Here is part four of the historic 1968 lecture We Are Unrepresented, by Eli Siegel. In this section he comments on the "black power" movement which was gaining strength then, and on its importance in showing what representation means.

     We also print part of a paper by Steve Weiner from an Aesthetic Realism public seminar of last month. Mr. Weiner is a computer specialist for the New York City Department of Education and a union official; and the title of the seminar was "The Mix-up in Men about Coldness and Warmth."

     That subject is related very much to the subject Mr. Siegel speaks on so deeply, widely, and kindly in the lecture we're serializing. If there is a coldness in us toward the world — and everyone has some — if we see the world as worthy not of our care but of our contempt, it will affect enormously the way we see representation. In the preface to his Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains:

     There has been much comment on the phenomenon called "voter apathy." Often what looks like "voter apathy" is really something else: an undeclared voter strike because voters don't feel that the candidates truly represent them, and therefore they refuse to cast their ballot. However, there has been in millions of people — and Mr. Siegel speaks about it in the first part of this lecture — a lack of interest in being represented: a readiness to let others worry about the country and the world; a feeling one has one's own life to worry about and that's enough.

     It has been very easy not to see that one's own life depends on how the rest of the world fares. And if you don't like the world, if you see it — with its largeness and manyness and people and happenings and history and ideas — as apart from you and in various ways repugnant, one result can be: you won't be interested in being represented in it. You'll feel the world of your interest is a world of your selection: a smaller world consisting of yourself and a few extensions — your job, family, some friends.

     There is a large, unarticulated feeling in people, "This world is not good enough for me to be represented in." It can take the form of not being interested in voting. It can also take the form of voting not too thoughtfully for one major party's candidate or the other's, and not asking, "What really represents me? What do I want someone to represent?"

     Another result of disliking the world has also been frequent in the history of elections. There has been the feeling, not articulated clearly but existing fiercely nevertheless, "This world is not for me to know and value — it should be mine to manage and use for my aggrandizement." When you have this feeling, you don't want other people to be represented. You want the world, or choice segments of it, to be under the control of yourself and those like you, with others not having a say in the matter.

     So a seeing of the world not as something one cares for and values but as something one can use for comfort and self-importance, has made for election fraud. It has made for ballot tampering; property qualifications for voting; gerrymandering; "pocket boroughs"; "rotten boroughs"; the intimidating, including through violence, of "undesirable" persons attempting to vote. It has made for the whole hideous array of techniques to ensure that persons not be represented but be kept in their place: beneath oneself.

     Meanwhile "ethics," Mr. Siegel explained, "is a force" in this world. And one of the forms it has taken is that people are demanding more than ever before that they be represented in the choices of their nation.

     No one was deeper, steadier, more logical, more passionate than Eli Siegel about the need that all people be represented truly in this world. He speaks about it beautifully in the passage of his lecture printed here. He explains what representation means. 

—Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

The desire of black people to be represented, to be seen with respect consciously by living reality — that is, other people — has been growing stronger. It is interesting to see that in the last few years the phrase "civil rights" has weakened and the phrase "black power" has become stronger; and people who were afraid of it in the beginning have had to welcome it. A notation to this effect is in the New York Times of yesterday:

     I think it well to read one of the important documents concerned with representation. Here is a person born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1805, a white person, whose interests didn't go much beyond abolition. He wrote the sonnet "Freedom for the Mind," yet one can say that William Lloyd Garrison, like John Greenleaf Whittier and some other abolitionists, was limited. But this document remains. And in a time of other people, including in the time of the Black Panthers, it is well to get to the first Black Panther, who was William Lloyd Garrison.

     So I read, from Commager's Documents of American History, the famous statement in the first number of the Liberator. I may mention that the document is reprinted in a book that people should have — it's a good collection of documents; it doesn't have everything — Black Protest, edited by Joanne Grant. This is Commager's note:

     The document concerns the fact that while persons want to be represented, they are not too interested in the representation of others. And representation here means to have the power that is in things and people bring out, with respect, what is in a person or persons.

When I had my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, I began to understand one of the most important things I needed to know: where a painful coldness I'd felt most of my life began. "Do you think you've made a considerable practice of not having too much feeling about anybody or anything?" my consultants asked me. My answer was a bitter "Yes."

     That consultation was the beginning of a huge and beautiful change in my life. Aesthetic Realism taught me a way of seeing the world and people that has enabled me to have deep, true emotion and a kinder, warmer heart.

Among my warmest early memories are those of reading about children who lived in other times — such as Johnny Tremain, a boy who grew up during the Revolutionary War — and playing with an erector set with my twin brother, Paul. But the atmosphere in our home could not be described as warm. Individually, my father and mother could show us affection, but it seemed as soon as they were in the same room, the feeling in the air changed to a tense chill, punctuated by heated arguments. I was aware too that even as I got a lot of approval, especially from my mother, I didn't think anyone wanted to know what I felt.

     My consultants asked: "Do you think you felt hurt by people quite early?" "Yes," I answered. And they asked: "Could that have something to do with deciding not to get too close to them?" I began to learn that I had turned disappointment into something unjust, and detrimental to my life. "In this world," Eli Siegel writes,

     There were times I had genuine feeling. I remember news reports of Southern police turning fire hoses and vicious dogs on people, including women and children, who were courageously fighting for civil rights. And I remember the fury that swept over me at this barbaric injustice.

     But mostly, I cultivated being cold and disdainful. I scornfully told myself that other people got too emotional, let things get to them. But even as I thought I was so smart and superior, I had the tormenting feeling there was something big missing in my life. I cursed myself, asking, "Why are you such a goddamned cold fish?" Often I had a fear I would die young from a heart attack because my heart was so cold.

      In issue 899 of The Right Of, Ellen Reiss explains the dilemma I was in:

In an Aesthetic Realism class, at a time when I was seeing a woman, I asked about the way I could go from warm affection to aloof coolness, which pained both of us very much. Ms. Reiss asked: "What would it mean for there to be a oneness of coldness and warmth in you, or any person?" "I'm not sure," I answered. And as the discussion continued, I began to learn what an aesthetic relation of coldness and warmth means.

     I began to see I'd been very warm to something ugly in myself — my ego, my false sense of superiority; in fact, I had been a "hotbed of self-love." As she explained this, Ellen Reiss was describing a big mistake people make: we caress the very thing in ourselves, our contempt, which makes us cold and has us dislike ourselves. And she described what I needed to have: "the beautiful coldness that is exactitude in knowing yourself."

The second instance took place as I was becoming more active in the labor movement and felt agitated in a way I didn't understand. Ms. Reiss said: "I think as you have this new interest, you want to be warmer to people, and you're also afraid of it." And she described a rift that so often people who work for the well-being of others unknowingly have: "People have worked to have others get justice, but haven't wanted to see how another person sees himself. There is such a thing as the depths of people, and they matter."

     It is more necessary than ever that people understand coldness and warmth in themselves, for the sake of their own lives and the future of our world. Aesthetic Realism makes this beautifully possible.