Pocahontas & What's More Important: To Appreciate Rightly or Be Praised?
With a consideration of the life and meaning of Pocahontas. First presented in a public seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York City.

Aesthetic Realism explains the fight that can be in women between honestly appreciating the world, and wanting praise just for ourselves. In his book Definitions and Comment, Eli Siegel defines "appreciation" as "The enjoying of a thing by seeing it as it is." And he explains:

Pleasure from a thing is based either on knowing the thing or it isn't. If pleasure does not arise from knowing a thing, it comes from something the self having the pleasure brought to the thing at the expense of what that thing was. The thing is then either underestimated or overestimated. In neither instance is there that being at one with, or accurate relation with, what's real; which...is of pleasure itself.

That "accurate relation with what's real" includes, I've learned, our husbands, a co-worker, a meal we may be preparing.

Growing up on the south shore of Long Island, I had a real appreciation for the lush beauty I saw around me. I liked learning about the yellow forsythia, and particularly liked the weeping willow tree, which asserted itself high into the sky while its branches curved so gracefully towards the earth. And I had pleasure trying to know the geography and waterways where I lived as I studied a map and made a replica of Long Island out of plaster of paris, with a blue hand-painted ocean, sandy beaches and land.

But I had another desire. In his great, kind lecture, "Seeing and Grabbing," Mr. Siegel explains:

The child can look very early on what is around it as a thing to be captured—it becomes a little Alexander or a little Wellington. Likewise, however, it has the tendency to see. To understand how, in the same organism, these two things can be so deep and so constant and can be mingled in so many ways—that is the understanding of a person.

I was "a little Alexandra," as I smiled and coaxed my father to help me with my school projects so I could beat out Johnny O'Brien. I respected Johnny for the careful way he worked on his projects, but I remember feeling triumphantly superior to him when I came to school with my handmade wooden boat—which my father had actually made—complete with a rubberband-driven propeller. But when the other students said mine was better, I felt very ashamed. Later, Johnny looked at me critically and said, "You cheated because your father made that!"

I also used my blonde curls and angelic appearance to look on what was around me "as a thing to be captured." I remember vividly descending the stairs one Christmas in my new red dress, to a crescendo of "ahs" from my grandparents, god parents, aunts, and uncles. Though I basked in this attention, I also felt uncomfortable. I felt increasingly dull and languid, and sometimes I didn't want to come down at all and would hide in my room.

Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Class Chairman Ellen Reiss asked me: "Is the main purpose of the self to get praise or to praise rightly? If a woman deserves praise she should get it, but Aesthetic Realism says the thing that makes a person feel not at ease is that we have not seen the world well." This explained why, though I was interested in art and music and studied both in college, I felt increasingly that knowing things was too slow compared to the swift pleasure I got when a man admired my looks or when I got a new outfit or a coveted piece of jewelry. At the same time, no matter how much I got I was never satisfied. Mr. Siegel said in his lecture:

When I use the word grab, I mean the tendency, in a premature and not beautiful way, to take things and make them part of oneself without having seen them. The tendency to see is to make things part of oneself through knowing them.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism years later that, like every girl, I had come to an attitude to the whole world, which included how I saw money, my family, men, books, food—everything. I too much wanted to grab and manage the world—not have it affect me deeply: and I also wanted to dismiss and get rid of everything—have myself pure.

Once as a child, when I saw some plastic toys I liked in the five and dime, I began stuffing them into my pockets. My mother criticized me, and made me return them. Later, when I got my first credit card, I was driven to buy much more than I could afford. It was this way of seeing, based on contempt, I later learned, that had centrally to do with the eating disorders bulimia and anorexia, which I had for years—in which a person alternately gobbles and discards and then starves themselves. As I have told in other papers, my study of Aesthetic Realism enabled this to end!

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