Aesthetic
Realism Seminar
Can
A Woman Be Both Serious and Lighthearted?
by
Nancy Huntting
I
remember in my late teens feeling that other people’s efforts to be
lighthearted
were silly. I tended to be sad, even grim, and by my twenties I felt
heavy
inside—it was an effort to talk, do things, move. At the same time, I
felt like
a shadow and that other people wouldn’t remember me. I’m very
grateful to say that I learned from Aesthetic Realism
why I was a painful relation of these opposites—and I have a
lightheartedness
and also a feeling of solidity now that I once thought impossible.
1.
The Self that Wants to Like the World Is Lighthearted
I
did many lively things as a girl in the village of Glendale,
Ohio—coasting on
my bike down Gunny Hill, dancing and singing with my friends to rock
‘n’ roll
music, cartwheels on our front lawn, running with Chippy, our dog. But
by my
mid-teens I was already losing my sense of fun. I preferred novels that
were
tragic. I avoided reading Dickens because I’d gotten the impression he
was a
humorist.
Our
family was economically fortunate, a
fact which enabled me to be much more carefree than many children. But
as I
enjoyed my parents praising me and giving me things I wanted, and I
also saw
them fight, and I used their foolishness, as I saw it, to think I was
smart and
very deep.
At 15, my three best friends and I all had a
crush on a senior, Taylor Smith.* He was tall, with mysterious
dark eyes, and
captain of the swimming team. Our new high school didn’t have a girls’
team—so
we began one, in order to work out with the boys. We didn’t dare to speak
to Taylor Smith—but we giggled and whispered in the halls; even
wrote “Taylor”
on the soles of our sneakers with a magic marker, as a secret
“tribute.”
What was the relation between my
“lighthearted” fun about Taylor and the achingly painful Saturday a few
years
later when I cried alone the whole day because my boyfriend, Johnny
Blair*,
broke up with me? I’d had day-dreams, imagining ways Johnny might show
he loved
me—such as, follow me and appear at unexpected moments, have a
rendevous with
me instead of going to his classes, suddenly arrive in a hot-looking
car to
take me somewhere. These things, I’d later see, like the games about
Taylor
Smith, were void of any actual interest in who Johnny was or what might
strengthen him. My idea of love, I later saw, was that a man should
glorify and
please me in a world that didn’t deserve my serious
consideration.
I didn’t know that the fact that a man
affected me stood for the world affecting me—and that, because
I
disdained the world, I couldn’t be “all for love.”
My purpose was
to keep myself intact and in
control. And so, at 26 my consuming passion for the multi-talented Pete
Townsend* became despair because, I felt, he was so energetic and busy
elsewhere
and I was left waiting, lethargic, and desperate for his company.
In Aesthetic Realism
consultations which I began to have at age 27, I learned a way of
seeing the
world that is beautifully serious, and enabled me to be increasingly
proud of
how I saw people—including men. I learned that my largest desire was to
like
the world—to get pleasure from knowing and seeing meaning in things.
Real
lightheartedness arises from this purpose. But another self wants
easier victories
through having contempt: lessening things, making fun. We’re seemingly
the most
important thing in the world, but it’s a fake self, at odds with
reality,
making us deeply heavy and stuck.
I was asked, for instance:
Consultants: Would you say there is
a disposition in you,
even as you have to do with people, to be removed and just by yourself?
Nancy Huntting: Yes.
Consultants: So even when you devote
yourself to a person, the
other self is working?
This
surprised me and I
didn’t agree at first—but I did begin to see it was true. When I told
my
consultants that my father, Donald Huntting’s manner was more
“reserved” than
my mother’s, and when she got very angry, he just didn’t respond, one
thing
they asked was: “Did your father tease your mother?”
NH: Yes.
Consultants: And have you
teased the world? Do you think you are
too good for the world?
Yes,
I did. As I reconsidered this, a certain heaviness
and lethargy ended. Through studying Aesthetic Realism I saw
something
absolutely thrilling: both I, and the men I’d had to do with, were
trying to
put reality’s opposites together. Being energetic didn’t have to
knock a
person out, seriousness was not depressing! Energy
and repose, lightness
and heaviness were meant to be in a beautiful relation as they are
in music,
or a good sentence in a novel—including tragic ones.
Then in an Aesthetic
Realism class, Mr. Siegel asked as to my relation with Pete Townsend:
Eli Siegel: Did you have a problem
of being taken too
seriously and too lightly? Was there a shrine for the both of you? Did
he make
you too heavy, [and you made him too heavy]?
That
is
just what I felt! I had made Pete the most weighty, most important
thing in the
world: because if he worshipped me as I worshipped him, I thought we
could
dismiss the rest of the human race! I was really making light of who he
was, by
not being interested in his past, his relations to other people,
except where
they had to do with me. And Mr. Siegel
explained:
ES: You and Mr.
Townsend felt that love and respect are two different things. They are
like
color and outline in art, where respect corresponds to outline,
and love
corresponds to color. To be interested in who a person really is, is
respect.
Were you able to be yourself with him?
No,
I
wasn’t, and I felt relieved to be finding out why! I didn’t like the
person I
was with him—acting weak, waiting to be doted on. The thrill of being
together
arose not from the good we encouraged in
each other, but from a
triumphant dismissal of things and people. What heaviness and pain will
change
all over the world when people are able to study the real purpose of
love: for
two people, with the utmost seriousness, to encourage each other’s
deepest
desire: to see meaning and wonder and form in the world—and to like it.
2.
Fanny Forester: A Woman Heavy & Light
I
will speak about a short story by Fanny Forester, (1817 to 1854), whose
real
name was Emily Chubbuck Judson. She “was noted for the gaiety of her
writing,”
Eli Siegel said, and her stories published in the eminent magazines of
the day—Graham’s,
the Columbian, the Knickerbocker. He gave an entire
lecture on
her in 1966 titled “What Is the Light?,” which consultants and
associates heard
via tape-recording in a class earlier this year. Mr. Siegel said:
I
found
[Emily Judson] presented the best example I know of a woman heavy and
light,
burdened and glad. This question goes on today…it has tormented
people—they can
be so sorrowful while they want to be so cheerful and joyous.
We learned that at the height of Fanny
Forester’s literary success in her 20’s, she married the most famous missionary
in American history, Adoniram Judson, for whom Judson Memorial Church
(NYC) is named,
and went with him to Burma. Tragically, within 5 years, Judson died of
illness
contracted there; she returned to her home in Madison County, New York,
and
died herself only a few years later at 37. I’m immensely grateful for
Mr.
Siegel’s justice to a woman who would otherwise be so little known now,
that
through her he’s enabling us to better understand these crucial
opposites!
Her
short story which Mr. Siegel said was her “best as art” is “The
Young Dream.”
He said it dealt with what well-known writers of the 20th century
like Mary McCarthy and Katherine Ann Porter would deal with, which he
described
this way:
What makes a woman,
even when things seems to
be going well with a man, be displeased, moody, dissatisfied, or mean,
bitter,
melancholy? [It is] one thing that relates women of the 1850s, 1866…and
1966….
Have you seen Miss
Follansbe, the elegant Miss Catharine Follansbe, belle and beauty?,”
the story begins, its narrator speaking to
the reader in an ever-so lighthearted manner:
A genuine star is
she, not of the first magnitude, perhaps, though requiring but the
reputation
of being an heiress, and a little less personal dignity and haughty
reserve, to
rank above the most brilliant.
So she has a little
too much “dignity and haughty reserve to rank above the most
brilliant.” “She
has shone at Washington, too”—it’s whispered that several powerful men
are
courting her. “How that may be I know not,” the narrator continues,
“but I do
know all about Miss Follansbe's first lover.” Ms. Forester
is playing on the often cruel way that women can talk about other women.
But
we are about to learn, through a prose style both sparkling and
earnest, why
the beautiful Catherine Follansbe changed from a light-hearted girl to
a bitter
and haughty woman of society.
Ten
years earlier, Forester writes, she was very different, she was “only
little
Katy Follansbe, or ‘Lily Katy,’ as she was generally called,” and her
father
was having a hard time providing for his family. At 15, Lily Katy
determines to
help her father by becoming a school teacher—something Emily Judson
herself did
at a similar age, for the same reason. Katy’s so lovely and good with
her young
pupils that the whole community is smitten with her—including a young
man named
Arthur Truesdail, home from college. But it Arhtur’s brother that
arrests Lily
Katy’s “sunny eyes.” The story
continues:
The school-mistress
had only time to hear, "My brother Philip," and to smile and shake
her curls toward a very serious-looking face, before she was…led away
to the
group awaiting her…."I wonder what makes him so melancholy-like this
gay
morning," thought Katy, as her eye turned for a moment on Philip
Truesdail…It was strange; and Katy, being too young to believe
seriousness
quite compatible with happiness, began to feel very kindly toward him….
I
think Katy
somehow feels she is too light, and is drawn to Philip’s seriousness,
and also
feels she can make him happier. The two start taking walks and reading
poetry
together; Philip, a farmer, has studied agriculture and also read many
philosophic books, but it was “seldom that he mingled with human
beings, for
there was something in their rude tones that jarred upon the refined
harmony of
his spirit.” And Forester
writes:
Good
and gentle as Katy was, there was a single vein of coquetry (innocent,
pleasing
coquetry to anybody but Philip Truesdail) about her, which originated
many a
shadow.”
Is the author describing,
delicately, contempt in both Philip and Katy—making for a
mix-up of
heaviness and lightness in each of them?
Mr. Siegel explained:
“Light” has two
meanings in English: not
heavy physically—as a cloud is not heavy, or thistledown; also, giving
light,
or radiance. The opposites are dark, and heavy…. Sunlight and shadow
are all
through the work of Miss Forester.
He gave this
important description of
something that Lily Katy and women now sincerely want—and is necessary
for true
lightheartedness:
Every person is
trying to be good-natured,
and every person hasn’t succeeded. Good nature is the courage to feel
that in
being pleased fully with something, we’re taking care of ourselves.
That
feeling, that being pleased is prudent, is the essential element.
As Philip and Katy
please each other,
things happen which women in 2007 will recognize. A man shows he’s
affected by
us, and we have a “flirtatious” response—that’s actually mean:
He had platted a
wreath, and she stood
smilingly… while he adjusted it among her light, silken curls; but when
he
picked…a rose-bud, and, touching it to his lips, was about adding it to
the
fragrant tiara, she shook it gayly from her head and placed her foot
upon it.
"Nay, nay, cousin Phil," (Katy
always used the
convenient
prefix,) "you will spoil my head-dress with these heavy additions; and
I
dare say you have made me look like a fright now—haven't you?"
Katy did not note the
expression—half of chagrin, half
of
involuntary pain—with which her companion turned to
another
topic; and neither did he note her hand soon after
creeping
down among the grass, to recover the rejected symbol of what had never
been spoken.
As summer is ending,
Philip expresses his
worry that she will go back to her work and other friends and forget
him;
she’ll “perhaps laugh at the rude farmer that has dared to—to call you
cousin,
Katy." He presses her to say she
will love him always; she says she’s too young, and puts him off. Then,
seeing
his disappointment, she relents, and they kiss for the first time. The
“for”
and “against” of man and woman for centuries is here. Forester
writes: “[T]hey sat down on the mossed bank together,
and spent two golden hours as hours were never spent by them before.”
The next morning, when Katy awakes, she has
two feelings:
That she was
happy could not be denied; but with her sense of happiness came the
mortifying
suspicion that she had been won too easily….
Mr.
Siegel commented:
The trouble
is exactly the trouble that goes on now. ‘What happened to me
when my
body did that?’ Me and body are still
not the same…. This question
of—‘What made us happy? How did we get to be happy?’
Katy,
in her 19th century way, is like women now, feeling: “I had
pleasure, but did I lessen myself?”—and getting angry with the man. She
determines that Philip “ought to be punished for leading her into such
folly.
How dignified she would be when she next met him!” And, when they do
meet, she
is bright and cool. Forester writes quite keenly—observing they are not
honest
with each other, and showing how a woman can go for a false lightness
when
she’s deeply affected, and how much injury is done by it:
Five
minutes of entire confidence on both sides would have set all right; but a
word unspoken often causes a life-estrangement.
And so, is it strange that Philip Truesdail
and Lily Katy parted that night forever? "Forever — forever!" sobbed
the poor girl, as she flung herself on the sofa, even before the echo
of her
light, merry laugh had died on the air.
It was years before that mocking laugh died
in the ears of Philip Truesdail.
“Because
they talk in this way, things are over,” Mr.
Siegel
commented, “Affection and mockery went on in the 1840s in America.”
3.
The Fight Is Serious—and the Education
about It Makes for Real Lightness of Heart!
Women
don’t know they have this very serious fight going on inside: How much
should
the outside world affect us? Do we want to be changed, deeply stirred,
criticized, shaken up by the world in the form of a man—or do we want
to be
superior, protect ourselves, conquer the world, get away from it? A
solution
has been flirting—and revenge. What is flirting, what is its purpose?
Do we
hope a strong man be weak about us?
Toni Whittaker* is a kindergarten teacher who
has telephone consultations from Massachusetts. She had a sunny energy
in her
voice and told us she loved the out of doors—tennis, biking, boating.
In
her second
consultation she said that a serious relation of more than seven
years with a man she cares for very much, Seth Brady, was breaking
down. Two
years ago she’d discovered that Professor Brady, distinguished in
physics, was
seeing another woman. Seth told her it was because he was lonely, she
hadn’t
enough time for him. She was devastated, and then “got consolation,”
she said,
by being with another man.
She and Seth had
gotten back together for almost a year. She told us he was too
possessive, and her voice alternated
between hopefulness and anger: Things would be better between them,
then he’d
bring everything up again. Now he’d broken up with her. She admitted,
“I must
be doing something wrong”; but she had another feeling we recognized:
“Why
doesn’t he appreciate how wonderful I am, and shape up?”
“I’ve had quite a horrible week,” she said,
“I’m very sad right now and upset.” We asked, “Does
he have suspicion of you?
“He’s very suspicious of me!,” she said with
exasperation, conveying she thought this was ridiculous.
We told her what Mr.
Siegel had once said to a woman in a class: “The greatest suspicion men
have is
that in some way they don’t see, a woman is making them weaker.” And we asked:
Consultants: Do you think
you’ve wanted Seth Brady
to be stronger, in a better relation to the world? Has that been your
purpose?
Toni Whittaker: I don’t
know.
Consultants: Could he feel: “This
woman wants my adoration, but does she want to know me and want me
stronger?
She wants me to be around, but does she want me to like the world?”
TW: Yes, he could.
Consultants: Do you think you’re in
a terrific fight
between whether you want to possess a man, or you want to have good
will for
him?
TW: I think so.
Women, wanting to be less
affected by men, have not given them their full existence, depths as
real as
our own. In behalf of changing this, and having her see that knowing
Seth Brady
could really do her good, we asked Toni Whittaker what specific
criticism he
had expressed of her.
Toni Whittaker: I think he kept a lot
inside.
Consultants: But he never
criticized you?
TW: He said
when I talked on the phone, I didn’t give him enough attention when he
was
there.
Consultants: Do
you know that in most apartments and homes that
is a big objection,
and it’s an ethical matter? So do
you think he was right in objecting? Do you think he felt you dismissed
him?
You feel he’s possessive, and he may be. Meanwhile, do you think you
are still
capable of dismissing a person?
TW: He definitely
felt dismissed.
Cons: Do you act like it’s
a minor matter?
TW: Right, no. I don’t think
it’s minor.
Eli Siegel defined Seriousness as “the
taking by a mind of what a thing wholly is, and what that thing
means….To be
serious,” he continued, “is to be ready to take, to be affected by, the
meaning
of anything.”
Consultants: We’re asking you to be
serious. If
you’re serious, you’ll really be happy.
We
suggested Toni Whittaker read the novel on
which Mr. Siegel gave the lecture: “Jane Eyre, or, This Girl Had
Good
Will.” In her next consultation she told us she loved it, and she had
some
important observations about Jane:
Toni Whittaker: She didn’t take the
opportunities
to flirt with Mr. Rochester, like I would have….She’s so humble, too,
in a good
way.
Consultants: Is she also
proud?
TW: Oh, yes! I’ve been asking
myself—What would
Jane Eyre do? I’ve spent my time in a better way.
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