Introduction
or
How to Read a Saint’s Guide
to
P a r a d i s e
"mj lorenzo[1]
introductory provisos
regarding the 1998
Hooked on Cocaland
was not at all like a
Christian saint but more like a head-whacked
‘Coyote’
who
had been
‘sanctified, as it were’
and
added ‘as a canine
afterthought’
to the
‘numinous pantheon of higher-level powers’
by
elders of the Southwest tribes
NOT
because of any moral superiority
or ‘purity’
but
because of the
enlightenment
Coyote had brought the tribes
millennium after millennium
regarding their natural
animal-mammal humanity
and its
ins and outs
ups and downs
and
pluses and minuses"
“Regrettably,” said many critics-. “Stupidly.” “Unforgivably.” “Lazily.” And others: “Irresponsibly.”
But the truth is that they did not shirk their work. They debated the pros and cons of the Dr.’s original diary at length among themselves. And in the end they left his trip journal practically unedited to show the world that their hero mj was ‘normally and naturally animal-human’. They wanted the whole planet of mj lorenzo fans to recognize, finally, that Dr. Lorenzo was not some kind of ‘imagined saint’, as – they opined – ‘a few too many of his followers had liked to think’.[3]
Or, on second thought, as Sammy Martinez ultimately added to the 1998 'Introduction': maybe mj lorenzo was ‘indeed a saint’ and ‘should be canonized or sanctified by some august holy body of experts on sacredness’;[4] but, if so, as Sammy put it, ‘saint mj’ would ‘never come out smelling like the saints of Christendom’.
Dr.
Samuel Oké Martinez, PhD., was qualified to speak on
this subject. He was
born in the San Juan Pueblo tribal village in northern
And Sammy became a tribal shaman like his grandfather; while Sammy’s father went off anthropologizing.
Mj lorenzo, as Sammy cooked into the original soup of introductory provisos regarding the 1998 Hooked on Cocaland, was not at all like a Christian saint but more like half-crazy ‘Coyote’, who had been ‘sanctified, as it were’, and added ‘as a canine afterthought’ to the ‘numinous pantheon of higher-level powers’ by tribal elders of the Southwest, not because of any moral superiority or ‘purity’, but because of the enlightenment Coyote had brought the tribes, millennium after millennium, regarding their natural animal-mammal humanity and its ins and outs, ups and downs, and pluses and minuses.
A number of Dr. Lorenzo’s most devoted pundit-followers, however, and especially his ‘culture-hero’ pundits, were not a little miffed by this tiny phrase in the introduction to the original 1998 published book version of Hooked on Cocaland, those words, ‘as a canine afterthought’, which seemed to relegate their hero to the very lowest realms of sanctity, if not quite to hell itself. But Sammy defended his stance, explaining that this semi-holy figure, ‘Coyote’, whom mj lorenzo resembled, as he thought, did not amble in Olympian realms or carry upon his hide the whiff of holy ordure in the same way that the other holies did, the Kachina people, all beautifully dressed up like tribal dancers in their eagle feathers and nicely painted buckskin.
For Coyote, after all, let’s admit it, was just a nutso wild dog.
And yet, in his own way, over the millennia, as tales about him built and built, Coyote did indeed accrue holy relevance, just as any family dog might, given enough time with a given family or neighborhood.
Southwestern tribes could recall tales of all kinds about Coyote, some of them morally uplifting, others thoroughly revolting, many hilarious, and a few even all of those at once.
Coyote, it is said, grew tired, once upon a time, of his bothersomely long schlong. So he pulled it up his chest and threw it over his left shoulder, pulled it along his back and down through his legs and tied it there in place to keep it from getting in the way.
The story came off better in the original, however, where it was told in lengthier and more convincing detail, and with the right kind of southwestern tribal storytelling tone. Sammy knew it from a book about Coyote his anthropologist father had given him when he was a kid.
A milder version of this funny if not very
uplifting tale could be found in the anthropologist Paul
Radin’s The Trickster,[5]
a small book first published in 1956 with an afterword by the
sage of the century, C. G. Jung. And that commentary by Jung,
it is important to note, became almost more famous than the
book it commented upon. Carl
Jung’s thoughts on Radin’s Trickster could be
found in The Collected
Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part I), The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious, under the title, “On the
Psychology of the Trickster-Figure” [6];
it was an important part of Jung’s lifelong oeuvre and
scholarship; BECAUSE, the universal ‘Trickster-figure’, of
which ‘Coyote’ was just one example, constituted one of the
God-given animal-human ‘archetypes’ of the Homo sapiens
spirit, a global fixture of man’s brain and psychology, the
‘collective unconscious’ of the human race; as could be
proven, Jung said, by studying in depth the psychology of
virtually any tribe or people on the planet, as revealed in
their dreams, art, and/or mythology. And the ‘archetypes’, and
the ‘collective unconscious’ from which they sprang, were
Jung’s great discoveries, his special unforgettable
contribution to the science of Homo sapiens psychology.
In other words, every civilization and culture in time and
space had its own version of 'Coyote', and planet earth's
trickster in 1998 was mj lorenzo. That's what Sammy and his
editor-helpers were saying, IN EFFECT.
Sammy was an expert in this kind of knowledge too, because he was not only a tribal shaman; and an anthropologist like his father; he was also a Jungian psychoanalyst officially trained and certified as such by the Jungian hierarchy of Denver, Boulder and Santa Fe (which in turn was certified by an even higher body of Jungian notables, just as those eminences were authorized by even grander ones from lofty Zürich in Switzerland).
Mad ‘trickster’ critters like Coyote, as Radin’s little book of Native American tales verified,[7] showed yet another noteworthy trait: Coyote-types were in the habit of doing nasty things to their best friends, much like mj lorenzo on his first trip to Colombia, as recorded in the journal we are here introducing, where the ‘best friend’ was Sammy; who could claim altogether too much first-hand experience in this area as well, therefore.
“Would you want this coyote on your team?”
asked critics
of mj lorenzo
in a
letter to National
Geographic
after Sammy's
article on the Dr. appeared in that magazine
with this photo
from his first trip to Colombia
If ever Coyote did accomplish something apparently noble or
morally admirable, it was, likely as not, by dumb bumbling
mistake, or with indifference, not by intention.
And yet Coyote saved the life of his tribe on more than one occasion, largely, ‘like mj’, as Sammy claimed, ‘by his bumbling luck and dumb-fuck instinct, not by any brilliantly thought out intent’.[8]
It was a similar kind of understanding of mj lorenzo that allowed Sammy to put up with mj over the years: he saw a good bit of sacred Coyote in his ‘sometimes impossible’ friend.
In 1998, however, when Hooked was first published (along with its introduction compiled by Sammy and his committee of experts), some of Dr. Lorenzo’s most ardent following, although they respected Mr. Martinez highly, could not escape feeling that such a ‘Coyote’ interpretation of their hero was ‘repulsive and detestable’; sort of the way many Catholics in Mexico might react to anything less than all-out highfalutin reverence for their matron saint, the ‘Virgin of Guadalupe’, or the way Fundamentalist Christians always reacted to any criticism of their ‘Lord’. How could you ‘not adore’ any spirit such as mj lorenzo’s, so ‘perfect and pure’, they asked, so far above YOUR inept humanity? It made no sense to them, and they likened it to ‘criticizing the weather’ (although they were criticized in turn for this defense, since all too much of the ‘weather’, as it was argued, was ‘man-made, not God-made’).
The incomparable mj lorenzo never lacked for staunch defenders, certainly. Yet; and nevertheless; and at the very same darn time: many of the most ardent aficionados of mj lorenzo lore, and sometimes the very same ones who defended him to highest heaven in public, were truly discomfited in private by his creative shenanigans, and found it difficult to stifle their own critical objections to their ‘hero’ mj, no matter how obsessed they remained by his life and his writing and art, or how much they revered and loved him.
Throughout the course of their long association with him, more or less constantly, many of Dr. Lorenzo’s best pundit devotees would complain in weekend pundit conferences or in internet pundit chat rooms that their hero had ‘disappointed’ them ‘once again’. One time they thought he had seemed to suggest that he was sexually impotent![9] This embarrassed and shamed them! – and for several years they could not decide how to defend in public their admiration for him and his writing, and his other seemingly noble endeavors. On another occasion, even before Hooked on Cocaland was published in 1998, they got the impression he might have been outing himself as bisexual! at the very least! maybe even all the way homosexual!!! This too was a burden for some of his pundit following to bear, or bare, in public (more in some homophobic quarters than in others, of course).
And then, worse yet, in his book Hooked on Cocaland mj lorenzo even appeared to have lost his faith, at times, in humanity’s capacity to preserve and improve itself: this despite the fact that he had inspired his pundit followers by saying he was born on the planet to teach them the tricks that would save them and save all of humanity from mass self-destruction. And they had been walking around the planet since, believing they were the special chosen of a great savior of humanity. But suddenly there seemed to be a fundamental self-contradiction in their hero, they complained. It made it harder yet to defend him in public (maybe almost "impossible!").
And finally, with the same book, Hooked on Cocaland, many of his pundit-devotees groaned with exasperation that mj lorenzo was now revealed as a psychotically depressed cocaine addict who could not raise his children properly!!!!!!!!!......
(But the great Sigmund Freud was addicted to cocaine for a while; and the great romantic composer Robert Schumann, too, became psychotically depressed, Sammy answered them; and worse yet, Schumann never recovered! At least Dr. Lorenzo’s devotees ought to be thankful that their hero had recovered!) (Especially since Sammy had been a prime agent of the recovery!!)
Literally hundreds of thankless complaints of a revealing variety had been lodged against the Dr. over many decades, in fact, just as any regular community in any country on planet earth might complain about a wild dog loose in the neighborhood comporting unconscionably, causing havoc month after month, and even year after year. As recently as the spring of 2014, for instance, the complaint was lodged by stately, dignified, and highly educated, globally renowned Calvinist ministers during a Bible Conference in St. Louis, in the presence of a live megachurch audience of thousands, that during his lifetime – so far – mj lorenzo, by his own admission in his newsletter, The Chockawhoppin Post, had learned and practiced at least twenty-three different religions and suffered at least nineteen different mental disorders, many of each category more than once, and several to the intensity of psychosis. The Dr. was indignant, appealed to a benefactor for money, and defended himself against such ‘scurrilous defamation’ in an expensive full-page REPUDIATION in the Sunday New York Times, clarifying that it was 19 and 23, not 23 and 19: 19 religions and 23 mental disorders and counting (to which, recently, the public had been adding 'senile dementia'); and for these 19 and 23, or 24, he was applauded by Rolling Stone and High Times (and every whirling dervish in Paradise, as the Seattle Sunday Times added; and a Buenos Aires paper agreed). High Times declared on its cover that what he had (‘almost certainly’) meant to reveal by this very public rebuttal in The New York Times, was that each religion he had tried was actually its own kind of crazy mental disorder, and that each crazy mental disorder he had suffered had actually been its own kind of religion. And yet, also, at about the same time, as recently as October of 2014, after a four-month stay with his Christian Fundamentalist 91-year-old Uncle Eddie, the Dr. scandalized to high heaven a very important part of his liberal core following, when he said to Bill O’Reilly on Fox Cable News – with a perfectly sincere (and innocent!) straight face – that he had discovered, with the help of his Christian Fundamentalist uncle and cousins, an easy way to defend intellectually the Fundamentalists’ belief in the existence of God, and in the virgin-born and resurrected Jesus the Messiah, and also in a six-day creation, AND EVEN IN A SIX-THOUSAND-YEAR TIME SPAN FROM BIG-BANG CREATION TO THE PRESENT. And he threw in for free, the confession that he also ‘really’ liked their idea, derived from their careful reading of Scripture in toto, that an individual woman or man, or even a whole group, could be ‘elected’ by God for a special purpose.[10] And while all of this was transpiring, of course, another class of critics complained that by changing his religion ‘even once’, mj lorenzo had proved he did not believe in anything.
Enough complaints like these were lodged, that at one Midwestern campus library they filled two hilarious and ever-growing student-maintained catalogues; which were kept and checked out so frequently as a joke – each complaint uniquely and rollickingly different from the rest – that in September 2012 the whole two-volume work had to be placed permanently in Reference Only; meaning it could not leave the library, and had to be hauled no further than a remote corner inside the library, maybe to a glassed-in booth, where several people could laugh out loud at once, and not disturb the quiet of the library. A long waiting list for access had to be endured. Prime booking times were Friday and Saturday nights. Some groups secreted beer into the library to make a better party of the experience. And there was talk of mass-producing the big two-volume work and publishing it mainstream, so that other campuses could get in on the joke; or of putting it online for universal consumption.
Often too, such complaints would be
referred by e-mail, or
Dr. Sammy Martinez
(
– for Sammy had been the chief go-between,
ever since 1976, when he and the early Remaking pundits had
stumbled upon each other at the
Everyone could communicate better with Sammy than with Dr. ‘mj’ Lorenzo, it seemed, everybody in the world almost, starting with mj’s parents, for as long as they lived.
And yet – just think – it was never Sammy that any of these people wished they could canonize, if only it were possible somehow: it was never anyone but mj lorenzo!
Who could explain this mind-boggling contradiction?
When Sammy attempted to do so, he used a metaphor: mj lorenzo, he said, ‘brought fire to the tribe’, just as Prometheus had brought fire to the Greeks from heaven. Mj, he said, ‘bequeathed’ humanity some essential tools for understanding its plight at the turn of the 3rd millennium A.D. (and C.E.), tools and tricks for alleviating the suffering which the mass social-psychiatric disorder of ‘rampant and severe hyperpolarization of humanity into two virulently opposed ideological and geopolitical camps’ had brought upon the human race. Dr. Lorenzo and his creative work, said Sammy Martinez, offered a speculum mentis,[11] a mirror in which they could see all of this in themselves, improve their self-understanding, and begin to solve the world’s problems.
Whereas Sammy Martinez, brilliant in his own right, as everyone acknowledged, devoted himself merely to raising humanity’s understanding of him, the man himself: mj.
And so, when they complained about this very difficult but also revered man, mj lorenzo, Sammy would say to them: “Well?! What did you expect?”
WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?????!!
Mj lorenzo – though he had looked for all the world, during his boyhood and teenage years, like a regular red-blooded American (since he was raised strictly Calvinist, i.e., very conservative U.S. American Bible-based Protestant) by two parents who loved him very much and knew that he loved them very much – after spending eighteen years wagging his tail, so to speak, for truly ultra-Christian parents, eighteen years steeped in Biblical lore and truth – suddenly, one day, at the critically formative age of eighteen, shocked his parents by becoming a ‘Jungian’, meaning a follower of the teaching of the psychiatrist-sage, Carl Gustav Jung; who, though in late life he called himself a ‘left-wing Protestant’,[12] had perhaps left Christianity in the dust, in some ways, long before; for Jung actually had devoted his whole life to studying (from the point of view of psychology) not only Roman Catholic and other forms of Christianity, but almost all of the world’s religions and philosophies as well, and with great respect too, almost every last one of the weltanschauungen (various and different world views) which homo sapiens history had vomited up from the dark, inchoate subterranean layers of the human ‘unconscious’ psyche,[13] i.e., from the human dream world. And Jung had especially studied with great respect the gods, goddesses, culture heroes, and even trickster figures (like Coyote) of those worldviews and religions. Carl Jung had devoted his entire life to attempting to distill from the welter of human history a scientifically sound formulation of the essence of what it meant to be human, ‘psychologically’ speaking.
Then,
eight years after discovering the writings of Carl Jung at 18,
mj lorenzo, now 26 coyote years old, while in his last year of
medical school at Penn (the University of Pennsylvania),
applied for and won grant money from Philadelphia’s College of
Physicians and Surgeons to travel to Europe and study at the
C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland; and while
there, underwent a brief psychoanalysis by Jung’s disciple and
protégé, Marie Louise von Franz, whose special
interest lay in psychoanalyzing – according to Jungian
principles – the fairy tales and culture heroes of all the
world’s peoples, and even the fairy tales of the various
individuals in her own analytic practice; and of people in her
own life experience; for, as she observed wisely:
sometimes fairy tales or culture heroes could and did pop up
even among the people one psychoanalyzed or knew
personally. Who
could guess when it might happen? Any day it could happen.
(See Bibliography under
von Franz.)
Maybe even Carl Jung or mj lorenzo, in other words, could be understood to have been: ‘culture heroes’; or to have ‘lived a fairy tale’.
What could you have expected from such an mj lorenzo, therefore? Humdrum everyday ‘sanity’???
Meanwhile,
on
top of all of this un-Calvin-like and un-good-preacher’s-son
behavior, during his mid-20s mj met and fell in love with an
Indian princess, the daughter of a maharaja, or prince-king in
a certain region of the Indian subcontinent; whereupon, to
understand this princess from India, and his feelings for her,
he thought it smart to study her people and culture and
religion. And a little
later, at 27, in 1970, he ended up somehow[14]
living for many months with a Native American tribal shaman in
far northern
“I could go on and on from there,” Sammy would say when attacked regarding mj lorenzo’s ‘saintliness’ or lack of it. “But how much more would you need to know in order to grasp, finally, that if ever Dr. Lorenzo had or might become ‘saintly’ one day, in any way, it could never end up being in a way we would expect of a Christian saint.”
And so, though anticipating endless overflowing truckloads of new complaints from certain of the hero’s devoted pundits and others (and especially his 'Sunday School pundits'), it was precisely because the editors of Hooked on Cocaland had this approach to mj lorenzo in mind, that in 1998 they decided they might present his first Colombian trip journal to the world JUST AS HE HAD WRITTEN IT, with its obnoxious and shocking human-coyote behaviors and thinking and all.
And so they composed a written introduction to the diary along all of the lines of argument described so far.
But before offering such an explanatory introduction to mj’s reading public, especially his most devoted ‘pundit’ following, the editors thought it best to run their proposed introduction by the diary’s author as well.
In this 1998 ‘Introduction’ which the
editorial staff planned to show Dr. Lorenzo for his approval,
they also explained that the Dr., just before his first trip
to Colombia, had been suffering ‘the worst depression of his
life’, one which had lasted ‘at least two years, roughly
1992-94’, a dog of a depressed-mood downer which he had at
first attempted to self-treat by shooting cocaine, with
disastrous results. Two
miserable years of severe depression later, just as the
present trip to
In the same way, more or less, that we today, in the Western world, still learn from the holy and wholly spectacular psalms of the shepherd-king David, as well as from his sometimes irreverent loves and life; or from the insane jealousies, wars and many strange loves of Achilles or Odysseus; all three of whom, though great culture heroes to their people and, after that, to Western civilization too, for thousands of years, have fallen short, as far as is known, of being nominated for Christian church canonization.
And this last idea was included in the proposed introduction to Hooked on Cocaland as well.
And so, when Sammy and his editors showed the Dr. their proposed introduction to his journal, he – maybe unwittingly – added some impetus to their argument for presenting his journal ‘as it was’.
One weekend in 1998 he drove down from Denver to northern New Mexico on Sammy’s invitation, met with them in San Juan, in Sammy’s ‘neck-breaking’ living room (as mj always called it, because of its low, 500-year-old ceiling), and barked a few words after having just read rapidly through their proposed introduction.
“Well. Let me think here. ‘Nasty, flawed and unsaintly’???.... Though ‘possibly heroic saint’???!!”
One or two of Sammy’s eminent editors nodded, while Sammy sat expressionless.
“Even some famous Christian saints,” said the Dr., “were ‘naturally animal-human’ in certain ways. ‘Saint’ Augustine, for one, according to his autobiographical book, Confessions, was a wild youth. He tried to channel his rampant teenage sex drive, but remained a randy son of a gun well after becoming a Christian, all the way until the day he decided to try asking and allowing God to take his sexual urges away; only to discover to his relief that such an approach actually worked; for him.” And, added the Dr., as for Augustine possibly being ‘gay’, or bi, or something close, if you studied his Confessions carefully, it was hard to come away without the impression that he never again loved any other human being in his life, male or female, family or friend, with as much gnawing fervor as he had loved his best friend during their teen years together, or as he continued to love him up until the day that the friend died so young of a mean illness, or as he probably even loved him thusly long beyond that day, even after the friend was dead and physically gone many years, and Augustine was still remembering him and writing about him intensely fondly in his ‘Confessions’.
The Dr. never addressed head-on the delicate question of ‘nasty’ saints that day in Sammy’s living room, and no one pressed him, of course, because they had just wanted an okay for their introduction.
And they had gotten it, they felt.
They were not going to kick a sleeping coyote to get some extra pearl about ‘nasty saints’.
“But,” asked a high school kid in Sammy’s after-school reading club, soon after the journal was published as Hooked on Cocaland in 1998 and studied there: “I don’t understand. Mj taught ‘personal energy balance’ in The Remaking. He learned a meditation from Joey’s guru which gave him ‘peace’, and he praised it in Mrs. Nixon’s Legs. In the diary he doesn’t mention The Remaking, or Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, or the psychological lessons he said in those books that he had learned. And – ....”
The kid lowered his voice, making it hard for the other fifteen students to hear him. “My Dad is upset you have us ‘reading stuff by homosexuals about homosexuals’, and I don’t know what to tell him. I’m kind of pissed too. What’s this about Dr. Lorenzo kissing Chalo ‘TO HELP HIM SURVIVE’, my Dad wants to know, and me too. Why should we read this crap?”
“I’ve been trying to get this across to you guys,” said Sammy, looking at a few other students, “all of you, that in his earlier works Dr. Lorenzo may have looked a little more normal and respectable, and even heroic, especially if you didn’t pry very deeply into a certain few of his ultimate meanings; but as he has gotten older and more brazen, as happens to many in this world, some of his more recent works have provoked virulent anti-mj-lorenzo reactions like your father’s: mj can really try the patience of anyone with very strict moral standards or moral prejudices, like the Christian Fundamentalist values of your father and his – and your – Indian Bible Church people. Many people for years have wondered if mj was gay, but he always has denied it.”
“Gay or not, mj was encouraging Chalo to prostitute himself to survive,” said the kid.
“I think if Dr. Lorenzo were here, he would
say that our simplified U. S. American view of right and wrong
does not cut it in other countries, especially when people in
those countries are poor, hungry, thirsty and desperate, and
moreover, live by a set of values completely different from
ours. He’d say, as
he always has said, year in and year out, that most other
cultures do not live by the same strict Calvinist Biblical
moral standards our ancestors who created this country did. Dr. Lorenzo would tell you
he couldn’t make Chalo a flesh-restraining Augustinian
Calvinist in five minutes, so he trusted his mj lorenzo
instincts and winged it with Chalo in
“But were any of the Christian saints ‘nasty’ like the Dr. in Hooked on Cocaland?” the kid asked.
Sammy sent this question to Dr. Lorenzo by
email and received a lengthy, caring, thought-out response
typical of those he usually sent Sammy’s high-schoolers,
accompanied by a digital email photo of a 1460-80 painting of
St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius
painting by Piero della Francesca
1460-80
I am not an expert on the lives of Christian saints. Much of what we think we know about them is derived from so-called ‘tradition’. It borders on legend, and cannot be verified by any historically reliable documents. But Augustine’s life was well documented in amazing detail during his lifetime, first by him, and then by the celibate monks of the ‘Augustinian’ order he established. The world’s books and treatises on his life and thinking would fill ten thousand large libraries at the very least, and much of the content would be historiographically verifiable, if only someone knew how to sort through it with that in mind.
I tried to do this in the early nineties and discovered to my surprise and comfort that, according to pretty reliable sources, the great saint could get very nasty at times, as Hooked on Cocaland mentions. He was well known, for instance, for acting meanly toward other clerics on the issue of celibacy. Up until Augustine’s day (354-430 A.D.) the priests of early Roman Christendom had married, based partly on tradition among the Jews, and partly on the Apostle Paul’s brief position statement in one of his letters to early churches and preachers that ‘it is better to marry than to burn’. But Augustine did not agree with Paul and some of the other ‘early church fathers’ on this. Why?
Augustine’s life
spanned the years during which the
Part of his game plan
for achieving this goal of universal priestly celibacy in the
church was to publicly embarrass prelates who had shown the
nerve to openly proclaim that they enjoyed sex as a healthy
and normal thing. A
comrade churchman in southern
So, yes, apparently certain Christian ‘saints’ were quite human and even ‘nasty’ at times, even though the church might like us to believe that they were ‘without blemish’, ‘beyond reproach’, and were therefore some variety of ‘super-human’, like 99.9% ‘pure self-sacrificing spirit’, and only 0.1% ‘selfish flesh’ at the very most.
“But,” asked the same high school student, after Sammy had read aloud this reply of the Dr.’s to the after-school reading club the following month, and while he was handing out copies of it, “Dr. Lorenzo was so nasty to you. That’s what bothered me when I read Hooked on Cocaland. Didn’t it bother you at the time?”
“A little,” Sammy said. “But then I would remember
that he was not just depressed but psychotically
depressed, which means depressed to the point of clinical,
hospitalizable, CRAZINESS. PSYCHOSIS. I’d known him for 23 years
by 1994, and I’d never seen him get so mean and disrespectful
before, least of all with me. So I tried to keep the
meanness in perspective. And
anyway, right after he came home from
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get it in writing?”
“It’s at the end of the diary you said you read, his 1998 Hooked on Cocaland.”
“Right.”
“But the Dr.’s critics are saying I made it up and put it there to make him ‘look better than he is’.”
“You should get a written apology with a notarized signature. Hooked on Cocaland could damage your reputation as a respectable, caring teacher, because it makes you look like a fool. Excuse me. That’s what my Dad says.”
“But I had it coming!” said Sammy. “I was a
fool. I’d made the
mistake, just before this first trip of his to
“Damn straight,” said a few who knew the stories of Coyote; since most of Sammy’s students, like Sammy, were at least partly of Southwest Native American stock; and also knew some wily coyotes in the physical animal sense; because throughout the western states coyotes were back yard pet-eating scavengers and on certain lucky days could be studied for long stretches from inside a glass window of a house which a coyote could not see through from outside, due to light reflection.
Any more than mj lorenzo, at certain vulnerable times in his life, could realize how intensely, or why, Sammy and his students – and millions of others – were studying him, mj.
Through the dark glass of his creative artifacts and life, forever distorted by reflections of every kind.
Due to whatever motivation, each and every one of those multi-millions.[15]
B. C. Duvall
Mexico
Christmas, 2016
[1] Coyote drawing borrowed from Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, digital reference for personal computer; and then slightly amended (with halo).
[2] Some of the
Dr.’s indefatigable critics suggested in a January 1999
published letter to TIME magazine that perhaps his
editorial staff preferred the term ‘creative artifacts’
to 'collective works' because they doubted their hero’s
demonstrations of self-expression met traditional
standards of true
art; or of genuine
scholarship; either one; and probably also,
suggested they, because Dr. Lorenzo always left his
‘creative artifacts’ in such a raw and unstomachable
state, for someone else, or some-thing else, to
pick up, clean up, and/or recycle to possible better
use...... ‘Like
coyote poop in Satan’s garden’! as
[3] The tendency to deify or at least canonize their hero, mj, was particularly strong among such groups as the ‘culture hero’ pundits and the ‘Sunday School’ pundits.
[4] After the 1998 publication of Hooked on Cocaland, the Dr. was interviewed on television by Charlie Rose, who asked with penetrating smiling eyes how Dr. Lorenzo felt about these thoughts on canonization and sanctification as expressed in the ‘Introduction’ to his new book. The Dr. said, apparently in all seriousness, that he thought that his mother had probably understood the difference between canonization and sanctification a little better than Sammy had. For, as she had finally informed him when he was about 45, she had ‘dedicated’ him ‘to the Lord’ the day he was born, holding him in her arms with her eyes closed and praying in her white-sheeted hospital bed, right in the noisy Obstetrics ward in Methodist Hospital on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, thereby ‘sanctifying’ him ‘in the wider sense’. Later, around the age of 4 or 5, as his mother knew too, he had knelt at his bedside in Florence, led there by his Calvinist-Methodist preacher father, who had knelt down with him, and he had given his heart to Jesus asking for and receiving salvation (this was right after a ‘mean’ whipping for wandering into a neighbor’s yard when told not to do so). And after that, as the Dr. thought his mother probably recognized, the ‘Holy Spirit’ had ‘descended invisibly and sanctified’ him ‘in a more specific sense’, creating in him a conviction of the Spirit’s presence more or less constant lifelong, and a bit more than usual from time to time ‘when the inimitable mj lorenzo in any of his nefarious darker forms didn’t get in the way’. But ‘as for canonization’, said the Dr., as Sammy should have known, being a super-highly educated regular attendee at mass and member of one of the oldest Christian congregations in what is now the USA, the cute little brick Franciscan Catholic church in San Juan Pueblo, with its little old-fashioned creaking wooden choir loft up at the ceiling in the back, behind and above the congregation, so that it seemed like invisible cloud-shrouded heavenly angels and cherubs were very close indeed, and singing down on the tribe: as for canonization, that was ‘up to the Pope and the Curia’, and they would never pick a Methodist preacher’s son, unless he had converted to Catholicism, which he had not (but would, as soon as they promised him sainthood in writing with papal seal; but on second thought, not even then; look at what their promise did to Hus, they promised him 'safe passage' then burned him at the stake!).
[5] In this
shorter version of the tale the trickster’s ridiculously
large and adventure-seeking sexual apparatus was such a
tremendous bother to its owner that it was finally
rolled up and stuffed into a box which he placed on his
back. Paul Radin,
The Trickster,
(New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 18f. For more tales
of Coyote-Trickster’s poorly-controlled-penis problems
see (1) John Bierhorst, The Red Swan: Myths and Tales of the American
Indians (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1976), p. 217, “Old-Man-Coyote and the Strawberry”; (2)
p. 223, “Coyote and Wren” (same book); (3) p. 209, “The
Buffalo Wife” (same book); (4) Radin, op. cit., p.
19, tale #16; (5) Ekkehart Malotki and Michael
Lomatuway’ma, Hopi
Coyote Tales Istutuwutsi (Lincoln, Nebraska: Univ.
Of
[6] C. G. Jung, On the Psychology
of the Trickster-Figure, in The Collected
Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part I, The Archetypes and
the Collective Unconscious, Princeton:
[7] The
‘trickster-figure’ assumed varied animal form in various
tribes’ story-cycles. In
Radin’s book, ‘Trickster’ is not a ‘Coyote’ but a
‘Hare’, in the trickster story-cycle told by the
Winnebago of Wisconsin; and he is a ‘Raven’ in the
Tlingit tribe’s trickster myth cycle (coastal
[8] Coyote saving the tribe ‘like mj’??? By 2014 mj lorenzo, despite all coyote-like ‘craziness’, was as well-known and oft-consulted for wisdom worldwide, as ‘Coyote’ was amongst the southwestern tribes. In the fall of 2014, for example, Rachel Maddow reported on her MSNBC news program that certain senators of Venezuela, Brazil, Italy and the USA, respectively, had separately made a concerted study of mj lorenzo’s major philosophical work, The Remaking, and come away with not just ‘inspiration’ for getting ‘left’ and ‘right’ to work together in their respective countries, but even specific ‘tricks’ that actually worked for accomplishing that seemingly impossible task. By Thanksgiving of 2014, the prospective U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, confessed to Rachel in a video interview that he was studying The Remaking, and particularly the chapter ‘Seventh Attempt’ (the moment in mj’s life when he had come closest to conscious suicide), for a comprehension of how the USA ‘right’ might find a way to make room for the USA ‘left’ in congressional decision-making. All over the world, by late 2014, a number of surviving ‘early Remaking pundits’, some of Dr. Lorenzo’s most scholarly followers from the very earliest days of mj lorenzo devotion in the early 1970s, were reporting, ‘almost daily’, examples of the use of mj lorenzo ‘tricks’ and ‘discoveries’ to settle disputes of every size and type all over the world, from local community conflicts, to ‘Apex’ meetings among the heads of state of Russia, China and the USA.
[9] Allusions to ‘impotence’ (of some kind) were several in mj lorenzo’s original The Remaking, especially in the chapter entitled ‘Sixth Attempt’. The impact of this discovery upon mj’s pundit following is described in a look at mj lorenzo’s first book, The Remaking, subsections 210-217, at the present website.
[10] It made
‘perfect sense’ to him, Dr. Lorenzo said, – after being
scared home out of Mexico in 2013 by a head-chopping
criminal cartel that was a law unto itself, only to
learn just a year later that a despotic Islamic
head-chopping criminal ‘caliphate’ wanted to take over
his home country, the USA, and operate likewise, as a
law unto itself, – that God, ‘whom (almost) everyone had
(almost) always agreed was by definition
omnipotent’, i.e., a law unto himself, could
have created creation in 6 days, 6000 years ago, and
‘MADE IT LOOK TO HUMANS AS IF (because he was,
after all, ominpotent)
HE HAD CREATED IT GRADUALLY’, item by item, over
the length of 14 billion years, the length of time most
scientists thought it had taken since the ‘Big Bang’ to
reach the present state of affairs. Furthermore, since
God was ‘by
definition omnipotent’, it was ‘only logical’,
after all, that since he was a law unto himself (rather
like a despotic, seemingly unstoppable cartel or
caliphate), he could create creation, including us,
according to certain laws and rules that he invented,
and then intervene in history with ‘miracles’ that
operated by a second set of rules that he also invented. Since he was ‘by definition
omnipotent’ it was ‘only logical that he was
perfectly capable of making both sets of laws
co-function’, i.e., operate simultaneously and without
conflict or contradiction.
And when O’Reilly asked the Dr. how anyone could
justify a belief in the existence of an omnipotent
creator-God in a scientific age, the Dr. said, simply,
that no scientist had ever explained adequately where
the first known ‘black hole’ and its sudden ‘Big Bang’
had come from. He
confessed it made more 'common' sense to him to think
that someBODY (like an omnipotent God or person-like
supernatural force) was behind the existence of
everything, than to think that some mere cold and
impersonal THING (like the first black hole, or the
matter and energy therein implied) was behind the
existence of everything.
And anyway, as he added, he liked the idea better. It comforted him. It did his heart
good. It was
‘more personal and intimate’ having someONE there than
just someTHING. ‘There’s
more human logic in the human heart than in cold
science’, he said later to The New York Times,
when asked about these comments. “Somebody, or better
still, we ourselves,” he said, “must somehow explain
how we can pray to God and feel that someone is
listening and responding; because, many billions of
individual human beings, including even self-designated
atheists, have had that same experience.
Carl Gustav Jung, the most stellar scientist to study
Homo sapiens psychology to date, explained it very much
to my satisfaction,” the Dr. said and cited the chapter
entitled ‘Recognition of the Psyche’ in Jolande Jacobi’s
C. G. Jung
Psychological Reflections: A New Anthology of His
Writings 1905-1961.
“Jung showed,” said the Dr., “that human
psychology virtually
requires a belief in a Higher Power in the
same way that the nature of plants virtually requires
that they produce flowers.
‘There is no difference in principle,” Jung said,
‘between organic and psychic formations. As a plant produces
its flowers, so the psyche creates its symbols
[including the mental picture of an omnipotent personal
God]’.” (This
last Jung quotation is from Jolande Jacobi’s Jung
anthology, pg. 3. See
Bibliography.) In other words, part
of our natural human biological makeup is: that just as
plants automatically produce flowers, we humans
automatically produce such images in our minds and
hearts as: God, gods, holy processes, culture heroes and
heroines, trickster figures, the sacred Self, goddess
figures, healing objects, magical healing personages,
sacred sky-father and earth-mother figures, sacred
immortal boy babies, evil shadow persons, Edenic gardens
of paradise, sacred protectors, and on and on, through
all of Jung's 'archetypes of the collective
unconscious'.
For more on the subject of the Dr.'s talking himself back into possibly believing all of the unbelievable beliefs of Fundamentalist and Evangelical neo- or quasi-Calvinist Christianity, late in life, see, at the present website: Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘re-finding his faith’ and the ‘logical and scientific’ steps he took to get there at age 71.
[12] See the first few pages of Aniela Jaffe (ed.), C. G. JUNG: Word and Image, “Prologue,” where Jung’s core character is introduced (especially pp. 6-7).
[13] It should be
noted that Jung, whether writing in German (as he
usually did) or translated into English, always used and
meant the Greek word psyche in its
original ancient-Greek-language sense: personality,
self, life-force, soul, spirit; with the result that his
PSYCH-ology
was
very different from – far more ‘elevated’ and
‘spiritual’ than – Freud’s, for whom PSYCH-ology was the
study of the ‘mind’ or personality only; or, defined a
bit more carefully, in a Freudian sense, e.g., as Merriam-Webster’s
Unabridged Dictionary defines ‘psyche’ in the
Freudian sense: “the totality of the id, ego, and
superego including both conscious and unconscious
components.” Jung
never could content himself with such a curtailed
understanding of human psychology as Freud’s. That is why Jungians
such as Sammy Martinez and mj lorenzo to this day, in
2017, have always taken seriously such enlightening
psychological phenomena as culture heroes (including
Moses, Christ, Buddha, etc.) and trickster figures like
Coyote; while Freudians, if there are any such animals
of significance left in 2017, still confine themselves
to the prosaic ‘id, ego and superego’; and ‘oral, anal
and phallic’.
[15] The
conversation with the questioning 'kid' continued that
day after Sammy’s high school reading club discussed Dr.
Lorenzo’s Hooked
on Cocaland, when other students left and the
student, a freshman new to Sammy’s group , lingered. Sammy said, “Did you
know that Dr. Lorenzo always has seen me as Samuel in
the Bible?” “What
do you mean?” the freshman asked. See Appendix D, “Afterthought 2,"
“Sammy on Sammy as Samuel,” for the discussion that
followed.
a dusty and damaged old photo of mj
lorenzo from his parents' attic
(salvaged by
his sister after both their parents died)
shows him as
a boyish-looking 21 when he graduated Wrigley College
in 1964
so it must
have been an even more innocent and impressionable
college freshman
who
discovered, read, and immediately endorsed
wholeheartedly Carl Gustav Jung
at just 18
