by Неизвестный
“I began to live exactly according to my belief. I mean, inside myself, my thoughts, feelings, memories, and all mental activity moved accordingly. I reacted to all things—people and things and happenings—as if they were one side of the real coin. And I rapidly found that all people have a powerful force in them—as humans. People, things, events, challenge us to respond. The way we respond gives the things we respond to a special quality. In a sense, we make them what they turn out to be for us.
“Let me give you an example that will also tell you to what an extent I pursued my idea. Once outside the Public Library on 42nd Street, on a sunny afternoon, a well-dressed woman passed by on the arm of a man. I was sitting on the steps, and she smiled at me. I found myself smiling back at them and saying by my smile (because I felt like that inside me): 'You like me. I like you. You hate me. I hate you. See! It is all the same!' She must have realized the same things, because the smile sort of froze on her face; but she went on smiling—as I did.
“Another day, I picked up a young man on Third Avenue. We went to his apartment and had intercourse. He was gentle; but when I was finished with him, he was a very frightened being. I guess I showed him a side of his character he never guessed existed. And I could see by his face that he was scared. I insisted he make coffee. Drinking it while still naked, I told him how much I hated him and how much he hated me really, and that the more he loved me and I, him, the more we hated each other. I can still see the blood draining from his face and the fear in the whites of his eyes. He was obviously afraid of some trouble. When he mumbled something about 'Hyde' and 'Jekyll,' I said: 'Oh no, man! Put the two in one with no switching back and forth, and you have it down pat. Jekyll-Hyde. That's perfect. See?”
From now on, as she remembers it, Marianne's development went in two quick stages. The first stage was very rapid. It consisted of a total independence. Except insofar as she needed them for survival or pleasure, she no longer bothered about anyone or anything. She had no more decisions to make about being morally good or evil; whether life was good or bad, worth quitting or worth continuing; whether she liked or disliked; whether she was liked or disliked; whether she met her obligations or shirked them.
The second stage was more difficult and went by fits and starts. It began with a near-adoration of herself. It ended in her “marriage with nothingness” and the fullness of the “naked light.” It became clear during her exorcism a few years later that these were terms that described her total subjection to an evil spirit.
She came to monitor her perceptions closely and scrupulously. At first she was fascinated by her perceptions; they came with a startling freshness, appearing to be utterly original in their source-her self. She became in her own eyes a genius with a single vision. She found the company of others exasperating and destructive. To talk with another softened the sharp edge of her perception; to do anything with another meant clothing herself in false clothes and not being wholly herself; to feel anything with anyone else meant she would feel only relatively, for she had to take account of them. Ideally, she believed, one should feel absolutely whatever one felt; whatever one thought one should think completely; whatever one desired one should desire totally. No concentration on self could be greater.
Before she achieved absolute isolation, whenever she returned from a conversation or a meal with others, or even after listening to a lecture or working in the laboratory, it was very difficult for her to regain “the inner space and the single vision” she had possessed before such contacts. She was left with a “double vision”; she was blurred, confused, and confusing in herself. She had to spend days “doing her own thing”—walking in the park (this she now did almost every day), sitting in her apartment writing page after page, which she immediately tore up and which she never reread; sitting or standing still for hours-until at last she was fully absorbed in the self that had been hiding. Then quite suddenly all the clamor would fade out. In the presence of that inner self all was naked again. And absolute. And secure. No longer was she interrupted or disrupted by the “bad flow” from others.
As she reached more and more permanent mastery of her isolation, she came to realize that the self she sought lay “beyond” and “beneath” and “behind” (to use her own expressions) the world of her psychophysical actions and reactions. Out of reach of the endless rhythm of responses, of recordings on her memory, of the fast-paced hip chatter of her companions, of blaring monologues by individuals. She became slowly more sensitive and expectant that she would find the self she sought, wrapped in semitransparent shadows. It was independent, she believed, of that distracting outer world, and of her inner psychic theater which was always at the mercy of that outer world and was so easily shattered by it. The restlessness of details had no place with the self. She came to believe that, if she could prevent the “bad flow” of others entering, she could achieve “perfection of personhood.”
“One of my big realizations was that in any commerce with others—a conversation, working with them, even being in their presence while they talked and acted with others—there were two levels of 'flow,' of communication.”
One, the “outer one,” was—as Marianne perceived it—the one with which she heard, saw, touched, tasted, smelled, remembered in images, conceptualized, and verbalized. All of its functions could be duplicated by a skillfully built machine, a computer, for instance. A lot of it could be found in highly intelligent animals. But in human beings you couldn't have this “outer” level of communication without the second level.
The second level of communication was, Marianne believed, a “flow” or “influence” from each person to another. And whenever two human beings communicated, they did so on both levels simultaneously. And they did so even if they didn't know it or wouldn't admit it.
Marianne had very definite ideas on the source of that second level of communication. Her academic training and her avid reading had given a very sophisticated edge to her viewpoint:
“The source was not the subconscious, not a sixth sense or telepathy or any of those gimmicky tags,” as she puts it. The source, she thought, was the self in each one. She said: “The self has a means of communication which does not need images or thoughts or logic or any particle of matter.” Psychologists and physiologists, she knew, identified the self with brain circuitry and synaptic joints and the mechanisms of sensation. This was like saying that the violin was the source of the violinist's music. Religionists and spiritualists identified the self with “soul” or “spirit”—even with God, or a god. And both psychologists and religionists insisted you make choices. And so, in most people, that source and its “flow” were split into a kind of “black-and-white” condition. Most people were always choosing, responding, being responsible for their actions, saying yes or no, and thereby “fissioning the self's lively unity.”
Rarely did Marianne meet anyone whose “flow” entered and left her without attempting to split up the self she had found within her. She remembers that the Man's “flow” was absolutely right, that he even helped her to reach “the place of semitransparent shadows.” At other times, in the subway, on the streets, at shop windows, she would receive helpful influence from passersby. But she never managed to find precisely from whom it came. Her daily life became a series of efforts to resist the “flow” from all but those who, like her ideal, had the “perfect flow” and the “perfect balance,” who had “nothingness within them.”
She has vague memories of continuing to be instructed by the Man, of seeing him regularly, of listening to him talk, of obeying some dictates he gave. But one can glean nothing precise or detailed from Marianne about her instructions. Even an effort by her today to recollect such instructions of the Man produces sudden panics and fears that temporarily paralyze her mind. It is as if, today, remnants of the Man's influence cling somewhere in the deep recesses of her inner being, and any effort to recall those days of her possession is like peeling the scab off a healing wound.
The end o
f her striving came one day in Bryant Park. She had entered cautiously, feeling the “flow” of all present, ready to flee if any disturbance came her way. He was sitting languidly on a bench doing nothing in particular, staring vacantly into space.
Sitting down at the other end of the bench, Marianne gazed vacantly on the passing scene. In the morning sunlight, beneath a sky cleansed by a light breeze, the traffic hummed with the busy purposefulness of other human beings about their day's work. School children and office workers passed by on their different ways. The pigeons were feeding. It could not have been a more peaceful city scene.
Then, in a quick instant, some tremendous pressure seemed to fall all around Marianne from head to toe like a net. She shivered. And then some invisible hand seemed to have pulled a tightening cord, so that the net slipped through every inch of her body and outer self, tightening and tightening. “As the net contracted in size passing through my outer person, it gathered and compressed every particle of my self.”
Marianne no longer saw or felt any sensation of sunlight or wind. The outer world had become a flat and painted picture neither fresh nor hot nor cold. And the movements of people and animals and objects were angular tracings with no depth and no coherent sound. All meaning was drained from the scene.
The only movement was within her. Bit by bit “the net, now like a sharp, all-surrounding hand, tightened, narrowing and narrowing all my consciousness.” At every moment, under that pressure, she was “opening up every secret part of my self, saying, 'Yes,' 'Yes,' 'Yes,' to a power that would not take 'No' for an answer.”
And none who saw her, a young girl sprawled motionless on the bench in the sunlight, could guess that Marianne was becoming a casement of possession.
Without any warning the pressure ceased. The net had been drawn tight. She was held invincibly, securely. And then she realized, like waking up from sleep, that some kind of mist or fog was lifting from her consciousness, allowing her a new sensation. She now knew that all along—all her life—she had been very near to “dusk, an accompanying darkness.” Even as she once more saw the grass, trees, men, women, children, animals, sun, sky, buildings, with their indifference and innocence in her regard, she saw also this dusk everywhere.
The dusk crept into her, like a snake slithering easily and lazily into a favorite hole, bringing with it twilight rustlings of such “smoky transparencies,” such “opaque light,” and such “brightest shadows” that a thrill ripped through her whole being.
What entered her seemed to be “personal,” to have an individual identity but of such seductive repulsiveness that the thrill she felt stung her with a “pain-pleasure” she had never dreamed possible. She felt her “whole being going quiet, self-aware, dissolving all the cobwebs.” It was like falling in love with the open jaws of an alligator. Each splotch of its saliva, each hook of its teeth, each crevasse in its mouth “was animal, just animal, and personal.”
All the while she kept on repeating “yes” silently as if answering a request for marriage or a demand for surrender. Time seemed to stand still, “as a bestiary of animal sounds and smells and presences” gradually flowed into her consciousness and mingled there with the sounds of children laughing, the tones of workmen nearby calling out jokes, or snatches of conversation from couples passing along the pathway. All the sounds that had enlivened the morning when she had entered Bryant Park now seeped with “a new odor of old and new corrupting things, of corruption.” The cool snap of the air and the sound of the traffic were marinated in a fluid of “grunts, snarls, hisses, bellowings, helpless bleatings.” The blue of the sky, the shining faces of the skyscrapers, the green of the grass, all the colors around her were, according to her memory, suffused in wreaths of black, browns, reds.
It was the “balance” she had always sought. “I have finally stepped into the locus of my self,” she reflected. It had always been there, of course. This was the wonder and the awe of it all. And the core of that wonder was “finding it to be nowhere, in a room with an empty chair that did not exist, bare walls that faded into nothingness,” and she herself “at last seen as a final illusion dissipated and annihilated into nothingful oneness.”
She stood up to go, overjoyed with her newfound “thrill of balance.” But she was whiplashed back to clamorous and unwanted sense by music from a portable radio on the arm of a passerby. The snake resting inside her had suddenly coiled like a whip cord and was lashing out at the attempted entry of any singular beauty or grace. She felt herself falling and whirling, falling and whirling. It was as if inside her head a little flywheel had broken loose and was whipping itself into a high-pitched scream as it sped faster and faster. The ground came up and hit her across the forehead. But the real suffering was deep inside her. “Never did I know such sadness and pain,” she said.
“When I walked away with the Man's help, he said little. His words burned themselves into my memory: 'Don't fear. You have now married nothingness and are of the Kingdom.' I understood it all without understanding anything at all with my intellect or reason. I said, 'Yes! Yes! All of me belongs now.'
“Nothing was ever the same again, until after I was exorcised.”
It was not so much what Marianne had learned. It was rather what she had become. “I was not another person. I was the same. Only I was convinced I had become free by being totally independent and by what had entered me and taken up residence inside me.”
Just to confirm herself in her conviction, “at one point about twelve months before the exorcism, I did go to a psychiatrist-really to find out how far I had traveled from the ordinary idea of being normal. As he spoke, I realized that all he said, the terminology and concepts he used, and the theories he relied on were such claptrap, all this was only halfway house to where I had arrived. He was treating me as if I were a sick human animal-concentrating on the animal part of me. But he did not know anything about spirit; and so I knew then he could not understand the spirit part of me, could not understand me. He smothered me in words and methods. Even tried some amateur hypnotic business. He finished up talking more about himself than me. A second psychiatrist told me I needed to travel, to get away from it all—but this was at the end of a long session. Again, in this case, I found that nothing the therapist, a woman this time, nothing she did by way of accepted psychoanalytic methods (discussions, monologues on a couch, hypnosis, pharmacology, etc.) ever reached beyond the shallow level of my psychic acts and consciousness. I always saw the therapist as if she were stalking around me fascinated by images and surfaces and terminology; and I saw my psychic self, this partial, puny mechanism in me, responding to her. All along, the real me, my very self which doesn't deal in images or words at all, was untouched. Its area was never entered by the therapist. No psychiatrist could fit in through the doorway because of the load of images and emotions and concepts he carried about with him. Only the naked I enters and lives there.”
From now on, as far as any outside observer could have assessed, Marianne's course was a deterioration. After the “marriage with nothingness” in Bryant Park, some fixed moorings seemed to have been severed.
She encouraged all forms of sexual intercourse with men and women, but never found anyone willing “to go the whole hog.” Lesbians generally stayed at the surface, wishing to generate pleasure and satisfaction without the necessity of a male. Men with whom she had anal intercourse suddenly became appalled, and usually impotent, when she proceeded to act out anal intercourse “to its fullest extent,” as she said. In her view, they wanted merely a novel experience but were quite unwilling “to achieve complete bestiality.” They could only take “a little of the beast.” They missed “the deliciousness of beauty bestialized and of beast beautified.”
The few neighborhood people who saw her with any frequency began to think she was peculiar. She rarely spoke. In shops she would point to what she wanted to buy or hand it to the shopkeeper with a grunt. She never looked them in the eye. All had a vague feeling of threat or danger,
some indefinable sense of an unknown fire in her, as long as she stood near them.
Her parents tried to see her several times, but could speak to her only through the locked door of her apartment. Her language to them was littered with obscenities.
Once the neighbors heard dull thuds and crashes for four to five hours. Finally overcoming the reluctance of East Village apartment dwellers to interfere with anyone, they called the police. The door had to be forced. The smell in the room was stomach-curdling. And they could not understand the freezing temperature, while outside New York sweltered in the fetid humidity of high summer.
The room was in chaos. On the floor around the bed and table, in the closets, bathroom, and kitchenette, there were thousands of torn sheets of paper covered with indecipherable scrawls. Marianne was lying across the bed, one leg bent beneath her, a little blood dropping from the corner of her mouth, her eyes open and sightless. She was breathing regularly.
An ambulance called by someone arrived just when Marianne stirred and sat up. She took in the scene in one glance. Quickly her face changed; she spoke in a normal voice, and assured them that all was well. She had fallen, she said, from a chair while fixing the curtains. “Police don't want trouble,” she comments in recalling the incident. “And anyway, I radiated too much power and self-confidence. The only thing I wanted to do was to shout obscenities in their faces: 'You missed it all! I've just been fucked by a big-bellied spider.' But there was no point in saying that.” They left her alone.
During all this time, Marianne always smelled bad, and she seemed to have constant cuts and bruises on her shins and the back of her hands. She never displayed any emotion except when confronted with a crucifix, or someone making the sign of the cross, the sound of church bells, the smell of incense from a church door, the sight of a nun or a priest, or the mention of the name of Jesus (even when spoken as an oath or used in jest). Her brother, George, who later went around her familiar haunts, was told by many that at such moments she seemed to shrink inside herself like somebody under a rain of blows, and through the gap in her dreadful, constant smile they would hear growled gurgles of resentment.