by Неизвестный
Her behavior was harmless, though erratic, at first. Some days she came, sat or stood without any motion to speak of. Then she departed suddenly as if on a signal. Other days, she arrived, gazed blankly around at every corner, then left precipitately. At other times she brought little wooden sticks which she ceremoniously stood upright in the earth, tying scraps of cloth with a single bow to their base. “Like little crosses upside down,” was a description given later.
Only once in that early time did she cause any commotion. She came to Bryant Park one morning, sat down for a while, then stood up stock-still facing south, with what could have been taken as a beatific gleam in her eyes. Someone passed by carrying a radio blaring music. As the radio came level with her, suddenly she flung her hands to her ears, screamed, spun around like a top, and fell hard on her face, her body twitching. A score of people gathered around her. A policeman strolled over with the unspeed of the New York cop. “Turn that thing off, pal,” he said to the owner of the radio.
Almost immediately a tall man was by the policeman's side. “She's Marianne. I will take care of her.” He spoke in a voice of authority and very clearly.
“Are you a relative?” the policeman asked, looking up as he crouched on his haunches beside Marianne.
“I'm the only one she has in this world.” The policeman remembered the man touched Marianne on the left wrist and spoke quietly. In a few seconds she awoke, and got quickly but unsteadily to her feet. Her face still had the smile. Together, she and the tall man walked slowly away towards Fifth Avenue.
“You needn't report it, Officer.”
The policeman heard the words said evenly, confidently, over the man's shoulder. “I was sure they were father and daughter,” he commented later in recalling the incident. “He looked old enough; and they both smiled in exactly the same way.”
Nothing of a recorded public nature took place again in Marianne's case, even though she was already in a state of possession by an evil spirit.
No definite sign of that possession, unequivocal in itself, had been visible in her from her childhood days until well into the year following the incident in Bryant Park.
Marianne grew up with one brother a year younger than she. They spent their first years in Philadelphia. The family was then of lower middle income. It was strongly Roman Catholic and closely knit. Her parents, both of Polish origin and second-generation American, had no living relatives in the United States. Close friends were few. Neither of them had completed high school; and they had never found time for culture or much leisure for the finer things in life. Her mother was a quiet-spoken, firm woman who held a job and continually worried : about bills. Her father was a bluff, down-to-earth character who grew up in the Depression, married late, was solidly faithful to his wife, and never fretted about difficulties, and, outside his working hours, spent all his spare time at home.
Discipline was not rigid at home, and a good deal of fun and merriment ran through it all. Both children were reared to lead an orderly existence. Religion occupied a prominent place in their lives. Prayers in common were recited mornings and evenings. Family love and loyalty were based on religious belief. The Polish pastor was the ultimate authority.
In those early years there was such a strong resemblance between Marianne and George, her younger brother, that they were often mistaken for twins. When their mother or father called them, either of them could answer by mimicking perfectly the voice of the other. They had special signs and words of their own, a kind of private language they could use. Marianne relied on George to a great extent. She was left-handed, had begun to speak normally only at the age of six, and was very shy and obstinate.
This close companionship between the two children was broken when, around Marianne's eighth birthday, the family moved to New York, where her father had been reassigned by his company. His new position made the family financially secure and comfortable. Marianne's mother no longer worked at a job outside the home. Her brother was successful in school. He made friends easily, was a good athlete, and had a rollicking disposition. In New York he gradually sought the company of his peers, and so spent less and less time with his sister.
Marianne made few friends and was at ease only when at home. She never seemed to prefer one parent over the other. After finishing high school, she spent two years at Manhattanville College, where her academic interests were physics and philosophy. But her stay there was stormy and unhappy. She wanted the “full truth, to know it all,” she told her teachers in the first flush of enthusiasm. But with time she seemed to get cynical and disillusioned, and gave the impression she believed they were evading the real problem and hiding the full truth from her.
She found particular difficulty with her metaphysics teacher, a certain Mother Virgilius, middle-aged, myopic, high-voiced, exigent, a disciplinarian and member of the “old school.” Mother Virgilius taught Scholastic philosophy. She derided modern philosophers and their theories. Her arguments with Marianne were, from the start, bitter and inconclusive. The girl kept plying the older woman with questions, perpetually throwing doubt on any statement Mother Virgilius made, driving her back step by step until the nun rested desperately on her own basic ideas she had accepted but had never questioned. And Marianne was too clever and too tenacious for her, leaping nimbly from objection to objection and strewing difficulties and remarks to trip her up.
But clearly what Marianne was after seemed to be a trap of an odd kind in which to catch the nun. There didn't seem to be any desire on her part to find out something true or to deepen her knowledge, only a disturbing viciousness, a stony-faced cunning with words and arguments alternating with a sardonic silence and smirking satisfaction, all leading to confusion and curiously bitter derision.
Virgilius sensed this but could not identify it: She merely stood on her dignity. But this was no help to either of them.
It all came to a head one afternoon. The lecture concerned the principle of contradiction. “If something exists, if something is, then it cannot but exist. It cannot not be at the same time and under the same respect,” concluded Mother Virgilius in her high pitch. “The table is here. While it is here, it cannot not be here. Being and nonbeing cannot be identified.”
As she finished, Marianne's hand shot up. “Why can't they be identified?”
They had been over this ground interminably. The nun had no more answers and no more patience. “Marianne, we will discuss this later.” “You say that because you cannot prove it. You just presume it.” “First principles cannot be proven. They. . .” “Why can't I have another first principle? Say: being and nonbeing are inseparable. The table is here because it isn't here. God exists because he doesn't exist at the same time.” A titter ran around the class.
Marianne rounded on her classmates: “It's no joke! We exist and we don't exist!”
The general amusement gave way to hostility and embarrassment. None in the room, Virgilius included, realized, as Marianne reflects today, that by some kink of inner impulse, her mind was running in little twisted gorges of confusion. She was guided by no clear ideas, was not commenting from a rich store of reflection and experience, but was only pulled by a peculiar fascination with the negative. Many a greater mind had fallen off a dark cliff somewhere along this same way or impaled itself in desperation on some sharp rocks.
Virgilius, feeling already tired, was humiliated. She got angry. “I told you, Miss, we will speak. . .”
But before she had finished the sentence, Marianne was on her feet, had swept up her books, glared at everyone, and was out the door.
Marianne refused to return to Manhattanville. To all questions as to why and to all entreaties that she give it another chance, she kept repeating: “They are trying to enslave my mind. I want to be free, to know all reality, to be real.” She had nothing but contempt for her former teachers. But none of them could guess how far she had already gone in this contempt.
As she traces it now, her new path began when she decided th
at her teachers—Mother Virgilius among them—were phonies, that they merely repeated what they had been taught. There was nothing abnormal in this. Up to a certain level, Marianne had an emotional reaction rather normal in the adolescent. But she pursued it with a logic that was not normal for her years. And she was deliberately isolated: she did not communicate with her companions, nor did she discuss it with her parents. She was determined to work it out for herself.
Gradually she extended the same premise (“All authorities in my life are phonies, because they repeat what they are told and never inquire”) to her parents, to the priests at the local church, to the religious teaching she had been given, and to the habits and customs of daily life. To everything.
Her parents knew nothing of philosophy. And when Marianne spoke darkly of “how good it is to see all the 'noes' side by side with the 'yesses' ” or of “dirt on the nose of the Venus de Milo” or of “murder as an act of beauty as real as composing a sonata,” they were bewildered. They only knew that they loved her; but manifestations of that love were taken by Marianne as chains thrown around her. “If only you could hate me, Mummy, just for five minutes, we would get along so well,” she said once to her mother. At another time: “Why doesn't Daddy rape me or break my nose with his fist? Then I would see my beauty. And he would be real for me.”
In the end, after much discussion and consultation, it was decided to send Marianne to Hunter College for the fall semester of 1954. Perhaps a purely secular school with good standards would satisfy what her parents could only take on the surface to be Marianne's urge to acquire knowledge.
Academically Marianne never had any difficulty during her three years at Hunter. But the rhythm of family life changed around this time. And she took a totally unexpected turn in character. George, her brother, had gone away the previous year to study oceanography. He had been the one human being with whom she communicated on an intimate basis. Her father was more frequently than ever out of town traveling for his company. Her mother, who had taken up working again in an advertising agency, lost any real contact with Marianne by the end of her first year at Hunter.
Her contemporaries at the college remember her as a rather plump, grave-faced girl who rarely laughed, did not smile easily, spoke in a low voice, had few friends, never dated boys, gave the impression of great stubbornness whenever an argument arose, and (as far as they were concerned) was a “homebody.” But neither they nor her family knew anything about her first meeting with the Man.
During her first two years at college, Marianne used to go downtown and sit in Washington Square Park, reading her textbooks and making notes. One afternoon in 1956, as she was reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, she felt suddenly, but without any sense of shock, that someone was bending over her shoulder and looking at the pages of her book. She looked around. He was a rather tall individual whose face and clothes never impressed themselves on her memory. His left hand was resting on the back of the park bench. Her one clear memory is only of his mouth and the regular teeth she glimpsed behind his lips as he read repeatedly from the open page of her book the words: “When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness. . .” running all the words as one sentence several times over and over again without pause or stop. The mouth kept repeating and repeating: “. . . on the ragged edge of consciousness on the ragged edge of consciousness on the ragged edge of consciousness on the. . .” It was done softly. Without hurry. Without emphasis. Until the words became a slowly whirling carousel in her ears, and her mind moved in circles, bumping against them on all sides. She burst into tears.
The mouth said, still softly: “They are all pushing you along the ragged edge. Want to get off it?”
She remembers a few things. She said through her tears: “I don't want them to help me. Just to leave me alone.”
He sat with her for about one hour. The left hand remained visible in her memory. And the mouth. She remembers nothing else of him, except that there were instructions: “Don't let any man touch you! You have a short time to reach your true self! Come and find me regularly!” And there was one peculiar instruction: “Seek those of the Kingdom. They will know you. You will know them.”
It was from this time that her family and acquaintances noticed definite changes in Marianne. She disappeared from home for long mornings and afternoons, even when there were no lectures or lab work at college. She spoke rarely with her parents. Her meals at home grew less frequent. Her contemporaries at Hunter noticed that she became more introspective, more fearful of strangers, more reticent with those who knew her, and extremely shy.
Her mother became worried. After much persuasion, she induced Marianne to see a psychiatrist. But after a couple of sessions, he dismissed her; he told her parents that, while she certainly needed more nourishment (she had been losing weight) and much love, he could detect nothing awry or dangerous in her psychology. She just wanted to be free; and this was, he said, the new generation. Anyway, he advised them, they should think of her age: rebellion and independence were normal for her age bracket.
Her father was satisfied. But her mother felt some deep apprehension.
“By the time they realized that I was in earnest about the change in me,” says Marianne, “I had already accepted the authority of the Man in my life. I had changed profoundly. I mean: my inner life-style altered under his influence.”
Marianne always refers to this figure as “the Man”; but nowadays it is impossible for her to determine if he was hallucination, deliberate figment of her own, a real person, or merely a metaphor and symbol of her initial revolt. Indeed, in Marianne's memory of the nine years between that first meeting with the Man and the exorcism of 1965, the Man keeps on appearing and reappearing in her recollections. But most of the time, especially the last four years, is nearly a total blank. Only a few searing experiences stand out starkly for her.
Having finished at Hunter, Marianne decided to follow postgraduate courses in physics at New York University. Her isolation now became complete. After a little over one year at New York University, she dropped out, took an apartment in the East Village, and started working as a sales clerk in a store on Union Square. Her behavior, according to the conservative Catholic standards of her parents, was unorthodox. Marianne never went to church any longer. She lived sporadically with various men, did not take care of her external appearance, and spoke disparagingly—sometimes very rudely and with four-letter words—of all that her parents held dear. She did not allow them to bother her.
For their part, her parents worried greatly; but, following the hopeful lead of the psychiatrist, they still thought that all this was a temporary phase of rebellion. They did worry in particular about her health: she shrank from 130 pounds to 95 pounds in a matter of months. But, in great anguish and confusion, her mother ceased leaving food packages at the door of Marianne's apartment, when the first one was delivered back smelling and dripping. Marianne had mixed excrement and urine with the fruit and sandwiches.
In her memory now, the next big step in her changing “inner life-style,” as she terms it, concerned formal religion and religious belief. She took that step consciously, with the Man by her side, and on two particular occasions.
One occasion was on Palm Sunday. In the evening as she passed by a church, services were being conducted. Something about the lights in this particular church aroused her interest—“It was in the nature of a challenge,” she recalls. She entered and stood among the people at the back of the church. Suddenly she felt the same disgust and rejection then as she had experienced toward her parents and teachers. As she turned to go, the Man beside her turned also. He had been there but she hadn't noticed him.
“Had enough, my friend?” he said quietly, jocularly.
She saw his smile in the half-darkness, and smiled back at him. He said: “The smile of the Kingdom is now yours.” Then, as they left: “If you don't like it, you haven't got to lump it, y'know.” They both smiled. That was al
l.
The second occasion took place the next week, at Easter. An illuminated cross was set up on the General Building on Park Avenue. She was viewing this from the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, when she heard the Man nearby say: “Seems one-sided. Shouldn't they turn it upside down also? Just in order to balance the odds? Same thing, really. Only in perfect balance.” The Man smiled.
“For me,” comments Marianne now, “it was a perfect smile. You hadn't to balance it up with a scowl. Perfect for me then.”
At home that night, she found herself drawing inverted crosses side by side with upright crosses. But she could not bring herself to draw the crucified figure on either type of cross. Whenever she tried, “The pencil ran away into S-shapes and Z-shapes and X-shapes.” From that time on, there, started in earnest what she recalls as a “new color and form in my inner life-style.” Her descriptions of it are confused and marked by expressions that one finds difficult to understand. But the overall meaning of what she says is chilling. The whole process was an acquisition of the “naked light” and her “marriage with nothingness,” expressions she learned from the Man.