PROTECTING YOUR CHEST
When a man and a woman are standing toe-to-toe arguing, what is it that the man wants? Beside a resolution to the specific issue that has led to the argument, what the man wants is to end the conflict. Conflict frightens him. Fighting is not something he knows much about. He doesn’t believe in fighting either. He watched his parents fighting, but never saw it happening in a fruitful way. He finds every sword thrust in an argument, in a fight with his wife, penetrates to the very centre of his chest, which is tender and fearful. When shouts of rage come out of the man, it means that his warriors have not been able to protect his chest. The lances have already entered and it is too late. -Ron Price with appreciation to Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men, Longmead, Dorset, 1990, p.167.
Perhaps as early as mid-century1
I watched their lance and parry,
the raised voice, the anger,
the hurt, the no-one-wins-
everybody-loses-in-the-lounge-room.
It never had any appeal, but lodged
fear in my soul at the sign of a voice
lifted somewhere above middle-C.
In these years with a woman,
these thirty summers and winters,
I have not been a good fighter;
don’t even believe in it, am getting
better at avoiding it, turning the tension
off at the pass, teaching my warriors to
protect my chest, before it’s too late.
Ron Price
29 May 1999
1 I think the first serious piece of verbal abuse I would have heard would have been about 1950, at the age of six. It is quite likely that arguments of severe intensity occurred before that date in my home, but I can not recall any until we lived at 426 Seneca Street in Burlington Ontario.