at things I saw go on in my family. The way my mother and father could seem for and against each other didn’t make sense—they were warm and affectionate at one moment, and irritated and sarcastic with each other the next. Aesthetic Realism shows that the way we see the first people we know closely is central in how we come to see the whole world, because early they stand for the world to us. What Mr. Siegel said in his lecture is true about the way I saw my parents: “The sight of the world deeply, since we cannot make sense of it, is a sight making for anger.”

I also used my parents’ pain to be a little politician—currying favor with one, then the other, so they would buy me things I wanted. Once I got my mother to buy me two new pairs of pants. They were beautifully made, but when she wouldn’t let me get them tailored in the style of the day—tight—I threw a fit and they sat in the closet, hardly ever worn.

In his lecture, Mr. Siegel said:

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.

My angers were “narrowly personal.” I don’t remember ever being angry in behalf of justice or something large in the world—I didn’t even know there was such a thing.

In college as an acting major at Syracuse University, I was cast in a production of Summer Brave by William Inge, which was a rewrite of his earlier play, Picnic. At rehearsals the director kept criticizing me because he couldn’t hear me from out in the audience. I got furious—”What the hell does he want from me!” I said to myself. “Doesn’t he know I’ll come through on opening night!? I’m ‘acting’ the part right—what’s the big deal about not hearing me every once in a while!”

That was representative of my anger generally: if someone didn’t treat me like a wonderful, special being, and had the gall to criticize me, I was enraged.

The way my angers were small and vain held up my life and also interfered with my acting. I had a very hard time showing anger on stage and dreaded any scene that required it. Once, in a role on a TV soap opera, I had to get furious with someone and threaten her life. I had a lot of trouble on the set that day, and felt ashamed of my performance.

I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class and Ellen Reiss asked me, “Do you think if you hoped to be less angry, you’d be able to express it as an actor?” That was surprising but so logical—if I didn’t want to hold onto my anger I’d be able to express it outwardly. And Ms. Reiss asked, “Do you think anger belongs to the world, or just to you?” “I don’t know,” I answered, and she said, “I think you’ve seen it as a personal treasure.”

That was true. The education about the self I’ve gotten from Aesthetic Realism has freed me as a man and actor to feel and express emotions I never thought would be possible. This includes showing anger given a beautiful form in dramatic presentations with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company of Eli Siegel’s great lectures on the drama, including Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Through him, we see the ugliest anger in man—fury at greatness, in this case, the greatness of Caesar. Early in the play, Cassius and Brutus watch Caesar from afar, and as they do Cassius becomes inflamed and says:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus: as we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves….
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great?

That is a vile anger made vivid, outward, and therefore it is on the side of good.

A Contemporary Book for Men

Beyond Anger, a Guide for Men was written by psychologist Thomas J. Harbin and published in 2000. The book, says Harbin, is about “How to free yourself from the grip of anger and get more out of life.” In the introduction Harbin writes, “This is a book that I had to write…[it] helped me organize my thoughts and feelings about the role of anger in my own life,” and he says his anger almost cost him his marriage.

Men are terrifically worried their anger will get out of control, and Harbin writes about the consequences—domestic violence, lost jobs, depression. He has a real feeling for what men endure as to anger, and wants to be of use. But he doesn’t know what Aesthetic Realism explains—that we are all in a moment-to-moment battle between liking the world and having contempt for it, and that battle can take a thousand forms.

At the beginning, Harbin writes:

Most people seemed to have more fun than I did…Unlike me, most people woke up and started their days looking forward to what life would bring—or at least not actively dreading it. I, on the other hand, approached most days from the perspective of surviving.

When Harbin says most people begin their days, “looking forward to what life would bring,” it isn’t true. From the moment the alarm goes off in the morning, the battle is: is the world good for us, or is it an enemy to fight? Throughout, Harbin makes a false differentiation between what he calls “angry men” and everyone else. Said Eli Siegel in his lecture: “Wherever you mention a person, you have a set of angers. This is not exaggerated. To be alive is to be angry. The next step…is to make order out of your anger. That step is seldom taken.”

Then Harbin says, “I always assumed that things would go wrong,” and later speaks about how “angry men…dwell on, scrutinize, and replay the slip-ups, the disagreements, and the annoyances.” We can ask, why would a man do that? I learned something in me was just waiting to get evidence that the world was an irritating obstruction. And a man can hunt for proof of that as, for instance, he walks in the door at the end of the day and meets his wife, looking for something to explode about. It’s the most brutal thing in us, and always makes us mean and ashamed.

Harbin writes at one point about anger and jobs:

U.S. society does a lot to promote…anger…Today’s heavy emphasis on competition…sets men up for anger…workers are working longer and longer hours…we are enjoying ourselves less.

I agree. Men feel they have to beat out others, fight just to get by, pay bills, keep food on the table. One of the large things Aesthetic Realism enables a man to understand is how to use this anger at injustice to be kinder.

A theme throughout this book is that men are angry because others have made them feel inferior. Harbin writes:

You may have come to believe several unfortunate (and mostly untrue) things about yourself…You somehow learned that you don’t deserve pleasure, that you have no right to be happy. Maybe your parents were overly shaming toward you; your teachers may have embarrassed you. Whatever the reasons, your capacity for joy has been mocked, slapped, insulted, humiliated…You may be deeply ashamed of…your imperfections…and inferiority.

Here a man is encouraged to feel that others have caused his low self esteem. But I learned—and it’s a scientific fact—that the main reason a man feels inferior and that he doesn’t deserve to be happy is because of his own ill-will. If we scorn people, feel they’re beneath us, we have to despise ourselves because we feel we’ve been unfair, and what Aesthetic Realism describes as our “ethical unconscious” will punish us.

Evidence for this is in what Harbin later explains, that “angry men,” though they feel inferior, have a heightened ability to see the flaws in others. “I had an unusual ability to see through a hypocrite,” he writes, “and since I thought that most people were hypocrites, I got a lot of practice.” He doesn’t know that this “heightened ability” is the very thing that makes a man feel lowly.

What a Man Learns in Aesthetic Realism Consultations

John Berman, a 28-year-old actor, lives in New York. Handsome and outgoing, he spoke in a consultation about how, though he presented himself as not having any problems, he didn’t feel that way. “I had no confidence,” he said, “—it was zero.”

Mr. Berman wanted to understand a deep change that took place when he was 14. Until then, he was an A student and was, as he said, “the funniest guy in the class.” But then:

John Berman.  My parents were fighting a lot verbally, and I thought they would break up. My brother and I would witness all these things. And I was getting to puberty and my skin was very bad. When I went into the bathroom, I didn’t turn on the light because I didn’t want to see myself in the mirror.

Consultants.  Did you feel this was an indication that reality was against you in some way?

John Berman.  Yeah, I thought the whole world was against me.

Consultants.  Do you think if a person feels the world deals him a bad hand, he can do two things—go into himself, become morose, and also explode angrily? You go away from the world and also lash out at it? Can you make sense of those two things in yourself?

John Berman.  I don’t think so.

Mr. Berman described how, in his mind, he thought his classmates were making fun of him, “even if I didn’t have any reason to believe that.” It made him want to punch the walls. “Did something in you leap to that feeling that everbody was an enemy?” we asked:

John Berman.  Yes—I wanted to protect myself.

Consultants.  But do you think there’s a hope in a man to find that the world is a disgusting mess. Then you get a little evidence, you go “Aha!”—you’re miserable, but also feel triumphant?

John Berman.  Yeah, I was—right.

Consultants.  You felt everybody was looking down on you. But in any way did you look down on them?

John Berman.  Yeah, I felt people were superficial.

Consultants.  And you made a kingdom of your own?

John Berman saw that that was true. As he questioned his purpose in being angry, he began to change. There was much more to respect in the world than he had seen. Instead of imagining that people were out to humiliate him, he began—and this was also useful to him as an actor—to see the feelings of people, their thoughts, as interesting and deeply dramatic. Some time later he wrote to us:

Thank you for the criticism you gave me. It helped me make sense of things that confused me and hurt my life. I feel more and more that the world is my friend, and have much more hope. I change dramatically from consultation to consultation…I see things differently, like a beautiful tree, women, a play, people…I’m grateful to have Aesthetic Realism on my side on this very pleasant trip!

Why Men Are Angry in Love

I wanted a woman to treat me like a prince whom she was lucky to have found. When she didn’t, and had the nerve to show she had some objection to me, I was furious.

Aesthetic Realism taught me the purpose that can make a man him proud of himself in love—to use knowing and being close to a woman to care more for the whole world, for people. Learning what that means can turn a man’s life around—it did mine, and I’m still learning.

In Beyond Anger, Thomas Harbin says men get angry because “Women tend to think differently than men…their emotions are different…they are unfamiliar, and therefore potentially threatening.” As a result, he says, men are in:

An approach-avoidance conflict over women…when a person is drawn toward a situation because of the benefits but at the same time wishes to avoid the situation because of its unpleasant characteristics.

What Harbin calls an “approach-avoidance conflict” is, I believe, a way of saying that we are both for and against caring for someone. There’s that in a man that wants to be swept by the powerful loveliness of a woman, and feel she completes him. But that very thing has made men angry—”I need something not me to be more myself? It’s insulting!” With that state of mind, men have looked for something wrong in their girlfriends or wives and picked fights with them to justify being angry.

I learned about this in an Aesthetic Realism class some years ago, when I spoke about the woman who is now my wife and whom I love very much, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. I was having very large feelings for Meryl, but then would get suspicious of her. Ellen Reiss said:

Ellen Reiss.  You are a keen, sharp, “nobody-is-going-to-pull-the-wool-over-my-eyes” person. But you also want to see a sunrise. Do you think your suspicion of Miss Nietsch is at one with your big feeling about her?

Bennett Cooperman.  No.

Ellen Reiss.  Does that make you mad at her?

Bennett Cooperman.  Yes.

Ellen Reiss.  She’s got some nerve! You’ve got her number, and then you find you have a large feeling about her.

That was true—I wanted everything clear and uncomplicated. And I was angry that Meryl had a whole life of her own that I couldn’t easily understand. Ms. Reiss asked whether I liked Meryl being, as every woman is, complex, deep, subtle, or did I want to “shape her up.” And she asked:

Are you more comfortable being swept by her or finding things wrong with her? How would you do with the Marlowe line, “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships?”

Seeing vividly I had a hope to be suspicious and angry, which would have undermined everything, changed me. I love my wife, her kind, beautiful face, and the impulsion she has to have good will for the people she knows, and also to be a critic of herself. Studying Aesthetic Realism together is the greatest gift for any man and woman.

Anger Can Be Beautiful

I once thought all anger was bad, and a person should avoid having it. But I learned we need to have a beautiful, big anger at injustice—a crucial matter at this time in history. That anger always strengthens the person having it. And Mr. Siegel showed that when anger is just, it’s not sloppy. He said:

Wherever an anger seems to have no shape to it…seems to be like angry marshmallow, or spaghetti on the loose, we can be pretty sure that…its basis is a false one. A beautiful emotion has form to it…a sense of limitation and boundlessness.

That form you feel in a simple but searing poem by Carl Sandburg, titled “Buttons.” It was published in 1915 in the midst of the First World War. In its indictment of that war, and somewhat the press, it has a horrible and meaningful relevance today. This is the poem.

                                     Buttons

I have been watching the war map slammed up for
advertising in front of the newspaper office.
Buttons—red and yellow buttons—blue and black buttons—
are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one
inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in
a red soak along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling
death in their throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one
inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper
office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing
to us?

Men today need to understand their anger so the terrible scene told of here by Sandburg doesn’t go on and on, and the world can be safe. Aesthetic Realism enables men to be proud of the way we have and express anger, and to have rich, proud lives. It’s done that for me, and I am grateful with all my heart.

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