| Yes, a woman can respect
herself in love and sex--when we use love and sex as they were meant to
be, to know and like the world.
"The purpose of love," Eli Siegel writes in
Self
and World, "is to feel closely one with things as a whole" [http://www.elisiegelcollection.net].
Every woman--at a health club, a restaurant, or a bar--meeting men, hoping
for love--should be able to know this, and what interferes! In The
Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss
explains:
The question about sex...is a matter of
the great opposites of Self and World: Do we want to use our self,
our thought, body, touch, to be fair to the world not ourselves--to
re-spect it, see it more deeply? Do we want to use our self to have
another person be in a better relation to the whole, wide world? Or do
we want to use sex to have contempt for the world--to feel that
we're finally running the world, making it serve us; that we can forget
about 99 percent of the world and make an ecstatic time apart with a person
who will adore us above everything in existence, who--in a tizzy--will
make it seem all reality is meaningless compared to us? [TRO 1248, 1250]
Tonight, as I speak about what I learned about
love, about a woman whose Aesthetic Realism consultations changed her life
and way of seeing men, and about a contemporary play which has affected
many people, Crossing Delancey, I will be speaking about something
that distresses women very much. While women now use our minds to see in
new and wider ways, are efficient on computers, run organizations, have
new roles in politics, sports--when it comes to being with a man in love
and sex, we have a different philosophy, and it is what Miss Reiss describes,
to get someone to adore us and make reality meaningless. Women need to
know we do not respect ourselves--not because we aren't seen right or we're
kept down by men or not encouraged to esteem ourselves--but because with
men our purpose is to conquer the world, not to use our minds to respect
the world. The reason we can't respect ourselves this way is that our purpose
in life is to use our selves and our whole minds to like and be fair
to the whole world. Aesthetic Realism shows how to do this--technically
and deeply--in love and sex.
A Woman Wants to Respect
Herself--What's in the Way?
In 1970, Eli Siegel was to say to me:
Every person is affected by two purposes:
"The world is my oyster"; and increased respect. We want to beat
something, and we want to respect it more and understand it more. This
is present in every friendship....If you respect something, it enables
you to have an achievement you’re proud of....[It makes for] self-respect.
Like every young women, I had that dual attitude.
Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, there were things I liked and was affected
by. For example, my great-grandparents, Minnie and Louie Levitz--who were
originally from Eastern Europe and lived in Brooklyn--would visit my family
during the winters. I felt through them there was a whole, big world I
did not know and wanted to know--a world of different cultures and languages,
and customs. They read a newspaper printed in Hebrew characters--in Yiddish--and
they spoke Yiddish. Mr. Siegel said that Yiddish is a language loved by
God, and I--a girl used to the Texas drawl--found their English which was
tinged with a lilting accent, exotic and thrilling. I loved to hear my
great-grandfather say, as we came home from somewhere and the car rolled
into the driveway, "Home, sweet home" with that accent, so it sounded like
a deeply tender "Hum, svit hum."
Yet, I never told them or anyone what I felt--rather
I used every man around me, from great-grandfather to grandfathers to father,
to charm, to extract as much as I could of adoration and goodies, and when
they approved, to have contempt for them. I thought I could and should
be able to get away with it. I liked school and books, but I used these
to get ahead and feel superior. I saw my father thought I was smart and
personable in my aggressively going after my way, in bossing around my
sister and brother, and I used his approval to feel I should be able to
get what I wanted and do what I wanted --that was the purpose of a intelligent
girl’s life.
This continued with how I was with men: as
Mr. Siegel was to describe in a class later: "A sense of yourself that
pleases you because other things are less than you. You feel: ‘These things
are beneath me and I’m telling them what to do.'" I felt that if I wanted
a man, he should succumb, and, like women do now, I would put everything
into the conquest--eyes, body, mind. If it took typing Bob Gold’s thesis,
I did it. If it took cutting out another woman, I did it. The same mind
that could try respectfully to see what a chemistry text might have in
it, was used to conquer, not to try to see what respectfully was in the
mind or self of a man.
I couldn’t understand why this smart girl
felt so unsure of herself as time went on, more and more miserable, and
love always failed. Eli Siegel said to me in an Aesthetic Realism class
early in my study, as I was in despair about love:
ES. Do you think it’s possible to use a
man to respect yourself?
DT. No, I don’t think so.
ES. Do you think pleasure and self-respect
are the same thing?
DT. No, I really don’t.
ES. What do you think is more primitive in
you, your desire to play games, or to respect yourself?
DT. I think to play games.
ES. That is an honest answer.
I did feel that the deepest thing in a person
was sexual, and therefore we should just stop pretending about it, yet
I still felt like hell. Then Mr. Siegel said something unlike anything
in all the psychology books I had studied:
ES. Self-respect is more primitive than
sex [because] the biggest desire of a thing is to approve of its own existence.
The feeling that self-respect is less primitive is only from personal history.
The only reason why they are not the same thing is because your thought
has stopped too quickly. The purpose of all knowledge and education is
to have our instincts at their simplest and intellect at its most complex
going
for the same purpose as pleasure.
My greatest pleasure would be to do that which
would have me respect myself most, and that was go after what was in keeping
with my own--and humankind's own-- fundamental purpose: justice to the
world and people. That was the most primitive thing and the way I would
get the most pleasure. I began to ask myself what would really give me
pleasure. Instead of, for example, playing off two men at a party, I had
conversations with people where I wanted to know them, not to weaken them
and have ugly victories. I saw I had greater and
real pleasure,
asking what it would mean to have good will, described by Eli Siegel
as "the desire that something else be stronger and more beautiful, for
this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful." This began
to happen with men, including the man who became my husband, Aesthetic
Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner.
Mr. Siegel explained in The Handbook of
Aesthetic Analysis:
The deepest unconscious purpose of the individual
is to like himself or be pleased with himself for the right reason; that
is, a reason with which he can also be pleased. This purpose works in sex
too...If sex...were accurately regardful of the persons concerned, would
it be good?
It had never occurred to me that a man could
be against himself for how he was with a woman, and through Jeffrey
Carduner, who talked courageously about where he had been unfair and was
against himself, I respected men more. I began to see and I feel it passionately
now, an obligation to use love and sex to be deeply thoughtful, to want
a man to like the world. Not to be further away from the world, but kinder,
fairer to other people and things. And I love learning how to do a better
and better job. I have been able to have the clean feeling that through
bodies being close, other people, the whole world means more--something
I once never dreamed could even be.
Continued:
click here for part 2
"CAN A WOMAN RESPECT HERSELF IN LOVE AND SEX?" |
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