Hooked on Cocaland: Afterthoughts

6. Sammy's editorial board assesses the impact of Jung's 'opposites' on mj lorenzo (a 'scholium' in response to the 'Postscript' at the bottom of the final page of the present work, the page entitled 'the end': the 'Postscript' is a quote from Carl Jung regarding what he called 'the opposites')

Starting with the three major mj lorenzo works studied at this website so far:

1. The Remaking

2. Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert

3. Hooked on Cocaland

1. The Remaking, mj lorenzo’s first book, was his first attempt to come to terms with what Carl Jung called ‘the opposites’ in each human being, the opposite forces vying, in this case, for control of mj lorenzo. And probably The Remaking was mj’s biggest and most important attempt lifelong to deal with his ‘opposites’ because: that first big struggle with his own ‘opposites’, during the Remaking year of 1970-71, helped determine the course of the rest of his life, and thereby affected world history, meaning the way that many individuals around the world subsequently dealt with their own opposites, after reading The Remaking, and the way nations and groups of nations dealt with conflict between opposites at national and international levels, based on principles derived from The Remaking.

When he began his Remaking trip of 1970-71 mj lorenzo was not aware that his trip west (and then north to the Arctic) was about to become a major journey in self-discovery, or that an important part of his discovery would end up being: that one opposite half of himself was controlling his life at the expense of the needs of the other, and opposite, half. He only became aware of this as he began to read his old notebooks and write down his reactions. And it was not until much later in the Remaking year, after he had studied Jung’s two early books, Psychological Types, and Symbols of Transformation, that he realized that what was happening inside of his own self was a reflection of what was happening in his countrymen, and in people and nations around the world. Even less was he aware at the beginning of that Remaking year that his own struggle, like the rest of the world’s, had been anticipated by Carl Jung.

As his trip and year progressed, young Dr. Lorenzo began to become aware that there were two major sides of himself, one he named ‘Mortimer’, and the other, Mortimer’s opposite, ‘Jack’; but by the end of the second third of his book and trip, two thirds of the way through his year and journey, he had put it together that (1) not only was there a major struggle between these opposite forces inside him, but also, worse yet, (2) the struggle was about to kill him, and, worst of all, from Mortimer’s point of view, (3) the only solution was that his ‘Jack’ side be given more say and sway.

Almost every event, every page in the Remaking story is a reflection of two opposites vying for control. Our publication (at this website), a look at mj lorenzo’s first book, The Remaking, brings most of these struggles to the conscious foreground, spelling out which set of opposites is in question at any given moment during the Remaking trip and year. In the book he wrote that year, his original work, The Remaking, mj did the same at times. For instance, throughout the work he left many detailed, multi-item CHARTS of OPPOSITES he was discovering in himself and in the world around him, and with which he was contending to one degree or another, at one time or another during the trip.

Even the structure of The Remaking was based on the opposites: Part I of the book and trip was Jack’s event; Part II was Mortimer’s; and Part III was mj’s, that of Mortimer and Jack, mj’s two opposite sides, combined into a single unified and simultaneously co-operating 'mj lorenzo', with Jack given more say than in the past.

None of mj lorenzo’s subsequent works was as consciously about opposites as The Remaking.

2. The Remaking was Dr. Lorenzo’s first, biggest and most important – but it was not his last – attempt to come to terms with certain kinds of opposites, whether in himself, or in the outside world (as opposing outer forces which resonated with his own inner conflicts). His fourth book, Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, described the conflict between white man Fred Waring and dark man (half-Huron) Bill Blackburn, between powerful boss and weaker but clever employee, between powerful older man and weaker but clever younger man, between powerful ‘father’ of the bride (-to-be) and weaker but clever suitor wannabe-groom, between powerful former lover and powerful current lover, and between powerful spiritual lover and powerful sexual lover. And in the end, perhaps the most important set of opposite forces was the egotism of extremely powerful President Nixon vs the altruism of Joey’s humble guru, whose methods of achieving inner peace were offered to the President of the United States by Fred Waring near the end of the story, to help Nixon come to terms with his own warring opposites, which were at that moment: (1) hiding the truth at all costs, vs the opposite approach, (2) ego effacement and political party effacement for the sake of general peace. Eventually Nixon chose the latter, stepping down from the presidency, to the relief of the human race and, especially, mj lorenzo.

3. And finally, in the present work, a look at mj lorenzo’s eleventh book, Hooked on Cocaland, we have seen again that within mj lorenzo’s writing of the original diary many opposites were at play – in this case, in 1994, as he was composing his first Colombia diary: depression vs mania; white man vs dark; celibacy vs natural and healthy human sexuality; psychosis vs sanity; love of men vs love of women; cultural insider vs cultural outsider; mental illness vs mental health; Northwestern European Calvinist Christianity vs Southern European Roman Catholic Christianity; the construction of civilization vs the annihilation of humanity; rich global superpower country vs poor weak developing country; and more. In fact, the editorial board, while attempting to address the question of opposites in mj lorenzo, in response to the Postscript’s Jung quotation, came up against a shock.

One of our editorial board members had been reading Barbara Hannah’s biographical memoir of Jung’s life in December of 2016, just as we were finishing up our work on the publication of the present study of Hooked on Cocaland, and offered the board the quote we placed on 'the End' page about Jung's opposites as food for thought. And when we did think about it, we realized that many of the Dr.’s personal issues in 1994 were the same issues which had driven his writing of The Remaking in 1970-71. We were shocked because we feared the Dr. might have made little progress during his lifetime coming to terms with his own inner conflicts. We were not shocked or fearful for our own sakes or for the sake of readers around the world, for we knew that we and they had benefited from his books and Mexican picture stories over the years. And we knew that our own civilization had been preserved a little longer from annihilation, and humanity at large saved from vast chaos, by his efforts. Instead, we were worried mostly about him.

What did it mean that 25 years after his writing The Remaking and undergoing all of the stresses the Remaking trip entailed in 70-71, Dr. Lorenzo was still struggling in 1994 with the same major sets of opposite forces in himself –

a. Depression vs mania

b. Psychosis vs sanity

c. Man love vs woman love

d. White man vs dark man issues

e. Cultural outsider vs cultural insider issues

f. Superpower country vs developing country issues

g. Mental illness vs mental well-being, and
h. Construction of civilization vs annihilation of humanity

–with all of which, among others, he had been dealing also back in 70-71?

Did it mean that he himself had made no personal progress toward finding spiritual inner peace in these areas during those 25 years? Or did it mean that his world had not resolved these several issues, and for that reason he was still writing about them? Or was it both?????

And what did it mean that he had added even more problems to his list of unresolved opposites? more conflicts between opposites that had never appeared in his writing of 70-71? such as the problem he had been addressing more and more since the 1990s, the USA’s ‘Calvinist’ or ‘neo-’ or ‘modified’-Calvinist worldview, and its pros and cons? Or celibacy vs normal healthy animal-human sexuality? Hadn’t he had enough problems already in 70-71 at the age of 27-28? Why would he have wanted to go and add more problems to his list of internal battles that would need to be worked through?

Some members of the editorial board felt that the explanation lay in the Dr.’s having been ‘severely mentally ill lifelong’. They proposed that mj lorenzo was an ‘untreated Bipolar’, a ‘manic-depressive who had never been willing to take psychiatry-endorsed medication to moderate his extreme moods’.

Others rebutted, not very helpfully either, that he had tried medication for his depressions, including alcohol and illegal street cocaine and amphetamines, and even pot, but had never tried to self-treat his manic episodes because he 'liked them too much'. He enjoyed the ‘Jack’ side of his personality too much to medicate it away. But then, somehow he had gotten off cocaine in 1992 and the emotional crash, the withdrawal from and loss of the cocaine high, had triggered a psychotic depression that had lasted two years and only really ended when he went to Colombia with Robbie in 94. His writing might have benefited humanity over the decades, but he had never benefited much from it personally, they said, as proven by the full-page ad he had taken out in the New York Sunday Times admitting – what was it? – that he had tried twenty-one religions and nineteen mental illnesses as defined by the DSM IV? And then he had gotten into an argument with the Times or somebody because they had gotten those numbers reversed? No, it was twenty-one mental illnesses and nineteen religions, etc. In other words, he was a fuck-up spiritually and mentally, but had nevertheless been helpful to humanity in some big ways, like Tchaikovsky; or Julius Caesar; or Robert Schumann; or Robin Williams.

The argument went on for days in Sammy’s hut in San Juan, back and forth, until Sammy stepped in and tried to bring some clarity to the muddle. He said that he knew from very intimate personal knowledge of the Dr. and his moods, mores and overall psychology, that what motivated him as a writer was to get at the very most essential and pressing issue of – not just his own people, the U.S. Americans; and not just the countries at the core of Western civilization, whose people were also his people; but – ALL of humanity, his REAL people. He had to write about the biggest question regarding healthy survival of the WHOLE human race; and that question, he had thought, throughout his life since age 28, was the same question that Barbara Hannah had said Dr. Jung had addressed at the Psychology Club in Zürich in 1954: whether huge devastation to humanity from weapons of mass destruction could be avoided or not.

In fact, Sammy called the Dr. in Mexico when the argument got hot in San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, to get his latest feelings on the subject, and Dr. Lorenzo expressed a low opinion of himself. He felt he had not done a good job of getting all of humanity sufficiently aroused with concern, or taught them effectively enough how to preserve their own species. His writing had not been clear enough, or heated enough or something enough. Alex Haley, he said, had done a better job of demonstrating the inhumanity of slavery, and presenting it in a book in a way that got everyone’s attention. That was the issue, he thought: getting people’s attention. And Haley had been original, he said. He hadn’t copied anyone. Maybe that was why his work, Roots, had been so shocking and attention-getting. Whereas he, mj lorenzo, had originated very little, but instead had attempted to spread knowledge of the mentors who had influenced him most: Guru Garland, Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, Allen Ginsberg, and Jesus Christ, just to name a few, each of whom had been shocking and attention-getting during mj's own lifetime, but when ‘transmogrified’ into books by mj lorenzo, had lost luster, he bemoaned.

Sammy had tried to comfort and reassure him on these points, reminding the Dr. of his vast readership worldwide, his speaking engagements with the Italian, Brazilian and U.S. legislatures, the United Nations and many prestigious universities, his many appearances on TV talk shows, his speaking tours worldwide for decades, even as far afield as Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Brisbane, and a constant discussion of his ideas in periodicals and books for 45 years that was as alive now in January of 2016 as it had been in the early seventies. His irreverent and shockingly revolutionary ‘sermons’, alone, in The Remaking, were world-famous, Sammy laughed. He loved them, and they had won him huge notoriety. Dr. Lorenzo WAS original, even when he drew on others. Every great writer, no matter how original, built on the work of his predecessors, Sammy reminded the Dr.: even the great and incomparable wizard, Carl Gustav Jung, in his early writing days, when putting together his first great work, Psychological Types, at about age 40-45, had built on the work of everybody you could think of, from ancient times to modern, from Plato and the Gnostics and Tertullian and Origen through Scotus Erigena and Abelard and Anselm of Canterbury, even the Brahmans of India, through Luther and Zwingli to Kant, Goethe and Schiller, William James, Nietzsche, Freud and Adler. That was just for one book! What about all of Jung's other books, each built on dozens of other writers and workers in human psychology? What about all of the alchemists whose work he built on? Paracelsus? The I Ching? The Indian Mandala? Pueblo Indian religion? Jung was original, but he also built his psychology on the shoulders of predecessors.

Joey’s Guru, Guru Garland, likewise constantly quoted old Indian masters in his satsangs (see glossary) and built his teaching entirely upon that of his natural father, who had been his own guru. Castaneda might have had nothing to say if he had never met don Juan Matús, the teacher he described in such detail in his early works. And Allen Ginsberg built on every poet you could think of, from his own natural father through William Blake to Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Garcia Lorca and William Carlos Williams. And Christ had built on the prophets and the law. He’d quoted David’s 22^nd psalm while on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” So lighten up, for Pete’s sake!

But the Dr., though polite and thankful, and apologetic, did not seem convinced that he had done anywhere near enough. Recently he had been thinking that if he could walk a tightrope across the Grand Canyon, maybe that would help draw attention to his cause of preserving humanity from mass destruction. But how could he ever help preserve humanity, let’s face it, he said, when his message was ‘so mixed’? He had started with Jungian psychology and moved on to an Indian guru, he explained, all the while quoting Jesus Christ from time to time. That right there was enough to confuse his close relative, Cousin Caroline, and turn her off forever. Then it was Castaneda and Native American religion, and finally, in the last twenty years or so, he had become obsessed with the strict Calvinist Protestant Christianity in which he had been raised. At first he had seen it as a problem; most of his adult life, in fact, he had seen it as such. But after living through the drug cartel wars which peaked in his part of Mexico around 2012-13, and witnessing firsthand how quickly an apparently functioning society can fall to shambles when it does not have a universal strict moral foundation like the Calvinist one on which he had been raised, which got the U.S. through two world wars, he began to take a different view of Calvinist values, and see that, while those values were strict and would limit your choices and freedoms in life, they would also be an anchor in tough times, like they were for the American people during World War II and all previous crises.

When he was a child the Republicans and Democrats worked together well because they had been forced to learn how to do so by WWII, and also because, deep down, they all shared the same more-or-less-Calvinist values. Whereas by now, 2016, he was disgusted with his American people. They had sacrificed their shared core values to hot-headed, one-sided ‘party’ partisanship. During WWII they had locked the Japanese-Americans up because they thought their values were too different from American values to be trusted. Perhaps this had been wrong-headed, but it did reveal a certain important truth, now, looking back: both political parties, though theoretically at opposite ends of the political spectrum, had felt that the rest of the country besides the Japanese could basically be counted on to share the right and the same core fundamental values, regardless of political party affiliation, to enough of an extent that they could hopefully, all Americans working together except the Japanese-Americans, get through the war victoriously together. Whereas now, in 2016, who, he asked Sammy, in the U.S.A., would trust anyone of opposite ilk in a moment of crisis? The ‘opposites’ in American life had re-established their extreme polar-opposite strengths and were at mad war with each other even more vehemently than during the Vietnam War era. The two sides could not even agree on what to call the enemy: ‘jihadists’ or ‘radical extremist Muslims’. Each side spat on the other over that issue and every other issue you could think of. He had just seen a prominent news anchor on the ‘fair and balanced’ Fox Cable news channel say that the only thing helpful or positive that President ‘Barack Hussein’ Obama had done during his entire eight years in office was to kill Osama bin Laden. Everything else he had done was either totally useless or an outright harm to the United States of America. When the opposite party won the presidency and congress, both, in 2016, the same thing happened all over again, only in reverse. How could America survive this degree of vitriol and dissension? And, worst of all, he, mj lorenzo, felt responsible for not having prevented, or cured, it, either one.

Americans needed the things he’d been trying to sell them in his writing, though, he agreed. Without the humility, love and forgiveness taught by Jesus Christ, he said, the human race would not survive. Without the self-understanding taught by Carl Jung they would not survive either. Too many people he knew personally, said the Dr., especially Americans, were not the least bit introspective or self-studying, and ended up inappropriately materialistic and self-confident, and not understanding of themselves at all. They had been spoiled by parents and a luxury life-style; and they thought they were faultless; and they were definitely not. That would be a fatal flaw for a superpower: to act in an arrogant manner toward the rest of the globe, thinking itself 'faultless'. Humility backed by massive strength of all kinds would get them much further and preserve the global peace longer. And the whole world needed to know the methods of achieving inner peace taught by Guru Garland, Joey’s guru. Also: Americans in particular needed to know how to laugh at themselves as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had laughed at themselves. And Americans needed to thoroughly understand their own important past, comprehend where their own value system had come from, the set of more-or-less-Calvinist values, the ‘neo-Calvinist’ weltanschauung, which motivated the USA to try to shape the rest of the planet after its own image. He had been trying to teach all of these things in his writing, it was true.

Obviously, he said, the USA felt it had something special to offer the planet. If it was going to continue to attempt to drive that something special down the throats of other nations of people; or to put it more nicely: if the USA was going to keep spreading its ‘American way’ abroad, consciously and unconsciously, by so many straightforward and also too many devious means, then it should understand exactly what it was that it was spreading, or trying to spread, and where it had come from. It had come from the Protestant Reformation, he said, the huge revolutionary breakaway from the Roman ‘Catholic’ corruption of Jesus’ teaching, the teaching clearly delineated in the Gospels and Paul’s writings which the Reformation revived. The values that marked America, as opposed to, let’s say, Mexico, or Colombia, were Calvinist, meaning derived from the theology and church reconstruction achieved by the Reformation leader, John Calvin; they were certainly not Roman Catholic, and they were not Lutheran either; nor just English or Anglican; and not just ‘Christian’ or ‘Judaeo-Christian’; nor just ‘Western’: no, American values were a particular brand of Western Christianity, Calvinism, slightly modified by the passage of five centuries’ time, but still essentially intact in 2016, and motivating most Americans to think and act in the similar ways that they did. This startling fact Americans needed to understand about themselves, in order to operate around the world with more wisdom and an appropriate degree of limited humble self-respect, including much more understanding of the difference between themselves and other nations, and where that difference really originated.

They needed to study the origin and history of Calvinism and its constant impact on American history, said the Dr., from its earliest days in Puritan Massachusetts and Anglican Virginia, through Quaker Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and Presbyterian backcountry Appalachia, through John Wesley, George Wakefield and the Great Awakening and other revivals right up trough Billy Sunday to Billy Graham and neo-Calvinism's latest incarnation in the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who helped put Donald Trump in office. They needed to study everything the German historian Dietrich Schwanitz had said directly – and also indirectly – about the Calvinist character of the English-and-American culture in his German language college textbook of European history, Bildung.^[14] They needed to read David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, gleaning from it everything Fischer said about Puritan, Anglican, Quaker and Presbyterian colonial founding groups.^[15] They needed to read and understand Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which analyzed Calvinism and its effects historically, sociologically and economically.^[16] They needed to read and understand Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy to comprehend what the hyper-Calvinist USA core, the Fundamentalist/Evangelical community and related groups (what Toynbee probably would have called the USA ‘creative minority’ or ‘dominant minority’), wanted our USA to look like right now, or as soon as they could get it looking that way, by one political trick or another.^[17]

When America either succeeded or ran amok, he said, they didn’t just succeed or run amok as part of a group of ‘Western civilization' value holders; or just as ‘Judaeo-Christian’ value holders. They succeeded or ran amok as a group of Calvinists or quasi-Calvinists: ‘neo-Calvinists’ was a term the Dr. used a lot, but no term seemed quite perfect; and people needed to understand what his term ‘neo-Calvinism’ meant. Once they did, they would understand their country far better than now. Americans did not understand why other countries provoked them to disgust or rage, they did not understand themselves well enough to comprehend that the rage and disgust came from the way other countries and other peoples violated core Calvinist values that had been bred and educated deeply into the American people's character for four or five centuries. Even Catholics the Dr. knew in Denver held to these values, Dr. Lorenzo said; and even Seattle Buddhists he had met whose parents were born in China and Vietnam adhered to these Calvinist values. The American value system was Calvinist in essence, and a touch of Catholic or Buddhist or other influence in a person did not lessen this truth. The only exception, he thought, might be some Americans who had just recently come from some very different 'old country'. But those born in America who attended American grade and high schools and lived in America were quickly assimilated into its value system. The most resistive cultures to Americanization, he thought, might be the Hispanic, i.e., the Latin American; and maybe the Sicilian mafia; and the Russian Putin mafia and friends who watched no TV but Russian; and the extremist Muslims; but even these groups would be mostly assimilated to core Calvinist American values within a few generations, he predicted, just as the Roman Catholic Irish and Italians and Eastern European Jews had been.

The most pressing set of opposite forces operating globally and stirring up global tension at the present moment, December of 2016, the Dr. said, was the hugely problematic global conflict between radical Islamist extremism and core Calvinist-American values. America offended radically religious Muslims because it allowed people so much freedom to be Marilyn-Monroe-obsessed, irreligious, materialistic, decadent, mixed up, fucked-up, intoxicated, philandering and degenerate in general, and to practice any kind of crazy religion or quasi-religion they might dream up. This ‘excessive’ freedom disgusted strict shari’a-law-embracing Islamists. Simultaneously, Radical Islam repulsed Americans for a number of reasons, including the fact that it was totalitarian, for the American dream since day one had been anti-totalitarian, and ‘freedom’-touting. Radical Islam offered no ‘freedom of religion’, or freedom of ideology, or freedom of expression, and neo-Calvinist American values did. Some critics of mj lorenzo's opinions might try to argue that the Calvinist Protestants were an intolerant bunch from day one, as in Calvin's Geneva, but the fact was that the English colonies had been settled by many different kinds of Calvinist groups escaping religious persecution in Europe, and so, by the time the colonies found it necessary to unite, in 1776, freedom and mutual tolerance of religion, idea and expression had been the only way to go. Most of the groups populating the colonies by 1776 were Calvinist or quasi-Calvinist in one way or another, and while some of these religious groups had shown a history of intolerance toward other religious groups at times, and even Calvin himself had resorted to banning or burning a few non-Calvinists in Geneva, the deeper fact was that in every Calvinist country since Calvin died around 1560, including for example Switzerland and the Netherlands; and England and Scotland after 1688 (the Glorious Revolution defining religious freedom) especially; and in the USA: Jews – just to name one non-Calvinist group – had enjoyed far more respect and freedom to be themselves than in Lutheran or Catholic Christian countries. So obviously, by 1776 the by now modified- or neo- Calvinists all up and down the eastern seaboard colonies had learned a great deal about the practice of religious tolerance or it never could or would have been made an essential pillar of the U.S. constitution.

Radical Islam repulsed Americans also because it showed no respect for human life, killing anyone who disagreed or disobeyed or complained or, even, killing people just to get Radical Islam noticed. He would have been able to sell a lot more books, mj lorenzo said, if he had just been able to slice his critics’ heads off on YouTube, to get the world’s attention so people would publish and read his books. That was a really smart way to get noticed, the way of the extremist Muslim group called 'ISIS'. It just wasn’t very Christian, and particularly it repulsed Calvinists, because they believed that a person would go to hell unless he had given his heart to Jesus, and if you sliced a person’s head off for whatever totalitarian reason you chose, you deprived him of a right the founding fathers had built into the American constitution, the right to have a good long half-a-lifetime’s half-a-chance to exercise his-or-her sacred civil liberty to think about seeing Jesus or Mohammed, or Mary, or anybody, whoever, even one's parents maybe, or even the Devil, in the afterlife, and to make decisions deliberately, carefully, and accordingly, in this life.

Even moderate Islam repulsed most Americans because they found it hard to understand why Muslim moderates did not do more to subude the mass-murdering extremists among themselves. If a group of American Christians had gone around the country committing mass murder for religious reasons, they would have been subdued by other Christians immediately, put in jail at the very least, but moderate Muslims had done no such thing with their extremist brothers. They barely even complained about these extremist brothers, or so it seemed to the core Calvinist culture bearers. Furthermore it was hard to believe the protests of moderate Muslims that they were innocent of the blood shed by their extremist co-religionists, and even ‘opposed’ it, when in fact the very founder of their religion himself, Mohammed, had ordered the shedding of innocent blood whenever he felt it was necessary to stop certain groups from preventing the spread of his new religion.^[18] He turned his movement from a spiritual inner one to a political and military outer one without a qualm, exactly what Jesus refused to allow his disciples to do. Jesus’ ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was an inner, spiritual realm, not an outer, material, political-military realm. Regardless of what the Koran might say about mercy, tolerance and an inner ‘spiritual’ realm, Mohammed’s own behavior modeled the exact opposite of what Jesus taught. If Jesus had shed the blood of others to spread his new beliefs, Christianity would have been a completely different and much less attractive religion and the world would have blown itself up long ago, probably. This was maybe the most repulsive and revolting of all aspects of Islam, the Dr. thought, to Americans, whose core rock-bottom Calvinist values included the fact that Jesus had shed his own blood rather than demand the blood of others. He had suffered a grizzly, protracted torturous death ON PURPOSE – for OUR progress – rather than sacrifice ANYONE ELSE for HIS progress, or the progress of HIS religion. He had known for a long time that his miserable persecution and death were coming and had willingly gone for it, when in fact he could have escaped to Egypt or India or anywhere, just as once before in his life his parents had hid him in Egypt from Roman authorities. What greater difference could there be between two religions, or two value systems? One was noble at its core, and super-self-consciously self-sacrificing so as to teach superior personal moral strength. The other was ignoble and mass-murderous of innocents so as to increase its political power at the expense of individual freedoms. That was how Americans thought, in whom Calvinist values had gained conscious or unconscious hold. Even Americans who were not Christian were possessed of these Calvinist Christian values: it was ignoble to take another’s life over religious or ideological difference. You didn’t have to be a Baptist or Presbyterian to hold strongly to this Calvinist value. Buddhists in America were offended too, by Radical Islam, because of the Calvinist principles deeply imbedded in their American character, principles conscious and/or unconscious. American Hindus were offended too. Even some moderate Muslims, maybe! Would that they had spoken out more loudly and boldly by now, if they were offended by radical jihadist Islam; but apparently, they feared getting their heads chopped off. What else were we to think, when so few moderate Muslims, if any, had spoken up in loud protest against their mass-murderous brothers and gotten any such expression noticed by the media or by anybody?

The Dr. had just seen on Mexican cable TV a movie with the title ‘My Name is Khan’, he said, illustrating this point, where Khan, a moderate Muslim, suffered an impulse to fight back against radical jihadist Islam and its consequences; but his ‘mistake’ was that he picked his fight with the American authorities instead, not with his radical extremist brothers, who were the true originators of the problem; probably because he feared they would inconsiderately and inhumanly chop off his head; whereas he knew that the American authorities would respect him enough to let him protest peacefully and maybe even loudly, head and all. This was the problem America faced by allowing radical Islam – and maybe Islam itself – to function inside its borders. America was dealing with a group of jihadist people who WOULD NOT LISTEN and had no respect whatever for the deepest longstanding American values. And those of the Islamic group who respected those values somewhat, enough to use them to complain, lacked the fortitude to complain straight in the face of their own mass-murdering brothers and publicize THAT on YouTube and news channels. THIS was the danger America faced, and it turned the stomach of anyone with those core neo-Calvinist values.

So, those were Dr. Lorenzo’s thoughts on Jung’s ‘opposites’ as of New Year’s, January 1, 2017, and he wished the editors well, and thanked them for going to such pains to help get his thoughts broadcast around the world via the internet; for, who knew, maybe, as Jung said in 1954, 63 years ago: since the human race had survived another 63 years, maybe it was still not too late or hopeless to keep them going another 63, or 6300, or 63,000....

And he asked Sammy to remind the editorial board not to worry about him so much. It might ‘interfere with their work’. Anyway, he was probably not as crazy and irreligious as his writing made him look at times, he said. If George Washington had kept a completely honest diary, he suggested, we would all probably think much less of him today than we do, for almost certainly, a number of inner weaknesses would have crept to the fore that no one had ever imagined. Forget the cherry tree story, for one thing. Old George Washington had lied like a Caribbean pirate, we’ve learned, building up his incredible spy network during the American Revolution; which was a good thing actually. But mj lorenzo, said the Dr., had kept not just ONE completely honest diary, but many; and some crazy heartless dude named Sammy Martinez had published ALL of them, no matter how sordid and fucked up, and that was the only reason people worried about poor mj’s sanity so much. If Abraham Lincoln had kept an honest diary, said Dr. Lorenzo, people probably would have had the common sense and decency not to publish it; but if they had, they probably never would have built the Lincoln Memorial, because the world would have seen at once that Abraham Lincoln, like everyone else in the world, was ‘fucked as shit in his deepest core’.

If John Calvin had kept an honest, a REALLY honest diary... In fact, said the Dr., there was revealing stuff in some of Calvin’s letters to friends. And the Catholics had written tons of muck about Calvin, some of which really made you wonder.

If Mary, Jesus’ mother...

And even Jesus, said Dr. Lorenzo, we know from the Gospels, was subject to terrific, earth-quakingly mammoth temptations. Even HE... begged his ‘Father’, who the rest of us called ‘God’, to save him from the cross; in a weak moment; if only he would, please;... but... ‘not my will, but thine’: those were his final words regarding that... enticing... DE – TOUR... de force.

Victoria's back yard kitchen, wooden table
as stove supports multiple pots, one on bricks for
cooking, chicken next to it, pig beneath table waiting
hopefully
Victoria’s pot is on;

But the chicken has flown the soup,

And the pig hopes the pot will fall,

And turn the soup to slop.

“After Thanksgiving a week or more went by of just working on Cocaland

and listening to his huge collection of Christmas music...”

7. 'Praise is becoming to the upright', or, The oeuvre overall (the ‒ hopefully not too hokey ‒ story behind Dr. Lorenzo's offering Psalm 33:1 as a third epigram for the home page of the present website)

Sammy’s editorial board had trouble with this one. By April of 2017, “A look at mj lorenzo’s Hooked on Cocaland” was an ‘ant’s ass’ from publication online, they complained. It was already 'terribly top-heavy' with a commentary of every kind, from ponderous pondering footnotes, to multiple introductions, to umpteen afterthoughts, one after the other, many originating from the old guy himself. With every ‘Afterthought’ the poor editorial board thought they had produced the last and most telling touché they or the old coyote could ever come up with. But in April, when the book should have been terminated as a Work in Progress and bequeathed to posterity long since, it was still in the Hooked On Cocaland dog pound, barking to be listened to. Half the team wanted to let the forever whining mutt out of the pound and drop it on the mercy of the public as was, so that the Editorial Bored, as they were starting to call themselves in cyber messages to Sammy, could move on to mj lorenzo’s next book to be published and 'looked at' online, his Tales of Waring, or maybe his Joey. But the other half of the team wanted to add 'one final afterthought’ entitled, very, very cornily and Bible-Belt-y, “Praise is becoming to the upright,” and the second half won, crazily; maybe because Sammy was among that second half of the editorially bored, and his vote so often counted more.

The trouble started just before Easter. After two months of late winter in Denver with his kids and granddaughter, Dr. Lorenzo had driven back to Mexico, not even stopping in Española to see Sammy and the board, and had fallen at once into a magical Mexican lull produced in part by the sudden great relative warmth of sun and spring flowering, compared with Denver. He’d figured out that the noisome creature waking him up every 5AM in the pitch black night was a Cenzontle Norteño. Humberto the village dentist who sang his own Catholic compositions to him in beautiful, gorgeous, full-throated and soulful riveting baritone, right in his face while fixing his teeth, had listened to Dr. Lorenzo whistle the sound that this strange bird made – this was when they went out for breakfast in a Morelia restaurant one day, way back at Christmas, not in the dentist’s chair. Dr. mj described the bird, a small undistinguished-looking grey thing with a whitish underbelly, and he whistled for Humberto at the restaurant table that incredible song of descending notes, so truly musical, that transported him at various times during the day in his humble rented abode in the Morelia suburbs. “I’ve asked Jaime, and Judith, and several other people, what bird sings so musically like this, and nobody knows,” he complained.

“That sounds like a Tzintzontle,” said Humberto. The Dr. didn’t believe him because he didn’t believe anything any Mexican in Mexico said to him any more, so he whistled it again, trying to get it a more perfect replica this time, and Humberto said the same thing. He sounded like he meant it and knew what he was talking about. But what with the pressing agendas and puttering rituals of a 74-year-old, the poor Dr. had not found time to look up the name in any of his five color-illustrated Mexican bird books, and the matter had lain unresolved all throughout his late-winter trip back to the states to renew Colorado driver’s license, U.S. passport and, eventually, his Mexican tourist visa.

But now, with the magical lull of warm Mexico at Easter, with the Jacarandas blooming big tall purple trees against a deep blue dry central-Mexican desert sky, with his patio garden coming back to life in every color of the rainbow and some besides, and with the songbirds singing and winging, the Dr. got out his five books. There was no Tzintzontle in any of the five indexes. So, knowing that Spanish Franciscan friars had transliterated Aztecs’ exotic Nahuatl sibilant clicking and spitting language sounds into Spanish spelling in many inconsistent ways, he tried Z without the T, then S instead of Z, and finally tried CINTZONTLE, and was about to call Humberto for his stab at spelling when he stumbled on the word ‘Cenzontle’ (pronounced 'sayn-SAWN-ktlay'!). The color drawing was a perfect match, grey above, and an off-white beneath. And darn! If it wasn’t a mockingbird! That explained EVERYTHING. It explained why that shrill singer produced so many distinctly different kinds of short songs (it could mimic or ‘mock’ other birds), why it repeated a particular favorite riff so many times (it was just what they did, said the books; then they would move on to a different riff and repeat that again and again, and different individual mockingbirds had different favorite riffs). It explained why it sat and sang on the very topmost ugly stick of steel protruding from a normal ugly boxy Mexican house (to case its territory from as high as possible), and why it chose to hop and flit around the Dr.’s suburban village at all (mockingbirds liked ‘gardens, parks, suburban neighborhoods, towns, grassy roadsides, edges, lawns, brush’, etc.). It explained why Harper Lee called her novel about Alabama To Kill a Mockingbird: Alabama was in the Northern Mockingbird’s range, which reached from Nova Scotia to southern Mexico; and it even explained WHY IT SANG AT NIGHT!!! (“mockingbirds may sing at night,” said two bird books) when most other birds in their right birdbrain mind sang only at sunrise and sunset, and occasional sunny moments in between.

“These birds actually sing at night,” said one birders’ manual, “ESPECIALLY IN SPRING” – !!!!

That REALLY nailed it.

One of the neighborhood Cenzontles sang at 5AM many nights in a row, the same exact riff each night, over and over again, and it was extremely piercing, about three feet from your amazed head, invariably waking you up two full pitch-black hours before sunup. In April.

No other Mexican bird but confused roosters sang at night, not even in spring. Not in his neighborhood anyway.

These were the deep ponderables that preoccupied old geezers with nothing better to do, apparently.

pages from
birding book showing Northern Mockingbird,
describing it, and mapping its range

"He’d figured out that the strange creature waking him up every 5AM in the pitch black night was a Cenzontle Norteño.
Humberto the village dentist who sang his own Catholic compositions to him in beautiful, gorgeous,
full-throated and soulful riveting baritone, right in his face while fixing his teeth,
had listened to Dr. Lorenzo whistle the sound that this strange bird made – this was when they went out for breakfast
in a Morelia restaurant one day, way back at Christmas, not in the dentist’s chair."

Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America describes the magical Mexican night singer, a Northern Mockingbird
(see Bibliography)

One day the old doc finally overcame his lazy benumbed Mexican spring torpor and took a shamefully rare bath, changed into presentable CLEAN cargo shorts and went out in his aging car looking for locally hand-made cane flower stands and a batch of fresh flowering plants to revive his world-famous Dr. Lorenzo’s Mexican Patio Garden from what he called, in a cell phone text to Sammy Martinez, its ‘withering wind-swept winter smithereens’. He’d gone to the states, and his nasturtiums and geraniums, left unwatered in the Mexican dry season, had bitten the dust. Driving east on the ancient cactus-strewn road to Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) he was overjoyed with the mix of purple jacaranda and red and fuchsia and purple bougainvillea everywhere. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought Mexico was a fairyland that a native American shaman had DREAMT UP hallucinating on peyote, replete with divine cantous songbirds and outrageously psychedelic Day-Glo-colored trees – and the additional thought hit him that the naturally intoxicated fairytale people of Mexico were about to give themselves eighteen straight days of national Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacation so they could CELEBRATE – of all things – the SUFFERING AND TORTURED DEATH (and even RESURRECTION – who would believe such dark trash?) of a remarkable man who had lived his short life on earth two thousand years ago (!!!) (What kind of credulous, fucked up people would have spent two and a half spring weeks every year doing such a thing? except the MEXICAN kind???) And since he was an old man with a fucked up drying brain, and such old and dry-brain farts were famous for shedding tears over things younger people thought totally hum-ho, supremely bogus, and forever forgettable, even puke-able, and it was even socially acceptable for them to do so, he allowed himself to shed a couple.

tall blue-purple blossoming tree above a lake
with dormant volcanoes and central Mexican countryside

Day-Glo purple Jacaranda blooming above Lake Pátzcuaro
just an hour's drive from Dr. Lorenzo's home in Morelia, April 2009
"If he hadn’t known better,
he might have thought Mexico was a fairyland
that a native American shaman had DREAMT UP hallucinating on peyote,
replete with divine cantous songbirds
and outrageously... colored trees..."

The next day he finally got out his Bibles, and the rest was history, it seems. He wrote a bunch of stuff and sent it to Sammy via cyberspace, knowing full well it would drive the editorial board crazy. But: it might make another worthy ‘afterthought’ for Hooked on Cocaland, he suggested.

Sammy called him and insisted he come back up to Española as punishment for ignoring the board on his way down to Mexico from Denver.

“The Expedition is running on 7 of 8 cylinders and could give out any second,” said the doc.

“The reading club insists. You haven’t visited for years, they’re claiming. They keep records.”

“I sank money into the car and a passport and my son Freddie and the trip and still haven’t recovered financially from half-moving to Denver last year then moving back, and renting an exorbitant Denver apartment I could barely turn around in, all because I listened to Dlune.”

“You have to come. You have no choice. We’ll fly you up and back and pay expenses. You stay with me as usual. The reading club wants to take you out for a taco party. They’re here with me now.”

“Tacos and beer!” one corrected loudly. "No, whiskey! another kid shouted. A ‘deer dance party’, a girl suggested. "Prime roast buffet at the San Juan Pueblo casino," shouted another, so Dr. Lorenzo could hear the invitation all the way down in far-away central Mexico.

They set up a special evening meeting of Sammy’s after-school reading club at Española High School but local interest multiplied so fast, and wide, they had to rent the school auditorium. Someone last minute did posters and got them placed as far south as the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center and Museum in Albuquerque and the big burritos joint in Bernalillo just off I-25, and as far north as some sprouts eateries in Taos and the Mable Dodge Lujan Bed and Breakfast, where there were always some elegant lesbian attorneys from Phoenix interested in such things, also a reception area and announcement board at Abiquiu’s Ghost Ranch, plus hotel lobbies in Santa Fe, and all over Española, Chimayo and the San Juan Pueblo too, of course. The whole reading club came with friends and teachers and Spanish grandmothers from the hills, ex-reading club members with their university professors from Santa Fe and Rio Rancho, the whole bored board with wives, husbands and friends, a few old tomahawks in funny pants and feathers from the San Juan Pueblo who were friends of Sammy’s, two priests in black from the Sanctuary in Chimayo, and several savants and painters from Taos, including a very white lady dressed prettily as a Comanche squaw. Joey Rosenblatt's parents drove up from retirement in Las Cruces, having gotten a call from Sammy. There was even a Buddhist delegation from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where the Dr. had honed writing skills under Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins back in the early 90s. The auditorium was full. The format was question and answer. Both the Dr. and Sammy Martinez sat on stage behind an old wooden table with a single table mike, a big white board on wheels behind them.

A student was first at the audience mike. He’d been standing there a long time to be first. “Dr. Lorenzo, I’ve read practically everything you’ve ever written and somewhere recently I saw a statement that the “purpose” of the ‘look at’ series of volumes online which ‘look at’ your ‘creative artifacts’, especially your books, one by one, has been to ‘leave a record for future anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of the thoughts and feelings of someone representative of your era', or something like that. Would you agree with that?”

The Dr. looked blank-faced at Sammy, who explained, “That’s OUR purpose in getting him published and 'looked at', ONE of our purposes, not necessarily HIS purpose in originally writing. I don’t think he was writing to anthropologists when he wrote The Remaking. The work itself in fact tells us that he was writing to his parents, who were church people, explaining his un-churchly self to them. And when he wrote Hooked on Cocaland, he was explaining himself to me! But you know this already, right?”

The same student persisted. The format appeared loose, or they would have moved to a different questioner. “But is there a common thread? A single purpose in his mind, in your mind, Dr. Lorenzo, for all of your writing put together? Or does each separate work have its own separate point to make?”

“Or no point at all,” someone said, apparently seriously, though several laughed.

Sammy kept answering for the Dr., for some reason. “You’ve read everything of mj lorenzo’s that you could find, but there’s a lot more that’s still unpublished.”

“But you HAVE read everything he has written.”

“Is there a common thread of purpose to the entire oeuvre? all of his writing-and-image works, all of his artistic output combined?” Sammy tried to re-word the question, as if stalling.

“That’s what I’m asking, yes. Is it possible to ask that of any writer or any artist? For instance, in the Pueblo tribes and in the Navajo region the sand painting masters, they say, many of whom were shamans, were trying to depict in ALL of their sand paintings all of the forces at once, at the moment they painted, that were affecting their lives, or their patients’ lives, and also trying to see in those forces some kind of balance, or symmetry, a kind of overriding ‘sense’ or ‘reason’ behind their lives.”

“And you’re not going to college?!”

“If you insist, I may consider it.”

“We’ll talk about it. Ok. Well, I have wondered about the same thing. Dr. Lorenzo said on the title page of his Remaking that it -- his first book -- was a ‘mandala’, and was intended ‘originally’ for his ‘own personal use’. What do you make of that?”

By continuing to answer for the Dr., Sammy seemed to be preserving him for some later and maybe greater purpose.

“The Remaking,” answered the kid, “was like a Pueblo sand painting, only in words and pictures, maybe because white men don’t know how to make real sand paintings, or real mandalas.”

Sammy looked at his friend, mj lorenzo, who had grabbed the mike from his hand.

“I think the white man Carl Jung, were he here, might disagree with that," he said. "The ‘Mandala’ chapter in the book, C. G. Jung: Word and Image – put together by a committee of white Europeans, I might add – attempts to show – I think successfully – that deep-thinking people in many if not all cultures since the Stone Age, including Carl Jung himself, have created mandala-like efforts including words and/or images which resemble more or less what the sand painters were trying to express: an effort to pull all the fragments of their universe and life (or, if they were healers, their patient’s life) into an integrated and balanced, intelligible whole.”^[19]

“Ok,” said the student. “So maybe The Remaking was or is a ‘mandala’. What about your other works? Do they fit into the Remaking mandala? Are they separate visions that get tacked on to your Remaking mandala like Shiva’s many arms? Is your entire life’s oeuvre of art a single unit of some kind? Or are they just fragments of a picture you were never fully able to pull together into a unit?”

“Maybe,” said Sammy into the mike that the Dr. was still holding, “you should skip college and just teach art theory somewhere.”

Some who attended said afterward that Sammy was protecting the Dr. in the early part of the evening, not knowing exactly what kind of shape he might be in for hard questions, or maybe just saving him until later for greater drama.

“Are you dodging the question for Dr. Lorenzo?” the kid asked Sammy, who actually knew him well. He was a senior at Española High, a four-year regular in Sammy’s after-school reading club. “Have you ever thought about this? I’ve read everything of Dr. Lorenzo’s I could find, and I’m still trying to figure it out. What is his schtick? Dr. Lorenzo, sometimes it just seems to me that you are all over the place. Other times I get a glimmer of something behind, but what is that glimmer?”

“This is one of the best questions ever to emerge from the students in my after-school reading group,” Sammy acknowledged, looking at his friend, Dr. Lorenzo. “It’s the same question that made me call you and invite you here.”

“You didn’t invite me. You ramrodded me. He BRIBED me,” said the Dr. to Joey Rosenblatt's lovely, white-haired mother in the front row, who smiled sadly, as if acknowledging it was the first time they'd seen each other since Joey died.

Dr. Lorenzo waited for the laughter then spoke.

“I think I write mainly to get at what’s REALLY most important to preserving and protecting my people and humanity. I say ‘I think’ because I can’t claim to be always conscious of all my motives for doing anything, except maybe going to the bathroom.”

“What’s that ‘most important’ thing then?” pressed the student, since no one was controlling which mike was on, and something was driving him. And, by the way, he did not consider his questions a joke, let alone a scatalogic one.

“They – we – I – ,” fumbled the Dr., “any society needs a common core of motivating beliefs and strengthening skills that will enable them – me – to excel as individuals and as a group, and to meet great complex challenges. I was made more aware of this in Mexico, when the social fabric of my quiet little traditional country village unraveled after a cartel moved into the local hacienda, the main house of the original walled 16^th century ranch-estate that covered the valley, made it an operational base, and was trafficking illegal drugs and who knows what else in great big shiny new SUVs between 1 and 4 am every night down the village main street past the plaza. The local murder rate skyrocketed over a four or five year period, until the state of Michoacán drove them out recently. A lot of young guys I knew personally, guys who had been IN MY HOME, either killed somebody, or were killed. Dead mutilated bodies in pieces were found in black plastic garbage bags on a dirt road outside of town past the cancha, the town soccer field on the other side of the highway. In the beginning the cartel dropped leaflets everywhere in the village letting us know they’d come to town, and why they had killed the people in the bags. Thievery and violence and crime of every kind multiplied, including bullying and extortion, which they even tried on me, inspiring me to shelter with my Uncle Eddie in Seattle. It’s a tiny inbred village where everybody knows everything about everybody, very easy to keep statistics on. The village needed a strong set of beliefs, firm moral principles like the Puritans and other U.S. Calvinist groups had held on to for centuries, and like my parents taught me, to get them through all this, I thought, and at first it didn’t seem to me that their medieval Roman Catholic faith and values, what there was of them, or their belief in constitutional law and order, corrupt and childlike as it was, or whatever values they held dear, were going to get them through this chaos; because basic human rights and civilized decency had gone out the window fast, and no one seemed to be able to wiggle their way out of passivity and think of anything that could be done about the situation. The Mexican Federales and the Michoacán state government were impotent, and local strong men other than mafia, including the mayor, seemed to be too. The state governor went to Texas for a surgical operation and never came back. I began to think more about core values, and whether ours in America were strong enough in our people, either, to meet the challenge of extremist Muslim terrorism, or international cartels, or whatever other new and surprising challenge might pop up in the states or globally. I became aware that the strict Protestant Christian values my parents had implanted in me had actually gotten me and my generation through an AWFUL lot in life, and had gotten America through several hundred years of severe crazy crises. We hadn't just gotten through. We'd gotten stronger and bigger with every crisis. So, in my writing, since coming to Mexico in 2001 and seeing how Mexico only HALF-works by comparison with the states, and especially in the last few years, for this and other reasons, I’ve focused much more on the core values contained in a ‘Calvinist’ or ‘neo-Calvinist’ worldview like that of my parents and our American forefathers.”

“Is that the key to your writing, then, to shine light on the core values of American Calvinism?”

“Well, let’s think. No, maybe not exactly. When I started writing, it was in 1959, age 16, the summer before high school senior year, it was a devotional handbook. I started out in my teens very religious Christian, and I’m finishing up my life that way again too, somewhat, it appears. But in between, over many decades I rejected Christianity, especially my parents' strict Protestant version of it, and looked more to the teaching of a guru from India and to a number of other religions, including Native American. Each one of these efforts helped me a lot. At times I was atheist or agnostic. So I think it’s safe to say that in my writing, I’ve always been contemplating what might be the best way people might fortify themselves against the most pressing difficulties of life, and I have tried different approaches.

"The purpose of my diaries in high school, college and med school was to reveal myself to myself, to get things expressed, and to help me think and sort things through. Then I wrote The Remaking right after medical school, 1970-71, age 27-28. That was to get personal balance. Wholeness. Centeredness. Then I started working on Tales of Waring in 74, that was to tell a good story, Bill Blackburn’s story about employee abuse and the culture clash between him and his boss, Waring, who showed arrogance of class, race, money and power. It also studied Waring’s artist’s life and his art, which was Americana and folklorish. Waring’s live and broadcast concerts, radio and TV, seemed aimed at celebrating the heart and soul of conservative traditional American culture, notably including Protestant religion and patriotic politics, and I was basically trying to wrap my head and heart around my parents’ generation’s lives and values, which Waring’s music summed up and represented. I was well into my rejection of my parents’ and Waring’s Calvinist Christian worldview by 1974, hut nonetheless was trying to see some good in Waring’s worldview as reflected in his musical art, if not in the way he behaved personally. His art raised him above his actual life, which was seedy. His life was seedy, whereas his art was the opposite of seedy, I guess that means fully flowered and beautiful. But then, as I kept re-working Tales of Waring over the years, other themes would emerge, like Freud and anti-Freud, and ancient Greek religion. That’s when I started exploring other religions; no, that started with The Remaking, when I spent the winter with Dlune’s grandfather who was a Dene shaman of the Chipewyan tribe in northwestern Canada. It’s complicated. I don’t know if I can make it simple for you. I can see that you would like a simple answer, but so far I’m having trouble making it simple for you.”

“Well, even with Tales of Waring, though, you were exploring Calvinism, both the beautiful musical art that a Calvinist culture could produce, and the ugly Calvinist artist that performed the beautiful musical art.”

“Yes, well maybe I saw myself in that combination somewhere. Something has drawn me to Waring for years and years. Maybe you’re right. I hate to think my behavior is ugly all of the time. I know it is some of the time. But according to Bill, Fred Waring’s behavior was ugly ALL of the time, except when he was rehearsing and conducting a concert. Then he was impeccable, an artist of highest caliber. And Bill was a very perceptive analyst of human nature. And he knew music and the world of music, 'the industry'. I would tend to think that he got Waring pegged about as rightly as anyone could. Virginia Waring’s biography of her husband, by contrast, would have to be taken with a grain of salt, I think, since she clearly wanted to defend him as much as possible.”^[20]

“I should add,” Sammy said, “that Tales of Waring is the next book we plan to ‘look at’ online, after we finish with Hooked on Cocaland, which has gotten snagged by foot-dragging, travel, spring fever and too many other things, but should be online VERY SOON!!!” he ended up shouting, as if aiming at someone present, hopefully none other than himself, chairman of the editing and publishing board.

"We might do Joey next," said the Dr., and Sammy half-smiled, hiding his reaction from the public.

“What happened after that?” said a girl at a second mike, which had just been set up.

“Well, I meant to add that one of the ‘other themes’ that popped up in Tales of Waring as I worked on it over the years was my own, our own, Dlune’s and my ‘fairy tale fantasy’ of marriage and friendship and baby-making.

“Anyway, then with its sequel, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, which is already on line in ‘look-at’ form, the issues were the same as Waring, since Legs still dealt with Fred Waring except with the addition of a shift of emphasis – thanks partly to the Legs pundits – to inner peace of a kind taught in the orient, i.e., Hindu; and Buddhist. Issues included maya entrapment, ego inflation, meditation, and centering and deep happiness. The book, in a sense, presented a real happy party in the Blackburn living room, underlain by deep contentment, and how we thought one might achieve such a state. Then, with Hooked on Cocaland, which is about to come online, as Sammy says, by the time we got to putting it online, in other words in the last couple of years, I’ve become increasingly aware of a sort of overall pattern which our first questioner might like to hear about, since he is looking for some kind of unity. I became aware of a movement over time from chaos to order.”

The Dr. went to the white board behind the table and wrote a bunch of words in two columns. The left-hand column was entitled ‘chaos/conflict’, the right-hand ‘order/peace’. In the left column he wrote ‘Remaking parts I and II’; then, below it, ‘Tales of Waring’; and below that, ‘early parts of Hooked on Cocaland’. And on the right: Remaking part III; then, below that, ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’, and below that, opposite ‘early Hooked on Cocaland’, he wrote ‘later parts of Hooked on Cocaland’.

He sat down again and said into the mike: “I realized that column 2 trumped column 1 subsuming column 1 under and within it, absorbing it, outshining it, over-glorying it; to my mind, anyway.”

what Dr. Lorenzo
wrote on the board as in previous paragraph
"'I realized that column 2 trumped column 1 subsuming column 1 under and within it,
absorbing it, outshining it, over-glorying it; to my mind, anyway'."

The first kid had not been chased from the mike. As they said afterward, ‘One high school student stole the whole show and dominated the questioning because of lack of organization’. But most felt it had turned out superbly, thanks to the one kid, and they congratulated him for it.

The persistent student’s next question was the real show-stopper, however; and Sammy had known he would ask it, from having talked with him.

“Does the overall theme of ALL your writing have anything to do with the recently added Bible verse on the home page of the website where the ‘look at’ series is being published?”

The Dr. reached for the mike but Sammy grabbed it. “That verse,” he said, “is Psalm 33:1, ‘Praise is becoming to the upright’.”

“You have to understand,” said the Dr., “that I was not raised on Coyote lore, as many kids in the Pueblos of New Mexico are raised, including many of Sammy’s reading club students who are here tonight, and I was not raised on The Iliad and The Odyssey as most of the great writers, thinkers and leaders of Greece, Rome and the Western World have been. I was raised on The Bible and Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress, but mostly on the Bible, the Bible, and the Bible, Old Testament as much as New, if not more, since there is so much more of it, and it contains so much of worth, the Old Testament does. And so, when I go digging for an epigram to tack on to the front of a large artistic work, I'm just as likely to draw from Jung or Nietzsche as to come up with David or Samuel or Moses or Isaiah and so on, most of whom were writers as great as Homer or Aeschylus or Plato or Aristotle or the Baghavad Gita, or whatever writers other people would use for finding an epigram. The main places I’ve gone for inspiration over the years have been the Bible, Carl Jung, and Guru Garland. Although The Remaking, my first book, also drew heavily on Native American lore.

"Hemingway and Steinbeck each based at least one of their novel titles on a Bible verse, by the way, just to name two modern writers who drew from scripture in a big way. Just so you don't think I'm too much of an old fogey.^[21]

"And: old people tend to wax conservative and return to childhood roots. So...: when Sammy and Duvall first started the website, there was no epigram on the homepage at all. Then one day reading Psalms, I ran into the line about 'publishing', and it hit me it could be a nice splash to throw on the home page of the publishing site: “That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works,” which is Psalm 26:7. Instinct drove me to ask them to put it there, and instinct has kept it there.

"The ‘that I may’ construct is often a subjunctive kind of ancient way of asking God for something, I have learned, from studying Spanish, where they still, to this day, use that kind of subjunctive construction in common speech, by which what they really mean is: “Oh, God, please help me, that I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.” In such a grammatical construct (based on a verb’s ‘mood’, as derived from Latin) the words ‘Oh, God, please help me’ are UNDERSTOOD and never stated out loud. They are IMPLIED by the subjunctive form of the verb. So in my mind the verse requested superhuman help, either from the Judaeo-Christian God or from the Greek goddess-muse of poetry, if you will, that, in spite of all the craziness in me and my writing, the writing have something of the very highest caliber, namely, singing the glory of the Divine.

“That was my first interpretation of the verse. But lately I’ve realized that David, who composed that particular psalm, was saying in verses leading up to this verse, and then in this verse, that he looked forward to coming into the house of worship, the tabernacle. He looked forward to washing his hands as a sign of wishing to be clean-spirited and holy, and guiltless of breaking any Sacred Law. And he looked forward to circling round and round the altar like the priests would do and, at the same time, shouting, or proclaiming – or, as the King James says, ’publishing' – with the voice of thanksgiving – and telling of all thy wondrous works.’ I was at the Western Wall in old Jerusalem a few years ago and saw the same thing: the men came down and approached the wall, went through a roped off required passage, and then went up to or near the ‘Western Wall’, where the ancient temple with the altar used to be; and they would pray out loud and, wagging their heads, would say whatever holy things they were saying in Hebrew or whatever language they were using. Whether David did, or wanted to do, the things he listed literally, or whether he thought of doing them only figuratively and poetically in this psalm, I’m not certain, partly because I’m not smart enough in the Law to know whether his kingly rights would have allowed him to circle the altar like the priests, or smart enough in Biblical lore to know whether the ‘I’ in his psalms is always the real David or is a fictional ‘I’ at times. Someone in my reading audience probably knows the answer to these things. But, in any case, he wanted to ‘publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works'.

“A good, effective, healing doctor is characterized by ‘willingness to be known’, as the Rogerian school of psychotherapy said. I did research in medical school based on Carl Rogers' principles of doctoring and won a prize for my psychiatry research paper.^[22] Such a doctor lets his psychiatric patients get to know him a little, so they aren’t operating in a total impersonal cold vacuum; and so, I always used to let my patients get to know me some. The Freudians, however, said you should never divulge hardly anything about yourself, least of all your religion; and I followed that rule, too. But I stopped practicing psychiatry about ten years ago; so, with this Bible verse, I began to ‘let it be known,’ or ‘publish,’ if you will, the fact that beneath all of the apparent craziness in my writing there might be a common desire throughout all of it to sing the praises of the Creator; which sounds terribly CORNEEEEE in a post-modern environment, but the older I’ve gotten, the gutsier I’ve become in revealing the truth about myself and flying in the face of ‘political correctness’, as some call it. It’s just me, that’s all. That’s the way I was raised. Even back when I stopped going to church and went flying west in a blue Buick stolen from my father and wrote The Remaking like a crazy person, I had the same goal, I think, to sing the glory of life in this world and its ups and downs. At times when things got rocky it was harder to sing prettily, but so far I’ve always come back to a place where I could sing like a mockingbird about my life, and not just mope and complain about it. I didn’t have a DEEP reaction to this verse at first. It didn’t knock me over, I just thought it might be a nice STANDARD by which to write: with a sense of gratitude for big things and small, bad things and good, problems, chaos, conflict as well as order, peace, and happy homecoming; and to advertise the wonderful and even awesome – maybe even miraculous – things about life as I have experienced and understood it.

“I’ve always been shy about talking about God. Some may see this as uncourageous. At times it was because I didn’t really believe in God as much as I do now. Other times it was because it seemed like bad taste to talk about God, my experience of which and/or whom is so very private and deep and inexpressible, even unbelieving, all too often, that I would prefer not to try to put it into words any more than absolutely necessary. I prefer to IMPLY. But there was a risk I was actually hiding a truth about myself, and since TRUTH is the lodestone of my writing, and since old people don’t hardly give a darn what people think any more, I had the verse added to the web page, come what might. It was pushing it to put this verse out there as representing me because it said, in effect, that my writing was – and if not, should be – a way of saying thanks to God, but not just saying thanks, but even a way of PRAISING God. That's a pretty high standard to claim for yourself. And it's categorically un-postmodern and anathema. Against the rules.

"But even the very best artists break rules, you see. So I'm asking for a little toleration here.

“Sammy, did you leave a barf bag in each seat?

“Now....” The Dr. waited for audience noise of all kinds to subside, including some high-schoolish fake barfs, and loud burps, followed by a giggling spree. “...When I was young I heard a million prayers from family members, and it all just floated in space somewhere in my vicinity, hovering about a foot from my head and not necessarily entering into me, even though I was constantly breathing this air. I knew all the catchphrases of praise and thanksgiving and they went, so to speak, in one ear and out the other. I hated repeating them, partly because a quality thing repeated too many times may lose its value, like chewing gum.

“Or maybe, unconsciously, it was because I didn’t want to be too much like my corny preacher father. Who knows?

"Maybe I wasn't having a very positive experience of life at times.

“I went to an extremely religious college by my own choice, prayer at the beginning of every single class, chapel every single weekday for 25 minutes including sermon and hymn singing AND MORE PRAYER. This was too much for me, but I went because of a girl I’d met in Ocean City who I’d liked, who’d gone to Wrigley College. It was not my parents’ idea. It was all because of a girl, as so many important things are. My folks and my high school guidance counselors had suggested regular colleges that were good for pre-med. But once there, I dreaded being asked to pray. I hated hearing all the catchphrases come from my mouth that I’d heard repeatedly, millions of times, growing up. I liked better being quiet about whatever faith or religious experience I might be having. I was an introvert and disliked public speaking, especially on subjects of great depth requiring extra-potent adjectives, lingo and poetry. I preferred to do this, if I tried to express it at all (anywhere, or ever), IN WRITING, just between me and whoever or whatever “God” was. But I added that verse about ‘publishing’ to the home page because I felt it captured an important aspect of my writing that I hadn’t expressed much to myself or others, thanks and praise to God, corny as it sounds, antiquated, anti-modern, and however anathema to the postmodern and post-postmodern New York and Santa Fe higher art circles.

“I wanted my work to have a divine dimension. I wanted it to be blessed and baptized by Higher Power, by Father Sky and Mother Earth. Shiva and Vishnu and their crew. BY THE REAL POWER IN THE UNIVERSE BEHIND EVERYTHING, whatever you choose to call it, whatever tiny angle of it you've been able to grasp.

“And it just felt right. I’m trying to explain it to you, but maybe all these words and reasons and rationale fall flat. Instinct demanded I put it there, and it has stood the test of time. I think it may have a kind of consecrating effect. I hope.

“The second verse I asked to have added there a couple years later, one day when I was reading one of my Bibles – which doesn’t happen often, no matter how it may sound – and again it hit me that the three verses from the Sermon on the Mount together might serve as a kind of motto. Why hide the light of your inner self? A good Dr. is willing to be known, said the Rogerians, and I believed they were right: even if your inner truth included some darkness. But it also included some light. So: I hoped my writing was a ‘good thing I was doing’, as – ”

Here Sammy interrupted and read from notes he had brought, because he'd thought the student might take the discussion in this direction. He said: “These verses are Matthew 5:14-16, Phillips translation, and Jesus is speaking to his disciples and to those of the multitude on the shore of Lake Galilee (near Capernaum) who could hear him: 'You are the world's light – it is impossible to hide a town built on the top of a hill. Men do not light a lamp and put it under a bucket. They put it on a lamp-stand and it gives light for everybody in the house. Let your light shine like that in the sight of men. Let them see the good things you do and praise your Father in Heaven'.”

“So,” continued the Dr., '"Let them see the good things you do".' I hope my writing is a good thing I am doing, and if I let it shine, it may help someone to connect to what’s really important in a new or better way; or, as Jesus put it, using the lingo of 1^st century religious Jewish Palestine: ‘Let them see the good things you do and praise your Father in Heaven’.

“Again it was an instinct and the verse has stuck. The 3 quotes from the Bible on the home page, in fact, have become MY favorite part of Duvall’s home page. I don’t like the page otherwise and would like to see it updated and snazzier with html 'tables', videos and whirligigs, maybe even music. But I have never asked webmaster Duvall to pull any of the Bible quotations from the page, because they continue to ring true. And I’m fully aware that they could easily drive certain kinds of people away, maybe even many in this audience, and I’m sorry for that.

"The image of the 'city on a hill', by the way, derived from right here, the Sermon on the Mount, was a favorite of the super-Calvinist Puritans. And echoing them, U.S. Senators and Presidents have continued to use the image for hundreds of years to inspire Americans to buck up and shine in critical moments of our history, and to be a brilliant and excellent model for the rest of the world to follow.

“Now, as for the third quote from Scripture you asked about; and by the way, I still have a lot to say, so if you’re tired of standing you might want to sit down.”

Tired or not, the student wanted answers and barely blinked.

“Okay then! It was the third Bible quote in time, but I put it in the middle between the other two. And this happened just recently, April 2017, in fact, so you must have gone to the website very recently and you must have been really paying attention. It was the Friday before Palm Sunday, April 7, the day in Mexico when all the children get out of school for a two-week nationwide Holy Week Semana-Santa vacation, and populate the summery street and send their shouts of freedom through the warm dry sunny air and your open windows.

“Again, I was reading my Bibles for the first time in a very long time. I’d spent quite a while in Leviticus that particular day. My Uncle Eddie had finally sent me the version of the Old Testament which he, an expert, felt was the truest, closest translation to the ancient manuscripts, yet in readable modern English. I’d been complaining to him that there were too many outdated words and concepts in the antiquated King James Version I didn’t understand and it frustrated me. It was put together from Greek manuscripts and some English translations in 1611, after all, and English had changed a heck of a lot in five hundred years, a half a millennium! He’d said, ‘Well: then get the New American Standard Bible,’ but I hadn’t done so and I kept complaining, so he’d bought it for me and sent it to me (bless his good uncle heart) and finally, after my trip to Colorado from Mexico visiting family, seeing doctors and dentists, wrangling with Mexican consulates, struggling with an aging 2000 Ford Expedition, I’d gotten back home to Mexico, unpacked and settled in, and FINALLY picked a day when I felt the energy was right to be able to absorb supernatural grace in some measure.

“The new version had changed the old Leviticus King James term ‘tabernacles’ to ‘booths’ and it didn’t ring right: ‘Feast of Booths’ sounded clunky and prosaic, even unholy, like a phone booth or a ticket or snapshot-taking booth. The old King James term, ‘tabernacle’, I’d known well since early childhood when my parents gave me a flannelgraph book of cut-outs for telling the story of the boy Samuel. King James said Samuel’s mother took him to the ‘tabernacle’ very young and dedicated him to the priesthood, and the flannelgraph book had a big two-page richly colored TENT in royal blue, purple and scarlet stripes that repeated blue purple scarlet blue purple scarlet all over the tent that was ‘The Tabernacle’ where the ancient Israelites worshipped. It was just a Middle Eastern desert nomad tent, really, but an extra fancily colored one with extra special holy purpose. So I was tired of struggling through all this when I flipped to the next step in my usual ritual of Bible reading, my routine: Psalms: and Psalm 33 whizzed past. It was really easy to read in the new version, blink and it was over, but I liked one part: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, The People whom He has chosen for his own inheritance.”

“This should be engraved on the Capitol building, I thought, let alone the home page.

“When I was growing up, just after we won the 2^nd world war in '46, we all felt that we were that people. That’s how I was raised, and it’s how I gradually came to understand in later years, how much we had lost when we stopped believing such a Calvinist Christian notion as our forefathers had handed down to us. You have to understand that when I was born in '43, practically everybody in America was still going to church. As I matured in understanding, even though I had rebelled against all things Calvinist and Christian in the 60s, 70s and 80s, I began to realize that without a common set of deep core values, deeper even than the Constitution or founding documents, America would have a much harder time facing grave and complicated challenges. Commonly shared Calvinist Christian values had gotten the USA through a grubby revolution against England, a horrible, bloody, family-splitting civil war, 2 execrable world wars that killed millions and millions, and the nerve-wracking Cold War, when both giant superpowers were ready to incinerate each other and even the rest of humanity too with nuclear bombs, a massive test of our quality, and yet we had turned around and thrown our religion out the window, it seemed, totally unappreciative of its hokey but holy worth.

“So I went back and re-read that short psalm, obviously written originally to inspire the descendants of Abraham’s grandson, Israel, the Israelites, to brave it out and do it right as a nation; and a psalm which was then co-opted hundreds of years later by the Christians, who were a messianic sect breaking off from Judaism, for their own edification, because they too thought of themselves as a ‘chosen’ ‘nation’, and I got stuck in the very first verse on: “Praise is becoming to the upright.”

“Suddenly I had a visual image, very telling, and got the full meaning. It meant, when you see or hear someone praising G-d in a right and real and convincing way, it can give you an experience of beholding utter truth and beauty, because that was what had happened to me one day in Seattle, when I was visiting Uncle Eddie in the summer of 2014. A guy named Randy had come for a whole day, one day a week, every week I was there, months straight, to study the Bible with Eddie, and I’d sat in on it to break the monotony of their super-tame lifestyle, daily vegetable gardening, Sunday churchgoing, Tuesday prayer meeting, Thursday band practice, Saturday morning Greek New Testament study group, Saturday afternoon band concerts, and Sunday churchgoing again: much more tame and old fashioned and super-structured than even my parents had raised me. So Randy was a feisty, argumentative break, and the three of us tried to psych out everything from ‘In the beginning was the Word’ to ‘God is a spirit’.

“I got to know Randy a little and was amazed that anybody so rough around the edges could have been married at one time to a Seattle Seahawks cheerleader; and somebody said that he and she had produced a son.

“One day when Randy was not there the son came by, who was also a spiritual protegé of Eddie’s, about age 25, in the service, at a base down below Tacoma. He was with his girlfriend and was all grace and youth and beauty, very smooth, extremely well centered, not like Randy at all. And for some reason Eddie, after we’d all just sat there in the living room chatting a while, suggested we pray, and Randy’s son accepted the honor, and his prayer floored me. I was shocked.

"Most praying Protestant Americans might thank God for this and that, but mostly they focus on their wants and needs, please give us this, please please please let things be the way we think they should be; or if they launch into praise it just sounds old-hat and hackneyed. Hum ho. Or so heart-revealing as to be wrenchingly embarrassing. But Randy’s son’s prayer was simple perfection. It had a ring of beauty and elegance. It went up and up and stayed up and never came down. Not ‘up’ with holy-roller emotion, but ‘up’ with simple sane realization of what were the great things about life in God’s world. I couldn’t even take it all in. It was so shockingly astute, especially for some 25-year old dude from an army base, that later when we were rubbing elbows in the tiny crowded kitchen I said to the kid, in spite of my usual feigned disinterest in Uncle Eddie’s hyper-religious lifestyle, ‘How did you ever learn to pray like that? Are you a leader in your church, a youth group leader or Sunday School teacher, or something?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘we hardly even go to church,’ and he explained some circumstance that had led to this. ‘I’ve never heard a prayer like that in my whole life’, I said.

How could any army squirt of 25, with so little life or church experience, and in a post-modern age, possess the poetic wisdom to see life so positively, so grandly, so old-fashioned in his faith? I couldn’t figure it out and still can’t, and since I like to figure everything out, it was an event hard to forget; and when I saw those words, “Praise is becoming to the upright,” I understood them. Praying like that had made Randy’s son gorgeous. It ‘became’ him.

The Dr. paused here to drink from a water bottle he’d brought and the same student asked, “Does this third scripture quotation relate in some way to the overall point or drift of all of your art work put together – since it’s on the home page, I assume maybe you were feeling it covers all the books published at the website so far, and maybe even the two Mexican Picture Stories??? Is that your intention?”

Sammy said, “Good question. You are making me proud.” He turned to the special guest from Mexico. “Doctor, would you be willing to address this excellent question? We don’t want to put you through the wringer like they did your cousin, Barack Obama, and turn your hair and beard whiter still; so we can make this the last question if you’d like.”

“Didn’t he ask the same question before?” The Dr. frowned. “Did I forget to answer your last question?" He thought a bit. "I was trying to get there and got lost in the lead-up, I guess. That’s a habit of mine, getting lost in the lead-up. Okay, we’ll get there this time.” He swallowed and thought.

“The third scripture quotation, this last one, hit me like the others. My reaction to it was gut. It seemed so large, it loomed and took possession of me.

“I realized that I wanted people to understand that my art is, along with whatever else it might be, an act of praise, not because I wanted to be made beautiful in their eyes, but because I wanted their lives to be made beautiful by it, the way Randy’s son’s prayer made me feel beautiful.

“And I realized that – as I showed earlier on the board – my work has drifted from conflict toward peace, chaos toward order, complaint toward party. A lot of my writings are extended parties; part III of The Remaking, for example, is the honeymoon Dlune and I enjoyed in the Canadian Rockies. All of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs is a party at Bill and Betty Ann’s house, and everyone is in a really good mood compared with previous interviews at their house. In fact, it’s a party within a party, because Bill is recounting the rollicking story of their romance and marriage, and then their honeymoon at the 1972 White House Christmas Party. And the first part of Tales of Waring is a rollicking party too, though there’s a lot of simultaneous mental confusion and tension.

“Almost all of Hooked on Cocaland, too, despite the constant wacko bitching and moaning, is a party. The whole two weeks in Colombia is a celebration of Robbie’s homecoming to Colombia after 13 years trapped in the states by visa requirements. His family and friends are also celebrating me, since I helped their Robbie when he got stranded in the states; they’re celebrating our friendship; and they’re also celebrating my coming out of a shell after two years of psychotic depression.

“What’s being celebrated in my writing, as I have come to understand all of this, is life. My life. And everybody’s around me. Our life together. And since life and friendship are sacred, the celebrations are sacred events. That’s one of the reasons why in Tales of Waring there’s so much emphasis on Greek gods and goddesses. Divine energy of various kinds imparts sacredness to the story. The ancient Hebrews saw their lives as sacred, too. They had been selected as a group by God, they believed, as Moses taught them, sanctified by God to a holy purpose. And this is what our forefathers believed about themselves too, if you delve into John Calvin’s theology and read the diaries and sermons of the first leaders of the Plymouth Plantation and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and study the theology of John Calvin behind the Scottish Presbyterians who settled the Appalachian frontier and backcountry, or the Quakers that settled the Delaware Valley and neighboring New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Even the Anglican English Cavalier gentry that fled the hyper-Calvinist extremists during and after the English Civil War and colonized and became the leaders of the Virginia colony, and Maryland, though almost Catholic in many ways in the way they worshipped in the Church of England, also believed that they were part of what Calvin called the ‘elect’, the ‘chosen’ of God, as claimed in one of the 'thirty nine articles’ that defined the beliefs of these Anglicans, later called Episcopalians. A great many of the leading first settlers in the 13 English colonies, and then their descendants too, therefore, saw themselves and their lives as sacred, and their trek to the New World to create a new life there as also sacred therefore.

“People used to ask me, Why don’t you write about that crazy patient who sued you not once but twice, or write about other things I NEVER had any interest in writing about.

“I’ve only written about events that appeared to me to have a 4^th, 5^th or 6^th dimension. And that extra dimension often had something to do with sacred celebration.

“This is how I’ve been seeing my writing recently, anyway.

"Homer, if you notice in The Iliad and The Odyssey, constantly imbues his stories with the divine. Gods and goddesses are forever behind the scenes pulling strings for their favorites, or are actually a part of the scene, in conversation with leading characters. It's very clear that for the Greeks, Homer's form of storytelling explained their history and lives as divinely invested. It celebrated, even praised the downfall of Troy and the loss of life as divine destiny.

“Praise is a kind of party, but a holy party, like Easter.

“High School and college kids party like nuts at Easter because they’re thrilled to be alive and young at springtime, ready for anything, ready for love or whatever, bad or good, and they think they’re indomitable and indestructible and eternal, so they celebrate spring break by taking off all their clothes, drinking gallons of keg beer and screwing total strangers in plain sight of millions on Padre Island and Daytona Beach. A prayer of praise is a similar thing but in discreet and decorous language, like Psalm 33, and a little humbler and better channeled than a nude beach party, because focused on the Judaeo-Christian ‘God’. We could probably find the same kind of ecstatic language of praise somewhere in Homer, if we tried, or maybe in Hesiod, or the dionysiac ancient Greek comedies, or any other ancient Greek writing. But I’m familiar with the literature of the Bible, so my inspiring literature of choice is often that. And I challenge you to listen to this beautiful literary language with the same degree of extra-cultural perspective you would lend to Homer’s Achilles praying to Athena, Odysseus praising Zeus, or Hector psychically foreseeing the downfall of Troy in grand and eloquent, epic, almost religious, images and terms. Great literature takes us to another dimension, unless we prevent it with a clouded, prejudiced mind.”^[22a]

Sammy had brought a print-out of the psalm from the New American Standard Bible and he handed it to the Dr. with a big smile.

“You knew they were going to ask these questions, didn’t you, you young whippersnapper, you. Okay. Ready? This is poetry. It’s ecstatic religious poetry from a particular religion. The purpose of any religion is to give sacred significance to everyday things. Every time you hear the word ‘LORD’, imagine ‘Zeus’, if you like, if you can’t stand the Judaeo-Christian idea of ‘God’; or just use your barf bag:

"'Sing for joy in the LORD, O you righteous ones;

Praise is becoming to the upright.

Give thanks to the LORD with the lyre;

Sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings.

Sing to Him a new song;

Play skillfully with a shout of joy.

For the word of the LORD is upright;

And all His work is done in faithfulness.

He loves righteousness and justice;

The earth is full of the lovingkindness of the LORD.

"'By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,

And by the breath of His mouth all their host.

He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap;

He lays up the deeps in storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the LORD;

Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.

For He spoke, and it was done;

He commanded, and it stood fast.

The LORD nullifies the counsel of the nations;

He frustrates the plans of the peoples.

The counsel of the LORD stands forever,

The plans of His heart from generation to generation.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,

The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance.

"'The LORD looks from heaven;

He sees all the sons of men;

From his dwelling-place He looks out

On all the inhabitants of the earth,

He who fashions the hearts of them all,

He who understands all their works.

The king is not saved by a mighty army;

A warrior is not delivered by great strength.

A horse is a false hope for victory;

Nor does it deliver anyone by its great strength.

"'Behold, the eye of the LORD is on those who fear Him,

On those who hope for His lovingkindness;

To deliver their soul from death,

And to keep them alive in famine.

Our soul waits for the LORD;

He is our help and our shield.

For our heart rejoices in Him,

Because we trust in His holy name.

Let Thy lovingkindness, O LORD, be upon us,

According as we have hoped in Thee'.

“That’s what you get when you ask an extremely personal question, you see, you get somebody quoting holy writ for hours and hours.

“The whole thing is, the psalmists were exceedingly great poets, just as Homer was, and just as Randy’s son was, stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Tacoma. I have no idea what he said that day. Maybe he doesn’t know either. I just know it was simple and positive, and gorgeous, and transported me.

“I’ve reached in that direction in my writing at times, I think, sometimes unconsciously. I don’t know if I’ve gotten there though.”

The student was not finished. “Are you saying that in your writing you are celebrating the sacredness of your life?”

“Mine and all life. All of Creation, in fact. If the Creator is holy, Creation must be. He who bombs women and children forgets the sacredness of life. I’m not saying it’s the whole explanation behind my writing, nor am I claiming to understand my writing any better than anyone else might, necessarily. Sammy probably understands me better than I do. It’s just one way of looking at it, I think. A lot of writers write and write, and then, after it’s all done, wonder, ‘What in the world was that all about?’ We go through stages trying to understand what it is we have created. Sometimes other people have to point out to us what it is we have done in our writing. The author of Psalm 33 may have been intending a psalm or song of praise, as the first verse says, but despite his intention he was not just praising, if you notice. He – or she – was:... – ” The Dr. went to the board again, holding the paper Sammy had given him, looking at it while saying aloud each item that he put on the board in big letters:

“Revving up the people,

“Instructing the people,

“Educating the people,

“Recalling past events of grand import,

“Describing divinity,

“Edifying, inspiring the people to greatness, to celebration, to thanksgiving, to artful song, to piety and awe, even to love of God, and a deeply penetrating understanding of themselves,

“Offering perspective sub specie aeternitatis, meaning from the point of view of eternity,

“Showing them how to think and pray,

“Promising rewards for right living, and finally,

“Offering a closing benediction, or blessing, a formal closing consecration.

“Randy’s son’s ‘prayer’, which was really more of a psalm or song, of praise, might have had any or all of this in it, it was so big-hearted, or I never would have been hit so hard, and I would like to think my writing, in its own weird way, might occasionally reach such a dimension and have such an impact – I wish. So I stuck that verse on the home page as a kind of reminder to me to keep looking up, like Psalm 33 does.

“Finally, the very last line asks the Divine for a favor. Most people pray for something. Randy’s son did not. He was pure praise, pure ecstasy. He seemed divine while he prayed, extraordinary; though later in the kitchen he seemed ordinary again.

"I should add that Joey Rosenblatt's guru affected the way I write too, I think. Having his mother and father in the first row here tonight has helped me remember. Joey died recently and his effect on my life and writing comes up again and again at the website. It was through Joey that I met Guru Garland, and for years I've kept some of the guru's words handy to remind me of something important." The Dr. dug out his wallet and extracted a piece of folded paper, opened it up and said into the mike: "Guru Garland is describing here the way he wants to affect his devotees, through his teaching and meditation, and it may help you understand why at times my writing is as much celebration and singing as – or more than just – plot tension:

"'I am like the tuner. I'll make sure the instrument is in tune, but you play.

After the instrument is tuned, I give it back to you and say: "Play. You play."

With this instrument, create the sweetest music you have ever created.
Play like you have never played before. Play with your heart. For whom?
Play for yourself. A lot of people don't understand that: "That's selfish."
Do you want to know the secret of the best musicians in this world? They play for themselves.
When they do, it sounds wonderful to anyone who hears it.
But when a musician starts playing for others, the music is over.
A lot of musicians will be playing, and then all of a sudden, close their eyes.
They don't want to see anyone. They just want to be one with the music,
because it has to come from the heart. It cannot come from the head.
Sing for yourself. Play for yourself. Play and enjoy.
That's when real music comes out. You are alive. You have that beauty in you.
Accept that. How fortunate you are, to be able to feel that beauty and joy in your life'.^[22b]

The audience mikes were empty, and Sammy seized the moment to thank people for coming and offering the author, by their presence and response, the honor and recognition he so rightly deserved; and he asked his after-school reading club students to stick around for a few minutes.

Dr. Lorenzo was certain, somehow, that they were not finished with him. Throughout the applause he kept feeling it. Something was unfinished, and Sammy reminded him that the students wanted to take him out for late night tacos.

They ushered him in first, trapping him against the wall in the giant booth with his chief inquisitor straight across, and after tacos, began talking about the evening.

“Dr. Lorenzo,” asked the same student, who by now felt like a new young friend, “do you consider yourself to be ‘upright’?”

“I knew you were saving up something. No, not really.”

“But isn’t that what the verse says? It seems to imply that the person about to do the praising is already ‘upright’.”

“Do you know what upright means?”

“I looked it up.”

“And?”

“'Strong moral rectitude'.”

“Yeah. No, I’m only upright when asleep maybe, probably not then either. I think the psalmist, who was not David in this case, apparently, was being so upbeat he – or she – didn’t want to remind the people, the Israelites, that they were all imperfect. It wasn’t the proper moment for that, so there are a few places in the Psalms where the people are addressed or referred to as if already and by default they are assumed to be, and therefore ARE, ‘upright’; but hopefully the wise and humble among them would have remembered they were only human and that the psalmist was simply flattering them, in a sense, by giving them the benefit of the doubt. Just for the moment. I’m sure Randy’s son was human and fallible, but in speaking of him tonight I never mentioned that imperfect aspect of him either, because the emphasis of my subject was so upbeat.

“I looked it up too, in the Vine’s that my uncle also gave me, which translates the Hebrew ‘yasar’ as ‘upright; righteous; right; just’. It says that God is yasar, and that the believer follows him in attempting to be the same.^[23] Some of the ancient Jews really did try very hard to follow every one of God’s sacred laws to the letter, some of the modern ones still do, and some Christians have lived the same way. David says in his psalms at times that he has followed every rule, like in Psalm 26, where he markets himself to God by talking like a used car salesman, stressing his good points and failing to mention the slightest fault in himself. But, standard interpretation of Scripture, whether Jewish, Catholic or Protestant, allows that no one ever reached the level of uprightness of God, except Jesus Christ after his Baptism. If you think about all of the personalities in Scripture, from Adam to St. Paul, no one comes up to upright perfection except Christ, who was the Jewish 'Messiah', according to Christian belief. St. Peter was a mess. Even Samuel, Sammy’s namesake, though he seemed headed for perfection, and was such a genius saint in childhood that the entire nation of Israel called him ‘a prophet’, made mistakes at times.^[24] Everybody screws up, and the Bible is not shy about it. Homer’s writing is the same. Odysseus is constantly screwing up. Achilles is the worst. Every Greek warrior on the beach at Troy knows Achilles is messed up. No one is perfect, and there is no equivalent of Christ in Greek mythology. Dionysus is anything but upright. Hercules screwed up mightily. Even the Greek gods and demigods are fucked by Biblical standards, all of them. The Catholics do come close to slipping into grave error when they affirm by papal decree that all of the crazy, degraded, corrupt and/or exceedingly human and imperfect snot-sniffing popes are ‘infallible’, or Mary, mother of Jesus, or Mother Theresa, or whoever. There may be some Catholics who are confused on this issue, but I think most religious Jews and Calvinists, these days, are way too sin-conscious to fall into that trap as often.”

“Do you think people might misunderstand that verse then, when they see it on the home page? Doesn’t it sound arrogant to imply that somebody you know, maybe even you, might be ‘upright’, or ‘strongly morally rectitudinous’, or ‘righteous’?”

“Well, I think people misunderstand me all the time. I’ve gotten used to it.”

“But why make it harder for them by putting a verse on your home page that is so easy to misunderstand?”

“Well, maybe we need to put this discussion into the website somewhere, and refer to it right on the home page where Psalm 33:1 is quoted. Would that satisfy you?”

“Maybe. It’s a shot in the right direction at least. Can I think about it and let you know?”

Sammy said he would get each one of them the other’s email address, so that they could continue discussions of this sort via cyberspace; but, sadly, the Dr. was tired and needed to go home, he said.

Dr. Lorenzo did not fight this last suggestion. But he said to Sammy so all heard, “Maybe you should consider this man for your editorial board.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Sammy said noncommittally, for no one rose to such status easily, in his mind. He would study the idea hard, he said.

Driving home he seemed ecstatic. The Dr. asked why.

“You proved a point tonight,” said Sammy, “a claim I’ve been making for years.”

“What’s that?”

“That one of the best things about your writing, and you, is your revolutionary sermons, what Joey Rosenblatt called your ‘rants’.”

“No comment.”

It never had been – nor would it ever become – his dream to be like his preacher father. Sammy knew this and knew exactly how he felt about it.

And if the world’s leading expert on mj lorenzo, Samuel Oké Martinez, wanted to rib him about it....

OK!!!!

...So be it

Two days later The New York Times reported that the story of this question-answering event was 'already legendary all over the world', having spread through the social media cyberverse of the Dr.'s following and then beyond.

And for days afterward Dr. Lorenzo kept hearing a spectacular hymn from childhood in his head:

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but Thou art mighty;
Hold me with Thy powerful hand;
Bread of heaven, Bread of heaven,
Feed me till I want no more,
Feed me till I want no more.

Dr. Lorenzo
before and during eating a carnitas taco

Dr. Lorenzo at his dining table in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, Christmas 2016
double-diamond mandala of his design (on wall)
made of decorative Spanish-style talavera glazed ceramic tiles he bought all over Mexico
winter garb explained by absence of indoor heating in ordinary Mexican houses
fat appearance explained by too many delicious carnitas tacos^[25]
(photos by Judith)

“ 'Ok', said the student. 'So maybe The Remaking was or is a "mandala".
What about your other works? Do they fit into the Remaking mandala?
Are they separate visions that get tacked on to your Remaking mandala like Shiva’s many arms?
Is your entire life’s oeuvre of art a single unit of some kind?
Or are they just fragments of a picture you were never fully able to pull together into a unit'?”

^[1] Cuchulainn, pronounced cooHOOlinn, “...chief hero of the medieval Ulster Cycle, the so-called ‘Cycle of the Knights of the Red Branch’ – would suddenly burst like an eruption, both overwhelming himself and smashing everything around.” Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 330 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949, 1968). Nevertheless, Campbell, a first class scholar and expert on the matter, had no doubt that Cuchulainn, despite his seeming loss of control and destructiveness, or maybe even partly because of it, deserved the distinguished and rare label of 'culture hero'.

^[2] Frank Waters, The Man Who Killed the Deer (New York: Washington Square Press, 1942, 1970, 1971). A novel about a man caught between northern New Mexico Native American culture and the white Anglo culture, in both of which he had been raised, and in neither of which he felt quite at home therefore. Although it tells a story about the Taos Pueblo, not San Juan Pueblo, for many years among Sammy’s after-school students at Española High, many of whom, like Sammy, have been Native American in whole or in part, it has been very popular; for, the local San Juan Pueblo and the Taos Pueblo, further to the north, are similar in many ways.

^[3] ¡Chinga tu madre!: an extremely violent and scandalous Mexican gutter invective that when translated through a dozen of the very grossest meanings can end up, when finally watered down, meaning to rob your best friend, or bite the hand that feeds you, as Juan Carlos was doing. The Dr. felt that if Mexican Nobel Literature prize-winner Octavio Paz could get so much mileage out of the expression in his Labyrinth of Solitude, where he used it to analyze the deepest macho character of his own Mexican people, it might be potent enough to get Juan Carlos’ attention. But in general Dr. Lorenzo always told non-Mexicans to avoid using the phrase ‘chinga tu madre’ with Mexicans because of its multi-layered complexity and the risk that if used wrongly – or even rightly – they could end up in a beautiful, glowing wood, see-through glass-top coffin. See Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Chapter 4 (p. 65ff): "The Sons of La Malinche," where Paz analyzes the Mexican masculine cult of machismo and its relationship to the way Mexicans use the verb chingar (fuck; screw). (See Bibliography.) See also David Burke, Street Spanish Slang Dictionary & Thesaurus, p. 64. (See Bibliography.)

^[4] Feliz Navidad: Spanish for ‘Merry Christmas’ (literally: Happy Nativity).

^[5] Dr. Lorenzo said the best recording he had found of this chorus, and of The Messiah in general, was by John Eliot Gardiner conducting his Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, a 1983 Phillips 6-record set. Gardiner had paid special attention to strict rhythm and emphatic choral attack ON THE VERY SPLIT BEAT, seemingly in the way Handel MUST have intended it, since the result was so much more powerful and convincing, even electric, than any other way of interpreting. And it made sense, he said, since most Baroque music, even sacred, was based on baroque era dance rhythms. Furthermore, unlike many Christmas choirs, he said, Gardiner’s people were obviously expert in general in the difficult high-technical art of Baroque fine singing; which had been all but forgotten until Gardiner and a few others re-discovered and revived the art in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

^[6] Samuel J. Schultz, The Old Testament Speaks (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 307f.

^[7] The Italian director Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth was something like seven hours long and was made for serialization on television, during Easter week. It came out in 1978, at about the same time that mj lorenzo first got seriously interested in Joey Rosenblatt’s guru and decided to go check him out for himself, in person, in Rome, Italy.

^[8] Ann Charters, editor, The Portable Jack Kerouac, New York: Penguin Books, 1995, 1996, p. 139ff.

^[9] Carl Gustav 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: Princeton University Press, 1959; 2nd ed., 1968.) This essay was originally published as an afterword/commentary on Paul Radin’s The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken Books, 1972) along with a companion commentary by Karl Kerényi. See Bibliography under Jung; and Radin. It is referred to at length in the ‘Introduction’ to the present work, a look at mj lorenzo’s eleventh book Hooked on Cocaland, as a resource for understanding one important aspect of mj lorenzo. For this reason Sammy had his students read both during the same month, so as to discuss them together.

^[10] Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 125

^[11] Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir (New York: Perigree Books, 1976), p. 117.

^[12] Ibid., p. 130.

^[13] Ibid., p. 26: “Jung told me more than once that he could never have analyzed me nor understood my dreams had he not been a parson’s son himself, and probably it is my being a parson’s daughter that gives me any understanding of this aspect of Jung’s childhood...”

^[14] Dietrich Schwanitz, La cultura: Todo lo que hay que saber. (Madrid: Santillana Ediciones Generales, S.L., 2002) The Spanish title means: ‘Culture: all you need to know’. The original title in German was Bildung: Alles was mann wissen muss (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1999), which meant ‘Toward a proper character-forming liberal arts education: all you need to know’. For a number of years this book, quite popular in Europe, having been translated into a number of Continental languages, had for some strange reason never been translated into English. Dr. Lorenzo did not know whether, as of 12/2016 it might have been, or not. He knew it only in its Spanish translation.

^[15] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

^[16] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Considered a classic in the field of scientific Sociological/Historical research. Dr. Lorenzo’s copy, an English translation of the 95-page scientific monograph published in German in 1905, he downloaded free from the University of Virginia’s ‘American Studies Program’ website, where it was published in 2001. It is not about Protestant ethic in general, but rather about Calvinist Protestant ethic in particular. Weber’s mother was a pious Calvinist, his father a partying Lutheran, and puzzled by it all as a little boy, he eventually made a scientific study of the Calvinist side to understand why his mother was so much more serious, sincere, dedicated, and self-sacrificing as a result of her faith, than his father, as a result of his, who guzzled beer and partied like Martin Luther himself.

^[17] Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). The book's middle section, namely "Part II: Too Many Preachers," and large parts of the long 'Introduction', lay bare the wish of contemporary American Quasi-Calvinism (Evangelical and Fundamentalist Protestants and related others) to take over the U.S. government.

^[18] Fred M. Donner, "Muhammed and the Caliphate: Political History of the Islamic Empire up to the Mongol Conquest," which is Chapter 1 in The Oxford History of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): pages 9 and 10 enumerate, as “drawn from the traditional narratives” (p. 6), the historical instances of violence committed under Muhammed’s own personal direction between 622 and his death in 632. People opposing him were “...exiled..., enslaved, or executed....; Muhammed... launched raids against Meccan caravans, seizing valuable booty and hostages.... he used... promises of material gain, or, on occasion, outright force to bring recalcitrant groups.... By this time [approaching the year 632] Muhammed’s position as the most powerful political leader in western Arabia had become apparent to all...”

^[19] Aniela Jaffe, ed., C. G. Jung: Word and Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 76-95, chapter entitled "The Mandala," shows (and explains with text) natural mandalas from nature (fossils, eggs), as well as man-made mandalas of the stone age, and mandala-like (1) city designs (Mexcaltitlan, Mexico), (2) Danish Viking military camps, (3) Navaho sand paintings, (4) Tibetan meditations, (5) modern art, (6) works by extraordinary Swiss peasants; and several mandalas by the extraordinary Swiss citizen Carl Gustav Jung; along with explanations: most of the mandalas, in Jung's case, being diamond-shaped.

^[20] Virginia Waring, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

^[21] When Hemingway finished writing his novel about his own young and disillusioned 'Lost Generation' in Paris after horrific, vomitous WWI, he was floundering for a title and Gertrude Stein suggested he name it 'The Sun Also Rises', a phrase from the book of Ecclesiastes in The Bible, Chapter 1, which described disillusionment: "...vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose..." (verses 2-5). The title of Steinbeck's novel, East of Eden, is borrowed from the end of Chapter 3 of Genesis, verses 23 and 24, when God throws Adam and Eve out of Paradise (Eden) toward the eastward: "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life."

^[22] "Florence Man Wins Prize In Research. Philadelphia ‒ A Florence man received one of 16 prizes for outstanding research papers presented last night by medical students of the University of Pennsylvania at the School of Medicine's Undergraduate Medical Association Day observance. Mortimer John Lorenzo of 209 Broad St., Florence, was awarded the 'Dr. Robert M. Toll Prize' for his paper on 'Patient Expectations and Desires and Satisfaction with Treatment in the Receiving Ward of Pennsylvania Hospital'. Lorenzo is a third-year medical student." Camden Courier, Camden, New Jersey, some time in the spring of 1968. Regardless of what the Courier said, Dr. Lorenzo always remembered his prize as having been for the 'Best Paper in Psychiatry', which was the definition of the Toll Prize.

^[22a] No more than five minutes into the first pages of The Iliad, Achilles is already in conversation with Athena, as the Dr. suggested; he is not praying to her, however, or praising her, but hearing her instruct him to stop brawling with Agamemnon over women. Indeed it is not easy in the early pages of The Iliad to find anything resembling a pure high-spirited prayer of praise such as Psalm 33 exemplifies, probably because everyone is arguing and out of sorts. Achilles does praise his mother, the goddess Thetis, but only to flatter her in hopes of getting her to seek him a favor from Zeus: "Ofttimes in my father's house have I heard you glory in that you alone of the immortals saved the son of Saturn from ruin, when the others, with Juno, Neptune, and Pallas Minerva would have put him in bonds. It was you, goddess, who delivered him by calling to Olympus the hundred-handed monster whom gods call Briareus..." Similarly, in the early pages of The Iliad, Achilles does not pray to or praise Zeus, as the Dr. suggested he might; but Agamemnon does, in Book II: "Zeus, most glorious, supreme, that dwellest in heaven, and ridest upon the storm-cloud, grant that the sun may not go down, nor the night fall, till the palace of Priam is laid low, and its gates are consumed with fire. Grant that my sword may pierce the shirt of Hector about his heart, and that full many of his comrades may bite the dust as they fall dying round him." The prayer praises the god with token flattery in order to manipulate him into granting victory in war. As for the end of The Iliad, again, when you might have expected the victors to be praising and thanking one god or another, nothing of the sort may be found, for Achilles and the Achaeans are grieving their dead and fighting organized boxing matches over the spoils of war. In sum, we have been unable to verify that any of the Dr.'s supposed examples of prayer to Greek gods exist in Greek literature, in the literal sense, though our search has not been exhaustive, since we only checked a few chapters. It may be best to understand them as 'theoretical', not actual examples, therefore, unless someone can show that the Dr.'s 'examples' actually exist. (All quotes are from the Butler translation. See Bibliography under 'The Iliad'.)

^[22b] Verbatim from a live satsang (inspirational message) delivered to his followers by Guru Maharaj Ji, also known as Maharaji, Indian birth name Prem Rawat. It was once published at the website "Words of Peace," a website that still exists as of April, 2017: www.wopg.org ; and is maintained by his followers.

^[23] W. E. Vine, Merrill F. Unger, William White, Jr., Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1985), p. 273, under 'upright'.

^[24] See in The Bible, for example, the beginning of the book of I Samuel chapter 8, where Samuel is said to have appointed his sons as 'judges' over the Israelites. The Pilgrim Bible (see Bibliography under 'Holy Bible') comments in a footnote to 8:3, "This was not right. Only God had the right to appoint the judge. Samuel should have sought God's will, and appointed those whom He chose, whether they were his sons or not." Harper's Bible Commentary (p. 274) criticizes Samuel further. When the people, displeased with Samuel's two sons as their judges, asked for 'a king' like neighbor nations had, to judge them instead, Samuel revealed 'a fragile ego stung by rejection', when he saw this request as a 'threat to himself'. (See Bibliography under 'Harper's'.)

^[25] The 'bread' of unleavened cornmeal tortillas which is wrapped around the pork 'carnitas' is not the same as the 'Bread of Heaven' in the hymn quoted just above. The former is physical. The latter is spiritual, i.e., psychological. To be filled with the former until you want no more gives stomach satisfaction, or maybe even nausea or pain. To be filled with the latter Bread until you want no more is ecstasy. It is possible to feel so rightly filled by the Bread of Heaven, you forget stomach hunger and every other kind of longing or lack. The hymn is the great Welsh 'Cwm Rhondda', which in Wales is sung on special occasions including important Welsh rugby matches. To the Jews the 'bread from heaven' was 'manna'. To Christians who have believed in the full gospel as taught by Christ, the 'Bread of Heaven' in the hymn is Christ, as taught and thoroughly elaborated by Jesus himself, in the gospel of John, chapter 6. Even some of his disciples were shocked and put off by this teaching of his at first, and walked off and never came back; because they did not understand that he was talking about SPIRITUAL, i.e., psychological bread, not physical bread which latter only 'Feeds the body, but not the soul'. (Who sings that song?)

patio garden with
tile wall, multicolor glazed Spanish pots and a variety
of flowers all colors