“Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?” That is a question I was asked in one of the classes I attend for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates, taught by Ellen Reiss.
And the answer, I’ve learned, is yes. The deepest purpose of every person, Aesthetic Realism shows, is to like the world. That emotion—like of the world on an honest, factual basis—is what men look for in every particular thing we do, whether it’s reading a book or holding the woman we care for in our arms.
But unknowingly, men also go for emotions that arise from a very different source. Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, has explained that source—it is contempt, the “disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the outside world.” In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled “The Emotion Hoped For,” Mr. Siegel writes:
There is a fight going on every moment in the minds of persons as to whether to respect the world and be grateful for its existence or to see the world as senseless, disorderly and deeply to be angry with it. This…is the largest matter in man’s unconscious.
In this paper I’ll talk about what I learned about that fight in me, and how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, I have emotions now that make me so happy. I’m very thankful for my education because I was a person who went for small, selfish emotions, and felt more numb and miserable with every year.
I’ll speak too about a contemporary book that is representative of the men’s movement, The Warrior’s Journey home by Jed Diamond.
Emotion Is For and Against
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known Mr. Siegel explains the elemental structure of emotion: “Emotion at its beginning is a feeling of for or against the world.” I learned that from the day we’re born we are making unconscious choices about being for and against the world itself—is it a friend, for us, something we should know? Or is it an enemy we have to beat, get what we can from and be aloof from?
That is the debate I was in growing up in Miami, Florida in the 1950’s and 60’s. There were things I definitely felt “for,” such as roller skating every Saturday when a bus picked up many children and took us to a huge roller rink. Roller skating has been popular for years because it puts opposites together.
The very technique of roller skating puts together for and against—you push against the floor in a steady rhythm, and that’s what enables you to be so free. Rounding a corner, you have to crouch down and lean in—when you get the right angle you can really fly, and the relation of tightness and expansion is very satisfying. I liked going fast, then gliding to a graceful stop using the rubber stopper on the tip of the skate. And at the rink there were surprises—you never knew when the announcer would say “all skate” or “couples only” or announce a limbo contest. I didn’t know I had such pleasure there because I was affected by reality’s opposites—precision and freedom, power and grace, surprise and continuity.
But very often I felt against things, angry. I saw my parents as existing to make me comfortable and important, and when they didn’t I got mad. And I was political. I would act like I was for my mother and try to console her because I knew she would buy me things. Then, I would try to be very friendly with my father, and go to football games with him. I used one against the other, and having that small, contemptuous purpose with the first representatives of the world I knew made it nearly impossible for me to have large, kind emotions about anything else. Very early, I felt I didn’t like myself.
In his 1994 book The Warrior’s Journey home, Jed Diamond speaks about men and their parents. Praised by leaders in the men’s movement such as John Gray, who says the book is “a must for men who want to heal their wounds,” Mr. Diamond says the purpose of his book is to “explore…the ways in which men lost the primal connection with their masculine selves.” He explains that this began 10,000 years ago when “we stopped being hunter-gatherers…Our relationships…came to be based on competition and domination rather than cooperation and partnership.”
Diamond says men now must find the “warrior spirit” of the hunter-gatherer within, and one feels throughout the book a man who is mixed up about the way he is angry and then trying to be kind. He romanticizes the hunter-gatherers, as though one hunter-gatherer never got up in the morning and was grouchy with another, or had a competitive thought. Meanwhile, that he is dealing with opposites that trouble men is clear, as is the fact that he has been affected by Aesthetic Realism when he writes, “The New Warrior…is wild and gentle, tough and loving, fierce and perceptive.”
But Jed Diamond’s book is extremely harmful because essentially it encourages men to feel hurt by the world. He does not see what Aesthetic Realism is beautifully dogmatic about and what I am grateful I learned: the chief thing stopping a man from having emotions he likes is his own contempt.
This hurt-by-the-world approach is vivid when Jed Diamond writes about how a man’s emotions are affected by his parents:
Although we are born perfect, most of us come into a family in which our basic needs for safety and security are not well met. We come to believe that something essential is missing in us…Believing that we are damaged goods, we come to despise ourselves…If we are hurt by our parents, we assume that it must be because we are so horrible…we [go] through life as wounded children.
This is very soothing to hear, but it represents a tremendously hurtful approach being foisted on men in the last years. Certainly there is criticism of parents, but Diamond encourages dishonesty and evasion—emotions men cannot like themselves for—when he has us blame the feeling that we despise ourselves on our parents. The chief reason men despise themselves, I learned, is because they have cheap purposes with people. I did. If we have good will for people—which Eli Siegel described as “the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful”—we will never despise ourselves. In “The Emotion Hoped For” Mr. Siegel writes: “We cannot like ourselves unless we can say: ‘The way I see the world and what I hope from it looks good to me.'”
Jed Diamond furthers a picture of the world and parents as hurting one when he writes about how civilization has made it nearly impossible for boys to grow into complete men. He praises tribal cultures where “boys are removed from their mothers and connected with the adult men of the tribe” and says we need to do something like that now—separate from our mothers and get the “support of a few good men.” He writes:
We need help in separating from the force field of the Woman or we will never make it to manhood. Her gravitational pull is too strong to resist on our own. Older males must be there to exert an even greater pull or we will always be afraid of being sucked back in to our mother’s orbit.
This is high-powered writing, but it brings up something much more ordinary that concerns a man’s ability to have large emotions. One of the biggest “pulls” a man can feel about his mother is something Diamond writes about as good—the feeling that no matter what you do or say you are “loved unconditionally.” In the discussion I quoted earlier, Ellen Reiss asked me: “Do you think you got the feeling that big emotion should be about you, not from you? Do you think you used this against other things?” That is what I was after, and though I didn’t know it, it made it nearly impossible for me to have feeling for anything else.
What Kind of Emotions Are Men Looking for in Love?
In the issue of The Right Of titled “The Right to Large Emotion,” Mr. Siegel writes: “Everyone has the question of whether it is better to have one’s principal emotion stemming from contempt or from gratitude.” That is a tremendously important statement. There is that in every man, I learned, that would like to have contempt for everything, even what he has cared for, so that he can have the victory of feeling the world is a rotten place, and there’s nothing to be grateful for or have feeling about.
I’ve seen studying Aesthetic Realism that the emotion of gratitude makes a man strong, has him like himself and feel he deserves to be cared for. In Aesthetic Realism consultations, my colleagues and I have asked men questions like these:
- When do you feel you are stronger, tougher—when you are grateful, or when you’re angry?
- Do you get angry that there are things in your girlfriend you don’t understand? Could you see these as opportunities to know her better instead of interferences?
- Do you hope to care for the world and other people more? And is the woman you are close to a means for that?
In “Love and Reality”, a chapter of Self and World, Eli Siegel writes about what a man hopes most deeply to feel in love as he asks about the feeling Jim Haskins has for Edith Ritchie:
What is that for which the self or body of Edith Ritchie stands? Where are the boundaries of the thing represented in Jim’s mind by this one person? Does it end with a state or a country or a family or an ocean or even the sky? There is no ending in Jim’s mind of the thing represented by Edith, for she stands for everything…The purpose of love is to feel closely one with things as a whole.
That is the beautiful, practical purpose we need in love—through a woman “to feel closely one with things as a whole,” to like the world. It is the one purpose that has love fare well, enables a man to have the emotion he’s looking for. Otherwise, love will go wrong in all kinds of ways.
For instance, Jed Diamond writes that men “develop excessive attachments. Afraid to get hurt, on the other hand, we keep at a distance. Our relationships often alternate between obsessive attachment and detachment.”
That is the opposites gone awry because a man’s purpose isn’t to use a woman to like the world. So he’ll concentrate on a woman at the exclusion of everything else, or he’ll be aloof from her and get rid of the world that way. Both mistakes—which I’ve made—stops a man from having large emotions.
In another passage, Diamond writes:
Most men know the perplexing feelings of loving, needing, and caring for a woman at one moment; then hating, hurting, and fearing her the next…Uncovering the roots of our ambivalence…is [a] task of mature masculinity.
But Diamond has no idea how to “uncover the roots.” Something so important I’ve seen studying Aesthetic Realism is that a man can feel insulted that a woman means so much to him, causes such great feeling in him. That’s the “root” of the ambivalence men feel about women, and I have learned about it in myself in classes with Ellen Reiss. Once, she suggested humorously that I write a handbook, and collect pointers from my friends—”How to Be Sane on the Subject of Love.”
In the class I have been quoting from, Ms. Reiss spoke to me about what in me objected to having large emotion about the woman I had come to love and who, I am very grateful to say, is now my wife, Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman. It was clear I had big feeling for Meryl, but I was uncomfortable and sometimes would act cool. “Do you think if you showed a tremendous emotion that you would feel foolish?” asked Ms. Reiss. I had, and she said:
Ellen Reiss. The important thing is accuracy—it isn’t just sweeping emotion…but accurate emotion. And if there is that in the world that deserves great emotion, the only accurate thing to do is to give it. Then there is what is a person born for? A person is being born right now. Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?
Bennett Cooperman. Great feeling.
Ellen Reiss. If you could feel, “I’m using my senses. I’m keen and boy, what I see makes for tremendous feeling!” Is that a victory or a defeat?
Bennett Cooperman. It’s a victory.
That is what I am so happy to feel knowing Meryl. Living with her, talking with her, has me feel every day I know people better, myself, I know the power and grace, the keenness and friendliness of a woman; I know music better, and so much more. I love studying with her in classes with Ellen Reiss, where we learn about the world and ourselves so deeply, and have tremendous emotions every week—including as we hear the honesty, intellect and kindness of Eli Siegel studying the tape-recorded lectures he gave.
“Annie Laurie” Has What Men Hope For
In this class, Ms. Reiss spoke to me about a song I was studying to sing, and having difficulty with, a song which has been loved for nearly 300 years. “Annie Laurie” stands for the kind of emotion every man wants to feel about a woman, and, I learned, about the world itself. “Do you think there’s great reverence in it?” Ms. Reiss asked me. “Tremendous,” I said. “Do you like reverence or does it embarrass you?” she asked, and I replied, “I think the second.”
The words to “Annie Laurie” in their first version were written as a poem in the early 1700s by the Scotsman William Douglas of Fingland, and the music is by Lady Scott. In his lecture “Poetry and Love,” Eli Siegel said the words “are great”, they are “tremendously physical and most unlimitedly sentimental.” The words of this song makes a one of what you can touch, and expansive, deep feeling. It begins:
Maxwellton banks are bonnie
Whar early fa’s the dew;
Whar me and Annie Laurie
Made up the promise true.
“‘Maxwellton banks’ sounds pretty definite,” Mr. Siegel comments. But each stanza ends with the lines, “And for bonnie Annie Laurie / I’d lay me down and die.” “There is the feeling of the infinite,” he explained, “of permanence.”
The second stanza of William Douglas’ poem, which Mr. Siegel said is greater than the revised words most often sung to “Annie Laurie,” definitely accents the physical. Taking it up line by line, Mr. Siegel explained:
“She’s brackit like the peacock” means that from the front she is like the peacock. Now, people in drugstores can think that way; many men have…”She’s breastit [breasted] like the swan”—how physical! “She’s jimp [slender] about the middle.” After the dolefulness, the sweet dirgelike quality of the first stanza, we have all this symmetrical alluringness of the physical.
“This poem,” Mr. Siegel said, “is a way of saying, ‘Yes, there is something mysterious about you, like the night wind going over the banks of Maxwellton. Even so, I know there is a body concerned, and somehow body and fidelity, the physical and the sweet and infinite, have joined.'”
The music of this song is so beautiful. It puts together other opposites that torment people in love—pride and humility, melting and assertion, high and low. I learned about this in the class when Ms. Reiss spoke to me about what the music does technically, and about how I see love.
Like many men, I have had a division between feeling I should have my feet solidly on the ground, and then having sweeping feeling. The song puts the two together throughout, including in the very first notes. It begins with four low, meditative notes, and then it soars. “The careful thoughtfulness in “Annie Laurie’ makes for that soaring,” said Ms. Reiss. I was thrilled by this! I had thought having great feeling was utterly different from being a smart person who takes care of himself. But Ms. Reiss showed me that the two can and need to be the same. “Reverence should be sensible,” she said, “and should go along with being a good critic. If there’s a feeling of big size, is it good for oneself?” she asked.
I am so happy to say that I am seeing the answer is “yes.” And here is “Annie Laurie”:
Annie Laurie
Maxwellton banks are bonnie
Whar early fa’s the dew;
Whar me and Annie Laurie
Made up the promise true.
Made up the promise true,
And never forget will I;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and die.
She’s brackit like the peacock,
She’s breastit like the swan;
She’s jimp about the middle,
Her waist ye weel micht span.
Her waist ye weel micht span,
And she has a rolling eye;
And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I’d lay me down and die.
I love Aesthetic Realism for teaching me what it means to have accurate, big, ever-growing emotion. People everywhere are desperate to have the kinds of emotions this education can make possible in their lives, and I want them to know it.