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.

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.

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