At 17, I packed my trunk and guitar in Massapequa, Long Island and headed out west to college in Montana—determined to study art and music near the Rocky Mountains. I was excited about seeing the American west and learning new things about the world. But often I had another kind of determination—to have my way no matter what. I could be like a steamroller, plowing ahead about something I wanted to do, and no one could talk me out of it.
In an Aesthetic Realism Class, Eli Siegel explained the difference between the two kinds of determination people have. “One,” he said, “has to do with will power…’I want this therefore it must be right!'” When a person is determined in this way, she doesn’t want to see the facts, and instead has the feeling Mr. Siegel described and which I had very often—”clench your teeth and go ahead!”
When our determination is right, Aesthetic Realism shows, there is still something we want, but it is accompanied by a large desire to know, self-questioning, and an ease in welcoming other peoples’ opinions. “The difference,” Mr. Siegel explained, “is between seeing something as good and being determined that something is good.”
I’m very grateful to have learned the difference between these two kinds of determination. I would have ruined my life going after things I thought were “right” just because I wanted them, but which left me feeling colder and harder.
The Determination to See vs. Wanting Our Way
“To live is to have one’s way somehow,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an issue of The Right Of:
The question is whether we know our true way well enough. Our desire to have our way is always accompanied by what the facts are….Reality and the facts may be at one with our desire; or reality and the facts may not be in agreement with our desire.
One way I think my own desire went along with seeing the facts, was through my early care for art. I studied painting, and liked drawing objects with pastels, such as the rough and smooth surface of an old bottle, trying to show the depth inside. I worked to get it right. This was in behalf of a good determination because it came from a desire to see, and I felt proud.
Yet this was very different from what I felt riding my bicycle around Biltmore Shores and seeing that other people in our affluent neighborhood had things my family didn’t have, which made me angry. In 3rd grade, I was jealous when Sharon Miller’s parents bought her the latest style plaid suits with matching fishnet stockings. We lived modestly, and I often felt that I wasn’t going to get what I wanted. Increasingly there came to be a determination in me that if I was to get my way, I would have to be very aggressive about it. When the Christmas catalogues came to our home, I would take them up to my room and look through them with a kind of greedy relish. I admired the jewelry with reverence, thinking of what I would get if I had money. These catalogues were like a bible to me.
As time went on and my parents had 5 more children—all boys—it became increasingly hard for them to make ends meet. Though we belonged to a beach club and went on summer vacations, there was a lot of pain about money and also how they saw each other. Often there would be fights.
I think my mother, Marion Nietsch felt things were too much for her. Though I saw a deep kindness in her when I was a little girl, as the years went on she got harder, and increasingly used alcohol to get some solace.
I’m sorry to say that I was in a team with my father Richard Nietsch against my mother. I was competitive with her and my brothers for his attention, and did not encourage him to care for her, instead I flattered and consoled him. He praised me a great deal and while I liked it, I thought he was foolish. Through what I began with him, I came to have a disproportionate sense of what should come to me without my doing anything to deserve it. In his book James and The Children, Mr. Siegel explains a determination I and many girls have had with our fathers and later with other men: “A person made by God exists for me to have glory.”
My mother was more sensible about me. When I made up a story so she wouldn’t find out I did something wrong, she would look at me and say, “I hope I can believe you.” While I respected her straightforward way, it made me angry that I couldn’t fool her.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism that when a child comes to see the world as a confusing, messy, unkind place, she can feel she’ll take care of herself by dismissing and managing people. I was determined not to like my mother and to show her that she could never please me. As I got older, we couldn’t be in the same room without arguing.
Once, when I was about 15, she came home with a lovely blouse she had bought for me. I showed such disdain for it and for her that she got furious and screamed, “What’s wrong with you!” I knew I was mean but I didn’t know how to be different, and I remember liking the fact that I could get her upset while I acted cool and unperturbed.
I felt I’d never be able to feel good about my mother, and then I began to have Aesthetic Realism consultations and I was tremendously relieved to learn that I could! In one consultation I was asked about what Marion Nietsch felt with 5 sons who were then ages 15-22, all living at home. “Do you think that’s an easy situation?”
Meryl Nietsch. “No.” And they asked, “How do you think you would do with six children?
Meryl Nietsch. “I don’t know!”
Consultants. Do you respect your mother enough?
Meryl Nietsch. I don’t think I respect her enough.
Consultants. Do you think you really have a sense of what a woman with six children feels? None of us is in that situation but do you think mind can try to [know] what that feels like?
Meryl Nietsch. I think so.
And with humor, they asked, “Do you think since you were the first…that she should have just stopped there!” That’s just what I felt. For the first time I began to think about who my mother was, as a person in her own right, with hopes and feelings that I never knew existed. I was given assignments to write a soliloquy of her when she was 17, and to write a scene from a play about her which was set at a time a few years after I was born and as I did this, I began to see her with new eyes.
A Determination to Manage the World through Food
A large thing my mother and I fought about is something I was intensely determined about, and which hurt me very much. Though she tried to be of use to me, at 13 and for the next 10 years, I had what is affecting over 9 million young women in America today— anorexia and bulimia. I am grateful with my whole heart that unlike so many of these women, I met what explained and ended my pain.
In Aesthetic Realism consultations I heard the kind comprehension women are looking for when my consultants asked, “Do you think Miss Nietsch that you changed tremendous confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?” “Yes,” I said. And they asked about how I ate and got rid of food, “Do you think what you have is a very dramatic and organized way of saying ‘I don’t need the world?'” That feeling, I have seen, is a huge determination in a woman with eating disorders. She can be in agony about what she is doing to herself, but there is a tremendous victory—you have beaten what you see as a confusing world, you are running things.
My consultants explained, “Bulimia is a way of managing the world, having it please you but not affect you deeply; anorexia is a means of having yourself pure, without any additions. Both arise from contempt.”
In an earlier paper I spoke at length about eating disorders and Aesthetic Realism’s magnificent understanding of them. I have seen as true what Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss once described in a class, that they are “an utter battle with the laws of reality.” And I know from my own life that when a woman learns how to value the world and see it justly, her determination to use food, eat proportionately, in this way ends, she wants to respect food and keep it inside of her. This is what I am so thankful to say happened to me.
Two Kinds of Determination in Peg ‘O My Heart
In a lecture he gave in 1941 titled “Seeing and Grabbing,” Eli Siegel said that every person, “From the very beginning…wants to see things and also wants to grab things,” and explained that these two things can torment, “because they are not joined: the desire to understand and the desire to possess.”
We can see a drama about those desires in two characters in J. Hartley Manners’ Peg O’ My Heart. The play takes place at the “regal villa” of the Chichesters, who are snobbish and cold, and have just lost all their money. When they learn that Mrs. Chichester’s brother left his fortune to an impoverished Irish-American niece, Peg—a young, vibrant “beautiful girl of 18″— Mrs. Chichester agrees to take Peg in and educate her for a fee.
Peg is strong and tender, and despite her feeling lonely, so far away from her home, she has a pretty steady determination not to give way to sadness and to have a good effect on others. We see her looking thoughtfully at things, trying to understand people, yet she also has a sharp tongue which she feels bad about.
Peg tries to befriend the daughter, Ethel Chichester, who is a selfish young women. Ethel is very unhappy and takes it out on Peg, telling her “We have nothing in common.”
Peg. That doesn’t prevent us from being decent to each other.
Ethel. …Decent?
Peg. I’ll meet ye three quarters of the way if ye’ll only show one generous feeling toward me. Ye would if ye knew what was in my mind.
That is a deep statement and I think Peg says it sincerely because she wants to have what Aesthetic Realism shows is crucial when our determination is right—good will, “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” Peg says to Ethel:
Peg. I watch ye and listen to ye. Ye turn yer face to the world as much to say “aren’t I the easy-goin’, sweet-tempered, calm young lady?” and ye’re not quite that, are ye?…up in yer head and down in yer heart you worry your soul all the time….And with all yer fine advantages ye’re not very happy are ye?…Are ye, dear?
Ethel. (Slowly) No. I’m not….
Ethel is affected by Peg’s kindness. Like many women, she thinks if she gets the adoration of a man, named Christian, she will like herself. But she doesn’t really want to know him, or think too much about the facts about him, including that he’s married and has a baby. Ethel stands for a determination as to love many women have had, I certainly did—a man exists to make much of us. Peg is critical of this notion of love and asks Ethel many questions about Christian including, “Is it customary for English husbands with babies to kiss other women?
Ethel. It is a very old and very respected custom.
Peg. Devil doubt it but it’s old. I’m not so sure about the respect.
In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss describes another young woman whom she calls Celia, saying that she:
…was determined to get a certain man Rick—but she wasn’t interested in understanding him, seeing who he really was…. There had been “signs” that all was not in the clear with Rick, but Celia had glossed over them, dismissed them….She saw a man as someone whose function was to glorify her, whom she could use to feel superior to the whole world. This makes her like many women. And, being based on contempt, her determination…had to be something that would cause her to trip up painfully.
There are women this summer on beaches in the Hamptons or sipping wine in an outdoor bar with the perfect white dress to offset their tans, who are in agony about this. I know about it first hand. I spent hours concentrating on what I would wear and arranging my hair to have a big affect on men when I walked into a room. Sometimes I calculatingly drove by a place where a man I liked was, and then acted nonchalant when I saw him.
Once, while working as a lifeguard on Long Island, I was determined to get the attention of Steve Connors. He had a gentle thoughtfulness and energy that I liked, but I was more interested in having him show how wonderful he thought I was than in knowing him. I pursued Steve all summer and finally got what I wanted, but I couldn’t understand why I felt so bad.
Fortunately I had just begun to have Aesthetic Realism consultations, and was asked the questions women have thirsted to hear. “Do you think that there’s a way he approves of you, whether he says a word or not, that is better than anything else?”
Meryl Nietsch. Maybe.
Consultants. Do you think it’s the closet thing to worship that’s around?
Meryl Nietsch. Yeah. But I don’t think its good.
Consultants. Well, but is it part of the interest?
It was part of the interest, but I didn’t feel so good about it. With humor and depth my consultants asked, if I felt something like this:
“I thought I was going to have power and have my way; I did have power and have my way; and I’m not happy anyway. How come?” Because you weren’t really interested in seeing what your way really is.
The purpose of love, Aesthetic Realism explains, is to like the world. This is our deepest desire, and that is why the determination to conquer a man can never satisfy. A man is the world, and knowing him, his relation to everything is a chance to know reality and ourselves better. I’m grateful to be in the midst of this grand study with the man I love and am proud to need, my husband, Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, Bennett Cooperman. Through his good will and criticism of me, which is often humorous including as to ways I am determined, I am a better woman.
For instance, early in our marriage Bennett asked me to wait until he got home to lift a heavy box down from a closet, but I didn’t want to wait and did it anyway. This was a pattern with me and sometimes I injured my back. I’ll never forgot what he said later: “Did it ever occur to you that a man can want to have a good effect you by lifting that box? Can that be part of your thought?” And he wrote kind critical lines about my back, which affected me very much. These are the first lines:
“Message from Meryl’s Back”
My loving back is telling me
To stop and look and want to see.
“I will be strong and will not ache
If you the proper time will take
To do the things you want to do—
Don’t plow ahead, but see what’s true”
I love Bennett for being a good critic of me and wanting me to be stronger.
The play, Peg ‘O My Heart comes to a crisis near the end when Peg stops Ethel from running away with Christian. It is night, and Peg comes home and sees Ethel with her suitcase:
Peg. Were ye goin’ away with him? Were ye?
Ethel. Take your hands off me…Let me go.
Peg. Ye’re not going out of this house tonight if I have to wake everyone…Ye’d take him from his wife and her baby?
Ethel. He hates them, and I hate this. And I’m going—
Peg. So ye’d break yer mother’s heart and his wife’s just to satisfy yer own selfish pleasures?….He gave his name and his life to a woman, and it’s your duty to protect her and the child she brought him.
Ethel. I’d kill myself first.
Peg. Not first. That’s what would happen to ye after ye’d gone with him…Doesn’t he want to leave the woman he swore to cherish…What do we suppose he’d do to one he took no oath with at all? You have some sense about this.
Ethel sees how wrong she has been, and breaks down in tears. Peg says kindly to her:
Don’t cry. Don’t do that….and with the sunlight the thought of all this will go from ye. Come to my room and I’ll sit by yer side till morning.
The Determination of Good Will
“This desire to know, value, bring out the good power in things and people,” Ellen Reiss writes in The Right Of:
…is, Aesthetic Realism shows, the greatest strength. It is the only purpose that will make us truly strong. And the having of this good will is at the same time the most subtle of jobs, the most delicate, the tenderest.
This is what was encouraged in me as to my mother in classes taught by Ms. Reiss. Through what I learned, I began to see who my mother really was with more depth and kindness. In one class Ms. Reiss asked, “Do you think you can find the depths of your mother a subject of real interest?” And I was asked, “Do you really want your mother to think well of herself?” And, we began to have conversations about many things that made us both stronger.
I learned about her home in Brooklyn where she grew up during the depression, and what she felt later moving to Seaford, Long Island. I learned that she loved to read, what her favorite books were, that she once sang in a band. She told me about the excitement she felt when she first met my father in high school. Many of these conversations took place during the last months of her life.
I told her how much it meant to me to be learning about what sincerity is from Aesthetic Realism, when I had felt like such a faker. And when I thanked her for having been a critic of my insincerity—I was very much affected that she told me she worried about sincerity in herself too.
My mother and I came to have a friendship that I treasure. A week before she died, she wrote in a letter to Ellen Reiss:
I thank Eli Siegel for saving my daughter’s life and I want to thank you Ms. Reiss for continuing the kind work of [Mr.] Siegel.