Eating Disorders & Power

Liking the World or Beating It

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that the one opposition to that in every person which wants to have contempt—dismiss things and get rid of them—is the desire to like the world.

Carolyn Adams Miller apparently liked learning in school, liked swimming, becoming a champion swimmer in her hometown. But from a very early age, she was fiercely competitive. Working on this paper, I have come to see that competition is central in the life of a person who has eating disorders. For example, Carolyn Miller writes of herself as a young girl:

My parents began to make comments, especially comparing me with my older sister, whom I began to hate with a passion. Even at my thinnest points, nothing in her closet ever fit me, which enraged and embarrassed me. To get back at her, I competed in other arenas...piano recitals, grades test scores, and so on, flaunting the results if I came out on top.

I know that feeling—I was also competitive with other girls and angry that God didn't make me differently. I wanted to be tall and lean and was jealous of my friends who were. I was determined that if I couldn't be tall, at least I could be thin. Sometimes I was so angry about this that I wouldn't even go out because I thought other girls looked so much better than I did. Mrs. Miller writes:

No one could possibly be better than I in anything without inviting my criticism. So whenever my parents had praised one of my friends...I...immediately rejoined with something negative about that person...This attitude affected me at work too. If someone I perceived as incompetent made more than me or got a raise, I went on a verbal rampage, decimating him or her to whomever would listen.

This contempt hurt Carolyn Miller very much. And even as she says these things, she is not against them. She never says straight that she was wrong to see people in this competitive way.

Mrs. Miller describes being fascinated by the vomitoriums of the Roman Empire. I, too, had found them very attractive when I learned about them in the sixth grade. When I spoke about this in a consultation, it was pointed out to me that these vomitoriums took place during the decline of the Roman Empire when the Romans were most brutal. Ellen Reiss asked these tremendously kind questions which changed my life:

Do you think there is anything else in history that's beautiful that you can imitate? It happens that the literature of Rome has been held onto by the world...there are lines in Latin literature that are beautiful and can have a person feel that there's emotion that she's proud of having. So what would you rather do, get inspired by a Roman vomitorium, or lines like these from Virgil, which I shall quote in English, and the world has not wanted to forget them: "These are the tears of things, and touch the mind of man." [And in Latin] "Sunt lachrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt." So which means more to you, the ability to vomit or the ability to hear that which lasted for many centuries?

Meryl Nietsch. The ability to hear that!

I love Ellen Reiss for her kindness and knowledge. Hearing this, what I had been so ashamed of was now in relation to the culture and beauty of the world.

Where I once felt I would have to spend the rest of my life living the hell of eating disorders, I now eat and enjoy three healthy meals a day. I eat what I like but with care and a respect that I never thought was possible.

In a class Eli Siegel once said, "The only thing that can combat the desire to eat excessively is the desire to know." Aesthetic Realism freed my mind to know and like the world and be deeply affected by it—and it is the most thrilling good time! This includes knowing my family, being interested in people's lives, reading some of the great literature of the world by George Eliot, Thackery, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, my study of the flute and music.

And this also includes my knowing of Aesthetic Realism Consultant, Bennett Cooperman, whom I love and am proud to be married to. I have been deeply stirred by the relation of thoughtfulness and exuberance in Bennett, and his humorous and straight criticism of me has made me a better person and had me care more for the whole world. As we study together in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, we are learning what all of America deserves to know—how the principles of Aesthetic Realism explain people and the world itself.

I'll end with some lines from Eli Siegel's great poem What Food Deserves: A Canticle, published in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:

When our strength is spent,
There's nothing like nourishment
To bring it back, back, back.
We go to the world again,
We eat a something, and then
We feel we've regained what we were.
Food can be a making of love
To the world we know.
We go to and fro,
But we come back to food,
Waiting for us.

And the poem ends:

So in a state of seemly elation,
We hail food;
And we hope that we have a just attitude
To our great friend, food,
Though seen wrongly, it can upset.
Food, though, deserves to be seen rightly,
Ever increasingly.
And if that goes on,
The unease that many feel about food
Will have gone.
Food will be seen as grace itself.

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