Tale 36

The ‘Nightmare Confession Defense’

personal gift to Fred Waring from American cartoonist Chon Day

“This was the most astutely psyche-analyzing

and acutely soul-delving,” said the Dr.,

“of all the scores of cartoons I photographed

in the Fred Waring’s America Collection.”[1]

‘Tales of Waring’ was criticized by the underground and above-ground press shortly after its appearance in late 1981 as ‘not dramatic enough’, or ‘lacking dramatic structure’ and with similar judgmental descriptives that might well turn the public off to it before they ever gave it a try, and for this reason a group of mj lorenzo’s most ardent supporters decided to defend it publicly. They struggled as a group to get to know this second book of their hero’s over a period of several months, and once they had wrestled with the last part of it in particular, the part that seemed to have stirred up press and public most, they came forward finally and announced publicly their observation that ‘the night had been a nightmare’ for their mj lorenzo, and like any nightmare it had not been structured, either in reality or in the book, by any buildup of plot tension and resolution of such tension in a scene of ‘denouement’. Such plot-designing constructs as ‘denouement’, said these particular pundits, were creative art constructs which were fancy inventions of storytellers and playwrights. They had been designed to captivate listeners and sell novels, to hold them interested throughout a story or play – or movie; and that would have been helpful in the case of Tales of Waring, granted, they said, for many felt that it ‘dragged’ or ‘seemed interminable’, especially toward the end; but mj had not resorted to such storytelling tricks for a good reason, they said: because re-designing the events of the night would have ‘misrepresented the truth’; and mj lorenzo’s intention had been to portray what had happened ‘in reality’, not to dress up real life so that it tasted better, or went down quicker; and one of them who was a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia published these comments along with a few more brief observations defending the author in an article in the San Francisco Jung Society Library Journal in the spring of ‘82.

But then, if that were the case, the critics challenged, why had mj lorenzo ever bothered to publish such a book about such a night that had dragged on so, and ended so dully? They implied that the answer was obvious: lorenzo was an idiot. They were not expecting an answer at all, not a satisfying one anyway, and certainly not the answer they got. For, the most ardent pundit studiers of mj’s Remaking soon came back with the second and longer part of their famous defense of Tales of Waring in late ’82; which they published informally via their worldwide underground pundit network.

And the whole of the defense became known eventually as the ‘Nightmare Confession Defense’.

In this ‘second part’ of the defense of their hero, mj lorenzo, they offered the additional explanation that the alleged ‘weaknesses in story structure’ were the fault of his followers. It was their own fault mj had published Tales of Waring. They had encouraged him to do so after they had found him in 1980, languishing as he was in Denver, Colorado, where he had moved from the Poconos in 1975. He was living and practicing psychiatry there without any support whatever for his writing or his mission, just as he had lived in the Poconos. He had written nothing new since ‘74 and still had no idea at all that he was appreciated around the globe as the important writer, mj lorenzo, author of The Remaking. He still did not know, when they first found him in 1980, that his father had published The Remaking in 1971 without telling him. They had been the first ones to tell him. And when they had heard he had another book waiting to be published, Tales of Waring, and when they looked at it to see how they liked it, they had taken the position that if it had been anyone else’s nightmare or madhouse of a midsummer night’s dream, it might not have been important to publish; but since it was his nightmare, the famous mj lorenzo’s, and since he was the only ‘culture hero’ around of any degree of importance that they knew of, as they evaluated things anyway, then it would be important to publish this book, or almost anything mj produced, in fact, no matter how ‘imperfect’ or ‘dramatically unsatisfying’ it might seem to some; in order that mj’s ‘culture’, or global subculture, the people for whom he had been born into the world to be a ‘hero’, or ‘culture hero’, could study it and see what they might learn from it.

So, they had recommended to mj lorenzo that he publish it. And he had done so, or rather, they had done so on his behalf. And they had studied it much more deeply, all of the ‘early Remaking pundits’, and the ‘psychopundits’, ‘Sunday School pundits’, ‘culture hero pundits’, and all of the other devoted groups of mj lorenzo punditry, plus many others around the world. And the young Dr.’s pundit supporters were now publishing this deeper apology and defense, and analysis.

The purpose of mj lorenzo’s writing and publishing Tales of Waring had never been to entertain, they clarified in their public defense of the book’s ‘lack of dramatic style’; any more than the purpose of his first book, The Remaking, had ever been to entertain; or, any more than the purpose of Christ’s sermons, or Buddha’s lessons, was to entertain. That very first book of their hero’s, The Remaking, had described the step by step process of his complete personality-remaking in 70-71, and had become the pundits’ blueprint for remaking themselves. They hoped, they said, that the entire Western world would use it as a blueprint for ‘remaking itself’, especially for remaking its international relations which needed complete redoing, and most of all for remaking its way of dealing with non-Western and/or slowly developing Western nations. And Tales of Waring was just as relevant to these critical issues as The Remaking had been, they said. Tales of Waring was relevant to these issues at the very least, as they saw it, especially to the remaking of the Western world’s character structure and its way of relating to the rest of the world.

Such issues constituted the biggest axe that the Remaking pundits always had wanted to grind, through the decades, the ‘pressingly critical’ matter that motivated nearly all they said and did; and such issues were the crux of mj lorenzo’s ‘message’ in his writing, as they saw it, the reason he was writing the kinds of books he was writing: the Western world’s, and especially the U.S.A.’s lack of interest in thoroughly understanding and appreciating other cultures unlike their own, while at the same time wanting to dominate and bully those other cultures around the world. It was the grave perennial problem of ‘Mortimer’ dominating ‘Jack’, to put it in Remaking language.

And so, they said, since mj lorenzo addressed this issue seriously and constructively in his books, it was JUST AS IMPORTANT right now for them and for the rest of the world, for the very pressing reason just mentioned, TO COMPREHEND every wrinkle of a book like TALES OF WARING, which described in detail a pivotal nightmare experience of mj lorenzo’s; AS IT HAD BEEN IMPORTANT back at the birth of Western Civilization FOR CHRISTIANS and others of that civilization TO COMPREHEND WHAT HAD HAPPENED WHEN JESUS HAD GONE INTO THE DESERT for ‘forty days and nights’ ‘to be tested by Satan’, as the gospels had said, since that event had been ‘a pivotal nightmare’ for Jesus.

They agreed with the New York literary critics that Tales of Waring was not an adventure novel or a thriller. It was perhaps entertainingly comic in its early chapters, but the last part of the book was gravely serious and could perhaps be said to ‘drag’, as some complained. But so did the Bible, they pointed out, toward its end. Most events of any importance or excitement or drama in that important book occurred in the Old Testament or in the first part of the New, not the last part, which ‘dragged’ dramatically by comparison. The Gospel of John was exciting reading, especially in the Phillips translation, they offered, but only a fanatic would read the last book of the Bible, Revelation, and: "only an idiot would read it looking for exciting plot structure," and only ardent Protestants had ever found Paul’s letters to the early churches very interesting to read entire. And Tales of Waring, like the Bible, they said, had been meant not for entertaining but for provoking readers to reflection, for helping them learn and meditate on what mattered. That was why the structure of Tales of Waring resembled the plotless structure of history or biography, not the plotted structure of a novel. The Roman Empire had not died in a dramatically plotted flash, but had faded slowly over several centuries, they pointed out, going out with a whimper. No nation’s end days 'promised' a denouement or great dramatic crisis that resolved crucial issues, nor did the end days of most people’s lives. Movie celebrities and U.S. presidents spent their last decades alone and forgotten, for example, as most old people did.

And nightmares were the same toward their end, like all dreams, they said. They were the same at their end as they had been at their beginning: they tended to hold you in their clutches throughout while you thought you would never escape, keeping you in their clutches with the same amount of tension and terror the whole time, on and on, seemingly without end or hope of end; until they suddenly ended abruptly without resolution, for no fancier reason than this: that you had awakened and realized you had been dreaming. You could look back at your nightmare if you wanted, and study it to see what it might teach you, or you could walk away and forget it.

But if a writer, and especially a writer who was a ‘culture hero’, as many of mj lorenzo’s pundit following said he was, wrote a book about a nightmare of his and presented it to his people, it behooved those people NOT to walk away from it and forget it; because he was saying, in effect, ‘Here is a nightmare we should look at and learn from.” It was the job of a writer, especially one who was a ‘culture hero’ – as this vocal group of pundits claimed, because most of them were ‘culture hero pundits’, mj’s most extreme supporters – to ferret out the very most important nightmare of his culture and present it to his people for study, so that they could learn what they needed to learn, so as to survive in the world comfortably and successfully a little longer. That was the purpose and mission of all ‘culture heroes’.

So, Tales of Waring purposely, and fully consciously, had not been structured like ancient Greek drama, said these ‘culture hero’ pundits. Greek drama had been molded deliberately and with great dramatic art by its famous playwrights for the sole purpose of holding you emotionally in its suspenseful spell until a final dramatic denouement within the drama itself resolved the suspense and sent you home feeling you had just had a visceral mental enema. That kind of structure was one of the greatest gifts the ancient Greeks had given humanity, and much of the Western world’s literature and entertainment had been modeled on it ever since. But that was the Greeks, said the Remaking pundits; this was mj lorenzo. Greek drama was not realistic or naturalistic; mj lorenzo was. This writer had not created plots or invented dramatic fiction in either of the two books he had given the world to date (The Remaking and Tales of Waring), for one simple reason: because he had written about real life situations, they explained; he had described certain real situations from his own real life in laborious detail, and then searched them equally laboriously for any lessons they might teach. That was why Tales of Waring offered readers no ‘cathartic’ experience or cleansing relief from terrible tension at the end. His book was realistic and naturalistic. This was why readers had complained, they maintained: because he had given them no cathartic dramatic denouement and instead had simply left them feeling after the last page, when they put the book down, that they had finally waked up and walked away from what now felt, in retrospect, something like a nightmare, an interminable, barely comprehensible, almost absurd, quasi-nightmare. Tales of Waring ended not the way a highly crafted drama ended, they said, but as a nightmare ended, or as someone’s life ended, anyone’s life, or as a nation’s history came to an end, and that was why it petered out in the end, instead of ending as drama usually did (only after a clarifying final dramatic climax).

Yet, they said, it was of utmost importance to Western culture that readers withstood the feelings this nightmare provoked in them while reading it, the wish to escape from the nightmare and run away from it, and that they persisted instead in reading through to the end. Because Tales of Waring, they maintained, described a waking, walking, wide-awake, mj lorenzo nightmare; and at the same time, therefore, because mj lorenzo was a ‘culture hero’, mj’s wide-awake nightmare was by definition a waking U.S. American nightmare. By definition, they explained, a ‘culture hero’ was so intimately identified with his people and yet at the same time was so strongly put together, that he could withstand and mirror the pain of his people’s culture without being destroyed by it. It behooved the culture, therefore, to study his pain and nightmare as they would look into a mirror, to look into his nightmare of a book and see what they saw of themselves, discover what lay at the root of their own pain and nightmare; just as, for example, Christian Western Civilization had reflected for 2000 years on Christ’s life and teaching, and particularly on his suffering, to understand its own suffering; or just as Buddhistic lands, longing for their own enlightenment, had admired the example of the Buddha, who like them had suffered extreme longing for enlightenment and found it, as Buddha claimed, and thus could show them the way to finding it; and, as a dissimilar but very pertinent example, nonetheless: just as Native Americans of the U.S. southwest had listened to tales of ‘Coyote’ with awe, appalled and dazzled equally by his picaresque exploits, eventually seeing themselves in him in a way they never had seen themselves before, and understanding themselves much better finally, thereby.

Mj lorenzo’s nightmare in Tales of Waring was the Western world’s nightmare, they reiterated. For it described in detail which was hilarious at times, for important reasons, and morbid or boring at other times for equally important reasons, the ‘backsliding’ of a culture hero, his withdrawal from the world and his pulling back from his commitment to the world and from his people in particular, his devotees, his followers, and through them all the people of his culture, the people he had been born in this world to save from catastrophic destruction, as he had said right in his first book, The Remaking; Tales of Waring described how he had forgotten or maybe even deliberately shirked that mission of his to save his people. Instead he had tried to go back in time to his childhood and reincorporate some of the values of his parents which he had so painfully yet clearly rejected in his first book, The Remaking. It revealed how he had slipped into a kind of fairy tale life removed from the real issues he had identified in The Remaking, the issues his life and mission as a culture hero were supposed to have addressed for the rest of his days. This culture hero had gone so far, even, in this nightmare he had allowed himself to slip into, as to deliberately impede the progress of a very good friend on the very path mj lorenzo was supposed to have been ‘endorsing and preaching’, the path of ‘remaking’ which rejected the unnatural, unhealthy, arrogant and dehumanizing aspects of the value system which the Western world had been developing for itself slowly over the sixteen or seventeen centuries of its history.

Bill Blackburn, the pundits maintained, before he met mj lorenzo, had already rejected major aspects of the contemporary Western world value system on his own, and had discovered a healthier, more natural and human path and ‘stuck to it’. This was why mj lorenzo had been drawn to him. Bill had done this on his own long before meeting mj, just as many of the Remaking pundits, mj’s most ardent followers, had done, back during the late sixties, likewise before ever hearing of mj in 1971. Because of his own remaking, Bill had naturally rejected Fred Waring and his worst personal values, precisely for the same reason that Tales of Waring was essential for Western culture to comprehend and appreciate. He had rejected the Western world’s arrogance, the very same value that he knew – even before he met Fred – had ruled Fred Waring’s relationships with other people. He knew about Fred’s worst personal values because they were widely known and discussed by ‘The Industry’, the entertainment industry, from Decca bosses to Dinah Shore, and he had rejected such typically arrogant Western world values long before, for the all-important reason that those values were a frighteningly telling reflection of what was worst and most dangerous about the Western world of his day, the Western world’s habit of de-humanizing the rest of the people of the world by the way it thought about them, and thus treated them. Fred Waring, maintained these pundits, embodied one of the worst aspects of the longstanding character pathology of Western Civilization, century in and century out, the sick, unnatural tendency it had always shown to de-humanize and devalue non-Western outsiders, a tendency which in our time, when the planet had shrunk to the size of a pea technologically speaking, threatened to end human history if nothing was done about it. The Western world, especially the U.S.A. with all its advanced technology and adolescent cockiness, had to be understood as capable of wiping out the human race while justifying its act morally, given the exclusivist way in which a frighteningly huge number of its people thought and believed, given the way of thinking that had been typical of ‘Christian’ Westerners since the beginning days of their civilization 2000 years ago, the egotistical and ethnocentric way they had always had of believing, and acting destructively and tyrannically upon the belief, that they were ‘more important’ than other peoples to the future of human history on the planet, and were morally and culturally superior to other civilizations and peoples by virtue of the fact that they were ‘good Christians’ and of primarily white, European ancestry.

And so, given these facts, said the pundits, the author and his followers all had wanted readers to feel progressively exasperated at the growing tedium, the frustrating lack of resolution and lack of drama in the last parts of Tales of Waring. It was important that readers experience, just as mj had that night, ‘mj lorenzo’s worst nightmare’, the world’s worst nightmare, in fact, namely, the feeling of being endlessly trapped in the clutches of some nameless, unidentifiable, invisible fiend. This fiend wanted the world to go backward in time so as to worship famous, colorful, philanthropic, even maybe highly artistic tyrants and bullies. The nameless fiend wanted mj and everyone else to condone or ignore such tyrants’ tyrannical or bullying treatment of humanity, by looking the other way and calling it high art or some kind of religion or fairy tale, as mj lorenzo had done throughout his night of Fred Waring nightmare. The fiend wanted mj and everyone else to call tyranny and bullying anything but what it was, in short, to call it ‘progress toward democracy’ or ‘progress toward freedom’ or ‘progress toward more advanced technology and wealth’; much as the Latin Americans called and considered their jefe tyrants and bullies ‘unavoidable’ and often even ‘a blessing to the community or Republic’. The fiend wanted everyone to ignore, minimize, or forgive for shallow, spurious reasons, the cocky, arrogant, spoiled, self-aggrandizing, self-indulgent, egocentric and/or in-group-ocentric, tyrannically disrespectful behavior that characterized the Western world’s (especially the USA’s) bullying of other peoples or groups, whether in a high school, on a ghetto or barrio sidewalk, or in a Fred Waring music workshop. That very fiend had gotten inside mj somehow and made him try and convince his best friend to give up his right path, said the pundits, after Bill Blackburn had decided he no longer wished to associate in any way with a bully tyrant like Fred Waring, a man who considered no one intrinsically worthy of respectful treatment: only if he decided to show them respect for selfish reasons, since only he, in his selfish mind, was intrinsically worthy of respect.

These Remaking pundits, even though they had been mj’s most avid supporters over the years, as they recognized, had been ‘horrified’, they said, ‘embarrassed to death’ when they had first seen Tales of Waring, it was so unlike The Remaking. But they had felt this way only until they had realized that Tales of Waring was a confession, like Augustine’s ‘Confessions’. That confessional book had been shocking in its author’s day too, but would become core reading for the Western world for many centuries after he wrote it, simply because it was his confession, and because Augustine was the culture hero of his day. That was a great book too, by the way, they added, “like the Bible or Tales of Waring,” which had no dramatic denouement at its close because it was designed not for excitement but for meditation and inspiration, for helping, in other words, sincere people with sincere questions about the world and life in the world, to reflect on the most important aspects of life in the world of their day. Mj lorenzo’s confession, Tales of Waring, was different from Augustine’s in at least one very important way, though, they said; because Augustine, a culture hero of the fifth century, had promoted in his writing what he felt the world needed most, right then, in the fifth century: flesh-rejecting Christian dogma; whereas mj’s writing taught the values he felt to be most crucial for preserving the natural humanity of the human race at this point in time, now, the very physical survival of the human race: respect for human flesh and physical existence in a human body; friendship; love; the celebration of the human life of every single individual human on the planet; respect for the dignity and physical animal humanity of every single human being on the planet and rejection of tyranny, domination, bullying and all forms of inhumanity to man, woman or child, including disrespectful acts carried out in the name of religion, politics or ideology of any kind; even if it meant that when you took a stand for such important values, you would be left, as Bill Blackburn had been left, with no job or income. The big emergency crucial issue for the planet was at the moment not only ‘spiritual’, they said, as it had been in the time of Christ and Augustine, as they taught; it was also physical and fleshly, species survival, the sheer physical survival of humanity. Humanity, they summed up, was on the brink of self-annihilation due to arrogant disrespect for others, arrogant disrespect for the intrinsic humanity of other people and peoples.

Granted, said the pundits, Tales of Waring was told from mj lorenzo’s point of view, as if he had been the heroic do-gooder the author had wanted the reader to focus on. But they, the ‘culture hero’ pundits, having made mj lorenzo and everything about him their study for the past ten years (from 1971 to 1981), felt strongly, and were certain mj ‘would have to agree’, that the real hero of the story had been Bill Blackburn, not mj lorenzo; because mj lorenzo in the book had ‘backslidden so hard and so long’ he had fallen backward into a dark hole, into a role of ‘anti-hero’, or as some of them even said, ‘near-villain’, albeit unthinkingly and therefore ‘hopefully forgivably’ for the most part.

They printed these comments in a special zine produced on a copier, and distributed the zine via their underground network of communication, enormous by now, toward the end of 1982; and the comments got picked up by the London Times Literary Supplement and the French Nouvelle Revue, because of the high level of interest in mj lorenzo in Europe, and were discussed as well in Columbia University’s ‘Political Science Quarterly’ and elsewhere.

But it was obvious to those who could read between the lines that this group of mj lorenzo pundits had not consulted mj before sending out either the short first part (to the Jung Library journal) or the second long part (in the zine) of what was eventually to become known as their ‘nightmare confession defense’ of his ‘Tales of Waring’. In other words, the public had not yet heard from the author on this matter. So Sammy Martinez spread through the same underground network a few additional comments.

Dr. Lorenzo, said Sammy, had made it clear to him that he had realized only after the night of the interview, long after it, gradually as the years had gone by, what had been going on during that night. He had figured it out after he had poured over the tapes and turned them into manuscripts and then studied every nuance of the night for years, trying to make the story of that night ever more understandable and publishable in book form. Slowly he had realized what had motivated his behavior that night. He had understood the implications of such behavior, and had grown to appreciate the way Bill had stood up to pressure from him, his own friend, mj, when mj had kept telling Bill he should step down from his strong position about this matter of Fred and compromise his values and try to see Fred Waring as ‘worth saving’, maybe even excusable morally, either because Fred was emotionally or psychiatrically damaged by events in childhood, or because he was someone ‘very important’ in the Western world.

Dr. Lorenzo had explained to Sammy, he said, that he had come to comprehend gradually that the ‘very important’ person – that night – to the Western world and its future and to humanity’s future too, was not Fred Waring but Bill Blackburn; because of the exemplary way he had dealt over the years with someone as destructive to people around him as Fred had been all those years; and for the example of firm resolve Bill had set for mj during the interview. His values that humanized people and situations, his knack for making healthy and human and natural and alive every event in which he ever participated, had been part of what had drawn mj to Bill from the beginning, of course; but then the young Dr. Lorenzo had allowed Fred-Waring-mania to intoxicate him and blind him to the importance of other things to such an extent that by this night of the first interview with the Blackburns, given mj’s goal for the night of ‘landing the great golden Fred Waring fairy tale’, Bill Blackburn’s exemplary high standards for how people should treat people, never with disrespect, instead of winning admiration and praise from mj lorenzo, had become his biggest bugaboo all night long, the main obstacle to his goals. And the interview and night had ended, of course, with mj still in the grip of this nameless, formless nightmare of a beast, the same Fred Waring celebrity mania with which he had arrived at the Blackburns’ that evening; so that the reader, after reading it, was left without the satisfaction of knowing that eventually mj HAD INDEED understood Bill’s decision to leave Fred Waring, and without the satisfaction of knowing that eventually mj had supported Bill’s choice as exemplary and admirable, and that eventually mj lorenzo HAD understood his own behavior that night as having been less than admirable, all of which it was essential for the public to know about the author, mj lorenzo.

In sum, said Sammy, Dr. Lorenzo had published this book about Fred Waring in the end, not for the reason he had intended in the beginning, when he had decided to interview the Blackburns, hoping they would give him material that would help him describe the charmed fairy tale life they all had been living together, all of it very much in the shadow of Fred Waring; but he had published it rather to describe the damage that living in the shadow of such a man had inflicted upon their individual selves and their relationships, and the nightmare into which it had sucked him, mj lorenzo, in particular. And since the purpose of the book in the end had been to describe as accurately as possible one long night’s never-ending nightmare, a dream that started out feeling deceptively bright and enticing but ended up feeling dark and dismal and confining and interminable, even gruesome and deathly, and to describe it in a way that might help the reader feel as accurately as possible how it had felt to be mj and Bill at the time and to be living such a nightmare, then it was reasonable that the book had been structured as it had been, without any denouement toward the end to relieve tension, but rather had been left to drag on with its tension interminably, without relief, until the reader finally finished the last sentence on the last page and exited from the world of the book, thereby waking up abruptly from the nightmare. Because that was how the night had been for mj and Bill.

There was no response from the ‘culture hero’ pundits to these comments from Sammy, however, probably because they were secretly in grave distress and conflict over the book by this time. Behind their official public response there had been an unofficial private reaction which was much more honest and less positive, one that would come out into the open soon enough after their ‘nightmare confession defense’; and so the ‘culture hero’ pundits were not through yet with mj lorenzo by any means on the matter of his Tales of Waring. The ‘nightmare confession defense’ had been merely their public reaction, their effort to maintain a respectable public image and deflect as much criticism and misinterpretation of mj lorenzo and themselves as possible. The private reaction, yet to come out in the open, would be quite a different story.