Aesthetic Realism Foundation

141 Greene Street
New York, NY 10012

Autumn 2022

Dear Friend,

To illustrate the importance of this foundation and the knowledge it presents, I’ll begin with an article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Robert Murphy. Had what is said in it been widely known and studied after it was published over twenty years ago, we would certainly have a more humane nation. The article appeared, among other places, in the San Antonio Register—and San Antonio is very near Uvalde, Texas, where children and teachers were shot to death in their school this year. Here is the article, in a somewhat condensed form:

The Education Humanity Is Looking For

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation presents a curriculum of magnificent classes, all based on that central principle Robert Murphy spoke of: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.” There are classes in poetry, anthropology, the visual arts, music, film, marriage, and on the great Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. These have all been conducted via video conference during the pandemic—and thanks to electronics, people across America and beyond are able to attend those thrilling classes.

There are Aesthetic Realism consultations—an example of which you saw in the Robert Murphy article. Consultations take place now via video conference too, and I’ll be saying more about them. They have the wide, deep, logical understanding of oneself that people thirst for.

Onsite aspects of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation’s beautiful work, necessarily suspended during the pandemic, will be resuming in various ways. There have been the wonderful public seminars on the subjects that affect people most, with such titles as:

• The Debate in Everyone: Should I Feel More or Less?
• The Mix-up in Marriage about Coldness & Warmth
• The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method: Students Learn, Prejudice Is Defeated!

And there are the dramatic and musical presentations by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company.

You can find out more in our Mission Statement—where you will see a description of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation’s Outreach Program. Those loved outreach events have been taking place—via video conference—in these months, at the request of libraries, educational institutions, and community centers.

Then, there is the Foundation’s international periodical. I’ll quote my colleague Aesthetic Realism consultant Barbara Allen on the subject, and I agree with her wholeheartedly:

“Every two weeks a new issue of the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known is published. Its editor is Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education. Each issue is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. Ms. Reiss’s commentaries look at and make clear matters that are explained at their source only by Aesthetic Realism — whether the cause of boredom, or what a child is looking for, or the injustice in America now. Her imagination is fresh, her scholarship warm, with every issue.

“TRO presents in serial form lectures by Eli Siegel that are cultural, immediate, and, with enormous diversity, embody his grandeur for history and right now. TRO often contains, too, portions of papers presented at seminars by Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates. This periodical is encyclopedic in the subjects it tells the truth about, to the life-changing benefit of everyone who reads it.”

I  Learned This

I’m glad to tell you now some of what I—as a representative person—learned from Aesthetic Realism. Through what I learned, my life changed profoundly, in ways I’d hoped for but hadn’t thought possible. For example, there is the subject of love.

People everywhere long for love. But what real love is, and what in us interferes with our having it, was not understood before Aesthetic Realism. “The purpose of love,”  Eli Siegel explained in his book Self and World, “is to feel closely one with things as a whole.”

When I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I didn’t know that how I saw the world  had anything to do with how I saw a man. Without putting it into words, I felt that love should be an offset to a world that mixed me up, didn’t appreciate me, got in my way. Unknowingly, I saw love as a means of conquering the world and managing it. I certainly did not feel love was a means of valuing the world through a person—who represents reality.

What I wanted was to have a big effect on men through how I looked—and to have a man make a lot of me, give me praise and make me the most important person in his life. Yet, though I sometimes seemed to get those things, every relationship I had failed.

Then, in one of my first Aesthetic Realism consultations, I began to understand why. I told my consultants I’d become interested in a man at my job—but I spoke with a huge lack of clarity about what in him affected me. They asked me with humor, “Are you very taken by how taken he is by you?” And they asked me this surprising yet deep question: “Do you see Mr. Carter as wholly existing?” I didn’t—because I didn’t see him as having a whole life, with ever so many thoughts and feelings. I was just interested in his liking me.

Ellen Reiss, who was one of my consultants, asked, “Do you think you’re afraid of the insides of people?” I said “Yes.” I remembered sitting across a table from a man with whom I was in a relationship when I lived in Montana—and not asking him anything about himself. Ms. Reiss explained, “There is a whole aspect of a person that you don’t recognize as real.”

Meryl Nietsch. What is that?

Ellen Reiss. It’s the inner life of the person. It’s the wholeness of a person’s feelings. It’s the world in a person. And people in the history of amour have loved shells of other people because they’re terrified of all the dimensions of a person.

This was a turning point in my life. It was the beginning of my wanting to see men, and people as such, as real, as having questions as deep as my own, as having reality in them. And reality in a person means, centrally, that the opposites which are in the whole world and in art are in a person too, and the person longs to make them one: such opposites as sureness and unsureness; strength and gentleness; high and low, or pride and humility. I was learning to see a person, including a man, with respect instead of contempt.

Here I’ll say too that what I’m describing is not only the basis for love but the basis for justice. When you see that another person has the structure of the world itself—the opposites—in him or her, you don’t want to hurt that person.

I am grateful without bounds for what I learned that made possible my tremendously happy marriage to Bennett Cooperman, an Aesthetic Realism consultant, and singer and actor with the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company. When I first met Bennett, I respected him very much. I was affected by a relation of logic and feeling in him: his intellectual perceptions about the world, drama, music—and his warmth toward people. Because of my study of Aesthetic Realism, I now had a desire to know a man, including how he himself wanted to be better. And Bennett also wanted to understand me. He has been a deep friend. Studying in the magnificent professional classes for consultants and associates, taught by Ellen Reiss, we are getting the richest education about the world and ourselves!

Food, & the World It Comes From

Before I began to study Aesthetic Realism, I had the eating disorders bulimia and anorexia. I felt tormented by them, but hid my torment under a sunny manner. I have spoken publicly and written articles about what I learned from Aesthetic Realism about these disorders. For now, I can tell you that eating disorders arise from a way of seeing the whole world. In Self and World, Eli Siegel writes in beautiful prose:

The taking of food is more than nutrition alone; it is also a profound homage of the self to its surroundings. We are saying when we eat, and with humility, too, that we need the world from which our food comes. We say, unconsciously, when we eat well: Bless reality which gives us our daily nutriment.—If we can’t logically bless, our daily bread will be a daily peril.

My “daily bread” was a “daily peril.” Then, in Aesthetic Realism consultations, I heard deep, compassionate criticism of my contempt for the world; and my desire to know, like, and respect the world was encouraged. I learned that, as my consultants put it,

[bulimia] is a way of managing the world — having it please you but not affect you deeply. Anorexia is a means of having yourself pure, without any additions.

What I learned from Aesthetic Realism enabled ten years of the agony of eating disorders to end. Today I eat with a dignity and self-respect for which I’m very grateful.

I have seen, through careful looking, that Eli Siegel is the philosopher who understood the human mind.

A Mother, a Daughter, & Reality

Growing up and later, the person about whom I had the most difficulty was my mother, Marion Nietsch. We argued a lot. I told myself she was always trying to manage me. But I was also mean to her, wanting to prove that nothing she did could make me happy. I remember how once she bought me a lovely summer blouse, for which I showed such disdain. I will never forget the look on her face, how hurt she was.

In an Aesthetic Realism consultation, when my consultants asked me about my mother, I said, “I try to forget about her.” They asked, “Do you think you’re mad at her because you can’t just sum her up?” This was true. I remembered seeing, when I was a child, a generosity in her as she wanted people in our neighborhood to fare well. Often she would invite someone to our home who was alone during a holiday, or give money to a relative who needed it. And this was the same mother who could be so severe. I didn’t know that both Marion Nietsch and I were longing to make sense of opposites in ourselves—like sweetness and severity.

My consultants asked, “If you don’t want to understand your mother, will it be hard for you to understand any other person?” Looking at her newly, I thought of how she had a difficult time with our large family, raising five boys and me. Money was tight, and we did not make it easy for her. Like many parents today, my mother and father struggled in an economy that is based not on good will for people but on using people for profit.

Through my Aesthetic Realism consultations, I began to see who my mother was. My consultants asked, “Do you think you really have a sense of what a woman with six children feels?” I didn’t. “But,” they continued, “can mind try to know what that feels like?” “I think so,” I said. “Do you think since you were the first child, she should have just stopped there?”—the question was asked with humor, but I did feel that!

I was given an assignment to write a soliloquy of Marion Nietsch when she was a young woman. And writing it, I realized there was so much I didn’t know about her.

As my study continued, I did something very different from once: I had conversations with my mother about her life. Often, they took place as we sat together by Long Island’s Great South Bay. There were many conversations, and they were exciting. She told me that she sang in a band, that she was valedictorian of her eighth grade class, and that one of her favorite novels as a girl was Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I learned about what she felt living in Brooklyn, and later moving to then-rural Seaford, Long Island, and about meeting my father, Richard Nietsch. I was seeing her with new eyes: she was not just my mother but a person who had to do with so much. She was one and many, personal and impersonal, familiar and mysterious. Seeing reality’s opposites in her, I was liking, deeply and stirringly, both Marion Nietsch and the world itself.

My mother died some years ago, and I will always cherish the friendship between us that came to be because of Aesthetic Realism. She herself was very grateful for what she called in a letter “the kind work of Eli Siegel.”

That kind education, with its logic and comprehension, is needed today more than ever!

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