Call Me Beatrice

I absolutely hate writing without inspiration.
Without having that little spark of “Aha!” that triggers a seemingly endless
stream of thoughts, ideas, remembrances of this old story, that old story, that
line I once heard, that movie based off the play that was based off Greek
mythology and so on and so on irks me something fierce. So when I do get that “Aha”
moment and I do see something, hear something that sets off that trail I almost
always have to write it down so I can remember it.

How I got here: I love my iGoogle account. I
have many things that I find useful and interesting waiting to greet me every
morning on my iGoogle account. One of said things is Wiki’s “How To of the Day”
which most of the time I don’t actually read because most of the time the “how
to’s” are completely absurd and brain-dead that I don’t even want to waste my
time in reading them. I just like to see the headlines because most of the time
they are quite humorous based on the reasons I have already used in why I don’t read them. Examples: How to make
people think you are a super hero, How to ward off vampires, and my favorite,
How to get rid of dark circles under your eyes. The suggestions were, get this,
get more sleep and put on makeup. No, I am not kidding. Anyway, one of today’s
“How To” is “How to save yourself from toxic people” which immediately threw me
back to a truly amazing short story written by Nathaniel Hawthorn entitled
Rappaccini’s Daughter. For those of you who (Gasp!) haven’t read it yet, you
should. You thought I was going to give you a brief summary of it weren’t you?

…. Okay I will.

Rappaccini’s Daughter was, like I said,
written by Nathaniel Hawthorn and is one of my favorite short stories ever, my
absolute favorite written by him. I think I identify with it so well because
for a long time, and possibly still, I felt like I was in a way a Beatrice.

Now Rappaccini’s Daughter is about a boy named
Giovanni who moves into a new apartment which window overlooks a most beautiful
garden owned and grown by Doctor Rappaccini. Rappaccini has a reputation in his
small Italian town of being one of the greatest minds in science but also of
unsympathetically using humans as his test subjects and his own daughter is the
biggest and perhaps greatest of all. Ever since her birth his daughter,
Beatrice, was raised side by side with a large bush and all the other flowers
in Rappaccini’s garden. The bush is referred to as Beatrice’s “sister”. There
is something different about Rappaccini’s garden as well as his daughter. For her
entire life she has spent 100% of her time at home or in the garden, never
leaving these two places. It is stated that many young men in the town have
fallen in love with her after only hearing her voice within the garden walls
and to touch or spend real time with her would mean a lifelong love that could
never be broken but by death. As Giovanni watches out his apartment window and
observes this beautiful garden and its beautiful keeper day by day he begins to
notice oddities concerning the nature of the plants that grow there. One day he
remarks of the doctor while moving about his garden “the man's demeanor was that of one
walking among will malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly
snakes, or evil spirits, which should he allow them one moment of license would
wreak upon him some terrible fatality.” Insects flying into the garden and
being touched by the irresistible perfumes would die instantly and just a
trickle of moisture from the broken stem of a flower killed a small lizard on
contact. The more Giovanni sees the more it becomes apparent the garden is
tainted with deadly poisons, and the more he falls in love with Beatrice who
seems to be the only person that can walk among the perfumes and touch not only
the flowers but the powerful bush which seems to terrify the Doctor himself.
One day Giovanni buys the lovely Beatrice some flowers to show his affection.
He tosses them down to her from his window and she seems pleased and immediately
takes them inside to put in water but before she enters the house Giovanni
notices that the flowers have already began to droop and die in her grasp. At
this moment it becomes clear to the reader that while Beatrice is not only
immune to the effects of the poisonous plants, she herself also seems to be some
type of poison. But at this point, Giovanni is so in love that nothing could
convince him to let her go. Their relationship grows, they talk more, and he
even begins to go down and enter the garden and take small walks with her
around this strange home of hers. One day a friend of Giovanni’s and
occupational foe of Rappaccini comes to visit Giovanni at his home to warn him
about spending time with his neighbors. As he sits and talks with the boy he
notices an odd and overpowering odor coming from Giovanni. An odor much like one
Giovanni noticed during his first meeting with Beatrice and it becomes evident
that Doctor Rappaccini has been poisoning Giovanni just like he’s done to his
daughter her entire life. The doctor then tells Giovanni that he has an antidote
that should rid Beatrice and Giovanni of all the poison in their systems and
Giovanni accepts it, gives it to Beatrice, and in the words of the master
himself, “This lovely woman had been nourished with poisons from her birth
upward, until her whole nature was so imbued with them that she herself had
become the deadliest poison in existence. Poison was her element of life. Her
love would have been poison- her embrace death. As poison had been life, so the
powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of
thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted
wisdom, perished there.”

I love that idea. One day you touch something,
you’re showed something, you’re pointed in some direction and you become so
involved and obsessed with it that it eventually envelops your entire world and
you become that thing, whatever it is. And as you are so saturated with it,
separation from it would be death, as you are now “it.” My mom asked me once if
I believed that a piece of art could change someone’s life and without
hesitation I said yes. It changed mine. Years and years ago someone told me to
read a certain book. And ever since then I have been so obsessed, so sehnsucht
I can’t stop it and I can’t separate myself from it because as I have been so
involved for so long, I am no longer “me” I am “it.” I am these books. I am
these ideas. I am these words written by these people. I am these places and
these times even though I have never physically been to these places and I will
never experience those times. I can’t stop it and I can’t let it go. I am a
never ending battle between myself and my other self that will never end. The
only difference is that most of the times, no matter how much people tell me, I
don’t think I want to be separated from these things that are me. And I won’t
be until someone forces the antidote down my throat.

Just call me Beatrice.