I remember in my very first consultation I was asked,
after speaking about how nervous I felt in groups, "Do you
think other people are more like you or more different from you?"
I said "different" right away. And I learned that was
a big, though very common, mistake -- in England, Russia, the US --
everywhere. It came from that desire which Eli Siegel identified as the biggest weakener of a person's mind --
contempt,
the making less of the world in order to build up oneself. It
not only made me nervous, it made me unkind to see people that way.
What I've learned over the years has caused me to rethink my relation
to other people from the ground up -- the way I think about friends,
family, students, colleagues, and people I don't even know that I speak to for a minute in
a grocery store, gives me so much more pleasure and pride.
Imagine that in
2013, just last week, one of the leading Black professional
footballers in the English Premier League had to go public with his
criticism of football fans in Russia for mocking him with monkeysounds during a Champions League game! Would this be happening
if they were studying Aesthetic Realism? No way.
Those football fans in Russia (and I think and hope
it was only a few) do not see Yaya Touré as fundamentally like
themselves; they see him as different and inferior. Meanwhile
he's one of the best footballers in the world! So they are
angry they have to look up to someone they feel driven to denigrate.
It's ugly and sad, and it wouldn't be happening at all if Aesthetic
Realism were being studied, and people were learning about the fight
in all of us between respect for the world and contempt.
I respect this poem by Karen Romeo about Aesthetic Realism, her feelings about
studying it; and about the damage done by the failure of the press to
report honestly on Aesthetic Realism. I am sure that if the press and
noted people in academia, culture and politics HAD been honest about
Aesthetic Realism, people would be better off in many ways.
Read Karen Romeo's Sapphics on the Press Boycott of Aesthetic
