How to Understand a Storyteller

or

A Long Answer to a Short Question

Hercules taming Cerberus

the three-headed canine monster

that guarded the gates to the Underworld[1]

“The analogy of Hercules would come to provide mj lorenzo

a whole world

 of understanding,

he said,

a route for him into

a whole new world

in which to visualize and comprehend Bill Blackburn

better than he had ever done when they had lived near each other

and were close friends on a day to day basis after work.”

Thirty one years after the Blackburn interviews Dr. Lorenzo attended a conference for psychotherapists in Colorado.

In 2001 he had retired from practicing psychiatry, but he was 58 and his Social Security had not kicked in, plus he was partying hardily in central Mexico and would run out of money, so each year went back to work part-time for a few months, often in the Colorado prison system where few psychiatrists wanted to work and they always needed him, therefore. In late June 2005, prison-therapist friends in Cañon City invited him to Snowmass, a few miles from Aspen, for the state’s annual psychotherapists’ conference. They were insistent. He was reluctant. For years he had detested sitting through dry, formal presentations of nearly any kind, most of all psych, which he claimed was the worst to squirm through when presented drily, as it so often was. And besides, at thirty-five, after twenty-six years of formal institutional education to the highest level, he had ‘clinically overdosed on the drug of formal education’, he said, ‘but survived somehow’, and ‘JUST SAID NO to doing it any more’. Granted, he had violated this prohibition and augmented his psychiatric education with summer workshops at the Naropa Writing program in the nineties, but that was only because Allen Ginsberg was 'one of the most inspiring teachers of writing that humanity could produce’, as he told Sammy’s high school reading group in the nineties, encouraging them to go there; and because the rest of the Naropa staff were practically as exciting and brilliant; plus the subject matter ‘covered the universe’, as you might expect in a left-wing Buddhist beatnik-hippy school; and because many of the lectures and panels, back then, were held outdoors under a large tent open on all sides to the big soft green lawn under spreading old trees, making higher ed more palatable.

But despite misgivings he decided to go, and the result was a memorable and oft-mentioned moment of mj lorenzo pundit-world and even ordinary-world literary lore.

He was not going for the conference itself, though. Since the 70s, when he and Dlune discovered Aspen, the Dr. had looked for every excuse to get up there in summer, when the high Rockies were heavenly, especially if he could be there on a Sunday afternoon for the orchestra concert at the Aspen music tent. He accepted the invitation because they promised to schedule him only as ‘Honorary Volunteer Panel Consultant’, rather than a regular speaker or panel participant. This meant he could skip every session if he liked, and could catch the concert, where he could sit on a blanket in the grass under groves of aspen whispering in the breeze, outside the music tent, sipping wine with family, friends and hundreds of beautiful, softly speaking strangers, the whole time enjoying Brahms’ Third, or an equally shimmering piece of classical music. He expected there would be entire days free, when he could hike up past Maroon Lake to a hanging valley he loved, where gigantic white and yellow daisies, red Indian paintbrush and blue alpine columbine soft-carpeted the earth on either side of the path, and for yards and furlongs, off across the meadows. And in the evenings he could catch Jan Garrett vocalizing jazz with her mercurial contralto, or could do any of a score of spirit-healing things.

Maroon Lake and the Maroon ‘Bells’ near Aspen:
Dr. Lorenzo’s son Freddie in lederhosen, about to turn 3 in 1976

one year after mj and Dlune moved from the Poconos to Denver

And though all this Aspen ‘garbanzo’ sounded sickeningly ‘effete’ to some of the press, the ‘culture hero’ pundits, a year later, defended their ‘hero’s’ ‘taste for the finer things’, especially music, and especially Aspen, as they said, ‘on teleological grounds alone’; for, as they reminded: mj lorenzo’s comments at “that posh 2005 Aspen psychotherapists’ weekend” had become “legendary” overnight, once they were excerpted in the American Psychiatry Association’s monthly newspaper, Psychiatric News; and especially after they were published in brief by People magazine and the travel pages of the Sunday New York Times; and in exact detail by the Wall Street Journal and The Manchester Guardian; and, translated nicely, by live camera on several Mexico City TV news broadcasts.[2]

Mj had rarely ‘gone public’ with his Tales of Waring, observed the Dr.’s ‘culture hero’ pundits, who had succeeded in making themselves ‘very special’ to mj over the years and were ‘qualified’, as he said, to speak authoritatively. His Snowmass comments were, as they announced correctly, maybe his best job so far at pulling together in one cogent package the several various ‘arguments’ that had been employed until then to defend the book’s usefulness to the future of humanity, including: (1) their own (the ‘culture hero’ pundits’) discovery of the appropriateness of the term ‘nightmare’ for describing the night of the first Blackburn interview, as proposed in their famous ‘nightmare confession defense’;[3] (2) the Dr.’s recent emphasis, during his lecture-tour talks around the globe, on Fred Waring’s (and other Americans’) ‘arrogance’ abroad; (3) the Dr.’s email to Sammy Martinez explaining his and Joey Rosenblatt’s ‘Hoha years’; (4) his perennial insistence that U.S. Americans HAD to truly and profoundly and unequivocally comprehend other peoples of the planet from the point of view of those peoples also, not merely from a Western world point of view, as long as the U.S. was going to choose to continue to consider it their God-ordained assignment to bully and boss those countries around; and (5) Dr. Lorenzo’s insistence, accordingly, that U.S. American high school graduation requirements include at least one summer month during high school years living with a typical (meaning ‘poor’) Mexican family in that family’s humble home in Mexico, a notion which had shocked and revolted the public at first. Everyone should be thankful, said the ‘culture hero pundits’, that the Dr.’s Snowmass talk stimulated much-needed discussion of these crucial matters and several others also vitally important to the future of humanity.

On the late afternoon when he reached the Roaring Fork valley, however, Dr. Lorenzo forgot ‘all this important teleology’, as he joked later, and convinced himself he should skip the conference altogether and honor his younger days by hiking straight up, early next morning, as far as he could toward Cathedral Lake so as to do it slowly and ‘without a heart attack’ (for he was now 62, and climbing at higher elevations made him short of breath); but when he saw that one of the workshops was entitled

and that he was a ‘possible’ ‘honorary’ panelist, he decided to postpone the hike and drop in on that workshop to see what he might learn. Friends forgot likely consequences, however, and let the cat out of the bag. The signup sheet flooded with enlistees. The conference coordinators had to move the workshop to the main tent on the hill in front of the Silvertree Inn at Snowmass Village, the winter ski slope which was pure green grass in summer. As a result staff who were assigned to other workshops during that morning hour canceled their workshops, hoping to catch the world famous mj lorenzo in action. And the ‘Psychotherapy for Mexicans’ ‘workshop’ was suddenly designated a conference-wide ‘Question and Answer’ session on that subject.

Colorado’s psychotherapists of all kinds, not just prison counselors, were met when they arrived at the tent with the sight of a small panel seated behind a folding table and several attendees already lined up behind a single floor mike. The workshop was introduced by a panel member and immediately thrown open to questions from ‘workshop participants’ in the audience, and the first young man in line asked Dr. Lorenzo if ‘the character of Bill Blackburn’ in the Dr.’s ‘Waring trilogy’ might shed any light on the difficulty that psychotherapists in the nearby town of Rifle and elsewhere in the state (and in other states too, as he knew for a fact) had experienced trying to provide counseling or psychotherapy to the Hispanic population in their towns, people who had emigrated, most of them, from backward areas of Mexico and/or were still close to indigenous (tribal) Mexican roots and ways of living and thinking.

Dr. Lorenzo answered by first revealing to everyone in the room that the questioner was a paid member of his writing staff and had been paid extra to ask that question, word for word, but then said he was kidding, since: “the closest thing to a ‘writing staff’” he had ever had the luck to enjoy was “Sammy Martinez and his high school volunteer upstarts, though they were worth far more than ten thousand royally paid New York City publishing company editorial staff.” Most Colorado therapists knew Sammy or knew of him. Sammy’s month-long group-therapy heal-ins in northern New Mexico were a legend in the Rocky Mountain west. And his model high-school after-school reading club in Española had been copied world-wide, especially in indigenous areas of the New World. Sammy was a psychotherapist and teacher of international renown, in other words, so could hardly have been on anyone’s ‘staff’, least of all on the Dr.’s ‘writing staff’, which must have been said as a joke, therefore, and got two or three snickers. This young man’s question, said the Dr., who was obviously impressed with the question, was one of the best he had ever been asked in ‘a conference of this type’; but only because he had never been to ‘a conference of this type’ before. Again this got fewer laughs than he wanted so he clarified that what he meant by ‘of this type’ was a conference where organizers were so unorganized they thought a routine workshop was ‘a plenary session’.

The response of 'thirty-two or -three guffaws' would have to suffice, he moaned, and so, concluding that the audience might be loosened up enough to perk ears, actually hear, and “maybe even comprehend,” as he said with pretend cheek, he asked the questioner for more details and was told that in general the therapists found that most of the Mexican blue collar workers and families who came into the office in Rifle wanted help sincerely, and came to the public mental health center for their gratis or almost-free sessions cooperatively enough, more or less, but did not seem to respond to the help, even when a given therapist spoke ‘good Spanish’.

The Dr. asked if the therapists were Hispanic and was told no: in Rifle they were Anglo; but some spoke ‘very good Spanish’.

Dr. Lorenzo thanked the man for the question and suggested that everyone who was lined up at the mike might want to sit down before someone stole their seat, since it might take a while to answer the question.

He began a very long answer by talking about dreams, even though the subject of dreams at first seemed bewilderingly irrelevant, as almost everyone said afterword. And not just irrelevant but even insulting to Mexicans. What fool of an American psychotherapist would ask a Mexican about their dreams? What could an American doctor’s nightmare dreams have to do with Mexicans, especially the kind of dreams Dr. Lorenzo started to describe?! Mexicans, if they dreamt nightmares, would dream about starvation, or their sons being pipe-bludgeoned in deadly street brawls, or the mafia threatening their family and chasing them out of town, being left without home, family, or anything or anybody in this world, and having to seek asylum in the USA where half the population would resent their presence. They would not be dreaming about their medical and psychiatric education, like the Dr. was! Mj lorenzo was as crazy as everyone had been saying for thirty-four years!

Dr. Lorenzo said that all of his life he had dreamt, from time to time, certain dreams that had bamboozled or amazed or shaken him up for a day or two afterward. Some dreams, while he was sleeping, filled him with dread for no good reason, as it seemed after he woke up and tried to guess what might have driven his nervous system to produce such convincing dread-filled hogwash even once. More bamboozling were the pop-up dreams his inscrutable nervous system had produced multiple times, as if he had not gotten some important message, and therefore they were flashing warning again, and not even half as politely as a computer virus program pop-up that said your virus definitions were out of date. Because one of the least forgettable of these mind boggling little dreams, he said, was so un-nice and so disrespectful, he had even felt forced to describe it to psychotherapist friends of his, some of whom were present right then at the conference. They could attest he was not making this stuff up for glory or infamy, he said. He had sincerely complained about these dreams in a half-joking way, to a few of his closest Colorado mental health colleagues one day recently when they had all gotten away from prison psychiatry to relax together around a big lunch table in a Mexican restaurant in Cañon City.

It was a mind-boggling dread-filler he had dreamt many times in various forms, actually, he said, a recurring nightmare about his medical and psychiatry training that would sink its teeth into him convincingly in his sleep once every year or two or three, all his professional life, even after he had ended his training and was finally practicing psychiatry; and it had always filled him with dread in his sleep, until he somehow managed to awaken and get away from it.

He always FELT AND BELIEVED HIMSELF TO BE, in the dream, a prisoner of his training program, year after year after year after year, unable to find a way to break free from training and graduate so he could move out on his own, fully approved by the institution to practice psychiatry independently. The exact location and stage of training varied dream to dream, but otherwise the essential content was always the same: he was always trapped interminably in the training stage of his psychiatry career, unable to graduate so as to take his psychiatry boards and then practice. You had to graduate to move on to those next steps. In a particular dream he might be anywhere along the path to final graduation, maybe as far back as a biochem lab in second year medical school, struggling alone in a big, cold and empty lab on an insufferable biochem project that required nitty gritty lab work in the lab; but no matter where he was, he would always be feeling, as in all the dreams of this type, that the work he was doing was a waste of his precious life time, that he was failing his studies anyway and was bound to fail again and never come up to his classmates and graduate, and right then the Dean of the Medical School would swing in through the lab door with the news that he had failed to pass the year again, one more time, and would have to do yet another year of training to make up for the lousy failure, before he could move on in the direction of graduation.

And by age 62 in ‘05, even after more than twenty-five years of practicing psychiatry independently (and quite successfully, actually), even when the Dr. was semi-retired and at times not practicing his profession at all, any more, even during these times, even when he was in Mexico 100% retired and writing, not practicing psychiatry at all, his brain still kept sending him such dreams: incorrectly, as he tended to think. One night recently, he said, “Right here in Colorado,” even though he was scheduled to stop working soon and return to Mexico, he woke up in a sweat and realized he had just dreamt one of these nasty, entrapping dreams again; and when he studied it later he was surprised to find that in the dream he had actually progressed in his training, way beyond medical school and internship now. He had reached the senior year of his psych residency and was class president, of all things, him, he, the one who failed perennially in these dreams, another illogical detail which might have seemed to disqualify the dream as valid or worth paying any mind. But come to think of it, though he was Psychiatry Residency Third (Senior) Year class president, true to form he was still doing everything wrong, losing the minutes of the last class meeting, running from room to room in the training building so as to try and remember which room the meeting had been in, so he could find the lost book of minutes, running around opening door after door in desperation without knocking, interrupting proceedings again and again, disrupting a class in one room and hanky panky in another, actually asking the two hanky panky people which room the last class meeting had been in, provoking weary looks from all and sundry in all of the rooms, and acting, in general, in ways so lame that he was bound to be called in by the Chairman of the Division of Psychiatry any day and told he would not be graduating again for another year. Whereupon: immediately, that very thing happened. Again.

Portions of the press critical of mj lorenzo loved these dreams, of course. Some of his Aunt Tisha’s Bible Presbyterians in Collingswood, New Jersey, published their own cutting – and sharply cutting-edge – interpretation of the dream sequence, calling him in The Christian Beacon, in a page-one headline:

‘The Great’

Doctor Lorenzo

Found to Be

Unfit to Practice

(Let Alone Preach)

.

The Dr. said that, in the same way that he had found it next to impossible over the years to ignore such nightmares, even after he woke up, he had found it just as hard to ignore, back in 1974, when he had interviewed the Blackburns, the sensational dream-like or vision-like images, metaphors and analogies that had kept leaping out of nowhere and attaching themselves ‘like crazy’ all night long, to the characters of Bill Blackburn, Fred Waring and Betty Ann McCall. AND EVEN HIMSELF!!! But they were anything but useless! All of these images had amounted essentially to dream-like rhetorical tropes or devices that eventually became useful in describing and conveying the multi-faceted essence of those four people, devices he had stumbled upon intuitively. They had simply popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, and had carried him off with them completely, not just that night, but afterwards too; for he had worked on the material all of his life after the interview, and even then – “Even now!” he almost shouted – his brain was sending him such pop-up material.

Bill Blackburn had boggled his mind since the day he had met him. And Bill had puzzled Fred Waring too, no doubt. Bill Blackburn had mystified many of his American neighbors and friends much in the same way that the world’s developing nations had mystified the whole United States population since the bombing of the twin towers on 9/11/01, said the Dr. The Muslim nations had suddenly become especially mystifying to U.S. Americans, but other ‘less developed’ countries had too, even the perennially harmless ones historically neglected and dismissed (by ignorant U.S.A. gringos) as forgettable, not even worth thinking about, like next-door neighbor Mexico. And since young Dr. mj, as he put it, on the night of the first Blackburn interview had found himself looking for valid ways to understand the two, Bill and Fred both, he had paid attention as soon as Fred Waring, for example, had shown up – in his mind – all dressed up in ancient Greek garb just like that of the Greek god Dionysus on ancient classic Greek vases.[4]

In the same way, he said, when he had tried for the very first time to describe Bill Blackburn in writing, and had found himself comparing Bill with Hercules without even thinking about it, though Hercules was a Bronze Age hero with throwbacks to shamanism and seemed at first too ancient and other-worldly to pertain, he had been forced to decide whether to listen to the inner censor that dismissed this notion as ‘a preposterous joke and exaggeration’, or to follow the ‘preposterous’ notion to see where it might lead. Every time, in fact, that a metaphor or analogy attached itself to a person in Tales of Waring, he had found himself faced with the same choice, to fight seeming nonsense and call it ridiculous and forget it, or to go along with the idea in the same unquestioning and automatic way that a dreamer followed wherever a dream took him, willy nilly and without complaint, because unconscious and helplessly asleep; and he had always chosen to consciously follow to see what he might learn. (“Notice what you notice!” Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg had taught hopeful writers, based partly on their experience of a particular kind of Buddhist meditation and its relation to their writing.) And Dr. Lorenzo was happy to report that doing so had given him an experience of being in a waking daytime dream like those dream-like experiences the disciples of Carl Jung had called ‘Active Imagination’. And all of these ‘trips’ that he took into nightmarish worlds had paid off royally in the end, he felt, including the nightmarish trip of seeing Fred Waring as Dionysus and then of exploring the strange ancient Greek world of Dionysus in Greek art and myth, therefore, on purpose and at length; and the nightmarish trip of seeing Bill as Hercules and exploring that strange ancient Greek mythological world of Hercules, getting books from the library on Hercules, thinking about Hercules’ own personal world of labor and strife, writing notes to himself in his computer diary about that ancient and foreign world, and so on for months and years, until he got to know that world of the ancient Greek hero Hercules intimately, in great detail.

And after many years of pursuing this notion and studying his friend, Bill, he said, he had been very surprised to find that the notion of a ‘bronze age hero’ like Achilles or Odysseus or Hercules, still seemed a very apt analogy for appreciating Bill; and ‘bronze age hero’ or something close often worked just as well for comprehending and appreciating many Mexicans and people from less developed countries, he thought. It worked especially aptly for understanding people who had recently been living in any area of Mexico that was governed not so much by a modern nationwide system of just and objective and reasonable laws, as by the mere verbal instantaneous yea or nay of a local Mexican strongman, or a local strong-arm politico, a neighborhood mafia chief, a tribal chieftain, or a warring warlord, as so many people still lived in so many areas of Mexico in 2005, particularly in remote and rural areas, but even in big Mexican cities often, just like so many Mexicans had lived nearly always throughout their long, arduous semi-civilized history going back thousands of years; and just as many other peoples still lived around the world.

The main thing of which he had to constantly remind himself, he said, was to always take very seriously the fact that when Fred Waring and Bill Blackburn met in a room together, or when Bill and ‘young Dr. mj’ were together, because of the way Bill’s life values, thinking, and gut reactions to things, had been shaped more by his mother’s tribal heritage than by his father’s and grandfather’s Western world one, the two who were meeting would almost always be coming from two drastically different worlds; just as the U.S. was drastically different from Mexico, or from the Muslim world. No ‘real understanding and cooperation’, therefore, could or would ever come about between two worlds as opposite as these, that were so drastically different that they were virtually opposite in nearly every way you could think of, not until people from each world could imagine and grasp the extent and nature of the oppositeness that was there, and could learn to accept those opposites and find a way to adapt to the opposites and – most of all – to even appreciate, to value those things that were positives, each in the other’s very opposite world, especially the positives that were to be found even, surprisingly, in the VERY MOST SHOCKINGLY (at first) OPPOSITE of those differences between the two worlds.[5]

In the case of Bill and Fred, said Dr. Lorenzo, since Fred Waring had rarely felt any motivation at all to get to know or understand or appreciate Bill Backburn, at all, as a living confrere human on the planet, during all the many years they had worked together, then nearly all the work over the years of bridging the gap between their two worlds had always been dumped on poor Bill; in the same way that the French Jesuit priests (described at the end of Tales of Waring) had dumped it on the poor put-upon Huron tribe to do all of the difficult adapting that was needed so that those two groups, the priests and the Huron, could go on sharing a certain geographic space in Canada in the 1500s; because the priests saw, selfishly, their own ‘Christian’ view of things as ‘superior’ and of a higher priority and a greater value than the Huron view, and saw the Huron world as expendable and erasable if it came to that, therefore. Naturally the arrogant one-sidedness on Fred’s part had wearied and offended Bill eventually and doomed the working relationship with Fred Waring, just as arrogant one-sidedness had wearied and offended Bill’s Huron ancestors when they had first been forced to deal with the ‘crazy’, ‘bewitched’, ‘selfish’, ethnocentric French Jesuits who ‘came to destroy their tribe’; and in fact the priests’ attitude eventually had aggravated the offended Huron to a point where, in frustration and anger and revenge, they and the Iroquois had roasted the French priests alive, literally, after following the strict protocol of their tribal custom of trial by protracted ‘ritual religious and psychological torture’; literally; no exaggeration: it was a true case and a famous one, of bicultural miscommunication and misunderstanding that had led to utter catastrophe for both sides and had been fairly well documented. That was why he had ended up using the story in Tales of Waring, and Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, both, he said.

an illustration from Bruce Trigger’s The Children of Aataentsic

depicting how the Huron tortured to death two Jesuit priests

(a thousand flesh wounds; plus scalding water in mockery of baptism)

whom they blamed for their Huron tribe’s destruction[6]

Similarly, if the U.S. made no effort to understand and appreciate the positives in the Mexican world and adapt itself to them, let’s say, or if we failed to understand and see positives in the Muslim world, as a more pressing example, working relationships between these worlds would be doomed. And again similarly, said Dr. Lorenzo, finally returning to Snowmass after what had seemed like a nightmare trip around the world: if a mental health worker of any level including psychotherapist failed to grasp at a basic intellectual AND intuitive gut instinct level the vastly different nature of the world that his Mexican (let’s say) patient lived in, then psychotherapy and healing of any kind was doomed. And: on an increasingly ‘smaller’ planet of proliferating nuclear and other devastating arms, as Dr. Lorenzo pointed out for the conference workshop, doomed relationships of any kind between cultures had to be disallowed. In the first place there was no excuse for doomed relationships any more. The knowledge and means existed for all U.S. Americans to get to know these other ‘foreign’ worlds. Americans were highly educated and had tons of leisure time and money compared with the rest of humanity; and anyway, even if they thought they didn’t have the means or time or education, it was a critical matter for America’s survival on the planet, and they would HAVE to find the means and time and education to get to know these very different worlds. Misunderstandings of any kind simply could not be afforded any more. They were too dangerous for the whole planet. All sides owed it to posterity, if not to themselves, to recognize they were forced by the current level of tension in the world between large disagreeing groups to bend toward the other side or suffer nuclear or some other kind of cataclysm. Bending meant understanding, accepting and adapting to opposing and opposite differences, and most importantly even seeing and appreciating the positives of the other side’s seemingly – at first, always – ‘crazy’ world. Any two sides that could not ‘bend’ enough to get past seeing the other side as ‘crazy’ and resolve such differences and tensions were doomed to cataclysm, he said, up to and including mutual destruction, dragging everyone else with them.[7]

And when trying to ‘bend’ toward a world vastly unlike your own, like the poor and un-modern world of most ordinary Mexicans, he went on, returning to the original point, the Rifle therapist’s question, it caused no harm to explore analogies that popped into mind, especially if experience had shown that your pop-up analogies had helped your understanding of foreign and different worlds in the past, as his own experience had shown. If, on the other hand, your own experience had shown no such success in the past, it would be more advisable to borrow analogies from other people who had experienced such success in understanding and ‘bending’ toward ‘foreign’ and ‘different’ worlds, people like E. M. Forster, Carl Jung or Carlos Castaneda, just to name three famous writer-sages who had been expert at ‘bending’ in just the right way so as to understand and write about foreign worlds, like Italy or India, in the case of Forster; or Africa and India, in the case of Jung; and Mexico, in the case of Castaneda. They had described those very foreign psychological worlds fairly accurately. Dr. Lorenzo said that in his own case his ’70-‘71 Remaking year had taught him to trust his intuition when it came to understanding foreign worlds: his intuition and the images it threw up at him during that year of his Remaking, like the ‘Utilidor’ at Inuvik, a graphic metaphor so famous by now that probably everyone in the room at the conference knew about it, had actually worked beautifully for him, had gotten him through the year with flying colors after all, in the end. And so, when the analogy of Hercules had popped intuitively into his mind in connection with Bill Blackburn he had trusted his intuition and explored the analogy. And Hercules had turned out to be not just a ‘good analogy’ but a ‘very good analogy’. A ‘very good analogy’, he said, was one where the analogy applied and ‘fit’ not just in one way or a few ways, but in a myriad of simple and complex ways, many of them eye-openingly enlightening.

The very first time his mind had leapt to grab an analogy fitting of Bill, to give a specific example, had been soon after the day the two had met, when he’d attempted to describe in writing the way Bill had slammed Becky to the floor, and his intuition had come back at once with the phrase ‘like Hercules in a lion skin’. The analogy had rung true and he had liked it: because many of Hercules’ famous ‘labors’ had called for the ‘taming’ or conquering and controlling, and even employing, of ‘wild’ animals or bizarre and dangerous mythical creatures of various kinds, for various purposes, strange creatures perhaps almost as bizarre in certain ways as Fred Waring and mj lorenzo, both of whom had needed a lot of taming and structuring from Bill when he had first met them. But then when the Dr. had realized and remembered that according to traditional Greek belief Hercules had been assigned to his twelve labors by a ‘petty tyrant’ of his own who had been not unlike Fred Waring in many ways; and remembered that Hercules had also interacted with legendary figures like Demeter and Dionysus during his mythical lifetime in some of the same ways Bill had interacted with legendary, virtually myth-like figures Betty Ann McCall and Fred Waring; and that Hercules had eventually gone on a mission to hell and back, just as Bill seemed to be doing on the night of this first interview; and dragging him, mj, along, as Hercules had dragged the Cretan Bull all the way from Crete to Greece and the underworld; and so forth and so on; and that so many other points in the character and life history of Hercules, in sum, could be said to apply aptly to Bill Blackburn besides just the fact that both Hercules and Bill were strong and could deal with difficult animals; then the analogy had become ‘almost too helpful to believe’ and ‘virtually indispensable’ for understanding this previously very mind-boggling friend of mj lorenzo’s, Bill.

The analogy of Hercules would come to provide mj lorenzo a whole world of understanding, he said, a route for him into a whole new world in which to visualize and comprehend Bill Blackburn better than he had ever done when they had lived near each other and were close friends on a day to day basis after work. And when the analogical world continued to work in so many details, for years and years afterward, it then became essential to his describing Bill in Tales of Waring. It was no longer sufficient to think of Bill Blackburn only in the ways he had thought of him at first, or as any average neighbor of Bill’s might have grasped as obvious. It wasn’t enough to describe him as a conscientious twentieth century U.S.A. citizen; a very friendly and colorful guy; a storyteller; a whiz with dogs; a clever aficionado of lake bass fishing; a modern ‘jack of all trades’; an energetic and ingenious promotions man; a man sharp enough to work for years for one of the greatest U.S. celebrities of the century; a former Air Force intelligence man in Korea; raised Episcopalian, but reared in Huron Indian ways by his mother; man enough to win an incredibly beautiful and supremely artistic woman as wife; and so forth; as many mental health charts might have described him if Bill had ever been a psych patient.

It became absolutely essential to see Bill Blackburn far more deeply than this collection of very visible and obvious, surface-y, modern materialistic Western-world characteristics; and to understand him, rather, far more importantly, in terms of his culture of origin, as someone who, just like most modern-day Mexicans, though living professedly in a ‘modern’ ‘capitalist’ ‘Christian’ and ‘democratic’ world, in reality still lived to a large extent mentally and spiritually in an ancient world resembling that of Homer’s bronze-age ‘Iliad’: a world of oral storytelling; of barter and trade and extensive neighborhood sharing, not competition or cash purchase; a violent world of war and brutality and weapons and heroism and great deeds and revenge of mythic proportion, revenge always being a huge motivator in warlord worlds like that of the Iroquoian tribes, which included the Huron, or of Mexico, or bronze-age Greece, or medieval Europe; a world where personal ‘honor’ and personal ‘glory’ mattered more than almost anything, even life itself, where one man’s desire for another man’s woman could start a world war, and one single hero’s wrath and pique could delay or extend that world war for a whole decade; a world of not just brute physical strength, but of psychological stamina so massive it was barely comprehensible to a U.S. gringo in 2005; and a world too, apparently, where mental torture of another man was a test of that man’s manliness and was a way of daily life so highly valued as to carry even deep religious meaning, a thing again incomprehensible to nice ordinary middle-class folks ‘like us’ from the modern, ‘civilized’ Western world, as the Dr. said.

This last aspect of the Herculean analogy, the mental torture, had reminded Dr. Lorenzo in the end, he said, not only of the intense and protracted mental war games Achilles and Odysseus and Hercules and other ‘heroes’ had perpetrated and/or suffered in ancient ‘bronze age’ Greece, but also of the Huron tribe’s complex mental and physical discipline called by modern ethnologists and anthropologists ‘ritual torture’, one of the most notorious and to ‘moderns’ (‘like most of us in this conference room’, as Dr. Lorenzo reminded) most horrifying aspects of the lifestyle of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century (1500-1660) Huron tribe. Before their virtual extinction they had lived sixty miles north of what were now Toronto and Lake Ontario, and just east of what was now called ‘Lake Huron’ on a peninsula jutting northward between what were now called ‘Nottawasaga Bay’ and ‘Georgian Bay’, in the area centering roughly on what was now the town of Penetanguishene, Ontario, in Canada: this virtually decimated tribe of which Bill’s mother and Bill had somehow managed to end up being two of the very last few surviving descendants left in the modern world; a fact of which Bill was most aware, as would come out in the second interview.[8] And that was why during the first night’s interview eventually the analogy in mj’s mind had shifted from Bill as Hercules taming wild animals, to Bill as a Huron ‘head man’ practicing ‘ritual torture’ on a French Jesuit priest as represented figuratively by Fred Waring. And, said Dr. Lorenzo, he had let that analogy too carry him where it would, as a dreamer was inevitably carried by a dream or nightmare, a trick he had learned mainly from ‘writer’s instinct’ (whatever that was, in reality), but had felt encouraged to try more freely after hearing about ‘Active Imagination’ from Jungians, as he had already mentioned.

But he wished to elaborate on that point a tiny bit more for the psychotherapists: Active Imagination, he said, was a trick or device some Jungian psychoanalysts had recommended to their patients under careful psychoanalytic supervision only, and only for the purpose of delving more deeply into ‘the unconscious’ in search of more meaningful handles that could help one as accurately and correctly as possible to understand and appreciate one’s complicated self and one’s incredibly complicated world of relationships with other people. It was not to be taken lightly, this ‘Active Imagination’, and was only to be done under supervision, said Jungian analysts, because the wandering from crazy metaphor to crazy metaphor could get out of hand before you knew it, and drive you literally psychotic.[9]

In conclusion, said Dr. Lorenzo, Bill Blackburn and Fred Waring, though they lived in a ‘modern’ ‘democratic’ nation still largely ‘quasi-Calvinist Christian’ in its beliefs in 1974, and though they ‘believed’ in and practiced the principles of ‘Christian’ ‘democracy’, nevertheless thought and functioned in many ways, both of them, as if they were local warlords or chieftains in the ancient pre-Enlightenment and pre-democratic style. Whereas poor young and innocent, naïve and gullible (compared with Bill and Fred, both) Dr. mj lorenzo, born at the end of the second world war and thus unfamiliar with the exigencies of wartime and exceedingly coddled by two professional parents increasingly well off due to smart as well as lucky investment and very hard work and economic self-denial, thus spoiled and walled off from the usual struggle for survival experienced by most normal people in most countries of the world, thought and functioned as an upper middle class ‘modern’ political idealist of the Western world, believing conflicts or misunderstandings or jealousies should be resolved by two sides in a ‘nice’ civilized way by due participatory process that included talking, negotiating, and getting to know the other side through reading, traveling and other nice civilized pursuits. Such a person (‘again like many if not most in this Snowmass conference room’, as the Dr. threw in, rightly no doubt) was NOT likely to succeed as a therapist very quickly with a patient who had lived most of his life in an area of vengeance-loving warlords or psychologically tricky healers of the ancient curandero type, people who thought magically, not scientifically, until and unless he had found a way to comprehend and especially appreciate the positives in that very different and foreign, to him, warlord-and-curandero way of looking at the world. In which case, some reading of Carlos Castaneda might help.

Such a therapist was not likely to succeed with such a patient any more, he threw in after a second, than ‘young Dr. mj’ had succeeded when he had tried to psychoanalyze Bill Blackburn. For the two had come from two utterly different worlds; and even though they had been buddies on a daily basis nearly, fishing together and talking for two whole years every day almost, they nevertheless had still failed to understand each other’s vastly different worlds well enough to tackle easily any of the huge and complicated jobs they would end up giving themselves on the night of the first interview: whether the job of one of them playing psychotherapist to the other, the job of one writing a book about the other, or the job of one educating the other from naïveté to wisdom. All of these jobs had turned out to be extremely exacting for both: for mj as interviewer, as therapist, as writer, and as initiate; and for Bill as educational-storytelling tribal initiator and as patient being psychoanalyzed unwittingly. That was one of the lessons to be learned from the story of that night, in Dr. Lorenzo’s opinion, as he said: that throwing together two vastly different worlds to accomplish a great and complicated task, before they had gained proper understanding of each other, could produce ‘an awful lot of hair-raising misunderstanding and confusion’, and could very possibly lead to something even much worse, maybe even world war.

Not surprisingly, therefore, it had taken Dr. Lorenzo all the years from 1974 until 2005, he said, thirty one years, to merely begin to comprehend the not so insignificant point that, just as ‘The Iliad’ had turned out to be less a story about Agamemnon’s great bloody battles of revenge against the Trojan kidnapper of his brother’s wife (despite having purported to be just that in its opening chapters) than an intensely psychological story, instead, about the wrath of Achilles and about Achilles’ own personal and extremely protracted mental torture and psychological revenge aimed at Agamemnon, whose side Achilles was supposed to have been on; so, likewise, Tales of Waring had turned out to be a story not as much about the noble and heroic accomplishments of the great Fred Waring and people around him, in the way its author, mj lorenzo had first intended it to be, as about the degree of wrath and revenge represented by the protracted, very sophisticated course of psychological torture that had been purposely designed by an employee, Bill Blackburn, and aimed at Fred Waring, whose side Bill was supposed to have been on (just as Achilles was supposed to have been on Agamemnon’s).

And, as for the ‘young Dr. mj’ being so fitly analogized as a bull or ox that could be 'dragged by the nose' through pen after pen after pen of fresh bull flop, he said, he would save that explanation for another day; but as for the ever recurring nightmare of his, which he had described, of feeling trapped inside a training program, never ever seeming to qualify enough to graduate and go out and function on his own in the world, everyone present probably knew enough about him now, from his writing, he said, to interpret the dream with reasonable accuracy; but if not, he recommended they read The Remaking and try to imagine what might be the consequences, not just for an individual member of a given nation, like the young mj lorenzo as described in that book of his, but for almost an entire civilized nation like the U.S.A., when its whole society reached a point in its historical development where its members, in a way thoroughly and shockingly opposite to that of Bill Blackburn, or of most Mexicans, spent more and more years and exhausting resources in formal, institutional, building-enclosed education with every passing generation, yet graduated knowing less and less every passing year about how to live life sanely and contentedly, and in happy conjunction with neighbors of every kind at home and around the globe.

Fred Waring, similarly, though he was rich as sin for years, brilliantly intelligent, college educated and hauling behind him as much as seventy years of broad experience in the world, nevertheless had never learned, apparently, how to work and get along in a relaxed and appreciative way with a real human being like ‘the best promotions man he ever had’, Bill Blackburn; and after a number of years of never even hardly half-trying to bend Bill’s way or appreciate Bill’s different world, to even the slightest degree, had finally quit even trying to appear to do so, ending up unwilling to be even as much as half-nice to Bill, and had blown the working relationship for good. Fred could get along for many years with the high-flying Richard Nixons and the Bing Crosbys, golfing with them and treating them with enough respect to get by, since they were rich and famous and 'important' like he was, and also had come from average Anglo backgrounds like he had. And he could continue working for years with an employee like Clyde Sechler, golfing with him the whole time he treated Clyde like dirt; and that worked for the two of them somehow; though Clyde had become an alcoholic (while making himself a doormat) maybe precisely because he had devoted his whole existence to Fred; who had consequently therefore lost respect for the man and continued forever after to treat him like dirt. They could ‘get along’ only as long as Clyde accepted being treated like dirt.

But Bill, though he was never rich or famous or important (meaning, mostly, highly enough placed to influence society's movers and shakers), had heard about the way that Fred treated people, and had made it clear to Fred from the beginning that he, Bill, would have to be treated with respect;[10] and that requirement of Bill’s had put Fred off, eventually, as tyrannical and abusive as Fred wanted to be at times, especially when he had finally reached the point where he chose, since a certain upsetting event occurred, or felt driven, to treat Bill disrespectfully whenever he wanted. After all, Fred had all the power in the organization, while the Pennsylvanians and the contract employees like Bill had none. And since Fred had all the power, and his employees had little or none, he saw no reason why he should treat with respect anyone that worked for him, unless he chose to do so for his own selfish reasons. Fred Waring was best friends with U.S. presidents and several New York City mayors. The government, after all, had never told him to stop making employees ‘crawl’, as Bill put it. No one had ever said such a thing to Fred Waring. And so, in his mind, no one in the organization had a right to demand anything of him, not even that he, Fred, treat them with respect. Something basic was lacking in his moral education, as Dr. Lorenzo put it, about how to live successfully in the world with ordinary salt-of-the-earth people like Bill, and how to treat them to their faces, how to share and enjoy the planet with simple people while respecting them fully (not just to their faces) as they deserved, on an absolutely equal footing human to human, and man to man; and it hurt his relationships, reputation, and legacy, in the end.

Almost every ordinary poor Mexican in Mexico today, by comparison, explained the Dr., had been taught (just like every Huron had been taught), this very essential piece of education from birth, and had practiced it religiously, in Mexico, and also when they came to the United States to work. He knew this, he said, because he had lived in Mexico for several years off and on, always with poor Mexican families, right in their homes, or they had lived with him in his own rented Mexican home. Rich or powerful Mexican bosses might abuse their poorer Mexican employees to their faces, because power and wealth everywhere in the world stripped people of essential aspects of their humanity, all too often, unfortunately; but ordinary poor Mexicans with little power almost always treated everyone with real respect, just as Huron Bill did. Yet that kind of basic education had been lacking in Fred Waring’s upbringing, or had been lost along the way, when Fred became so overly ‘important’ in his own eyes. Just as it was lacking now, as the Dr. said, in the value systems of so many ordinary U.S. Americans who were living in sumptuous luxury, even poorer Americans, compared with the rest of the world. U.S. Americans had become overly ‘important’ in their own eyes, and dominated and bullied the rest of the world with their power and arrogance. They believed grandiosely that the American people were ‘the light of the world’ and were ‘more important in God’s eyes’ to humanity’s future than any other group of people on the planet were, 'based on a hubristic twist of a Calvinist Protestant interpretation of Galatians chapter 3 and related Bible passages', as the Dr. put it.

And with that frightening thought he ended his long answer, saying thank you, and sat down.

And there was little applause, maybe because the audience was too shocked, as a Fox Cable News commentator said.