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Leila Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate
The Debate in Every Person: To Have More Feeling
or Less?
At 19, feeling dull and empty, I
decided to join a friend who was going to
“To
feel something,” I learned, is to respond to reality—to the things we
meet. Said Mr. Siegel:
The biggest feeling that we want to have, the feeling of
feelings, is that we like the fact that the combination of ourselves and the
world can be a cause of gratification on both sides.
And I learned about the thing in everyone
that also wants to feel this world isn’t good enough to cause a response in
us. This lessening of feeling, which
comes from the lessening of meaning, is contempt, and when we go after it, we
are less alive.
I’ll
describe tonight how my life has flourished as I’ve learned from Aesthetic
Realism about this debate in me. I’ll
also speak about a courageous Latin American woman whose feeling about having
justice come to people was so large, she has become a national heroine.
“If one knows more,” asked
Mr. Siegel,
what happens to one’s feelings? Real knowledge always helps one’s feelings,
because where feeling isn’t rich it is not complete, and the only way to have
feeling rich is to get that material which is in learning.
As a child in
Yet so often, I was determined not to show I had feeling about things—for or
against. When something bothered me or
made me angry, I felt it was weak to show it could get to me. This was also true with things I liked. When the Beatles appeared on tv, and I
watched the show with my friends, they screamed with pleasure, but I felt they
were silly and excessive, and inwardly mocked them. And though I enjoyed watching my parents’
graceful steps and dips as they danced, I appeared unaffected. To admit I liked what others liked was a
comedown, as I saw it. I had
discrimination—and I felt it was crass to show emotion.
I learned from Aesthetic Realism: when we don’t want to show
our feeling, it’s because we’re in a fight about how much we want to have it in
the first place. “In order to feel
good,” Mr. Siegel explained, “we have to feel much. You cannot really feel good if you are trying
to feel a little rill, a little dripping that is safe. The human mind is not made for it.” I did try to be “safe” by limiting my
feeling, and wore a blank expression—but more and more, I felt blank myself.
The debate about feeling showed in me when I became
interested in boys. I say
“interested”—but to observe me, you’d never have known it. In 3rd grade, I liked Danny
Forrester; he was friendly, handsome, and smart. I wished there were some magical way he could
know I liked him so I wouldn’t have to tell him. He just didn’t seem to get the message by my
poker face. Then, we moved and I didn’t
see him again until I was 15. When he
greeted me at a party, I said in a cool tone that belied my agitation, “Do I
know you?” “What an idiot!,” I thought,
but I’d be damned if I said anything.
Studying
in Aesthetic Realism consultations, as I saw new meaning in things and in
people, I had much more feeling about both; I also hoped to be close to a
man. Yet my debate about how much
feeling I should have showed when I was asked, “Are you distressed about the
men question?” “Not terribly, but somewhat.” “Do you think to say that you're
really concerned about men gives them too much importance?” my consultants
asked. I did!
The exciting education I’ve received has shown me that
having feeling about another person, welcoming his meaning, is real strength
and pride; it has made for my happy marriage to
II. Deep feeling about justice in Latin
America
In 1926, in the town of
Minerva was the third of four daughters of Mercedes and
Enrique Mirabal. Her father was a
successful agricultural businessman, and the family was affluent. Biographer Miguel Aquino García says their
social status and prosperity “made it improbable¼[that]
a torch of light against the relentless tyranny” of the regime would arise in
their home—but that’s just what happened.
III. What were her feelings about: for and
against?
The
enormous desire in everyone,
to have nothing contradict us, to have everyone and everything behave as we please.¼This
desire to squelch anything that ruffles our ego has a correlative in the
political field. It is what fascism, for
example, has gone for: the making sure there is no dissent, that everyone
behaves the way the person or persons heading the government desire.
If you go after
this kind of power over people, you can’t have feeling about what they
deserve. Historian Frank Moya Pons
describes how
As a child, Minerva loved reading; a favorite activity
was reciting poems she’d memorized. She
spent hours in the lush gardens outside their home and cared for animals. Even then, she had deep feeling about
freedom, which every living being deserves. One day, as she was playing with a
pet heron she cared for, it flew off.
Knowing his daughter would be sad, Enrique tried to console her, telling
her to forget the bird; it was ungrateful to leave after having received such
affection from her. But she replied,
sobbing, “Even herons love liberty!”
And
a school friend tells that when Minerva, whose life was privileged, saw how
much the people of her nation endured, she cried, saying “she had never
realized that people lived so poorly.”
It is said she had an “insatiable avidity for
information.” She read voraciously—literature
and poetry, and also books about politics and sociology. She met people who’d fought in the Spanish
Civil War and told her of its meaning; she learned of the international fight
against oppression; she listened to illegal radio transmissions
for news generated in other lands, especially
By her early 20s, Minerva was
beautiful—tall and slender, with short black hair and an olive complexion—and,
said a close friend, “When [she] arrived somewhere you immediately felt her
presence; her imposing personality attracted everyone right away.” Yet, while many men made advances, this
friend spoke of her “apparent immunity¼in
matters of the heart.”
The one man who did affect her at this time was Pericles
Franco, a medical student who’d returned from exile in
While Minerva Mirabal’s life was very different from
mine, I think what I learned about myself would have been useful to her. When I first met
Do you hope to be as exact as
you can and also have the largest emotion exactitude can make for? I think you
can be afraid you won't be proud of it because it's not exact. You can also be afraid of having large
emotion because
it is exact, and it would get
you.
I saw that both were
true. The picture of myself I’d
carefully arranged was being broken up.
Also, I was afraid I’d be more interested in being made important by a
man than in being exact about who he truly is, and that I’d use having more
feeling about him to have less feeling for other people and things.
This discussion, with its beautiful logic, had me see I
could be the same person having feeling about Alan and looking at the structure
of a poem, or preparing lessons for my high school English classes. I’m proud to say I love my husband for his
kindness, his humor, his energetic way of meeting the world, and his friendly
criticism. I’m grateful that, as we
study together in Aesthetic Realism classes, we are having greater feeling,
including about the need for justice to people.
Minerva Mirabal clearly had large feeling about her
country and its people, and had close friends, but was there that in her that
didn’t want to be affected deeply by one man? And might she also have been afraid for a
good reason, related to what Ellen Reiss said to me—worried her feeling might
be inexact, and might have her be untrue to her large purpose?
The lives of the Mirabals changed forever one night in
1949 when, against their will, they attended a party at
Furious that he couldn’t conquer her, and also that she
had political ideas opposed to his, he began a campaign of revenge. It was unwritten law that no one could leave
a gathering before
Again and again over the next decade, Trujillo tried to get
revenge on Minerva and her family—by threats, imprisonments, trying to prevent
Minerva from pursuing a university education, and more. The Mirabals were
hardly the only ones who suffered, yet their well-known situation highlights
the growing feeling of discontent in the nation, and
In 1953, just after the death of her father, Minerva met
Manolo Tavarez, a fellow law student.
Evidence that she wasn’t sure how much feeling she should have for him
is in Manolo’s comment that, during their courtship, she was “a pineapple that
wasn’t easy to peel.” Yet she was
affected by his knowledge and tenderness, and also by his passionate objection
to the regime, and a year later, they were married. It seems there were difficult times in their
marriage, but their large purpose on behalf of justice made for a feeling of
deep mutual respect.
Three important events occurred in Minerva’s life between
1956 and 1958—the birth of her and Manolo’s two children, and in between, her
graduation with a law degree. With this,
My aim is not to describe the last years of the
In
1959, Minerva, Manolo, and many others—including her sisters Maria Teresa and
Patria and their husbands—were heartened by the fact that elsewhere in
If our sense of our own power
is opposed to other human beings’ getting what they deserve¼and
if we want to protect
our power, we will play fast and free with truth, and also with human lives.
And so,
On November 25, 1960, on their way back from one visit,
The large feeling about justice that
Minerva Mirabal had was encouraged by her love for poetry. Poetry, Eli Siegel showed, comes from a
feeling about reality that is both deep and exact. And so I end my paper with lines by a poet
she cared for, Pablo Neruda, which represent the kind of feeling for people
that can make a person proud. They are
from a translation of his poem: “La Gran Alegría”—“Great Happiness”:
I write for the people, even though they cannot
read my poetry with their rustic eyes.
The moment will come in which a line, the air
that stirred my life, will reach their ears,
and then the farmer will raise his eyes,
the miner will smile breaking stones,
the brakeman will wipe his brow,
the fisherman will see clearly the glow
of a quivering fish that will burn his hands,
the mechanic, clean, recently washed,
smelling of soap will see my poems,
and perhaps they will say: “He is a friend.”
Home:
Leila Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic Realism Associate