Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [12]
Nancy looked up from her typewriter and flipped her mane of hair back with her hand with a momentum that started in her lower back and whipped her entire upper body around to reveal her face.
“I don’t care what you do. Just get out of my room. You should go write, go sleep, go meditate. I don’t care. Just go.” Her hair fell and she refocused on her typewriter.
Something about meditating clicked in little Beat Marc’s head. “I’ll meditate. Yeah. I’ve never tried that.”
So, I went down to my room. I turned off the lights. I put on this music that Steve LaRue had turned me on to. It used water as a percussion instrument. Very deep.
I got into what I thought was a lotus position and I guess I improvised a mantra. It was probably something like, “Fuck yes! Fuck yeah! Here we go! Inner peace! Bring it on! Whoo!”
I was breathing deeply. At that point in my life it was most likely anxiety-related hyperventilation, but I was breathing deeply nonetheless. I remember I was slowly rocking back and forth. Then something started to happen. I heard a high-pitched tone in my ears. It sounded like that noise that came out of the television when programming used to stop for the night. The color bars of the test pattern appeared, floating over my head in a blue mist. I felt myself rising up out of myself. I felt my inner self slowly disengage from my body and rise to the ceiling. There I was, hovering over my body, looking down at myself listening to very pretentious music. I felt that I was being drawn toward something eternal. I thought, Hey, this is amazing. I could go anywhere. I’m gonna go look God in the face.
That thought was followed immediately by I might be in trouble here. What if I can’t get back into my body? That would be awkward and I would miss class. So, I jumped back into my body, hard. I got in. Thank God. Then I ran upstairs to Nancy’s room and pounded on the door.
In one fluid motion Nancy whipped the door open, went into a hair flip, and screamed, “What, Marc?”
I was gasping and out of breath. “I just meditated like you suggested. I was sitting on the floor and I left my body and rose up to the ceiling and looked down on myself sitting on the floor.”
Nancy took a drag off her cigarette and said, concerned and scolding, “Really? That’s called astral projection. Don’t fuck with that.” Then she slammed the door in my face.
I knew that was the end of the first phase of my mystical training. It was a gift of enlightenment. I had pushed myself to the limit and I felt closer to some eternal truth. I knew there was something out there trying to reach me. At least on an astral level. I had a belief system in place and it was working for me. My Jerusalem Syndrome had become symptomatic. Sophomore year I transferred to Boston University.
During my four years at Boston University I was a true Beat adept. I took a course in existentialism during which, with the help of my professor, I erased myself completely and had to rebuild from scratch. I drank. I fell in love with a girl who was coming out of a relationship with a girl and learned the true deep fury of jealousy because I was in a position to be jealous of both sexes. I drank. I had threesomes and took drugs. I drank. I had a sexual identity crisis. I drank. I wrote poems and short stories and was an editor of the literary journal. I drank. I had a nervous breakdown. I drank. I wrote, directed, and acted in plays. I drank. I had sex with enough women to be hated in several social circles. I drank. I was a film critic for the newspaper. I drank. I wrecked a car. I drank. I started doing comedy because I thought it was the purest expression of truth. I drank.
Some way or another I managed to graduate cum laude. The two people that most changed the way I saw the world during my time at B.U. were Carl Chiarenza and Lauren Osmolski. Chiarenza taught a yearlong survey in the history of photography that focused on defining a reproduced image, the artistic integrity of the reproduced