This is a section of a talk given at the Terrain Gallery of
the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, New York
On October 21, 1971, millions of Puerto Ricans, including my
high school friends and me, watched on live TV as Roberto Clemente, the famed
baseball player, descended the steps of a plane at San Juan International
Airport. Having just arrived home after leading the Pittsburg Pirates to
their 1971 World Series win against the Baltimore Orioles, he was swept up by
thousands of fans, shouting, “Clemente, Clemente, orgullo Boricua”--pride of
Puerto Rico.
Clemente was one of the greats of baseball: the eleventh player
to reach 3,000 career hits; he won four National League batting titles; he was
voted the 1971 World Series MVP, and was also a noted humanitarian. As an
athlete he had a self-confidence that was authentic. Yet, not knowing the
difference between confidence and conceit, he couldn’t make sense of the way he
went back and forth between being sure of himself, even boasting, and doubting
himself terrifically. His life, which I’ll discuss in part tonight, can
help us understand what men most need to know about self-confidence and
conceit.
Men all over the world are trying to feel
confident, feel that we can count on our abilities--at work, in love, social
life; and we can also can brag, show off, insist, “I am right, no questions
please!” We can also, as I’ve done, use
something we are proudly confident about, to be conceited and later feel ashamed.
What men most need to know is what Aesthetic Realism shows: that there is a
central fight in every human being, which affects every aspect of one’s life.
There are two ways we can go after confidence, which are as
different from each other as real money is from counterfeit; one is based on
respect for the world and other people and one based on contempt.
Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic
Realism, described conceit as the feeling, that “one’s self is one’s only
friend and the rest of the world is inferior.” Though very common—-in fact some
men may see it as strength-—conceit is always harmful; it has made for terrible
things in history. “True confidence,” he explained “is to be able to say, ‘I
like the way I see the world.’” Honest like of the world is the only
basis on which a man can be sure of himself.
Self-confidence and Conceit in a Boy from the Caribbean
Like Roberto Clemente, I was born and raised in a small
town in Puerto Rico in the midst of an extended family. As a boy, the times I
felt truly confident were in school. I
loved science and felt it had a logic I could count on.
In sixth grade, after learning about the
properties of chemical elements and the movement of the tectonic plates, my
classmates and I were assigned to build a model of an active volcano. After
each failure we reexamined the facts and gained more confidence as we got more
exact. At last, with the right proportion of baking soda and vinegar a red,
foamy mixture rose over the top of the "volcano" and flowed down its
slopes!! We were thrilled! This is evidence for what I learned from Aesthetic
Realism: that the desire to know always makes for self-confidence and pride.
But too
often, I preferred a false criteria that “I knew better”--period. I used the
easy praise I received from my parents, grandparents, aunts and neighbors to
bolster my conceited notion that I was superior. I relished being told that I
was more polite than Alberto, better behaved than Peter and smarter than
Andres. Father Elias even chose me to be the altar boy for the best attended mass on Sundays. I took all
this as proof that I was destined for better things, and I wanted others to
know it.
When I
volunteered to bring a platter of jumbo shrimp, which I had seen “fancy”
people eat in the movies, to a school fundraising event, I thought everyone
would be impressed. It didn’t matter that I had never eaten jumbo shrimps, knew
where to buy them or how to prepare them. My mother, Delia Figueroa, suggested
other possibilities, including flan, which she makes deliciously, but I said: absolutamente
no!
My conceit bubble was burst when a
classmate’s mother pointed out that the shrimps had not been deveined. I was
horrified and angry, but instead of being a critic of myself, I blamed my
mother for the fiasco. I was too busy feeling humiliated to even think about the
bad effect my conceited insistence had on her. Eli Siegel explained what was
going on in me when he wrote:
Conceit can make one satisfied where one shouldn’t be, but also can make one dissatisfied where one shouldn’t be. Persons would rather be dissatisfied with the world than dissatisfied with what they take to be themselves. [TRO 767]
Being so easily satisfied with myself
and dissatisfied with the world was the reason I blamed a teacher in college
for a bad grade on a paper that I had not given much effort to, and why I
cursed a traffic agent for giving me a ticket even though the meter had
expired, justifying myself that, “I was seeing a patient, doing something
important, not like what you are doing!”
Increasingly I felt unsure of myself and
often spent weekends alone in my bedroom feeling depressed. In an early
Aesthetic Realism consultation I was asked, "Has your conceit made you
lonely?" Yes, it had! Ellen Reiss, Chairman of Education, explained
in the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known:
There is nothing more burdensome than the false weight of conceit: the concentration on ourselves, the being laden with ourselves, and not wanting to see that we are related to everything. [TRO 1694]
I learned that when we
contemptuously elevate ourselves, we will punish ourselves by feeling low and
weighed down. This is what I was doing, and my consultants described the basis
of the self-confidence I was longing for. In order to like
ourselves and really be happy, we have to be fair to all that is not ourselves.
That will enable you to have the confidence and pride you are looking for.
The Life & Achievements of Roberto Clemente:
What They Tell Us about Confidence and Conceit
In
a recent article, columnist John Steigerwald, wrote about Roberto Clemente,
Pittsburg Pirate #21,
He finished with 3,000 hits and a .317 batting average, but those are numbers. You had to see him run the bases….you had to see him throw to really appreciate his arm…It’s been 42 years since Clemente played his last game and I’ve still never seen anyone throw like that. Indescribable would be another good word.
Clemente
played eighteen seasons for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and was the first Latino
inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Sportswriter Ron Silverman describes him as having “the
flair of Willie Mays, the swagger of Mickey Mantle and … the confidence of Hank
Aaron.” His confidence on the field was
based on great skill and a desire to know the facts of baseball: from the
hardness and grains of woods used for bats, the speed and trajectory of a ball,
what stance at bat would make for the best contact with the ball, and he wanted
to learn from other players.
But Clemente, like men everywhere, could be
arrogant, “Nobody” he said, “does anything better than me in baseball;” and a
Milwaukee Journal headline called him conceited.
He was born on August 18, 1934 in Carolina, Puerto Rico,
the youngest of seven children. Like many families, life was hard for the
Clemente family. His father Melchor, was
a foreman overseeing sugar cane cutters, working from dawn until after nightfall.
His mother Luisa was a laundress who also prepared meals for the sugar cane
workers. At age eight, Roberto began working alongside his father in the
fields.
According to David Maraniss, author of “Clemente: ThePassion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero,” people who knew Roberto growing up
described him as often “shy” but also competitive, “proud bordering on
arrogant.”
What he experienced early in life, I believe, had him
feel that he was born in a world he had to fight and protect himself from. Meanwhile,
like every child, he was hoping to find meaning in the world, and at age six he
found that meaning in baseball. His mother, Luisa, said that he loved it so
much that he would forget to eat.
Why baseball is beautiful and why it has been loved by people
all over the world, was explained by Eli Siegel in this principle of Aesthetic
Realism,
All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
In The Right of,
Ellen Reiss describes thrillingly that:
To see a player slide into third base rightly is to see humility and triumph at once. To see a double play is to see people as simultaneously individual and related. And as we watch a player run well, we are watching power and grace as the same. These are the world's opposites. To feel them together is to respect the world.
Through
baseball Roberto Clemente had a respect for the aesthetic structure of the
world--the opposites! I think that on the baseball field was the
place where Roberto felt the world made most sense and where he felt most
confident.
In 1955, at age 21, he was recruited to play right field
for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Arriving in Florida for spring training, Clemente,
a dark skinned Latino, was not prepared for what he met--the racism and
prejudice of segregation. Prejudice is a horrible form of conceit and is
contempt: it is the ugly idea that what is like us is superior to what we see
as different from ourselves.
While his teammates stayed in whites’ only
hotels, Roberto stayed in the home of a black family. Writes historian Samuel
O. Regalado:
They’re training in the south...where...Clemente like other Latin American blacks are introduced to the overt racism they had heard about back in their homeland but now actually see in front of them, and it’s really a concept that is very difficult for them to grasp.
Certainly there was prejudice in Puerto Rico;
in fact his first girlfriend, writes Maraniss, “stopped seeing him because her
family thought his skin was too dark,” but in the United States he met
institutionalized Jim Crow.
Throughout
his career he endured horrible discrimination, but it’s important to ask: how
did he use it? Ellen Reiss describes the
two choices we have when we feel hurt:
We will either use it to want to know; or we will use it to justify and give free rein to a desire present in us all the time — the desire for contempt. [TRO 1439]
Roberto Clemente felt
misunderstood and hurt by the team owners, the press, and even other players.
He was disparaged for the color of his skin and his Spanish accent. But he didn’t know that the same
contempt that causes racism, was also the source of his own conceit. According to
reporter Phil Musick,
He was vain, occasionally arrogant, often intolerant, unforgiving, and there were moments when I thought for sure he’d cornered the market on self-pity. Mostly, he acted as if the world had just declared all-out war on [him].
The way he felt that he was his “only
friend and the rest of the world [was] inferior,” weakened him. One of the ways
was that he suffered from chronic insomnia. Insomnia, I have learned, is an
ethical matter; it’s one of the ways we can unknowingly punish ourselves for
having contempt. “The reason” explained Eli Siegel, “within people
for their not sleeping...is: each night people are trying to find shelter in
themselves from an unliked though participated in world.”
In a landmark talk, “The Beauty of Baseball Shows How We Want to Be,” presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, by
Aesthetic Realism consultant and former professional baseball player,
Ernest DeFilippis, he described what baseball players,
including Clemente, and fans
have not known: that what a player does on the field,
is a guide to what he want[s] to do in the rest of his life. To respect ourselves, feel strong and kind, we need to be energetically engaged with reality, interested in things, ready to see and meet squarely, fairly, the “curves and fastballs,” the complexities of life.
I believe a turning point in Roberto
Clemente’s life that had him be more engaged with the complexities of life, is
described by historian Rob Ruck:
Roberto had a political and social awakening. He wanted to be treated like other human beings. He saw he had rights, he had a platform for speaking about what was happening to Latino players.
Clemente came to feel that he could
use his fame in behalf of justice to people. He began to study the news of what was happening in
the South. He followed Rosa Park’s civil disobedience and the murder of
fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, and became a great admirer of Martin Luther King
Jr. Roberto’s wife, Vera Zabala, encouraged him, and said in a family
biography, that:
Roberto would talk a lot about how being a black Latino coming into baseball meant you had two strikes against you. He wanted the Latino players to get their fair share of money...and respect.
He became a union leader in the Major League
Baseball Players Association, defending players’ rights for better working
conditions and benefits.
He convinced other players to support a
lawsuit against major league baseball's "reserve clause," which
essentially bound a player to his team for life, making players pieces of
property to be bought and sold irrespective of their wishes. He convinced his
teammates to stand with him in protest in an effort to postpone the Pirates
1968 opening game in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, and succeeded.
And he wanted to create sport cities for
underprivileged children in Puerto Rico and other places. As his life went on, Clemente was
impelled by a desire for justice not conceit. He said, “If you have a chance to make life
better for others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.”
When an earthquake devastated Managua
Nicaragua on December 23, 1972, Clemente worked day and night leading relief
efforts in Puerto Rico. When he learned
that the aid sent was being stolen by the corrupt Somoza
government, he insisted on going himself. On the
night of December 31, his plane carrying supplies to Nicaragua crashed, killing
him and everyone on board. In 1973, he received posthumously the
Presidential Citizen Medal which reads in part:
[Roberto Clemente] stands with the handful of men whose brilliance has transformed the game of baseball…More than that, his selfless dedication to helping those with two strikes against them in life has blessed thousands and set an example for millions.
