Alysse Aallyn

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

    Memory –


    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.

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

      Partnership –

        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”.

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

        Resources:

          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.

        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

            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

              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 – becoming a warrior by Alysse Aallyn

              The Lovers

              My husband and I frequently refer to each other as our “cuttle bone/cuddlebone.” We keep each other’s warrior blades sharp. When trying to explain how I became a warrior, deepest emotional relationships we form by choice paint a picture of a quest for support and validation. My coed boarding school had rigid social requirements of dating and communicating – there was a “Boys End” and a “Girls End” and every evening representatives from each side would meet in “Central” and exchange baskets of messages. At Girls’ End these messages (called “KOBS” or “Kindness of Bearer”) were stored in a stocking hung beside the recipient’s mirror. This was our earliest form of flirting! One lover I chose because his KOBS were beautiful – always expressed as free-floating poetry – another because he was imaginative and ambitious – a third because he was forceful and honest. It was how these boys came alive on the page that was significant to me.
              My last boyfriend at that school – whom I was to marry eleven years later – we are still married to this day – presented himself as an ideal combination of all of these, plus he was gorgeously beautiful. But before we could come together, many dragons needed to be killed.

              Leaving the Coven

              A craven of cronies stood
              Between us & God –
              God demands clones
              God hated short skirts.

              A damnation of judges
              Stood between us &
              Knowledge; truth exists
              Only in service.

              A clowder of cretins
              Stood between us &
              Art: “Don’t be disturbing”
              “Never trust instincts.”

              From the depths of
              This oubliette
              You drank the koolaid
              Guaranteeing survival

              Cherishing passions that
              One day would rescue me –
              So I could grow up
              And write you this poem.

            3. 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.

            4. 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.

            5. 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