quoted in
Gary Jennings, on the frontispiece page of his astonishing novel Aztec[1]

[Explanatory note from editors regarding what follows: Our hero, the writer Mortimer John (Jack) Lorenzo, 'global culture hero' according to some, global shaman, witch doctor or physician/psychiatrist to others (but total perennial bugaboo to millions worldwide who failed to understand him, unfortunately), has made himself world-famous for not being able to remember what the heck he was writing about. In our 'look at' The Remaking we devoted a whole drole section of the book to this quaint subject. Not surprisingly then, on September 16, 2019, a Monday, which happened to be a quiet Mexican Independence Day in the rural Morelia suburbs, the Dr., frustrated, finally sat down at his laptop and typed some thoughts into his Tales of Waring work-journal for the first time in months. He wrote to himself to help himself think and remember, describing yet one more serious incident of writer's mind-block. Later he cleaned up the entry and sent it to Sammy and the editorial board, as below.]

[Dr. Lorenzo writing to himself, as he often did when working on a book:]

9/16/19 – We’re about to wrap up a look at mj lorenzo’s second book Tales of Waring. Everything is in web-format html except a last additional 'postscript' page which Sammy and his people just devised, and in so devising made me wonder if I could add a certain quote from Durant I just came across (vol. 11, pg. 412), which struck me as applying to my life and writing:

...the basic aspect of life is the conscription of the individual into the service of the race.[2]

But the question is: does it BELONG in this book, does it APPLY to this book, and, more precisely, to its main theme, or thesis, in the Egri[3] sense.

I am writing here to help me think, and answer that question..

For days I could not answer the question, thinking about it. I was bewildered.

Finally I realized I could only answer it if I were very clear what my book, Tales of Waring, was supposed to have been 'about'.
 

“I’m about to go through the html pages ONE LAST TIME,” I found myself thinking for a few days, “and propose to Sammy's team any changes I think fit, and it’s a good time to remind myself what this darn monstrosity of a 'look at' book was supposed to be about!”

I could remember lots of things I said and did in the enormous and complicated book; but, after putting it aside for so many weeks and not thinking about it at all: I couldn’t remember what the ‘theme’, the MAIN POINT of Tales of Waring was supposed to have been, if there even was a main point! After a couple more days I asked myself, Was it that I, young Dr. mj, wanted to go back in time to childhood, to a conservative worldview, after all of the liberal-radical garbanzo of The Remaking and the late sixties, as our ‘look at’ Tales of Waring has talked about in several places? Was that the main point of Tales of Waring and/or this ‘look at’ it? Or did I blow it again, and forget to try using Egri to organize my thinking around his notion of ‘premise’, as I know I have done with some of my books. I worked out the 'premise' for other books, but maybe I forgot to do it with this one.

I'm using the terms 'premise', 'main point', 'theme', and 'thesis' interchangeably right now.

I used to just compose things in writing, open-structured like a Chopin piano 'fantasia', as if just adding thoughts to a diary (as in the original Remaking trip journal), not looking for a unifying thread, necessarily. But after reading Egri, I tried to at least explore the idea of finding and keeping to – at least roughly – a central focal idea in a given single book or picture show.

Whenever I let a book go, putting it down, and take a break like I did over the summer, the purpose is often to just get away from it long enough and completely enough that when I come back to it I’ll have a fresh perspective, almost as if I were another person looking at it for the first time. Via this trick, I have found some terrible mistakes at times in my writing – and also some opportunities – and that was one of the purposes of the summer’s break. Plus, though I am in high-elevation (6000 feet) central Mexico where it is springtime year-round, my nervous system is still wired from all the years in the states when I dropped everything in August and flew from Colorado to Philly to savor the last few precious drops of summertime with my kids and folks at the shore. And then, every year around the end of August or the beginning of September, it was back to school or work.

But this time, with my 76-year-old – and slowly drying and hardening-to-wood – brain, I guess, I couldn’t even remember what the damn book was about.

[Note from editors: It may well have had little or nothing to do with a drying brain. Dr. Lorenzo is sharp as a tack, still at 76. But he ALWAYS has forgotten what he was writing about. He's been doing it all his life. It probably has to do with the fact that his books are so complicated and multi-level, as a result of what Isabel Briggs Myers in Gifts Differing (pg. 92) called the 'debit side' of that extremely rare and wonderful commodity called Intuitive-Introverted-Thinker personality type, of which the Dr. no doubt is an example: "When confronted by a simple question that needs a simple answer," writes Myers, "the introverted thinkers feel bound to state the exact truth, with every qualification that their scholarly consciences dictate; the answer is so exact and so complicated that few can follow it..." INCLUDING THEIR OWN SELVES, we add, creating a need for EDITORS! See Bibliography under 'Myers'. ^[4] ]

So, when I finally got down to business, willing to actually try to wrap my mind around this ‘premise’ issue (I was fighting getting back to ‘work’ after 1-2 months of reading history and novels, a trip to Ajijic with the boys, lots of TV, and gardening, and cooking, and more reading, and watching on Spanish-language TV all 21 stages of the Tour de France, beginning to end, every single one, each lasting for hours, during three weeks in July), I opened this very work file to help me remember if, maybe, I had once upon a time tried to ferret out and settle on a ‘premise’ for Tales of Waring; and I realized quickly I had indeed tried to grapple with the issue of ‘theme’ or ‘thesis’ in the Egri sense. On July 15, 2018, at Uncle Eddie’s in Seattle, I had come up with:

You can’t save a fairy tale

by chaining the hero to a bull in a china shop

or to a god in sheep’s clothing.

When we finally got the book into html this past spring, we changed it to:

No fairy tale leaves its hero

chained up

to a bull in a china shop

or to a god in sheep’s clothing.

mj lorenzo

miscellaneous work notes associated with

Tales of Waring

Sunday, July 15, 2018

And just now I changed it one (last?) time to:

A true fairy tale does not end with its hero
CHAINED

to a bull in a china shop

or
to a wolf in divine lamb’s clothing
or

to ANYTHING.
True fairy tales redeem their heroes from their chains.

In other words, after all of the sixties radical revolution and young mj’s (my!) writing The Remaking, with its revolutionary themes and proposals, if mj now, a few years after The Remaking, writing a second book, Tales of Waring, after all that, has to go back all the way to childhood and restore that child's fairy-tale aspect to his life, we’ll give it to him. After all, he's a young writer! Any blinkin' thing he wants! We like young writers! We need them! Bless them, Lord, and take care of them BUT: his fairy tale cannot go awry and break fairy tale rules; he has to follow the rules for fairy tales!!!!!!!!!

To preserve the fairy tale the hero or heroes must be bought back – 'redeemed' – from whatever psychological pit or trap they have fallen into: a curse; a neurosis; a bewitchment; or set of chains; a captivity; a morass of evil, sin or wrongdoing; a trap or bind of some kind; even, if you like, a 'nightmare'.

In this case the cost of the buy-back or ransom, is A BOOK, a tremendous effort by many people working together, including even Betty Ann McCall Blackburn and Sammy Martinez, a bunch of New Mexico high school students and even an elementary-level webmaster, but principally by three 'heroes' named Fred, Bill, and mj.

People may argue, Who is the hero of Tales of Waring anyway? But if you allow, as I would like to right now, that any of the three main characters of the story might theoretically be considered a hero in one way or another, Fred, Bill, or mj, then – okay – maybe it's true: (1) Fred Waring is freed (by mj, heroically) from the chains (or 'curse', or 'bewitchment', as Marie-Louise would have said) of Bill’s persecution of him (when, at the end of the interview, mj throws Fred over his shoulder and runs out the door with him, so to speak, saving him – heroically – for another day and another purpose than somebody's punching bag); (2) Bill is freed of the chains (or 'curse', or 'bewitchment') of his vengeful bitterness by his – heroically – confessing EVERYTHING to – a very heroically longsuffering – mj – and the world, via the nightlong nightmare interview which will become a book; and (3) mj is freed of the chains (or 'curse', or 'bewitchment') of his gone-awry naive fairy-tale fantasy world by Bill’s long nightmarish night of – heroically – educating him, wising him up to painful reality. As Sammy said to me once, "Young Dr. mj was 'cursed' so badly by his naivete that only a live Indian with a tomahawk hanging on his living room wall could yank him – painfully – out of it." And as von Franz said in her book, sometimes the 'curse' turns a person into an animal. Not surprisingly, mj was turned into a 'Cretan Bull', and it took a Hercules-like American Indian to drag him out of the curse, 'redeeming' him, as von Franz uses the term, paying the price, making the huge effort. And as for the once-hero Fred Waring, he is, at the end, still the hero he was in the beginning, for mj anyway, if for no one else, a demi-god musical artist, virtually, maybe even a culture hero, at least to some.

By the end of the story, Bill is no longer chained to mj by mj’s persistent, insensitive, naive, bull-in-a-china-shop interrogation; nor is Bill any longer chained by bitterness to that wolf in sacred baby sheep’s clothing, Fred Waring.

Of the three heroes, each has been rescued – 'redeemed' – 'ransomed' – bought back from entrapment – by one of the other two. (See Bbliography under 'von Franz'. All of this she presented on the first page of her book, meaning in the first two minutes of the lecture she gave on the subject at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich in 1956, 13 years before I studied there; heard her lecture; met her; and was psychoanalyzed by her – briefly.)
 

So now, the question, again: is this quote from Durant appropriate as a closing comment? Does it enhance a comprehension of the main point of the story, this theme about the essential nature of fairy tales always rescuing – 'redeeming' – their heroes:

...the basic aspect of life is the conscription of the individual into the service of the race.

If there is a connection, I guess it would have to be that mj lorenzo has been 'conscripted into service to the race' not just as a psychiatrist and father and grandfather but also as a writer; because he was born a writer – even when extremely busy making a family, even when helping his children make families, and practicing psychiatry and climbing 14,000-foot Colorado Rockies one after another, he could not stop writing, and he has accepted his fate and character, his basic nature, and he has written many books for the race in an attempt to illustrate for them lessons he has wanted to pass on, including a book whose lesson turns out to be that: ‘a true fairy tale liberates its heroes’. He didn’t start out with that understanding when he set out to write the book that he and Bill and Betty Ann agreed they would help him write, but in the end he did understand the lesson the whole event taught him.

During the Second World War a surprisingly, gratifyingly, and tragically enormous percentage of young Americans volunteered to risk their lives to preserve Western democracy, but when that was not enough, the rest were 'conscripted'. In the 2018 movie 'Overlord' the African-American soldier named Edward Boyce (played by Jovan Adepo) explains that he was 'drafted' or 'conscripted' into the Army. To paraphrase: "One day they came to my house, knocked on my door and said I was needed," he explains, "and so here I am, in beautiful France." He had not signed up voluntarily.

Similarly, the early pages of Tales of Waring explain that mj lorenzo was 'drafted' or 'conscripted' by Bill Blackburn to write a book about Fred Waring, and mj felt he could not refuse such a request, from such a friend, even though he did not like the idea, especially at first.

Young Dr. mj then conducted the first interview of the Blackburns. He had intended to preserve the fairytale story that he had created in his head and heart about Waring, the Blackburns, Dlune and himself. But as the interview progressed, while doing the job he was drafted for, things got complicated, just as they did for drafted Private First Class Boyce on D Day in France. Just married and living with Dlune at Spring Lake, East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, 1972-75, mj wanted to return to, and hide out in, a fairy tale existence. But, as 'conscripted hero to his race', in order to avoid creating a tragedy, he ultimately felt obligated to follow fairy tale rules, namely, in this case, that no hero of his, in that book of life called Tales of Waring, could be left in chains at the end of the story: each one of the three heroes and/or anti-heroes of his second autobiographical book – and all three in the real world too, not just in the book – would have to be redeemed and liberated from their own special kind of psychological chains in the end. Private First Class Boyce's story, sadly, by contrast was more tragic, as we might have expected of a WWII story, and did not end up with all of its heroes intact.

Fred could remain a demi-god to mj, maybe.

MAYBE.

Okay.

We'll allow it.

But only if Bill is allowed to smash Fred’s clay feet to dust BEFORE THE EYES AND EARS OF THE WORLD.

No tragic ending for Bill. He gets it off his chest.

No tragic ending for mj. He uncovers a thing or two.

No tragic ending for Fred either. He is scarred and blood-spattered, even injured forever, you could argue, but still a demi-god to some.

No tragedy allowed.

No fairy tale ever ended in tragedy.

The nightmare is over.

________________________________________

The Dr. sent off these thoughts via email from Mexico, to Sammy and the board 1200 miles straight north in New Mexico, and they were soon approved for the last, very last page of: a look at mj lorenzo’s second book, Tales of Waring.^[5]