Hooked on Cocaland: saturday 10/15/94

[1] Guide for the Perplexed was published around AD 1190 in Cairo, Egypt, originally written in Arabic by a devout Jew. Moses Maimonides was a medical physician, and also a theologian, philosopher and sage: in short, along with Rashi one of the towering Jewish scholars of the Middle Ages. Dr. Lorenzo was not normally someone to whom the name of an unknown ancient sage came in a dream. But, to his amazement, he dreamt about Maimonides once during his 50s, not sure where he had heard of him, if ever, maybe only briefly in a Philosophy course or textbook while at Wrigley College, and if that, none of it remembered consciously. Because of the dream’s uncommonly shocking strangeness, straight from the mj lorenzo (or ‘collective’) unconscious, especially its uncannily specific naming of a medieval mystic philosopher and doctor he knew virtually nothing about, he read up on Maimonides in encyclopedias and then took the dream to a Jungian friend of his for interpretation. From time to time in subsequent years Dr. Lorenzo found Moses Maimonides to be a reliable source of wisdom on a variety of subjects, including Biblical scripture, the Jewish Talmud, and certain frank exotic medical intricacies of male sexuality, such as the partial numbing effect upon sexual appetite lifelong caused by infant male circumcision, as Maimonides claimed. Additionally, studying Maimonides’ dramatic biography offered a colorful and enlightening window into Old World life in the Middle Ages.

The present quotation illustrates the tendency of almost all religious mystics to equate physical and/or spiritual (Platonic) love of the beloved to spiritual love of God, and to blur the boundaries between the two, letting each kind of love teach of the other. Such a tendency is found among mystics of all faiths, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim (e.g., Sufism and the Persian mystic poet, Rumi), etc. It is not surprising, therefore, that Christians and Jews of a wide variety tend to agree that the Song of Solomon (in the Bible), though ostensibly a sensuous love conversation between a King and his bride, is to be read and understood as a parallel of the kind of deep spiritual love that is possible between God and human. Maimonides, given his tendency toward the mystical, was clearly a member of this school of thought, as this quotation from his ‘Guide for the Perplexed’ reveals. Many students of mysticism consider Augustine, as well, to have been a kind of mystic, as suggested by the opening to his Confessions (“Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.”), and by many other passages from his writings. And Carl Jung grew up in a family imbued with knowledge of mysticism’s esoterica: one important male member of his family had made a scholarly study of an Arabic version of the Song of Solomon. All of which may help explain why mj lorenzo, increasingly over his lifetime, ‘fell in with this bunch of lovesick fried-brain mystics’, as High Times put it in their 1998 review of his just published Hooked on Cocaland. The Maimonides quote here was found by the Dr. in an article entitled “From Guide for the Perplexed,” in Encarta, a digital encyclopedia for computer. Microsoft Encarta Premium 2006, version 15.0.0.0603 (Redmond, Washington: Microsoft Corporation, 1993-2005). The selection of the Maimonides quote and its placement here were mj lorenzo's idea; and he has approved this footnote (as well as every other aspect of this work, and of this B.C.Duvall website).

[2] ‘Carnival’ in Latin American countries is the equivalent of New Orleans’ ‘Mardi Gras’, occurring on ‘fat Tuesday’, the last day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of ‘Lent’, the traditional church season of self-denial that leads up to, and prepares one for grasping the significance of, Easter. In Colombia the principal ‘Carnaval’ celebration occurs in Barranquilla each year.

[3] no tengo dinero = I don’t have money.

[4] Augustine’s views on nocturnal emission can be found in Confessions X: 30.

[5] Sandro Botticelli’s “The Primavera,” or ‘Spring’, painted in 1478.

[6] Dr. Lorenzo is quite correct here in the way he paints a picture of the West Goths in A.D. 410 when they sacked Rome, and this speaks well for his likely historical accurateness throughout. Eventually the Roman church unequivocally condemned the Arianism of the Christian Goths (Visigoths and Ostrogoths, both) and the Christianized Vandals, as ‘not orthodox’, and thus ‘a heresy’. In 410 AD, however, things were not so clearly spelled out, as yet. Christianity had been the Roman Empire state religion for almost a century by 410, and the Goths, living on the fringes of the empire, had been converted from barbarian polytheism to Christianity; but they did not yet understand Jesus to have been (a human incarnation of) God. They were not Trinitarian Christians, in other words. In AD 410 ‘orthodoxy’ was still a fuzzy proposition, even though the Nicene Creed of 325 AD and Theodosius’ Council in 381 had both made Trinitarianism part of the official Roman state religion; 'orthodoxy' was still ‘fuzzy’ in 410 because some prominent Christian bishops here and there still held to Arianism in 410, i.e., the belief that Jesus, though he was the Messiah, was not God; and this left the West Goths (‘Visigoths’) seeing themselves, in 410, when they sacked Rome, as still not too very rebuked or un-Christian or heretical in their way of looking at Jesus. In short, though they indeed sacked Rome, and were at that time called, and still are thought of as having been, 'barbarians', they nevertheless saw themselves in 410 as good mainstream Christians, as did many others. St. Augustine himself painted Alaric's West Goths in 410 as being less barbarically 'barbarian', and more 'mildly' atrocious, than other barbarians in their "soft-hearted"-ness toward their victims (see Toynbee [cf. Bibliography], p. 409, where he quotes Augustine on this matter, from the latter's City of God, Bk. 1, Ch. 7).

[7] ‘Cartagena de Indias’ – another name for the city of Cartagena in the country of Colombia: if the namesake city in Spain was simply ‘Cartagena’ (Woman from Carthage), the new Spanish city in the New World named after the original would have to have a slightly different name, and so would be nicknamed ‘Cartagena de Indias’, which meant ‘the city of Cartagena which can be found in the Indies’ or, ‘Cartagena of the indigenous people of the New World’ or, ‘the Indian Carthage-woman’. A related term, ‘La India Catalina’, or simply ‘La India’, literally ‘The Indian woman’, was a term which came to refer to the famous enormous big dark bronze statue of an entirely naked and divinely endowed (in the bosom) indigenous woman that the city erected in 1974, many centuries after its founding, to honor (and symbolize) the city of Cartagena and its history, its name, and original indigenous population, a statue Robbie never failed to point out to mj whenever they drove by it, out of his chest-swelling pride for his family’s city and its culture and history; except that, in the constant Cocaland confusion it seemed to mj lorenzo that Robbie referred to the statue as ‘Cartagena de Indias’, or ‘La India Cartagena’, though he may have said, or meant to say, ‘La India Catalina’. Who knew?

[8] The most popular new vallenato hit of the day, in October, 1994, was probably ‘Santo Cachón’, sung by Diomedes Diaz and his vallenato band.

[9] Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History (Abridgement of Vols. I-VI by D. C. Somervell), Oxford (New York: 1947). Toynbee was a philosopher of history who studied all known civilizations of the past and analyzed how each one of history’s known major civilizations had gone about succeeding or failing as a civilization; he then drew certain conclusions and described a few universal principles by which any civilization ticked, and might be preserved or destroyed at certain critical points in its history. According to Toynbee, for example, if a civilization such as the ‘Western’ or ‘American’ reached the point that mj lorenzo felt it had reached as of 1994 (including all of the negative things the Dr. said about it in this dairy), that particular civilization could still pull itself together and deal with the challenge, perhaps with the right leadership from a kind of ‘culture hero’ that Toynbee described, or by some other self-saving means. But Dr. Lorenzo, though he knew Toynbee’s thinking in this area, was too depressed at that moment, in 1994, to consider it worth remembering or mentioning in this diary, and therefore stressed the negative, repeatedly predicting that Western civilization would fall, as so many other civilizations had, and just like the Roman, the classic example. Later, once completely recovered from depression, his hope for Western (sometimes called ‘American’) civilization returned.

The student of mj lorenzo lore should recall that Hooked on Cocaland was perhaps the Dr.’s very most negative work, and as such was, and remains, quite atypical of his usually bright outlook and output; because, it was partly the result of a severe psychotic depression, i.e., a very, very down mood and a set of obsessive, repetitive thoughts that were pessimistic and self-defeating, quite a few of the ideas even delusional, meaning, in plain street Spanglish, ‘cra-zee loco’. He himself admitted this eventually and apologized to the public for Hooked on Cocaland during a late-night TV talk show on New Year’s Eve, 1999. His most dedicated critics, for the most part, accepted and advertized the apology, but his readership rejected it, chastising him in The Rolling Stone and elsewhere for putting himself down (by apologizing) ‘one more unacceptable time’, and for underestimating the value of his controversial art in its original raw state 'one more unacceptable time'.

[10] Beer label decalled to yellow notebook paper: see the illustration accompanying the ‘Editors' note to reader’.

[11] Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor did star together in the movie ‘Giant’ (1956), about a Texas oil family striking it rich. Elizabeth Taylor had a number of close gay friends, some famous in Hollywood but still in the closet about their sexuality, like Rock Hudson, and she protected their secret. As she got older she supported publicly the causes of the GLBT community more and more. The off-the-cuff analogy demonstrates not only Robbie's intelligence and knowledge of USA popular culture, it proves his natural instinct for brilliantly apt analogies.

[12] It took mj lorenzo 22 years to realize the likeliest meaning of Robbie’s statement here, even after having read it and wondered about it a thousand times over many years. The Dr. explained to Sammy in the fall of 2016 that it finally hit him that Robbie seemed to have been saying that when Ibrahim and Gustavo would party in outlying towns, in the countryside surrounding Santisima Cruz controlled by ELN guerrillas, who apparently were their friends, the latter would send the boys home after a certain amount of partying and drinking, not because they were drinking too much or getting out of control or inappropriate, but because of the hour. Because the boys were friendly with the guerrillas, and therefore, in a sense, represented them, or were a symbol of them, an extension of them, a potential good advertisement for them; and it would “sully the reputation” of the guerrillas (as it did when other guerrilla-friendly boys killed some cattle) if the brothers stayed out past an hour that the Castroite ELN revolutionaries deemed decent for a revolutionary or for a revolution-sympathetic youth. This is our latest understanding of these brief and mystifying statements from Robbie about how or why the guerrillas would routinely send the two late-night-partying brothers home; though we would be open to further correction if someone with true knowledge of the situation were to explain it further, or better. Robbie’s knowledge of his hometown was often incomplete, since he had not lived there for many years. And mj’s ability to hear those explanations was questionable and scattered, given his befuddled and intense emotions regarding such matters; as illustrated by the conversation here, where he changed the subject to safety issues exactly when Robbie was explaining why the boys were sent home, instead of 'doubling down' and intensifying his queries to get the full and detailed picture of why they were sent home. A good, experienced reporter would have ‘doubled down’ on the ‘sending home’ matter, because mj lorenzo, for his safety’s sake in the future, seriously needed to know exactly what kind of relationship the boys had with guerrillas whom the Dr. considered possibly capable of kidnapping him and therefore potentially inimical to his well-being and even survival.

The Dr. told Sammy that he was beginning to comprehend, if this latest interpretation were correct, that the ELN guerrillas with whom Victoria and the boys were friendly, reminded him of his Calvinist Puritan, Quaker, Baptist and Huguenot ancestors, who had taken their sacred Calvinist cause so seriously that they barely had allowed partying at all, let alone half the night long; and some of whom had even killed the English king, they were so dead serious. This reminded him of the related fact that the most famous hero of the ELN was Camilo Torres, a young idealistic priest-guerrilla tragically killed in his first gun battle; and that others of the ELN were likely to have been just as religiously Catholic as Torres. More on Camilo Torres will appear in the last chapter, which covers the diary entries for October 17, 18, 23, 24, 29 and 30. The Torres material is in Subsection 122, q.v. Torres interested mj lorenzo so much that on a subsequent trip to Colombia he went out of his way to track down the seminary where Camilo Torres studied to become a priest. In Focus: Colombia states this about the ELN and Camilo Torres:

“The years of violence [La Violencia, roughly 1948-1964, an undeclared civil war between the two major political parties, Conservatives and Liberals] spawned several of the various guerrilla groups which have since become a feature of Colombian political life. The Communist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) had its origins in the Liberal self-defence guerrillas, while the Castroite Ejercito de Liberación Nacional (ELN), the other big armed group still in action today, was a later creation of radicalised middle-class youths dazzled by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Their icon was Camilo Torres, a young seminarian of good family who despaired of reforming Colombia’s tradition-bound society by peaceful means and took to the hills with a handful of followers. He was promptly killed in his first encounter with the army, but the ELN and his legend live on to this day.” Pg. 23. See Bibliography, under Harding, Colin.
In 2016 the Colombian president, Juan Manuel Santos, finally achieved a peace accord with the FARC guerrillas and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as reward. As of mid-2017 peace talks were still under way and progressing with the ELN, the guerrila group with whom the people of Santisima Cruz had been dealing for so many decades.