On Defense

Pretty Lady was all agog to defend her dear friend Chris against charges of loving company in his misery, this morning. She was about to leap precipitately into the fray, and declare that she knows ALL ABOUT keeping company with misery-lovers, and Chris is not it. He's mopey, but not particularly sadistic.

However, she was called to the carpet by virtue of her chosen spiritual text, the Course in Miracles. This strange and counterintuitive document has a strange and counterintuitive thing to say, on the subject of Defense:

If I defend myself, I am attacked.

...You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you. A sense of threat is an acknowledgment of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense. The world is based on this insane belief. And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

This is one of those things that so baffles Pretty Lady's friends, when she goes off upon one of her eccentric maunderings about the illusory nature of Time, and such. Surely, they say, Pretty Lady has got it backwards, and her chosen text is a mass of psychotic bunk. What happens, they explain patiently, is that one is attacked, first; then one defends. Quite properly.

For a lady with such a high IQ, they think, Pretty Lady can be awfully dense, on occasion.

Pretty Lady used to think this was true, once upon a time. Then she invited another lady to live with her, who was all Sweetness and Light and Occupational Therapy. This roommate was more harmless than a ladybug, and cute as a button. She liked to vacuum, and hum tunelessly while doing so, and make soup. What a perfect roommate, Pretty Lady thought.

Then she began to notice, over time, that in the course of friendly, idle conversation, this Perfect Roommate had a tendency to flinch. She would flinch, and then apologize, as though Pretty Lady were about to explode in a violent rage, for some crime she had mysteriously committed.

Pretty Lady was mildly perplexed by this. She hastened to reassure this lovely girl; she petted and soothed and explained that her intentions were wholly benign. The girl kept flinching.

Over time, affairs in Pretty Lady's household became Tense and Strained. No matter what Pretty Lady did, her roommate continued to cower; the more Pretty Lady reassured, the more she grew wide-eyed and fearful. Occasionally she would muster her courage, and grow assertive; Pretty Lady supported this assertion, although she still had no idea what the girl was so worried about.

Finally, matters came to a crisis. The roommate, in abject terror, came cowering assertively to Pretty Lady and begged her not to evict her yet, not before finals! Anything but that!

Pretty Lady, all at once, saw that Danger loomed. The Danger was that this girl would, by sheer force of willpower and expectation, get Pretty Lady to follow along with her Script, the one that said that Pretty Lady was an abusive, cruel, unreasonable bitch, and knock her across the room and through the window before Pretty Lady was aware of her own actions.

So, in clarity and desperation, Pretty Lady evicted her. Before finals.

Pretty Lady does not expect any of her friends to take this odd little anecdote as being conclusive of anything, let alone the validity of her pet esoteric text. But it lends one To Think, and that is one of Pretty Lady's favorite addictions. And what she thinks, quite often in these days, is that when we choose to see an attack, we will proceed to make this attack an unequivocal reality, as soon as we throw up that armor.