Aesthetic Realism logically, beautifully makes clear that a woman’s greatest need is to like the world and see meaning in it. Like many people, I felt that to really need anything was weak, and I should depend only on myself.
This attitude can have us feel we don’t have to listen to another person; we don’t need to read books; we don’t have to learn new things
This is contempt, defined by Eli Siegel as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else,” and it is the thing which stifles and hurts us, and makes us mean, and it is what I so much needed to know as I grew up in the 1960s.
The Confusion about Need in a Girl on Long Island
In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss writes:
Aesthetic Realism show[s] there is a criterion for need: for what we can respect ourselves for needing and what we cannot. We can be proud of any need that is in behalf of our greatest need: to like the world. We are ashamed of, and weakened by, any need that is a substitute for that largest need, or impedes our fulfilling it.
Growing up in Massapequa, I felt I needed to be outdoors, and I loved learning about the different kinds of flowers and trees that grew near our home. In the summer I looked forward to seeing the yellow buttercups that grew in the midst of green grass in our backyard, and I remember so vividly the fragrance of the lush purple lilac bushes in spring.
We lived near the Great South Bay where I would watch the sail boats and smell the fresh sea air in the warmth of the sun. I also liked swimming in the ocean and being tossed about by the strong waves.
But as I got older, I used the very things I liked so much—the sun and beach—as a means to impress people. As a lifeguard, I made sure everyone at Tobay Beach noticed my athletic ability and my blonde hair and dark tan, which I worked very hard on for hours. I felt I absolutely needed to have a tan in the summer or I would die. But I was so concentrated on myself, I felt more and more nervous and empty.
I was the only child for four years and then over the next years something big happened. My mother gave birth to five sons, and I was no longer an only, pampered child. I was excited when my first two brothers came, but when the third and then the twins came I felt “this is too much.” Often, I helped my mother take care of them, and as time went on I used my position as the oldest, to discipline them, and liked the fact that they seemed to need me. But I didn’t feel I needed them. In an Aesthetic Realism lesson Mr. Siegel explained to a person: “the ego wants people to need us without limit but we want to put limits on our need of others. Out of this comes much misery.” This was true of me.
At the same time, I felt I had to compete with my brothers for my father’s attention by playing sports, fixing things around the house, doing heavy work like chopping the wood. This was to become a way of life with me—competing with men and not wanting to need them.
Like many families today, my parents worried about money and there were many fights. I didn’t want to think about what my father felt having to work such long hours to support his large family. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation years later, my consultants asked me so kindly: “Do you think you changed confusion and discontent with the world into the triumph of being able to manage it?” I had. And whenever I felt angry with my family I would run to my room and slam the door, or go out on my bicycle and ride for hours by myself, trying to get rid of everyone. Increasingly I felt I should depend only on myself. In his great lecture, “Mind and Emptiness,” Mr. Siegel explains so compassionately:
Unconsciously, we are all trying to be Mr. and Mrs. Zero, Mr. And Mrs. Hurrah for Nothing which is Me.There is a refusal to feel that we need anything.
I was trying to be Miss Zero and it made me feel very empty inside. In high school, I started getting rid of things that once had meant so much to me—I quit the swimming team and other sports, dropped out of the chorus and stopped playing the flute in the band. More and more I did not want to need anything, and this took a dramatic form. I began eating large amounts of food then disgorging what I ate, or I would starve myself for weeks, eating very little. I had bulimia and anorexia which for ten years I was to suffer from. Years later my consultants asked: “Do you think full and empty are very big things in your life?” I said, “Yes,” and they continued:
Do you think sometimes you can feel very empty and want to fill yourself and then you can just want to empty yourself? Do you think there’s a state of emptiness that you enjoy, having yourself to yourself?”
Meryl Nietsch. Yes. I think that’s true.
Eating disorders are, my consultants explained, “a very dramatic and organized example of saying, ‘I don’t need the world.'”
Aesthetic Realism explains the cause and solution to eating disorders, and because of this they ended permanently in me. In The Right Of #1310, Ellen Reiss explains:
[I]t is the contemptuous desire not to need the world that has made people not want to need that terrific representative of the world which is food. Anorexia nervosa won’t be understood until the desire for contempt is understood. [A]norexia would not occur without a person’s unconsciously wanting the victory of showing she does not need the world; she is gloriously sufficient unto herself; the less she needs, the more she is her own superior self, and pure.
I know with my own thriving, healthy life that when Aesthetic Realism is known and studied, anorexia and bulimia will not be causing the deaths of so many women and crippling the lives of millions of others who suffer from them today.
Can We Be Proud to Need Someone?
In “Mind and Emptiness” Mr. Siegel said:
We have to see that the needing of something is freedom. While we are trying to say to things, “Reach me,” we are also trying to wipe them away. The process of wiping away—which can take the form of forgetfulness, lack of interest, and so on—is the thing that has to be understood.
And he continues:
[T]he needing of a friend, the needing of company, the need to know what another person is, are signs of emancipation, not signs of bondage.
These sentences describe a huge mistake women have made as to love and I made it—feeling that if we need another person we are not free.
As I was coming to know Aesthetic Realism consultant and actor, Bennett Cooperman, I was very affected by the depth of his thought and kindness to people, including me. I felt I was too managing and speedy and aloof with people, and his thoughtfulness had a good effect on me. When I saw the combination of tenderness and strength in Bennett and his humorous straight criticism of me, I felt I needed him. I looked forward to talking with him every day.
But more than I knew, I also had the feeling: Meryl Nietsch can take care of herself; and I used what I saw as my physical strength to feel I didn’t need a man because I was self-sufficient. At the time Bennett and I decided to move in together, I didn’t understand why I suddenly felt very intensely against some of the suggestions he made about the apartment. I got my back up when he suggested moving a wall where the refrigerator was. I felt there was something wrong with my intensity, and spoke about it in an Aesthetic Realism class. Ms. Reiss so kindly asked me:
Do you think you are bending over backwards having Bennett Cooperman more in your life?
Meryl Nietsch. Yes.
Ellen Reiss. Do you think you want, on the one hand for Bennett Cooperman to be with you, but on the other hand, a woman can feel if she lets a man into her life, she’s no longer the person she was. “The Meryl Nietsch that was will be no more!” The great question is, if a person means more to us, are we more or less?
The answer is, we are more! I am grateful for what I have learned and continue to learn about this question. Bennett and I were married in October of 1995. As a woman who spent so much of my time feeling superior and being competitive with men, it means so much to me that I love a man and with every week I am more and more proud to need him—his perceptions about the world and people, his ability as an actor, his intellect and his important work as a consultant.
What Do Women’s Magazines Encourage Women to Need?
Women’s magazines are filled with things they say women need—a fit body, good sex, the latest styles, various techniques on how to get a man or a job, how to have marriage succeed. But they encourage the very thing that women have been doing for centuries which is completely against our largest need—contempt, for men and for the world.
Aesthetic Realism explains that the greatest need of women in love is to have good will, which Mr. Siegel said is, “the desire to have some one else stronger and more beautiful for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful. How different this is from what is advised in an article in an issue ofMademoiselle, titled, “Want to Sweep Him off His Feet? Get Inside His Head” by Colin McEnroe.
The article says what a woman needs is to get a man to love her utterly, and to do this she needs to find his “secret self” and encourage it to come out. There are these sentences:
What we’re talking about is considerably more profound and powerful than mere flattery, or endorsing somebody’s choice of hobby. And we’re certainly not talking about molding somebody into your vision of what they are. No, this is more about opening doors. This one leads to him on a sailboat. That one leads to him reading at a poetry slam. This one leads to him as a passionate cook…It’s not your job to make him walk through. It’s enough to show him the door exists.
Under the guise of encouraging a man to express himself—it is really patronizing as hell and all for one purpose—to get a man to adore you exclusively. The article continues: “The thing you want to do is put yourself in the picture,” and says that a woman needs to “water the part of the guy that doesn’t get watered.”
The article tells about Helen, who can’t concentrate on her work because she is obsessed with Alex. Finally after seeing him sing at a company talent show she sends a flirtatious e-mail which asks:
If an asteroid were about to hit the planet and there were only 15 minutes left live, would you come and stand by me, humming something by Springstein?
So the world is coming to an end, but you’ve got your man! And if a woman does get a man through being wily and strategic she feels cold and calculating and like a fraud. I have learned that a woman needs to be passionately interested in a man’s relation to the whole world—this is good will and it makes a woman feel proud and clean.
Women need to know how great and kind Aesthetic Realism is on the subject of what we need in love. In The Right Of Ellen Reiss explains:
[B]ecause of Aesthetic Realism, people can be proud and intelligent at last on the beautiful subject of need in love. We can ask ourselves: “Do I feel I need this person 1) because I see him as a means of getting rid of the world, of feeling at last I’m being made superior to everything? Do I need him in order to feel I own a human being, a person magnificently silly about me? Or, 2) Do I need this person because he is a means of my respecting every person more? Through him, I am fairer to everything and everyone.” The second is the only need as to a person which can make us proud. It is real love. It is romance at its most passionate.
Aesthetics: What a Woman Needs Most
Through the magnificent way Aesthetic Realism explains art, people can learn how we want to be in our lives. “All beauty,” Eli Siegel explained, “is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
Women need to learn from art how to put together opposites in themselves such as sweetness and strength, passion and exactitude, the intimate and the wide. A woman who has been loved for nearly 400 years I believe because of the way she puts these opposites together is William Shakespeare’s Juliet from Romeo and Juliet.
In an Aesthetic Realism Class, when I said that I didn’t like myself for how I was often too managing of my husband, particularly after I’m very much affected by him. I said I wanted to be sweet with him, but I didn’t see it as strong. I was surprised when Ellen Reiss read passages from Romeo and Juliet and asked me if I thought Juliet was sensible in her feeling about Romeo. I had felt Juliet was beautiful, but I had never thought about whether she was sensible. Ms. Reiss suggested I study Juliet and ask, “Was Juliet wise or stupid?” These are some of my findings.
When Juliet first meets Romeo at a ball at her home, she sees qualities in him that she is swept by—he seems both fervent and gentle, passionate and kind. And while being a critic and wanting to see if she can trust him, she doesn’t hold herself back, she is not coy or insincerely restrained. When the Nurse tells her he is a Montague-the family her own family hates and who have been bitter enemies of each other for many years—it doesn’t change her mind: she is very logical, and later, speaking to the night air as if it were Romeo, says:
Tis but thy name that is my enemy.
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.And she says:
And for thy name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.I believe Juliet is wise because she is glad to have met a person she feels she can love for who he is, and she has a response that is accurate and full. Juliet is precise—she is questioning of Romeo. She isn’t ga-ga over a man—she asks him “Where do you stand?”
O gentle Romeo,
If thou dost love, pronouce it faithfully.
Or if thou thinkest I am too quickly won,
I’ll frown, and be perverse, and say thee nay,
So thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world.
In truth, fair Montague, I am too fond,
And therefore thou mayst think my havior light;
But trust me, gentleman, I’ll prove more true
Than those that have more cunning to be strange.Even though she doesn’t know what his response will be, Juliet is not hidden and calculating with Romeo. She is straightforward; she is passionate but her mind is still keen. She sees this as a beginning, and says when they part, “This bud of love, by summer’s ripening breath,/May prove a beauteous flow’r when next we meet.” And she says in one of the greatest, most famous passages in the drama:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee
The more I have, for both are infinite.Here, Juliet is showing what Aesthetic Realism says is love itself: proud need. And so different from the hurtful advice given by women’s magazines—to plot to have a man make you the most important thing in the world, an empress, while you strategically and contemptuously withhold yourself, saying “You need me, but I don’t need you—Juliet says she is so grateful she needs Romeo to be herself, her “bounty is as boundless as the sea,” and “the more I give to thee/the more I have, for both are infinite.” The opposites of self and world are here sheerly. She says the more she gives the more she has, and she is sweet and critical, tender and strong, passionate and so exact. I admire her enormously for this and want to be like her.
In “Love and Reality” Eli Siegel writes: “We love because we desire to be entirely ourselves, everything we can be.” And in order to be everything we can be, we need to like the world in its wideness and intimacy. This, the education of Aesthetic Realism makes possible; it is the joyous study women all over the world need.
