Difficult to become a warrior without resources. It’s probably not impossible, but it seems to require more psychic strength –or perhaps just the ability to engage a team – than I’ve ever had. On the other hand, I’ve always been able to make the most of whatever resources came my way. It’s the gift I’d like most to pass on to my children, because it helps you persist in the slog and outwit your pursuers.
I can’t tell you how many job interviews I’ve had where I realized they wanted me to come across as more ruthless, and I just couldn’t do it, even for the purposes of Shapeshifting Performance Art and Fun Impersonations, both of which I was familiar with using on a daily basis and enjoyed. But this was survival we were talking about, the magic metamorphosis of confusion into livelihood. My interest in personal transformation led me to studying a degree in Rehab Counseling and this particular interviewer seemed to want me to express a desire to punish my clients. Maybe that was when I realized I was in the wrong business. I wanted to teach these people how to become warriors.
How To Become a Warrior
In heaven the victors Celebrate with their rivals Not taking it personally But loving. Forgiving. “You thought WHAT? I was wrong!” You went WHERE? It’s so nuts!” How we’ll laugh while Scars dissolve; Iridescent plumage Shivers off our beautiful selves Unconditionally Eternally Mysteriously Revealed.
Becoming a warrior is rough. The only thing harder than becoming a warrior is NOT becoming one. Then you’re subject to the wild vagaries of circumstance. What you must do Is fight your way up to the controls and try to steer this thing in a safe direction. You won’t be able to do that without assembling a team, and teams rely on cooperation.
My mother died of breast cancer when she was 70 years old – and my father lost his mind. This was a complete surprise to everyone. My father had always been the strongest, smartest, wiliest person in the room. He was especially good at Reality. As the captain of our ship he piloted us through storms, foreign borders, bizarre customs officials and threatening cops and robbers. He once jumped overboard with a knife in his teeth to cut our propeller free. He untangled anchor chains, rescued a man at sea, founded successful businesses, managed money and liberated cash from international banks. He didn’t believe in God, he was scientifically educated and intellectually up-to-date.
My mother’s death was no surprise – she’d been dying for five years, up until the time the hospital sent her home and said they could do nothing for her. After the body bag left, my father’s first impulse was to kill himself by swimming as far out to sea as he could go. He was rescued by my brother-in-law, but he was still talking crazy. A helicopter took him to a hospital on the mainland where he was diagnosed with grief psychosis and briefly institutionalized while various medications were tried.
I took him out for lunch one day and he asked to stop at the Kwik Check for a newspaper, running in by himself. In the car I went into a slow panic – what if he bought razor blades? Luckily, he didn’t, but that was the way we all had to think as I strategized with my three sisters. We took turns with him. We could see the medication – Thorazine – had debilitating side effects, so checked him into the Philadelphia Mood Clinic to see if they could do a better job. They could, using primarily talk therapy.
Here my father fixated on getting married again, and as soon as he was out of the clinic he was stalking a variety of women, all of whom turned him down. Finally, he hooked up with an old friend of the family who was coming out of a bad divorce where her husband wanted Someone Else. She needed a Someone Else to shake in his face.
She certainly was familiar – having attended all the same churches and schools that we had. But she was not like my mother at all – flat-footed where my mother was imaginative, plain where my mother was beautiful, astringent where my mother was warm. But my father certainly calmed down. Creepily, he put her in charge of everything. He began referring to her as “your mother”. None of us were invited to the wedding. Newly married, they went on a tour of all our houses where he carefully explained to us that we wouldn’t be getting anything in the will, because he’d already done plenty, plus he’d made our stepmother leave her job so she could tour the world with him and he had to take care of her.
My husband said, Great! I’ll take it from here! One of my sisters said, “It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it.” Another was so depressed – “He’s abandoning us AGAIN” – she couldn’t speak. The third sister said, “We’re helpless, we can’t stop him.”
I said, I was taught to speak truth to power. I was taught that resistance is not only not futile but mandatory. Guess who taught me that? My conscientious objector father, who went to Kentucky State Prison for his pacifist beliefs.
I wrote him a letter in which I said half of that money was Mom’s and she felt an obligation to and love for her grandchildren and daughters. I threw in every moral rationale I could think of. Incredibly – considering the way he’d distanced himself from us – it worked. He said he would leave us a small amount at his death and put the bulk of the money in a trust that would revert to us on our stepmother’s death. He didn’t leave us as much as he promised, but the trust idea is a good one. Someday it might even come to pass.
ON BEING DISINHERITED
These are the tasks To be performed Without feeling; The snipping the Slashing The shredding The with-holding, the Bundling into bunches. You play the remote ogre And I’ll be the crying child.
Why do partitioned pieces Melt before they touch? You fear to give; I am helpless to receive. Suppose we changed places. Would that explain Your fear of me?
After the bank took our house, we moved into one of the vacant condos in their project. My mother-in-law sued us with a federal injunction that accused us of damaging her tax credits.
Throughout this horrible state of affairs my husband kept hoping his mother would come to her senses. I consulted a divorce attorney but realized that I didn’t want a different husband, I wanted a different life. I wanted to return to the past, when we were happy and everything was possible.
At this time, my own family sold our summer place in Maine and I gained a sudden influx of cash. I decided to use it to get my husband away from his mother and into a new life. There was certainly the possibility that he would feel obligated to choose her, because of his “sunk costs” or just feel emotionally unable to leave his situation.
Through the nine years of our marriage we had found joy and release visiting his family summer place, StormFall, in the Berkshires, and it seemed to make sense to choose somewhere near there. Hartford was the nearest big city and Connecticut seemed halcyon and clean; almost a paradise in comparison with Philadelphia. The children were six and two at the time; as soon as I received my psychology degree from LaSalle U we took off to explore the Hartford suburbs. Manchester, “Silk City”; “The City Of Village Charm” seemed just perfect. I bought a cute little new townhouse and enrolled the kids in school. It took Toss only a few months to join me. He hired a lawyer to extract him from his partnership and he found a wonderful job writing for the Connecticut Lawyer. He stayed there twenty-three years! We were a happy family again.
NEW HOUSE
The pregnant car disgorges Us. It’s winter. We beat our gills as light As hummingbirds. In a town of green schools and Greener parks this New built house Gapes and swells To draw us in. There’s a science room and A writing room and A TV room and Rooms for children. We sleep aloft for safety High above the thorny osiers Unseen by the demon’s angry outriders; Cherishing a safe word She’ll never guess; it’s Love.
Right after our marriage, my husband went into partnership with his mother to buy two wrecked downtown buildings and turn them into condos. I was happy about this since I was already thirty years old and wanted to concentrate on starting a family. We moved into the recently vacated grandmother’s home – she relocated to a nursing home – it was a 45 minute drive from my mother In law’s house.
I noticed right away that my mother-in-law was a contentious person. She flat-out contradicted people, turning social chitchat into argument. She talked so angrily and incessantly about her divorce you would have thought it happened yesterday, not ten years ago. Above all, she hated seeing other people happy and expressed constant envy, resentment and rage. She made regular false statements about herself as if challenging others to correct her, and she corrected me about my own areas of expertise where I could easily prove her wrong if I cared to. I didn’t care to – she was my mother-in-law, my landlord and my husband’s business partner. I just determined to see as little of her as possible. She liked argument, publicly humiliating the shy, frightened man she called her “boyfriend” and ruining countless holidays working hard to destroy his ego. (He had no visible ego.)
This was unsettling, to say the least. My husband sank all his money into their venture, she kept the books and was supposed to pay him a salary – she never did. They worked hard to secure a construction loan and she used part of the money to buy her “dream home” which meant they didn’t have enough cash to finish the project. We began to get threats of lawsuits from the bank which stated that I, who was not a partner and had signed nothing, was also on the hook for the money. She had no regard for the truth and frequently claimed lying on sworn documents was a clever business tactic.
My husband was better than this, tried to correct and help her and in turn was attacked by her. But he felt helpless – all his money was tied up and the condos were slowly being readied for sale. When I complained about her behavior he was worried I would “expose” her and make things worse. So our partnership, too, was threatened. They went into therapy together – she reading from a long list of criticisms of my husband and what a terrible person and partner he was. When I finally spoke to the therapist I discovered neither of them had mentioned the mother-son relationship (which they both considered humiliating.) ! Needless to say, the newly-informed therapist “got it” immediately. “Get the hell out”, he advised. (She never paid him and he joined the long line of suers against her.)
We bought a modest house in a struggling neighborhood and began to upgrade it. We had two small children and I was finishing college for a bachelor’s in psychology. All the way along I asked for professional help trying to understand this weird woman who hated her own children, humiliated anyone who ever loved her and felt insulted by rescuers. It was my first experience of evil. The diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder was just being established and she fit it to a tee. The bank took our house. Ultimately I was able to convince my husband, who was contemplating suicide, that we needed to get away from her and sever all ties. He got a wonderful legal writing job that combined his best interests, we moved two states away and lived happily ever after except… there was always my husband’s pain. Having that kind of person for a mother.
#Haiku: The Definition of Evil
Lost souls Twist truth: “Trust” is “punish” “Wild” is “Poison” “Conserve” is “destroy”.
To our father, we were the Four Princesses – Alyssiana, Genviana, Merrillana and Avrilana. He grew up with a mother, a sister, two brothers, a grandmother and four great-aunts in circumstances of extreme frugality in the Depression. Nonetheless, they were a family of snobs and social pretensions kept afloat by a “bachelor uncle” who made a fortune in the insurance business.
My father came into the capital from his trust fund when he was 25 (I was born when he was 31) built us a house and rented out surrounding properties. He went into the construction business with an architect friend from college, then into the laboratory development business with one of his tenants. He replaced his blue-chip stocks with high-flying ventures like Xerox and Sony, which in the sixties was like coining money.
By the time I was 11 he quit his job and went into philanthropic work in Africa. I was concerned that we would be “poor”. I had already seen the stark divisions in my Ohio hometown and I never aspired to shift to the other side of the tracks. He told me not to worry, but when I saw the desperate refugees from a war-torn country he was trying to help, I had to worry.
My father had a yacht built, my beautiful mother bought high-end clothes, they invested in art and traveled all over the world, but one by one his daughters fell off the gravy train. We went to boarding schools and approved colleges, shopped at re-sale stores and were discouraged from thinking of ourselves as “rich.”
My father bought a house in a 50 acre park (in the middle of the city!) and slowly filled it treasures acquired abroad. I felt guilty for all the money he gave me and aspired to pay my own way. I was relieved to dodge college – that was a big price tag.
I achieved an artist husband like myself – a touring musician with a wonderful sound who could play anything. We bought a house in the woods and I settled down to write. I figured we were set. But I had confused “intrinsic” with “extrinsic” values which can be easily swept away. I didn’t have “resources”. When my “house of cards” collapsed I found myself sitting in a temp office, paid minimum wage, waiting in case someone wanted to hire me for my only known skill: typing.
HORROR STORY
Lubricity Darkens into sweat; We face each other Across the cooling dinner, Night by night Stiff as andirons Masterpieces seen best by candlelight To hide the cracks, Well-meant improvements by Another’s hand. A well-matched pair. A fountain sings but One tune only. It didn’t look this way Proceeding forward. Backward is a different view. I could have sworn that we’d last longer. I caught flak from my mother, Who cast a role in Wuthering Heights; Preaching doom In guise of cheer. All I wanted was Sufficient light To read my tarot; recycled Tea leaves brewed From your used bathwater. The leaves are dank and do not speak. I shiver with cold and you With anger; a Brace of disappointments. Speechless. There’s still too much We can’t admit.
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
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.
In the life of a warrior, Models and Mentors are key. Whose coping mechanisms and vision of reality do you use to sustain you through tough times. When I was young, TV viewing was an event – not an influence. Reading was the most powerful influence, ever since I tackled My Father’s Dragon with its beautiful Henri Rousseau-like illustrations. What could they mean? I was determined to learn to read.
I entered books through illustrations, which I puzzled over long and hard. Egyptian tomb paintings. Imaginative depictions of the city of Troy. Nineteenth century pirates battled with Narnians for control of my dreams. I worked my way through world fairy tales and a bowdlerized Thousand and One Nights.
On summer vacation we read a book aloud; the Travels of Jamie McPheeters is the one I specially remember – I was horrified by its depiction of Indians eating puppies.
Summers we were allowed to buy books to take with us on the boat, and we read each other’s books. That’s how I discovered my sister’s favorite, Nancy Drew, and I was immediately galvanized. Here was literature as aspiration – more intimate than a hero’s tale or an imaginary quest; specifically designed to appeal to the yearnings of an artistically underserved group, it depicted and ennobled a female snoop and an empowered teenager – someone you identify with and actually imagine becoming. Nancy Drew was certainly someone I very much wanted to emulate and in my own small way, I believe I have.
I once shocked at group of literati debating what protagonist of literature one would choose to be by saying in was Nancy Drew, hands down. No contest. She’s constantly solving puzzles, having adventures and joyriding with her friends. Although she’s been physically threatened, her bodily autonomy and integrity is never in doubt. Over the years, I haven’t managed as much joyriding as I’d like but I’ve solved a LOT of puzzles, adventured much, and been very lucky.
Boss Detective
Nobody listens To the teenage girl Or notices her either Pawing through receipts Inspecting medicine cabinets Snooping in the garage – Is that weedkiller Paint thinner or Vanishing cream – Keys to the attic, cellar or Deepest basement of The self?
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.
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
Alysse Aallyn 