Women's Dissatisfaction--Can It Be Beautiful?

"If that computer goes down again, I'll scream!" "I never seem to meet the right person for me." I speak tonight about "Women's Dissatisfaction--Can It Be Beautiful?" because how we are dissatisfied has centrally to do with whether we like ourselves or not. What is the basis for our dissatisfaction? In The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known Class Chairman Ellen Reiss explains something which has never been understood before Aesthetic Realism: There are two kinds of dissatisfaction, one beautiful and one ugly. The beautiful dissatisfaction arises from this fact, stated by Eli Siegel: "Man's deepest desire, his largest desire, is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis."...Without knowing it, people everywhere are dissatisfied with themselves because they are not doing all they can to like the world. It is a person's welcoming of this beautiful dissatisfaction which is the source of all art; for art comes from this feeling: "I have not been fair enough to the world; I must see it more truly, honoringly." And we can learn from Aesthetic Realism how to be a good critic of the hope in every one of us to have an ugly dissatisfaction--to hope to find reasons to be displeased with everything! This is contempt, which Mr. Siegel described as "the addition to self through the lessening of something else."

Tonight I will talk about a woman whose art shows how our dissatisfaction--both with the world and ourselves--can be beautiful: the ceramist Beatrice Wood. Now 104, in her twenties she was a Dada artist. Her life also shows how the desire in a woman to be dissatisfied, to feel this world and its people aren't fit for us, hurts her.

Why I Was Dissatisfied

When I was 17 looking toward my last year in high school in San Antonio, Texas, I wrote in my journal:

How can I relate the worst in me with the best in me? I always feel the need for this frantic search....This next year I must not feel frustrated as I feel myself unfulfilled. As I see others together, I must relax the tension and jealousy and strive to be at one with myself. I'm tired and depressed....I'll return to the mundane matters of school and the constant battle for success. Here I was an outwardly fortunate young woman--fairly popular, getting good grades, not having to worry about getting into college, and I had no idea why I was so dissatisfied with myself and everything else why I saw things as "mundane" and people around me as "dull." How grateful I am that five years later I met Aesthetic Realism and in the first class I attended with Eli Siegel, he asked me: Do you want to throw up existence as a bad job occasionally? Many people feel like the universe is a vase they'd like to shatter to bits. I did! And meanwhile, I was so discontent with myself. ES. And you feel you can hurt people? Have you told people off?

DT. Yes.

ES. Why? There's a tendency to think that anyone we know is an invader.

DT. Oh yes.

ES. (referring to the man I was seeing then) And what do you think Mr. R. has against you?

DT. I think he thinks I'm trying to take him over.

ES. And is there truth in that?

DT. Yes.

ES. Well, most people see themselves as mean, and rigid and stubborn, and human, and all that kind of thing.

Mr. Siegel described truly why I was against myself and against "existence as such," and for showing me the relation between the two.

And I saw, too, why the more I was dissatisfied with myself, the more I had looked for a man to show he liked me. I was acquisitive with men, while being deeply aloof. Who a man was, was not real to me, and because I was after contempt, I became dissatisfied with every man I was with. This one was not sure enough of himself, this one was too sure; one was too intellectual, another not intellectual enough. And every conquest I had in love made me even more dissatisfied with myself because, I was later to learn, I was using a man to get further away from satisfying my own deepest goal which is--"to like the world on an honest or accurate basis." A man couldn't make me satisfied with myself: only trying to be fair to the world, which includes the depths of a man, could.

Continued: click here for part 2 "Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction in Love"

To Part 1 | To Part 2 | To Part 3 | To Part 4 | To Part 5

Women's Dissatisfaction--Can It Be Beautiful? By Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism Consultant

Women's Dissatisfaction--Can It Be Beautiful?
By Devorah Tarrow, Aesthetic Realism Consultant