Everyone’s Biggest Confusion: How Should We See Other People?

 

This paper has been presented in English and Spanish at the Museo De Arte de Puerto Rico, the Terrain Gallery in New York City, and La Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, Puerto Rico.  In it I have the pleasure of discussing how an artist sees other people with greater respect and depth, in relation to photographs by the noted artist Jack Delano. 

    

In the summer of 1967 when I was 10 years old, I heard a man speaking passionately to a large crowd about his plans to bring needed jobs to our town and to improve living conditions.  As hundreds of men and women cheered, I was impressed, but what I showed was coldness and indifference as I sulkily complained to my mother, "When are we going home? I'm tired of standing."  

        This man was Jaime Torres Rodriguez, my father, who was running for mayor of Ciales, Puerto Rico -- the town where I grew up. He hoped to have a good effect on people's lives.  But I thought his concern for the welfare of men and women I didn't even know was against me, and I made the mistake—which I, unfortunately, was to repeat again and again—of being more interested in what was coming to me than warmly, respectfully being for what other people deserved.

 

        I'm more grateful than I can say that Aesthetic Realism brought kind, logical sanity to the way I saw people, where I shuttled from warmth to coldness, and which caused me and others pain and confusion.  For example, sometimes I would act as though a person I just met was destined to be the best friend I ever had; but at other times I would avoid someone on the street whom I actually knew quite well. I learned that the debate we have between these opposites of warmth and coldness to people is an aspect of a bigger debate raging in every person about how to see the world: should we see it as a warm, friendly place we hope to like and see meaning in; or, should we see it as indifferent or against us, and therefore a place we should be aloof from and have as little as possible to do with? Explained Mr. Siegel, 

In this world men and women often find refuge in coldness. Coldness, quite clearly, is allied to contempt; and...contempt for the world is seen by man as a safeguard of himself....Any time we can give a cold shoulder to something, our self-stock rises. 

 

Eli Siegel's understanding of what contempt is, how it works in us, is one of the most important discoveries in history. Without this knowledge, people cannot see that the very thing we may treasure warmly in ourselves, is contempt, and is the thing that most hurts our lives, keeping us from our fundamental purpose—which is to like the world.   

        It changed my life to learn from Aesthetic Realism that both warmth and coldness can be beautiful and kind if our purpose is to have good will. In the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, Chair of Education Ellen Reiss, explains:  

If you have good will for a person, if you want him to be all he can be, [you] will be uncompromisingly cold to what is unjust and hurtful in him—not flattering­ly "accept" something for which he has to dislike himself.  And this coolness and againstness [will] have the same purpose as your desire to encourage, with the rich­est warmth, what is best in him.

 

Warmth, Coolness and the Family 

Being my parent’s first born child, and the family’s first grandson—as often happens in many families around the world, I was generally the center of attention. From very early, I came to feel that the praise my mother and other relatives lavished on me was the warmest thing in the world. Unfortunately, I used this to be self-centered, and to feel I should be waited on and adored—which continued even after my sister Wandivette was born. When I couldn't run things on my terms, I felt everything was against me, trying to bring me down, and a quick way to feel "my self-stock" rising, was to give a "cold shoulder" to people. 

        On the outside I seemed affable and easy going, but inside I often seethed with anger. When I was 15 and my grandfather Olegario Torres died, I seemed to feel nothing.  At his funeral I cried not because I felt too much, but because I felt too little.  "How could I be so cold?" I wondered to myself.   

        A person I regret seeing unfairly for a long time was my father.  He had begun working at age 13 in a drugstore when his own father lost his farm during the Great Depression.  Years later he was able to buy the same drugstore where he worked for 40 years. In public, my father was outgoing and energetic, but at home he often seemed tired and didn't want to talk much.  The way he acted so friendly and warm to his customers, then later in private would often complain about them, confused me. 

Like myself, my father had a fight between wanting to care for people and wanting to make less of them, but instead of trying to understand and see that he himself was pained by this, which would have been good will, I coldly used it to feel he was insincere and to be scornful of him. 

        Meanwhile, the thing I held against my father the most was that he had so many interests that weren’t me; and also he was often critical of my selfishness. In my mind, he was the cold one and I was bent on punishing him.  When he did try to show me affection I would recoil; if he made a joke and everyone laughed, I remained stony. And I'm sorry now for the way I mocked his desire to be in public office, feeling it was a big interference with our Sunday outings. I had made up my mind that I would be different from him, which really meant better than him.  

        Years later in an Aesthetic Realism consultation when I said bitterly that my father was more interested in his business than in me, my consultants asked:

 Consultants:     Where do you think he felt more respected, at work or at home?

"What a question!" I said, as I remembered the many times I was at home watching TV on the couch and I would hear my father arrive from work at 9 PM. I would fake being asleep so that I didn't have get up to greet him.  My consultants continued,

Consultants:     What did he do to you to deserve this coldness?

I answered defensively, "He didn't want to know me."

Consultants:      It is sad not to be understood, but what have you done to be understood?

Jaime Torres:     I don't think much.

Consultants:     What have you done to understand him? 

Jaime Torres:     Not much either. 

At the age of 27 I began consciously to change my desire to look for hurts to a desire to know—beginning with both my parents.  For that purpose, my consultants asked me to read Eli Siegel's essay "The Disesteemed Father," which has these kind sentences about a father named Andrew, which describe what fathers, including my own, have felt through the centuries.

 

Children… can make...a father feel he isn't everything....In fact, at this time, Andrew feels he gets most respect from a young man, working with him, in the same...company....A disesteemed father, like many fathers, finds something where he works that he doesn't find at home or in his family....Many fathers... are trying to forget the disappointments and slights of home in activity on the job.  

Because of what I've learned and continue to learn, I have new respect and care for my parents that is light years away from that summer in 1967.  We began to have conversations as never before; and a new warmth came to be between us.  Then in 1991, to my great happiness, my father and mother began to study Aesthetic Realism in phone consultations from Puerto Rico, and how their lives changed! To celebrate their 42^nd wedding anniversary, they wrote a letter which was published in Puerto Rico and in New York City, in which they said in part:

 

We are more alive than ever because of what we have learned from Aesthetic Realism... We learned to understand and respect each other more, and to see the world around us with more value. Instead of routine, we now have more communica­tion.  We believe that if families all over the world study this education, the social prob­lems that at this time are destroying human beings would greatly change.       

The Art Way of Seeing People & the Photographs of Jack Delano

        I talk now about some aspects of an artist whose work is beloved in Puerto Rico because of the emotions he had about our land and people, and the world itself, which he captured on film—the photographer Jack Delano. 

His work is explained by this central principle stated by Eli Siegel:

 All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

  

 

Warmth and coldness are related to the opposites of logic and emotion, and I have learned from Aesthetic Realism that all art arises from the desire to be warmly swept by the meaning of reality and to give it form.  In his definitive essay “Afternoon Regard for Photography” Eli Siegel wrote:

"The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.” And he explained that a photographer wants to “use other people to have a great emotion with."    

This is true about the work of Jack Delano.  

He was born Jacob Ovcharov in 1914 in Ukraine and immigrated with his family to Philadelphia in 1923.  At the suggestion of classmates at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art,    he took the name Jack Delano.  Like many immigrants, his family had a difficult time meeting a new culture and trying to make it financially. In his autobiography he describes how his parents “never earned much money,” but were “always willing to make…sacrifices” for him and his brother. From his parents, he wrote: “I learned to respect the dignity of ordinary, hardworking people.”   But Delano, like me, was also confused by his father and could be remote from him. 

Meantime, as photographer, his hope to respect ordinary people impelled him in his work for the Farm Security Administration in the 1940’s.  As had Dorothea Lange  and Walker Evans, Delano traveled across America during the Great Depression documenting the social conditions of people: coalminers in Pennsylvania, farmers in North Carolina,  migrant workers from Florida to Maine.   

What he saw affected him deeply and he used it to criticize lack of feeling in himself. He wrote:  “I was brought up in the big city…It never occurred to me to think of the farmers and their wives who produced [the food I ate]…The land and soil were to me just “dirt”, not something that had to be nourished, protected and revered.” 

In 1941 Delano was sent on assignment to Puerto Rico, arriving on the island with his wife, graphic artist Irene Delano. They fell in love with the culture and people of Puerto Rico and spent their lives there.  He was swept by the beauty of the island with its “layers of lush blue-green mountains.”  But he also describes seeing:   “barefoot children... sugarcane fields bustling with sweat-drenched men...horrendous slums festering in the towns and cities. I had seen plenty of poverty during my travels...but never anything like this.”  

So different from the aloofness I once had for people, Delano—as photographer—wanted to see the people he met with compassion and respect. “What impels me to click the shutter,” he wrote, “is not what things look like, but what they mean.” In his photographs a desire to see accurately and also to feel deeply work together for the same purpose—there is a respectful closeness to and distance from his subjects, together with the warmth of his feeling about the people he photographed.  He wanted to see the meaning of: farmers; their wives; and children; dock workers; sugar cane workers; a woman in a dress factory families living in the countryside.

 

He was deeply affected by the great art of the Italian Renaissance, and the paintings of Giotto, Goya, and Vincent Van Gogh.  “I often thought,” he wrote, “that if members of the nobility could have their portraits painted to hang in ...museums, working people deserved no less.” 

A photograph I care for very much is this one taken in 1942 in El Fanguito, which translates as “the little muddy place.” 

When I was growing up, El Fanguito was slum to avoid because I was told it was full of criminals and low class people. Who lived there, how much they endured because of the contempt of economic injustice and discrimination, was not real to me.  Delano warmly, courageously sees them as real.  In his autobiography he movingly describes what he and his wife Irene saw when they arrived to photograph: 

 More than 20,000 people had built flimsy homes of scrap lumber on an enormous stretch of swamped land.  The houses were connected by shaky footbridges over stagnant water ...In the morning the sight that impressed us was of people, young and old, coming out of their shacks to go to work, the girls in pretty dresses, the men in white suits... carrying shoes in their hands as they stepped gingerly to the dry area.  We could not but admire the spirit of such people, who would not allow their poverty to affect their self-esteem.

 

In this photo standing on a thin and flimsy footbridge we see a woman from afar, holding her child next to a little curious dog. But that distance doesn’t make for aloofness. The result is a scene that is both lovely and unbearable; a drama of reflection and depth, high and low, structure and disarray. 

The woman in her bright and lively-patterned dress seems suspended in space, with water below and sky above. Behind her stand the houses of El Fanguito, a cluster of little cubical shacks with low pointed roofs, their weathered wood a monotonous grey, and porches supported by thin rickety posts. The stagnant water Delano described is bright, reflecting the sky. And the watery reflections of the houses seem to soften somewhat their harsh reality. 

 All that feeling is framed in precise geometric shape: her figure is the vertical strong center of a classical triangular composition. She is not pitied by the photographer, but seen with dignity, in relation to the forms and structure of reality itself.  

Delano’s seeing can encourage everyone today to see the dignity in the people of Puerto Rico whose lives and homes were devastated in 2017 by Hurricane Maria. They, too, stand for the desire to like the world, even in the midst of what might seem unendurable.

After Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico 2017

Jack Delano, Puerto Rico 1940's

How Do We See Another Person in Love?

        This is a crucial question for everyone, and I’m grateful for what I’ve been learning about the mix-up in me about coldness and warmth—as to love. In The Right Of, Ellen Reiss asks this question:

        Are you troubled by the way you can feel cold to someone close to you, someone you thought you felt so warm towards?  Aesthetic Realism shows...that our purpose in being close to a person should be to like the world itself....We can feel cold towards someone we care for because there is that in us which wants to love only ourselves. 

Soon after I began seeing Donita Ellison, a high school teacher of art, I found myself having feelings about her that were big and new. I liked the way she spoke about her students in our conversations, and for the good effect she was able to have on them using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method in her classes.  And the way she was lively and thoughtful, feminine and strong affected me tremendously. Donita was also critical of me—of the way I could be friendly at one moment and then aloof. She moved me more than any woman I’d ever known, and I was swept and hopeful about love as never before. 

        But I also made a mistake, that men have made from San Juan to Australia—a mistake that, without Aesthetic Realism, I would never have been able to understand and change. For several months Donita and I spoke almost every day, and I couldn't wait to see her. Yet, I found myself one day feeling we were too different—she from Missouri and me from Puerto Rico—and therefore, not compatible. When I discussed this in a consultation I was asked: "Is Donita Ellison a threat to your big love affair?  “What do you mean?” I said indignantly, “I'm not seeing anyone else!” 

Consultants:     The one you've had with yourself!"                

They explained:

Consultants:     There are two things: you and the world.  If you don't want to be truly affected by the world, that leaves only you….Does Donita Ellison have the right to affect you in a big way?

Jaime Torres:     Yes.

Consultants:      Is it wholly in your control?

Jaime Torres:     No. It's not.

Consultants:       Congratulations!

 "As a person is afraid of being cold," said Mr. Siegel in a lesson, "he is also afraid of being warmer, because God knows what that will lead to." 

          This quote illuminates something that happened the first time I invited Donita to visit my apartment in Westchester.  After having dinner at a restaurant and an exciting conversation where both of us had more feeling, on the way back to the apartment I began to think, "this is getting too deep and it is out of my control."  After a few minutes in the apartment, I told Donita, seemingly concerned: “Look, it’s going to rain and you have to drive back to Manhattan. Here is an umbrella; drive carefully." As she left somehow puzzled, I felt relieved, but also so ashamed.  And when Donita called me after she arrived home safely, and she was critical of the way I was cold and dismissing — and I was grateful to hear what she said! 

          By the end of 1993 I knew I wanted to marry Donita, and in my mind I pictured a proposal, an engagement, the ceremony and honeymoon, and a life happily ever after. And I came up with a plan to surprise Donita by announcing our engagement—which she knew nothing about—at a party with my parents present. Somehow I didn’t feel at ease with my plans, and when I told my consultants about them, they asked:

 

Consultants:  As you thought about this, how did you see Miss Ellison?  Is she just part of the decoration, or do you see her as a real person?  As you thought about this, who were all the people at the party looking at?

Jaime Torres:     I guess, me.

Consultants:      What happened to Donita Ellison?

Jaime Torres:      I guess she was also looking at me?

And with humor, they said:  Getting pale? Do you see how something that may begin so well can be used for a purpose that is selfish? 

Yes, I certainly did.  I saw that the only way I would feel I deserved to have Donita care for me, and be trusted by her was to be able to say sincerely: (1) I want to use you to like the world, and (2) I want to do everything I can to have you like the world, and (3) I want to meet what you are truly hoping for. 

          I'm so happy that because of this life changing education I was able to say this to Donita from the bottom of my heart, and I was honored when she said, yes, I'll marry you.  This was 25 years ago, and my love for my wife has grown with each happy year. 

        My happiness represents what people everywhere will feel as they study Aesthetic Realism--they can learn to see people in a way that makes them kind and proud!