in a Woman's
Mind
By Lynette Abel
It was 1933 and America was in
the midst of the
Great Depression--over 13 million people were unemployed,
families
had lost their homes. There were hundreds of thousands of men
roaming
the country for work, people standing on long bread lines. President
elect
Franklin Roosevelt had asked Frances Perkins to be his Secretary of
Labor,
the first woman to hold a cabinet post. She said yes, but only if he
agreed
to all the legislation she wanted, which was to become the basis for
Roosevelt’s
New Deal program, including federal aid to states for unemployment
relief,
public works to provide jobs, abolition of child labor, establishing
maximum
hours of work, minimum wages, and social security. Frances
Perkins
had a great awareness of what was needed to bring immediate relief to
hopeless
Americans, and what would protect their future.
Tonight I'll comment on aspects of her life, and what I learned about
"The
Fight between Boredom and Awareness in a Woman's Mind."
1.
Where Does This Fight Begin?
In his preface to Self and
World, Eli
Siegel explains:
To be bored
by the world is
wearisome, but…it is a victory for the individual. We are in a
fight
between being bored and being aroused. Being bored is a victory
for
ubiquitous contempt. Interest is on the side of respect as one’s
bloodstream.
This fight corresponds to
what Aesthetic
Realism shows is the large fight in everyone: between our desire to
like
the world, see meaning in it, and another desire which dulls and
weakens
our minds, to have contempt, to look down on other people.
As a child, I was excited about taking dance lessons, and because I
couldn’t
decide which interested me more, I got to take both tap and
ballet.
I loved listening to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and each time I
heard
it, I became aware of new things--how violins and oboes could produce
sounds
enabling you to visualize a duck, a wolf, a boy, and his
grandfather.
But I remember too, often feeling painfully bored with everything,
asking
my mother over and over, “What can I do?” and quickly dismissing
suggestion,
after suggestion.
Growing up with 3 brothers and 2 sisters, I was competitive with them
as
to most everything: who got to ride in the front seat of the car, who
got
to see their television show, who got the remains of the fudge pan,
etc.
feeling the big thing was what was coming to me. I was making
choices
between wanting to have a keen awareness of things and what they
deserved,
and wanting to dull things over and see myself as the only thing of
consequence.
In the 6th grade before a holiday, each student exchanged names with
another
and was to buy a $2 gift. I bought a box of 8 rolls of lifesavers for
Joan—something
I thought she would love. Joan could not afford to buy me anything, and
gave me her beloved baton. I soon became aware she felt awful about
parting
with it, and I insisted she take it back. I hadn’t really known
before
then, that some people were so poor they couldn’t even afford $2.
This experience made me deeper, more thoughtful.
But I also could be contemptuously unaware of the feelings of others.
"There
is a mix-up, because we want to see things and we want to protect
ourselves
from seeing,” Mr. Siegel said in his lecture on awareness, “People do
use
awareness not to be aware: that is, they watch out not to see too
much.”
When I'd drive through an impoverished area of Alexandria, Virginia,
and
see dilapidated shacks, instead of feeling compassion for the people
living
in them, and outrage at this injustice, I callous-ly thought, "Why
don't
they get a job." My desire "not to see too much," to be superior to
others,
had big repercussions. I became increasingly immured in myself,
and
fearful around other people. Once, while at the Mt.
Vernon Swim
Club, I wanted everyone to be aware of me. Wearing a colorful,
Hawaiian
moo moo over my bathing suit, I thought it would be charming to spring
off the diving board with it on. But after jumping in, the moo
moo
enveloped my head and I couldn’t breathe. Frantically struggling with
it,
I finally ripped it off gasping for air—I almost drowned. Embarrassed
and
shook up, I hadn't been aware of this consequence.
In High School, though I liked French, when I found I needed to study
it--my
interest waned. And just weeks after I began taking chemistry, I
felt “What could I possibly need it for?” More and more things I
thought
I’d like, I was deciding I didn’t need. In an Aesthetic Realism
class
years later, Eli Siegel explained:
Every person has a
terrific desire
to be bored. Being bored is the same thing as trying to prove
nothing
has done one any good. To be bored is to be a conqueror….Contempt
has been the key to many a dreary door.
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