Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Mysteries

Twists & Turns

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Intuition –

    Intuition is the Warrior’s most critical tool. It starts in childhood when adults say something that sounds “not quite right” to the child. Something about their facial expression and the way they hold their body suggests they’re hoping you won’t inquire further, meaning they have no evidence or rationality for what they’re proposing. Sounds like they don’t quite believe it themselves and they’re just passing it to you, like an infection. It’s an infection you don’t want to get.

    Sometimes you ask further, other times you snoop around for evidence on your own. You can usually catch the Grownups talking earnestly in what they think is privacy about what you will buy and what are the consequences if they fail to persuade you.

    Reading is a helpful source of information. You can always find evidence that completely contradicts any BS du Jour.

    And right then, you’ve become a Warrior, because you’ve realized you need to rely on yourself. Not them.

    Breaking Free

    In retrospect we
    Forgive ourselves
    Imperfect inspirations
    Unbecoming intuitions
    Seeing how high we flew;
    Unaltered
    Compared to many others
    Scraping by along the
    Substrate;
    Just a memory of cloud’s
    Enough
    To settle into sunset
    Pillowed into selfhood;
    “I heard
    I saw
    I
    Flew”

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

    Creativity –

    When I was 11 I saw a 3,000 year old Greek play in a Greek stone theatre and was very taken by all its mechanisms of chorus and emotion. When we went back to the boat I sat down and wrote my own play, Chrysothemis, about Electra’s other sister. I couldn’t help it, I had to reflect that emotion back. It was a hot day and everyone else went swimming, but a Warrior would have finished that play.
    I finished the play.

    Clap Back

    When the universe calls


    You have to answer


    Mimicking what you hear


    Imitating what you see


    Until you’re brave enough to grab


    The balls of fire


    And juggle them for yourself.


    Then you get offered a job


    Juggling other people’s fire.


    Good work for some but not for warriors


    We call those people


    Mercenaries.


    We need to juggle our own fire


    And if you think learning the basics


    Was humiliation enough


    You won’t survive this.


    There’s a lot of stumbling and


    Silencing.


    I was what’s politely called a


    “Late Bloomer.”


    But I did finally


    Bloom.


    And when you’ve created your first


    And maybe only


    Immortelle


    It’s worth everything.

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

    Conflict

    It’s in Conflict that warriors emerge. My uncle insisted people in authority be “respected” and said whether they were worthy of respect was not the point. My parents were never that crass. It was a subtle game with them. My mother referred conflict to my father; we were ”hurting” her by not being the people that she wanted. It was hard to take seriously. But “discipline” quickly transferred to my father and he was a much scarier proposition. He was physically violent – spanking me, breaking down my door, visibly losing his temper and then further enraged over losing his temper. This was a whirlwind I could not ride and it hardened me against him. Some facts he refused to accept, actual truths he rejected with “No.” I understood that my mother was too weak to face things but Dad claimed to be a fearless seeker in life. It made me disrespect him.

    Detaching From Dad

    Dad taught us to stand up for ourselves


    Except around him.


    Dad enjoyed being silly


    When we were little.


    Entertaining story teller –


    Teased us to obedience.


    When I said wild horses couldn’t drag me


    He played wild horse.


    He was the captain, and


    Life wasn’t ship-shape


    When I was a shape-shifter.


    He wanted to go to Europe


    Without my eldest sister


    She called her congressman


    To change Daddy’s mind.


    He institutionalized her in


    Switzerland


    Two thousand miles from


    Our new home.


    I was stubborn and


    Honest: the worst combination.


    When I was twelve and Genevieve fourteen


    He sent us to school across


    Oceans.


    As my dad had before me


    I stood up to uncles and teachers


    Because I had to respect somebody


    Might as well be myself.

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

    Summer

    My family typically spent a month each summer cruising on a thirty-seven foot sloop called the Phoenix. Four children and two adults relating in such a confined space shaped the warrior skills of my adult personality, including a taste for exploration, for reveling in the physical pleasures of water, wind, storm & sun, for the absolute dissociation of reading and thinking, and for reading aloud, also group card games such a Michigan and Oh Hell played during wild evening parties called “Phoenix A-Gogo.”

    Trailing

    When we sailed I was fore & aft &

    Up the mast –

    Exulting with the spinnaker –

    Bikinied & brown with

    Binoculars in hand –

    Mapping unseen islands

    In the geography of my heart

    Scoring constellations

    To the cosmology of my brain –

    Reading by the light of

    Photo-luminescence –

    Foraging with seals & jellyfish

    Flying higher

    Dreaming farther

    Fish-hooking memory forever.

    Mother warmed the compass

    Father was a sextant,

    Sisters manned the jibs, but

    I owned the reacher-drifter –

    Favorite sail

    Which makes the most of

    Any air

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

    The Goddess –

    One of my earliest jobs was an office work temp – ending up as receptionist at an architecture firm. In my hegira through multiple workplaces I did not find one where I liked the lowly way I was treated. But Warriors, by definition, don’t put up with the Status Quo. Seeking to ratchet up my power level I used my training and auditioned to be a dancer. Things improved mightily! Although I still encountered some mistrust and scorn, on the whole, I achieved my goal of feeling plugged into the Universal Power Source.

    Artistic Expression

    What if you could


    Be Yourself at work –


    Release


    Every day feelings


    Invoking ancient


    Raptures?


    Though mother disapproved and


    Dad worried, I


    Launched my


    Physical self


    Into the Universe and


    The Universe


    Loved me back.

  • Secrets of the Self – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

    Resistance –

    It’s a different challenge coming in to oneself in a large family. I’ve never been certain since which part of me is my real self and which part is my sisters. Certainly the push-pull with my 18 month older sister Genevieve had a significant effect on me. You could argue that she forced me to become a warrior, in order to resist her.

    Genevieve was a natural leader – she rewarded complicity and punished rebellion. The escapades I adventured on with her – stringing the entire house with yarn like a maze, filling the kitchen with sand – were enormous fun, even though they got us into trouble. But I often wanted to be alone and discovered that if I climbed into the highest branches of the cooper beech I could read peacefully. No one could get at me there.

    Reader of Trees

    I was the only one who knew your bark

    Was better than your bite

    I could resist you there

    Climbing higher just to

    Become myself

    Dragging books into branches

    Like a jaguar storing prey – fairy tales –
    The Iliad –
    Egyptian magic –
    That was how it started

    Even during thunderstorms that

    Shook me to my core

    I resisted you by

    Refusing to come down.