She bids me rise, both in body and in spirit,
This because I have been overcome by new
And nebulous fears and have not the means
Within my small and mortal frame to ascend
Of my own accord the heights She wishes me
To conquer by dint of force of will and dependence
Upon a strength newly offered by a being unknown
To my fathers and the generations come before them.
"Do take make hand and scale the sky upon the ladder I
Provide you and consider not the fate of Icarus who spilled
Into the sea ... for my heat is ice and scarce could you burn
Your wings upon me as I take you into the bosom of eternity."
Looking out his studio's street-side window, Marcel squints as diminishing afternoon rays of a limping, hazy sun come slicing through half-opened blinds.
Some men, he had read [for none had ever declared this truth to the young writer personally], write in a darkened box of a room to fend off all possible distraction from the proper conception and development of their little tales. That, Marcel pondered, was too simplistic an accounting of how one's thoughts truly do go to paper. Whether wide open, whether wide shut, these eyes sense feelingly a concept or a vision that waits in the offing and begs to be reined in, harnessed, in order to be transformed into an off-center mystery of an otherwise commonplace affair.
Marcel awaits the moon should rise and blind him with love and longing through fully-opened blinds ...
Only by random chance would an errant soul happen upon these words, words hastily scratched out upon a few scraps of soiled paper that Marcel had found in a sunless and deserted alley in the seaside village, Port of Good Hope. Not by design has any man deliberately sought out the black menace, that which fully intends to cripple and, then, kill ... degree, by degree, by degree....
It is not with innocently anticipated and eager love and longing that Marcel has been smitten, that blissful state helped along by a bright and glorious moon rising. Through a now fully opened window he gazes wonderingly at a super orb that, in its majestic and drawn out ascent, devours all other less mighty luminaries in its inexorable rise to celestial dominion. Upon the worlds' seas this invader, dark moon works her crazed but orderly magic, dashing both ship and leviathan upon jagged rocks which front the greedy maw of Hell. She makes Marcel - a simple man of the earth - see her boundless power through eyes newly opened, and, hence, an incredulous spirit only now become aware of that ageless, invisible realm, that mystic kingdom ever sought by the wise but whose entry thereto is summarily denied.
Piety toward God and the doing of good toward his fellow were as second nature to the young man as were the act of breathing and the daily walk about the harbor of his beloved Port of Good Hope. Marcel's hands were in his khaki's pockets as he sauntered mindlessly along the quay. He reached deep for a snatch of coin in his right pocket, rolled them through his fingers and let them drop back into the cul-de-poche one by one. Every coin, though hidden away in the dark of layered, stitched cotton, yet has two sides. So, too, every man.
Drinking down the salty air that came wafting in off the mighty Pacific, Marcel felt invigorated in body, this despite a niggling inner struggle twisting his mortal soul into a knot and dangling it over the licking flames of eternal torment. The other side beckoned him, tugged ever so gently at his heart strings, the cloaked Mistress assuring this naturally inquisitive youth unsteady in the absolutism of family faith and traditional mores that, if he dared peer through the darkened veil, he surely would not die.
The mediocrity of his little life - a good life, but all too commonplace an existence - was hemming Marcel in, particularly at a time when the blood ran hot and a persisting coolness of spirit impinged upon the need, the absolute necessity, to take a chance and transcend the all too stifling life of a parson's son ...
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
Righteous Job would look neither downward upon a virgin in an unchaste manner nor turn his eyes upward in worshipful gaze upon Heaven's own Queen of the night. However much the willing Marcel had had drummed into his head the Word (with the full intent of its reaching his youthful, vacillating heart), yet he could not help but be drawn nightly to the deeply hued expanse and its precession of sidereal jewelry. Where does wondering amazement at the cloaked lives of mysterious and glorious celestial entities leave off and take the diversionary path away from staid, acceptable religion, luring the total man into the cult of the zodiac?
Marcel was certainly lacking in art and too provincial a lad (given his family's eschewing all things deemed worldly and forbidden knowledge) to have been schooled in the arcane precepts of the deep magic of the universe. How could he know that there were unseen forces at work upon him? He felt a pull but had no inkling whence it came.
His father, a good and simple man of God, was blissfully unaware, in his humble devotion to the heavenly Father, that a subtle direction of a lesser but nonetheless mighty god was playing upon his son, Marcel....