of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
| NancyHuntting.net Aesthetic Realism Consultant Home |
Aesthetic Realism Public SeminarFrom the Women Are Various
Seminar Is Good Will Our
Greatest Power? paper by Nancy Huntting given at the Aesthetic
Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012
Part IV.
"What Was He to Himself?"
Jane
Marston studies Aesthetic
Realism in consultations with an Each and All trio, and it was
clear from her first
consultation the person she was angriest with was her father. She was raised mostly by her mother, she
said; when she was a
girl, her father left her mother for another woman.
When we asked what she thought her father felt at
that time, she was short and
uncomfortable in her answer. "I
saw he was guilty and angry," she said.
We asked: "Do you see your father's feelings as real? Do you think if he felt he was wrong, and felt guilty, against himself, that you should respect that?" Jane Marston: Yes, that's true. Mostly I think of his anger. We asked
Miss Marston to write a monologue of her father
at the age of 18, and try to think what his hopes and his fears were
then. She brought the monologue to her
next
consultation, and read what she had written about her father's thoughts
as he dressed
to go to a dance: My
jacket is too short...I want to belong...The guys like my sense of
humor--girls
like it when I goof around, but I hate being something I'm not. And I don't even know who I am.
"Do you
think your father is still trying to know who he is?" we asked. "Do you think you have given men the
right to have a question about who they are...this enormous question
that you know
you have?" "Not enough,"
Miss Marston answered. Consultants. Do you
think your father, now, is for himself or against himself? Jane Marston. I
don't know
him that well--it's probably combination. Consultants. Do you want him to think more of himself, or less of himself? Jane Marston: I want him to think more of himself. "Do you think you've used your father and the pain you saw your mother have," we asked, "to keep your distance from the world?" Yes, she said. We asked how she felt writing the monologue. "I feel better," she said. Conultants: Do you
feel proud? To write [this way]
about your father is a major event in your life, because you tried to
think
about the insides of a person you used to hate the world.
You're going to give the world a second
chance.” V. Good Will Has
Immortal Power Sara
Coleridge did have a hard time
because the father whose warmth of heart she truly loved and respected
so much,
also wanted to forget the persons who meant the most to him. I believe the way Sara Coleridge had
resentment about her father's absence had to do with the difficulty
sleeping
and ill health that plagued her from early childhood, and her death
after a
long illness at the age of 49. But her life has
deep
value because in such a large way she did try to understand her father
and what
he went through.
Toward the conclusion of her introduction she asks for honesty from the critics. I am impelled to say, this is what Eli Siegel has been denied by the press and literary world: I have endeavored to give the genuine
impressions of my mind respecting [my
father], believing that if reporters will but be honest, and study to
say that
and that alone, which they really think and feel, the color, which
their
opinions and feelings may cast upon the subject they have to treat of,
will not
finally obscure the truth.
Commented Mr. Siegel: What Miss Coleridge is saying here is that
you
need to have good will to be a critic. The critic always has to hope
that he meet something good. At the same time, in order to be just to
your hope, you have to
make sure you don't want to be deceived.
In a letter she wrote to her husband, Mr. Siegel said, is her greatest writing: "She is saying in a sweet way, that once there has been good will for a person, love that is honest, it can be seen as part of the permanent being of the world, and can't be destroyed." Sara Coleridge writes: Will death at one blow crush into endless
ruin all our mental growths as an
autumnal tempest prostrates the frail summer-house...? Surely there
will be a
second spring when these firm and profuse growths shall flourish
again.... how utterly
impossible it is to reconcile the mind to the prospect of the
extinction of our
earthly affections...
What Mr. Siegel explained about this passage is also about the power a woman hopes to have: If it's honest love, it's immortal, you cannot feel it otherwise....There is a notion that if the world ever comes to something honest, honest, honest, honest, honest, it couldn't let it die. In the largest sense honesty is the beauty of beauty itself. The more it's honest and beautiful, the more it has to be immortal. This is what Sara Coleridge is dealing with. The honesty of Aesthetic Realism is immortal. Eli Siegel wanted to see the value of persons of the past, in this instance a woman so unknown, and made it possible for us, of the present, to understand ourselves.
|