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The deepest thing in a woman or man is to
know the world and to have as much feeling about it as possible.
If we curtail this desire, try to feel less by having contempt, making
ourselves superior to people, we hurt our minds and we cannot like ourselves. "When the most esteemed actress of the cinema turned her face at a certain angle, it would make for deep emotion. She was very strong. People felt she could handle any emotion coming her way, and then she could be as much affected as anyone has ever been."And he continued, asking: "Are we going for two things: to have all the feeling possible and yet to feel strong? Many people go around feeling hollow because they trained themselves to make emotion less. This is the tendency of all people in the world at this time. It hurts one’s life because a great desire is to have as much emotion as possible. If in any way we curtail emotion in order to protect ourselves, is the loss greater than the gain?"I believe these two ways of self help explain the woman who has been an enigma to people for many years. I. A Girl Is Trying to Like the World Greta Garbo was born Greta Gustafsson in 1905 in the poorer section of Stockholm, Sweden. John Bainbridge, in his 1970 biography of Garbo, tells how she had to take her father, a World War I veteran, to a charity clinic every week: “She spoke of the humiliation and sadness she felt in having to watch him, suffering great pain, wait for what seemed an endless time for attention.” Aesthetic Realism asks this question: how do we use the difficulty we meet--to see better, to feel more, or to separate ourselves, feel less? Greta Garbo did both. In Mr. Siegel’s essay “Woman Is the Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites,” he wrote: “Advancing: Recessive. 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.”Greta Gustafsson was a study in the opposites--on the one hand she was a good student and lively. On the other, she went into a world of her own. She said once: “Even when I was a tiny girl, I preferred to be alone. I could give my own imagination free rein and live in a world of lovely dreams.” Later, as a girl of 16, she wrote to a friend this letter, so pained and lonely: "Eva child,In the first Aesthetic Realism Lesson I had, Mr. Siegel asked: Eli Siegel. Even when you’re in a state of reverie, do you think you’re looking for something? DT Yes, I think I am. ES. The reason that thought is preferable to reverie is that there’s more of a chance in reverie that the incomplete self or the self that is not entire be served. And he explained what the whole self, the “entire” self would include: ES. A person wants to honor fact and oneself. That is one thing that I’ll say is a must. Even when people make mistakes, that desire is there, only all of what self is, is not seen. All of herself was not seen by Greta Gustafsson. She was looking for something, just as I was. Even as a woman tries to put the world aside, she’s hoping desperately to hear: This does not represent you, Devorah or Greta! Your deepest desire is not to forget about the world, but to know it, and have as much feeling about it as possible--this is how you’re going to like yourself! II. The Aesthetic Junction Is What We’re Going For The exciting thing to see is how early Greta Garbo showed she was looking for the aesthetic junction of two motions--towards the world and towards self--and she found that through acting. “All art,” Mr. Siegel wrote in Self and World, “puts separateness and togetherness together. All selves want to do this.” She worked hard: she didn’t just appear magically on the screen. At age 14, when her father died, she had to go to work, first as a soap-lather girl in a barber shop, and then as a salesgirl at a department store. While she worked, she got several parts in advertising films, and then in an early comedy, Luffar Petter or Peter the Tramp, made by Erik Petschler. She found an acting coach, and finally, in 1922, she got a scholarship to the esteemed Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy of Sweden. Swedish biographer Fritiof Billquist tells us that Greta Gustafsson loved to act from very early, and in her teens: “Her favorite role was that of a harem girl….Her girl friends had to play the sheik, but Greta was seldom satisfied with their performances.If a girl wants to take the part of other people--a dashing, imperious sheik and a shy devoted woman, is she trying to like the world different from herself? In an Aesthetic Realism lesson about acting, Mr. Siegel said: “As soon as you ask yourself what does another person feel, you are taking an expedition, because the only way to feel as that person does is to become that person. The self is multiple and the more exercise it has in being other than itself, the more it comes home refreshed. According to Aesthetic Realism, all seeing is an extension of self, a change of self for the purpose of establishing the self.”This is what Greta Garbo did, and it is what we want to do: I think these sentences are beautiful--“the more exercise it has in being other than itself, the more it comes home refreshed.” This is what we were teaching Josie Sawyer in Aesthetic Realism consultations. She was against herself for the way she saw her parents, particularly her father. We gave her the assignment to write a monologue of her father at the age of 18. The principle, in keeping with the aesthetic solution in acting, is to get into the self of another person. Josie Sawyer was surprised, not believing she could do such a thing about the father she saw as intolerant. But she did the assignment and she was moved at what she saw. She wrote as her father, John Sawyer, at the age of 18: “I have a bad heart; no one knows but my family. I see this illness as a weakness in character….I am frightened of my heart giving out on me. It is only the powers of my mind that I depend upon to keep myself in good health.”Ms. Sawyer was learning the aesthetic process: how to see her father as a co-presence of opposites--weakness and strength, hope and fear, sureness and unsureness. In her next consultation, she said: “I’m changing the way I see my father, and it’s news!” III. Is the Purpose of Love to Feel More or Less about the World There are these two choices each of us has. In an Aesthetic Realism class of 1970, Mr. Siegel explained, "People want two things from each other: One, a true respect for ourselves and the world; Two, a feeling of power for ourselves and contempt for the world."I believe that to Greta Garbo, two men represented these two different ideas--Mauritz Stiller, the director who gave her her start, and John Gilbert, the idol of the 1920s Hollywood movies. In the spring of 1923, Greta Garbo--she and a girlfriend had made up this name for herself--was asked to go to see Stiller, the Russian-born and now Swedish director, who was looking for unknown faces for a new film. That film, Gosta Berling’s Saga, made Garbo known throughout Europe. It also brought her to the attention of Louis B. Mayer of MGM. Stiller criticized Garbo. Billquist tells about their work on that first film: After some hours of endless repetition and retakes, she would be on the point of tears, and ready to give up. “The part’s too big for me,” she sniffled. “Don’t bawl!” roared Stiller. “I’m going to make you do it right!”In an early issue of The Right Of, Mr. Siegel wrote “Everyone person who has ever lived has wanted to know what the voice of the world might tell him….This criticism is that persons have been so inclined to cherish themselves or favor themselves, they have not been just to the meaning of what is not themselves.” One of the most affecting things about Garbo is the way she wanted criticism. When she returned to Stockholm after making Saga and becoming something of a sensation, her girlfriend asked her, “Aren’t you awfully happy to be a movie star?” Garbo’s response was: “[But] What did you think of me?” A later director said of her, “If one gave her directions, she accepted them gladly, though she was a big star even then.” But Garbo never got the criticism of herself she yearned for. Suppose she had heard questions like the ones Mr. Siegel asked in a class, would she have been able to feel, “Yes, I can be the same person in life, as I am in art?” For example: “People feel if they have emotion beyond a certain point, they will be hurt. How much emotion can there be? How much is wise? On what basis should emotions be in us? If there is a possibility of large emotion--do I want to lessen it or am I going to be up to it?”I think she would have felt relieved and grateful. If I hadn’t heard these questions, I would have been a cold person and unknown. In 1925, Stiller and she went together to Hollywood. Garbo remained there and became a star; Stiller did not: he had much difficulty and returned to Sweden in 1927. It isn’t exactly clear what occurred between them, but I am sure he was affected by the fact that in 1926, Greta Garbo met John Gilbert on the set of their famous silent movie Flesh and the Devil. Director Clarence Brown said of Gilbert and Garbo, “In front of the camera their lovemaking was so intense that it surpassed anything anyone had seen and made the technical staff feel their mere presence an indiscretion.” Gilbert and Garbo became lovers, but there was something tremendously deep in Garbo looking for that oneness of herself and the world, which was her integrity. Bainbridge gives a picture of Garbo that affected me very much--he quotes a producer telling her wanting to know Gilbert, whom she called Jack She never talked about herself, but she used to ask lots of questions bout Jack. She wanted to understand him. “Why does Jack do this?” she would ask, or “Why does Jack do that?”But Gilbert wanted something from her she felt would make her untrue to herself. The Hollywood writer Adela Rogers St. Johns tells that she said to him, “You are in love with Garbo,” meaning the movie star, not her. He wanted a glamorous, famous woman to entertain his guests with him, and Garbo wanted none of it. In an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel was to say, “Greta Garbo had more integrity than 10 men in Hollywood.” There was something else she wanted than to be a self-centered and thoughtless adornment--she wanted to be an artist. In fact, she said the best time she was with Gilbert was when they were acting: “He is so fine an artist he lefts me up and carries me along with him. It is not just a scene I am doing--I am living.” But it was Stiller, even Gilbert said, that Garbo never stopped loving. “I have Mauritz Stiller to thank for everything in the world,” she said some years later in an interview. “If ever I were to love anyone, it would be [Moje] Stiller.” For years after he died in 1928, she could be heard saying, “Moje says this,” and “Moje wouldn’t like that.” I believe Garbo thought of him as bringing out the best in her: her hope to value the world, to have greater and more exact emotion about it. IV. The Opposites Make for Great Feeling and Beauty A beginning principle of Aesthetic Realism
is this: “The resolution of conflict
in self is like the making one of opposites in art.” “Greta Garbo,”
Mr. Siegel said about the opposites in her in his lecture on the cinema,
“was a person who brought together innocence with wisdom. In Camille, she plays a Parisian courtesan of the 1850s, beautiful and cynical. One of her lines is, “I am afraid of nothing but being bored.” Marguerite acts merry and frivolous; meanwhile, she knows she is dying of tuberculosis. In this scene, Armand has told her he loves her and wants to take care of her. She laughs at him and tells him he should find a nice girl to marry. Then, he takes her by her shoulders, and, as he grasps her, she throws back her head completely to look up at him. [slide] In this motion, we have that yielding to great feeling. The motion is utterly yielding and utterly assertive at once. She recedes back and comes forward at once. “She used an angle of the head almost as an abstract painting,” Mr. Siegel said of her. It is true: we feel the abstract form of her--line and curve--is so breathtaking, there is something eternal felt. V. She Wants to Have Big Feeling. Josie Sawyer has been seeing this is what she wants. She wrote to her consultants that not only did she feel kinder towards her father, but wanted to have more feeling in general: “I was moved by your kindness and encouragement to look at my relationship with my father. Because I’ve been learning about the way I see him, I feel lighter, less judgmental, and have more compassion towards him and others. I think this has to do with a new interest in what causes a person to act or think as they do, including myself, rather than label a thing as good or bad. I feel prouder to need others to know myself and know them! Friends have gotten closer as a result of trying to see what’s true. I’m very grateful and hopeful for the future.”Aesthetic Realism makes possible honest, exact, and greater feeling about the value of the world and people, and we’re proud to study this and to teach it!
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