In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? Eli Siegel asks this question, which I see as central in explaining the Rhapsody:

Is there what is playful, valuably mischievous, unreined and sportive in a work of art?—and is there also what is serious, sincere, thoroughly meaningful, solidly valuable?—and do grace and sportiveness, seriousness and meaningfulness, interplay and meet everywhere…?

Ross Gorman’s Glissando

Right from the start, with that solo clarinet glissando played by Ross Gorman, there is an interplay of the “playful, valuably mischievous” and the “thoroughly meaningful.”  It gets your attention immediately—each note is played so carefully, seriously, beginning with that low-register trill which changes on its way up into a slurred chromatic scale.  That slur was actually Ross Gorman’s idea, and Gershwin loved it. Glissando means to slide from one note to another, and the clarinet is very playful here, even seems to laugh.  But as we just heard, it can also wail.

Next, the clarinet does another glissando, but instead of continuing on to the melody, that melody is now played by a high trumpet with “wah, wah” mute.  Repeating the melody shows that Gershwin wants us to take it seriously.  But he’s joined it to yet another comic sound—that trumpet.  And what follows?  The very opposite: a bit of serious, meditative low piano—the first time we’ve heard the soloist, by the way.  Then, the whole orchestra shouts enthusiastically; the piano responds with a longer solo; and the orchestra makes comic interruptions, including from the baritone sax.

I first heard this music as a young girl on Long Island.  My mother would turn on the old Zenith radio while washing the dishes, and I stood in awe, listening to it.  The way it’s both sassy and deep, sportive and profound, made me feel composed.  How much I needed to know what Eli Siegel was teaching just 40 miles away in Manhattan in Aesthetic Realism classes about the relation of art and life: that every person is trying to put opposites together and that I could learn from this very music how I wanted to be.

How a Girl on Long Island Saw Playfulness

My “playfulness” had a very different purpose than Gershwin’s music.  I could be serious as I studied music and art, but I was also wild and unreined in ways I despised myself for.  Though I smiled sweetly, inwardly, I felt hard and tough as I made fun of people and laughed at them in my mind.  I was sarcastic, especially with men.  Years later, I was to learn from Aesthetic Realism that this contempt, building myself up through scornfully diminishing others, making light of their feelings, was the cause of my feeling inwardly heavy-hearted and mean.

In one Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I spoke about my worry that I couldn’t be serious for very long—that I liked dismissing things, my consultants asked, “Do you think that desire is in everyone?”  “Yes,” I said.  “Do you think you’ve gotten a lot of importance saying, ‘I can’t stand it here, I’m leaving.’”

MN. Yes.
Consultants. Would you like to give up the occupation of being a professional door slammer?
MN. Yes. I would! I think I have gotten importance that way.
Cons. So if you see people and things as having meaning you can respect, it is harder to dismiss them and justify saying, “I’m getting out of here.”

As I learned what it means honestly to like the world and to criticize the drive in me to make fun of things and to disparage, I became more truly lighthearted and more thoughtful. In Rhapsody in Blue—the high-jinks, the playfulness, and even a usefully mocking sassiness are not only in the same universe as warm, large, tender feeling but are at one with it.

Part of the reason Rhapsody in Blue is “valuably mischievous”—to quote Mr. Siegel’s phrase—are the speed and the teasing stop-and-start quality of the solo piano part.  Is it sportive or profound?  It’s both. And more than once, there’s an unexpected dissonant blare from the orchestra that seems to criticize what came before sharply.

Let’s hear it now, and I go to a more recent recording in an orchestral arrangement also by Ferde Grofé, with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, Earl Wild on the piano.

George Gershwin said he conceived the piece on a trip to Boston:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty-bang that is often so stimulating to a composer….I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.  And there I suddenly heard and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end….I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.

Part of what we just heard has exactly that noise and “melting pot” quality:  that dissonant “blare” on the brass, that noisy train-like sound, and that Latin-tinged rhythm.  And in a moment, we’ll reach the grand, majestic section, which I think is the most beautiful part of the Rhapsody.  Its largeness and lyricism seem to grow directly out of all the fun that came before. How Gershwin composed this is ever so fine; we hear a sound that goes out wide—yearningly—yet at the end of each phrase, as that grand arching melody reaches its longest notes, what do we hear underneath?  A jazzy countermelody on French Horn, playful and sportive. This music is saying: “It’s the same world that has both the grand and the mischievous, and both are in behalf of respecting, not diminishing, reality.”   Gershwin’s counterpoint between those two melodies resolves the conflict that practically ruined my life, between mockery and reverence, high jinks and seriousness.

After that grand melody, the music continues to search—building dramatically.  As the Rhapsody concludes, we hear the most triumphant music in the entire piece.  I’ll play this to end my paper. I want to say I’m very thankful to be studying in classes here at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and getting the richest education in the world.

The post George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”—Profound & Playful appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Early in our marriage, I often found myself pointing out things I felt my husband did “wrong” in the house (most of which weren’t wrong at all).  Though that seems ordinary, it’s a manifestation of a huge drive in people, a drive that causes tremendous pain in marriage.  Aesthetic Realism is very kind in describing this drive to be displeased, and enabling us happily to criticize it in ourselves so we can change.  In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Editor Ellen Reiss explains:

There is an actual hope to be displeased, because one feels more important being displeased by things than grateful to them: when you’re displeased, you look down, feel superior; when you’re grateful, you look up, have respect. And so this morning…a wife found herself just leaping at the chance to complain, “There—he left his socks lying on the living room rug again. No matter how many times I tell him, he doesn’t care. He’ll never change.” To something in us, to complain is to have a victory….

This was true about me.  Here I was, in the home I share with Bennett Cooperman, who is an Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, and who I’m very grateful to be married to, and I was leaping for reasons to be displeased.

Aesthetic Realism explains that every person has two warring desires: to respect the world—see meaning in things, value in people, including our husbands—and to have contempt, make less of something or someone and falsely elevate ourselves. These two desires are in a woman before and after she marries. That wives can study this in ourselves is immensely kind and liberating.

The Battle

When I was 17, I traveled from New York to Billings, Montana, to study art and music in college. I was swept by the beauty of the American West with its great plains and the majestic Rocky Mountains. I liked the outdoors, and along with my study of art, I took caving and canoeing classes and learned about rappelling off cliffs.

But I took to Montana a feeling I had come to early, that the world was a messy place. I saw my parents care for each other, then argue; and with my five younger brothers, our home had much confusion.  Instead of wanting to understand my family, I used what I saw to be scornful and build a case against the world and men. Later, I felt if I could get a man to make a lot of me and take me away from the world, that would make me happy.

This attitude was with me when I met Luke, a geology major from Texas. I was affected by his energy and his interest in science and the land of Montana.  He showed me a world very different from what I had known in New York.  I was hoping to love a man, but I didn’t see Luke deeply, as having full, rich feelings and hopes. I remember thinking not about who he was but about what I’d wear to get him to adore me. Yet though I seemed victorious I became increasingly displeased, and this relationship ended painfully, as others did afterwards. The solution, I thought, was: not to need a man and just take care of myself. As the years went on, I got harder and colder, and I didn’t think real love existed.

Then, so fortunately, I came back to Long Island to work one summer, where I learned of Aesthetic Realism. And as I studied it in consultations, I learned that our deepest purpose in life is to like the world honestly—and that this same purpose is the basis for real love.

When I met Bennett Cooperman, I was very much affected by his acting and singing in performances at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and I respected the fact that he was a good friend to many people. Bennett wanted to know me: he was interested in how I saw things. And because of what I was learning, I had a real hope that I could care for a man in a way I’d respect myself for.  I was, for the first time, trying to know a man, not conquer him.  But at a certain point, I began to feel very agitated talking with Bennett.  I wanted to understand my tumult, so I spoke about it in a class for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates.

“As you talk with Bennett Cooperman,” Ellen Reiss asked me, “are there two hopes you have: one, to respect him, and the other, not to?”  She asked if something in me “would like to slam the phone down on his ear and say, ‘you are not worthy of my respect!'” Yes!  And she continued, “It may be right to think a person is not worthy of your esteem, but it’s never right to hope for it…. You have a chance to really respect yourself at this time.”

I was so glad to see my ugly hope that Bennett would not come through—because now I could be deeply and truly affected by him! I respect and am moved by Bennett Cooperman more each week and year we have the pleasure to be together.

A Wife in a Short Story Shows the Hope to Be Displeased

In an Aesthetic Realism Class, Eli Siegel said:

Please never put aside the world view: that is, do people want to like at all?…When a woman consents to marry, she hopes to like the man. At the same time, she feels she can like the man without the desire to like as such. There is a big desire in people not to be pleased with what is not themselves.

And then Mr. Siegel asked this question that is crucial for a woman as she walks down the aisle, or a woman who has been married for 50 years:

Does one have to be grateful that reality exists, and particular things in it, in order to have a successful marriage?

This is at the heart of a short story by Katherine Mansfield, a popular 20th-century writer from New Zealand. The story is titled, The Escape and usefully illustrates our subject tonight.

The Escape is about a husband and wife on a trip—perhaps seeing it as an escape from their everyday lives, and then wanting to escape from each other. The woman has no name, nor does her husband, and she is driven to be displeased. I think the couple doesn’t have names because Ms. Mansfield wants us to see them as representing everyone.  The story begins:

It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault, that they had missed the train. What if the idiotic hotel people had refused to produce the bill? Wasn’t that simply because he hadn’t impressed upon the waiter at lunch that they must have it by two o’clock?  Any other man would have sat there and refused to move until they handed it over. But no! His exquisite belief in human nature had allowed him to get up and expect one of those idiots to bring it to their room…. And then, when the…[carriage] did arrive,…Had he expected her to go outside, to stand under the awning in the heat…?

We hear in these thoughts of a woman such contempt for the world, her husband, and people as such. And we can ask: Is there a determination to be displeased with everything? I think it is valuable to look courageously and ask ourselves, “where might I have thoughts like this?”

The woman’s husband is presented as pale, distant, and existing to serve her. He is completely unknown to her, except when she describes in vivid detail how he hurts and is against her in nearly everything they do. This is a huge and ordinary mistake wives make. Certainly there can be a true displeasure in a wife because her husband has not wanted to know her and has not encouraged her to care for the world. Husbands can feel this too.  But it is crucial to distinguish between this displeasure and an active hope to be displeased so we can feel superior.

A lot could be said about the husband—why isn’t he critical of his wife’s contemptuous scorn and displeasure?  A man can hope to have contempt and be displeased too, and keep it all inside under a quiet exterior. But a wife’s sarcasm can drive a man in himself. And yet we see he has some kindness.  They travel through the countryside to the sea.  Ms. Mansfield writes vividly about the world around them:

There was a little wind, just enough…to blow the new leaves on the fruit trees, to stroke the fine grass,…just enough wind to start in front of the carriage a whirling, twirling snatch of dust that settled on their clothes….

With all there is to like in the countryside, the wife’s determination to be scornful continues:

When she took out her powder-puff the powder came flying over them both. “Oh, the dust,” she breathed, “the disgusting, revolting dust.”  And she put down her veil and lay back as if overcome. “Why don’t you put up your parasol?” he suggested. It was on the front seat and he leaned forward to hand it to her. At that she suddenly sat upright and blazed again. “Please leave my parasol alone!  I don’t want my parasol! And anyone who was not utterly insensitive would know that I’m far, far too exhausted to hold up a parasol.”

When a woman relishes her disdain for the world, hopes to be displeased, and takes the life out of things around her, she’ll never be able to care for a man because a man is the world too, and she will take the life out of him as well. In The Furious Aesthetics of Marriage, Eli Siegel explains that you “cannot love a person unless you want to love the world, as a large and unlimited fact, but still a fact.”

As the story goes on, they pass many lovely things in the world, including little children who try to sell her lilacs, hyacinths, and marigolds. She scornfully calls the children “horrid little monkeys and beggars” and yells at her husband for trying to give them money.  Soon after, the carriage nears a beautiful coastline.

Now there were houses…blue shuttered…with bright burning gardens,…geranium carpets flung over pinkish walls.  The coastline was dark; on the edge of the sea a white fringe just stirred.

Despite the beauty of the scenery, Mansfield describes how the wife sees nothing but the rough ride to the shore:

The carriage swung down the hill, bumped, shook…. She clutched the sides of the seat, she closed her eyes, and he knew she felt this was happening on purpose; this swinging and bumping, this was all done—and he was responsible for it, somehow to spite her because she had asked if they couldn’t go…faster….

After a big bump, she notices her beloved parasol has fallen out of the carriage. She blames her husband for this too.  When he offers to go and find it for her, she responds with haughty malice and says something every wife can recognize: “No, thank you…. I’ll go myself. I’ll walk back and find it… if I don’t escape from you for a minute I shall go mad.”  That is a deep statement. When a woman is driven to use a man to have contempt for the world and other people, she despises herself and hurts her mind.

At the end of the story, Mansfield shows the effect this representative wife has on her husband with her unending desire to be displeased. As she goes off to find her parasol, the husband leans back in the carriage. Mansfield writes:

He felt himself, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as if it were of ashes.

Mansfield doesn’t say what happens in the end, but it is clear that her husband is worried about himself, and he decides to go deeply into himself—and get away from the world.

The Understanding Marriage! Class

The wife in this story needed to know what we studied in a recent Understanding Marriage class.  In this class, which I am honored to teach with my fellow consultants, marriage is a subject of wide, cultural education. Eli Siegel’s comprehension of the human self has made that possible.  We took up the following statement from his lecture Mind and Disappointment:

Many people…don’t want to be pleased by anything;…on the one hand, they complain that they are disappointed, and on the other, to be disappointed is their triumph.

Speaking self-critically, one woman in the class, whom I’ll call Lydia Ivers, gave this example: before she goes outside she can worry she’ll be either too cold or too hot and is always looking for the right coat; she’ll ask her husband’s opinion—then be displeased with him. She said:

I can get disappointed without fail.  He can say he’s not me, that my way of meeting temperature is different. I say, “Can’t you put yourself in my position?” The other end of it is: I’m walking down the street and I’m hot and shouldn’t have worn this coat and he didn’t tell me not to! I want to stop this.

It’s important to note that Ms. Ivers felt to a very large degree her husband had wanted to know her and encouraged her care for the world.  We asked: “Is there gratitude for that?” And: “Do you think in some way, you are queenly and your subject should take care of you?” Yes, she said.

Consultants. And he should in some way make right your relation to the world?
LI. Yes.
Cons. Now, who’s job is that?
LI.  It’s my job.
Cons. Should his purpose be to encourage you to value things truly—or is his job to outfit you for your travels outside?
LI.  Definitely the first!
Cons.  Once we are displeased, the question is, what do we do with it? Do we want to see if we’re right, or do we nourish the displeasure, exploit it and use it against seeing what we value in a man?  We need to have good will, which Aesthetic Realism describes as the hope to have another person stronger and more beautiful.
LI.  Thank you very much!

There is Juliet

I’ll mention another discussion in an Aesthetic Realism class, through which my education in love continued.  After Bennett and I were married, though I was very happy, I felt that I could see and respond to my husband even more fully, and that something was stopping me. Ellen Reiss explained that I was in the midst of the question “whether loving someone is the same as taking care of yourself.” “Yes,” I said. She continued: “Do you think you came to feel pretty early that men were going to be interested in you in a way that made less of you?” I did feel that very much. And she asked:

Ellen Reiss:  Do you think something in you feels you had such a victory coming to that opinion that you’re not going to give this up? Do you have a fight between two ways of mind? If a man doesn’t see you right, you have more evidence for your favorite jewel—that you’re right not to care for someone?  Then there’s something else in you that wants to be very sweet, but you don’t see it as strong.

Ms. Reiss suggested I study these lines from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and ask whether Juliet was smart or not. Juliet says to Romeo:

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.

And she asked: “What do you think of that?”

MN-C.  It’s beautiful.
ER.  Do you think it’s smart?
MN-C.  I don’t think I’ve felt that.
ER.  Is it necessary to feel that it is smart?  People have felt Juliet was sincere—If she is sincere, was she wise?

Then Ms. Reiss read these lines of Juliet:

Come, gentle night–come, loving, black-browed night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night.

Ms. Reiss explained: “Juliet feels Romeo is good for the whole world.  These words are saying, This person makes the world more beautiful.”

As I studied the lines and what was said in the class, something big changed in me. I saw I was stronger, was taking care of myself, in having large, passionate feeling for Bennett Cooperman. I am deeply stirred by him, including by how how he is a kind critic of me, and I know that through Aesthetic Realism marriages can flourish as never before.

The post A Wife’s Unseen Battle: Do I Hope to Like Things—or Be Displeased? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

In An Outline of Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel writes about food:

A child grows from 12 pounds to 80 pounds through making the world himself. In eating anything, we assimilate the world; that is, the world becomes like ourselves.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that whenever we see food, there is a question that is not stated but should be: Is this a chance for me to respect the world or have contempt for it? My attitude was to grab disproportionately and then dismiss.

For ten years—from age fourteen to twenty four—I suffered from a combination of the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia. Anorexia is self-starvation and excessive weight loss. Bulimia is eating non-stop, then disgorging all of what you eat.

I thought this would never change, and the side effects were devastating. I suffered from hair loss, loss of periods, dizziness, kidney infections, dehydration and cysts on my knees from excessive exercise. At this time I was very depressed and lonely, and my parents were desperate. They took me to doctors, psychologists and weight control centers. I took diet pills and later was addicted to speed.

A psychiatrist told me I was suffering from chronic depression, and his plan was to enter me into group therapy and administer antidepressants. This frightened me more, because no one had a clear explanation of the cause or seemed hopeful that my trouble about food would stop. I couldn’t read, couldn’t care deeply for a man, and I couldn’t sing, something I had once loved to do. I spent most of my time alone.

The Explanation

When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I found the explanation. In his book Self and World Eli Siegel writes:

We are saying when we eat, and with humility, too, that we need the world from which our food comes. We say, unconsciously, when we eat well: Bless reality which gives us our daily nutriment.—If we can’t logically bless, our daily bread will be a daily peril.

I began to have consultations at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York. Early, my consultants asked me, “Do you think it is possible that a way of seeing the whole world is present in how you deal with food?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes, I do.

Consultants.  Do you want to grab it and get rid of it? Do you want to be controlled by reality or control it?

Meryl Nietsch.  I like to be able to control things.

My consultants said about bulimia, “It’s a neat trick. It’s like the metaphor “having your cake and eating it too.” You have the world please you but not affect you in the way biology and botany want it to. Aren’t you a little proud of this?”

I felt I had it down to a science. I would choose certain foods to binge on because they came up easier. In consultations, I was asked to write about the advantages of vomiting and why I thought it was smart. Doing this assignment, I saw how contempt worked in me, and I simply couldn’t continue this procedure. I was able to keep my food down.

Anger and Confusion Turned into Triumph

In an issue of People magazine, Cherry Boone O’Neill, author of the book on anorexia Starving for Attention, writes, “When you start denying yourself food…it’s exhilarating. The anorexic feels that while she may not be able to control anything else, she will, by God, control every morsel that goes into her mouth.” Without knowing it, Mrs. O’Neill is describing the pleasure of contempt.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism how I came to a way of seeing the world that was to result in these eating disorders. My parents had a big job bringing up six children, and we didn’t make it easy. In our home there were a lot of fights and coldness. I was asked in a consultation, “Do you think, Miss Nietsch, that you came to feel the world was a messy place?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes.

Consultants.  Do you think that this eating and vomiting situation is anger and confusion turned into the triumph of contempt?

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes, I do.

Consultants.  Eli Siegel would often give the example of contempt, that a “high point” in a person’s life was his ability to vomit. It is a saying, “I get rid of you, world!” Do you have a very dramatic and organized example of saying, “I don’t need the world?”

I learned that I wanted to have myself pure, untouched by the outside world, but that this choice was keeping me from something I wanted more: to like the world on an honest basis.

In an early consultation, Ellen Reiss composed three couplets with humor that had me see my disorders in relation to the world:

The same universe in which I vomit
Has clouds, and also a star, and a comet.

When I meet something in the world, I will either become it,
Or get rid of it by trying to vomit.

I feel like a queen, or at least a duchess or a duke
Every time I can eat something and puke.

Food Puts Opposites Together

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that I worshipped food: I made it the most important thing in the world. I used to say, “Food is my world.”

I was so ashamed of the way I saw it that I felt I couldn’t go out with people or to parties. I knew there was something wrong when I thought more about getting to the table with the food than about getting to know the people at the party. My consultants asked me: “Do you think you see food as your Mecca? Some people wear crosses or gold stars around their necks. You should get yourself a little refrigerator charm.”

My eating disorders stopped in 1981 because of what I learned. Today I eat three meals a day like a normal person, and I never have to worry about my health the way I once did.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the world, like a person, has a structure of opposites which can be counted on: it is aesthetic, the oneness of opposites, the same opposites that are in us. I began to study the opposites in food.

I saw, for example, that cottage cheese is both smooth and rough. It has smooth liquid and curds of harder cheese. And I have flesh that is soft and supple and bones and muscles that are hard and firm. Studying the opposites made me feel that I was stronger through being affected deeply by the world.

The clear explanation of the cause of eating disorders is in the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel. I want my life to be useful so that the hundred thousand anorexics in the United States alone will not face a prospect of dying of heart failure, infections, irreversible hypoglycemia, and simple starvation. I am one of the luckiest people on this earth because I have met truth about the world and myself.

The post I Learned This about Food appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

At 21, “An Essay on Criticism” made Pope famous because of the way he got so much into his tight, neat couplets.  Mr. Siegel showed that what Pope is dealing with—what makes for a good poem and for good judgment as a critic—is something we need to learn from for our lives to go well.

Eli Siegel looked at many of Pope’s lines, explaining their beauty and value.  He showed that a good critic needs to be aesthetic, to put opposites together, and we learned that central opposites in true poetry and good criticism are logic and emotion.

Mr. Siegel began by saying:

Mind happens to be geometry, and it happens to be the greatest anger. Tears come from mind, and also epigrams.  Pope felt that poetry should be correct. What that means is still to be seen. Pope felt he could talk of what is in poetry in couplets, and as he does, one feels all is well with the world.

Pope wanted to see what makes a person’s judgment good and also what interferes.  He writes about this in couplets which themselves are poetic and which people have enjoyed and been affected by for hundreds of years.  “Within the couplet of Pope,” said Mr. Siegel, “is a lot of wonder.”

Alexander Pope’s Poem, “An Essay on Criticism”

“An Essay on Criticism” begins:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
Appear in writing or in judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offense
To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.

Pope is saying it is less dangerous to “tire our patience” by writing badly than to judge badly and therefore “mislead our sense.”  Then, he makes a comparison between how people feel about the accuracy of their  judgment, and the accuracy of their watches:

   ‘Tis with our judgments as our watches, none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

Said Mr. Siegel, “We have to believe in our judgment because our judgment is ourselves.”  Yet, he explained:

We are unsure of ourselves.  One could ask in a kind way, “What do you think of yourself? Why do you think that way?” Every person who has gone through hearing questions is stronger because of it. To have criticism of oneself is fortunate.

And he said:

The art of self-criticism is the art man has gone for. There will be people in business who will write memos and dictate things…yet an executive has a gnawing notion that the person he is, he doesn’t like.

Hearing this makes me grateful for how Aesthetic Realism sees the subject of criticism.  I am one of the people who has heard questions in consultations, and now in Aesthetic Realism classes with Ellen Reiss, and I am stronger because of them.  I learned that we are always criticizing ourselves.  But criticism today is not seen as what a person wants and needs most.  It is seen as hurtful to the self, and people are told we need someone to praise and soothe us and build our self-esteem.  Aesthetic Realism shows that the one way to like ourselves is to have this purpose in everything we do: to like the world on an honest basis and be fair to it.

What Is Good Taste?

“Criticism,” Mr. Siegel wrote in The Scientific Criticism in 1923, “is that action of mind, whose aim is to get the value of anything; and by value I mean size of power; and this power may be good or bad.”  We learned that an important aspect of criticism is something everyone wants to have—good taste.  In these next lines, Pope talks about the relation of being a true poet and having taste as a critic:

In Poets as true genius is but rare,
True taste as seldom is the Critic’s share;
Both must alike from Heav’n derive their light,
These born to judge, as well as those to write.

“Taste,” Mr. Siegel explained, “can be called the swift, immediate ability to value beauty.”

Eli Siegel himself was the critic to show that authentic poetry—of any style, form or century—arises from a person’s seeing reality in a way that is so honest and exact, the structure of the whole world is in the sound of the words, making for music.  And that structure is the oneness of opposites.  Commenting on opposites at the heart of Pope’s style of writing, Mr. Siegel gave this wonderful description:

The couplet here pleases definitely because of its energy and its trimness—like an evening gown that fits a girl very well, but at the same time, the fabric has texture and color.

This you can hear in the following lines, where Pope says most critics have at least the “seeds” or beginnings of the capacity for judgment:

   Yet if we look more closely, we shall find
Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind:
Nature affords at least a glimm’ring light;
The lines, tho’ touch’d but faintly, are drawn right.

Along with those “seeds of judgment,” there are interferences to good judgment in all of us, and pointing to the two biggest, Mr. Siegel said: “Our desire to love ourselves, no matter whether we deserve it or not,” and our desire to “belong to the crowd.”  Bad criticism, he showed, has to do with “ego and snobbery.”  “Being in the swing, in the trend,” he said, “has made for a lot of corruption”:

When people get more interested in what others want to hear than what a thing is—that has made for a great deal of trouble.

He then asked this important question which people haven’t known the answer to, but have worried about: “What makes judgment weaker in a person?”  The thing that makes a person’s judgment weaker, Aesthetic Realism explains, is contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.”  One form contempt takes is competition, the desire to beat out other people and be above them.  Pope describes this vividly when he says of some critics:

All fools have still an itching to deride,
And fain would be upon the laughing side.

And in these later lines, he talks about how some critics turned against the important poets and critics of ancient times from whom they had learned so much:

Against the Poets their own arms they turn’d,
Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn’d.

Here Pope is describing one of the worst things in self. It is the hatred of respecting someone else, feeling humiliated because you need to learn from that person.  Eli Siegel himself was met with this ugly resentment throughout his life, and I saw studying this poem how much Pope detested that horrible, unjust emotion in people.  Pope also described, with great feeling and respect, its opposite when he writes about critics who have a beautiful purpose: “The gen’rous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire,/And taught the world reason to admire.”

In the next section of the poem, Pope describes with reverence how it is through nature that we can learn to be good critics because it is from nature that all true art arises:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang’d, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.
Art from that fund each just supply provides,
Works without show, and without pomp presides:

Pope, Mr. Siegel explained, made clearer than anyone before him that nature “was always something to be followed.”  Yet, Mr. Siegel asked, “what does it mean to follow nature?”  And relating this to our everyday lives, he asked, “Do we act naturally?  Once you ask the question ‘Am I natural?’ it’s useful,” he said. Aesthetic Realism explains that for a person to be natural is to be sincere.  And to be sincere, we need to be like a good poem, to put opposites together such as logic and emotion, large feeling and precision.

Later, Pope describes a fight between two purposes that have been in critics:

For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Tho’ meant each other’s aid, like man and wife.

Here, Pope is saying that a critic’s desire to be witty and bright can get in the way of wanting to see something exactly.  Then, pointing to opposites a true artist puts together—letting go and restraint—Pope makes a relation to a person riding a horse, a “steed”:

Tis more to guide, than spur the Muse’s steed;
Restrain his fury, than provoke his speed;
The winged courser, like a gen’rous horse,
Shows most true mettle when you check his course.

This, Mr. Siegel explained, “brings up a big thing”:

Is it natural to express or natural to abstain?  Nature can tell you to do something with great zeal then go back from it….Where is art economy and where is it excess, overflow?  Poetry can also be seen as the making of economy dazzlingly beautiful.  The trimness of these lines is beautiful.

He said Pope’s couplets “are very tight,” and made a very surprising relation between the pleasure we get from them and from one of the most popular shows in New York: “Someone from the Bronx can be soothed by the Radio City Hall Rockettes. Pope’s couplets are a little bit like the discipline of the Rockettes.”

The large thing brought up by “The Essay On Criticism” Mr. Siegel explained is “what man wants to know most.”

Hamlet & the Desire to Know

Eli Siegel then read what he said was the “the most famous passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,” which is about the desire to know.  It is from Act 1, Scene iv, when Hamlet meets the ghost of his father on the platform of the castle of Elsinore.  Asked Mr. Siegel:

What is Hamlet trying to know through the ghost?… “How does some cause I don’t know make for you, father, and armor?”

Early in the scene, when his friends try to warn Hamlet to stay away from the ghost, Hamlet says again and again, “I will follow it.”  And addressing the ghost he says:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!–
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee;…

Hamlet shows a large desire to know when he says in some of the greatest lines of poetry:

King, Father, Royal Dane, O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher,
Wherein we saw thee quietly in-urn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws
To cast thee up again.  What may ths mean…

Later, Hamlet asks why his father has come back in this form, “With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? / Say, why is this?”

Through this class, I saw how crucial it is for us to want to know what the world is.  If you don’t, you can be sloppy, inexact, gush, try to impress through your wit, or be scornful, grudging, snobbish and try to make less of things.

Aesthetic Realism enables people to learn what it means to be a good critic of ourselves and the world.  There is nothing more urgent for people to know, and so I conclude with these sentences which Mr. Siegel’s said at the end of the class:

If people knew how much they wanted to see what beauty is, they would use the phrase of Hamlet, “let me not burst in ignorance!”…Pope’s [couplets] are very trim, but they have beauty in them, pointing to the mystery of all existence….When people are very much affected by art, they have thoughts beyond the reach of their souls. You want to be as emotional as possible, and you also want to have judgment—to be as good a critic as possible—and don’t mind if Aesthetic Realism shows you they are the same.

The post A Class on Alexander Pope’s Poem “An Essay on Criticism” appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

The criticism of poetry implies the full enjoyment of it. I think the trying to be fair to poetry is a wonderful thing to go after. It is exceedingly necessary because poetic music is the greatest tribute to honesty.

Alfred de Musset & Poetic Music

Mr. Siegel said that after a great deal of thought on the subject, the person he felt could be most useful in showing what poetic music is, is the French poet and writer Alfred de Musset, who lived from 1810 to 1857.  In his poetry and prose, de Musset had both great feeling and precision and that combination, Mr. Siegel explained later, is what all poetic music goes for.

He discussed what he called “one of the great poems of its kind,” “À la Malibran,” about the famous 19th Century opera singer Maria Felicia Garcia Malibran, who stirred people tremendously both in Europe and America.

De Musset’s lines tell how she had a depth of feeling and sincerity at one with accuracy that made her immortal.  “She was,” Mr. Siegel said, “one of the greatest singers of any time.”  De Musset’s poem was written in October 1836, shortly after Malibran’s untimely death at the age of 24, and Mr. Siegel said, “There is no greater poem on a singer than this by de Musset.”  He read each of its 27 stanzas in French, translating literally, and also read 17 short poems—translations he had made of portions of this moving work—which he called, “Little Poems from Alfred de Musset’s ‘À La Malibran.’”

De Musset, said Mr. Siegel, “is one of those persons who can clutch at your heart and clutch at your throat….  He’s alive.” He read these lines:

Où vibre maintenant cette voix éplorée,
Cette harpe vivante attachée à ton cœur?…
Ces pleurs sur tes bras nus, quand tu chantais le Saule,
N’était–ce pas hier, pâle Desdemona?

Mr. Siegel translated these lines as two short poems with titles:

Where Is that Harp?
Where trembles now this mourned voice,
That living harp at one with your heart?

There Were Tears on Your Arms
Those tears on your naked arms, when you sang The Willow—
Were they not yesterday, pale Desdemona?

The Honesty of Maria Malibran

“We have nothing of Malibran’s voice,” commented Mr. Siegel, “we can only feel that de Musset was greatly moved hearing her sing.”

And there are these lines in which, Mr. Siegel said, “de Musset tells how Malibran is putting some notable opposites together”:

Heart of an angel and of lion, free bird in motion,
Mischievous child this evening, sainted artist tomorrow.

De Musset says other singers would pretend to have emotions, but Malibran simply couldn’t—and her honesty affected him very deeply. He speaks about her ability:

To…pour real tears on the stage,
When so many story tellers and famous artists,
A thousand times crowned, do not have any tear in their eyes…

We see de Musset’s tremendous respect for Malibran’s sincerity.  Mr. Siegel described the quality of de Musset’s poetic music in one stanza as like the Spenserian stanza—“pulsating in neatness, pulsating in opulent exact measurement.”  These are the opposites that he was showing in this class are central in all poetic music—emotion that swells, is boundless, and critical perception that is exact.

I think Mr. Siegel’s translation of another stanza conveys in English the “pulsating” that can be heard in the French:

This Makes Us Weep
What we weep rightly over your hastened tomb,
Is not divine art, nor its learned secrets:
Another will study the art you gave birth to.
It is your soul Ninette, and your naive grandeur.
It was that heart’s voice which alone comes to the heart;
Which no other, after you, will ever bring to us.

In a seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City, consultant Carrie Wilson spoke of the life and art of Maria Malibran—of the intensity with which she was driven to sing, the beauty of her voice, and her tragic accident while riding fast on a horse.  In these last stanzas, which are very beautiful, we can see that Malibran wanted to love something with all of herself—so much so that despite a serious injury, in the months following, she refused to rest and continued to sing at the theatre. De Musset writes:

Yes, yes, you knew it; you knew that in this life,
Nothing is good but to love, nothing true but suffering.
Each day in your songs you felt yourself paler.
You knew the world, and the crowd, and envy.
And, in that broken body concentrating your genius,
You saw, also Malibran dying.

Die then! Your death is sweet, your task has been done.
What man down here calls genius
Is the need to love: everything besides that is empty.
And, since sooner or later human love is forgotten.
It is for a soul with grandeur and for a fortunate destiny
To leave life, as you did, in behalf of a divine love.

De Musset says Malibran gave herself utterly when she sang. This was the “divine love” he speaks of—which gives one “a soul with grandeur” and “a fortunate destiny.”  “Was there a kind of love in the technique of Malibran?”  Mr. Siegel asked, “What is the relation of love to a kind of profound accuracy?”  “This,” he continued:

is what poetic music is about.  These last two stanzas have closely to do with the title of this talk, ‘What does poetic music go for?’ Every bit of poetic music has an attitude to the world and how one should see it. The music of poetry is the oneness of the utmost criticism and the utmost love.

As Mr. Siegel spoke of how poetic music is the oneness of unbounded feeling and exactitude of perception, and as I saw how these opposites were in both Malibran’s art and de Musset’s poem about her, I was tremendously moved.  Like many people, I once thought having large emotions couldn’t be logical or accurate, and I am grateful to be learning from Aesthetic Realism how these opposites can be one in my life as I study the sincerity of poetic music. “Poetry,” wrote Mr. Siegel in an “Outline of Aesthetic Realism,” “is logic and emotion brought together so well, music ensues. Sanity is the oneness of unconfined emotion and perceptive precision.” And I want to say, Eli Siegel had that oneness of great feeling and critical exactitude all the time—he had the most beautiful relation of knowledge and feeling I have ever known.

Hippolyte Adolphe Taine on Alfred de Musset

To see further who Alfred de Musset was and what he was going for, we heard a passage from History of English Literature by Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, the French critic who taught at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The passage is about de Musset himself and why he is so loved by the French people:

Such as he was, we love him forever: we cannot listen to another; beside him all seem cold and false….  From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite….  He left his mark on human thought; he told the world what was man, love, truth, happiness.  He suffered, but he imagined; he fainted, but he created….  There is in the world but one work worthy of man, the production of a truth, to which we devote ourselves, and in which we believe.

“[That] is a notable passage” Mr. Siegel commented, and he said of Taine, “There was no more famous professor of 19th century France.”  He then read from The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset, various passages of de Musset’s prose—about the Duke of Wellington, Christ, baked apples, an English dandy, the quality of evanescence in life, a caricature of a man from Peking. Even in his prose, we saw how de Musset was deeply affected by things and also had critical precision. For example, he writes about a tired horse:

Have you ever stopped in rainy weather to look at a cab-horse when, in spite of the fury of the winds, this pitiful, resigned creature waits patiently at the door of a house?  A blow from the whip of his master is the one thing that can induce him to start on his jog-trot; until he feels that blow he stands perfectly still.  His head bent down, he sadly submits to the pelting of the rain that drops from the eaves; perhaps at that sight, you can not help recalling the fine racehorse with fiery eye, which can not be held back and which poises on his nimble feet like a reed even on the straw of his stall.  Are these two the same species?

De Musset also writes about a stream near Paris in a way that shows, Mr. Siegel explained, he “was interested in where things begin”:

I say, that when following the stream against its current, you never think whence comes this immense quantity of water, by what channels does it flow, what spring is its source?  Why does it start in a corner of a lonely meadow, or the summit of a steep mountain, flow, and advance like a child at first, then a man, then an old man, toward the ocean which is its death.

I’m grateful to Ellen Reiss for taking seriously how Eli Siegel explained poetry, and for her joyous, warm scholarship as she teaches The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry class. In the discussion following the lecture, she described the state of mind of a person when that person writes a true poem:

A person feels at that time that justice to an object—justice to the world itself and how it’s made—is the same as taking care of oneself.  The person wants to be so just, the whole world gets into the sound. The universe does provide a chance of feeling that a person can be himself fully by being fair to what’s not himself.

Concluding this beautiful lecture, Mr. Siegel read a short poem of de Musset in which, he explained:

De Musset says that the world can be endured if there’s music that you can like and also a face that is beautiful.  The poem is one of de Musset’s small lyrics that seems to be like a breath. It’s called ‘Chanson.’ This is Mr. Siegel’s literal translation:

When one loses through sad occurrence
His hope and gaiety
The remedy for the sad and melancholy one
Is music and beauty.
A beautiful face can do more than an armed man.

Learning about poetic music through what Eli Siegel said about the work of Alfred de Musset was one of the greatest experiences of my life! “The music in poetry is ever so important,” he said, “because it shows that a logical statement can be musical. If a thought-out statement can be musical—what good tidings that is.”

The post What Does Poetic Music Go For? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Years later I learned—and this is new in civilization—that there was actually a hope in me to be a disappointed woman. Aesthetic Realism explains with solid logic that there are two kinds of disappointment. Certainly, people have been honestly disappointed; have met tremendous injustice economically and personally. But there’s also a determination in a person, which Aesthetic Realism makes clear, to see the world as a flop, as never coming through for you, so you can be disdainful and superior.

In his lecture, “Mind and Disappointment,” Mr. Siegel describes that drive. “On the one hand,” he says, people complain because they are disappointed:

On the other, to be disappointed is their triumph. If a person finds himself at the movies, he can be disappointed because he is not at home. If he’s at home, he’s disappointed because he’s not at the movies. If he gets a telephone call, he’s disappointed because his solitude is interrupted. If he doesn’t get a phone call, he’s disappointed because no one cares for him. And if he gets a phone call, and it happens to be a short one, he feels people are neglecting him and not talking long enough…Once you are looking for disappointment you can be a super-FBI.

I was one of those. Once, a friend pointed out on a very happy occasion at a restaurant, that I was looking to be disappointed with everything. I acted like a queen as I scornfully and casually mentioned that the food took too long to arrive; when it did, it wasn’t what I expected; and then it was too hot in the place. Though this is ordinary, the determination in a woman day after day to find things to be disappointed about saps the life out of her, and also makes her mean.

The reason we want to be disappointed, I learned, is explained by this Aesthetic Realism principle: “There is a disposition in every person to think [we] will be for [ourselves] by making less of the outside world.” This is contempt, and though having it makes you feel awful, you also have the pleasure of thinking other people are inept and you are the smartest thing going.

There Is Honest Disappointment, but How Do We Use It?

As the first child and only girl in our family, I was made a lot of by my parents and grandparents. While I liked the attention I got about how I looked, I also felt that no one wanted to know what I felt inside, and this made me angry. Sometimes I would hide in my room away from everyone.

There is an honest disappointment children have had, I learned, that who we are and what we feel inside is not known by those close to us. But a girl can also feel victorious keeping herself to herself. Mr. Siegel explained:

The first thing necessary to avoid disappointment is to ask if we’re not going after it….For instance, I have seen people complain about their not being understood by others. I’ve asked, “What have you done to be understood? Have you really tried to show yourself as you are?”…People conceal themselves, and then complain that they are not understood.

I did conceal myself. Though my father called me “sunshine,” most of the time I didn’t feel very sunny inside. I could appear like the all-American girl, but inwardly I made fun of people, and as time went on, I was increasingly sarcastic.

As our family grew larger, I had to help take care of my five younger brothers. Often I wished I were the only child like my friend, Andrea, across the street. I also felt put aside by my parents as they had other children to care for. Mostly, my brothers played together, and instead of joining in with them I remember feeling disdainful and going off by myself. When I did play with them, I would show off and was competitive to get my parent’s attention, especially my father’s.

As a young girl, my father took me to the hardware store every Saturday because he knew I liked learning about tools and how to fix things. One Saturday, when my brother Douglas was old enough, my father took him instead of me. Watching them drive away, I was jealous and angry. I remember hardening myself and acting cool when they came home. This is one example of what became an industry in me— feeling all men were brutes; that they didn’t see me right, and should be punished. My father used to say I had a chip on my shoulder. I hung onto memories for years that justified that case—like the time my father, simply doing his chores, unknowingly mowed over my favorite flower—a tiny buttercup in the middle of the lawn.

Yet this was the same man who spent hours carefully building a doll house for me at Christmas with carpeting, cabinets and a staircase inside, and who spoke about books with such pleasure that encouraged us all to read.

In an Aesthetic Realism class, years later I said I wanted to understand why I had come to be so bitter and disappointed with men. Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked me,”Do you think something in you feels that you had such a victory coming to that opinion of the men in your home that you’re not going to just give this up.” And she said, “A woman can feel somewhere if a man doesn’t see her right, she has more evidence for her favorite case, and it’s like a jewel.”

This was true. Ms. Reiss then said there was also something else in me, “that wants to be very sweet, but you don’t see it as strong.” I felt so described by this, and I’m very grateful to for explaining it. I’ve come to see that a woman is strong if she can feel honestly sweet in knowing a man, because she’s not trying to fool and manage him, she’s glad to be affected by him; and I have experienced this first hand in my marriage to Bennett Cooperman, Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, whom I love very much.

I’ve also been able to study the hope in a woman to be disappointed, which is endemic in marriage. Once, when Bennett did the grocery shopping and came home, as I began to unpack, I saw there were many things I liked. But then, as I found that the nuts were “roasted” instead of “raw,” I had a little rush of irritation. Looking further, I asked, “Oh, are these really Gala apples, because they don’t look like them,” and when Bennett pointed out the touch of scornful glee in my voice, I saw he was right and I was grateful.

This is a minute to minute choice in a woman’s life and I’m continuing to learn about it, including from questions such as these asked of me by Ellen Reiss in a class: “Do you think you feel that the world should serve you and will fail at doing so? Do you think you set up things so you can be disappointed and angry?”

Love and a Disappointed Woman

In his lecture “Mind and Disappointment,” Eli Siegel explained:

I have said to persons, “You will never be loved by anybody until you can love the world from which that person comes. And even if you seem to be successful, you’ll feel disappointment.” The reason is that any person who expects to get what [she] wants from the world without giving the world that beautiful payment which is a desire to know and respect it, will be disappointed. Instead of… seeing the world as a process, it will change into an icebox….; it will be a greedy acquisitive business. Then, at a certain time, even if [one] gets what [one] wants, there will be a feeling of not having it. TRO 786

So often I ended up with that feeling of “not having it.” When I met Luke Tyler in college, I liked his seriousness and liveliness. He was very different from me. He grew up in Texas, cared for science and had traveled a lot.

But as I had with my brothers and father earlier, I wanted a man to make me the most important thing in the world, and was disappointed and hurt when he didn’t. Luke felt I wanted to manage and own him, and once told me he was even worried about giving me a gift, because I would use it to feel I finally “got him.” This was different from what I felt using my mind to study Renaissance painting in my art history classes. I would calculate when to be at the student union, pretending to study, sometimes even cutting a class to do it, waiting for him to walk in. Often I’d wear clinging outfits to get his attention; and when I did have what I saw as the ultimate victory through sex, I felt empty and cheap. In his lecture, Mr. Siegel said:

A woman has had a certain notion of love….She knows that this notion of love does not wholly represent her, but it is.the one thing with which she associates victory…. And every time she wins, she’s disappointed. TRO 788

I would have spent my whole life trying to get a man this way, feeling disappointed and desolate afterwards. Increasingly, Luke and I would fight and then reconcile. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked, “Do you think you and Mr. Tyler were very warm to each other [but]… that [together] you made less of the outside world?” This was true. And the warmth was really coldness because I didn’t want to know Luke, or encourage his care for other people and things. In fact, I was competitive with his friends.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the purpose of love, which will always satisfy and never disappoint, is to like the world. Having this purpose is a million times greater and more romantic than the cheap victories I went after trying to conquer a man.

When I met Bennett Cooperman, I felt for the first time that a man really wanted to know me and respect my mind. He didn’t just take my surface as the whole picture.

Yet that drive to be disappointed and to prove it was all a mistake was working in me. In a class Ms. Reiss asked me: “Do you think you’d like to be able to slam the phone down on his ear and say: ‘ You’re not worthy of my respect!'” It may be right not to think a person is worthy of respect but it’s never right to hope it.” At one point she asked me humorously as to Bennett, “Has Mr. Cooperman shown himself to be a thorough cad yet?” When I said “no,” she suggested that Bennett say to me: “Don’t worry, there’s plenty of evil left in me!”

I love Bennett’s thoughtfulness and exuberance, tenderness and strength—the way he encourages other people, wants to know them—including the men he teaches in consultations; and for his work in The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company presenting the historic lectures by Eli Siegel on the drama.

Sarah Josepha Hale Used Disappointment to Have America Better

A woman who used a true disappointment in behalf of the world, to have people seen with more justice, is the American writer and editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, who lived from 1788-1879.

Mrs. Hale was the editor for over 40 years of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the largest and most popular women’s magazine of its time. She was also the author of one of the first novels in America titled, Northwood, about slavery, and Poems for Our Children, which included “Mary’s Lamb” —better known as the song, “Mary Had a Little Lamb”—and many other books including a scholarly work, Woman’s Record, or Sketches of Distinguished Women from the Creation to the Present Day, a copy of which Eli Siegel had in his library.

Sarah Josepha Hale was a force in America. She used the true disappointment many women had about how they were seen in the Victorian era—they were largely deprived of education, economic rights, and equal employment opportunities—to work for changes that are still in effect today. Her biographer writes:

She was the early champion of elementary education for girls equal to that of boys and of higher education for women. She was the first to advocate women as teachers in public schools….she helped organize Vassar College…. She began the fight for the retention of property rights for married women. She founded the first society for the advancement of women’s wages, better working conditions for women and the reduction of child labor.

As a young girl, Sarah Josepha had a large desire to know the world. Her brother Horatio was attending Dartmouth College, and when he came home would teach Sarah what he was learning. Her biographer tells how she was “generous in her gratitude.” Sarah wrote:

To my brother….I owe what knowledge I have of Latin, of the higher branches of mathematics, and of mental philosophy. He often regretted that I could not, like himself, have the privilege of a college education.

At 25, Sarah came to know and marry the young lawyer, David Hale, with whom she had five children. I believe he encouraged her mind and life very much. She describes how, soon after their marriage “We commenced…a system of study and reading.” And:

The hours allotted were from eight o’clock until ten…How I enjoyed those hours! In this manner we studied French, Botany…obtained some knowledge of Mineralogy, Geology…In all our mental pursuits, it seemed the aim of my husband to enlighten my reason, strengthen my judgment, and give me confidence in my own powers of mind, which he estimated more highly than I did.

Here we see a woman glad to be grateful for the good affect of a man—not looking to be disappointed.

Early in her marriage, Sarah Hale was diagnosed with what was called quick consumption, for which there was no cure. Ruth Finely describes how Mrs. Hale accepted her fate, but David Hale would have none of it. He had done research on the good effects of grapes on her illness. It was Fall and he took her up to the mountains where the grapes were ripe, and they traveled for six weeks. “It was beautiful weather,” Mrs. Hale recalled, and “I ate grapes.” Ruth Finley writes how Mrs. Hale said that David:

Also…had a theory that fresh air ought to be good for sick lungs….[When] we stopped at the doctor’s house on the way out of town…he vowed David would never bring me home alive. But David did bring me home, cured.”

Tragically, after only seven years of marriage Sarah Hale’s husband died suddenly, leaving her penniless and with 5 young children to support. But she did not use this to hate the world. She moved her family to Boston so she could work and provide for her children. It was at this time that she began her literary career and important work to have other women’s lives better. In a lecture, “Mind and Emptiness” Eli Siegel said:

A tragedy occurs and the self is shocked. For a while nothing has meaning. If there is a largeness of mind in the woman to whom the tragedy occurs, she won’t resent other people,…though she’ll be sad, she will feel…a sense of kinship between herself and all other people.

When Sarah Hale saw the poverty that wives and families of working sailors endured in Boston, she founded the first Seaman’s Aid Society. She wrote passionately:

The lot of the sailor’s wife is of extreme hardship. The highest wages, which at the best of times a common seaman can obtain, is eighteen dollars a month—often he is obliged to accept ten or twelve dollars….

This left the sailor’s family only enough money to “pay the rent and buy fuel” and forced his wife to support herself and their children at “grinding wages.”

Mrs. Hale opened a store where the wives of the sailors could work for good wages and sell the clothing they made from their own hands to the public. She established the first day nurseries where women could leave their children while they worked. The store was a huge success.

During Sarah Hale’s over 40 year editorship, Ruth Finley tells how Godey’s Ladies Magazine:

Dared to criticize conditions theretofore unquestioned, and then crusaded against them. It suggested reforms, and then organized committees to actuate them. It…”publicized” the inequalities and injustices suffered by women…

Sarah Hale encouraged Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor, and other women to study medicine. She stood up for Dr. William T.G. Morton’s discovery of anesthesia when he was attacked vehemently by his rivals and religious leaders, Ruth Finley writes how “she devoted pages of Godey’s to his defense.”

In an editorial in 1853, Sarah Hale invited inventors to make machines that would make life easier for American women. One result was the first washing machine. She published works by important writers of the day, including Edgar Allen Poe, and wrote articles encouraging better health and sanitation.

Meanwhile, a large matter in Sarah Josepha Hale’s life was how she saw the American Civil War, which took place during her editorship of Godey’s. Here, I believe, she made a large mistake which hurt her life. Louis Godey, the publisher, had a “no politics” policy, and the magazine at the height of its success was silent during one of the most important times in our nation. Her biographer tells how Mrs. Hale, having been born shortly after the American Revolution, had an enormous fear that her “beloved Union” might be dissolved. Though she was against slavery, she wrote about:

The great error of those who would sever the Union, rather than see a slave within its borders….

One can ask, “Was there something too soft in her against evil—the desire in people to have a war so they could continue to own human beings and use them for profit?” There are hints that she thought the abolitionists were too intense. She said of her novel “Northwood” that it “was written when what is now known as “Abolitionism first began to disturb seriously the harmony between the South and the North.” And Ruth Finley describes how she republished the book to counteract “the inflammatory influences of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

How much did she feel that justice was worth fighting for, that there could be a beautiful fight? When she and the magazine chose to be silent, Ms. Finley writes, “it was no longer the arbiter of the nation’s parlors,” and it “never again…caught up with the times.” Was Mrs. Hale deeply and rightly disappointed in herself?

Still, because of her important work, Sarah Hale was cared for by persons of her time who cared for justice, notably Charles Dickens. I’m very grateful that in our time, through the education of Aesthetic Realism, the drive in a woman to be disappointed can at last be criticized and change into an honest desire to know, an honest desire to find the world likeable, deeply satisfying. This is good will, the desire to “have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” That desire, truly had, will never fail one, never disappoint.

The post Why Are Women Disappointed & Do We Ever Want to Be? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Pleasure from a thing is based either on knowing the thing or it isn’t. If pleasure does not arise from knowing a thing, it comes from something the self having the pleasure brought to the thing at the expense of what that thing was. The thing is then either underestimated or overestimated. In neither instance is there that being at one with, or accurate relation with, what’s real; which…is of pleasure itself.

That “accurate relation with what’s real,” includes, I have learned, our husbands, a co-worker, a meal we may be preparing.

Growing up on the south shore of Long Island, I had a real appreciation for the lush beauty I saw around me. I liked learning about the yellow forsythia, and particularly liked the weeping willow tree, which asserted itself high into the sky while its branches curved so gracefully towards the earth. And I had pleasure trying to know the geography and waterways where I lived as I studied a map and made a replica of Long Island out of plaster of paris, with a blue hand-painted ocean, sandy beaches and land.

But I had another desire. In his great, kind lecture, “Seeing and Grabbing,” Mr. Siegel explains:

The child can look very early on what is around it as a thing to be captured—it becomes a little Alexander or a little Wellington. Likewise, however, it has the tendency to see. To understand how, in the same organism, these two things can be so deep and so constant and can be mingled in so many ways—that is the understanding of a person.

I was “a little Alexandra,” as I smiled and coaxed my father to help me with my school projects so I could beat out Johnny O’Brien. I respected Johnny for the careful way he worked on his projects, but I remember feeling triumphantly superior to him when I came to school with my handmade wooden boat—which my father had actually made—complete with a rubberband-driven propeller. But when the other students said mine was better, I felt very ashamed. Later, Johnny looked at me critically and said, “You cheated because your father made that!”

I also used my blonde curls and angelic appearance to look on what was around me “as a thing to be captured.” I remember vividly descending the stairs one Christmas in my new red dress, to a crescendo of “ahs” from my grandparents, god parents, aunts, and uncles. Though I basked in this attention, I also felt uncomfortable. I felt increasingly dull and languid, and sometimes I didn’t want to come down at all and would hide in my room.

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss asked me: “Is the main purpose of the self to get praise or to praise rightly? If a woman deserves praise she should get it, but Aesthetic Realism says the thing that makes a person feel not at ease is that we have not seen the world well.” This explained why, though I was interested in art and music and studied both in college, I felt increasingly that knowing things was too slow compared to the swift pleasure I got when a man admired my looks or when I got a new outfit or a coveted piece of jewelry. At the same time, no matter how much I got I was never satisfied. Mr. Siegel said in his lecture:

When I use the word grab, I mean the tendency, in a premature and not beautiful way, to take things and make them part of oneself without having seen them. The tendency to see is to make things part of oneself through knowing them.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism years later that, like every girl, I had come to an attitude to the whole world, which included how I saw money, my family, men, books, food—everything. I too much wanted to grab and manage the world—not have it affect me deeply: and I also wanted to dismiss and get rid of everything—have myself pure.

Once as a child, when I saw some plastic toys I liked in the five and dime, I began stuffing them into my pockets. My mother criticized me, and made me return them. Later, when I got my first credit card, I was driven to buy much more than I could afford. It was this way of seeing, based on contempt, I later learned, that had centrally to do with the eating disorders bulimia and anorexia, which I had for years—in which a person alternately gobbles and discards and then starves themselves. As I have told in other papers, my study of Aesthetic Realism enabled this to end!

The Fight in Love between Seeing and Grabbing

Beginning with my father, I thought that a man’s job was to appreciate me, and really I was very little interested in who the man himself might happen to be. This was my state of mind when I began to date Jake Carson, and I didn’t understand why, as with every other relationship, things weren’t going so well. In an early Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked with critical humor, “Are you very taken by how taken he is with you?” “Yes,” I said, and they asked:

Consultants.  Do you see Mr. Carson as wholly existing?

Meryl Nietsch. I don’t know.

Consultants.  Do you think what you can make up about a man is preferable to who he is?

The answer was yes. Often when I felt attracted to a man I would fantasize about how he would adore me. Once, at a rock concert amidst hundreds of people, I was sure the male lead saw me in the audience, was interested, and in fact was singing to me. Ellen Reiss asked me so kindly: “Do you think that you are afraid of the full life of another person?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Yes.

Ellen Reiss.   You are. You’re afraid of the insides of people…there’s a stoppage in you…and there’s a whole aspect of a person that you don’t recognize as real.

Meryl Nietsch.  What is that?

Ellen Reiss.   It’s the inner life of the person. It’s the wholeness of a person’s feelings. It’s the world in a person. And people in the history of amour have loved shells of other people, because they are terrified of all the dimensions of a person.

Through my Aesthetic Realism education, the cold, self-centered way I saw the world and people changed, and my desire to know and see who a man really is, and use my critical perception to want him to be as strong as he can be, has grown. The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world.

Studying this principle has made possible my happy marriage to Aesthetic Realism consultant Bennett Cooperman, whom I love and respect. I see it as a wonderful opportunity to try to understand my husband of nine years—how he sees his mother, a song he cares for, a character he is studying in a play, what he felt at five growing up in Miami. I have seen that what a man wants from a woman is for her to know him and be a kind critic. This is so much greater than the small, narrow pleasure I got from trying to own and conquer a man.

Pocahontas and the Desire to See

The Native American woman, Pocahontas, who lived from about 1595 to 1617, had something large and kind in her that every woman can learn from and which I believe, is why her meaning for people has lasted nearly four centuries.

In a documentary about her life titled Pocahontas, Her True Story, it is said that she was “intelligent, and visionary,” that she had “vitality and brilliance,” and “large sparkling brown eyes with a sensitive and caring face.” Pocahontas was affected by the new people she met who sailed from England in 1607 to establish the first English colony in America at Jamestown. Her life, so much standing for the desire to appreciate and see, took place at a time of intense drama between seeing and grabbing in American history.

Pocahontas, whose name means full of joy and mischief, was one of about 25 children born to the great Chief Powhatan who ruled over 160 villages on the east coast—including what came to be most of Virginia. At 13, she was already a trusted advisor to her father, and from all accounts, persuaded him to “understand the settlers.” In Pocahontas The Life and The Legend, Frances Mossiker writes that Powhatan was:

Highly articulate, eloquent, with a sentimental, poetic, as well as philosophical mind. The extraordinary closeness between father and daughter was attested to by almost every reporter of the period: those who saw Powhatan saw Pocahontas at his side, in his longhouse, at his hearth, in his retinue.

I respect Pocahontas who, though she was her father’s favorite child, described as his “dearest jewel,” had a large desire to know and be kind. This is very different from girls today who are their fathers’ favorites, and feel through the importance they get this way, don’t have to be fair to anything. I know this territory personally. From what I have read, Pocahontas did not misuse her father to be unjust to others.

On the 26th day of April in 1607, three ships carrying 104 Englishmen arrived at the New World. Mossiker quotes from the diary of Sir George Percy:

We entered into the Bay of Chesupioc. There we landed and discovered a little way, fair meadows and goodly tall trees: with such fresh waters running through the woods, as I was almost ravished at the first sight thereof.

Yet these same people, filled with wonder at what they saw, also wanted to grab. This expedition was backed by The Virginia Company which, under the auspices of King James “was a joint stock corporation” whose sole purpose was to make profit for their investors in England. Powhatan would later say to the English, “many do inform me your coming…is not for trade, but to invade my people and possess my country.” He watched the settlers very carefully.

One of the Englishmen was Captain John Smith, whose courage led to the success of the Jamestown settlement. In the winter of 1607, he was taken prisoner by Powhatan’s brother, and after days of questioning about the European’s purpose in America, brought before Powhatan. Mossiker quotes Smith’s account of what happened then—which has lived in American history:

Two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could laid hands on [Smith], dragged him to [the stones], and thereon laid his head ready with their clubs, to beat out his brains [when] Pocahontas the King’s dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevail, got his head in her arms, and laid her own upon his to save him from death.”

Two days later, Smith was told he was now an adopted son of Powhatan, and could return to Jamestown. This story is generally believed to be true. He wrote in a letter to Queen Anne years later:

Pocahontas, the Kings most deare and beloved daughter, being a child of 12 or 13…whose compassionate pitifull heart, of my desperate state, gave me much cause to respect her.

Pocahontas became the benefactress of Jamestown. She insisted on learning English and Smith was impressed by the speed and ease with which she learned. I believe she had what every woman can learn from—which Mr. Siegel describes: “The tendency to see…to make things part of oneself through knowing them.” She also taught Smith the Powhatan language, and he wrote:

Once in four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants, brought [us] so much provision, that saved many of [our] lives, that else for all this, [we] had starved with hunger…[she] was still the instrument to preserve this Colony from death, famine and utter confusion…

Tragically, John Smith was injured by gun powder while on an expedition and had to depart for England to recover. With Smith gone, negotiations for peaceful co-habitation between the Indians and the English deteriorated.

Pocahontas was captured by the English and used as a hostage for the return of settlers held by the Powhatan, but her captors were so taken by her dignity that they treated her with “great respect.” It was at this time she met and came to care for the Englishman, John Rolfe. Rolfe stood for a world so different from her own which she wanted to know. They married and had a son, and it seems their marriage made for a cessation of hostilities between the Indians and the English—it came to be known as the Peace of Pocahontas. The desire in this woman to know the world, to appreciate things rightly represents what women are hoping for in love. I speak now about what I am so fortunate to be learning about marriage.

Love Must Be for the Purpose of Knowing

A woman wants very much to care for a man, but doesn’t know she also wants “a person who will adore [her] above everything.” At the time Bennett and I were making our wedding plans, though I had changed very much, I was making a classic mistake about appreciation many brides-to-be make. I took his proposal of marriage to mean that I should now be the center of attention.

As the weeks went on even though I had outwardly scorned big weddings as excessive and vulgar, inwardly I had ambitions to be “queen for a day,” and was getting all wrapped up in what kind of dress to wear, what kind of flowers. I even went so far as to put my own money down on an engagement ring that Bennett had actually picked out for me—and while I was there—I picked out the wedding band as well, telling myself that I was sure he would like it.

When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss asked me very kindly: “Are you being sensible as you contemplate marriage?

Meryl Nietsch.   No, I am not…I’ve had a hard time making up my mind about things—the ring, the place.

Ellen Reiss.   Are you looking for some glory?

Meryl Nietsch.   Yes, I think so. I have wanted to be made much of.

And then Ms. Reiss asked me humorously and so importantly:

Ellen Reiss. Do you think you see Bennett Cooperman as central to this marriage?

Ms. Reiss then asked this beautiful question the basis of which I feel should be part of every wedding ceremony: “Do you feel you want to spend the rest of your life understanding Mr. Cooperman?” She continued:

Ellen Reiss. Do you think marriage is to care for the whole world more? Here is Bennett Cooperman—I didn’t know him 25 years ago, but I see him as a representative of the world. “Through you, Bennett Cooperman, I intend to care more for everything.” Is that the purpose you should have?

I said, “Yes!” And she asked me this critical question: “Do you think you are giving such a tribute to a person in marrying that you want to get glory for yourself?” “Yes,” I said. “I think that’s true.” “Weddings would be seen differently,” Ms. Reiss said, “if people felt there was glory in caring for another person.”

I have seen every month since that there is glory in caring for another person. Through knowing my husband, I care for the whole world more, am kinder to people, my mind is larger, and I am more ambitious to be fair to things.

Pocahontas, “So Distinct and Yet So Unknown”

I was very affected to read in a lecture Eli Siegel gave on the poetry of Carl Sandburg sentences about Sandburg’s poem “Cool Tombs,” which has the line:

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw
in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder?
does she remember?…in the dust…in the cool tombs?

Said Mr. Siegel, “Pocahontas is so distinct, and yet so unknown. Her life is very tragic.” This is true. Because the Virginia Company was on the verge of bankruptcy, they brought Pocahontas to England, presented her to “the King and Court” in hopes that she and “her troop of redskins would stimulate investment to keep the colony alive.”

While in England Pocahontas was much esteemed, including by the poet Ben Jonson who said of her, “I have known a princess, and a great one.” Yet knowing, as she must have, the ugly purpose of the Virginia Company–using her as a novelty to stimulate investors and make more profit, which meant further exploitation of her people and land–must have made her heart sick. “Sometime after that gala season ended,” Mossiker writes, “Pocahontas’s health and high spirits visibly deteriorated.” She became ill with a respiratory illness and while on a ship returning to America, Pocahontas died in her husband’s arms. Till her last day she showed a dignity and courage, and she is buried at Gravesend, England.

I was moved to read in an issue of The Right Of that Mr. Siegel saw Pocahontas as standing for something large and just in America when he wrote: “We have been asked to evoke good will from the American press by Pocahontas, Spinoza, Albert Einstein, and Rain-in-the-Face.” I am so happy that Pocahontas is getting what Mr. Siegel said she was asking for as Aesthetic Realism is becoming known across America.

Through Aesthetic Realism every person can have the proud, thrilling good time of knowing what the world is and appreciating it truly. That is what I am so grateful to say happened to me.

The post Pocahontas & What’s More Important: To Appreciate Rightly or Be Praised? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

I told myself I was aching to have real love, but to a large degree, like many women, I used my body as a weapon, to affect a man while I acted cool and aloof. I was after what I learned from Aesthetic Realism is the very thing that always ruins love—I wanted a person to become weak about me. This purpose is contempt. It was mean and made it impossible for me to really care for anyone.

Though I could appear sunny, I worried about the increasingly cold, hard, and sarcastic way I was with men. Often I would drink before sex because I thought it would make me feel warmer. By the age of 23, I was so bitter and ashamed that for months at a time I wouldn’t have anything to do with a man.

In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known #1248, Ellen Reiss explains:

The question about sex…is a matter of the great opposites of Self and World: Do we want to use our self, our thought, body, touch, to be fair to the world not ourselves—to respect it, see it more deeply? Do we want to use our self to have another person be in a better relation to the whole, wide world? Or do we want to…feel that we’re finally running the world… [through a person] who—in a tizzy—will make it seem all reality is meaningless compared to us?

As I learned about this choice, my whole life changed. I am proud to be studying what it means to be kind with the man I love very much, my husband Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, Bennett Cooperman.

I Learned What Kindness Is

Eli Siegel defined kindness as “that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased.” Wanting other things to be “rightly pleased,” I learned, begins with the hope that another person be stronger, in a better relation to the world, not weaker. And so, in order to be kind we have to know who a person really is.

I wanted very much to please a man, including in sex, and I read women’s magazines and books that gave tips. But I never felt kind as I did these things because I wasn’t thinking about who this man really was, or how he could be stronger. I wanted him to “adore [me] above everything in existence.” In Mr. Siegel’s definition of kindness, he says: “Kindness is accuracy…Where kindness is lavishness, gush, it very clearly is also unkindness.”

Aesthetic Realism shows that every woman has an attitude to the whole world, and this will affect how she sees men. As the only girl in a family with five younger boys, though I tried to be kind, mostly I tried to run everyone, order them around like a sergeant; then I would go to my room, close the door and dismiss them. I was grabby, and then aloof.

Meanwhile, I got a lot of praise from my father for my athletic ability and how I looked; and I became self-centered. I came to feel I didn’t have to think too deeply or accurately about anything outside of myself.

When I was affected by a man, I would try to engulf him and manage him. I would flatter him, give him things, while dismissing his relation to everything not me.

For example, there was Tony Davis, who was studying to be a pilot—a very good looking young man who had a lot of skill as a carpenter. Soon after meeting him I was invited to his birthday party. Thinking I was being generous, and also that I would beat out the competition, I baked Tony a cake, a replica of a 747 jet complete with stripes and windows; made homemade ice cream; and also gave him a book and his favorite music tape. Tony looked nonplussed and uncomfortable, and I was mortified. I knew I had been excessive, and had a gnawing feeling that I was out for something selfish.

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

The only kindness is the desire for another person to be more complete, more organized, stronger, more himself. All other kindness is fake.”

It never even crossed my mind to think about how Tony could be stronger or what he was hoping for in his life—why, for instance had he wanted to be a pilot? Why did he care for carpentry? Where was he confident and where was he unsure? I didn’t have what was described to me years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation, “a certain generosity” thinking about how “this person [could] honestly like himself.”

Another time, a man I was seeing at college, Luke Tyler, who was a geology major from Texas, came over to my apartment to study. I strategically draped myself over a chair in a seductive outfit with a book, hoping Luke would stop studying and concentrate on me. Soon, I had my victory; there was sex. But afterwards I felt empty and ashamed. Luke was angry, and said he was never going to come over to study again—he couldn’t trust me. In The Right Of #1249, Ellen Reiss explains what I was going after:

In sex, too, people have felt the weakness of another made oneself important. A woman has felt triumphant seeing a man who seemed self-assured now act desperate, tumultuous, really senseless for her.

This would have been my whole life. Then, in the winter of 1979, I learned about Aesthetic Realism and began to have consultations. I heard the questions women throughout time have thirsted for—about how I saw the world, including how I saw men and love and sex. I was asked:

• Did you have respect for a man as you were able to get him into such a tizzy?
• Are you very taken by how taken he is by you?
• Do you see this man as a means of liking yourself through a shortcut? or do you see him as a means of your honestly liking the world?

I was given assignments such as, “Five questions you would like to ask a man that you are sure are kind,” and to write on the subject of “the proper use of legs.” I felt as if heavy weights were taken away!

When I began to see Bennett Cooperman, I respected him enormously. I saw him be a kind friend to people. And the more we spoke, the more I felt, “I need his perceptions and his criticism of me!”—which he gave often with humor. And as I thought of where Bennett was critical of himself—how he could see his mother better, or a person he worked with, or the character of Iago he was working on for a dramatic presentation here of Eli Siegel’s lecture on Shakespeare’s Othello, I began to have a new emotion: a feeling of pride in being able to respect a man and in thinking about what would make him stronger.

What We Can Learn about Kindness from Adam Bede by George Eliot

George Eliot is a novelist I have come to love because of the deeply kind way she sees and portrays people. Eli Siegel once said in a lecture “George Eliot did a great deal to make understanding something as important as it is today.”

I speak now about some aspects of the character of Hetty Sorrel from her novel, Adam Bede, which takes place in the farming town of Hayslope, England during the 1800s. Her fate in this novel is a tragic one; yet the purposes Hetty has, represent the ordinary selfishness and unkindness in women everywhere, not only in novels. And we can see through her the fight which Mr. Siegel explained in The Right Of titled “What Opposes Love”:

Love is either a possibility of seeing the world differently because something different from ourselves is seen as needed and lovely; or it is an extension of our imperialistic approval of ourselves in such a way that we have a carnal satellite.

Hetty, a beautiful young woman, has lost her parents and comes to live with her relatives on a farm. She is angry at being poor, feels the world has rooked her, and uses her body to have power over men. Hetty dreams about how she will be a rich lady with satin dresses and jewels, envied by all. In prose that is deep and critical, George Eliot writes about this young woman’s vanity:

Hetty Sorrel often took the opportunity…of looking at the pleasing reflection of herself in those polished surfaces…she could see herself sometimes in the great round pewter dishes that were ranged on the shelves above the long…dinner table, or in the [kn]obs of the grate, which always shone like jasper.

Amidst vivid descriptions of the world that she dismisses, we see Hetty loving herself at the expense of a wide, rich reality around her. Though she works carefully in the dairy, she essentially sees everything as dull and uninteresting, except for the thrill she has in affecting men.

Many men are interested in her, including Adam Bede—the main character of the book—a carpenter who is very much respected by the people of the town. But it is the attention of a young wealthy squire, Arthur Donnithorne that Hetty really wants. George Eliot writes:

Hetty blushed a deep rose-colour when Captain Donithorne entered the dairy and spoke to her; but it was not at all a distressed blush, for it was inwreathed with smiles and dimples, and with sparkels from under long curled dark eyelashes; and while her aunt was discoursing to him about the…[dairy] Hetty tossed and patted her pound of butter…with quite a self-possessed, coquettish air, slyly… conscious that no turn of her head was lost.

Hetty uses Arthur’s being smitten by her to puff herself up inwardly and scorn the world around her. George Eliot says her thoughts about Arthur had a “narcotic effect,” making her see things “through a soft, liquid veil, as if she were living not in this solid world.” And yet, with the softness, there is a tremendous hardness in Hetty too. Like many women, like me of once, she cannot be honestly moved and affected. George Eliot writes with critical compassion:

We must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fill-others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

When a woman cannot respond to what has meaning, she is not kind and she feels awful. In his definition of kindness Mr. Siegel explains: “To neglect things, not to want to know them, not to see them as beautiful or as having meaning when they have, is to be unkind.”

Hetty’s aunt, Mrs. Poyser says with concern for her, “there’s nothing seems to give her a turn I’ th’ inside…It’s my belief her heart’s as hard as a pebble.” One of the things that makes Hetty’s heart “hard”—as it did mine—is her purpose to affect men, see them as weak fools, while she is superior and cool. George Eliot writes:

Hetty was quite used to the thought that people liked to look at her…She knew still better, that Adam Bede—tall, upright, clever, brave Adam Bede—who carried such authority with all the people round about…she knew that Adam…could be made to turn pale or red any day by a word or a look from her…she liked to feel that this strong, skilful, keen-eyed man was in her power.

And George Eliot writes of Hetty’s “cold triumph of knowing that he loved her.” This contempt cripples a woman’s ability to have large, kind emotion.

Arthur Donithorne, like other men, is very much affected by Hetty and feels she is an easy conquest. He arranges to meet her secretly in the woods. He is ardent, but deeply cold and calculating. Hetty is flattered by his being so clearly swept by her, yet inwardly, she remains aloof from him. She doesn’t want to know him, including the fact that a rich squire will never marry a poor country girl. Later, there is sex, but George Eliot says that Arthur is “mortified” by his actions with Hetty.

Kindness in Love Is Aesthetic

In a class some years ago, I asked about something which is related to what George Eliot describes in Hetty Sorrel—the inability to be deeply affected by things—which troubles women very much. What stops a woman from having the big feeling she hopes for in sex? There have been thousands of articles in women’s magazines showing how worried women can be, but only Aesthetic Realism explains why.

Like many women, I was troubled because I never had the large feeling I hoped for in sex. I would pretend and later feel like a fraud.

I learned that what stops a woman from having feeling in sex is exactly the same as what stops her from having feeling about the world as a whole. InThe Right Of Ellen Reiss writes:

The only way sex will be sensible, beautiful, and kind is if it is a continuation of the desire to know—not a substitute for it, not a saying, “People aren’t worth thinking about deeply, but they should make me glorious.” Sex is what it was meant to be when a person feels about another: “You stand for a world I want to know and never stop knowing.”

Early in my marriage, though I had changed a very great deal, I felt there was an impediment in me to being more affected by my husband and I asked about this in an Aesthetic Realism class. I said sometimes I was aware of myself having an effect. Ellen Reiss asked me:

Do you think this matter of feeling you are affecting a man through [how you look] has anything to do with your not feeling what you want to feel?

Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.  I think so.

Ms. Reiss showed that when a woman does affect a man, it isn’t just herself that’s affecting him—it’s the world. It is both personal and impersonal, intimate and wide. A woman has reality’s opposites such as straight line and curve, logic and emotion, power and grace, sweetness and strength. “If a woman wants two things,” Ms. Reiss explained, “for a man to honor the world but also to make her the most important thing—it can make for certain impasses.”

I had that impasse. Ellen Reiss showed that there are two reasons for a woman’s not having a fulness of feeling as she is close to a man. The first is ethical: she is deeply afraid that in sex she will have contempt for the world and the man, and also be used by him for contempt. The second is, she feels something standing for the outside world—a man—has too much meaning.

I understood better why, sometimes, after having large feeling about my husband, I would suddenly find myself giving him an order, or get very busy cleaning the house. Ellen Reiss asked: “If you are affected fully will it be too much of a tribute to what isn’t you?” ‘Yes,” I said. A man stands for the world different from us and we can either be angry that he affects us, or grateful that he has so much meaning, and want to know him as deeply as we can.

This discussion changed me tremendously. I am grateful to feel now as I am close to Bennett that he stands for a world I want increasingly to know and be affected by; and this has made for passionate emotion that takes in both my mind and body. I love Aesthetic Realism for enabling women—and men—to respect ourselves on this great subject of kindness and sex.

The post Is Kindness Possible in Love? appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

Power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others. If a person’s power is only of the first kind, his unconscious will be in distress.

I learned that there are two kinds of power people are after. The power of respecting the world—being affected by and seeing value in people, books, world events, history—strengthens us and makes us proud.

But there is another power we go after which hurts and weakens us. It is the desire to have contempt, which Eli Siegel defined as “the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self increase as one sees it.” Women go after this kind of power every day in offices and homes as they try to “affect or change others,” manage them while not being affected themselves—making them feel empty and ashamed. Studying the difference between these two purposes changed the direction of my life.

Like many women today, I wanted to have a big effect on others, particularly men, through the way I looked, while I remained cool, aloof and unaffected. I also went after power through physical strength—exercising, lifting heavy things without assistance, and participating in sports. But I didn’t want to think about how much my body could actually do, and sometimes I hurt myself. With every year the way I went after conquering people and things hurt my mind and body.

I’ll write about of one dramatic form this took in my life—the eating disorders anorexia and bulimia, which I suffered from for 10 years. The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD) reports that anorexia and bulimia are “life-threatening illnesses that afflict an estimated seven million women and one million men in our country.” Because of what I learned from Aesthetic Realism, these disorders ended in me completely.

Two Kinds of Power

As a young girl, I cared very much for the land of Long Island with its lush green trees, flowers, and the great Atlantic Ocean. I remember the first time I saw that wide expanse of sand and ocean, and the sound and beauty of the waves as they advanced and retreated from the shore. And I liked sailing on the Great South Bay. I didn’t know it then, but sailing has so much to do with a beautiful power, “the ability to be affected.” It was thrilling to see how the sail yielded to and took in a strong wind, which then gave the boat the power to sail so gracefully and swiftly through the water.

But I also wanted another kind of power—to have the biggest effect and to get people to do what I wanted. Once, I calculatingly and demurely coaxed my Aunt Edna over to a shoe store window and said so sweetly, “Look, this is what all the girls are wearing.” They were white go-go boots, and I knew full well that she would buy them for me. Later, I felt uneasy because I had taken advantage of her.

Years later, in a discussion in an Aesthetic Realism Class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, explained so truly what had been an industry in me about power when she said, “You found out you could look innocent and pretty, and you’ve used it.”

I didn’t know it then, but the way I used my father to think I was the center of the universe and should be made much of—this made working to know other things and being affected by them look increasingly dull in comparison.

On the one hand, at Birch Lane Elementary School, I would spend hours in art class drawing or painting something I liked, and loved playing the flute in the band and singing in the choir. But at other times, in math or science lessons, my teacher would have to call me a few times before I would snap out of a dreamy state. As the years went on I found it increasingly difficult to read, or concentrate on anything outside of myself.

Many years later, the pain I had about this was understood in an Aesthetic Realism consultation when my consultants explained so kindly and centrally about how I had come to see the whole world—and these words describe, too, the state of mind making for eating disorders: “You feel that the Meryl of Meryl is you and the Meryl touched by other things isn’t you. You are not sure you want anything to be a part of you.”

I learned that like many children, I used the pain and confusion of my family to have contempt, to be disgusted and lessen the meaning of things. I didn’t understand my parents—they could dance in the living room after dinner and then later get so angry with each other. Like many families today, they were worried about money and there were fights. Often our dinner table—with my parents and five brothers and me—was a battle-ground with shouting matches, or cold silences.

But I didn’t want to know what either of my parents felt, including my father who worked very long hours, to support his family. Instead, I exploited their pain to feel this world was no good and I had a right to dismiss everyone. I was competitive with my brothers and often when I felt angry I would go to my room and slam the door or go out, get on my bicycle and ride for hours. I was, what my consultants once described so accurately, “a top notch discarder and professional door slammer.”

Power and How We See and Use Food

In Self and World, in some of the most beautiful prose I ever read, Eli Siegel explains:

The taking of food is more than nutrition alone, it is also a profound homage of the self to its surroundings. We are saying when we eat, and with humility too, that we need the world from which our food comes. We say, unconsciously, when we eat well: Bless reality which gives us our daily nutriment.—If we can’t logically bless, our daily bread will be a daily peril.

In these sentences is what every person needs to know who has ever suffered from anorexia, which is self starvation, and bulimia—eating large quantities of food non-stop and then purging what you eat through self-induced vomiting.

Food, Aesthetic Realism explains is either a means of our having respect for the world, or having contempt. At its best, eating is organic respect for the world, a desire to like it and take it in. But if a person doesn’t like the world, she will either not want to have food inside of her at all, or she will take it inside in a way that is contemptuous. This is what happened to me and why for 10 agonizing years my daily bread was “a daily peril.”

I say with my grateful, happy life and healthy body that the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel explains definitively that eating disorders are caused by contempt for the world. My suffering ended because my consultants explained the cause. They showed me that: “bulimia is a way of managing, having the world please you but not affect you deeply; anorexia is a means of having yourself pure, without any additions. Both arise from contempt.”

Learning this was like radiant, clear sunlight in what had been a dark, miserable cave. I learned to see food with a respect and pleasure that I never thought was possible. I love Aesthetic Realism for this.

I first became bulimic the summer before 9th grade. I was afraid of entering high school with the older students. I was angry that my body was changing, becoming more womanly and round, and this seemed different from my taller, more slender friends. When I gained a few pounds and heard two young men comment about this, I felt humiliated. I secretly began staying home from school, disconnecting the phone so no one from school could call my parents, and would eat. I ate large quantities of food—such as four containers of yogurt, a box of cereal, last night’s pot of spaghetti, garlic bread, and dessert—then disgorged all of what I had eaten.

Afraid that I would binge at every meal, I took diet pills and amphetamines which gave me more energy and made me feel I didn’t need any food at all. I starved myself for weeks; I lost a lot of weight and once fainted from lack of food. I had anorexia. What is happening now to women all over America happened to me. I began to lose my hair, my menstruation stopped, I had dizzy spells, my face was swollen from so much vomiting and my teeth were beginning to erode. I was very frightened about what I was doing to myself but I couldn’t stop.

As the years went on, I tried everything to stop, to no avail. Then I began to study Aesthetic Realism. In an early consultation, my consultants asked: “Do you think…you came to feel the world was a messy place?” “Yes,” I said.

Consultants. Did you change tremendous confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?

Meryl Nietsch. Yes.

Consultants. Do you think this eating and vomiting situation is anger and confusion turned into the triumph of contempt—and what you have is a very dramatic and organized way of saying “I don’t need the world”?

Meryl Nietsch. Yes, I think so!

I felt understood to my depths by these questions, and I have seen with every year since that they explain women now suffering with eating disorders. In one consultation when I said, “I do feel better after I have gotten the food out of me,” my consultants explained it was because, “You feel you’ve beaten the world, you’re running things.” And they explained so kindly:

Miss Nietsch, you are not different from everybody else; your mode of showing your dislike, disgust with reality may not be the most common one, but what it comes from is what has run humanity for centuries.

I came to see that even as I suffered, I had made myself terrifically important feeling I was unique and that nothing could change this awful situation. And though sometimes I fought my consultants, it was a terrific relief for me to see through scientific principles that I was like other people.

I also love the humor my consultants had about what I wanted to see as both my ability and the biggest tragedy. They once asked me, “Do you think you see food a little like a devout Catholic sees the Vatican? It’s religious.” They said:

Some people wear gold crosses or stars around their necks. You should get yourself a little refrigerator charm, a little Westinghouse.

And they asked this beautiful question, “Do you think if you see food as honestly showing what the world is like, you won’t exploit it and you won’t want to expel it?” “Yes,” I said, and this is what I am so grateful to say is what happened to me.

Food, I learned, puts opposites together, the same opposites that were fighting in me—softness and toughness, inside and outside. For example, deep dish blueberry pie, which I love to make, is tart and sweet, soft and firm, light and dark. The blueberries inside the pie retain their firm round shape even as their juice mixes and bakes with the soft flour, eggs and butter. And while the filling inside is a deep, dark rich purple, on top is a light golden, powdery crust. And I learned that these opposites—hard and soft, light and dark, sharpness and sweetness, are in me too, in my family, in all people.

A Woman’s Life Shows the Fight between the Power of Respect and the Power of Contempt

Carolyn Adams Miller, born in 1961, began the Foundation for Education on Eating Disorders in Baltimore where she lives with her husband and child. In her book My Name Is Carolyn she tells how, though she appeared like the all-American girl and was a graduate of Harvard University, she was tormented for years by eating disorders. She tells how she was finally able to control these through Overeaters Anonymous.

Mrs. Miller is seen as something of an authority on this subject, has been touted by the press, interviewed on television talk shows and published in women’s magazines. But she does not know this crucial thing that Aesthetic Realism explains—contempt is the cause of eating disorders. So while it is important that she has been able to stop hurting herself through food, Mrs. Miller lives in fear her eating disorders will return. She writes:

I know through agonizing experience that my food addiction is out there waiting for me to get cocky and complacent again, and that it will gobble me up if I give it half a chance to come back into my life.

Mrs. Miller admits she does not know what made for her anorexia and bulimia. The one thing she presents as cause, with uncertainty, after much research, is biology. She writes:

I had never been able to understand how a single bite of sugar could lead to such terrible consequences…The only thing that made sense to me was that I had been born with—or had developed through years of bingeing and purging a chemical makeup that left me powerless over sugar and other…foods the minute they hit the blood stream.

There are many descriptions of eating and purging, including with college women who do this together. Carolyn Miller writes about the first time she saw two women eat and purge:

Maybe vomiting wasn’t such a terrible way to keep weight off. In fact, it sounded like nirvana. If I could eat all my favorite foods—as much as I wanted—and not gain an ounce then it wouldn’t hurt to try it.

This is what my consultants once described as “a neat trick, having the world please you but not affect you.” There is also the power a woman has fooling people through secrecy. Mrs. Miller writes:

To the outside world I had it all: good looks, good family, good grades, and athletic abilities. But I also had a side that no one knew about. Almost daily I ate vast quantities of food and got rid of it through vomiting, laxatives, diuretics, syrup of ipecac, or compulsive exercising.

Carolyn Miller was tremendously against herself as I once was. She tells of how, while purging, she punched her stomach so hard she had black and blue marks the next day. She needs to know what only Aesthetic Realism explains—how a young woman could get to such a disgust with herself. Eli Siegel once said to a person that, the high point of his life was his ability to vomit “because you simply say ‘I get rid of you world.'”

Liking the World or Beating It

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the one opposition to that in every person which wants to have contempt—dismiss things and get rid of them—is the desire to like the world.

Carolyn Adams Miller apparently liked learning in school, liked swimming, becoming a champion swimmer in her hometown. But from a very early age, she was fiercely competitive. Working on this paper, I have come to see that competition is central in the life of a person who has eating disorders. For example, Carolyn Miller writes of herself as a young girl:

My parents began to make comments, especially comparing me with my older sister, whom I began to hate with a passion. Even at my thinnest points, nothing in her closet ever fit me, which enraged and embarrassed me. To get back at her, I competed in other arenas…piano recitals, grades test scores, and so on, flaunting the results if I came out on top.

I know that feeling—I was also competitive with other girls and angry that God didn’t make me differently. I wanted to be tall and lean and was jealous of my friends who were. I was determined that if I couldn’t be tall, at least I could be thin. Sometimes I was so angry about this that I wouldn’t even go out because I thought other girls looked so much better than I did. Mrs. Miller writes:

No one could possibly be better than I in anything without inviting my criticism. So whenever my parents had praised one of my friends…I…immediately rejoined with something negative about that person…This attitude affected me at work too. If someone I perceived as incompetent made more than me or got a raise, I went on a verbal rampage, decimating him or her to whomever would listen.

This contempt hurt Carolyn Miller very much. And even as she says these things, she is not against them. She never says straight that she was wrong to see people in this competitive way.

Mrs. Miller describes being fascinated by the vomitoriums of the Roman Empire. I, too, had found them very attractive when I learned about them in the sixth grade. When I spoke about this in a consultation, it was pointed out to me that these vomitoriums took place during the decline of the Roman Empire when the Romans were most brutal. Ellen Reiss asked these tremendously kind questions which changed my life:

Do you think there is anything else in history that’s beautiful that you can imitate? It happens that the literature of Rome has been held onto by the world…there are lines in Latin literature that are beautiful and can have a person feel that there’s emotion that she’s proud of having. So what would you rather do, get inspired by a Roman vomitorium, or lines like these from Virgil, which I shall quote in English, and the world has not wanted to forget them: “These are the tears of things, and touch the mind of man.” [And in Latin] “Sunt lachrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.” So which means more to you, the ability to vomit or the ability to hear that which lasted for many centuries?

Meryl Nietsch. The ability to hear that!

I love Ellen Reiss for her kindness and knowledge. Hearing this, what I had been so ashamed of was now in relation to the culture and beauty of the world.

Where I once felt I would have to spend the rest of my life living the hell of eating disorders, I now eat and enjoy three healthy meals a day. I eat what I like but with care and a respect that I never thought was possible.

In a class Eli Siegel once said, “The only thing that can combat the desire to eat excessively is the desire to know.” Aesthetic Realism freed my mind to know and like the world and be deeply affected by it—and it is the most thrilling good time! This includes knowing my family, being interested in people’s lives, reading some of the great literature of the world by George Eliot, Thackery, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, my study of the flute and music.

And this also includes my knowing of Aesthetic Realism Consultant, Bennett Cooperman, whom I love and am proud to be married to. I have been deeply stirred by the relation of thoughtfulness and exuberance in Bennett, and his humorous and straight criticism of me has made me a better person and had me care more for the whole world. As we study together in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, we are learning what all of America deserves to know—how the principles of Aesthetic Realism explain people and the world itself.

I’ll end with some lines from Eli Siegel’s great poem What Food Deserves: A Canticle, published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:

When our strength is spent,
There’s nothing like nourishment
To bring it back, back, back.
We go to the world again,
We eat a something, and then
We feel we’ve regained what we were.
Food can be a making of love
To the world we know.
We go to and fro,
But we come back to food,
Waiting for us.

And the poem ends:

So in a state of seemly elation,
We hail food;
And we hope that we have a just attitude
To our great friend, food,
Though seen wrongly, it can upset.
Food, though, deserves to be seen rightly,
Ever increasingly.
And if that goes on,
The unease that many feel about food
Will have gone.
Food will be seen as grace itself.

The post Eating Disorders & Power appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

In an Aesthetic Realism Class, Eli Siegel explained the difference between the two kinds of determination people have. “One,” he said, “has to do with will power…’I want this therefore it must be right!'” When a person is determined in this way, she doesn’t want to see the facts, and instead has the feeling Mr. Siegel described and which I had very often—”clench your teeth and go ahead!”

When our determination is right, Aesthetic Realism shows, there is still something we want, but it is accompanied by a large desire to know, self-questioning, and an ease in welcoming other peoples’ opinions. “The difference,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is between seeing something as good and being determined that something is good.”

I’m very grateful to have learned the difference between these two kinds of determination. I would have ruined my life going after things I thought were “right” just because I wanted them, but which left me feeling colder and harder.

The Determination to See vs. Wanting Our Way

“To live is to have one’s way somehow,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an issue of The Right Of:

The question is whether we know our true way well enough. Our desire to have our way is always accompanied by what the facts are….Reality and the facts may be at one with our desire; or reality and the facts may not be in agreement with our desire.

One way I think my own desire went along with seeing the facts, was through my early care for art. I studied painting, and liked drawing objects with pastels, such as the rough and smooth surface of an old bottle, trying to show the depth inside. I worked to get it right. This was in behalf of a good determination because it came from a desire to see, and I felt proud.

Yet this was very different from what I felt riding my bicycle around Biltmore Shores and seeing that other people in our affluent neighborhood had things my family didn’t have, which made me angry. In 3rd grade, I was jealous when Sharon Miller’s parents bought her the latest style plaid suits with matching fishnet stockings. We lived modestly, and I often felt that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. Increasingly there came to be a determination in me that if I was to get my way, I would have to be very aggressive about it. When the Christmas catalogues came to our home, I would take them up to my room and look through them with a kind of greedy relish. I admired the jewelry with reverence, thinking of what I would get if I had money. These catalogues were like a bible to me.

As time went on and my parents had 5 more children—all boys—it became increasingly hard for them to make ends meet. Though we belonged to a beach club and went on summer vacations, there was a lot of pain about money and also how they saw each other. Often there would be fights.

I think my mother, Marion Nietsch felt things were too much for her. Though I saw a deep kindness in her when I was a little girl, as the years went on she got harder, and increasingly used alcohol to get some solace.

I’m sorry to say that I was in a team with my father Richard Nietsch against my mother. I was competitive with her and my brothers for his attention, and did not encourage him to care for her, instead I flattered and consoled him. He praised me a great deal and while I liked it, I thought he was foolish. Through what I began with him, I came to have a disproportionate sense of what should come to me without my doing anything to deserve it. In his book James and The Children, Mr. Siegel explains a determination I and many girls have had with our fathers and later with other men: “A person made by God exists for me to have glory.”

My mother was more sensible about me. When I made up a story so she wouldn’t find out I did something wrong, she would look at me and say, “I hope I can believe you.” While I respected her straightforward way, it made me angry that I couldn’t fool her.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that when a child comes to see the world as a confusing, messy, unkind place, she can feel she’ll take care of herself by dismissing and managing people. I was determined not to like my mother and to show her that she could never please me. As I got older, we couldn’t be in the same room without arguing.

Once, when I was about 15, she came home with a lovely blouse she had bought for me. I showed such disdain for it and for her that she got furious and screamed, “What’s wrong with you!” I knew I was mean but I didn’t know how to be different, and I remember liking the fact that I could get her upset while I acted cool and unperturbed.

I felt I’d never be able to feel good about my mother, and then I began to have Aesthetic Realism consultations and I was tremendously relieved to learn that I could! In one consultation I was asked about what Marion Nietsch felt with 5 sons who were then ages 15-22, all living at home. “Do you think that’s an easy situation?”

Meryl Nietsch.  “No.” And they asked, “How do you think you would do with six children?

Meryl Nietsch.  “I don’t know!”

Consultants.  Do you respect your mother enough?

Meryl Nietsch.  I don’t think I respect her enough.

Consultants.  Do you think you really have a sense of what a woman with six children feels? None of us is in that situation but do you think mind can try to [know] what that feels like?

Meryl Nietsch. I think so.

And with humor, they asked, “Do you think since you were the first…that she should have just stopped there!” That’s just what I felt. For the first time I began to think about who my mother was, as a person in her own right, with hopes and feelings that I never knew existed. I was given assignments to write a soliloquy of her when she was 17, and to write a scene from a play about her which was set at a time a few years after I was born and as I did this, I began to see her with new eyes.

A Determination to Manage the World through Food

A large thing my mother and I fought about is something I was intensely determined about, and which hurt me very much. Though she tried to be of use to me, at 13 and for the next 10 years, I had what is affecting over 9 million young women in America today— anorexia and bulimia. I am grateful with my whole heart that unlike so many of these women, I met what explained and ended my pain.

In Aesthetic Realism consultations I heard the kind comprehension women are looking for when my consultants asked, “Do you think Miss Nietsch that you changed tremendous confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?” “Yes,” I said. And they asked about how I ate and got rid of food, “Do you think what you have is a very dramatic and organized way of saying ‘I don’t need the world?'” That feeling, I have seen, is a huge determination in a woman with eating disorders. She can be in agony about what she is doing to herself, but there is a tremendous victory—you have beaten what you see as a confusing world, you are running things.

My consultants explained, “Bulimia is a way of managing the world, having it please you but not affect you deeply; anorexia is a means of having yourself pure, without any additions. Both arise from contempt.”

In an earlier paper I spoke at length about eating disorders and Aesthetic Realism’s magnificent understanding of them. I have seen as true what Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss once described in a class, that they are “an utter battle with the laws of reality.” And I know from my own life that when a woman learns how to value the world and see it justly, her determination to use food, eat proportionately, in this way ends, she wants to respect food and keep it inside of her. This is what I am so thankful to say happened to me.

Two Kinds of Determination in Peg ‘O My Heart

In a lecture he gave in 1941 titled “Seeing and Grabbing,” Eli Siegel said that every person, “From the very beginning…wants to see things and also wants to grab things,” and explained that these two things can torment, “because they are not joined: the desire to understand and the desire to possess.”

We can see a drama about those desires in two characters in J. Hartley Manners’ Peg O’ My Heart. The play takes place at the “regal villa” of the Chichesters, who are snobbish and cold, and have just lost all their money. When they learn that Mrs. Chichester’s brother left his fortune to an impoverished Irish-American niece, Peg—a young, vibrant “beautiful girl of 18″— Mrs. Chichester agrees to take Peg in and educate her for a fee.

Peg is strong and tender, and despite her feeling lonely, so far away from her home, she has a pretty steady determination not to give way to sadness and to have a good effect on others. We see her looking thoughtfully at things, trying to understand people, yet she also has a sharp tongue which she feels bad about.

Peg tries to befriend the daughter, Ethel Chichester, who is a selfish young women. Ethel is very unhappy and takes it out on Peg, telling her “We have nothing in common.”

Peg.  That doesn’t prevent us from being decent to each other.

Ethel.  …Decent?

Peg.  I’ll meet ye three quarters of the way if ye’ll only show one generous feeling toward me. Ye would if ye knew what was in my mind.

That is a deep statement and I think Peg says it sincerely because she wants to have what Aesthetic Realism shows is crucial when our determination is right—good will, “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” Peg says to Ethel:

Peg.  I watch ye and listen to ye. Ye turn yer face to the world as much to say “aren’t I the easy-goin’, sweet-tempered, calm young lady?” and ye’re not quite that, are ye?…up in yer head and down in yer heart you worry your soul all the time….And with all yer fine advantages ye’re not very happy are ye?…Are ye, dear?

Ethel.  (Slowly) No. I’m not….

Ethel is affected by Peg’s kindness. Like many women, she thinks if she gets the adoration of a man, named Christian, she will like herself. But she doesn’t really want to know him, or think too much about the facts about him, including that he’s married and has a baby. Ethel stands for a determination as to love many women have had, I certainly did—a man exists to make much of us. Peg is critical of this notion of love and asks Ethel many questions about Christian including, “Is it customary for English husbands with babies to kiss other women?

Ethel.  It is a very old and very respected custom.

Peg.  Devil doubt it but it’s old. I’m not so sure about the respect.

In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss describes another young woman whom she calls Celia, saying that she:

…was determined to get a certain man Rick—but she wasn’t interested in understanding him, seeing who he really was…. There had been “signs” that all was not in the clear with Rick, but Celia had glossed over them, dismissed them….She saw a man as someone whose function was to glorify her, whom she could use to feel superior to the whole world. This makes her like many women. And, being based on contempt, her determination…had to be something that would cause her to trip up painfully.

There are women this summer on beaches in the Hamptons or sipping wine in an outdoor bar with the perfect white dress to offset their tans, who are in agony about this. I know about it first hand. I spent hours concentrating on what I would wear and arranging my hair to have a big affect on men when I walked into a room. Sometimes I calculatingly drove by a place where a man I liked was, and then acted nonchalant when I saw him.

Once, while working as a lifeguard on Long Island, I was determined to get the attention of Steve Connors. He had a gentle thoughtfulness and energy that I liked, but I was more interested in having him show how wonderful he thought I was than in knowing him. I pursued Steve all summer and finally got what I wanted, but I couldn’t understand why I felt so bad.

Fortunately I had just begun to have Aesthetic Realism consultations, and was asked the questions women have thirsted to hear. “Do you think that there’s a way he approves of you, whether he says a word or not, that is better than anything else?”

Meryl Nietsch.  Maybe.

Consultants.  Do you think it’s the closet thing to worship that’s around?

Meryl Nietsch.  Yeah. But I don’t think its good.

Consultants.  Well, but is it part of the interest?

It was part of the interest, but I didn’t feel so good about it. With humor and depth my consultants asked, if I felt something like this:

“I thought I was going to have power and have my way; I did have power and have my way; and I’m not happy anyway. How come?” Because you weren’t really interested in seeing what your way really is.

The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world. This is our deepest desire, and that is why the determination to conquer a man can never satisfy. A man is the world, and knowing him, his relation to everything is a chance to know reality and ourselves better. I’m grateful to be in the midst of this grand study with the man I love and am proud to need, my husband, Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, Bennett Cooperman. Through his good will and criticism of me, which is often humorous including as to ways I am determined, I am a better woman.

For instance, early in our marriage Bennett asked me to wait until he got home to lift a heavy box down from a closet, but I didn’t want to wait and did it anyway. This was a pattern with me and sometimes I injured my back. I’ll never forgot what he said later: “Did it ever occur to you that a man can want to have a good effect you by lifting that box? Can that be part of your thought?” And he wrote kind critical lines about my back, which affected me very much. These are the first lines:

“Message from Meryl’s Back”

My loving back is telling me
To stop and look and want to see.
“I will be strong and will not ache
If you the proper time will take
To do the things you want to do—
Don’t plow ahead, but see what’s true”

I love Bennett for being a good critic of me and wanting me to be stronger.

The play, Peg ‘O My Heart comes to a crisis near the end when Peg stops Ethel from running away with Christian. It is night, and Peg comes home and sees Ethel with her suitcase:

Peg.  Were ye goin’ away with him? Were ye?

Ethel.  Take your hands off me…Let me go.

Peg.  Ye’re not going out of this house tonight if I have to wake everyone…Ye’d take him from his wife and her baby?

Ethel.  He hates them, and I hate this. And I’m going—

Peg.  So ye’d break yer mother’s heart and his wife’s just to satisfy yer own selfish pleasures?….He gave his name and his life to a woman, and it’s your duty to protect her and the child she brought him.

Ethel.  I’d kill myself first.

Peg.  Not first. That’s what would happen to ye after ye’d gone with him…Doesn’t he want to leave the woman he swore to cherish…What do we suppose he’d do to one he took no oath with at all? You have some sense about this.

Ethel sees how wrong she has been, and breaks down in tears. Peg says kindly to her:

Don’t cry. Don’t do that….and with the sunlight the thought of all this will go from ye. Come to my room and I’ll sit by yer side till morning.

The Determination of Good Will

“This desire to know, value, bring out the good power in things and people,” Ellen Reiss writes in The Right Of:

…is, Aesthetic Realism shows, the greatest strength. It is the only purpose that will make us truly strong. And the having of this good will is at the same time the most subtle of jobs, the most delicate, the tenderest.

This is what was encouraged in me as to my mother in classes taught by Ms. Reiss. Through what I learned, I began to see who my mother really was with more depth and kindness. In one class Ms. Reiss asked, “Do you think you can find the depths of your mother a subject of real interest?” And I was asked, “Do you really want your mother to think well of herself?” And, we began to have conversations about many things that made us both stronger.

I learned about her home in Brooklyn where she grew up during the depression, and what she felt later moving to Seaford, Long Island. I learned that she loved to read, what her favorite books were, that she once sang in a band. She told me about the excitement she felt when she first met my father in high school. Many of these conversations took place during the last months of her life.

I told her how much it meant to me to be learning about what sincerity is from Aesthetic Realism, when I had felt like such a faker. And when I thanked her for having been a critic of my insincerity—I was very much affected that she told me she worried about sincerity in herself too.

My mother and I came to have a friendship that I treasure. A week before she died, she wrote in a letter to Ellen Reiss:

I thank Eli Siegel for saving my daughter’s life and I want to thank you Ms. Reiss for continuing the kind work of [Mr.] Siegel.

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