Alysse Aallyn

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  • 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.

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

    Dormancy –

    Artists spend a lot of time trying to find and develop their unique voice. Purveyors of art want you to copy first – so they can compare it to something they already sell – and put a unique – but not TOO unique – touch on it later.

    These contrasting mandates send the artist down a lot of rabbit holes with no rabbits at the end.

    Before I discovered True Crime my own work annoyed me with its amorphousness. I could not figure out where my sense of doom was coming from. Everyone around me just assumed I was being fashionably angsty. You know! Modern megrims!

    But then I attended the Beth Carpenter trial for capital murder in New London, CT in 2002. The guilty were paraded before us – the hitman, the girlfriend, the coked-up lawyer, the hitman’s son. Frozen in the press gallery (my husband was covering it) our eyes boggled. American law gave the story shape – defense attorneys battled right in front of us with the prosecution bar. The jury, invisible on TV, sat before us dressed as if attending sporting event. Which this was – the outcome in question right up to the end.

    This was thrilling modern theatre – the view (the harbor was visible from the courthouse), the company (Press World), even the food was good – we tried a different restaurant every day (once the jury treated us to an Italian meal.)

    I became an addict of Court TV, segueing to the ID channel (where I appeared on Blood Relatives in 2014.) I began reading the true crime greats of which, it turns out, there are many. A novel I had been struggling with – Model Prisoner (which could have described me) was freed into becoming Woman Into Wolf. I based Find Courtney on 2 famous cases.

    LIZZIE BORDEN:
    “Not I But the Moon”…

    Not I but the moon

    Decrees each loss of blood

    You confided slyly, Besom-Breast!

    I’ll crochet a horsehair head for you and

    Lacework- stitch your flesh, my darling

    You and Scrimshaw Pate – He

    Who Must Know Better.

    Hot wax outlines a new broom’s sweep in

    Sacred dust: chorus of shoe-buttons popping like

    Potato-eyes. Oh, I shall dine on you

    My darlings, rolling you in

    Pig viands, I dredge your souls in

    Righteous lard. I am the sanctified enemy

    Of the paper cut people:

    My hymn shall rock

    The laughing house.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

    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.

  • 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.