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

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Decision

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

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

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

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

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

Indecisive Men: Because We Have Two Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Classic Movie about the Biggest Decision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Men Learn in Aesthetic Realism Consultations

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

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

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

Michael White. I’m not sure.

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

Michael White. Yeah, it’s got to be.

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

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

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

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

And we asked:

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

Michael White. Yeah!

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

Michael White. Thank you—I want to!

Nothing Is Good Enough to Have You

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARY: What are you doing, picketing?

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

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

GEORGE: About what?

MARY: About coming in.

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

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

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

MARY: Would you rather leave?

GEORGE: No, I don’t want to be rude.

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

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

GEORGE: Well, I…

MARY: What do you want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bennett Cooperman: Me.

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

Bennett Cooperman: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARY: How much do you need?

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

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

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

The Main Decision: Can We Like the World?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Anger and How We See the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Anger of Art and of the Ego

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anger and Sweetness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Are Men Angry in Love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Opposites, The Honeymooners and Anger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our text in the class was Eli Siegel’s essay, “The Graceful Effort; or, The Oneness of Ease & Difficulty in Art,”— a chapter from his book The Opposites Theory. In it he says, “There must be enough obstruction, resistance, somehow in a work to make that work likable deeply…. Reality resists as it beckons,” and he speaks about true art having both “love and struggle.”

That is what we hear in large measure in this recording. Ella begins the song sweetly and deeply. Her voice has a clear, warm, lyrical quality that is lovely. I’m going to talk mainly about Louis Armstrong’s singing, but here’s a taste of how Ella Fitzgerald begins. And you’ll hear that even while she accents something graceful, there’s also a little roughness in what she does with the rhythm — sometimes jumping the beat, sometimes holding back. As the critic Henry Pleasants says in his book The Great American Popular Singers, “She has an impeccable and ultimately sophisticated rhythmic sense.” Here’s her entire solo, with Louis playing trumpet in back of her, along with the superb Oscar Peterson quartet.

Then as you just heard, Louis comes in, and there is the unmistakable sound of his voice. It’s like sunshine and cragginess, both at the same time. Isn’t that a little like ease and difficulty? My colleague, jazz pianist Alan Shapiro, has written that Louis Armstrong’s voice has the “roughness and grit of earth itself, and at the same time is so sweet, warm, tender.” When you hear Louis Armstrong, you can’t help but smile, and yet his voice is rough, it has obstruction, it isn’t just “pretty.”

The notable thing about this particular recording is how clearly you can hear the nuances of that roughness — the roughness and the feeling.  He sings in a simple way, and it sounds like the microphone was very close up to him. This allows you to hear all kinds of subtle things going on in his voice — the dips, the crags, the sweetness, even the tugs in his throat. Here is the beginning of his solo, coming in just after Ella Fitzgerald has sung.

To me, this singing has a beautiful raw quality; it’s as if you have a window into a person’s unvarnished feeling. Often, people think when something is raw it’s going to be difficult, not happy. That’s what I felt. But here the raw feeling is the same as sweetness and sincerity. In fact, I feel the sincerity of this singing is courageous, because it’s a person showing himself, not being falsely smooth, covered up.

We hear throughout this singing what Mr. Siegel said is in all true art: love and struggle. For example, you just heard the wonderful thing he does for a second on the word “key” when he says “the way you sing off key” — his voice slides down to the basement, and along the way we don’t know what key we’re in.

Now I’ll play some more of his solo and point to two other moments that are beautiful in how they put together ease and difficulty. First, the way he sings “life” so movingly in “The way you changed my life.” There’s pleasure but also some pain in the sound as he reaches for the note, and aren’t these — pain and pleasure — close to difficulty and ease? Then, toward the end of this section, when he sings the “No” on “No-o-o, they can’t take that away from me,” it’s a growl and a caress at the same time.

Are We Looking for a Oneness of Roughness & Ease?

Like many people, I preferred to stay away from things that seemed difficult. I wanted things to be easy, yet my notion of ease was wrong — because it didn’t include all the possibilities of the world, including its honest and beautiful roughness. And so, while I tried to find ease in various ways — from trying to make a neat, tidy world I controlled through having my apartment in perfect order, to taking drugs — I hardly ever felt at ease.  And though I did my best to hide it, I was often terrifically agitated.

Two months after I began to study Aesthetic Realism, because of what I was learning about my deepest desire — to like the world on an honest basis — I already felt so different that I wrote in a letter to Eli Siegel, “I feel more comfortable in my own skin.”

The goodness of this recording is in how much Louis Armstrong welcomes difficulty and makes it one with delight and ease. We hear this in his trumpet solo, at the start of which he says, “Swing it boys.”  He’s clearly enjoying that light swing rhythm of the quartet in back of him. At the same time, though he starts close to the melody, later he plays many unexpected notes, sometimes clearly dissonant ones, and with surprising, edgy rhythms.  He doesn’t play it safe — he likes the feeling of being tossed around!  And yet, he sounds so at ease, so relaxed.

Love — & What in Us Is Against It

Of course, along with Louis Armstrong’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s performances, there’s what this song is about. The person proudly says no one can take away the memories he has of the woman he cares for. There are ordinary memories, “The way you hold your knife,” and then deeper things, “the way you changed my life.”  There’s both love and struggle as he says, “We may never, never meet again on that bumpy road to love / Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of…” That’s pain and pleasure as one.

What this song is about means a lot to me. I love my dear wife,  Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman, very much. I cherish the chance to be with her and talk with her and hold her in my arms, and I look forward to the many memories we’ll be making as the years go on. I feel very fortunate for the education we’re getting from Aesthetic Realism about love, which is unprecedented, logical and magnificent!

Part of my education has been learning there was something in me that was actually against being stirred up by anything or anyone not me. Once, when I was going to sing a love song, “Annie Laurie,” in a musical presentation here, I was having trouble with the depth of feeling in it and I didn’t understand why. When I spoke about this in an Aesthetic Realism class, the Chairman of Education, Ellen Reiss, asked me:

ER: Do you like reverence or does it embarrass you? This song has grandeur and reverence.
BC: I think it embarrasses me.

And Ms. Reiss continued: “Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?” The answer, I’ve seen, is “Yes.” In my life I equated being at ease with keeping myself cool and intact.

At the time of this discussion, I was dating Meryl, and Miss Reiss asked:

ER: How much do you want Miss Nietsch to mean to you?
BC: She does mean a great deal to me and I want her to mean more.
ER: Does anything in you feel if you had a tremendous emotion that you would be a fool? You need to see there is that in you that feels, “I’m not going to be taken in by anything.” And you shouldn’t be. But one of the things a person can be taken in by is his own narrowness.

How true! What an education I was getting — and it continues. Said Ms. Reiss: “A person is being born right now. Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?”

Louis Armstrong’s singing points to the answer to that question: that a person will never really be at ease unless he welcomes great feeling, including the honest roughness, the being shaken up, that’s in all great feeling. That principle is true about marriage, too. Through what we’ve learned from Aesthetic Realism, Meryl and I try to be good critics of each other — encouraging what is good in the other person, and saying where we think the other could be better. It’s not just smooth—as music shouldn’t be — and is sure is romantic.

I’ll end my paper the way the recording does as Ella Fitzgerald comes back in and then Louis Armstrong joins her, singing.  At first, she’s high flying and he has rough, almost guttural punctuations underneath.  They’re so different and they add to each other, need each other.  Aesthetic Realism says, “Love is proud need.”  And when he sings “The way you changed my life,” again I find it so moving. That statement surely stands for what I and so many others feel about Aesthetic Realism itself, which beautifully can change the life of every person.

The post Roughness & Grace in “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” 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.

I care very much for this recording of Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, played with great feeling and power by Jascha Heifetz, accompanied by the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra and conducted by William Steinberg. Zigeunerweisen means “the ways of the gypsies.” What we just heard is rich with the opposites which, I believe, are central in this whole piece—assertion and yielding, pride and humility. These are opposites very big in my life as they are in everyone. How can we be proud without being arrogant?  How can we be modest without groveling? Aesthetic Realism shows art has the answer, and we can hear it in this music.

As you heard, the orchestra begins forcefully, dramatically rising fortissimo, very loud. Then it suddenly yields as Heifetz enters, playing the same melody two octaves lower, modestly yet having dramatic flourishes of his own. That violin dances all the way up the scale to a super high Eb, then instantly drops down to a low C, followed by a joyous, proud pizzicato pluck at the end. This is assertion and yielding as one!

This opening sounds almost like a gypsy improvisation. Then we get to a clear melody. The notes are aching and sweet, passionate and inquiring. Listen to how it begins:

Pride & Humility in Art

In his great essay, Art as, Yes, Humility, Eli Siegel explains:

Humility is the willingness to see things other than oneself as having meaning for oneself. This humility makes for pride; for pride, in the long run, comes from the comprehensive and accurate way one is affected by reality, the universe that is under one’s nose and is far away. The artist is more humble than is customary, because, as artist, he wants things to mean more and more to him; he wants to see more and more.

That is what we hear—there is a desire on the part of the composer Sarasate to see what a simple melody can have in it, how much feeling. And Heifetz has this purpose, too, as he yields in a very exact way to the notes this composer wrote. Heifetz was renowned for his precision, but it isn’t a cool precision: he’s passionate, proud, and plays the music with flourish.

Good Will—the Oneness of Assertion & Yielding

This music, I believe, embodies what I learned from Aesthetic Realism is crucial for the happiness of every person: the desire to have good will—”the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” That desire, I learned, is both assertive and yielding: it’s an active, conscious purpose to see what something else is, to be affected. You heard this as Heifetz played the highest note of this melody. He doesn’t blast it; he yields with piercing sweetness.

This is so different from how I was in my life. My purpose was to impress people while not being too affected myself. In fact, I thought being affected by someone was a humiliation. This made for a hurtful relation in me of assertion, followed by excessive humility. I’m grateful my attitude to the world and people was criticized through my study of Aesthetic Realism, enabling me to change.

Crucial in this change is what I learned as I began to care for Bennett Cooperman, who is now my husband. When we first started living together, I was very much affected by Bennett—his care for music and drama and his friendship and kindness to many people, and his love for the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism. I felt very much that I needed him—but I also thought I’d better assert myself and let him know I was not going to take his orders. My theme song with men had been “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better.”

In an Aesthetic Realism class, when I spoke about this, Ellen Reiss, the Chair of Education, asked me, “Do you think you feel, ‘I’m not going to let any man walk over me’…and then there is something else in you that wants to be very sweet, but you don’t see it as strong.”  And she also asked me: “Do you think you get very fast to feeling you’ve yielded sufficiently?” I did. “Yielding,” she explained, “needs to be felt as the same as expression.”  Yes—and I am learning more about this with every year. Studying Aesthetic Realism melted my cold, steel-like hardness to men and the world and enabled me to be increasingly, deeply affected.

And that’s what happens in this music. Right after the yearning, melting and flourishing passages—so graceful, musically—comes the celebration! Sarasate ends Zigeurnerweisen with a wild, rapid Allegro, and from what I know, this is in keeping with the musical style of the Romani people: it is how they most often like their improvisations to go: from slowness to speed. The music in this final section kicks up its heels!  Yet here, too, every note is cared for exactly and what self-expression it makes for! I think it illustrates what Mr. Siegel said in his essay, in some of the great sentences of the world: “Art, itself, is humility at one with pride. In art, the successful humility is the soul’s swellingness.”

Let’s begin with where the change occurs and listen all the way through to the brilliant, joyous conclusion!

The post Pride & Humility, Assertion & Yielding in Pablo de Sarasate’s “Ziegeunerweisen,” played by Jascha Heifetz appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism this great principle: “The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art.”  And this aria puts together two opposites people are very troubled by and which I have been: assertion and yielding. Though the plot of the opera is complicated and not entirely convincing, there is something symbolically true in this aria as a man asserts his passionate desire to have a woman true to herself. She has been cold and cruel, and this night will determine his fate—whether he is to live or die. He sings quietly, “Nessun dorma, None shall sleep!”  and says, “You too, O princess, in your cold room, you watch the stars tremble with love and hope.”  His name is Calaf, and the woman is Princess Turandot.

Proudly Assertive & Yielding at the Same Time

The first thing we hear is Calaf singing assertively on a single pitch, “Nessun dorma,” but immediately Puccini asks the tenor to repeat the phrase in the deep, yielding register of his voice an octave lower. There is humility and gentleness even as this beginning melody also asserts that single note, D, eight times. While this is happening, the orchestral strings rise from their deepest register to the heights. On the word “Nessun,” the woodwinds add a mysterious chord. And as he imagines her looking at the stars, all this is marked Andante Sostenuto, “slowly sustained”—a thoughtful tempo. It’s as if Calaf is asserting: “I am the man that can have you break out of your coldness and be closer to things.” The music is not arrogant or pompous; it is both proudly assertive and yielding at the same time. I start again at the beginning and play even more of this magnificent music.

The music soars as Calaf asserts he is the man to melt her cold, hard heart. He sees something imprisoned in Turandot and believes he can be a means for her to love a person. He rises up to high A and repeats it, almost crying out. And as his melody cadences, comes to rest on the very note he began with, D, Puccini does this wonderful thing with the orchestra:  he goes from an assertive dominant chord, not to the expected tonic, but to the most yielding chord in any major key: the sub-dominant.

Puccini’s harmonies make you melt. There is tenderness at one with strength, calling forth in Pavarotti some of the most beautiful singing I’ve ever heard—passionately assertive and yielding for the same purpose. I believe Calaf stands for the principle of good will, which Aesthetic Realism defines as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.”

“Nessun Dorma” illustrates greatly what people are hoping for, what I’m hoping for in my life. I learned from Aesthetic Realism that having good will as our purpose enables us increasingly to have a good relation of assertion and yielding. I also learned that without good will, we will assert and yield in a way that is unkind and hurtful.

Assertion & Yielding in Love

While I am different from Princess Turandot, I, too, prided myself on my ability to assert myself and my opinions in a way that was often hard and inconsiderate. And I felt yielding was weak. I’m grateful for what I’ve learned about this enabling me to change, including in my marriage to Bennett Cooperman.

A pivotal time was when Bennett and I began to live together. While very happy, I also felt I was losing something. I was in tumult and spoke about it in an Aesthetic Realism class conducted by the Chair of Education, Ellen Reiss. She asked: “Do you think you are bending over backwards in having Bennett Cooperman more in your life? “Yes,” I said, and she explained:

ER. When two people come together, there is a great drama of assertion and yielding. Do you feel somewhere he’s going to annihilate your personality; you’re going to have to yield to him all over the place?
MN-C. Yes!  That is what I feel.
ER. Do you think you want, on the one hand, for Bennett Cooperman to be with you, but on the other hand, a woman who wants very much to be with a man can feel she’s going to be made into nothing in some way—the Meryl Nietsch that was will be no more! The great question is if a person means more to us, are we more or less?

I’m very glad to feel that I am more, proud to feel that through my marriage to Bennett, assertion and yielding in me are in a much better relation.

Returning to the aria: After that great outpouring of melody already so full and so rich, Puccini honors the principle of feeling more. In the second stanza of this aria, he goes even further—not only does the chorus enter from a distance taking up Calaf’s melody and standing for the wide world, but as the tenor reenters, he soars triumphantly up to the highest note of all, high B. Pavarotti sustains that note astonishingly and with all of himself. His voice is both proudly assertive and passionately yielding. And he is singing “vincero!”—“I will be victorious!” We feel it is the victory of good will, the victory of honest warmth over coldness.

I’m glad to be learning deeply from the music of Puccini and this performance of the great Luciano Pavarotti how, as the title of our seminar says: “Music Tells Us How We Want to Be!” Here is the conclusion of the aria.

The post Luciano Pavarotti Sings Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” – A Oneness of Assertion & Yielding appeared first on Bennett Cooperman & Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman.