Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Mysteries

  • Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Wisdom –

      What is the difference between an old soul and a new soul? So many times, I saw the people around me choose suffering. I made a lot of idiotic choices in my life, but I never chose suffering. I graduated from suffering to sadness, and now I’m trying to graduate to compassion.

      Wisdom means seeing suffering coming and trying to get out of its way. It’s not always possible, and sometimes we just have to blast through it.

      A lot of my poems and stories are about ghosts. Ghosts describe the edge between the comprehensible and the impossible, between sadness and suffering, between guilt and gratitude.

      The deaths of pets are always traumatic for children, and I could even participate in the sadness of roadkill. I once tried to carry our cat Beautiful out to the road to see a dead cat, but, being an old soul, she did not want to come.

      When our family moved to Africa, I was eleven and had to leave our dog Four-Eyes, behind. I was haunted by his eyes for years and years. Every time I read the book The Cat That Went to Heaven I was in floods of tears.

      I asked a wise old man if animals went to heaven and he said, “Think how disappointed St. Francis would be if they don’t.” With a gush of relief I realized he was right – that wouldn’t be heaven for St. Francis. Or me.

      STICKS

      My dog
      Went on fetching sticks
      Long after it was dead.
      We’d find them on the stoop
      Arranged in patterns.
      Monk would sigh and say
      Poor old Four-Eyes
      Missing us. Still
      Playing people games

    1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

      The Sun – Truth –

        High school for me was a religious boarding school whose faculty asserted their monopoly on truth. I considered myself an honorable person and despised lies. So when asked straightforward questions, I told the truth and accepted my punishment. However, I gradually discovered that they reserved the right to lie to us and in fact, considered that “parental” and pedagogical. Was there any point telling “the truth” to such people? Apparently, truth was a scarce resource that I, at age 14, possessed. The hypocrisy was huge. My father loved the Society of Friends because creed was optional, attendance at meeting was voluntary and silent. No one spoke unless moved by the Holy Spirit. But at our school, religious attendance (we even had Vespers!) was mandatory and our captive audience was lectured from the Facing Bench (where the Important People sit.)

        In such a world, is truth possible? Is it even findable? Above all, is it communicable? I was naturally artistic, a bent which was discouraged because it was “self-indulgent”. And poetry (it’s poetry if the poet says it is) is the most self-indulgent of all. So that’s what I chose.

        PREPPY

        Corseted with verbs
        The French teacher sweeps
        The cherry blossoms from the tennis court
        As she would like to sweep
        The cherries, squelching them soundly
        Beneath soccer-spiked shoes

        While the headmistress
        Cello-breasted
        Polishes graffiti carved upon her coffin
        In Chaucerian High English
        And the girls –
        Nun-white, nun-blue

        Soar above hockey fields like
        Foul-mouthed angels, anticipated ecstasy locked
        In narrow hope chests ripened on
        Amphetamines
        Free Love
        Bad dreams.

      1. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Dreams & Imagination

        Children can’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s imaginary. Neither can artists, because Mind Power is the only game in town. Classic Comics put out wonderfully evocative, absorbing versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventures – The Black Arrow, Kidnapped and Treasure Island. His stories have psychological questions about who’s worthy of trust and who’s a victimizer that affect me powerfully to this day.

        I wrote and illustrated a story – Poor Left Out Harry – that my parents noisily admired and showed to all their friends. Someone sent it to a publisher (we never got it back.) I was very surprised by this because I intended it as a joke and was much more psychologically involved in making up new worlds, copying Narnia, in a complex mapmaking game my sister and I invented called Scrambles & Rocks. But then, as now, Officianados want you to “write what you know”, and as third daughter, I was uncomfortably familiar with being left out of things. I learned if you want to write about what interests YOU, you’re going to have to Resist adult promotion.

        #Haiku: Re-Cognition

        Confront
        Contemptible
        Quotidian
        Skewed,
        Re-Ignite. You’re
        Welcome

      2. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Ambivalence –

        I like to work but I definitely understand the procrastination people. Is there anything more painful than our efforts never matching our imagination? YES, the horrible realization that all our ideas are BAD. But there’s something even more painful than that – having NO ideas. With such a fraught future awaiting isn’t it better to just exist – even if interminably – on the precipice of Hope? But that way lies FRUSTRATION and that’s the most horrible emotion of all. You’re all blocked up – can’t express yourself. And you know the person blocking you is YOU so there’s self-hatred and hopelessness, too.

        Let me introduce you to the pleasures of being a Warrior. Warriors aren’t looking for perfection – not only is that impossible – it’s a waste of all this excellent musculature we’ve been training forever and ever. Warriors are about Process ie. Battles. It’s one battle after another, guys. Do Warriors yearn to retire? NO. We want to WIN. We’re going to eliminate that Frustration by finding a way around it. We’re going to educate ourselves about our latest bedevilment and we are going to conquer it.

        I saw the great mime Marcel Marceau perform his famous piece about escaping a cage. Then he finds a cage outside that and one outside THAT and on and on. That’s life, folks. The way I’ve come to terms with it is by choosing Eternity. If you have Eternity on your side, you can accomplish anything. According to Blaise Pascal (1600’s) all you have to do is compare the benefits of life with Belief (meaning, comfort & hope) to the benefits of life without (you’re not responsible to anyone or for anyone!) Freedom from superstition would be a possible argument if non-believers were actually free from superstition but no one is. Superstition just transmutes itself into a different form, so it probably is endemic to the human brain. Warriors must be free of superstition – we mapmakers glory in Reality.

        #Haiku: Warrior Courage

        Terrifying
        Ascent
        Leads to
        Breathtaking view of
        Eternity

      3. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Duality

        Have you ever both wanted something and not wanted it? Of course you have. It’s the human condition. We often choose something temporary, hoping to dodge the consequences. Or we tolerate something to get a certain outcome, and when we’re denied that, we feel cheated.

        My duality is the desire to reveal myself and also be private. I want both things at once – to be completely known and to be utterly unknown.

        I already have two superpowers (Art & Love) but if I could get a third (seems unlikely) I would choose Invisibility. I love eavesdropping on conversations.

        These aspects of myself have certainly frustrated incredulous friends, boyfriends, managers and agents.

        I was very uncomfortable in the theatre, speaking and acting other people’s words, but I think (though I never got the chance) that acting my own words would have felt even worse.

        I could never express to family and friends the enormous relief it was to dance – utterly silent – in the spotlight –to my own moods – which you couldn’t dignify as “choreography”. Being almost nude didn’t bother me at all but felt absolutely right, since clothes & costumes were an impediment to which the performer must be mindful.

        I became a Warrior trying to explain these anomalies to people. Welcome to duality – the other edge we walk.

        Centering

        Dance is holy expression

        A centering, before

        The explosion

        Tuning to ancient volcanos

        Pre-dating the planet

        Performing with magma

        Shooting like footlights

        Re-shaping everything

        Selfhood and sainthood

        Willingly abandoned.

      4. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        The Shadow –

        Is there justice…or not? The Shadow says there isn’t. The Shadow passes over us, enervatingly, sapping our vitals, suggesting, “What’s the use?” If Jesus is right and “By their fruits you shall judge them” then the Shadow’s apparent desire is that we lose hope and focus and accomplish nothing.

        This is such a devastatingly undesirable outcome it is obvious that the Shadow is to be resisted with all our strength. Warriors reject The Shadow.

        But Jesus also says, “Resist not evil” because evil wants you to play with it. How resist non-forcefully?

        I would say through the exercise of our creative – i.e. positive – gifts. This is why I study evil, tease it, laugh at it, explicate it.

        The Gruesome Gourmet

        My mother loved corpses


        Folded in with the custard; she


        Smoked out the kitchen like a witch


        In Macbeth.


        Taylor’s Toxicology shared shelf with


        Julia Child; Mom often


        Talked Trotsky over


        Soft-boiled eggs. She


        Smeared more Mercurochrome


        Than was strictly necessary


        On juvenile cuts; dabbed with dilated pupils like


        An artist in mayhem or an MGM makeup man


        While Dad ate mute


        Pacifist chili from cans in his room


        Re-reading KonTiki.


        I became vegetarian.


        It’s true what they say about


        Becoming your past;


        When I hear “Lizzie Borden”


        I remember –


        I think of mutton for breakfast in


        Sticky red sauce.

      5. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Self-Sufficiency

        When looking for approval, you first notice that the “approvers” aren’t in agreement, keep contradicting themselves and shifting their own goalposts.

        This is enough to make a warrior out of anybody.

        How to choose your standards? How to design our path and feel confident about it?

        As a child, I was a sunflower, looking for nourishment I could turn my face towards. People who dampened and depressed, who structured and suffocated, were to be avoided.

        My parents claimed to be interested in physical health (and I wasn’t even completely convinced of that) but mum on the subject of mental health, which seemed to be the purview of adults who’d mastered the wherewithal to “step out of the rat race.”

        As an elementary school student, I was certainly in a rat race. And it looked like a long haul. When we moved to Morocco and I was sent to a school where I didn’t speak the language, life got downright dangerous.

        Luckily there were books. Agatha Christie in specific, who turned out to be the favored reading of travelers passing through Dar El Baraka, where we had been installed.

        Agatha Christie is excellent training in the Art of Being a Warrior. Life in her books is dangerous, but since everyone is lying and pretending to be someone they’re not (“Society”) it’s difficult to tell where the threat is coming from. The Detective uses Clues and a knowledge of Human Nature to figure out The Truth.

        This is riveting stuff for an eleven year old. These skills of judgment, analysis, research and truth-telling are essential for the Warrior.

        Clue Gathering

        Don’t take people at face value

        Check their stories –

        Question values

        Motives,

        Duplicitous

        Suspects

        Hoodwink

        Bamboozle

        Beguile

        Ignorant

        Dupes like

        You.

      6. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Rebirth –

        I’m convinced the main attraction of the evangelical religious movement is that it offers the opportunity to be “born again.” But I believe that option is always available to you without the necessity of signing up to be a cog in a “movement.”

        When I was twelve years old I read a James Bond novel in which he is washed up on a beach and needs to be nursed back into life without any of the previous appurtenances of his personality. I was very taken with this idea. Of course, it has literary antecedents in all the “castaway” and adventure stories of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. The question revolves around your essential self: do you have one? Or can even that be remodeled and rebuilt? This is the question warriors try to answer.

        Warriors pare their needs down. We keep ourselves ready for action. We are shapeshifters and time travelers – if that sounds attractive to you, keep listening.

        The first rebirth was rather brutal. At age 12, I was sent to live with my father’s sister and uncle and four boy cousins in Wayland, Massachusetts. Since these people didn’t believe anything my father believed I found this cross-training startling, and the more I behaved in my father’s image, the more I was punished. My uncle was enormously excited to have a pubescent girl in the household, snuck into my bathroom, groped and French-kissed me. I did my best to fend him off, while crushing on one of my cousins. In intervals, we exhibited social politeness. (I attended dancing class where white gloves were mandated for touching specimens of the opposite sex.) I also was taught to ski. Sort of. This hot-house atmosphere lasted only nine months.

        My parents simply refused to listen to, believe in, or pay attention to any of this. I realized I needed to become a different person –the person I truly was, underneath, the person without all this reflexive training and behavior. And the question was, who was that?

        The Kilning

        “Shame” means

        Should Have Already Mastered

        Everything. Excoriating

        That you couldn’t

        Eviscerating

        Failure on top of

        Guilt.

        Once fire retreats

        Examine the scorch marks.

        Yellow mud

        Fuses into azure glass

        Shining for

        Eternity.

      7. Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Serendipity –

        People often translate “serendipity” as “luck” – highly desirable and a very rare commodity. I think it translates better as “surprise” – equally desirable and much more common. It’s easy to imagine yourself into a modality where everything’s a surprise – as it is for a three year old or a friendly and excitable dog.

        Warriors enjoy surprise. We ride its drafts, like a hawk aboard breezes. Seen this way, all life becomes a joy.

        Art is built on a framework of serendipity and so are warriors. The idea is to take advantage of what’s around, use your imagination to aggregate seemingly unconnected objects/ideas and shepherd them into usable, satisfying and constructive formats. Usable for what? To get where you’re trying to go. Natch. Share the surprise.

        The “warrior” ethos first emerges when we bump up against the “forces” trying to block us. What are these forces? Sometimes individual people, but more usually combinations of people, working together to pound you into a shape for their purposes, not for yours. They’re not interested in imagination and surprise, but in coercion and control. It doesn’t take much observation to uncover their conviction that all resources and power belong to them, and you should cooperate with that. Why? The pay-off is mutable and unclear, but the punishments are stark and immediate.

        Warriors become wily. Serendipity itself – its recognition, use & joy – all in our corner. Their side is having a miserable time and they have to crank up the addictions to get through it.
        We, on the other hand, are finding invisible breezes. And riding them.

        Disappearing Act

        First, my sister and I ran together

        Then she disappeared.

        The baby was too young to run

        I regarded her speculatively:

        Would she ever be ready?

        Better go on alone

        Braving the night’s reaches

        Breasting the sunrise

        Singing to myself and

        When I get home

        Writing the music down.

      8. Secrets of the Self – how I became a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

        Inspiration –

        The desire to participate in the world of art hit me early. As a young teen, I was fascinated by the internecine struggles of the Trojan War and the Wars of the Roses. History was a family story, history was a crime story. Books for children – the Narnia stories, for example, couldn’t match the explosive, desperate sweep of historical intrigue. I had a facility with English that allowed me to “opt out” of language drills – I read the encyclopedia instead, which was full of improbable information. I loved reading to the class, and the class loved to have me read to them.

        When I entered boarding school at age 14 I really began to write in earnest. But the faculty did not like what I wrote. Moby Dick and the writings of John Steinbeck were seriously offered to me as models. This was the first moment I chose the Warrior Path. I complained that we were not reading any female authors and in fact, made a resolve never to read male authors again (I broke it for the Russians, who were feminine enough for me – especially Turgenev.) I liked Colette, so I read Francoise Sagan. I modeled myself on them – they were literally anathema at my school to such an extent that I decided not to go to college and pursued acting school instead.

        That was a dumb decision literally no one helped me with but by that time I had discarded The Appropriate Path to such an extent I don’t know if anyone could have reasoned me out of it since Adult World seemed so desperately stupid to me. What I chose – I thought – was the world of inspiration where magic could be created, second by second.

        PLAYING HIDE & SEEK IN THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

        Life class is

        My game – you started it.

        Now I’m too obvious –

        Resembling

        This swollen storehouse where

        nothing is explained.

        We are all

        Open to interpretation.

        Outside the tiny window a single tree

        Flowers in its smug

        Delusion.

        This whiteness weights

        my soul. I long for the whick

        of teeth on lip; and bite

        the bended elbow where the blood 

        lies gathered. Take responsibility 

        For unfinished work.

        Unsignatured because

        It never finished school. 

        No blood here, lady


        You must have

         Imagined it – a

         Powder burn without 

        A bullet.