MISTAKES MEN & WOMEN MAKE ABOUT COLDNESS AND WARMTH
(continued)
I. Politics About Coldness and Warmth Begin Early
One of the things I remember liking very much as a child was going with my parents, Sarah and Conrad Weiss, to see Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and Oliver. I couldn't wait until we got the sheet music and would spend evenings singing the songs: there was a sincerely warm feeling as we saw value in something outside of us.
However, there was something else I went after with my parents that was very different from this, though I didn't know it then. I felt essentially that they were warmer than anything in the world because they made so much of me, and would, I thought, do almost anything for me. Who else after all, would I dare ask to send me all the items in what I now see as very nervy requests in letters from camp--such as cans of salmon steak, plastic lemons, shrimp chips from Chinatown, magazines, the Kurt Vonnegut novel everyone was reading, thinking that naturally they would feel expressed hunting over the city for one thing or the other. I was very "warm" about what should be coming to me, and I exacted it from my parents like a cold tyrant.
In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss asks: "Have you used your parents' making you the most important thing in the world to feel that if a person is accurate about you, he is cold?" I did. I remember distinctly feeling that my piano teacher Mrs. Elfenbein, who smiled at me as I came in for my lesson, but who smiled less and less as I once again played the Mozart Minuet with my own brand of counting time, and my own method of fingering, was cold. "Did she have to get that intense about these details?" I said to myself feeling wounded. And when my parents were critical of me, I felt they too had welched on me.
I knew I didn't wholly deserve the importance I got from them and couldn't respect them for giving it, but I still craved every ounce of it. I also felt, "Can't they be more discreet!" The more demonstrative my mother was for instance, I made myself stiffer, and more remote. I was making a mistake about coldness and warmth so many children do—feeling I owned my parents, thinking they existed essentially to make me important. When I was asked in my first consultation "Do you see your parents as part of the whole world, or do you think of them as yours?" I said sheepishly, "I guess I think of them as mine."
My consultants asked me: "Is your father faced with a situation that many people have, that the person who's warmest to me doesn't really want to know me?" Hearing questions like these had me think about both my parents deeply for the first time. As I began to learn how this way of using two human beings hurt every aspect of my life: my perceptions, how I saw other people, my ability to have large emotions, and also saw how cold it was to them, I was able to change. I felt like a weight was being lifted off me. My consultants explained:
Supposing a girl is growing up and has a father who thinks she's the most important thing in the world. Meanwhile, she doesn't feel she's done that much, she just is. Do you think she's going to feel she really has to be fair to other people?
I didn't. While I always had a few friends, I was generally ill at ease with people. I told myself I was shy, but I really felt knowing people was hard work—after all they were so different from me, and what would it get me anyway?
As I wrote such assignments in consultations as "An inner monologue of Conrad Weiss," a short one‑act play about the first meeting of my parents; how reality's opposites were in both my parents, a painful relation of warmth and coldness—the way I could both cling to them and dismiss them--was changing in me. I came to have big new feelings that I wasn't embarrassed to express. I wrote at this time:
I am learning a new way of seeing my parents. I no longer see them in my old fashion, as protectors in a cold world of strangers. I am much more interested in them as people, as themselves, rather than just as my parents, and I see [this] has much more respect.
The whole world looked friendlier to me, more interesting, and instead of keeping my distance from people, I found myself having so much to say—even to people I just met, cab drivers, people in stores, classmates at school. Shortly after I began to study Aesthetic Realism, Conrad Weiss wrote me a letter for the first time, showing how proud he was for how I was changing, and telling me things about his early life I had never known.
Some years later, in an Aesthetic Realism class my mother and I were honored to attend taught by Mr. Siegel, he asked me: "Do you think you need your coldness? Does your life have the hope to make warmth and coldness one?" I said yes, and he continued:
The greatest victory of a human being is to have good will for another human being. Good will is that which a person most wants to have.
Good will, I learned, is a oneness of warmth and coolness, and Mr. Siegel himself exemplified this magnificently, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for the good will he had for me. He wanted to be thoroughly exact about a person, know who that person was in all his or her individuality, including where they were against themselves, and he worked passionately and with scientific logic to have a person see the world fairly and so be all he or she could be.
I am so sorry I was cold to Mr. Siegel himself. I had felt I would be able to have some contempt for every thing and person I met, and instead of rejoicing at the fact that I respected someone and something so much, I was angry. I am proud now to see how wrong I was. It means so much to me that in these years my mother, Sarah Weiss, and I have been colleagues studying Aesthetic Realism in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, together with my husband, Joseph Spetly. Today there is real warmth in our lives—true affection based on respect.
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Writer & Aesthetic Realism Associate