I publish here a paper I gave on how love can succeed, that was first published in
The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #1713, March 5, 2008, titled "The Opposites, Love, & Florence Nightingale." Everyone wants to understand this important subject, and I'm happy to convey what I've learned from Aesthetic Realism!
For Love to Succeed
By Devorah Tarrow
Aesthetic Realism explains: “The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.”2 But women have had another purpose: to conquer a man, have him extol us, make us the most important thing in existence. In an issue of TRO, Ellen Reiss writes that
"love is good will:...the feeling that I am more, not because I can make this person silly about me, but because I've honestly seen value in someone not myself, standing for a world not myself." [TRO 1655]
A Fight between Two Purposes
Like many women today, I went after having my way with men, including through body. It wasn't that I didn't try to have love on what I thought was a solid basis: I would have said I valued honesty between a man and woman. I wrote in a letter to a man I felt I loved, “You I can trust. You will give me honest answers—no more façades. It seems I don't know you or me. Oh man, I want to talk and talk and feel and feel.”
Though we did “talk and talk,” I had another value too: love meant for me to be praised lavishly, including through sex.
When he and I fought and broke up I didn't want to question myself or know why he felt the way he did. I had no idea why this relation had failed: it had seemed to be based on so much we had in common. We had the same political views; we had the same friends; we were both Jewish! So I spent days sobbing in my bed, cursing him and myself, feeling life was over.
It was at this time that I read Eli Siegel's essay “The Ordinary Doom.” There are these sentences:
To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.
The universe? What did that have to do with love? Yes, we went out to movies and concerts and parties, but wasn't the purpose of love for two people to adore and protect each other? I began to learn that, indeed, I was a universe skipper: I hadn't really thought that the world, the big world outside of me, and how fair I was to it, had anything to do with love. The idea that it did, thrilled me!
Studying in classes taught by Eli Siegel, I heard him talk to men, and as I began to care for Jeffrey Carduner, I knew Mr. Siegel would understand his life deeply. But I also had a hope that Mr. Siegel would tell Jeff how lucky he was to have me! Instead, he asked Jeffrey deep, ethical questions about how he, Jeff, saw the world. For example, Mr. Siegel asked: “Do you give enough meaning to what is not yourself?”
When Jeffrey said thoughtfully, “No,” I was surprised, and respected him. Mr. Siegel asked more questions, including about how Jeff could see his father more justly. I began to look at him differently—not as a worshipper of Devorah. I saw that to be able to love him, I had to want to know him and encourage him to meet his hopes.
We Continue to Learn
Jeff is now my husband, and together we continue to learn that love means the desire to know. In a class years ago, Mr. Siegel spoke to me critically about my desire to sum Jeffrey up, think I knew him. At that time, we were caring more for each other but we were fighting, and Mr. Siegel explained why. “Everyone,” he said, “wants to be loved and adored, and at the same time they don't want to respect the other living being for adoring them. The idea of respecting a person for loving them is too much for people.”
Speaking to me, he explained:
"You want to be loved, and at the same time be superior to the man who loves you.... Aesthetic Realism says the fight between high and low, inferior and superior, respect and contempt, is in human nature, and if a person sees that fight this way[, as part of humanity itself,] she'll be better off....Every woman should ask, is the problem she has something peculiar to her, or is it the condition humaine, let alone feminine?"
Then he described the way of seeing we needed to have for love—and our lives—to succeed. It is to feel,
”I want to give everything to that person that he has, including his possibilities, and not to deny him anything because I seem to be the gainer by it. That way I'm fair to myself.” Give existence everything that comes to existence. It's the only way to be fair to yourself!
I'm very glad that, with my dear husband, I can learn every day how to do this!
1(NY: Modern Library, 1918), p. 137.
2Eli Siegel, Self and World (NY: Definition Press, 1981), p.171.
