Alysse Aallyn

Category: #SoulTravel

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

    Youth – Resilience –

      Right before my husband and I moved East, I applied to the MFA program at Brooklyn College and to my surprise, was accepted and offered a “fellowship”. I was given a stipend and a class to teach. When they asked where I’d graduated college, I left the form blank. In my Warrior Way, such things weren’t important. Apparently , they didn’t notice this until half-way through the semester. When they confronted me on it, I said I’d been to two colleges but hadn’t graduated from anywhere. With the insouciance of youth, I didn’t think it was such a big deal. After all, they were a college! I was there to take whatever classes were required to get their silly degree. If that meant I couldn’t teach classes, that was OK by me. These prep classes – how to write an essay – were Brooklyn’s way of weeding out undergrads who couldn’t hack the demands of college courses. Traumatic for teacher AND student. I wouldn’t miss giving them. I didn’t aspire to be a teacher, I wanted to be a writer. Before my record was discovered, my teaching was given very high marks. Afterwards – not so much.
      But the college felt it was a VERY big deal and kicked me out. My writing teacher offered to contest their decision, but I told him not to bother. I was realizing that I probably DID need a degree, that I probably DID need to go to college and that Brooklyn WASN’T the right place for me. (I didn’t like their writing program!)

      I was feeling the powerful pull of mysticism. One of the reasons I was so cavalier about universal requirements was that I felt the world they represented was an illusion. I could see the Real World invitingly glittering, unexplored, around me. I applied to undergrad at LaSalle College which also offered me a writing fellowship. Here I worked one on one with students to improve their writing and I wasn’t required to grade or even assess anyone. I took it.

      Fellows

      Choosing the perfect word
      Is about rendering the fatted thought;
      Blending ideas –
      Maximizing luck &
      Happenstance;
      Unbulking winged objects
      Capable of flight –
      Lifting you
      And maybe me –
      Out of the muck
      We all woke up in
      Just this morning.

    1. 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

        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

      2. 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.

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

        Dissonance –

        Dissonance is created by facts that make each other impossible. They simply can’t both be true.
        Most people are made so uncomfortable by dissonance they pretend it doesn’t exist. But dissonance is the line that artists – and warriors – learn to walk.
        When I was little my first dissonant discovery was that highly desired things seemed to melt in my arms – I wanted getting them, but I didn’t want having them. The next dissonance was people saying they loved you but fleeing. I decided this dissonance was connected to the first; people like the idea of something much more than they like its reality. This was my first introduction to the importance of ideas.
        My warrior self began to emerge when I observed that people made elaborate rationales to retroactively justify their behavior and they wanted me to sign on to these. I thought it was easier to just admit that emotional states are fleeting – the pursuit of knowledge shows us that knowledge itself is amorphous, but discovered that my ideas were unpopular to say the least. In the meantime I wanted to strengthen my shell and explore ecstatic states. Looking at the past and trying to figure out what actually happened – turns out to be the most ecstatic state of all.

        Bird of Paradise

        I have seen the


        Souls caved in-


        Flashing hyaline –


        Wings upflung


        Tesserae shagreen;


        A flare-tailed phoenix


        Shuddering-


        Rip the orchid-breasted


        Dream


        Blood & lung –


        Incinerating


        Coils of lies


        Where love & truth –


        Diamorphate –


        Polychromize

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

        RISK

        What looked like stupidity was only my determination. First I had a determination to get married, then when I discovered my husband was a casual liar (he lied to everybody) I was determined to get rid of my husband. He wanted to travel – I didn’t – I said “goodbye” and divided the assets. He always thought I would change my mind (though he never changed his behavior) and was surprised when I didn’t.

        But Warriors are honest. Warriors are loyal. Warriors are committed to finding the truth and living in its light. So obviously I needed to find another Warrior.

        Grounds for Divorce

        I wanted the house, you

        Didn’t; simple as that.

        I liked the way the roof

        Lost battle to the windows

        You saw decay

        But then I’m always tempted

        By the portents that you fear.

        Decay is just

        Another form of growth. You

        Cultivated virgins; unlike me

        Whose scars are

        Deepening daily

        like my eyes,

        harden like my body, sheltering

        soul-spores readying

        for flight.

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

        Danger

        Antioch Columbia decided it didn’t give grades, a fact my father, who was paying for it, found unsettling. They also told me if I wanted a class on Women’s Lit I would have to teach it myself. I could handle that, what I couldn’t handle was my writing teacher’s outspoken preference for and devotion to Bruce Vill. He ‘writes like an angel,” she said. He was also a successful musician and disturbingly handsome. Horribly, I married him. But nothing shapes a warrior like suddenly finding herself in the wrong camp.

        Your Sideways Smile

        I heard you singing and remembered

        All the things that you’ve forgotten.

        I see you clearly like

        A fish in a hailstone.

        See your hands, so

        Long for a man I always thought

        And your upper lip too short

        Like a lion’s in fact

        You have an animal presence

        Placing no trust in words

        No trust in love

        Acting after marriage like

        We’d never met –

        Creating islands undiscovered in

        Worlds unreachable.

        You were the joke

        I didn’t get;

        Blowing your smoke endlessly

        Between us

        Refusing to forget or

        Forgive that essential fragility

        Marking us human;

        Fated as you were

        Always to surrender

        To the scornful cries of your

        Invisible hecklers.

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

        Solitude

        I’ve always enjoyed being alone, where I can sort my thoughts and groom my feelings and arrange my objectives. This fact was startlingly obvious from the first, and later I found out that people like that are called “introverts’. We draw energy from being alone, whereas our energy is depleted by contact with others.

        My most profound warrior resistance, so ancient I can’t recall its inception, is my allergy to being “directed.” For my poor parents it must have felt like their third daughter never emerged from ”the terrible twos.”

        My father was a very self-directed man, happiest with just my mother for company, so I had a model of resistance to being “molded.” He explained that he never could work for anyone else because their management style always rubbed him the wrong way. He formed two companies that he directed, and towards the end of his life was the kingpin or a charitable organization with a religious bent. He was grateful to that religion since they’d helped him with his conscientious objection in World War II, but he was never a believer. My mother was more mystical, with a strong response to beauty and design, who felt the most important things in life cannot be expressed. A wonderful challenge for a writer.

        Conscientious Objection

        I said No to

        Trooping past the David statue

        Attending parties

        Avoiding concerts,

        Wanting to be alone to write.

        I kept a diary my sisters

        Jeered at and it was

        Pretty stupid – training ground for

        Plays and proms

        Novels and stories –

        And I still make notes on

        Everything.

        “You’re not important,” said my

        Cohort –

        “You have to become important

        To have anything to say.”

        I knew that was wrong – every

        Artist I had studied –


        Every thinker –

        Bubbled like a kettle

        From inception.

        Reading tealeaves is as

        Necessary as

        Finding tea.

      7. 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.

      8. 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