Home: Leila Rosen—English Teacher and Aesthetic
Realism Associate
As a person who once felt
speaking to more than two people at a time constituted a crisis, I’m grateful
to tell what I’ve learned from Aesthetic Realism about the subject of our
seminar. In his lecture on expression,
Eli Siegel explains that expression
is anything we do having an outward
form, for some purpose of ourselves. . . .Whenever we do something, we show
what we are and also what we want. No
person can do anything without expressing himself in some way. The question is how successful the expression
is.
My life—as a woman, wife, and
high school English teacher—shows what Ellen Reiss writes in TRO 902: “Our true
expression is freed by Aesthetic Realism, as surely and sweetly as a caged lark
is freed when the cage is opened and he soars into blue sky.”
I. Where the trouble about
self-expression begins
“Expression,” said Mr. Siegel,
“begins with our thoughts to ourselves. That is where we decide on who we
are.” As a child in
But mostly, as I looked at the
people closest to me, I had another kind of thought. Like many children, I felt my parents were
less refined than I was. I saw my father
go from humming “Sweet Georgia Brown” and dancing jauntily to suddenly being
furious. And in my snobbishness I was
embarrassed by my mother because she was very talkative—even with strangers. I also didn’t feel this was the same mother
who made cutting remarks about a neighbor or relative. I used my impressions to be scornful, to have
contempt, and to feel I’d express myself, as Mr. Siegel describes in his
lecture, “by restraining [myself], by not talking.” I went for the expression of feeling:
you’re roving around in the clouds that
make up yourself; and in this way you’ll get away from all the knocks and
sharpnesses and thorns that you had to meet.
I wanted to be as different from
my parents as I could—including by getting rid of my Brooklyn accent—and from
age 9 I worked painstakingly to eradicate any trace of Brooklyn from my
speech. It was exhausting!—and it added to my feeling that talking was a
burden, not happy self-expression.
For years I was puzzled
by the fact that, fiercely untalkative and separate as I was, I cared so much
for one of the deepest forms of human expression—language. In an Aesthetic Realism consultation, I began
to understand why when my consultants said:
Aesthetic Realism says the way we use
words, both to ourselves and to others, is what our life depends on. Any warfare with words is essentially a
warfare with meaning. [But] the triumph
of contempt is also its disaster. We
find we're in ourselves and we can't get out.
Do you think one of the reasons you're interested in language is a
criticism of this?
Yes, it was. I learned that language stands for our deep
relation to the world, for through it we are affected by and can express
ourselves to other people—which I desperately needed to be and do. I’d felt encased in myself, and periodically
would throw myself into activities that would bring me closer to people—at
summer camp; at a new, experimental high school. But because I wanted to scorn and haughtily
dismiss people as “not my type,” I continued to ward them off, and would
retreat once again, in pain and triumph.
Mr. Siegel explains why, in these exact and kind sentences:
We have to be impressed before we can express ourselves. Part of the being impressed
is the being stirred. If in the field of
thought we have put up so many guards that we can be immune to anything deeply
exciting, we’ll never express ourselves.
I was deeply immune to
what was outside myself. An instance I
remember was in late spring, 1970, when I was a sophomore in high school, and
the
II. What is true self-expression in love?
Though I tried to convince
myself the reason I hadn’t been successful in love was the poor judgment of
men, who didn’t know a good thing when they met it, I had a suspicion something
in me interfered. In an early
consultation, when I was asked: “Are you distressed about the men question?” I
answered, “Not terribly, but somewhat.”
My consultants asked, “Do you think to say you're really concerned about
men gives them too much importance?”
Yes. I did feel showing I was
affected by a man was humiliating!
I began to learn that the reason
love didn’t fare so well with me was that I’d made a rift between expressing
myself and wanting to be affected by someone outside myself. In an Aesthetic Realism class, when I said
several men I knew had been critical of my wanting to be useful to them, while
not feeling they could be useful to me, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss
asked: “Do you think if we don't want people to be useful to us, we can't
wholly want to be useful to them?” I
didn’t understand why, and she explained with thrilling logic that to be really
useful to a person, we have to want him to have all the meaning he
can—including for us.
What she was describing
is good will, which Mr. Siegel defined as “the desire to have something else
stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful.” I learned that when we love a person, we want
the best thing in him to be stronger, more expressed; we want to be a kind
critic of the things he dislikes himself for—and we want him to do the same for
us. I’m grateful to be engaged in this
happy process with my husband
III. Powerful Self-Expression in a Woman of
“The question of expression,”
Mr. Siegel explained, “has to do with how much we take in and how we take it
in.” A woman who, because she was
profoundly stirred by what persons in her native land endured, responded with
some of the true self-expression of the 20th century, is Mary Benson, who was
born in
Her courage was remarkable—for,
as she writes in her autobiography, A
Far Cry—The Making of a South African, growing up she had the racism of “a
typical white South African.” Born in
1919, the daughter of the well-to-do administrator of
We never questioned the ludicrousness,
let alone the humiliation to them, of calling these men ‘boys.’ From the time I
had learned to write well enough, if the rest of the family was absent, they
would come to me: ‘Can I have a night pass, please, nonnie?’ Then I would spell
out on a piece of paper: ‘Please pass native
This is about the degrading pass
laws, which forced all black persons to carry identification passes; caught
without them, they could be arrested, fined, imprisoned. Aesthetic Realism explains that all
prejudice, including apartheid, arises from contempt, from persons’ feeling
they’ll express themselves by looking down on and exerting power over people
different from them.
At 19, “determined to escape
from a life centred on the Country Club,” Ms. Benson felt she had to leave
During the 2nd World War she
joined the South African Women’s Auxiliary Army Service, and in
IV. Expression She Was Proud Of
The turning point in Mary
Benson’s life was when, at 29, she read Alan Paton’s just-published novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Citing its moving first sentences—“There is a
lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered
and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it”—she writes:
I read those words one
momentous day in 1948. They still strike
at my heart. . . .Through its revelation of
She wrote to Paton, beginning a
lifelong friendship with him. It was
through speaking with him that she first heard about a courageous Anglican
priest whose work exposing slave-labor conditions for black laborers made him
loved by Africans and hated by the ruling white minority. His name was Michael Scott, and she
determined to meet and work with him. In
The revelations which in Paton’s book
had opened heart and mind were now there before my eyes and I tried to catch up
on long years of ignorance by reading all the relevant books and articles I
could.
“What happens to you when you
know something?,” asked Mr. Siegel. “Are you expressed more? Of course, because
you have more reason to respond, and all expression is a response.” Mary Benson responded powerfully to what she
was learning, and her expression became a great source of pride, and of
usefulness to many people.
V. What Interfered with Her
Self-Expression in Love
Mary Benson says she longed to
“combine love. . .with [a large] purpose in life.” The person with whom she got closest to this
was Michael Scott. More than with any
other man she knew, and she’d had several painful relationships, she had large
reason to respect him. “Where principles of justice and humanity were
involved,” she writes, “he was totally uncompromising. . . .He had a wide
intelligence and probing mind.” She worked, without a salary, as Scott’s
secretary and associate for the next seven years. Together, they founded the African Bureau in
But Mary Benson also had another
purpose with Michael Scott, and there was much pain between them. I wish she could have heard questions like
this, which I had the good fortune to hear in an Aesthetic Realism
consultation. “Do you think that even if
there's a man you admire somewhat, you'd like to affect him in such a way that
you can have contempt for him?” I did
feel this. If I respected a man, I felt
I was giving in, and had to assert myself by managing him, aggressively giving
advice, feeling I knew better than he how to run his life. This was also some of the trouble in how Mary
Benson saw Michael Scott. She tells, for
example, of his coming to stay at the apartment she shared with a friend after
an exhausting tour of the country. “[He] welcomed my affectionate
attention. I tidied him up and, when his
back was turned, gave his ankle-length coat to charity.”
Their relationship was complex,
and there is much to understand about how Scott himself saw. But the fight in Ms. Benson between
respecting him and wanting to own him was intense. I think what Mr. Siegel describes in Self and World in speaking of another woman,
Stella Winn, who was “noble, self-denying publicly; nervous, narrow, nagging,.
. .unjust privately,” explains something that was working in Mary Benson. Though in her work, she wanted to know and
understand
Like women everywhere, who have
done much less good for the world, Mary Benson wanted something else from
men. She says she “was flattered by. .
.invitations to lunches or dinners” with male friends who made her very
important. When, confused about how to
see Michael Scott, she decided to return to
Over the next decade
she worked closely with members of the ANC, many of whom—including Nelson
Mandela—were on trial for their lives, charged with high treason, and in 1961,
she was asked to write a history of the ANC.
She eagerly accepted, though meeting with members of an outlawed
organization was prohibited, and therefore dangerous. It also involved travel, which was difficult
as she had developed crippling rheumatoid arthritis. But she says, “I came to know my country as
never before.” In 1963 she testified
before the UN Committee on Apartheid, describing the hideous injustice with
which native Africans were treated, the courage of many people fighting it, and
the “fantastic wave of prosperity” for American and British investors who
reaped huge profits from the earth and labor of
Two years later, she was placed
under house arrest. She could hardly
leave her home, could no longer write anything—even a personal diary—couldn’t
have visitors or speak with more than one person at a time. After much thought, she decided to leave
True self-expression,
Mr. Siegel said, “is useful to yourself and everybody else.” To a very large degree, Mary Benson had this,
and I’m sure she would want her life to be useful in having women understand
themselves. I see Aesthetic Realism
itself, the magnificent result of the way Eli Siegel was affected by and used
his mind on all reality, as the greatest achievement of expression in the
history of human thought. Studying it
can have every person, on every continent, feel truly expressed, complete,
proud.