XXIX

C

ourses charted by sightless navigators cast captains upon shores undreamt of. In the steering clear such fanciful fears, I found myself in as common and safe a shoal as I would never have imagined for myself. My state was astonishing for its predictability and for how common it was turning out to be. Some several further scurvied years had left me beached in V_______ once more. My military career, having spoiled, had been jettisoned but still, day-to-day, the jetsam of that past would float by, useless to me.

Now I served as a civilian within the Naval Communications center where, spending night shifts watching television, we performed perhaps five minutes of labour in every long hour. Labour meant moving a disk from one machine to another and then back with a single keystroke in betwixt. With bored delirium, we waited impatiently for a war. Any disaster would do. It would though only have been another shade of tedium. Two people composed the shift but we in no ways contributed significantly to filling the big and windowless room that we were secured within. Incommunicado, we abided twelve-hour shifts in demi-solitude and it was too often wordless. We had nothing to say, afterall.

The Internet by this time had become a constant companion and he eased our discomfortable quiets in the muggy hours. I will be forgiven for turning the Internet's telescope toward Beatrice. It is true that the secrets of the stars are often revealed only by the movements of their near neighbours. By observing the progress of sister Katelyn's artist's retreat business in Southern France, I pratfell upon a blog wherein she reported on how she had recently been pulled from her normal orbit by a family gathering in Paris. They had gathered at a Paris Cathedral to celebrate the marriage of a tenor to Beatrice.

Relief forcibly flung me back in my chair. It was not the emotion that I had ever predicted as often as I had pursued the idea of my muse marrying another. I had never sniffed at the image of her and I together in any intimate way. Not a once. But had I clung to some invisible hope? It seemed not for that relief, I came to later realize, was not because I could hereafter unburden myself safely from any such now unattainable fantasies (they were no more inaccessible with this news), but rather a real relief that I had not by my obsession unhappied her. Of course I had not but I could not know.

Now, from the moment that word of the wedlock reached me, she could be imagined sweetly going through her life with a smile. She was in love and someone deeply loved her back. Someone was looking after my dear, lovely girl. Beatrice no longer shared my mortal world. In my heart, she had ascended to Paradise. I know that winged angels carried her through that cathedral vault and that friends and family were united in singing some splendid celebration. Hallelujah! Bach too accompanies her stately flight with a score of concerted cellos. I know that her gown was whiter than light and of such purity that its like could never find a place on my pallet. She wore, I am certain, a garland of living green about her head where her once bright hair was dimmed by her halo of delight.

Not one heartbeat sent sad blood through my veins. I was overwhelmed by such rare and boundless joy.

Then, hardly an instant after that unbinding flash came a wave of energy that shocked my core. I was knocked to my feet. From beyond a bank of computer screens and books, my scruffy shift partner raised a single bushy eyebrow to acknowledge my agitated state.

I turned. I spun. I grasped the air, grappling with the identity of this thing within me. It bade me act but I didn't know how. Trembling fingers could not be stilled by making fast fists. They would not so remain. They would not be tamed. When, finally, those claws fastened about a yellow pencil, that energy could be named. Kneeling in my sterile space, with twisted trembling hands, I began to make. My body, my brain, some energetic part of me, was driving the horses with bridled madness. There was no heed paid to balance or beauty. There was no destination, only a bumpy, possessed ride on that moonless night. I could do little more than make marks but that satisfied the driver. Some diabolic design required only that hoof beats hammered the hard and too long unused trail.

It was only marks at first and then, taking small steps that had been taken long before, I began to make my iconic shapes: the signature serpentine silhouette of Adam's hand, the flowing contour of a frontal nude, and a crosshatched sphere for chiaroscuro play.

During my fourteen years in the wilderness I had, yes, put pencil to page a few times but never had there been any passion to make. It would only ever have been out of a sense of duty to my former existential intentions or regret. Today, that day, I was no longer being pursued by my past but nor was I chasing my future. I was simply, purely, making simple marks. I drew a line and it was not beautiful so I drew it again and made it better. I drew it again but that one failed. A mark that failed. Again, and again, carefully and calmly despite the thundering heart, I made my marks.

Eventually I had to stop to move a disk from one machine to another and then back again with a single keystroke in betwixt.

An attempt to release the energy by pacing failed. Instead I knelt at my desk anew and made more marks.

So many circles were tried. To craft the perfect geometric in a single, even pencil stroke required a steadier hand than I was capable of that night. Perhaps I could never do it. Only the Divine Raphael…

A bar abuts the right of the circle, exactly as long as twice the radius, perpendicular to the page's bottom edge. One length away to the right, starting from the same horizon, rises a parallel line that is twice the height still. In turn, another perfect circle touches with each bottom circumference well aligned. With the interval retained, another arc is begun aright but we do not complete the circle; instead insisting that a one quarter of the circumference, centered upon the rightmost perimeter, is left undrawn. And so on and on I'd march and with discipline dictate my marks.

It was not as though some part of my soul had been set free. Were it so I would have been, I imagine, luxuriating in the liberty and running about trying to express myself. I would be urged by my heart to undertake grand exultations of freedom. I should have run. Instead, walking with this need to make simple measured pencil strokes, to spend grey residue upon the off-white page, I was answering some queer demand to imprison myself. I was free to pace my prison cell and exercise my withered limbs.

XXX