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O Muse!
Enlighten my sunless days
Tread first my slippery way
But do not take my hand.

ach time Beatrice performed, I was in attendance, even without Anne. I'd lurk in the back and simply enjoy the experience. I would enjoy the sensations of music, beauty, and idolatry coming together in near perfect synthesis. It isn't correct though to imagine that this was an obsession in that it did not occupy my thoughts constantly and I would not take excessive pains to encounter her. I would pass up no opportunity though to have the remarkably sensations rejuvenated. Each time I did so, the possession would become more entrenched within me until it passively pervaded every corner of my self.

Again though, I was a young man who suffered from the vices of young men. In my enthusiasm for this woman I acted inappropriately and foolishly. It took me a great while to realize that I was not seeking a romance or reciprocated relationship with her and until that sunk in, I erred.

It was the usual things that misguided young boys did when overwhelmed by infatuations. I went to where I thought she would pass to catch a sight of her, I found her address and drove past her home. I investigated her and spied upon her from afar. I was not climbing trees to peer into her windows. This was not a sexual perversion as much as an aesthetic perversion. My stalkings, in the cold light of day, were a matter of my wishing to simply affirm that we shared the same universe and that she was, as often as possible, confirmed to still be a paragon of humanity. What I learned from my perverse and unwanted scrutinizing yet furthered my appreciations.

Beatrice was the eldest daughter but one of a local clergyman and his church was famous for maintaining a striking relationship between music and religion. It was often a venue for local classical musicians to perform. Her home life, from what I could see (or more correctly imagine) was blissful and enlightened. Her three sisters (Phaedra, Katelyn, and Janine) were also all musical, intelligent, and good-natured. It seemed to me that her family life and upbringing were what I had wished mine own had been but that simply wasn't the case. My own home life was close to perfect. I had 3 brothers and a sister. We got along well and we were highly creative. I was obligingly put into any sport, club, or creative outlet that I desired. What more could I have asked for? I could not discern what it was. How could her family life have somehow been better than mine own? Was it simply a matter of greener grass? Was it perhaps just my placing the label of ideal upon every aspect of her?

In time something towards truth would seemingly settle onto the question. What she had that brought forth envy from me was guidance and inspiration. There must have been something in her family life that turned her and her sisters toward artistic achievement and to this I attribute her parents. Patrons of the arts, they would have led lives of art and would have been examples that such a lifestyle is possible. My parents, as fine a people and good parents as they were, lived lives without creativity or art. I grew up believing that a creative life was for other people. My role in life would be as a worker.

We see this obviously in movie stars. When one or both parents are in the business, it is very likely that their children will do the same. They are brought up to think of the entertainment business as perfectly natural and, dare I say it, their destiny.

Perhaps though it was something more and that possibility unsettles me. Perhaps it was that she and her family were all apparently happy believers in God and were neither fundamentalists nor lambs. Their religion was not worn on their sleeves. Perhaps I envied them their faith and the perceived security that would come from that.

In any case, she and her family, perhaps the whole world that she moved in, had come to represent an ideal for me. Herein I could see a better, happier way. It was not the way for me though. I would not emulate her anymore than I would seek to conspire with her. Surely, imaginings of she and I alone in a decorous living room, living out our silver years as companions flitted into my consciousness but it was not something I could take seriously and certainly could not act upon them. She was for inspiration rather than emulation.

I was inspired. Even as I was stooping to previously unexplored depths of depravity and obsession I was also climbing to new heights of artistic endeavour. I was aiming higher and believing that greater goals were attainable. I had seen beauty come from the hands of a mortal, a person who shared my small world, and this led me to believe that beauty could one day come from my hands. Fleetingly, I would believe this new passion to create was because I wished to make something that she would be delighted to see. I might have thought that creating beauty would be a way of gaining her favour but my rational mind aggressively pushed aside such notions and bulwarked me into reason and objectiveness.

Oh yes, I was a ridiculous fool. Countless notions that were relentlessly dispatched by hormones and heartfelt emotions assailed me and I could not fight them. Embattled I could but twist and turn seeking to find brief strong points to hide behind and shelter from until the violence of the passions abated. Love, lust, longing, loneliness, and lechery all had their turns at the attack and reason was my only weak and battered ally. Dignitas turned her back on my plight and Fortitude but mocked me. What bastion though is reason from such violent and resourceful adversaries?

Reason fails in the face of what appears to be love just as it fails when confronted by desire. It can prevent one from acting imprudently but it cannot remove the feelings. Reason kept me as a rock against a sea of passions but those waters rushed past me and left me further submerged beneath them with each wave. I could divert the seas but I could not oppose them. I could not defeat them. So there I sat, awash in a churning surf and I could only hope to let time allow me to resurface.

Barnacle encrusted stones sitting at the bottom of the seas are hard to put romantic spins on. They are difficult to paint as heroic. Even Goethe’s Werther is only a remarkable hero because he succumbed to the press of the passionate tides. He collapsed broken upon the beach of his desires and gained a heroic level among such sufferers. Me, beneath the swells, is not even fit to be pitied. T’was shameful and I am still ashamed of those days for I am shaped by events and feelings of that time and so yet still bear the scars of my struggles.

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