Steve Weiner

2008-01-20T21:35:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog!

My name is Steve Weiner, and I live in New York City.

I am an Associate of Aesthetic Realism which is the philosophy founded by the American poet and critic, Eli Siegel. Here are its three main principles:

1. Man's deepest desire, his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest basis.

2. The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.

3. The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

One of the joys of my life is presenting what I have learned from Aesthetic Realism at its not-for-profit foundation in Soho, and elsewhere.

Here are some of the subjects I have spoken on: "Mind and Body: Can a Man Use Both to Be Kind?", "The Pleasures and Perils of Conceit", "What Do Fathers and Sons Really Want from Each Other?" and "What Stops a Man from Having True Love?"

I have also discussed in talks artists such as Rembrandt, Alberto Giacometti, Diego Rivera, Louise Nevelson, and Roy Lichtenstein.

For many years, I was a Computer Specialist for the New York City Department of Education, and a labor union official.

Please make sure to look at my archives for additional articles.

If you wish to contact me, my email address is snweiner@yahoo.com

Steve

Simplicity and Complexity: Roy Lichtenstein's “Stepping Out”

2008-01-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

The following is an art talk I've presented at the Terrain Gallery, part of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in Soho. "Stepping Out" by Roy Lichtenstein is part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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From the first time I saw Roy Lichtenstein’s 1978 painting “Stepping Out”, I was moved by how much human emotion is conveyed by the most primary of colors and simplest of forms. I believe that what the artist does in this work affirms the question about simplicity and complexity Eli Siegel asks in “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?”

Is there a simplicity in all art, a deep naivete, an immediate self-containedness, accompanied perhaps by fresh directness or startling economy?--and is there that, so rich it cannot be summed up; something subterranean and intricate counteracting and completing simplicity, the teasing complexity of reality meditated on?

Lichtenstein definitely accents “fresh directness” and “startling economy.” This very large painting, it is seven feet high, nearly six feet wide, consists of strong, bright colors with definite lines and forms. There are essentially five colors--the primary ones--red, blue and yellow, plus black and white. They are flat and unmodulated and on their own do not give a feeling of depth or texture. And, yet, with all this simplicity, I think the complexity of love is here--the hope and pain, closeness and distance that men and women have felt for centuries.

I believe this work is a criticism of how a man has often wanted to see a woman as simple, as just a “pretty face”, without too much substance, and how a woman may accommodate herself to this unjust, contemptuous way of seeing her. All we see of the woman are features and clothes—wavy blonde hair in a barrette, one blue eye, vivid red lips and yellow scarf and coat. Where her head should be is a mirror with no reflection in it. But unlike most men, Lichtenstein uses these features to show that beneath a bright, seemingly vapid surface, there is the depth and complexity of a person. Her vertical eye is surprising and critical. Her unsmiling lips are closed, but they are dual; solid red on top, complex red dots on the bottom. And the duality, the mystery is right on top, on the surface, not hidden.

Lichtenstein is both critical of and compassionate towards the man. He shows him, with his sad Leger face and a yellow film over his eyes, as uncomprehending and far away from the woman even as he is so close to her. The man is almost presenting her as an ornament; yet she is part of him. She completes his shape but not quite. She is the same and different. But he doesn’t see her, who she is. She is on the other side of the mirror that forms her face.

In an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel once asked me questions that I think have very much to do with one of the subject of this work: how men have made the mistake of seeing women as too superficial at one time, and too confusing at another. He asked me:

ES: Do you think women should be simple?

SW: I guess I do.

And he continued with humor:

ES: The more you know of women, the more you’ll find them baffling—so the prospects are not so good. Do you want to feel you’re the only complex person?

These questions and others I’ve heard have made for a great change in me. Where once I was shallow about women, I now see and honor their depths much more. This in turn had made my own life and emotions so much deeper and richer.

In this painting, while the man and woman seem so far away from each other—the sharp diagonal line in the middle accents this--the artist also shows their deep relation to each other in a way that has tenderness, even humor. Their lips have a similar outline but hers are red and have those dots while his are solid black and white, and the line that separates her upper and lower lip is curved; his is straight. The outline of her lower lip almost meets and has the same lovely shape as his jawline and chin. Both their faces have red Benday dots that Lichtenstein is so famous for that become more intense as their faces meet.

One of the deepest parts of this picture is the way her scarf both hugs herself and also reaches out to him, touching his striped blue tie, in a manner that is both playful and yearning, and perhaps even a little desperate. Do these two directions of her scarf stand for the fight that I learned is in every person, including centrally as to love--between wanting to love only ourselves and longing to care deeply for another person? I think so.

Lichtenstein sees deep meaning in the complexities of a situation that many people use to be cynical about love. Through my study of Aesthetic Realism, I came to see that I used the chilly distance I saw between my parents to have contempt--for them, all people, and the world itself. My scorn, my feeling that humanity was deeply messy, made it impossible for me to see people the way Lichtenstein did here--with largeness, respect and compassion. When I learned a true way of seeing the world and people, the art way, my life changed beautifully.

Once, I never would have seen that this painting, complex and yet so forthright in its composition, could be a means for me to see all people more deeply. I thank Eli Siegel for enabling me to care for both art and life and for showing the deep relation between the two.

For more information about how Aesthetic Realism sees the relation of art and life, please click on:

The Terrain Gallery / Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Photography Education: the Aesthetic Realism Viewpoint

Dorothy Koppelman, artist

www.donitaellison.com

www.edgreenmusic.org

Louis and Amy Dienes, photographers

Anne Fielding, actress

Barbara Allen, flutist

www.alanshapiromusic.net

Aesthetic Realism Theater Company

More information!

2007-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

There is a wealth of material about Aesthetic Realism on the Internet. Here are some websites you can visit to find out more:

The truth about some of the most ridiculous misrepresentations about Aesthetic Realism on the Internet

Aesthetic Realism: A New Perspective for Anthropology & Sociology

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company

Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism: A Biography

Photography Education: the Aesthetic Realism Viewpoint

The Terrain Gallery / Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, on poet Robert Burns

Ellen Reiss comments on eight poems by Eli Siegel

Ellen Reiss on J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter, and Romanticism

Ellen Reiss on the criticism of John Keats in 1818

Eli Siegel's 'Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?'

The Answer to Racism

Aesthetic Realism Foundation Faculty

Aesthetic Realism Online Library

Definition Press

Leila Rosen, Teacher

Rosemary Plumstead, Teacher
Rosemary Plumstead article on Emperor Penguins--Part 1
Rosemary Plumstead article on Emperor Penguins--Part 2

Lynette Abel, Aesthetic Realism and Life

Alice Bernstein, Aesthetic Realism Associate

Mike Palmer on the Questions of Men

Devorah Tarrow and Jeffrey Carduner

Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism Consultant

Bennett Cooperman and Meryl Nietsch

Ruth Oron on Art and International Questions

Philippine Post Magazine: Aesthetic Realism — A Cure for Racism?

Aesthetic Realism and Our Lives

Christopher Balchin on How Can Racism End?

How Should a Child be Seen?

Aesthetic Realism Is True Christopher Balchin

Ann Richards on Teaching The Miracle Worker

How Aesthetic Realism Explains the beauty of New York City!

What is Art For? by Eli Siegel

The Greatest Gift: Authentic Criticism

We’re Determined but Are We Right? The Criteria for Good Determination (about the life and work of Alberto Giacometti)

2007-10-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

Awhile ago when I asked several persons in my family if they thought I was a determined child, there were no puzzled looks on their faces, no vacillation in their voices, they immediately answered “Yes!”

Aesthetic Realism makes eminently clear: there are two different kinds of determination: one that does a man’s life good because it comes from wanting to know the world, be just to people; and another determination based on contempt in which we are relentless in trying to have our own selfish way, and what others deserve from us be damned.

As a child, there were times I had good determination. In school, I was eager to learn, and if there was a subject I found difficult, like chemistry, I kept working at it.

But mostly my determination was of a different kind, and I was intense about it. I was set on being one of the favored children in school, and realized that I had a tremendous built in advantage--my older brother of three years, Fred. He was very lively and definitely a BMOC—big man on campus. “Are you Freddie Weiner’s little brother,” was frequently asked of me by teachers and older students. “Yes,” I eagerly replied, and was often made a lot of. I came to feel this special treatment was my due, and used it to dismiss all the other “ordinary” children.

However, even as I used Fred for self-importance, I also wanted to be superior to him. Having gotten better grades than he did, I rubbed this in as often as possible. But no matter what I did, Fred wasn’t going to be managed by me. That I found easier to do with my twin brother, Paul. In exchange for helping Paul with his homework, or doing his errands for our mother, I expected total submission and when I didn’t get it, I was irate. Once, when Paul refused to go to a party with me, I punched him. He said, “You always have to have your way, don’t you, Steven?”

And there was another big way I was determined. Even though my father worked very hard so that our family could live in an apartment in a nice neighborhood in Brooklyn, I felt humiliated because friends of mine were better off than me, and some of them were moving to large homes in the suburbs. In a class years later, Eli Siegel asked me, “Is there anything greater in you than your desire to be bitter?” I began to see that I had a drive, a determination, to feel the world had hurt me, and therefore I had the right to despise it.

I had no idea that the way I was bent on proving that I was above everyone and everything made for my very low opinion of myself, and feeling that my life really didn’t matter too much.

Through my study of Aesthetic Realism, I have a determination today to be a kinder, deeper person, useful to others, and I’m grateful my education continues. Once in a class, Mr. Siegel encouraged me to look at where I had been unjust to my brother, Fred. I wrote about specific ways I’d been mean, and showed what I wrote to Fred, and he felt I was trying to be honest. I’m very glad to say that with each year there is more friendliness and respect between us.

I. Right and Wrong Determination in a Noted 20th Century Artist

I now discuss some aspects of the life and work of Alberto Giacometti, one of the few artists eminent in three media—drawing:

painting:

and most famously for his sculptures of tall, thin, anonymous women and men:

In his art, he had as beautiful a determination as any: the critic Charles Juliet called it a “quest to understand art, man, and life.”

Born in Switzerland in 1901, Alberto was the son of Giovanni and Annetta Giacometti. His brother Diego to whom he was close for his entire life arrived a year later.

In Self and World, Eli Siegel has sentences that while deeply philosophic have so much to do with how Giacometti and many men have been rightly and wrongly determined. He writes:

“A person is separate from all other things and together with all other things…All art puts separateness and togetherness together. All selves want to do this.

[And he continues:] So the problem that faces a self is how to make its separateness at one with its togetherness. This is the problem which is underneath all others. It can make for agony and it can make for triumph.”

In his fine biography of the artist, James Lord tells of the drama in the young Alberto of wanting to be “together” with other things but also “separate.” Early, it seems he preferred objects like stones and trees to people, and a nearby cave to his own home. Lord writes: “From the first, Alberto was made aware of a distance between himself and the rest of the world.”

And in his reveries, Alberto often traveled to Siberia. Of this land, he said: “There I saw myself on a vast plain covered with gray snow: there was never any sun and it was always cold.” I, too, as a child had dreams of being enveloped by snow. When I spoke of them in a class, Mr. Siegel asked me: “Do you have a tendency to vanish? “I think I do,” I answered, remembering how from a young age I was intent to be off by myself. Mr. Siegel continued: “Do you think it shows an attitude to the world?” It did in me, and I think in Giacometti too. Throughout his life, even as he had to do with many people, including the renowned artists and thinkers of his day, his determination to “vanish” made for a pervasive loneliness.

Meanwhile, his biographer also describes how Alberto wanted to be “together” with things, which showed in his care for art. He showed an aptitude for sculpture early on that was encouraged by his father, himself a well-known artist. By his teens, he was sculpting his family. This is a work he did when he was just thirteen of his younger brother, Bruno:

Giacometti said, “I began doing sculpture because that was precisely the realm I understood least. I couldn’t endure having it elude me completely. I had no choice.” This is a beautiful resolve that every man can learn from. Too often, men have associated determination with arrogantly imposing our will on others; not by being deeply affected by something big in the world, and feeling we have to be fair to it. Here is a self-portrait at age 20, showing his intense desire to see:

II. A Determination for More Seeing

As a young man, Alberto moved to Paris. At first, he took up cubism, and then surrealism. These are some of his works from that time, and I think many of them have a deep charm:

Giacometti was praised a good deal for these works, and he could have rested. But he had a determination to go deeper, get to something greater—he wanted to produce sculpture that would embrace, what he called, “the totality of life.”

For the next ten years, Giacometti worked in relative obscurity. Then something profound happened to him one day. As he walked down a Paris boulevard, he experienced a “complete transformation of reality.” He said:

“I began to see (the forms of people in the space that surrounds them (and) I trembled…as never before.”

I think what he saw is about the philosophic concept that a person exists in all of space. This idea engrossed Giacometti, and in trying to show it visually, he came to magnitude as sculptor. As we look at these works, we can see Giacometti’s insistence on showing humanity at its most elemental, not decorated or covered up.

At a certain point, pedestals became more important in his work:

Part of the great power of his works is their colors, indentations, and patinas. James Lord writes: “Rough, rippling, gouged, granular, the texture of his sculptures has a glimmering animation all its own.” This is so evident in details from two of the above works:

Pablo Picasso said Giacometti brought a “completely new essence” to sculpture, and I think we can see that in “The Chariot” of 1950:

Here, a woman, shorn of all accoutrements, stands gracefully atop a pedestal supported by two very large wheels. The weightiness of the chariot is counteracted by the etherealness of her elongated torso and legs; the diagonal spokes are related to her asymmetrical open arms. And she seems to looking out at all space.

Aesthetic Realism explains that the biggest hope of a woman is to be in a beautiful relation with all of reality. But hurtfully, many men have been determined to lessen women and see them in terms of narrow comfort. This woman, in all her delicacy, is resolute that she be seen in her largeness and depth, even abstraction. I believe this work is a visual representation of what Mr. Siegel describes so deeply about the nature of femininity, as reality has determined it to be, in his essay “A Woman is the Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites.” He writes about “Form: Body”:

“Meaning, form, ethics, mind, spirit, value are all in woman as much as they are anywhere in the universe…But body is begun with, is claspingly, pressingly honored because in the possibilities of body, meaning lodges, ready often to go the limits of the world.”

“The Chariot” is a beautiful composition of a feminine “mind” and “body”, and the “limits of the world.”

III. Determination, the Family, and Love

The art of Giacometti came, I’ve learned, from what all art does: an impulsion to see the world and people deeply and justly. But too often, with the people we know, we’re determined very differently: to own. This was so of Giacometti, and it made for much agony in him and the persons to whom he was close.

For instance, there was a lot of feeling between Alberto and his brother Diego, and some kindness. At a low point in Diego’s life, Alberto asked him to assist in his studio. There, Diego became indispensable, including applying the patinated touches to the works that made for such a vital part of their beauty. But Alberto got very angry when Diego did not do just as he was ordered. What hurt Diego most of all was Alberto’s refusal to ever publicly acknowledge his contributions. Meanwhile, as artist, Alberto said: “Diego has posed for me ten thousand times; but each time he poses, I no longer recognize him.” These are two of his works of Diego:

There is a good separation here, an objectivity, for the purpose of being more deeply of, inside a person.

And then there was his mother, Annetta, who favored Alberto over her other children. James Lord said that from them, she expected “unconditional devotion” and Alberto was very willing to comply. Though he had to do with many women, from the time he was a young man, he found it difficult to have a sustained feeling for one particular woman. Instead, he had casual relationships with many women—he called them his “shadows”—with whom he would “vanish” into the night.

In his mid-forties, he met Annette Arm and was taken by her liveliness and youth--she was twenty years old--and her veneration of him. They wed a few years later. But as a husband, Alberto was, as James Lord writes, enormously “at fault.” For example, while he gave money away very freely to others, with his wife he was parsimonious; and he often belittled her in public. Meanest of all, he obstinately continued his life with other women. As his wife became increasingly distraught and enraged, he referred to her sarcastically as “The Sound and the Fury.” In a class years ago when I was angry with a woman who was not submissive enough to me as I saw it, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Would you rather have love that is not tremendous but where you are the master? Would you rather have tyranny than love?” I had and it made me mean and unhappy.

Though his biographer said that Alberto shed real tears about his marriage, and repeated often that he had destroyed his wife, he never changed. But the art in him demanded that he be fair, and so he was impelled to draw, paint, and sculpt his mother and his wife over and over again. In “The Artist’s Mother, 1950,” Mrs. Giacometti is seen as part of the large abstraction of the world, made up of horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and circular lines. Seated in an upright chair, she is framed by a doorway and beyond that a void.

And this is the deeply moving sculpture of his wife, “Annette VIII”:

As Giacometti shows her looking out, we get the sense of a particular person, even as she has such wonder and mystery.

Through Aesthetic Realism, men can learn how to have a beautiful determination as to a woman. Miss Reiss explained what this would mean when she asked me in a class:

“Do you see trying to [know a woman] forever as thrilling? “So the chase takes up one’s life, that’s all” is a line from a poem by Robert Browning. Do you think there’s something you’re after that can take up your whole life?”

Yes, and this intention to try to understand what a woman feels, I’m seeing more clearly each day, makes me prouder and kinder.

IV. Art: The Oneness of Separateness and Togetherness

Many critics of Giacometti’s day said his work represented man’s separation, his alienation and anxiety in an insecure, cold universe, brought on by the desolation and destruction that ravaged Europe during World War II. But the Giacometti protested, saying: “I have no intention of being an artist of solitude. Moreover, I believe that all life consists of a fabric of relations with others.”

We can see this “fabric of relation” in his “City Square.”

Giacometti was very taken by pedestrians on Parisian streets, and here, on a platform, four men coming from different directions pass by a stationary woman. While we can insist on our distinction as we walk by other people, Giacometti shows these persons’ “togetherness”: they are part of a larger composition, even a choreography. Still, these figures, just about eight inches tall, are subtly different from each other but all have a lovely grace. Should we be determined to see people this way, with dignity and depth, and like us?

Here is one of Giacometti’s works that moves me most: “Walking Man, 1960.”

As we hear Mr. Siegel’s words from Self and World, we can ask: does this being stand for me?

“All of us, in a way, are separate from the world. We seem to end with our bodies. And yet we can look out. Everything is around us, indefinitely close, indefinitely inescapable, becoming ourselves. This means we are not only separate, we are together.”

See the strong diagonal line that is formed by his back leg and torso. It separates but also impels up, out, and energetically forward.

Look at the lift in his foot even as it merges with, becomes the pedestal beneath it.

Then there is the relation of matter and space, and they are “indefinitely close, indefinitely inescapable.” This is the lovely triangle formed by his legs and the base:

And here is the vibrant, pulsating space between his arm and midsection:

With a gleam in his eye, and a light shining on his forehead:

this man is alert, keenly affected by what is around him. Like him, does the “totality,” the completeness of our lives depend on how determined we are to be “together” with reality, see it truly and deeply, and have it become us? Art shows that the answer is yes!

It is a very large tribute to Alberto Giacometti that what he was determined to understand was so vast, he never felt he succeeded. Towards the end of his life, he said:

“I see my sculptures before me: each one…a fragment, each one a failure. But there is in each a little of what I would like to create some day…That gives me a longing, an irresistible longing to pursue my efforts—and perhaps in the end I will attain my goal.”

Our greatest “goal”, our greatest determination is to like the whole world on an honest basis. And it is the large good fortune of our time that Aesthetic Realism can teach us how to do so!

A Man's Imagination: What Kind is Good? (about the Life and Art of Diego Rivera)

2006-07-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

“What is imagination?,” asked Eli Siegel in a lecture of 1952, and he explained:

"One of the answers to that question is: imagination is that which changes the world in order to see better what it is. The other is what changes the world in order to make us better able to live without it; that is bad imagination."

I’ve learned that our imagination is working well when we use it to think about the world and people deeply and fairly. But there is that in every man that can use his imagination badly--to alter the world into something smaller and uglier, a world he
has the right to feel superior to and have contempt for. This contempt hurts a man’s life very much.

I. Two Ways of Seeing the World

Early, one of the things I most liked to do was read stories about children in other times and lands. As I imagined what a boy felt growing up at the time of Alexander the Great, or during the Revolutionary War, I had a sense of wonder about people and a world different from the one I was accustomed to.

But I also spent a lot of time using my imagination to collect hurts and grievances. Writes Mr. Siegel in Self and World:

"One of the earliest and most frequent things that can happen to a human mind is to see the world as inimical."

The person I used most to feel the world was against me was my father, Sam Weiner. It never occurred to me to think about his life, for example, as a teenager growing up during the Depression, or as a WW II soldier, or as a husband and father who worked very hard to support his family. Instead, in my mind I turned him into a tyrant whose chief purpose was to make me suffer, and deny me all the things I spent much time dwelling on that I didn’t have--a home in the suburbs, fancy vacations, expensive summer camps. This mean and cold way of seeing my father hurt him and had me dislike myself very much.

Aggrandizing myself was another frequent way I used my imagination. I envisioned the ecstatic reviews for the autobiographical play which I would one day author, and, of course, star in, reviews that said things such as—“a masterpiece of self-perception.” And I’d imagine the many awards that would be bestowed upon me. The high point of the play would be a dramatic monologue on a darkened stage with a spotlight on me. You may be asking what I said in it, but since I never actually wrote any words to my play, I can’t tell you.

I used both getting hurt and puffing myself up to feel I would be “better able to live without” the world and people. By the time I was eighteen, I had few close friends; and a recurrent dream was my being alone in a cabin in the Catskills enveloped by snow.

In his lecture, Mr. Siegel explains:

"The first thing we need in imagination is to get away from what we are for the moment and see adequately what we are not."

To “see adequately what we are not” is to put our egos aside and use our selves to have a strengthening effect on other people. This is good will, and I didn’t have it. It was nearly impossible because of my large self-absorption, my feeling, as it is put today, that “everything was about me.” For instance, in an early consultation, I was asked: “Do you resent the pain of other people?” “That I cause it?” I asked. “No, that they have it.” “That they have it?” I repeated. And I saw that I actually did resent it.

As I will tell of, I’m glad to say that my ability to think deeply and imaginatively about people has increased a good deal through my study of Aesthetic Realism.

2. “Dreaming With His Eyes Open”

I tell of now about some aspects of the very rich life and work of the Mexican artist Diego Rivera.

In Self and World, Mr. Siegel wrote:

"We all of us have pictures of the world in our minds—and these pictures are of imagination; the beauty and rightness of these pictures depend on how much we can see the world as what it is."

Because of the way, as artist, Rivera used his imagination to see the world as “what it is”—as a relation of good and evil, wonder and ordinariness, human feeling and abstract shapes, many of his works have a large “beauty” and “rightness” which make him one of the important artists of the past century.

Diego Maria Rivera was born, along with a twin brother, in 1886 in a small town in central Mexico. His heritage was amazing; that is, he was of Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian, and Portuguese descent.

Before the age of two, his brother who was sickly from birth, died, and his mother had a nervous breakdown. After this, it seems she turned her affections to Diego in a way he found stifling. He had the question every child has, and this is a question about imagination, how much did he want to think about what his mother felt? From what his biographer tells of in "Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera", it seems not so much. Patrick Marnam writes:

"[In all his years] Diego almost never mentioned his mother except in belittling or dismissive terms."

It can be asked: Did the scornful way Diego saw his maternal parent affect badly how he would come to see all women? Marnam indicates that this was so. He says:

"Rivera’s emotional elusiveness [from his mother] was to become a distinguishing feature of his adult life."

But imagination also worked in a very different way in the young Diego. He writes in his autobiography "My Art, My Life":

"As far back as I can remember, I was drawing. Almost as soon as my fat baby fingers could grasp a pencil, I was marking up walls, doors, and furniture. To avoid mutilation of his entire house, my father set aside a special room where I was allowed to write on anything I wanted. Here I made my earliest 'murals'.”

By the age of nine, he was very adept at sketching; two years later, he was attending art school full-time. Here is a very deep and thoughtful portrait of a woman he did at the age of twelve:

In 1907, he left Mexico to study in Europe, and spent much time in Paris. There, the great Picasso befriended him and saw value in his work. For awhile, Rivera became a Cubist and gained some notice. This is his most famous work of that time, “Zapatista Landscape”:

And here is a portrait he did of himself at age twenty.

As Diego Rivera traveled about Europe, he became aware of poverty in a way he hadn’t been before—how people had to sleep under bridges, and scavenge for food. What he saw was to have a profound effect on his future as artist. He said of himself at that time:

"I now had a vision of my vocation—to produce true and complete pictures of the life of the toiling masses."

But it was not until he traveled to Italy to see the frescos of Giotto, did he find the technique he wanted to work in.

After spending many years in Europe, he felt he needed to return to his homeland. When he did, something very deep happened to him inspiring his artistic imagination. He wrote:

"In everything I saw a potential masterpiece—the crowds, the markets, the festivals, the workingmen in the shops and the fields—in every glowing face, in every luminous child. All was revealed to me. I had the conviction that if I lived a hundred lives I could not exhaust even a fraction of this store of buoyant beauty."

3. The Murals of Rivera: Warmth and Abstraction

Soon, Rivera began to receive commissions to create murals for buildings in Mexico. One of his greatest works was for the Ministry of Education in Mexico City which consisted of 128 individual panels on three floors covering a total of 17,000 feet that took him over four years to complete. Here is one section of the building:

And here are three of his panels:

He himself said of them: “Each fresco was individual and separate in itself, yet all were interrelated.” He used his imagination to show human beings who had been subjected to such poverty and neglect, who had been horribly misused—as having grandeur and nobility.

In a lecture, Mr. Siegel said:

"To see what many people feel is already a job of imagination which most people have given themselves the privilege of not doing."

This kind of imagination is what Diego Rivera was going after in his murals, including this one entitled “Entering the Mine.”

Here, miners descend into what was called the “mouth of hell.” Rivera gives these “toiling masses” dignity, even religious meaning: with their shovels and wooden beams, they have a relation to Christ on the cross; their sombreros are similar to the halos of Giotto.

I think a central pair of opposites in Diego Rivera's murals is personal and impersonal. Eli Siegel asks about them in “Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?”:

"Does every instance of art and beauty contain something which stands for the meaning of all that is, all that is true in an outside way, reality just so?—and does every instance of art and beauty also contain something which stands for the individual mind, a self which has been moved, a person seeing as original person?"

In customary life—and I know this from personal experience—a man can not want to see large “meaning”, or be “moved” by the reality of another persons. This makes us mean, and robs us of emotions we’re desperately hoping to have.

In "Entering the Mine", there is much humanity and pain, but there is also the abstract forms and directions of “reality just so”: the miners and their tools form an oval shape. Look at the man in the bottom center surrounded by darkness. His isolation is interrupted by the lit lamp, and he is joined to the other men by the diagonal lines of their tools. The plank he is holding is a continuation to the arch above. These arches, along with the upward thrusts of the tools, counteract the downward motion of the work. The self of Rivera was “moved” by the plight of these miners, and we in turn are “moved” also—and educated.

These are some other murals that I see as very good because of how powerfully they put together impersonal and personal, human feeling and abstraction: “The Burning of the Judases”:

Here is the “Festival of the Distribution of the Land.” Look at how Rivera had people sitting (and one child standing) above the door. That took wonderful imagination!

And these two are of the Mexican revolutionary hero, Zapata, and both are very fine.

However, in some murals there is a crowdedness of figures that I think hurts the composition. Take for instance, “Friday of Sorrows”:

I think the “Day of the Dead is a mingling: the skeletons on top are very lively but again the bottom of the work is too busy.

Rivera loved the earth and people of Mexico, and saw them as deeply of each other. He said: “The land belongs to everyone like the air, the water, the light, and the heat of the sun.” And he hated how the conquistadors with their desire for profit at all costs, made for a horrible sundering, enslaving millions of Mexicans for the enrichment of a few.

We can see his feeling in this beautiful mural: “Crossing the Barranca” in which Spanish conquerors drive Indians, some of them already slain, across a deep gully.

Intertwined with branches, many of them in brightly colored clothing are hanging onto the branches for dear life, lest they fall into that abyss.

At the bottom is a very surprising being: part-human, part-animal, and it is wailing in protest at this horrible scene.

All this is surrounded by a blue sky, mountains, and lush green foliage. We feel the richness and vacancy of reality, its “buoyant beauty” and confusion, the separation and togetherness of men and nature.

4. Rivera and Women: Too Much Imagination, and Too Little

In his definition of kindness, Mr. Siegel explains: “To be kind, we must have the imagination arising from the knowledge of feelings had by others.” In his murals, Rivera was kind as he thought about the effect hundreds of years of imperialism had on thousands of his fellow countrymen.

But this kind imagination was much lacking in him in his relations to women. He was married four times and had many to do with many women, including with photographer Tina Modotti, and actresses Dolores Del Rio and Paulette Goddard.

The woman who affected him most was his third wife, Frida Kahlo. Their 25-year relationship was a complex and agonizing mingling of respect and contempt, dependence and defiance, and as his biographer writes, “idolization and neglect.”

They met when she was just fifteen, and Rivera, 36. A few years later, Frida was badly injured in a bus crash, became bedridden, and then took up painting. One day, she went to him and spoke in a way that I’m sure made for respect in Rivera. Asking him to look at her work, she said: “I have not come to you looking for compliments. I want the criticism of a serious man.” This, along with her pride in her Mexican heritage, her passion about the inequities in her land, and her vivacity, affected him very much. He said of Frida: “Her sparkling presence filled me with a wonderful joy.” After a brief courtship, they wed. Here is a photo of them at a May Day parade in 1929:

But there was something in Rivera that was against having a large, sweeping, respectful emotion about a woman. In a class, when I spoke coolly about a woman I respected and who had deeply affected me, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Do you think you now want to show that she’s not so necessary to you, and that you can take or leave her?” I saw that this was my purpose.

This ugly use of imagination became Rivera’s attitude to Frida; it took a very mean form. Just after a year of marriage, Rivera began having affairs, including with some of Frida’s closest friends. Meanwhile, Rivera despised himself for this. He wrote: “And what sort of man was I? I had never had any morals at all and had lived only for pleasure where I found it. I was not good.”

Every man needs to ask: Do I use my imagination to try to be fair, or for some other purpose? Some time ago, I met a woman and very quickly felt she “fit the bill” and I began to make my “plans”: forming the guest list for our wedding, and looking for a new apartment--even though we had gone on just one date. When I told of this in a class, Miss Reiss said to me:

There has to be a large enough desire to know a person before deciding if she “fits the bill.” Otherwise, we are looking for someone to fulfill a function of ours. If we have to do with a person and are not interested in knowing them, what are we interested in?

I saw that I was using a woman for self-love, and no woman wants to be used this way. What a woman is most hoping for from a man, and what I’m asking for from myself, is to use my thought, my imagination, to try to understand. Becoming increasingly clear about this has made for a new happiness and confidence in me.

At his kindest, Diego Rivera encouraged Frida Kahlo in her art, and was pleased when she received recognition. But I also think he had contempt for Frida’s idolization of him. “You are my life itself,” she wrote to him, “and nothing and no one can change this.” At a time a woman acted as if she needed me very much, Mr. Siegel asked me “Do you have a kind of power over her that is detestable?” I did, and I think that the callous way Rivera treated his wife shows that he did too. Marnam writes how he was “possessive” and “overbearing” at one time, and then so neglectful even as she was in great physical pain from her earlier accident. Writing critically of himself, Rivera said:

"If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait."

I think the unjust way Rivera used his imagination as to women hurt his imagination as artist. His depictions of women are various, but some are clearly not good. Take for example, this one in which a woman is made to look smooth and cold, not as having the true depth and richness of reality in her.

None I have seen is as deep or as moving as the one he did when he was twelve.

I end with a work that has a relation of the "toiling masses" and "buoyant beauty" that I care very much--“The Flower Carrier”:

In this somber but lush work, an Indian wearing a yellow hat that partially hides his face is kneeling on the ground, weighed down by a large basket of flowers, and holding himself up with his columnar-like arms. An abstract yellow band of cloth connects his heart to her heart. She is gentle and strong as she uses her body to try to ease some of his burden. I believe the largeness of the figures on the canvas is a criticism of the small, insignificant way people such as these were seen. And the irony is that because of the economic exploitation of the land and people of Mexico, these lovely and delicate flowers that stand for a kind earth have been turned into a source of pain and oppression.

The life of Diego Rivera—his fineness as artist, his unkindness as a man and a husband—is evidence for the crucial difference between good and bad imagination. It is the difference that Aesthetic Realism is teaching me and can teach every man to recognize so he can make a proud, wise choice for his life.

Mind and Body: Can a Man Use Both to be Kind?

2006-06-02T19:49:00.000-07:00

Because Aesthetic Realism shows what kindness is, the real thing, men can learn, as I know from my own happy life, how to use our minds and our bodies to be kind in every aspect of our lives, including love.

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

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

I have learned that wanting another person to be “stronger” and “more complete” means to encourage that person to like the world, and to care truly for people and things. This, Aesthetic Realism shows, is the deepest desire of every person; the thing we were born to do.

And while men hope to be kind, so much of the time we feel we aren’t. Every man needs to understand the terrific hindrance to kindness in ourselves. It is the desire for contempt, ”the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” Contempt, because it is based on the hope that other people are weaker so that we can be superior and look down on them, is the greatest opponent to kindness.

I. My Notion of Kindness Changed

As I grew up in Brooklyn, there was a desire in me to be kind. For instance, I got pleasure tutoring children in an after-school center. Also, one summer as I worked as a counselor, there was a young girl, Yvonne, who was very frightened of the ocean, and I wanted her to be less afraid. Over a period of weeks, we spoke about way the water was friendlier than she thought, and one day she was very proud as she went in and splashed around with some ease.

But mostly how I saw kindness was very different. In his lecture Mr. Siegel says:

“Persons will be ‘kind’ not because they feel it is good to be for the strength of another, but because it is political to do so. “

Beginning with my family, I was a little politician. For example, I would help my twin brother, Paul, with his homework. But if I had a disagreement with our older brother, Fred, I would give Paul a look that said “Don’t you forget how much I’ve done for you,” and Paul would almost always take my side, whether I was right or wrong. I also used doing things for other people, such as going out of my way for a neighbor or friend, to feel noble and sacrificial, and superior to all the selfish people I knew. But with all my seeming “kindness”, I felt I was selfish and cold. Years later, when I was asked in one of my first Aesthetic Realism Consultations, “Is there anyone in this world you feel you’ve had a good effect on--the effect you’re hoping to have?”

I answered “No” right away.

And they asked: “How much of your personality have you based on feeling different from other people?”

“At least 75%,” I said.

My answer, I was so surprised to learn, had much to do with why I felt I wasn’t kind.

Writes Mr. Siegel: “A person is kind who feels a sense of likeness to other things; who accepts accurately his relation to other things. ”

There were two big ways I was driven to prove how unlike I was from other people: 1) No one suffered as much as I did; and 2) I was better than everyone--smarter and handsomer.

In another consultation I was asked questions to have me see that despite my feeling of tall, lonely distinction, I had a lot in common with other people, including, “Did you ever feel, ‘Nobody understands me’? Do you think your father ever felt that?” and about a friend, “Is he worried, like you can be, that his heart is too cold?”

And I was given the assignment to write how I was the same and different from ten people I knew. As I did, and as I had conversations with people about their families and friends, their experiences, things they cared for, their hopes--I began to have, which made for a great sense of relief, a new, warm feeling that I was related to other human beings! My thoughts became kinder and deeper, and I really enjoyed thinking about what another person felt, and saw that it added to me, made me more!

II. Mind And Body, Kindness and Unkindness in a Novel of 1913

D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers is important because it vividly shows the bad effect one man has on other people and himself through the unkind way he uses his mind and body. This man is Paul Morel who Lawrence based on his own life.

In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel places Lawrence as a prominent chronicler of unkindness when he writes:

“The works of D.H. Lawrence constitute an epic on the sufferings men and women have caused in each other...the manifoldness of the descriptions by Lawrence of what a woman endures from a man or a man from a woman, has not been equaled in these decades. All in all, Lawrence was rather despairing about the possibility of man’s really pleasing woman or of her pleasing him.”

Sons and Lovers takes place in a mining town in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the novel begins, we see unkindness right away between Paul’s father, Walter, a coal miner since the age of ten, and his mother, Gertrude. Each is bitterly disappointed in the other: Mrs. Morel is very angry at her husband for spending money on alcohol that the family needs, and Mr. Morel is hurt by his wife’s sarcasm and turning their four children, including Paul, against him. Lawrence makes it clear that Paul uses the excessive approval Mrs. Morel gives him to be unkind, including later with women.

Lawrence describes powerfully Paul's meanness to his father, including his praying for Mr. Morel to die. And the author gives instances of what Mr. Siegel explains in The Right Of:

“It is difficult to be kind, and it is difficult to take kindness....Many people resent [kindness.] One way of showing resentment is by trying to make the kindness less. “

When Paul is sick in bed, his father comes to him and asks:

“Are you asleep, my darlin’?”

“No; is my mother comin’?”

“She’s just finishin’ foldin’ the clothes. Do you want anything?”
“I don’t want nothing.”

[His father] loitered about indefinitely. At last [he]...said softly: “Good night, my darling.”

“Good night,” Paul replied, turning around in relief to be alone.

Like Paul, I regret that I was once determined to be angry with my father, and when he showed me kindness, I was often ill-at-ease and ungrateful. In a discussion in a class many years ago, Mr. Siegel asked me: “Do you think there is anything greater in you than your desire to be bitter (with your father)?“

It affected me to learn that as an adult Lawrence came to feel he had been unfair to his father. I believe this made it possible for him, as novelist, to have some of that kindness which Mr. Siegel explains comes from “the imagination arising from the knowledge of feelings had by others” that Lawrence clearly did not have as a child.

For instance, Lawrence describes in a moving passage the feelings of his father as a young man meeting his future wife for the first time. What he does here is similar to what a person having Aesthetic Realism consultations is encouraged to do as a means of seeing a mother or father more deeply, to write a soliloquy of a parent at the age of eighteen. Lawrence writes:

“When [Gertrude] was twenty-three years old, she met at a Christmas party, Walter Morel who had that rare thing, a rich, ringing laugh. He was so full of color and animation. He was so ready and pleasant with everybody. She was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. She thought him rather wonderful, never having met anyone like him. “

A place I think Lawrence could have gone deeper is that as he presents the suffering of people, especially that of Mrs. Morel, he does not show sufficiently that a person is against himself or herself for their own unkindness. In Mind and Kindness, Mr. Siegel writes: “Any person who isn’t kind, in the real sense of the word, is a person who is hurting himself.”

III. How Complete Do We Want our Relation to Another Person to Be?

At the age of sixteen, Paul meets Miriam Leivers. Miriam, who must spend most of her time doing drudgery work on her family’s farm, wants so much to be educated. She is very affected by Paul because, in an important way, he wants her to be “stronger...more complete”: he offers to teach her French and algebra. And for Paul, Lawrence writes, “there was...the most intense pleasure in talking with Miriam,” about his hope to become an artist.

But as much as Paul likes Miriam, he doesn’t know, as men haven’t, that there is that in him which is against a woman meaning a great deal to him, and this stops him from being kind.

In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel explains that kindness is always a relation of being affected and affecting as deeply as possible:

“Kindness, in human terms, is the acceptance of a relation with other selves and the wishing to make that relation as complete and as right as possible.”

But Paul is not for a “complete” relation with Miriam; he does not want to be affected by her as much as he can be, and this makes him mean. Lawrence writes:

“If [Paul] brought his sketch-book, it was [Miriam] who pondered longest over the last picture. Then she would look up at him. Suddenly, her dark eyes alight like water [and] she would ask: “Why do I like this so?” Always something in his breast shrank from these close, intimate, dazzled looks of hers.”

Men need to learn, as I have, about the thing in them against having their relation with a woman “as complete and as right as possible.” Aesthetic Realism taught me that how a man is as to a woman is directly affected by how he sees the whole world, how much he wants to be affected by and like it.

Once, in a class, I told of how much I was moved by a woman’s's kindness and desire to strengthen me, and felt tremendously impelled towards her. At the same time, I said I was troubled because in the midst of being ever intimate, something would occur too quickly on my part. With the greatest respect, Miss Reiss asked me questions to have me understand myself:

ER: Do you have a fight between wanting to honor what is not you or honor only yourself?

“I do,” I said. And she explained:

“It is a fight between love of self and love of the world. How steadily do you think a person outside yourself deserves your [care]? “

SW: I’m seeing where I’m against that.

Miss Reiss continued:

“Do you think a picture of yourself as tremendously devoted to the meaning of another person is a proud picture or a shameful picture?”

SW: I’m not sure.

ER: Do you have a certain notion of your dignity that is not in keeping with feeling that a woman, who stands for the meaning of the world, should do a great deal to you and not just for a moment?

I thank Miss Reiss for her kindness. Through this discussion, I saw in a way that made for a very big and permanent change in me--that the deeper my thought are about a woman, the more I want to be affected by her and the world itself, the stronger, more passionate, dignified and substantial I feel. And I am kinder.

IV. The Desire to Possess : The Great Enemy to Kindness in Love

In the novel, we learn that after seeing each other for a number of years, Paul breaks off with Miriam. When he does, Miriam says to him: “It has been one long battle between us...It has always been you fighting me off.”

“Love should be attended by kindness,” writes Eli Siegel:

“The idea is to put together the utmost in carnality, the utmost in fleshly ecstasy, with the utmost good will or kindness. If that isn’t done, then love is used against oneself. The purpose of a fleshly height or a tremendously ecstatic depth is to honor the cause of it, to be kind to the cause of it. Most often love goes along with a known or unknown cruelty; and then, the sex is bad. “

As the story continues, Paul begins to see Clara Dawes. He is very much taken by her beauty and worldliness, and soon, there comes to be intense closeness between them. But Paul makes two huge mistakes men have made for centuries, and are making right now. The first is that he does not use sex to “honor” or “be kind” to the “cause” of sex which is the world itself but to obliterate it. Lawrence tells of how as Paul is close to Clara “thought went [away]” and he “became, not a man with a mind, but a great instinct.”

The second mistake is that Paul feels, because Clara has given her body to him, that he has her and can treat her as he pleases. He says to her:

“The night is free to you. In the daytime I want to be by myself....[And Lawrence writes:] [Paul] forgot [Clara] a good deal. He was...short and offhand to her. When she talked, he often didn’t listen.”

At a time in my life when I was angry and hurt because a woman, Tina Sims, had become cool to me after we had been close, Eli Siegel spoke to me in a class. What I learned in this discussion is what every man now holding a woman in his arms needs to know, including D.H. Lawrence who suffered greatly in love. Mr. Siegel said to me:

“Girls have felt [about men], ‘Let him touch my fingertips but not beyond.’ If you were Miss Sims, would you be cautious with Steven Weiner because you felt that if you were somewhat gracious, he would take advantage of it?

SW: Yes, I would because that’s what I’ve done.

ES: That is the tendency of man. As soon as a girl is nice to him, he cheapens her. Possession in love always cheapens the thing possessed. The more you have a thing the more you should appreciate it. [And he asked me:] Do you feel anything that you can have is at that moment given less value?

SW: Yes, I do.

ES: To undervalue has all the bad possibilities of life.

Then Mr. Siegel read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and pointed to a line that described poetically the unkindest thing in a man: “Enjoy’d no sooner, but despised straight.”
I thank Mr. Siegel for criticizing my contempt, my desire to own a woman that was ruining any chance for true and lasting love in my life. He made it possible for me to change, and gave kindness a chance to win in me.

As the novel ends, Lawrence shows vividly the repulsion Paul’s unkindness has made for in Clara. He writes that: “[Clara] was afraid of [Paul...he was] somebody sinister, [he] filled her with horror...It was almost as if he were a criminal.” And we see too how much Paul has hurt and weakened his own life: he is so ashamed of his bad effect that he makes plans to leave England. It means so much to me that this kind of desolation was not my fate.

Every man in America has the right to know that the resounding answer to the question of our seminar “Mind and Body: Can a Man Use Both to Be Kind?” is Yes!

The Pleasures and Perils of Conceit

2005-06-19T18:36:00.000-07:00

Aesthetic Realism explains these two crucial things about conceit: 1) the pleasure one gets from it is that of contempt; a conceited person gets to an exalted opinion of himself by having a low opinion of the world and looking down on everything; 2) Because this is a false basis for liking oneself, a person can never really feel confident, and he will also punish himself by feeling inferior and low. This is one of the large perils of conceit.

Learning this, first in consultations, and then in classes I attended taught by Eli Siegel made for a huge and beautiful change in my life.

The logic of Aesthetic Realism is beautiful and scientific: it shows we come from the world and have its structure of opposites in us. Therefore, our opinion of ourselves is in direct relation to our attitude towards it; the more we honestly think well of the world, respect it, the more we will truly esteem ourselves.

I. My Conceit: A Primer

In an issue of The Right Of, Mr. Siegel describes the two ways people have tried to think well of themselves:

"The first is honestly to respect a thing, give it meaning. The second way is to diminish as much as possible, give as little meaning to things as we can; and feel the less we have given meaning to other things, the more the edifice of ourselves is substantial."

As a child, the place I respected things most was in school, as I eagerly read such books as It's Like This, Cat and worked on math problems. But I also used getting good grades, along with how often my mother commented on them, to be conceited. I was very competitive, making sure everyone was aware of my superiority. If another child came from a family better off than mine, I would say "Peter may be richer but I'm in the Intellectually Gifted Class, he's not." And if someone else got higher marks, I would tell myself "All Mitch does is study. At least, I know how to have fun." In the sixth grade, I was so stuck up and such a showoff, that my teacher, Miss Jourdan, once said to me: "Stop acting as if you're the most important child in this class--because you're not!"

One of the pleasures of conceit is thinking that you're so much sharper, keener than anyone else but this can make a person stupid in many ways. In a high school social studies class, I finished a test about halfway through the period even as everyone else was busily writing away. I didn’t ask myself why this was; I just smugly sat back, glorying in how brighter I was than all the other students. But when I got my test back, I got a 35--in my arrogance, I had carelessly misread the instructions and hadn't answered all the questions.

Aesthetic Realism taught me that because conceit is based on making other people and what they feel unimportant, a large peril is that a person inevitably feels ashamed. Once, a friend came to talk to me after he had argued with his girlfriend. He felt very bad and I could have tried to be useful. Instead, I mocked him, acting as if he were ridiculous for getting so wrought up. I’ll never forget his shock and then the disgusted look on his face. It was after times like these, when I got a sight of how unfeeling I was, that I would call myself a "jerk" and say, "Why can't you keep your big mouth shut?" I would then sleep for hours on end, and not want to talk to anyone for days.

I was, as Eli Siegel once said of another person, a relation of "too much confidence, too much despair." But I never saw a connection between thinking I was too good for nearly anybody, and then feeling that I really didn't matter much to other people; between my inflated picture of myself and my abilities, and feeling I was an uninteresting person who hadn't done anything useful. A great peril of conceit is this: if we have a disproportionately high picture of ourselves, we will also have a very low one. In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel explains:

"Once you start making yourself out better than you are, you will make yourself out worse than you are. Man is the only animal who can call himself names. People make themselves stupider, more criminal, more vicious than they are. One reason is that they have come to their good points too easily."

My life changed because I heard kind, straight criticism of my contemptuous purpose with people and the world. This ended the agonizing seesaw I was on between excessively praising and then condemning myself. And I’m grateful that I learned my life had a much larger, more beautiful goal: to value things truly, to try to have a good effect on people. I began to see meaning and wonder in things that I once hardly paid attention to such as a leaf, a pussycat, a painting; and by caring so much more about what people deserve, which now takes in my work as a union official--I thought so much better of myself without any painful kickbacks. I had an ease and pride that was new.

II. Conceit is Perilous to Love

Once, I was in a position many other men in America are in now: while I hoped to care for a woman, I didn’t want to give up my conceit. My purpose was not to respect a woman, use her to see more meaning in things but to have her join me in building up the "edifice of [myself]." When a woman was critical, as she inevitably was, I got hurt and angry, and our relationship would end bitterly. Then I would despair and feel I was never going to have love.

At a time a woman and I were giving each other pain, in a class Mr. Siegel had me see what she objected to. He asked me:

ES: Do you believe you represent a tradition in men?

SW: Yes, the unwillingness to respect women.

ES: Do you think Miss Chapman doesn't like your arrogance? As soon as something good happens to you, you get arrogant. [And he explained:] An arrogant person is one who takes things unto himself that do not belong to him. You think Miss Chapman needs you more than she needs truth.

And he asked me: "Do you think [your arrogance] causes you any sorrow?" It did. I love him for explaining something that hurt my whole life--how I used fortunate things that came to me, including a woman showing me care, not to ask more of myself, but to be complacent and add to my conceit. I began to see that my arrogance, which I tried to see as a blessing, was really a great enemy: it made love out of the question.

III. A Study in Male Conceit

A novel I love is The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. This classic is the story of Isabel Archer, one of the finest heroines in all literature; it is also the portrait of a very conceited man, Gilbert Osmond.

Eli Siegel is the critic who showed the tremendous import-ance of Henry James' work. In his landmark book, James and the Children: A Consideration of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Mr. Siegel describes James's purpose as author that is so against the coldness conceit makes for:

"[James is] asking us to participate more in the lives of others. [He is] asking us to know that other things feel and that the feelings of others are things which we diminish or are not interested in at a loss to ourselves."

Osmond, as character, is useful in showing not only how much a man’s conceit robs him of emotions he can be proud of, but makes him mean, even sinister. These words of Mr. Siegel in The Right Of describe him:

"Conceit can make one satisfied where one shouldn't be, but also can make one dissatisfied where one shouldn't be. Persons would rather be dissatisfied with the world than dissatisfied with what they take to be themselves."

An American living in Italy, Osmond is described by James as "indolent" and a "dilettante" who acts like a "prince"--he is smugly self-satisfied, seeing himself as vastly superior to the rest of what he calls "dingy" humanity. He is a snob and uses his taste in art to build up the "edifice of [himself]" and be in a "state of disgust" with nearly everything else. “Osmond was certainly fastidious and critical,” James writes,

"His sensibility had governed him. It had made him impatient of vulgar troubles and had led him to live by himself, in a sifted, arranged world."

I learned that when we take an aspect of the world--it can be music, sports, computers, or cars--and use it for our own conceit, we will inevitably be dissatisfied both with that thing and ourselves. We see this when Osmond, after being complimented on his furnishings, says "I'm sick of my adorable taste." And James shows that under all his seeming self-assurance, Osmond has misgivings—he knows he doesn't have large feelings, isn't pleased enough by things. He writes:

"Osmond was too often--he would have admitted that--too sorely aware of something wrong, something ugly; the fertilizing dew of a conceivable felicity too seldom descended upon his spirit."

IV. How Should a Man See a Woman?

In Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains so deeply what every man
is hoping for in love:

"To know and feel the self of another is a beautiful thing. To see another person as having meaning and beauty and power is a lovely procedure."

And he also shows how conceit corrupts this when he writes:

"But to see another person as having meaning, having beauty, having power because one can use that person as an argument in behalf of one's self-love--that is really to despise a person; to hate him; to deindividualize him."

In his seeing of Isabel Archer, an American girl traveling in Europe, James shows some of the greatest "meaning" and "power" a woman has ever had. In beautiful prose, he says of her:

"Isabel Archer was a young person of many theories; her imagination was remarkably active. It had been her fortune to possess a fine mind, to have a large perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. She spent half her time thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action."

This means Isabel wants to like the world, and have a great emotion about it. She has a deep care for beauty, but unlike Osmond, doesn't use it to look down on everything.

At first, Osmond becomes interested in Isabel because of the large fortune she has inherited. But as he gets to know her, he is deeply affected by her loveliness and depth of mind. Despite himself, he comes to care for her and for a time has less of an ugly dissatisfaction with the world. "Osmond was in love,” James writes, “and he had never deserved less the harsh criticism passed upon him." Osmond says to Isabel:

"It has made me better, loving you. It has made me wiser and easier and even stronger. Now, I'm really satisfied, because I can't think of anything better."

But there are two huge mistakes Osmond makes: one, he is too satisfied, is not ambitious enough to have an even greater emotion about Isabel and the world she stands for; and two, he feels that in thinking so much of Isabel, he has lessened himself. So Osmond does what other men, including myself, have done: he turns the very qualities that have moved him in a woman into, as Eli Siegel explains, "an argument on behalf of [his] self-love," to add to his conceit. Writes James:

"[Osmond] was immensely pleased with his young lady. What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness? For would not the softness be all for one's self? What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind which reflected one's [own] thought on a polished, elegant surface?"

Osmond says that Isabel has only one fault: she has "too many ideas" which "must be sacrificed". The only purpose of her intellect, he feels, should be to adorn his own being.

During their courtship, Osmond affects a humility and nobility that impress Isabel very much. But as admirable as she is, Isabel’s desire to see in Osmond the large qualities she is hoping to find in a man run ahead of seeing who he actually is, including where he is unjust. Despite the warnings of her family, she accepts Osmond's proposal of marriage. It is a fatal mistake, and one can see that Isabel, with all her goodness, hasn’t been sufficiently interested in seeing all the facts. And when we next see them three years after they had wed, James shows that Osmond is furious because Isabel has refused to become an extension of himself. James writes: “He had thought at first he could change her,” but he then sees with chagrin that he cannot.

Like many men, Osmond felt he could and had the right to mold a woman to fit in his with his arrangements. I was greatly fortunate to be learning about this ugly, conceited purpose in myself. In a class, when I said I was too jumpy in my thought about a woman I was hoping to care for, Miss Reiss asked:

ER: What do you think is the interference to knowing a woman?

SW: I can feel I want something to happen in my life now, and I’m looking for someone who fits the bill.

ER: To have your plans is all right. But what has to be present? The thing one is looking for has to be beautiful enough, and there has to be a large enough desire to know that person before deciding whether or not that person “fits the bill.” Otherwise, we are looking for someone to fulfill a function of ours. If we have to do with a person and are not interested in knowing her, what are we interested in?

SW: Someone to make us important.

ER: As much as we don’t want to know another person, it is self-love. Meanwhile, how much true satisfaction do you think you can get from knowing a woman?

The answer to that I’ve been seeing is much, much more than I knew. I thank Ellen Reiss so much for this discussion and the questions she asked. I am seeing the true pleasure and pride there is in knowing a woman, how she sees everything, not just me.

In the novel, Gilbert Osmond had expected his wife to join him in his conceited scorn for the world. But Isabel, because she still hopes to care for things, will not become a partner to this. In fact, she is a critic, despising the ugliness in him. Writes James:

"[Osmond] had plenty of contempt, and it was proper his wife should be as well furnished; but that she should turn the hot light of her disdain upon his conception of things--this was a danger he had not allowed for. When one had a wife who gave one that sensation there was nothing left but to hate her."

There is much in the book I cannot discuss, but throughout, we see how Isabel tries to remain true to herself despite Osmond’s ill will and we feel she is beautiful.

Because of Aesthetic Realism, men today do not have to be run by cruel conceit; we can learn how to be kind--to the world and a woman. And we can learn from what Eli Siegel describes in Self and World how true love is always a means of honestly thinking better of reality and ourselves. I end my paper with his beautiful words:

"A self can say to another being, 'Through what you do and what you are and what you can do, I can come to be more I, more me, more myself; and I can see the immeasurable being of things more wonderfully of me, for me, and therefore sharply and magnificently kind and akin.'”

What Stops a Man from Having True Love?

2005-06-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Aesthetic Realism shows what love really is: "proud need." It means we are pleased and made stronger by another person who represents the world so richly to us, stirs us so deeply, that we feel incomplete without that person. Everyone wants to feel this about someone else but we have to understand what in ourselves is against having this large emotion. We may long for love, but something in us feels we’re more important needing no one.”

I. OUR NARROW SELVES DO NOT WANT TO NEED ANYTHING

As a young boy, there were many things I felt I needed—the Lincoln logs that my brother and I used to construct buildings, my bicycle that I rode for hours, and very much, books. But as I got older, I felt increasingly that people were bothersome, too changeable, too demanding, and that the only person I could rely on and should need was myself. By my teens, while I still hung out with my friends on a Friday night, I spent a lot of time alone feeling it was only then that I could really do what I wanted, unencumbered by other people who as I told myself were "in my way" and "slowed me down."

I arrogantly felt there was hardly any thing another person could do for me that I couldn't do better myself. The idea of asking someone else's opinion I saw as a waste of time. Once, when a gas station attendant offered directions for a trip I was taking, I cut him off, saying curtly, "I know how to get there"--even though, as it turned out, my route took much longer. And as I sat in a science class at school, I felt, "Why do I need to listen to Mr. Goldberg; I can read the textbook and learn this stuff myself"--despite the fact that more than once I found I couldn't.

But with all my smug self-reliance, and while it was the last thing I would ever admit, I was worried that I would never have grand, sweeping feelings about another person, and that I would spend my life pretty much alone. I had no idea that even as I thought there was something very wrong with how little people meant to me, I was also having a victory in thinking no one mattered more to me than myself.

In an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel explained a mistake I was making:

When we see the outside world wanting to assist us, we don't like it even though the direction we've adopted for ourselves may not be the best.

And he put into words what he called my "very unwise motto" which he said was shared by many people:

"Everything that happens to me must be done by myself; I won't let anything else affect me well."

I thank Mr. Siegel for criticizing the hurtful track I was on. What I learned enabled me to change a great deal on the subject of needing something outside myself. Where I once couldn't be in a conversation without very quickly getting impatient and annoyed, I began listening to people with pleasure. And instead of defending myself vociferously against anyone who questioned practically anything about me, I feel proud to need other people’s perceptions of me to be the person I want to be. This has made it possible for me to really have hope about love.

II. SELF-LOVE VS. TRUE CARE FOR ANOTHER

Right next to the ugly feeling in a man that he doesn’t need anything outside himself is the assumption that if we do have to do with another person, we’re bestowing a great favor. While I had changed in a big way in how I saw the world and people, I'm sorry to say I still clung to this egotistical attitude which a friend once described so aptly. He said that I felt that if I granted a woman my company, she should rest easy and be deeply pleased because one of the large hopes for her life had been met. At the time, I was so conceited I really didn't think I was wrong! Despite the fact that a number of women showed their displeasure with my self-inflated notions, when they did, I was shocked and hurt, feeling I was the one misseen and maltreated.

In a class, as I spoke dolefully about a breakup with a woman, Miss Reiss asked me:

Would you rather feel sad or change something central in yourself: the belief that you have the right to feel superior, to have contempt?

SW: I’m not sure.

ER: Do you think there is something you feel you're entitled to, and it doesn't go over with the ladies and it doesn't go over with yourself?

I began to do a study—both cultural and personal—about instances of self-love, and how it hurts one, including things I saw in myself. Here are two of the many points I wrote:

As I wore my new raincoat today, I had this picture of myself dashing down the street with everyone turning to look at me and thinking to themselves or commenting to others "What a tall, good-looking, well-dressed man he is!" This hurt me because it is a superficial, narrow way of seeing people: people want to like the whole world, be interested in all of it. (AND)

After leaving the museum today, what was most memorable were not the beautiful paintings by artists such as Degas and Courbet but by what I thought were my very keen observations of them. I hurt myself because I could have had more feeling for these works but instead chose to use some of the great art of the world to love myself which is clearly not their purpose.

This was an eye-opener; it helped to change the direction of my life. I saw that the way I used many things to aggrandize myself was really so small, even laughable and that there was something much larger I wanted.

III. A FILM OF THE 1990’S

I now discuss aspects of the 1993 movie "The Remains of the Day", based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It shows something of how far the narrow self of a man will go in protecting and treasuring his superiority to the world: it makes him hard, unfeeling and ruins any chance for true love. Meanwhile, I feel this film is not wholly honest because the main character, James Stevens, played by Anthony Hopkins, is made to seem poignant, even pathetic, not as essentially cold and unkind.

Set in England in the late 1930's as Hitler is gaining power in Europe, Mr. Stevens is the chief butler in charge of a large staff on the estate of Lord Darlington. We see right away that Stevens uses his job--the managing of Darlington Manor down to the smallest detail--for self-importance and snobbishness. While he is seemingly ever so polite, he runs the house with an iron hand, and maintains a steely distance between himself and his staff, keeping his emotions untouched and hidden. Stevens has what is described by Miss Reiss in The Right Of as the "contemptuous determination" to feel that:

No one is good enough to stir me completely--the only one who should be able to affect me is me!

One of the persons Mr. Stevens feels this about is Miss Kenton, the lively and competent head housekeeper, portrayed by Emma Thompson, whom he hires at the outset of the film. One day, she brings flowers to cheer up his somber office. But instead of welcoming her friendly encouragement, Stevens rebuffs her, saying, "I regard this room as my private place of work and I prefer to keep distractions to a minimum." Then he proceeds to find fault about some minor jobs she hasn't done to his exacting standards.

And a few scenes later, Miss Kenton tries to tell Stevens that his elderly father, a butler on the staff, is beginning to have difficulty performing his duties, but Stevens refuses to listen. When she kindly insists they speak, Stevens dismisses her by saying, "I'm afraid you can't talk to me this way, Miss Kenton. Perhaps you’ll allow me to go about my business." Soon afterwards, the senior Stevens, carrying a tray of china, trips in front of Darlington and his guests, falls down and is knocked unconscious.

IV. PERSONAL UNKINDNESS; INTERNATIONAL CRUELTY

One of the things this film points to is something Aesthetic Realism explains: the cold way a man can see a woman which makes love impossible and the horrors one nation can inflict upon another arise from a similar cause.

Mr. Siegel defined fascism as the "unwillingness to understand as power." And while it has certainly been seen that governments have been fascist, it hasn’t been seen as clearly that the determination not to see what another person feels has been very much in social life too. It is what impels Stevens, has him be quietly brutal. He makes it clear that none of the servants should show any feeling, especially for each other. And while he is willing to spend evenings with Miss Kenton discussing the business of the manor, when she tries to talk about what she feels, Stevens becomes even more determinedly unyielding. At one point, even as she weeps, he acts as if he doesn't notice and reminds her of figurines she hasn’t dusted. Ellen Reiss explains in The Right Of:

People have hoped for love, but they haven't seen they also hope for incomplete, tepid, dull feeling--because such feeling places a regal crown on one's own self-adoring forehead.

While Stevens’s coldness is vividly ugly, no man should feel he’s above it. At a time I was unkind to a woman and unwilling to see what she felt, Miss Reiss asked me:

Would you like to have love that is not tremendous but where you are the master? Would you rather have tyranny than love?

I'm sorry to say my answer was yes.

And it is tyranny over millions of people that is desired by the persons Stevens glorifies and serves so obsequiously. The fictional Lord Darlington represents many actual English noblemen who were Nazi sympathizers, very willing to betray their country by trying to have their government make a secret deal to appease Germany. But because Stevens gets so much contemptuous importance as Lord Darlington's head butler, he makes himself oblivious to the despicable way people are spoken about by Darlington's aristocratic guests at the sumptuous dinners he oversees; Stevens is more concerned with the proper placement of the silver and crystal. For instance, one guest says:

One has to regard the laws of the fascists as [to the Jews, Gypsies and Negroes] as a much overdue sanitary measure.... Here, we [have] prisons, over there, they [have] concentration camps. What's the difference?

And another comments:

The Nazis got rid of all that trade union rubbish. Believe me, no workers strike in Germany and everyone’s kept in line.

Despite these and other chilling statements he overhears, later that evening Stevens says to a fellow butler:

In my philosophy, a man cannot call himself well-contented until he has done all he can to be in service to his employer. Of course, this assumes one's employer is a superior person, not only in rank or wealth, but in moral stature.

Quite taken aback, the other butler says:

In your opinion, what's going on up there has moral stature, does it? I've heard some very fishy things, Mr. Stevens, very fishy!

Stevens: I hear nothing. To listen to the gentlemen's conversations would distract me from my work.

Many men might think that Stevens and his refusal to see what is going on before his eyes is very foreign, but every man needs to ask: "How much does it really matter to me that there are many people in this world who are suffering? Is there any relation between my not being too interested in the feelings of a terrified child in Iraq, or an unemployed worker in the Midwest, and how I see a girlfriend or wife? And while I may think through coldness I’m taking care of myself, might I be harming myself--including hurting tremendously the possibilities of love in my life?"

Aesthetic Realism says definitely if we are not interested in knowing the feelings of people as such, it greatly impedes us from knowing and caring for one person.

At a certain point, Darlington tells Stevens that two German Jewish servant girls must be fired because their dark features are offensive to his guests. For once, we see a flicker of real feeling cross Stevens' face as he offers a mild protest. However, as soon as Darlington shows displeasure, Stevens quickly acquiesces. When he informs Miss Kenton, she expresses horror at Darlington's decision and shows she despises Stevens for his casual manner in telling it. She says:

I'm amazed that you can stand there as if you were discussing orders from the larder. If those girls have no work, they could be sent back to Germany. If you dismiss them, it will be wrong, a sin as much as there ever was one!

Stevens coolly replies:

There are many things that you and I don't understand in the world today whereas his Lordship understands fully, including the nature of Jewry.

I believe a very valuable thing about "The Remains of the Day" is that it illustrates what Aesthetic Realism explains: there is a beautiful, strict justice about love. If we do not want to be full out against evil and ugliness, including in ourselves, we won’t be able to have the love we’re hoping for.

And the converse is also true: It is only when we want to use all of ourselves passionately, happily on behalf of what is fair and kind, will we be closer to caring deeply for another. That is what is shown in Richard Lovelace’s great 17th century English poem: "To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars." Ellen Reiss, teacher of the class "The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry", said of it:

There is hardly a more important poem on love. [because it says:] Unless you want to fight for justice, you're unequipped to love a person.

In it, a man tells Lucasta, a woman he is close to, that he must leave her to go into battle. But he says she shouldn’t be angry with him because through defeating injustice, he will love her more. Here is the poem with its famous two last lines:

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Because Aesthetic Realism understands and criticizes the narrow self in all of us that wants to care only for ourselves and have small, diluted feeling for everything else, it gloriously makes possible the real, passionate, complete love every person is hoping for.

What Do Fathers and Sons Really Want From Each Other?

2005-06-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

My life changed deeply and beautifully because I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the way we think about people, how we see them is crucial for our happiness. And the reason is: our deepest desire is to like the world, see it truly, and every person, and very much a parent, represents that wide, vast world.

The way every person most wants to be seen and thought about was described by Eli Siegel when he said:

People are reality when most complete; reality when aware of itself. The importance of people is that they are reality in the richest form. We cannot afford to despise reality. If we do, we are giving ourselves poison....The important thing about people--with all their weaknesses, hypocrisies, mistakes, meannesses, lazinesses, grudgingnesses, inertias, pretences--is, they are real. If, after much fuss and evolution, reality took the form of people, we have to respect that happening. ("Aesthetic Realism and People")

Once, I was a cold snob who contemptuously dismissed most of humanity, beginning with my father, as beneath me. And like many persons, I had no idea that the way I thought about people had anything to do with why I didn't like myself. I saw them superficially, only in terms of myself—if someone didn’t praise me, they were against me? "[A] phase of disrespect," Mr. Siegel explains in The Right Of:

is the unwillingness to see someone as having an inner life he is aware of. The most fashionable way of not giving respect to a person is not giving him full, busy, deep consciousness. (81, 5)

I. HOW WE THINK ABOUT THE FIRST PEOPLE IN OUR LIVES

By about the age of seven, I had made up my mind that I didn't like my father, Sam Weiner. Even while he could sometimes swing me in his arms, and was gentle when I was sick, I saw him as remote and gruff and as sternly "laying down the law." I wasn't interested in what my father's worries were; I felt that he was against me--and, without knowing it, I used him to make a case against the world and other people. I was so far away from seeing Sam Weiner in the beautiful, deep way Eli Siegel saw what a father feels and goes through. In "Mind and Fathers," he writes:

Fathers do have two motives towards their children. They cannot, as father, admit that they're confused. They cannot see that a child is after the same thing they are. They cannot, therefore, put together pride and humility, the desire to learn and the desire to teach. (349, 4)

Early in my father’s life, his own father abandoned their family, and Sam Weiner had to go to work in his teens to help support his mother and mentally ill brother. Every once in a while I had a glimmer of feeling for what my father had been through, but these moments were few, and forgotten by me as soon as he raised his voice. “There he goes again,” I would say under my breath.

I never even attempted to understand what my father felt about the hostility and coldness between him and my mother. Instead, I encouraged her and my two brothers to be angry with him: and tried to convince them that we would be better off if he left and never came back.

Since I had a tremendous "unwillingness" to think about my father's "inward life," I missed the fact that he didn’t like himself for the way he was ill-natured and aloof. Like most sons, I spent a lot of time trying to prove how different I was from him, how much better. "I'll never be like him," I often said. Both of us would learn years later that we deeply agreed the world was unfriendly, and that we should have little to do with other people--and this attitude was what caused both of us much pain.

As much as I tried to blame my father for everything wrong in my life--my unhappiness and unsureness, I felt very guilty about him. That, I learned, is inevitable when we are unfair to a person. I was extremely nervous in my father's presence and could never look him in the eye. And because I didn't want and didn't know how, to be a critic of my ill will, there was another emotion I couldn't make sense of. In Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains:

Since [the feeling of guilt] is unbearable, we may change the sense that the cause of the pain is in ourselves to the sense that it is caused by an external object. Once, however, we see the world as giving us pain, we can see it as giving us pain in the future. This has to do with the existence of a pervasive, vague and constant fear....

I had that "pervasive" fear. But I never made any association between sneering at my father and then cowering before him; how I spoke disparagingly of him, and then would get anxious at the thought of facing him again.

II. I LEARNED WHAT MY FATHER MOST WANTED FROM ME

In the Aesthetic Realism classes I attended, Mr. Siegel was a kind critic of how I saw people. In one class, he asked me what I had most against my father, and I said he was tyrannical and also aloof. Mr. Siegel then asked:

ES: So, because he was not interested in you, you paid him back by not being interested in him?

SW: That's what I've done.

ES: Is that wise? When you retaliate, make sure the effect is good on you.

I began to see it wasn't wise. And starting with my father, I learned what he and every person most hope for—to be seen deeply, from within—as a relation of sameness and difference from other people. Mr. Siegel also asked me:

ES: Do you think that when your father quarreled with your mother, he felt his knowledge of women was insufficient?

SW: He must have.

ES: Do you think he had some reason for self-doubt?

This was a revelation! It had never occurred to me that my father could be unsure about anything. "I think so," I said.
Mr. Siegel continued:

ES: Did he know how to use his doubt of himself?

SW: No.

ES: Do you know how?

SW: I don't.

I thank Mr. Siegel for the way he encouraged me to be fair to the depths of Sam Weiner.

I'll never forget the day I asked Sam Weiner questions about his life--and how amazed he was to see the son who had been so scornful, really interested in him! He told me later that that was the first time "You treated me like I was a human being." He was so affected by how I had changed that he began to have Aesthetic Realism consultations to learn about himself. In time, we were able to talk deeply with each other, and he trusted me more because he saw I wanted to know him. I no longer felt intimidated; and even began to have a sense of humor with him. Through Mr. Siegel's good will, I came to love Sam Weiner. As the way I thought about my father changed so did the way I saw people as such. Instead of being driven to prove I was superior, I saw that I liked myself much more for being interested in people, and trying to make them stronger.

III. HE USED HIS FATHER TO HATE THE WHOLE WORLD

The 1993 film In the Name of the Father deals largely with the turbulent relation between a young Irish man, Gerry Conlon and his father, Guiseppe. I feel the film itself is confused about the long, brutal conflict between Northern Ireland and England, which I say carefully will not end until Aesthetic Realism is studied. Meanwhile, for the purpose of this paper, I will speak about one aspect of it--the deep fight that goes on in this son between seeing his father fairly and having wholesale contempt for him.

In "Aesthetic Realism and People," Mr. Siegel said:

Before you start hating anybody, try to understand what makes him confused, and you will find, perhaps, that there is more confusion than just animosity. Very few people are given to animosity and nothing else. They're trying to be happy, and somewhere they meet confusion.

Based loosely on a true story, Gerry, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is a reckless and insolent petty thief living in war-torn Belfast, in Northern Ireland in 1974. We see early that Gerry is confused by and very angry with his father, Guiseppe, a quiet, hardworking man, played by Pete Postlethwaite--who he sees as righteous and severely judgmental.

Hoping to keep Gerry out of trouble, Guiseppe, who suffers from a respiratory illness resulting from his work in a factory, sends him to London to stay with an aunt. When Gerry is boarding the ferry, his father handing him some cash, says "Go then son¼ Remember, honest money goes further." Then Gerry does what so many sons have, he mocks his father, saying to himself: "Honest money goes further. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. He had a cliché for every occasion. I had to run up the gangplank to get away from him." But Gerry feels remorseful, and tries to call "goodbye, Da" to his father, who by this time is out of earshot.

Soon after Gerry arrives in London, a local pub is bombed and people die. Because he is Irish and poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time, the English police assume Gerry is guilty, and under tremendous pressure from an outraged public to find the bombers, they try to torture him into confessing. But it is only when they threaten to have his father killed, that Gerry signs a paper saying he is guilty.

One of the film's most moving scenes illustrates what Aesthetic Realism explains: there's a tremendous desire on the part of a person to use another person close to us, very often a member of our family, to hate whole world and despise other people. In an Aesthetic Realism Lesson, Mr. Siegel spoke to a young man about the fight that went on in him between seeing his father a friend, but also as his "greatest enemy." These two ways of seeing, Mr. Siegel explained:

[I]nstead of being an opportunity for people, make them feel the whole world is false, because the person who is for you [you] also [see] as so much against you....We come to the conclusion, "My parent doesn't make sense; therefore the universe is senseless."

This, I have learned, is clearly an inaccurate and hurtful conclusion, and it is not inevitable! A father wants to be used to know the world, and to like it--not as a justification for being against everything and everyone. But that is just what Gerry Conlon has done.

Gerry is in jail awaiting trial, when suddenly, the cell door opens, and his father is brought in. "What the hell are you doing here?" Gerry asks in rage. Giuseppe tells him that on his arrival in London to find him a lawyer, he was arrested as a conspirator in the bombing. Gerry’s immediate reaction is gratitude to his father but he swiftly changes it into fury, and goes on a tirade, saying:

Ge: Why do you always follow me when I do something wrong?

Gu: What are you talking about?

And then Gerry brings up a memory from his childhood.

Ge: I'm talking about the medal.

Gu: What medal?

Ge: The only medal that I ever won--at soccer. And you sat on the sidelines shouting instructions at me. You couldn't even play soccer. You could only see what I was doing wrong on the field…

Gu: This is a shock!

GE: For once in our lives, my team won but you ruined it all for me....That's when I started to rob--the proof that I was no good. I've been like this since I was 7. I knew I was bad. I started to tell lies, the same lies I've been telling my whole life. It doesn't matter because I'm no good. (Guiseppe moves towards son.) Keep away from me.

Gerry lets go with a series of brutally contemptuous insults, then begins slapping himself, and screaming at his father to strike him, saying "I'm no good! Hit me! I’m no good!"

At their trial, both Conlons are found guilty and given long sentences. At first, as they spend many hours in a cell together, Gerry ridicules Guiseppe's deep religious faith and his seeming passivity. He uses a gang of angry, rebellious prisoners he takes drugs with against Guiseppe, saying to him: "At least they fight back, more than you ever did in your life." Meanwhile it is Guiseppe who initiates a campaign to publicize their unjust conviction that Gerry scoffs at as a waste of time.

As the film continues, we see the cover up by the government after the real bombers of the pub are found. But Guiseppe refuses to become cynical, and this affects Gerry very much. He also sees that the other prisoners have come to have a real care for his father. Gerry tells his lawyer, played by Emma Thompson, that "Guiseppe always recognized the good in people."

But it is only after the warden is viciously attacked by the gang Gerry had seen as his friends, that Gerry realizes how wrong he had been: he made into nothing what he should have valued so much: his father's belief in justice and decency. Gerry stops using drugs, and joins in Guiseppe's campaign to clear their names.

In the Lesson I quoted from earlier, Mr. Siegel also said to the young man:

Have good will for your father [and you] will cleanse your life. You won't be nervous, and you will have good will for other people. Good will is the doing all you can not to weaken a person and doing all that which would strengthen a person.

Gerry begins to take better care of Guiseppe. With humor and patience he helps his father, now gravely ill, take medicine for his breathing. In one scene, trying to encourage Giuseppe not to lose heart, Gerry tells him about a memory he has--and this is so different from the scornful, disparaging way he talked earlier.

Ge: What I remember most about my childhood is holding my wee hand in your big hand. Even now, I can smell the tobacco in the palm of your hand.

Fighting back tears, his father says weakly: "Hold my hand."

Guiseppe dies in prison. But while this is heartbreaking, we also feel that a victory has taken place because of the large change in how his son saw him. When the other prisoners learn of Guiseppe's death, in honor of him, they take strips of paper, light them with matches, and drop them from their cell windows--and as these burning wads float down, they illuminate the black courtyard. There is a relation of dark and light, brilliance and fadingness that I believe is beautiful. And because of the persistence and conviction of his lawyer, Gerry gets a new trial and his and his father's names are cleared.

IV. I GOT WHAT I MOST WANTED BY SEEING WHAT MY FATHER MOST WANTED FROM ME

Some years ago I was facing a situation that many people are facing now: the illness of an elderly parent. In such a situation, a person can have all kinds of emotions: pity, guilt, anger, fear, and a big tendency to see the world as cruel.

In 1992, when my father's health was deteriorating, I am grateful that because of what I was learning, I was I able to be useful to him, even as I was very much affected, and could sometimes sink. In a class, when I spoke about having a drive to feel "This is all too much for me," Ellen Reiss encouraged me to like thinking about my father. Among the questions she asked me were: "Do you want to have a certain steadiness and depth of thought about another person which has not been enough in your life?" And she said: "What your father is asking for from you is to go further than you have ever gone."

"That's what I want to do," I said.

ER: The question is: Is that good for you? It's terrible that it's in this form, but you do have a chance to respect yourself.

This discussion made for an urgency in me to be deeper about my father. And he was grateful and said so.

I feel what I have learned through this will enable me to be useful to men all over America. Aesthetic Realism can teach us how to be proud of our thought about other people, beginning with a parent; this is the most emergent and most hopeful fact in the world!

Comfort or Justice: What Does a Man Want Most?

2005-05-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

Eli Siegel has described the great battle in everyone. It is:

“a…fight between comfort and the desire to know more and see more clearly....Since man as an individual is first impelled towards feeling good, feathering the nest of his singular felicity, the desire to see other things, other living beings, is secondary. This makes for a contest between the desire to soothe oneself, caress oneself, make oneself distingushedly belligerent, and the desire to see justly, comprehensively, gracefully, beautifully.”

And Aesthetic Realism makes clear that "to see justly, comprehensively" is the one way we will like ourselves and feel truly comfortable in the world. But men have also gone after a different kind of comfort--being unbothered, concentrating selfishly on what we want. Yet if, as Class Chairman Ellen Reiss explains in The Right Of, “our notion of comfort is not the same as the desire to be just to people and things (and it usually
isn't)--we will be deeply unsure.”

1. The Fight in Myself

As I grew up in Brooklyn, I went after two things. I remember, for example, how thrilled and composed I felt as I learned in math class how to tell if a number was divisible by three: by adding up its digits, and seeing if its sum could be divided by three. As I tried to be exact and was excited by what numbers are and can do, I respected the world: I saw it as having logic and making sense.

But at home as I observed my parents angry and cold to each other, my purpose was not to "see justly, comprehensively," to try to understand what they felt, but to feeling the world was messy and cruel, and I was better than it.

I felt that other people--including teachers who I thought did not make enough of me--were the cause of my feeling bad and unsure, and that therefore, I had the right to "soothe" and "caress" myself. As a child, I couldn't wait to get home after school, change into pajamas, climb into bed, and get away from all those "mean" people.

I also thought I was ill-at-ease because my family lived in a small apartment, while many children I knew had nice homes, went on vacations and to private camps in the summer. I felt the world had given me a raw deal and I had the right to “feather my own nest.”

I came to feel the goal of life was to set up the most comfortable existence for myself I could which included being able to buy a lot of things. This made me cold and snobbish: I judged people not on how fair they were, but on how much money they had. In general, I kidded people along, told them what I thought they wanted to hear so that things would be easy rather than really trying to know them.

My life changed when I learned that the desire to be just, to see what other people deserved from me, was not the sacrificial thing I thought it was, but the one way of being good to myself.

In Aesthetic Realism classes, Eli Siegel encouraged justice in me as he taught me what interfered. In one class, he asked:

What do you want to be--serious with people or play with them? What are you doing?

I think I'm playing with people, I responded.

ES: Is that best for you? The purpose of life is to have the greatest emotions. Do you think you'd rather have a minor feeling about people as long as it's smooth? It is hard for you to see another [person] fully or in depth.

I began to see that my choice for comfort, to have "minor” and “smooth” feelings about people, not to see them "fully or in depth" had made for large loneliness and ill-at-easeness in me. And I saw that as I thought more deeply about people, asked them questions about themselves, and tried to speak about what I felt, I became more sure of myself.

2. A Great American Lawyer

In The Right Of, Eli Siegel explains:

“Justice is the great opponent of contempt; justice, loved and studied, can in time have a victory over contempt. However, justice now is not seen as sufficiently real except where the law is concerned. Man has so far seen himself as hindered by justice, not expressed by it. This is man's greatest misfortune; that he has come to see justice as a restriction, not as the largest way of being or becoming himself.”

I will speak about aspects of the life and career of the attorney Clarence Darrow who lived from 1857 to 1938. Because of the way he used the law to oppose the contempt of our country's unjust economic system, Darrow is one of the loved persons in American history.

His life shows that a man respects himself most when he is trying to be just. Meanwhile, Darrow was also turbulent--he was troubled by not being able to understand how he could be so passionately for justice, and then also go for narrow comfort.

Darrow is perhaps most famous for the Scopes trial in which he defended the teaching of the theory of evolution in schools. For over forty years, and against odds that sometimes seemed insurmountable, he fought and won cases for labor unions that brought new justice to the working people of America. Darrow was also one of the first white lawyers to represent African-Americans.

Clarence Darrow was born in Ohio to parents who were passionate abolitionists; their house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As a young child, he heard stories about Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, and later, he would often be awakened at night to ride in a wagon that concealed an escaping slave. And in the small Bible Belt town in which his family lived, his parents had "radical" and unpopular ideas such as equal rights for women, which Clarence defended in public debates. Darrow wrote about himself as a youth:

“Not only could I put myself in the other person's place, but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering and the poor.”

But the young Darrow was also very much affected by the fact that his father was barely able to support his family of nine. In the biography The People v. Clarence Darrow, Geoffrey Cowan writes:

“If Clarence was inspired by his father's idealism, he was also motivated by his professional failures. He was determined to achieve economic security.”

By age 21, Darrow was practicing law successfully in a small Ohio town, and achieved the economic security he wanted. But it mattered a great deal to him that the vast majority of Americans hadn't.

America in the 1880's was the time of "robber barons", men like Jay Gould and Henry Frick who made enormous fortunes in industries such as railroads and steel by exploiting thousands of men, forcing them to work long hours for low pay under dangerous conditions. When workers tried to form unions or strike, they were ruthlessly suppressed, sometimes murdered. In Self and World, Eli Siegel explains the state of mind of these industrialists which is in so many men:

“The fact that most people have felt they had the right to see other people and other objects in a way that seemed to go with comfort---this fact is the beginning of the injustice and pain of the world. It is contempt in its first universal hideous form.”

Darrow wanted to fight against this injustice. He explained to a friend:

“These modern thoughts about the rights of labor, and the wrongs of the world, had just taken possession of me.”

3. A Choice for Justice Changes His Life

At the age of 30, Darrow moved to Chicago where with some misgivings, he became an attorney representing the Chicago and North Western Railway.

It was at this time in 1894 that the Pullman railroad workers in Chicago went on strike after their wages were cut 25%. In support of them, Eugene V. Debs, the great socialist leader of the American Railway Union, ordered a full-scale strike stopping railroad traffic across America. When the government charged Debs and his union with conspiracy to restrain trade, Debs asked Darrow to represent him. Darrow quit his job with the railroad, and switched sides.

The railroad workers, he learned, were forced to live in a town built by George Pullman that was run "like a feudal manor, with Pullman as absolute monarch" where they were forced to buy inflated-priced goods at company stores.

What infuriated Darrow most was that the owners' collaboration to decrease wages was not, according to the government, a criminal conspiracy, but the union's striking to oppose their wage cuts was. In the ensuing trial, the biographer Cowan describes what occurred:

“Darrow converted the railroads into the defendants, charging that they were the real conspirators, that they had conspired to destroy the lives of the nation's most valuable workers.”

In what Cowan called a “brilliant stroke of courtroom genius,” Darrow subpoenaed Pullman to tell the court why he cut the wages of his workers to subsistence levels when there was twenty-six million dollars in cash in his company's coffers. Pullman suddenly disappeared. The prosecution against Debs was dropped.

4. How Should Injustice Be Used?

This question, I have learned, is so important in every person's life: Are we going to use the injustice we see to be against it in all its forms, including in ourselves, or use it to feel we have the right to be unjust ourselves?

I believe Darrow suffered because he, as people have, vacillated as to this question. He hated economic injustice and worked hard and steadily to have it end. His speeches, which he gave in a forceful and eloquent manner, affected people very much. In a speech of 1895, he stated:

“With the land and possessions of America rapidly passing into the hands of a favored few; with thousands of men in idleness and want; with the sight of thousands of children forced into involuntary slavery at the tender age that should find them at home or in school; and above all, with the knowledge that the servants of the people, elected to correct abuses, are bought and sold [by] corporations and individuals; with all these notorious evils, some rude awakening must come.”

But Darrow also used what he saw to have contempt, and feel he had the right to go after narrow comfort himself. He began to represent, for sheer monetary gain, corporations and individuals he once criticized. For instance, he used his political contacts to enable a private utility company to get a contract with the city of Chicago, earning it huge profits almost overnight. He tried to justify himself by saying he did so to finance his more radical work, but he also showed how much he was really against himself. He wrote:

“Judged by the higher law, I am practically a thief. I am taking money that I did not earn, which comes to me from men who did not earn it. I take it without performing any useful service to the world.”

5. Love is Justice to the World

I’ve learned that a big mistake people make about love is to see it as a means to glorify oneself, “soothe oneself.”

In 1899, Darrow met Ruby Hammerstrom, an attractive and fashionable society reporter. Cowan writes:

“Ruby wasn't like the social workers and political reporters that Darrow generally dated, who insisted on holding him to the high ideals that he set forth in his speeches. He deliberately married a woman who expected him to become a prosperous and solid citizen.”

At the time of their courtship, Darrow was representing nine hundred men and women who were on strike against the Kellogg Switchboard Company. What followed represents what many couples in America are doing right now--using each other to dismiss the pain of others and make each other selfishly comfortable. Writes Cowan:

“A court issued an injunction against picketing, and strikers were sent to jail by the carload, Violence became a daily occurrence, the plant was in a state of siege. Darrow, amidst this carnage and devastation got married. After a champagne breakfast at the home of a wealthy friend, the couple headed off for Europe where they spent three sybaritic months. It was a symbolic start to Darrow's new life with Ruby.”

While Darrow and Ruby remained married until his death, I believe he was deeply angry with her for encouraging him to betray himself, and he punished her by spending much time away from home, and having to do with other women.

What the Darrows needed so much to know, men and women are now learning from Aesthetic Realism. In one class, Ellen Reiss was showing me why love had not fared well in my life, as she asked:

Do you think you are afraid of the criticism of a woman?

I responded, I tell myself I'm all for love.

And the Class Chairman explained,

You're all for love if it doesn't criticize you. You don't want a person questioning you all the time. It makes you feel very uncomfortable.

I am proud to say how wrong I was to have associated a woman’s questioning with discomfort.

During the time Darrow was engaged to Ruby, he began to do what he said he never would--represent rich corporate clients in cases against their own workers and the poor. Cowan writes:

“He became the kind of lawyer he once attacked. In the process, he became more and more bitter, his conversations dark and often vicious.”

I believe Darrow's cynicism is explained by Eli Siegel when he writes:

“There are millions of persons in America and elsewhere who have the discomfort of feeling that somehow they have stopped going after what they wholly wanted.”

In 1912 in California, after taking part in a case that was a large setback for the labor movement, Darrow was put on trial himself for jury tampering. If he had been convicted, he would have been ruined; fortunately, he was not. I was very moved to read how he used this ordeal. He said:

“I know that this sad, hard experience made me kindlier and more understanding of all who live. I am sure that it gave me a point of view that nothing else could bring.”

After having undergone this, Darrow’s ethics became stronger and he had a renewed passion about justice. He spent the rest of his years as a powerful critic of religious intolerance and racial discrimination, while continuing his fight against industrial injustice. He also defended the right to free speech at a time it was under great attack in America. This included working for the release of Eugene V. Debs who had been imprisoned for opposing America's entry into WWI.

6. Justice Has a Victory over Contempt

There is one more thing I want to tell of that represents Darrow at his best, where he enabled justice to come to people who were seen and exploited so contemptuously for huge profit.

A highpoint of this was in 1902, when 147,000 men, led by the United Mine Workers, went on strike for an eight-hour day and decent wages. In a commission set up by President Theodore Roosevelt to arbitrate the dispute, the UMW asked Darrow to lead their defense.

In the trial before the commission, while the operators tried to portray the miners as criminals for going on strike, Darrow brought forth hundreds of witnesses--including men who began work in the mines at the age of 12, and were broken by the age of fifty, many suffering from lung and heart diseases.

In his closing argument, Darrow said with great passion:

“When I think of the cripples, of the orphans, of the widows of the maimed who are left and neglected, it seems to me this is the greatest indictment of this business that could be possibly be made. These owners are fighting for slavery, while we are fighting for freedom. They are fighting for the rule of man over man, for despotism, for darkness, for the past. We are striving to build up man. We are working for democracy, for humanity, for the future.”

Chiefly because of Darrow the miners received a wage increase, and a shorter working day. And most crucially, this was the first time a national union went out on strike and was not broken. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, called it "the most important single incident in the labor movement in the United States."

The greatest justice to people, and the greatest encourager of justice in people is Aesthetic Realism.

The Mixup in Men about Coldness and Warmth

2004-12-31T17:08:00.000-08:00

On a November day over thirty years ago, I had my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, and began to understand one of the most important things I needed to know: where a painful coldness I had felt most of my life began. “Do you think you’ve made a considerable practice of not having too much feeling about anybody or anything?” my consultants asked me. Though I was just eighteen years old, my answer was a bitter, “Yes.”

That consultation was the beginning of a very large change in my life. I learned a way of seeing the world and people that has enabled me to have deep, true emotion and a kinder heart, a warmer heart.

I. Coldness and Warmth in a Family of Brooklyn

Among my warmest memories as I grew up were reading about children who lived in other times such as Johnny Tremaine, a boy who grew up during the Revolutionary War; and playing with our erector set with my twin brother, Paul.

But the atmosphere in the Weiner home could not be described as warm. Individually, my father and mother could show affection to us, but it seemed as soon as they were in the same room, the feeling in the air changed to a tense chilliness, punctuated by heated arguments. I was aware too that even as I got a lot of approval, especially from my mother, I didn’t think anyone wanted to know what I felt. My consultants asked: “Do you think you felt hurt by people quite early?

SW: Yes.

C: Could that have something to do with deciding not to get too close to them?

I began to learn that I had turned disappointment into something unjust and detrimental to my whole life. In The Right Of, Mr. Siegel explains:

In this world, men and women often find refuge in coldness. Coldness, quite clearly, is allied to contempt; and contempt has been seen often as a protector of the distressed or uncertain self.

By the time I was in school, I had decided the world was not my friend. Often, when other children went to the playground in the afternoon, I would go home, change into pajamas, go under the covers, and get away from everyone who I felt had hurt me. It never occurred to me that other people could feel wounded by me because I wasn’t interested in them.

There were times I had genuine feeling. I remember watching news reports of Southern police turning high-pressured fire hoses and vicious dogs on people, including women and children, courageously fighting for their civil rights. And I remember the fury that swept over me at this barbaric injustice.

But I didn’t know, as many men don’t, that I felt I was betraying myself to have so much feeling about something not me; so mostly, I cultivated being cold and disdainful. I scornfully thought other people, especially women, got too emotional, let things get to them, while I prided myself on my level-headedness. My motto was one Mr. Siegel had said was exceedingly popular: “Keep your cool and everybody’s a fool.”

But even as I thought I was so smart and superior in my contempt, I had the tormenting feeling there was something big missing in my life. I cursed myself, asking “Why are you such a goddamned cold fish?” Often, I had a fear I would die young from a heart attack because my heart was so cold.

In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss explains the dilemma I was in:

We feel we have ourselves in a kingly or queenly fashion if nothing can move us; we are above the turmoil; we are unbothered; we are too good to be tossed about by the crude world. Coldness, Aesthetic Realism shows, is a triumph. But with that triumph is a sinking, a fearfulness, a shame.

At a time I was seeing a woman, I asked in a class about the way I could go from warm affection to aloof coolness--she once called me a “Chilly Willy”—which pained both of us very much. What Miss Reiss explained took in my whole life. She asked, “What would it mean for there to be a oneness of coldness and warmth in [you], or any person?”

SW: I’m not sure.

ER: People think warmth is good and coldness is bad. What you should go for, Mr. Weiner, is 98.6—to have coldness and warmth in an aesthetic relation.
I began to see I had been very warm but to something ugly in myself—my ego, my false sense of superiority; in fact, I had been a “hot bed of self-love”.

Ellen Reiss was describing a big mistake men have made: we caress the very thing in ourselves, our contempt, which makes us cold, and has us dislike ourselves. What I needed to have, she explained, “is the beautiful coolness that is exactitude in knowing yourself.”

Because Aesthetic Realism has enabled me to know myself better, I have seen, and my education continues every happy day of my life, that to be accurately warm to the world and people is equivalent to liking and respecting oneself. I am thankful that today I have deep feeling about friends, members of my family, about literature and art. As a union shop steward of my local, it matters so much to me that economic and social justice come to the workers I represent and to the people of America.

II. A Man Important in US History

In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss writes:

Good will is the oneness of heat and cold: for when you have good will, you passionately want a person to be all he or she can be, and you are passionately against what is not beautiful in the person…Good will is the great eternal coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling.

I speak now about aspects of the life of Henry Agard Wallace, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Vice President in his third term from 1940 until 1944.

To a large degree, Wallace had good will for America at a time it was desperately needed as it is so much today: he wanted to see what the American people needed and deserved, and he was a critic, often fiercely, of the forces in our country against this. His life brings up a crucial question for every person: what is the relation of working for justice to many people, and being interested in the selves of individuals?

In the biography American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace, John C. Culver and John Hyde describe incidents in Wallace’s childhood showing that early he had a fight between warmly knowing and respecting the world and being coolly superior to it.

He was born in 1888 in Iowa to Harry and Mae Wallace; his first years were spent living on an isolated farm with his parents where he came to care intensely for plants and gardening, an interest that continued his whole life.

At the age of seven, his family moved to Des Moines where he had an opportunity to make friends with other children; but it seems he preferred his own company. In school, he thought the other boys rowdy; later, he would describe himself critically as “puffed up” for using his high grades to feel smarter than they. As to his five younger siblings whom he felt his mother indulged, Wallace appointed himself their disciplinarian; they were not appreciative.

But there was something very good in Henry Wallace that wanted to be encouraged. His biographers write that the person who affected him most was his grandfather, after whom he was named. In this description, we can see what the young boy was hoping to have brought out and strengthened in him, a relation of the “coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling” Ellen Reiss described:

There was a gravity about his grandfather, seriousness leavened by tolerance, which imbedded itself in the boy’s soul. His grandfather knew what was important—God and agriculture—and Young Henry made that vision his own.

On graduating from college in 1909, Wallace first became a writer and then editor for his grandfather’s farm publication, highly esteemed by Iowan farmers. Though his family was Republican, they were furious at the party’s economic policies, in which farmers were at the mercy of high railroad and interest rates. Wallace used some of his columns to criticize the leadership of Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of Agriculture.

In those years, Henry Wallace studied everything available about soil conditions, the effect of tariffs, weather trends, animal husbandry, and he came to be widely known as one of America’s leading agricultural authorities. Through years of experimentation, he helped make one of the most important discoveries in farming history—how the cross-breeding of corn dramatically increased its yield.

In 1929, when the stock market collapsed, and millions of people lost their jobs, and thousands of farms were foreclosed, Wallace showed warmth in an area in which men have hurt themselves terrifically by being cold—economics. He wrote that the “cure for hard times” was very simple: “a greater percentage of the income of the nation [must] be turned back to the mass of people.”

And he pointed to what Mr. Siegel was to explain so clearly years later: economics has centrally to do with warmth and coldness: should people be seen in terms of what they are hoping for and need, or be used for one’s own advantage? About how to prevent another Great Depression, Wallace wrote:

Finally the problem becomes a spiritual one. Do we believe in the abundant life or in the narrow contracted life? The forces pulling towards narrow, national selfishness are combating those working in the direction of international understanding.

It is Mr. Siegel who showed definitively how an economy can flourish and be just to all people, stating in 1970:

There will be no economic recovery in the world until economics itself, the making of money, the having of jobs, becomes ethical; is based on good will rather than on the ill will which has been predominant for centuries.

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, and he appointed Wallace his Secretary of Agriculture. I believe that FDR was affected by the relation of “coolness of accuracy and warmth of deep feeling” in Wallace. His biographers write:

Few men knew more about agriculture than Wallace, and no man anywhere burned with greater zeal to rescue farmers from their cruel misfortune.

In his new post, Wallace was key in formulating President Roosevelt’s New Deal farm program which was revolutionary; and despite fierce opposition from entrenched agribusiness interests, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed, giving Wallace the power he needed to effect change. Immediately, he established the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation, which distributed surplus food to the hungry people of America. The AAA subsequently enabled many farmers to stay on their land.

Every man has the question of how much we want to be, as I learned in the class I quoted from earlier, “cold to the ugliest thing” in ourselves and others for the purpose of true warmth. To a significant extent, I think Wallace succeeded here. When a lobbyist tried to win a favor from him for a special business interest, he replied “No. Unless we learn to treat each other fairly this country is going to smash.”

But sometimes, under enormous political pressure, he was forced to give in. Once, he could have come to the aid of mercilessly exploited Southern sharecroppers but succumbed to what he called “sinister forces” in Congress. To his credit, he felt terrible about his decision, and worked to make up for it.

Many historians feel that Wallace was the most effective Agricultural Secretary the US ever had. He began many innovative initiatives on behalf of warmth to the American people and the earth itself: land-use planning, soil conservation policies, food stamp and school lunch programs.

As admirable as he was, I think Henry Wallace was in a mix-up about coldness and warmth he never understood. In his marriage of many years to Ilo Browne, it seems that his wife was uncomfortable with her husband’s activist colleagues of different backgrounds and races, and kept to a small circle of her wealthy friends. Perhaps this appealed to something in Wallace himself. His biographers hint at this:

High-minded and cerebral, reserved to the point of shyness, Wallace did not make conversation freely…It was said of him that he loved mankind but was not particularly interested in individuals.

Henry Wallace would have benefited enormously if he been able to hear useful, kind questions as I have. At a time I was becoming more active in the Labor movement, I felt agitated in a way I didn’t understand, and Miss Reiss asked me: Do you feel you're warm enough to people?

SW: I can’t say that I just feel I have a warm heart, yet.

ER: [The question you have] is really about how to see people. I think as you have this new interest, you want to be warmer to people and you're also afraid of it. People have worked to have others get justice but haven’t wanted to see how another person sees himself. There is such a thing as the depths of people and they matter.

This is major! For a man to be truly warm and effective as he works for justice, it’s crucial for him to be interested in the selves of individual people. This is as important as anything I’ve learned as I endeavor to be a force for good.

III. Should We Use Ourselves and Our Country, to be Colder or Warmer?

One of the great things Aesthetic Realism explains is that the choices a man makes are like the ones a nation makes.

By 1940, Wallace was the most popular and respected member of Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet, and so when Roosevelt ran for a third term, he chose Wallace whom he called “Old Man Common Sense” to be his running mate. They won easily.

One of the most famous speeches Wallace gave was in response to an early 1941 editorial by Time Magazine publisher, Henry Luce, titled “The American Century.” Luce advocated America’s entry into the war against Germany, seeing it as an opportunity for America to become economically dominant worldwide after the war was over. Wallace’s speech, the “Century of the Common Man,” refuted Luce, stating that the purpose of a second world war had to be to end economic slavery and colonialism. He explained what he felt was necessary for enduring world peace:

No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.

The speech was translated into 20 languages, and in visits to other countries, he was cheered by millions. About this time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began an insidious campaign to show Wallace was under the influence of Communists.

IV. A Choice for Coldness Has a Terrible Effect on the World

When Roosevelt ran for a fourth term, there was fierce and ugly opposition from right-wing elements--Wall Street businessmen, Southern conservatives, and many political bosses—who saw Wallace as dangerous. They were furious at his strong stands against war profiteering, racism, and his advocacy for the rights of labor and cooperation with the USSR.

Through a series of backroom deals, which Roosevelt was too ill to combat, Wallace was shut out of the vice-presidency, the nomination going to Harry S. Truman, who then became President upon the death of Roosevelt six months later.

It needs to be asked: Since that time, has America’s foreign policy been one of good will, warm to the needs of other nations, or something very other: to enrich US corporations, at the expense of causing pain to millions of people?

In 1948, Wallace ran unsuccessfully for president on the Progressive Party ticket. When the press wasn’t boycotting his campaign, they were writing articles besmirching his character. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people came to hear him speak in cities across the country.

After the ill will shown to him, it would have been so easy for Wallace to have found “refuge in coldness.” But for the rest of his life--he died in 1965--Wallace continued to be a force “against what [was] not beautiful” in America, including the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee for which he was subpoenaed to testify.

Henry Wallace shows that the very goodness and usefulness of a man’s life depends on the choices he makes about coldness and warmth. It is more necessary then ever that men understand this mix-up in themselves, for the sake of their own lives, and for the future of our world. This, Aesthetic Realism makes beautifully possible.