In Part One, Irene Reiss discussed the definition of Courage, by Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism: “Courage is the belief that the way things are is not against oneself, and therefore that these things should not be gone away from.” She described attending lectures by Mr. Siegel on world history and culture, and lessons in which she was encouraged to study how to honestly like and believe in the world, which is the one means for our being truly courageous. Aesthetic Realism also explains the constant opposition in a person to liking the world: the desire to build oneself up by having contempt for it. Contempt is the cause of all injustice including racism.
          Mrs. Reiss also spoke of the early life of Emma Mashinini, and her auto-biography, Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life (Routledge New York, 1991). Born in 1929, Emma lived under apartheid: the brutal political and economic system in which 95% of South Africa’s 36 million people, because they were black, were forced to live in those areas reserved for “non-whites,” and denied their basic human rights.
            In 1975 she courageously founded the militant Commercial Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa. As a leader in the trade union movement, she was harassed constantly by government police. As you’ll see, this did not stop her struggle for justice.
            Irene Reiss wrote this paper in 1992 and presented it in a public seminar at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City. Two years later apartheid ended with the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.  
            In preparation for publishing Part Two, I contacted Emma Mashinini in South Africa. She was excited to learn about Irene Reiss’s paper and about Aesthetic Realism. My interview with Mrs. Mashinini will appear in the coming weeks.

Courage and Emma Mashinini of South Africa
By Irene Reiss
    
  At the age of 15 Emma was forced to leave school and support herself by cleaning homes. She married at 17, she said, so that she could have a stable home. Both she and her husband Roger were badly affected by worry about money, as are marriages increasingly today in the United States. But in South Africa, there was the additional horror of apartheid and the humiliation of a whole people.

            In their 12-year marriage, Emma bore 6 children, 3 of whom died within days of birth because of poor medical care for black people. Her husband, who worked in the factory and on the streets of Johannesburg, felt robbed of his dignity every day. He retaliated not only against his wife but, through her, against the world. There were frequent quarrels and physical abuse. Emma came to feel the whole world was oppressing her. She did not know what only Aesthetic Realism teaches, that she, like every person, had two desires: to know the world and to have contempt for it.

            In his definition of Courage, Eli Siegel writes: “Real courage, which wishes to be graceful, is always after the facts.”

            I have learned that no matter what the circumstances, unless a woman and man want to know each other’s feelings there has to be anger with and contempt for each other. Emma had reason to be critical of her husband, because all of us can always see things better than we do. Her husband spent money on expensive clothes even while the family needed food and Emma was angry. But it takes courage, when you are in pain yourself, to think of the pain of another. There is also that in a woman that would rather be clearly disappointed than to have to think more about her husband.

            In order to afford the bare necessities for her family and to save the marriage, Emma worked in a factory. She vividly describes her grueling 12-hour day away from home, and then all she had to do when she got home. She is scornful of her husband for spending money on himself when they desperately needed food. However, years later, trying to know what her husband felt, she wrote:

         “Perhaps our men were trying to maintain their dignity, which they felt was stripped from them in the terrible oppression we suffered, and they needed to look smart in those imported clothes, as if to say, ‘Look, I’m [dressed] so smart. I am human after all.”

Emma is courageous as she wants to see more the facts that made for her troubled marriage.

The Courage to Know

[In this section, Irene Reiss discusses consultations which are based on the Aesthetic Realism lessons Eli Siegel gave from 1941 to 1978. In them an individual studies the questions of his or her life with three consultants on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation. This principle is at the heart of every consultation: “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”]  

            In Aesthetic Realism consultations, people have seen what I have seen for my own life: that there is a true pride in hearing criticism that can change what makes us ashamed, and have us stronger and kinder.

            In her first consultation, Lila Garvey (not her real name), age 59, told us she was very nervous and unsure, although she acted self-assured. She had been divorced for some years but was still very bitter about her marriage. She told us: “I was 35 years old and I thought I loved him—he seemed nice and was interested in me. I found him interesting and it was a chance to escape from the family.”

            Consultants: There is always a feeling of unfinished business in people who have been divorced. If you try to see what your husband felt inside, you will respect yourself. You now have a chance to be fair to him in your mind. Did he feel you respected him?

            Lila Garvey:  I don’t know.

            Consultants:  Did you act superior to him? Can a man be made to feel he is a failure?

            Lila Garvey:  Perhaps.

            Consultants: Do you see him as having the opposites of the world in him? Is he both hard and soft?

            Lila Garvey: Yes.

            Since Mrs. Garvey communicated with her ex-husband because of their mutual concern for their son, we gave her an assignment to ask him for his criticisms of her, and to write them down. She was courageous and did so. Two criticisms were that she is too cold and not interested in another person’s feelings, and that she wants to tell people what to do and control them.

            As Mrs. Garvey got a new sense of herself, admitting that these criticisms were mainly justified, she felt relieved and also proud—because the desire to change in order to be fair to the world always makes us proud. She also said she respects her ex-husband more.

Emma Mashinini Fights to Like the World

It was in a clothing factory that Emma Mashinini began her union career, as she saw the humiliation and cruelty with which black workers were treated. They were cursed for not producing enough, and constantly threatened with being fired. As a union organizer, starting in 1975, she was often physically removed from shopping areas where she tried to organize the black workers. She writes: “I resent being dominated by white people, be they man or woman….[We are] just trying to say, ‘I am human. I exist. I am a complete person.”

  That year she played a central role in the founding of the Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union of South Africa. Because she had the desire to know and have feeling for people, she was courageous despite the fear of arrest by the security police who worked hand in hand with the employers and were against unions. She felt the trade union movement was essential for the liberation of black workers, and she would not be driven from her work.

            In November 1981, at the age of 52, what she had feared for a long time happened: early one morning before arising, Emma Mashinini was arrested while her husband and children were forced to stand outside in their night clothes, and her house was searched for records of political and union activities. She was detained in jail for six months, most of the time in solitary confinement. She had to sleep on the floor—there was no bed, no chair. These cruel conditions, including bad food which she could not eat and the lack of human contact, caused her to suffer physical ailments. She tells of how she would even look forward to the periodic interrogations, because then she would see another human face. She writes: “I even thanked myself for being so ill, because of the outings to the doctor.”

            And she writes with pride of the support of her second husband, Tom Mashinini, who had demonstrated in front of the Supreme Court, demanding her release. Her second marriage, in which there is mutual concern for the rights of other people, appears to be a source of strength to her. Once, when she was taken for interrogation, her husband had brought her various fruit juices in boxes, which she describes:

            “One was peach, orange, apple and so forth. I had these boxes in my cell. When they were empty I kept them. The colour meant much to me—the green, the orange—it was closeness to nature. It kept me going.”

            In the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, #703, Eli Siegel has asked this urgent question:

“Is this true: No matter how much of a case one has against the world—its unkindness, its disorder, its ugliness, its meaningless-ness—one has to do all one can to like it, or one will weaken oneself?”

            Emma Mashinini was fighting to like the world. After many months in solitary confinement, the struggle between feeling the world was something still to know, and feeling it was unbearable, inimical, came to a head. In 1992 she told an interviewer: “I was ready to die when I realized I could no longer remember my baby’s name—but I kept trying.”

            Her strong desire to see, even under these brutal circumstances, gave her courage to keep trying. The fight raged in her for days, and on the fifth day she remembered her daughter’s name, and felt connected to the world again.

            After 6 months, never having been formally charged with any crime, she was released and told not to discuss her detention with anyone. But she defied this order because she wants the brutality of apartheid known—brutality against which there has been an insufficient world outcry.

            For years after her detention and despite her fear that at any moment the security police were coming to get her again, Emma Mashinini resumed her union activities. Courage does enlarge a person and makes for respect.  

            In the late 1980s, Emma Mashinini   was associated with the Anglican Church of Bishop Desmond Tutu, and worked with detainees, some of whom were school children as young as 11 years old. She wanted to encourage them to feel that the world is not against them. In 1989 she was heartened by developments and wrote in the Preface to her autobiography: “I close my manuscript with a surge of elation, hope and happiness.”  Her courage has, I am sure, encouraged millions of other people. And in 1992, as I give this paper, news has come of a referendum in South Africa approving the move toward ending apartheid! This is a sign of what Eli Siegel stated in 1970:

“Justice is still in business, it is still working. It may have begun three thousand years ago, but it intends to get its man. [Justice] is more persistent than the Northwest Mounted Police.”

            And justice is what is called for in “Ethics—the Only Answer for the Economy” which appeared as ads in the New York Times and USA Today, in which Ellen Reiss writes:

“In order for the United States economy to fare well, it has to be based on an honest answering of this decisive question, asked with such kindness by Eli Siegel: What does a person deserve by being a person?”

            This is the question everyone in South Africa and the world must answer honestly. It is a question that has given a new direction to the life of Lila Garvey. In a document Mrs. Garvey wrote, expressing her gratitude for the changes in her through her study in consultations, she says:

“Aesthetic Realism enables every human being to be a success because it is in the power of every person to like himself through how he sees the world, and this is our largest purpose.”

            I agree with Mrs. Garvey, and I am proud to work with many others so that all people can meet the knowledge which enables us to have the kind, courageous lives we were meant to have.

Irene Reiss’s article, “We Can Feel More Alive at Any Age,” has appeared in Idaho Senior News and other newspapers. She and her husband Daniel Reiss, both of whom are now in their nineties, have published letters on the answer to the catastrophic cost of healthcare for everyone including senior citizens. Mrs. Reiss's seminar papers at the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, given with the consultants of The Later Surprise, have included discussions of Lillian Wald, Frances Perkins, Sarah Delano Roosevelt, Imelda Marcos, and Mary Pickford. Some titles of these seminars are: How Can We Look Good in Our Own Eyes?; The Fight in Women Between Energy and Weariness; How Much Feeling Should We Have for People?; Honest Criticism—Are Women Looking for It? 

 
Irene and Daniel Reiss