Musical event to take place on Sunday, February 12

I invite you to a tremendously beautiful and rousing musical event to take place on Sunday, February 12, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, at 2:30! It's performed by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, directed by Anne Fielding, and includes commentary on the meaning of the songs as well. The performers are consummate professionals and you will be moved and delighted! This is being repeated by popular demand, and you'll love it. That's at 141 Greene Street, SoHo, NYC, and visit the website at www.AestheticRealismTheatreCo.org Dev

Holiday event will be moving

I invite everyone to a holiday event at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation presented by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company -- with songs of the season and commentary by the performers, based on this principle of Aesthetic Realism stated by Eli Siegel, "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." It's on Saturday night, Dec. 17, 8 PM, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, off West Houston Street, in SoHo. You can make reservations by calling 212.777.4490, or seating is on a first arrival basis. There's a suggested contribution of $10.

You'll love these events!

You'll love two upcoming events at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. They are Saturday, Nov. 19: a whole night on jazz and the new relation Aesthetic Realism shows between art, music, jazz, and the self! And December 17: "Christmas Carols Begin with the World's Opposites!" These are all presented by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company! Call 212.777.4490 for info or visit http://www.AestheticRealism.org

Lynette Abel tells of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others

Dear friends,

I want to tell you of a great website, that of Lynette Abel, a scholar, writer on women's issues, and one of the consultations coordinators at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. It is http://www.lynetteable.org On this website she writes of classes she attended taught by poet and philosopher Eli Siegel, and reports written up of these classes. She writes of reports she includes:

"Freedom Is with Imagination," Nevertheless Poetry class given by Eli Siegel,
September 29, 1971. In it, he discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge, including his great poem "Christabel," and Homer's Iliad, the translations of Richmond Lattimore, and Alexander Pope.
This is a report written by Paul Abel, musician, retired airline pilot, and my father. He studied Aesthetic Realism in classes with Eli Siegel in the 1970s. I am grateful to him for introducing me to this great education. In speaking to him recently, he told me he is so glad to have his report published on my website.

"Instinct and Mme de Sevigne,"a report by Lynette Abel on a class given by Eli Siegel, December 11, 1964, one in a series he gave on instinct.


I urge you to read this wonderful site, and see what's true about the intellectual education, Aesthetic Realism.

Aesthetic Realism in the News

These are important articles about how to end prejudice, and have education in America succeed--at http://www.perey-anthropology.net/

Arnold Perey's website important in anthropology

To understand the importance of anthropology to our lives, to understand the cause of racism and how it can end, see Arnold Perey's website at http://www.perey-anthropology.net/

Remember Sunday, October 23rd Musical Event

Remember this great event this Sunday, "The Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth--Songs about Love, Justice, and Everybody's Feelings!" at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, SoHo. 2:30 PM

These articles have answers to current questions!

For answers to what our society needs, read these articles at http://www.aestheticrealism.net/

How can a person have authentic self-expression?

Read Miriam Mondlin's excellent website at http://mmondlin.home.mindspring.com/eli-sieg ... /eli-siegel-on-stuttering.html Her account of her Aesthetic Realism education.

Do you want to hear exciting songs and thrilling commentary?

You will love "The Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth --Songs about Love, Justice, and Everybody's Feelings!" On Sunday, October 23, 2:30 PM, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, in New York City's SoHo, it will be wonderful--and honest about what's going on in our country! It's presented by the singers and actors of the professional Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.

More about a great, honest, effective teaching method

With all that's demanded from children to learn--read about the method that works, at http://www.aestheticrealism.org/Education_link.htm

A teaching method that works

I'm mad that anyone would attack this kind, tremendously effective philosophy and teaching method--the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method! Read this and see what works -- http://www.lenbernstein.com/Martone.html

Aesthetic Realism Has Answer to Racism & Prejudice

As schools are worried about bullying and prejudice, this website Aesthetic Realism in the News, has answers parents and teachers should know. And also see: http://www.aestheticrealism.net/education.html

Stuttering can really end!

I think you will find this website useful on the subject of stuttering; in fact, with new information: http://mmondlin.home.mindspring.com/eli-siegel/eli-siegel-on-stuttering.html

Leila Rosen tells of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

I highly recommend this site because of its depth about the beauty of literature and poetry--Leila Rosen's website. She is a high school English teacher who's given presentations at many schools and conferences on this successful method.

Fantastic photographs

You'll love Len Bernstein's website, with thoughtful photographs of people and places. I highly recommend it--and see Amy and Louis Dienes' photos too at http://www.dienes-dienes.com

A site you'll love--about sculpture and Greta Garbo and more!

I'm glad to tell you of the website of myself and Jeffrey Carduner--at http://www.tarrow-carduner.net In it, are articles I wrote about love, about Greta Garbo, and about Beatrice Wood, the ceramist, whose work I esteem very much. And you'll learn about the great integrity and honesty of the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel.

You'll never hear and see a musical event like this!

You will love "The Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth --Songs about Love, Justice, and Everybody's Feelings!" On Sunday, October 23, 2:30 PM, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, in New York City's SoHo, it will be wonderful--and honest about what's going on in our country! It's presented by the singers and actors of the professional Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.

Really Cool Jazz Night!

Hear jazz musician Alan Shapiro [www.alanshapiromusic.net/], and much much more, as jazz is played and talked about--from its beginnings--at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, November 19, 8 to 10 PM! Bessie Smith, Baby Dodds, and Shelby Foote's short story about a jazz trumpeter called "Ride Out" talked about by poet and critic Eli Siegel. The deepest kind of understanding, based on Mr. Siegel's statement "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." You'll never have another night like this--and it's titled "Jazz & Life: A Celebration!"

Founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel, is told of

For those who'd like to know more about poet and critic Eli Siegel, with whom I was honored to study from 1968 to 1978, please see http://perey-anthropology.blogspot.com/2005/02/eli-siegel-brief-biography.html

Anthropology and You--Very Surprising, Wonderful, and True

You'll find how much you can love anthropology by reading this site of Dr. Arnold Perey, who teaches at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

Great articles--anti-racism, about how education can succeed, how love can fare well

Please see Aesthetic Realism in the News for terrific, deep, kind articles -- writings that could make America far kinder,k which is so needed now what with the disaster of Katrina.

Articles about how racism can end, education can succeed, and more!

Please see these great articles at Aesthetic Realism in the News.

No Matter What Lies--What's True and Good Lives!

This is the URL of a flyer for a great event--with singing and ethics and real, vibrant, alive commentary about what's going on in the world and in us right now!--
http://www.aestheticrealism.org/Songs-10-05.pdf You'll love it--Oct.23, 2005 at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, Off West Houston Str., NYC, 10012, 212-777-4490. Be There!

A kind book against racism is made into a dramatic reading: Sunday, June 12

Hear Gwe, Young Man of New Guinea, A Novel Against Racism, performed Sunday, June 12, 2:30 at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, SoHo, NYC. The novel is by anthropologist Arnold Perey, and is moving. The anthropology is authentic, as Dr. Perey lived with Gwe's people, the Mengti people, in New Guinea. His doctorate advisor was Margaret Mead. This book tells a story of how a white anthropologist learned to see how much LIKE he was to the men and women, through his study of Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by poet and critic Eli Siegel.

And the drama is also in the stories of love, war, the family, while, all the time, two people come to see one another as deeply alike. It's tremendously moving and urgently needed now! This is a dramatic reading, with Dr. Perey, Anne Fielding, and Bennett Cooperman. -- Devorah Tarrow

Fabulous presentation by Aesthetic Realism Theatre Co.

Saturday, April 30, I attended a May Day Celebration at the American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark that was absolutely smashing! It was in honor of the IWW, the Wobblies, and among the entertainers were Anne Feeney and George and Julius. And the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company sang and commented on union and labor songs. It was one of the deepest presentations I've ever heard, as that theatre company showed, for example, how the song "Ten Cents a Dance" is about the feelings of a working woman, a woman who has to earn money by dancing with customers--and someone makes a profit from her work--work which is degrading and saddening. See this Theatre Co. at http://aestheticrealismtheatreco.org/

Events at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City

Events at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City

Papers and Talks on Art and Artists

You can find really useful works on art and artists, such as Monet and Guston at this website of the Terrain Gallery, at http://www.terraingallery.org/Art-Talks-Archive.html

Women's seminar is a must!

If you haven't already, make plans to attend a seminar: "Loving a Man and Being an Individual--Can a Woman Have Both?" at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, NYC, on Thursday, May 19, at 6:30 PM. For info, call 212-777-4490 and visit http://www.AestheticRealism.org

Aesthetic Realism Art Classes!

You'll be very interested in the art works on this page, and in the classes in art, taught at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation by some of the foremost artists in America: http://www.terraingallery.org/ArtClasses.html

Aesthetic Realism art classes!

You'll love this page: http://www.terraingallery.org/ArtClasses.html
and you'll want to look into these art classes, based on the Aesthetic Realism education founded by Eli Siegel.

A time-tested educational method: Seminar, May 12

On Thursday, May 12, at 6:30 PM, metropolitan area educators will present, in a public seminar open to teachers, parents, students, administrators, and all people interested in the future of education: "The Answer to the Fury and Failure in America's Schools: The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method!"

The announcement for it can be seen at http://www.aestheticrealism.org/education-seminar-5-05.pdf

With demonstrations of lessons from their own classrooms, the speakers will show the success of this method, and the excitement of their students as they really, eagerly learn and become kinder to one another!

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation is a not-for-profit educational foundation, 141 Greene Street, in the SoHo section of Manhattan. For further information, I can be reached Monday through Friday, 10 to 6, at 212-777-4490.

Stuttering can really change

I think you will find this website useful on the subject of stuttering; in fact, with new information: http://mmondlin.home.mindspring.com/eli-siegel/eli-siegel-on-stuttering.html

The tragedy in Minnesota can be understood!

Read Jeff Carduner's important, courageous article on the cause of youth violence--at http://www.tarrow-carduner.net

The Terrain Gallery celebrates art and life!

If you care for art, you will care for this site, all about what makes for beauty in the visual arts: http://www.terraingallery.org/

If you like theatre and excellent acting, you'd like this webwsite!

http://www.aestheticrealismtheatreco.org/

Read about a woman who honors art and teaching

See this website about artist and teacher Donita Ellison.

A fine anti-prejudice website

http://www.cjbalchin.blogspot.com/

Great class: What Does It Mean for a Wife to Encourage Her Husband?

Aesthetic Realism & Marriage class, Sat., April 2, 11AM -12:30 PM, taught by Barbara Allen, Anne Fielding, Pauline Meglino, has marriages succeed. This is a great class and this time-tested education founded by philosopher Eli Siegel shows: “The purpose of marriage is to like the world.” 141 Greene St., SoHo, 212-777-4490, www.AestheticRealism.org

Miriam Makeba & the Desire in Women for a Beautiful Power

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT'S GOOD POWER? by Devorah Tarrow
Presented at an Aesthetic Realism Seminar, Aesthetic Realism Foundation, NYC


I have learned from Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel that there are two kinds of power: one arises from a person's deepest desire, to like and respect the world, and is the source of pride and self respect. The other is completely unjust, hurts people and weakens us: it comes from the desire to be separate and superior to the world, from the desire for contempt. In an Aesthetic Realism class of 1972, Eli Siegel gave the criterion for good power:

"The way that good power can be distinguished is through asking the question: "If this desire of mine was to be successful, and I have power over this person, would the world look better and would the person himself or herself be stronger?" Any power that a human being has over another that doesn't make the person it is exerted on stronger and the world in which the power takes place more beautiful is bad power."

I’ve seen that though there are these two possibilities in us, our real power is our ability to know and value the meaning of other people and things, and to have a good and strengthening effect. A woman must have good power in order to respect herself and to feel proud. Tonight, I’m going to talk about what I learned about power for my own life and of what women are learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations. And I’m going to talk about aspects of the life of the singer, Miriam Makeba. She is from South Africa, whose government had power over millions of people in one of the ugliest ways power has shown itself: apartheid. I learned from Aesthetic Realism, that the way of seeing people had by the white South African government, which is the desire to be superior to everything different from oneself, is a possibility in every person, a possibility that will flourish unless it is criticized and changed. Learning this and what good power really is, made me a fairer and kind¬er person. Miriam Makeba's life is useful because it shows the struggle in a person between good and bad power, and that a woman can respect herself only when she chooses power in behalf of justice to the world.

I. I Learned There Are Two Kinds of Power

There is hardly a woman who wouldn't recognize the kind of power I wrote about at the age of 16:

"I swear I've never had power like this before! Tom adores me and I adore him and we're just like two birds in a nest. He and I laughed over his dates with Samantha and he told me he never even kissed her. He seems to think her fairly bad after me. Truthfully it doesn't worry me a bit, but I'd better act like it does if I want Tom to think I'm not taking him for granted. Which I do in a perfectly horrible way."

Power to me, as it is to most women, was the ability to get a man to do what I wanted him to do, to see my effect on him unmistakably, and to be able to think less of him at the same time. And I wanted to use him to look down on other people including Samantha, a girl whom I had known for many years, and who was supposed to be my friend. As I gloated over the defeat of my rival, I did not know I was going against my own deepest hope, to be fair to the world and to have a good effect on it. I didn't want to know who Tom Allen was, I wanted to use him to make myself important. I did not know that this way of using anoth¬er human being was contempt: as Eli Siegel defined, the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the out¬side world." And I didn’t know that this contempt was the reason, as time went on, I liked myself less and less. No matter how much I said, "I'm not worried a bit," I was worried. By the time I met Aesthetic Realism when I was 2l, though I would tell myself to stop it, I was driven to flirt with and conquer men.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism the one reason this way of going after power made me dislike myself: it was a substitute for the real power: being able to know and to like, and to have a good effect on the world. When I first read this in Self and World by Eli Siegel, I began to see a new and kind possibility for myself:

"We want to be praised, to have power, but we also want to deserve this. There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious. Well, if we praise ourselves and we know we have been unfair to outside reality in doing so, there is a nervous conflict in us....To love ourselves really, we have to love and want to know outside reality; that is, the outside form of ourselves, or the world."

Nowhere else--not in any psychology or sociology course or college I attended--did I learn that true power, good power, begins with the desire to be know the world. I learned there was something larger I wanted, and every woman wants: to like her purpose with the world, to like how we think about and see the depths of things and people, not to capture a man.

From the beginning, Mr. Siegel spoke to me about power. He asked:

Eli Siegel. You have had people affected and not been affected yourself?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

Eli Siegel. Do you feel you hurt people?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

Eli Siegel. Are you a mingling of tenderness and harshness? Do they give you trouble?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

And he said:

"To conquer reality is the most stupid, bourgeois, loathsome thing you can do. It is not to be conquered, it is to be seen. The desire of people deeply or unconsciously is to see the world. The world is waiting to be known, not to be conquered."

This is magnificent. I had loathed myself because I wanted to conquer the world, not to know it. When Eli Siegel criticized my way of seeing the world, my whole life took a new, fairer direction. "A problem in life," Mr. Siegel said, "is how to have the power we want without hurting ourselves. Practice this line," he said, "'Have a daffodil, he bellowed!'" This sentence puts together opposites that were the cause of such pain in me: harshness and tenderness, force and delicacy, affecting and being affected.

When I learned to be affected by who a person is, to want to know and have a good effect, I felt for the first time I had a power that made me proud to be alive. I love Eli Siegel for this. I still remember practically the first time I actually listened to what another person was saying, didn't try to overpower them, and thought about what I might say that could be useful. I was able to be honestly affected by a man, to want to learn from him, and this has made possible my marriage to Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner. And I was able to have a good effect on the lives of women we have the privilege to teach in Aesthetic Realism consultations.

II. Good and Bad Power Is Personal and International

In 1960 Americans heard the voice of Miriam Makeba singing Jikele Maweni on her first record album. When people heard her sing, it was the first time most had heard a South African person. She showed as she sang this song about Zulu warriors having to retreat, as she sang a wedding song, a hunt¬ing song, that South African people were real, had feelings, like the people of America. She also told of the hideous, political and economic system apartheid under which millions of native South Africans were forced to live by a white, powerfully armed minority. As she sang, and as she wanted to bring the reality of her people's suffering to the whole world, she had the good power we want to have, as Mr. Siegel said, to "make the...world in which the power takes place more beautiful." Aesthetic Realism makes clear how Miriam Makeba's life can be used to understand two kinds of power in every person, and to make the choice for justice that is an emergency for every person and nation. In l970, Eli Siegel said there is a force working now to have the profit system, by which one man uses another man to make profit for himself: "Good will is the most powerful thing in the world; it's more powerful than General Motors, Allied Chemical, and AT&T." Miriam Makeba's life is part of that power of good will working now.

She was born Zenzi Makeba, March 4, 1932 in Johannesburg, her father of the Xhosa, her mother of the Swazi tribes. Her peoples had lived in southern Africa for centuries as herdsman and farmers: "We lived in harmony with the land for so long," she writes in her new book Makeba: My Story, "we had no reason to think this har¬mony would not last forever. Ours was a marriage, a love affair the land would nurture us, and we would honor the land." But in 1652, the Dutch East India Company, and later the British, with superior weapons, brutally took the land away from the original South Africans.

Miriam Makeba saw what Eli Siegel described in lines of the poem printed in the international periodical THE RIGHT OF AESTHETIC REALISM TO BE KNOWN 787, "Slick Dishonesty, Executive, Will Be There":

"South Africa, with your denying that Africans are entirely human, what have you to do with a geographically felicitous Africa?
South Africa its miles, its fallings, its waters, its loftiness is badly covered by those ruling it, seeing the earliest Africans there as not persons."

Miriam Makeba's family, friends, teachers were seen as "not persons." Mr. Siegel defined fascism as "the unwillingness to understand as power." This is the state of mind made nationally murderous, that, in a less dramatic way, I saw I had in myself towards fellow human beings. South Africa was ruled by a white English minority until, in 1947, the Dutch Afrikaner Nationalist Party won "national" elections (whites only allowed to vote), and then began "apartheid" or aparthood. She writes of a night in the 1940s when she was staying with cousins: her father had died and her mother worked in Johannesburg and could not keep her child with her. It was at a time when men were required to carry "passbooks":

"The darkness is shattered by a loud banging on the door....the white policeman force their way inside. "Pass!" they shout....One of my uncles does not produce his passbook quickly enough to satisfy one young policeman....The youth curses my uncle and slaps him. My cousin...has to watch his father be humiliated....My uncle has to take the humiliation....Sometimes people are taken away and are never seen again....So my uncle swallows the insults, and his son watches, and learns, and remembers....I am learning a lot about the way the world is for us."

Aesthetic Realism shows a child has a choice to make about how to use what she sees: will she like the world or dislike it, will she find her power in going out to meet things and try to know them, or to go into herself and say this world is not good enough for her? Miriam Makeba saw the greatest horror: people seen, as Mr. Siegel said, as less than human, and she had to do something about it. Whereas my way of power had been to assert myself in a world I didn't like, it seems Miriam Makeba's way was to retreat from it. I was affected that she said over and over in her autobiography that she who could sound like she did in "Jikele Maweni" was shy. "I am very shy by nature," she writes, "except when I sing, then watch out!" She also was known for her very soft voice and recessive manner. I believe as a little girl Zenzi had a tendency to want both to go out to understand this world, and also to retreat into herself. Mr. Siegel so beautifully understood how a woman can feel in his great essay, "A Woman is the Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites":

"Towards something is in the feminine mind importantly: the future as outward and to be visited and had. But how much retreat is in woman, too, the unseen sinking, the leaving for a previously chosen background."

How much "unseen sinking" has been in Miriam Makeba, I do not know, and it is a miracle at all that anyone was able to bear what the South Africans did. Yet, women have been confused about how to use what they have met, and this has been talked about in Aesthetic Realism consultations. I’m grateful, and the women who study Aesthetic Realism are, because Aesthetic Realism wants to know and understand what they have undergone as they have met actual prejudice and inhumanity. Women have been criticized and passionately en¬couraged to use what they have met to know this world, to value what truly has value, and to fight for justice. The Three Persons spoke to Alicia Young of Chile, whose family had been through agony as rulers of her country tried to protect the profit system. Her grandfather was jailed and never seen again. Though she had a quiet, sweet man¬ner and voice, inside herself she was superior and furious. She was also very against herself. She said "I'll welcome my relation to the world only if it brings me some peace." My consultation trio, The Three Persons, asked her:

TTP. Do you want to feel so disgusted with the world, you can just go into yourself.

A. Young. Yes, I know it isn't right. But I say people are never as nice as I am back! Why do I do that?

TTP. Do you think there is a victory in that?

Alicia Young. Yes, I think there is. What is the victory?

TTP. Do you think there is anything better for you than what is named Alicia Young? Are you superior and within yourself?

A. Young. Yes!

The Three Persons. Do you think you show an opinion of the whole world in your soft voice you're a nice girl and everything else is terrible?

A. Young. Yes.

Mr. Siegel asked me, a girl different from Miss Young and Miriam Makeba, if I was always going to sound like a little girl lost in a forest? I saw I got a bad kind of power this way. Alicia Young began to see she had used what she had met to feel she was superior to everything. The way this had showed itself in her was by being, as Mr. Siegel said in a line of poetry, in her "own majestic booth." Once she saw this, she began to change. She saw there was a greater power she wanted much more: to be able to know and like the world.

There was something in Zenzi Makeba too that wanted so deeply to like this world, and it was in how she felt about music. She studied music in school, sang in the church chorus. She writes about herself at the age of 10, watching the Bapedi people dance:

"Music is a type of magic...It can make sad people happy. It can make dull people sit up and pay attention...Music gets deep inside me and starts to shake things up....The Bapedi stomp and sing out in the field, and there I am, on the edge, singing with them, apart from them but sharing their joy. Who can keep us down as long as we have our music?"

In his book SELF AND WORLD, Eli Siegel gives the great and beautiful
explanation of what was happening inside Zenzi Makeba that would have her sing in such a way that the whole world was moved:

"Through merging with things, the artist has become deeply independent. In feeling things he has controlled them and been controlled by them. He has come to power by undergoing the might of things and giving them form through his personality."

III. She Finds Her True Power

In 1953, the Manhattan Brothers, a popular black singing group in South Africa, heard her and asked her to join them. In 1959, she appeared in an anti government film, "Come Back, Africa," made secretly by an English filmmaker. Makeba was allowed to visit and sing in America, sponsored by Harry Belafonte. But when she applied for her visa to return home, her passport was stamped "Invalid." She has never been able to return to her homeland.

Here she was, a new celebrity: she could have gotten power by continuing simply to be, as she herself says, "the darling of the newsmagazines and the music industry." Instead she made a choice, to have a good and strengthening effect on people. At a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning and there was cruel opposition to it, at a time when no one knew what was going on in South Africa, much less protested it, and in South Africa without fear of death Miss Makeba began to speak out, to have a kind of power she never had before. In 1963, she spoke for the first time at the United Nations:

“My country has been turned by the Verwoerd Government into a huge prison....I must urge the United Nations to impose a complete boycott of South Africa. The first priority must be to stop the shipments of arms. I have not the slightest doubt that these arms will be used against African women and children."

Miriam Makeba was doing that which every person, every woman, wants deeply to be able to do: to stand honestly, passionately for justice, to make the world more beautiful. She writes of what she felt to herself at that time:

"Miriam Makeba is no longer just an African singer. I am a symbol of my repressed people. To be in such a position is to live with a great responsibility. It is as if I am more than myself."

IV. A Woman Learns What Her Truest Power Is

It gives me great pleasure to say a little of what has happened to Alicia Young's life because it shows the enduring power of Aesthetic Realism. Through her study, she has seen how she has hurt herself feeling other people could never understand her, weren't good enough for her, and that she should go within herself. But she saw what was in this: we asked her, "Do you think there is a power in being recessive?" "Yes," she said. The Three Persons, in a consultation, asked her to make a wide gesture with her arms, something Eli Siegel had asked a young woman to do in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, and say, "All you out there I want to know you!" She did it, and it was lovely.

TTP. Write every day something someone does you respect. You don't see the victory yet in having a good effect on other people. But it is your greatest ambition.

Miss Young was a woman who would cross the street in order to avoid meeting a man. As she studied the opposites in men, she began to see men with more thoughtful respect. We asked: "Do you want to conquer a man and use him to make a secluded world for yourself, or do you want to know a man who is interested in truth, including the truth about you?" "Truth," she said. One of the reasons I hope Miriam Makeba studies Aesthetic Realism, is because of the hopes and the pain she has had about love. I believe her marriage of 10 years to Stokely Carmichael was part of her desire for good power because he had an energy for justice that I think she felt strengthened her, made her more passionate.

But when she married Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba was blacklisted by the music business. She met terror that justice might come to all people in America. But she didn't stop her marriage they moved to Guinea at the kind invitation of its president Sekou Toure. Yet I think there was pain with her husband she didn't have to have.

Ms. Makeba should be able to know that her deepest questions and her deepest hopes are answered in the art she loves. Eli Siegel stated "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." I believe this is what we hear as Miss Makeba sang the South African national anthem, in the Paul Simon Graceland Tour in Zimbabwe. She has beautiful power as she merges with thousands of others, calling for the freedom of all Africans. She both sinks and rises as she sings: she yields to join with others and then asserts herself to sing one verse. Aesthetic Realism beautifully shows, that as she puts opposites together singing here, she is answering her deepest question, and every person's deepest hope about how to have good power.

I want her to know of what Ellen Reiss wrote in TRO 787:

"The force of ethics working through years has brought things to such a point that the contemptuous use of man for profit, the contemptuous ownership of the earth by only some people, can no longer function....South Africa will be owned differently in keeping with this statement, mighty and true, from Eli Siegel's Self and World: 'The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his.'"

People throughout the world have the need and right to know their deepest hope is to make stronger and more beautiful every person and the whole world. Alicia Young wrote: "I want to be in the world liking it, and using myself to have other people like the world. If I can accomplish this my life will have the meaning I want it to have."

Sticks & stones!

Since what I respect, Aesthetic Realism, is being maligned on the Internet, and since therefore I am seen not as a critic and scientist but as something quite different, I urge you to visit the Friends of Aesthetic Realism website at http://www.counteringthelies.com/ and also my own statement on it at http://www.counteringthelies.com/d_tarrow.html And you'll have a wonderful time learning about this kind education and its founder, the poet and critic Eli Siegel.

Praise and Approval, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

Women, Ethics, Aesthetic Realism

My name is Devorah Tarrow. I am a sociologist and Aesthetic Realism consultant. This blog is to tell people about the education Aesthetic Realism, founded by the poet and critic Eli Siegel. I’m going to tell you straight off--I think Aesthetic Realism is great, kind, and needed education. I felt that when I met it in 1968, and heard this principle, stated by Mr. Siegel, “There is a disposition in every person to think he’ll be for himself by making less of the outside world.” This is contempt, and the reason we don’t like ourselves.

I’d been studying clinical psychology, intending to be a therapist, and with all the theories I’d read, nothing made sense to me like that principle of contempt. Because I knew I had it. For the first time I began to see yes, I made less of people in order to make more of myself, and it was no wonder I didn’t like myself--I was unfair.

I realized that up until that point, I hadn’t felt that any statement in psychology was really true. It was all theory and you were supposed to pick and choose, but there was no principle that was true about people. I had the honor to study with Eli Siegel from 1968 to 1978, and since 1978, I’ve studied in professional classes for consultants and associates taught by Ellen Reiss, who is the Class Chairman. I’ve taught women with my consultation trio, The Three Persons, since 1971, at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, a not-for-profit educational foundation. And the following will be a seminar paper I gave there titled “Praise and Approval--Is There Anything a Woman Wants More?” And there will be more to come!

posted by Devorah Tarrow @ 4:19 PM 0 comments

PRAISE AND APPROVAL‑‑IS THERE ANYTHING A WOMAN WANTS MORE?
(c) 2005 by Devorah Tarrow



When I was 18 and distressed about how I was with men, I wrote in my journal about a conversation I had with a young man:

"Jim and I talked. I wish I could convey the emotions I went through....We started talking about my relationships with guys‑‑the deception of them, the coyness.... After he got finished demolishing my ego by telling me how I faked, acted selfish, didn't know how to be a friend, I loved him because what he said were such insights, was so true....He looked at me and told me the truth. I could never ask for more."

Yes, there is something a woman wants far more than praise and approval, and that is why I wrote with such feeling about a man not flattering me but saying things I felt were true. But no matter how I vowed to be better and not be selfish or coy or fake with men, I kept going after the kind of approval that made me despise myself, until I met Aesthetic Realism and learned what I wanted more. When I read these sentences by Eli Siegel from his great essay The Ordinary Doom, I was swept by their logic and knew they were about me:

"Our desire for praise, so common and often so hurtful, is really a substitute for our desire to be known as we are....It is true that most people seem to prefer being praised without being known, to being known without being praised; nevertheless our greatest desire is to be known first. We live not only in our own minds, but in other minds; our minds depend for their full existence on being apprehended by other minds justly, beautifully. If this does not happen, there is misfortune."

More than praise and approval, we want to be encouraged to go after our deepest purpose, which is to know and like the world. This includes criticism of where we are not fair to people, to things. I love Mr. Siegel for his seeing how much a woman's desire is for truth, including about ourselves. That is the real approval we long for, and if we don't get this, no matter how many hugs, how much "support" of our "self‑esteem" we get, we simply cannot feel we are wholly ourselves. Said Mr. Siegel in his lecture Aesthetic Realism and Love:

"Our biggest desire is to feel that the big world in which we are is something that makes us grow, something that makes us what we want to be. "

Meanwhile, there is that in a woman that wants to be made more important than everything and everyone else, no matter what the facts. This is contempt, the desire to get "a false importance or glory through the lessening of things not oneself."
I. The Fight in Women between Approval and Justice

In an Aesthetic Realism class, when I said I wanted to understand why I didn't like myself for what I went after with men, Eli Siegel asked me:

"What is the chief order of business?‑‑Is it to be just or to be cared for? Do you feel, like most people, that you don't have to be just, because you think you're not cared for?"

DT. Yes‑‑I feel that is what I do!

ES. There is usually a fight between being admired and seeing something truly.

And he said with humor:

ES. Well, Miss Tarrow, you're a real scientist‑‑keen about everything, except yourself!

This was true. As I was growing up in San Antonio, I was in a terrific debate between wanting to be praised no matter what, and wanting to be fair to something. I liked learning things‑‑I loved to read, and studying the violin and playing with others in the San Antonio youth orchestra‑‑I got pleasure trying to be fair to words and to notes and other instruments. Sometimes I heard sincere praise for this.

But when I found I could do things well, I used the approval I got to think I was better than anyone else. As time went on, though I studied hard in school, the thing that seemed to give me the rush, the glory, the thrill, was the praise that made me feel like a star. If there was an election, I ran for office: 6th grade class president; cheerleader; princess in Queen Esther's Court; B'nai B'rith Girls yearbook editor; Community Council secretary in college. If I lost, I would be devastated; yet often if I won, something fell flat and I didn't know why.

I needed to know that what made me feel disgusted with myself no matter how much approval I got was my desire to be scornfully superior. Explained Mr. Siegel in his lecture, "No person can like herself unless she likes the outside world. But people also want to dislike the world, to be contemptuous of it....So there is a great deal of difficulty." This was why I often felt bad, and despised myself for being competitive, jealous and hoping others would flop. For instance, while outwardly I seemed to admire Suzy Jefferson's beauty and intelligence, inwardly I was glad that her big family was poorer than mine, so I could feel superior to her.

As time went on, like a woman today in a coffee bar, I would work to get a man to want me, but then be disgusted with myself when he showed he did, and angry at him for not seeing who I was. Yet I couldn't seem to change. In my journal I gave it to myself as I wrote a mock letter to a former professor whom I'd asked for a praising recommendation: 'Dear Mr. Finch, You couldn't have said too many nice things about me....I'm all grand talk and no grand reality. All fluffy frosting and no cake."

When I met the great logic of Aesthetic Realism about what the self is most deeply after and what interferes, I felt I had emerged into honest sunshine. "We want to be praised," Mr. Siegel wrote with comprehending power in Self and World,

"...but we also want to deserve this. There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious. Well, if we praise ourselves and we know we have been unfair to outside reality in doing so, there is a nervous conflict in us....We can't really think another person loves us unless we really like ourselves with the facts present...."

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel spoke to me about this, as I asserted sadly that all my interest in learning was really a pretense: what I was most interested in was the approval I got through sex. He said:

ES. Is it? Sex is more interesting, but...if you knew that sex would make your mind less powerful, would you be for it?

DT. No.

ES. So what does that show?

DT. That I'm more interested in....

ES. That it is something to consider. People do think that. But if a woman were sure that it would hurt her mind, she wouldn't be for it very much, would she?

DT. That's true.

ES. And you wouldn't be?

DT. That's true!

ES. This has significance. Man and woman are alike there. There's something they cherish in themselves; the way they can see, once they're sure of it.

For the first time I felt I could reach the goal that had been in me but was so hazy until I met the knowledge which made it clear. I was learning that I most deeply wanted to use my mind to see things and people fairly: this I could respect myself for.
Women need to learn--and this is crucial--that we want to be seen, as all people deserve to be, as standing for the world, as having an aesthetic structure: a relation of opposites--such as rest and motion, sureness and unsureness, inside and outside, mind and body, good and evil. As I studied Aesthetic Realism, I came to feel the biggest thing I wanted in love was for a man to want to se me this way and for me to see a man fairly, for who he was, because this was the way I would like myself. Then I met and came to know Jeffrey Carduner, who is now my husband and an Aesthetic Realism consultant. I fell in love with him because he wanted to see me, the person I am, and to make me stronger and better through criticism. And he wanted me to be a good critic of him so he could reach his hopes. There is nothing more roman­tic!


[To be continued]

Another link to a Little Women site

http://www.louisamayalcott.org/index.html

Links to Louisa May Alcott sites

http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/alco-lou.htm

PRAISE AND APPROVAL‑‑IS THERE ANYTHING A WOMAN WANTS MORE? Part 2

This post continues the paper I began to serialize in an earlier posting on my blog. And this part of PRAISE AND APPROVAL‑‑IS THERE ANYTHING A WOMAN WANTS MORE? is about the American author Louisa May Alcott, her novel Little Women, and how Aesthetic Realism consultations answer the deepest questions of women now.

II. What Little Women Shows about Praise

One of the things I loved since I was a girl, as thousands of girls since 1868‑‑is Louisa May Alcott's novel Little Women. I would vow to be like the heroine Jo March, who doesn't care about clothes, or boys' admiring her, or vanity, but says she will go out into the world and "do something very splendid." Throughout the novel, Jo asks for criticism‑‑of her anger, her impatience, her irascibility‑‑and I believe girls have loved her because they wanted criticism too, and saw our struggle in hers. I respect Louisa May Alcott for showing that women are desperate to hear what will have us true to ourselves and fairer to people.

For example, the novel opens with the four March sisters of Concord, Mass.‑‑Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy‑‑complaining about all they don't have‑‑nice dresses, a big house, jewels. Their father is a minister, now a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, and they are rather poor. Then their mother comes home with a letter from him, and they all look at each other guiltily, as he writes of his daughters:

"I know they will...be loving children to you, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully that when I come back to them, I may be fonder and prouder than ever of my little women."
Amy sobbed out, 'I am a selfish girl! But I'll truly try to be better!' 'We all will,' cried Meg. 'I think too much of my looks...but won't any more if I can help it!'"

I didn't know when I first read this, that the greatest 'bosom enemy' is contempt. That is what has us feel we are the most important thing in the world: we don't have to think about what another person deserves as long as we shine, even out‑shine someone else. And it is the thing that makes us ashamed, even if we get the praise we are desperate for.

For instance, Meg goes to a dance at a rich girlfriend's house, and Alcott writes:

"They crimped and curled her hair,...polished her neck and arms with fragrant powder....They laced her into a dress which was so tight she could hardly breathe and so low in the neck that modest Meg blushed at herself in the mirror....Meg...felt as if her 'fun' had really begun at last, for the mirror had plainly told her that she was a 'little beauty.' "

But even as she affects the men present, she is ashamed when a family friend, Theodore Lawrence, sees her. "Don't you like me so?," Meg asks him. "No, I don't," was the blunt reply, "I don't like all the fuss and feathers." Meg is embarrassed, as women have been, even as she bursts out later to her mother: "But it is nice to be praised and admired!" Mr. Siegel wrote about a young woman in his essay The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl:

"Doris is vexed....When she seems to be affecting gen­tle­men, when there is admiration in their eyes, the victory is not entire. Because Doris has come to ask, perhaps more than other girls, "Is it I that is doing these things, or perhaps just someone standing for me?"....A girl...has found it most difficult to be effective as a beautiful feminine being and yet, honestly, to go after being thought of beautifully. First, she had to se her own intention as beautiful. That wasn't easy."

What is in these sentences, The Three Persons spoke about to Dee Simmonds, as she had her first consultations.

III. What She Learned about Praise

I am very grateful to be able to teach women Aesthetic Realism. Every woman who sits down at a consultation table knows we will not flatter, won't kid her along or give her phony buck­ing up statements, but will try to have her see both what she hopes for most deeply and what is in her that is against her own hopes. Such a woman is Dee Simmonds [her name has been changed], a lively computer analyst. She told us she was seeing a man who was separated from his wife, and said that though they would have a good time, later she she'd be confused, distressed, feeling distrustful of him and herself.

Cons. What has he said he cares for in you?

DS. He's said I'm more understanding than his wife.

Cons. That's flattering, but do you think he's using you against his wife, and not trying to understand her?

DS. Oh‑‑yes.

Cons. Do you feel he is kinder to everyone, including his wife, because of you?

DS. I didn't think about this before, but I don't think so.

Cons. Does that matter to you?

DS. Yes, it does.

Cons. Do you think you are going after what you really hope for from yourself? Or do you think, in not being passion­ately interested in this man's being fair to his wife, you are being unjust and hurting yourself?

DS. Yes, I'm hurting my esteem of myself.

Mr. Siegel wrote in an essay titled "The Problem about Approval," that what a woman wants to hear is that both she and the world can look good at the same time: we want to hear "that the like for oneself and the greater approval of the universe are simultaneous." This is what we were asking Ms. Simmonds:

Cons. What do you think is the most important thing in life, having a man approve of you, or having a beautiful attitude to the world?

DS. Oh! Having a beautiful attitude to the world.

Cons. If that's what you're honestly going after, then you'll respect yourself‑‑and a man can!

[to be continued]

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Women, Ethics, Aesthetic Realism