AS TO WOMEN, ECONOMICS, LIFE ITSELF-DOES A MAN WANT TO KNOW OR CONQUER ?*

(*based on a seminar paper first given November, 2004)

Christopher Balchin

When I was ten years old my teacher, Mr. Rowland, took the whole school, comprising 30 students, on an end-of-year trip to the old Roman fort at Richborough in Kent . I was thrilled seeing the actual remains of stone walls that had been built by people living nearly two thousand years earlier. But when we returned, after talking about the fort, Mr. Rowland asked us “Did you see anything remarkable on the coach journey to Richborough?” I was flustered and drew a complete blank. I hadn't been looking for anything out of the window! Then to my horror I saw Sam Woodcock raise his hand. A year my junior, the son of a farm labourer, and living in a small rented house with no garden, he said in his working class Kentish accent, “The power station!” “That's right, Sam! Well spotted!” said Mr. Rowland. I was furious. Gone was my desire to know, gone was Richborough, gone were the Ancient Romans. All I could think about was how SAM WOODCOCK got praise for knowing something that I DIDN'T. And when I got home I complained to my mother, as I often did.

“Mind has two large aspects” Eli Siegel wrote,

It is that which goes after knowledge, sometimes beautiful and large knowledge; and it is also that which plans and achieves, which circumvents and outwits. ... . Mind can go after the explanation of an event in history and also be used to have a rather cheap victory over another person.

As a man who today teaches and cares very much for history, I love this description of the human mind. (I want to say how much I regret my snobbishness, the way I made Sam Woodcock other people two-dimensional and didn't want to think about their lives, what they felt, at all, including how their lives were hurt by the effect of profit economics in England .

On the one hand I did go after knowledge, read a great deal, and in high school loved learning French and studying Shakespeare. I also wanted victories over other people, including my parents and sister, and was sneaky and strategic about what I said and didn't say. I was polite and well-behaved when it got me my way, but when Martin Sheepwash did something I didn't like I was a bully and held him on the ground with his face in the stinging nettles. As years passed I didn't understand why, considering what a superior being I was, I found it unbearable to speak up in front of other people. I loved singing, but when I had the chance to sing a solo in the St. Mary's Church choir at Christmas I was too scared and refused.

“How does your desire for superiority make other people look?” I was asked years later in my first Aesthetic Realism consultation, when I was 23 years old. “Does it make you feel you're in a world of enemies?” It did, and I felt I was being understood for the first time in my life! “(Is the) feeling you have that you have to be better than (other) people a large thing that makes you feel you don't like yourself?” Yes! I began to learn that my lack of confidence was the payback I gave myself for my unjust desire to assert my superiority over everyone.

In his essay "There Is Individualism," Mr. Siegel writes about timid people:

In the shadows, they are unhindered Tamurlanes. In the shadows they are Bluebeards, Rimbauds, Captain Kidds, Cleopatras, and Men in the Iron Mask.

I was in a fight with a world I saw as confusing and unfriendly.

If I couldn't watch the show on TV that I wanted to, because my sister wanted to watch a different channel, I let everyone know how displeased I was and would retire in what I thought was an attitude of splendid, disappointed dignity, to spend the rest of the evening in my chamber, that is, my bedroom. In my bedroom there was no mother, no father, no sister to bother me. There, I was Tamurlane. I organized my toys, model cars, teddy bears, soldiers and all, into two opposing sides and had them fight battles, with me as the general. I always made sure that my side won.

1. The fight took this form as to women

When I met Jenny Pope I thought she was pretty, had a good sense of humour and a directness I liked. After I got the courage to speak to her I was thrilled when she let me hold her hand one day outside the gym. From then on we saw each other for over two years, but I was driven to feel I had her under lock and key. I would get furious if she went somewhere without me. I was jealous of her friends, and of her study time away from me. Some years later after I had begun studying Aesthetic Realism, I told my consultants:

CB: I want a complete relationship with a woman

Consultants: When you say you want to have a complete relationship, does it mean completely absorbing a person or respecting that person (independent of yourself?)

It was the first and women did not like it.

Looking back it is appalling to me how little I wanted to know who Jenny Pope was. She liked geography, but I had no idea what that meant to her. Once, she wanted to go to the school church service (which was compulsory) and I wanted her to cut: I saw it as a test of the depth of her love for me – how much would she sacrifice what she wanted to give in to me? The more she had to give up what she liked, the more she loved me, I thought. One of my favourite songs was the Rolling Stones' “Under My Thumb!” with the lyrics “Under my thumb, the girl who once had me down/Under my thumb, the girl who once pushed me around.” I thought love was me being able to utterly control a person. Because of this I gave and got a lot of pain.

After we had left high school and gone to different colleges I made the long journey down to South-West England to visit her. I felt that after the 4 hour train ride and twenty-miles' bicycling to her in a storm, this was it; this was the time for my conquest of her to be complete. When Jenny said no, I was furious and actually raised my hands to hurt her, though I'm so glad I couldn't do it. Jenny and I saw each other a few more times but we were both shocked by what had happened and our relationship ended in pain and anger.

In Ellen Reiss' commentary to issue 1228 of the international journal The Right Of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, she asks:

Do you see the world essentially as something to be conquered by you, to be managed by you, to make you comfortable and important quick, or as something it is your pleasure to try to comprehend—that is something you respect? The answer is usually the first; it is the enormously ordinary answer and, Aesthetic Realism says, it is infinitely dangerous.

I saw the world and women essentially as things for me to conquer and manage, not to comprehend, and it was dangerous. This question is urgent for men everywhere and for the leader of every nation right now.

2. Conquest vs. Knowledge in a Musical Set in England

The character of Professor Henry Higgins, played by Rex Harrison in Lerner's and Loewe's 1956 musical My Fair Lady, gives dramatic form to the question, “Does a man want to know or conquer?” Aesthetic Realism consultant Derek Mali has spoken here in a seminar about Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion , on which My Fair Lady is based.

Higgins has a large desire to know in one particular field. When he is asked how he can tell where a complete stranger he meets on the street is from, he replies:

To be interested in language and people's speech and to have this ability is to be respected, but to use his knowledge to have a victory over the world as Higgins does is ugly and, as presented here, rather foolish. It is contempt. Human beings are pawns he can “place” and do with what he likes as I did to the toys in my room, and women when I could.

Higgins boasts about Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl he sees at Covent Garden Market and refers to as “this creature” that “in six months I could pass her off as a duchess at an Embassy ball.” Eliza, who is poor and wants a better life, has the courage and gumption to go to this high-class teacher's home to ask for speech lessons. Higgins, under pressure from Colonel Pickering, who is another linguist – but kinder-hearted -- agrees. We learn that “(Higgins') “manner varies from genial bullying when he is in good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong,” which it does frequently while he is teaching Eliza. He talks down to her, ignores her when she is hungry and thirsty, is generally conceited and treats her like dirt.

At one point Higgins explains to Pickering why he has remained a bachelor. Then, in a scene I think is symbolic, he does the following with his recording machines, which are the scientific instruments that help him know the world in the form of human speech:

He turns on one of the machines at (the) accelerated speed so that the voice coming over the speaker becomes a piercing female babble. He runs to the next machine . . . singing, “Let a woman in your life ...” He turns it on the same way and dashes to the next. “Let a woman in your life ...” He turns on the third; the third being the master control, he slowly turns up the volume until the chattering is unbearable . . . Pickering covers his ears, his face knotted in pain. Having illustrated his point, Higgins suddenly turns all the machines off and makes himself comfortable in a chair. “I shall never let a woman in my life!”

Here, as men are doing everywhere, he is making a woman look ridiculous in order to have the victory of contempt. Unlike Higgins, I pursued women but like him I didn't want any woman to affect me deeply.

After much effort and pain, with much abuse of Eliza by Higgins, he has what is one of his best moments, which gives evidence that there is a conquest a man really wants. My consultants once asked me “What do you need a woman for, Mr. Balchin?” I was at a loss to answer. They said, and it surprised me so much, “To have a good effect.” And to feel that through knowing a woman and being close to her, I am more myself, more complete. A woman represents the world as different from oneself, and having good will for her is essential for a man to respect himself. In this passage, we see Higgins at last having some fellow feeling, even tenderness, and respect for Eliza Doolittle. (Eliza has been saying “The rine in Spine staiys minely in the pline”) He says:

Henry Higgins: I know your head aches. I know you're tired. . . But think what you're trying to accomplish. Just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men...are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will. Now try it again.

Eliza Doolittle: The rain in Spain ...stays mainly...in the plain.

HH: What was that?

ED: The rain in Spain ...stays mainly...in the plain.

HH: Again.

ED: The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain

HH: I think she's got it. I think she's got it.

Here Higgins is celebrating the accomplishment of another human being, not himself, and a woman no less, and it's a high point .

But he cannot distinguish between the victory that is in good will and the victory of his ego which is contempt. If I hadn't had the inestimable good fortune to study Aesthetic Realism I never would have known the difference, and my life would have been so much less, my emotions so limited, so small, and true love would have been impossible. Because of the questions I heard, assignments I did, novels such as George Eliot's Middlemarch and Henry James' Portrait of a Lady that I was encouraged to read, I came to have large respect for women, and a new desire to know them, including their minds.

I remember one day nearly nineteen years ago being at a friend's house when Ann Richards came in the door. I was affected right away by her beauty, and by her passion about economic justice for people. Thanks to my Aesthetic Realism education I resolved not to try to conquer her, but to simply try to do her life good, beginning in my thoughts about her, whether we saw each other more or not.

Ann and I did speak more, and in conversations we had I admired her intellect. I learned so much from her about the art of acting, which she had studied, about world drama, including the character of Rosalind in As You Like It , and about novels she loves, such as James Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans . She had me feel closer to the land and people of America , and through Ann I came to have feeling about upstate New York and the town of Oswego where she grew up. I came to count on her honest encouragement, and her often humorous criticism of my conceit. In 1987 we were married. The fact that both of us are now New York City teachers—she in English and drama—using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, makes our lives together very exciting and useful.

In the musical, when Eliza, looking beautiful, does successfully pass as a duchess, and is the toast of the ball, Higgins reverts to his old ways, claims the whole victory as his, and Pickering and the servants sing “You did it!” Eliza is completely ignored. She is very sad, and rightly angry, throwing his slippers at him when he asks where they are. Higgins now does something I recognize in myself; he asks many seemingly earnest questions, including:

What's the matter? Is anything wrong? What did you throw those slippers at me for? Why have you suddenly begun going on like this? May I ask if you complain of your treatment here? Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs. Pearce? You don't pretend that I have treated you badly? Would you, uh, would you have a chocolate?

These questions have one thing in common: they lack a real desire to know. I was asked in a(n Aesthetic Realism) consultation, “Do you think a woman can experience the world as deeply, as intensely, as largely as you can?” In my foolish arrogance, I didn't, and neither does Henry Higgins. He doesn't want to see how deeply a woman feels, for the same reason I didn't. As my consultants said, “You are afraid you will meet mind there, mind like your own.”

Higgins also doesn't want to see whether there may really be any real criticism of him. Instead, he feels hurt and unappreciated and is angry that he's asked to give his own precious thought to the feelings of another person.

In the classes (for Aesthetic Realism consultants and associates) taught by Class Chairman Ellen Reiss. I'm getting the education about the world and myself I longed for.

In one class I said I felt my desire to know Ann wasn't strong enough, and Miss Reiss said: “Everyone feels their desire to know isn't large enough.” She continued:

Do you think knowing Ann Richards is like knowing history? Do you think there has been anything that has happened in world history, including British history, that doesn't have its likeness in the life of Ann Richards?

And she said: “To want to know a person is to want to see her in relation to everything.” This discussion, which took in much that I couldn't include here, was the beginning of a big change in me.

A poem Ann cares for is The Solitary Reaper , in which William Wordsworth hears a young woman singing as she works in a field, and wants to know what her song means . Ann wrote about the first line, “Behold her, single in the field” for the Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry class, taught by Ellen Reiss. I was moved when Miss Reiss asked her “Do you think a question of marriage is in this line? Do you want to be seen that way, as by yourself, but in relation to everything?” And about the later lines she said they have happiness, they have an emergency in them and an ache. The lines are:

Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago . . .

The poem is saying, Ellen Reiss explained: “I want to understand the meaning of this person.”

What a man wants most, what the happiness of our lives depend on--and men in every town on every continent are yearning for this--is to know the world as a means of being truly kind, and of really liking ourselves, and believe you me, gentlemen, this is the conquest we are after.