Generous or Selfish?

I'm proud that part of a public seminar I gave last fall “How Can Selfishness & Generosity Make Sense in a Woman’s Life?,” was published in a recent issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known: 

Growing up, I wanted to think I was good, but I can’t remember being generous in any deep or steady way. I did have kind feelings for animals. And I helped my mother by setting the table (grudgingly) and generally behaving. But I liked being served, and got nearly everything I wanted in terms of toys, clothes, ballet and piano lessons, and lots of praise.

I liked school, and it was there I gave myself most: to learning. I remember wanting to be fair to words—spell them correctly, use them grammatically—and I loved to read. When we try to be fair to something, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, we’re truly selfish, truly take care of ourselves.

However, I mainly felt the world was a harsh, competitive place I had to hide from and outwit. While I had friends and was fairly popular, I saw myself as superior to most people and had a self-centered, unjust way of seeing that made me cold to others’ feelings. Writes Eli Siegel:

“The chief reason for the winning out of selfishness so far is man’s feeling that he is accompanied by a world hostile to himself and which he has to defeat....Once we are clear that it is not sensible for us to fight the world the way we have, selfishness will have received a central blow.” [TRO 173]

In my first Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked what I thought of the world, and my initial response was: “I don’t think about it.” I added: “I’m mostly concerned with myself”...Read more

"Respect, Contempt, and Individuality"

There is a paper I presented as part of a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation some years ago which includes a section about the life and work of an important woman, Civil Rights lawyer Pauli Murray. She, with others, was instrumental to the success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My paper, which can be read online, begins:

"Eli Siegel explained what individuality really is--and I believe that every person’s personal happiness and our collective future depends on this great, true explanation being known. He writes in his essay titled “There Is Individualism”:

"Individualism is the whole world rightly in ourselves, and welcome there. It is reality working with a sweet lack of interference, through us….It is the self thriving on what it has to do with, making beautiful what it has to do with." . . . .

Pauli Murray's life shows that what makes for true individuality is not our difference from others or our possible superiority to others--it is respect for the world. Born in Baltimore—in the segregated South—she and her family, as black persons, suffered from the contempt of white for black that was enforced by law. Like apartheid in South Africa, they were separated by force from what every human being needs and has a right to: their full relation to the world. more

Deep Friends

Here is a photo of two very different beings, wildly, gracefully, tenderly together--it is by photographer and marine biologist Lori Mazzuca: http://www.mnh.si.edu/exhibits/natures_best_2006/gallery/humpbackwhaleanddolphin.html

Discontent in America

I recommend, as going along with Dickens' scathing criticism of economic injustice in his own time in Little Dorrit, the following commentary on jobs and work--and discontent--in America today. Written by Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, in 1998, it is up to the minute now: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/poetry/tro1324-burns-esc.html

Dickens Is So Useful

Charles Dickens

When I read the following from Chapter 10 of Charles Dickens' novel Little Dorrit, it gave wonderful form to what was weighing me down about our present Government! So I bring this great, humorous excerpt from Little Dorrit to you here, believing that others will be strengthened as I was in their work to change things.
      Aesthetic Realism sees humor as essential, and in an early class, reported on by writer Sheldon Kranz, Eli Siegel explained:

"The purpose of true satire is to take an ugly thing and present it gracefully and humorously so that the ugliness is seen....Satire changes a bad thing into a good thing, an untrue thing into a true thing. It makes us laugh to make the ugly more apparent."  

Mr. Siegel lectured on many works of Dickens including Hard Times, and I once heard him say that Pickwick Papers was his favorite book. -NH

From Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens--

Chapter 10: Containing the whole Science of GovernmentThe Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.
     This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.
     Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.
     It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done.

....For more, see http://www.dickens-literature.com/Little_Dorrit/index.html

The Gates in Central Park

We went to see the Gates on the last day, Sunday, February 27--and we thought they were beautiful! The park was filled with people on that sunny winter day, pleased, in awe, and puzzled, too. What do they mean?

I'm grateful to see that this principle does explain why thousands went to see them, came from other states to see them--"All beauty," Eli Siegel said, "is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

The 7,500 gates with their saffron fabric rippling in the wind are fixed and flowing, separate and joined in a way that is stirring and brings something so new to the curving pathways they frame. Do we want to be free to move and be stirred by the wind--and have a solid, sensible base? Do we want to stand out, glow, contrast with what is around us and blend with it, too; bring new life to what is around us, as the gates did to the stark winter landscapes of our beloved Central Park?

Read, too, what Dorothy Koppelman, founding director of the Terrain Gallery (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year!) writes about the Gates at http://ck-dk-art.blogspot.com.

These pictures are from the Central Park website--the second is of Christo & Jeanne-Claude, the artists.

What Is Honesty?

This is a definition of honesty that I've studied, from Eli Siegel's important work Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World:

Honesty is the whole desire of the self to have pleasure by seeing what it is and what other things are.--[The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #300]

In the comment to this definition, Mr. Siegel says:

There can be no honesty without knowing. To be honest is to wish to get pleasure by the facts of oneself and everything else: and this means the whole of the facts....Honesty....is a belief, a trust, a gaiety and exaltation in what is. In every one of us there is a desire to accommodate the motives or purposes of the self to what is; or a fear of doing so, which is equivalent to making what is, fit our desires prematurely, disproportionately, inaccurately.

I've seen that what I once and many people associate with honesty--saying things to others even if you know they'll be angered or hurt by what you say--is not a criterion. We have to be sure we're interested in the whole of the facts about that person--good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. The desire to know a person fully and respect them is often lacking.

Art, meanwhile, that is truly that, is honest--is always respect for the world. So I close my post with a work I love by Degas. She's a singer, the title tells us. She's in the shadow, somewhat; she's not flattered by Degas; the pastels have an edgy quality--blue-greens, oranges, and yellows. Degas has us see her depth, her struggle; he wanted to see her, to have pleasure by seeing what is.