Aesthetic
Realism seminar:
The Fight
between Boredom
and Awareness
in a Woman's Mind, part 2
At Florida State University, though I’d hoped through English literature
and history to have a wider interest in things, I began to find it difficult
to concentrate—everything seemed a wash. At night I often hung out
with friends at the college pub; I felt livelier after I had a few drinks.
Other times I would listen to my Elton John records alone in the dorm.
I looked to meet a man who would save me from a world I felt was cold and
dreary. I liked dating Tom, whose eyes lit up whenever he saw me.
Now I felt tinglingly aware! But who he was, and what he was hoping
for, I was little interested in. And as I was seeing Tom, I was also
writing letters to another man stationed overseas, thinking the more men
who were inter-ested in me, the better I'd feel. But I didn't feel
better, I felt ashamed, and stopped seeing Tom after a few months. I was
22, and already felt weary about the future.
Several months after this, a great thing happened: I began to have Aesthetic
Realism consultations! "How tired are you of life?" my consultants
asked me. How did they know? I wondered, but I languidly answered
"Ah, not too terribly tired."
Consultants: Do you feel the world is interesting
or dull? I hadn’t seen it as interesting, but I felt honestly hopeful
that I was going to learn how. Then they asked: "Are you going
to like the world because you have a lot of men interested in you…or because
you see it in a way that is honest, beautiful, and just?"
As my consultants talked about the meaning of this principle of Aesthetic
Realism “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic
oneness of opposites,” I began to see things differently. One question
they asked was "Are you, like this table, both surface and depth?"
This was the beginning to seeing many things with greater dimension.
After this consultation, I had a fresh awareness of the world around me.
Walking down the street, I felt something new: I was related to things—to
a maple tree I saw--it was one tree with many leaves as I was one person
with many thoughts. And as I passed a woman, I felt a kinship: she
had a surface, and also feelings beneath, as I did.
2.
Awareness in an important Woman of the 20th Century
Frances Perkins, whom my colleague Irene Reiss
spoke about in a seminar here some years ago, is a person I admire for
her passionate, scientific work to have social
and economic justice come to the American people. A
former secretary of labor said of her: "Every man and woman who works at
a living wage, under safe conditions, for reasonable hours, or who is protected
by unemployment insurance or social security, is her debtor."
Frances Perkins was born in Boston in 1880. Her parents were well
off, described by Bill Severn in his biography as "strict conservative
pillars of the Congregational Church," who "protected [their daughter]
from the harsher realities of life. She was shielded from those who lived
in less fortunate homes, cautioned not to speak to strangers."
She was encouraged to feel she was better than some people and should keep
her distance. This, however, made her fearful. She recalled
that she was exceedingly shy, so much so that she hesitated to walk "into
the public library to ask for a book or to go into a store to buy a spool
of thread."
When she began school
and became aware that one of her best friends came from an impoverished
home, she was troubled, and anxiously asked her parents questions.
"In Frances Perkins family's opinion," Severn writes,
alcohol was the primary evil that
dragged…people down into poverty, along with shiftlessness….Her father
[told] her [she] shouldn't concern herself with such things, when she asked
"But why are so many nice people poor?"
She would come to have a vivid awareness of "such
things"; they would concern her life most.
While attending college at Mount Holyoke, one of her professors encouraged
her to major in chemistry. Unlike me, she felt the stimulus of the
course “opened her mind and gave her a scientific approach to other things."
For a course she took on industrial growth in America, she visited factories
and described the shocking conditions of working people.
"I was horrified at the work that
many women and children had to do in factories…."There were absolutely
no effective laws that regulated the number of hours they were permitted
to work. There were no provisions which guarded their health nor…compensation
in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong."
She was becoming keener and keener--using scientific
observation to come to logical conclusions. Biographer George Martin
wrote:
She discovered that one serious accident—say,
the loss of a man’s hand—could drive a steady, sober working family into
penury…. Avoiding poverty therefore was not a question simply of liquor
or laziness but also of safety devices on machines…."
When, in her senior year she heard a speech by
the important reformer Florence Kelley on the horrors of child labor and
sweatshops, Ms. Perkins knew with certainty
social justice would be her vocation.
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