Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Warrior

  • 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

      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

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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.

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

      Synchronicity

      You could say I was a “success” at Circle in the Square, because I got the coveted ingénue part in the student production of Anouilh’s The Enchanted at The New Yorker Theatre. But I wasn’t happy. I thought I was as bad an actress as a dancer and it wasn’t gratifying because I wanted the story to be different. I wanted to be a writer! In fact, I felt I already WAS a writer. But I had absolutely nothing intelligent to say.

      How to get my inner development synchronized with my outer existence? In other words, develop a professional life. I did realize I needed a string of degrees – how coordinate that with my abhorrence of Higher Ed? Enroll at one of the Antioch College experimental schools – the one in Columbia, Md, for a degree in Creative Writing.

      Peacock Pavement: The Poet on her walk

      Femininity’s  Everests

      I climb them daily. Envy the crow’s

      wombless contentment

      As I stroll 

      among the old

      wrappers used

      condoms; joints rolled like French

      Letters used abused discarded.

      What the crow envies is my

      Zircon hair; a lunar map of freedom

      Battering-ram jaw 

      baroque nose, the

       Greek depths through which

      My eyes record their wanderings

      Outside the convent wall,

      The stalls, the chained-up lambs,

      The  leaf-clogged swimming pools.

      First act, second act, third act

      Epilogue. 

      Number days by seeking out

      Life’s taproot;

      Marking ages not my own;

      Investing in some future;

      All unknowing what anyone will make

      Of these

      Portentous Pleiades:

      disparate sisters

      Me, myself and I.

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

      Education

      As soon as my education was my own to manage, I bollixed it up. My high school’s near total repudiation of Art left me seeking some kind of art school, but which? I was accepted at a School of the Arts in San Diego but depressed by the distance – a visit to my ex-boyfriend in Oregon and a visit to my handsy uncle in Hollywood had not endeared me to the West Coast. I auditioned at glitzy acting schools but had zero game and even less confidence so obviously THAT wasn’t going to work, so I started off modestly by interning at Southwark Theatre School (they gave me office work) and taking classes at the Philadelphia Academy of Dance. I was physically clumsy and slow and this was going to hold me back from any theatre career. I was very well developed in the left brain areas but my right brain appeared to be asleep. Although I was the worst in the class I did get better and I was amazed to be accepted by a prestigious theatre school in New York City. I got an apartment in New York city, signed up for classes at Martha Graham to prop up my confidence, and gave that a try.

      Act, Don’t Think

      Anxious about future

      I had no idea of living in the moment.

      Until was dancing

      The “present” wasn’t real.

      Releasing my

      Self

      Freed me from self-ness

      Becoming “eternal”

      In one second

      Was exactly

      The training I

      Required.