chapter twenty three
Exactly How
Mrs. Nixon's Legs
Saved the White House Christmas Concert
including
exactly
how
to study seriously and maybe even 'look' at
and meditate upon
as well (almost) as any blankety-blank XY#!&#X!
or whatever kind of PUNDIT
Dr. Lorenzo's ever-popular
(and uncannily intuitively brilliant)
and lucid (and 'luminous'?)
and even funny (some days)
(depending on one's mood)
fourth book
Being another
penetrating compendium of tips for comprehending Dr. Lorenzo’s
fourth book, with help from the Dr. himself, and from
publications by Remaking
pundits, Legs
pundits, and the author’s chief in-house critic, Sammy
Martinez; and being also too, Sammy’s answers to 27 questions
asked by – and of – U.S. and Canadian high-schoolers in
after-school reading clubs in the U.S. and Canada (followed by
the estimated number of times asked over the decades).
(Please
note: All references to ‘Legs’, to ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’,
to ‘Exactly How Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert’,
and to ‘mj lorenzo’s fourth book’, are to be understood to
mean the same thing, the standard and authorized GUULP version of that
important book: just as, whenever the Rev. Dr. Carl McIntire1 used to say the words, ‘Holy
Bible’, or ‘Scriptures’, or ‘The Lord’s Holy Word’, he always
meant The 1611 Standard
Authorized King James Version of The Bible.)
1. The Zeitgeist.
(1,387,687)
2. Mj’s ‘search for
ultimate truth’.
(1,386,547)
3. Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
on Broadway.
(9,762,832)
4. How mj’s admirers felt
about his guru.
(150,398)
6. Was the Bill Blackburn
Secret Service File really real? (50,854,344)
7. Could U.S. President
Richard Nixon really have been psychotic? (50,582,962)
8. Did Bill’s being 50%
Huron really make him ‘think like an Indian’? Or was mj
lorenzo ‘carried away on the wings of immigration’, as his
white-haired, 80-year-old Aunt Tisha suggested to The Philadelphia
Inquirer in ‘96 (only then to say she meant ‘wings of
imagination’)? (1,233,477)
9. Would it be worth
reading The Children of Aataentsic? that
impressive (and very long) classic in the field of cultural
historiography to which Dr. Lorenzo kept referring in his
10. How has the
traditional Western-world view of the individual person
differed from the eastern (oriental)? (5,109)
11. What does maya mean exactly? (1,786,012)
12. How many ingenious,
punsterous, pun-loving interpretations could ‘pun-ditzies’
milk from Dr. Lorenzo’s book title SENSIBLY; or humanely;
meaning, without offending human sense and sensibility;
without provoking a legally sane person to ask with
exasperation: ‘Could, really,
a legally sane person intend so many utterly different weighty
matters by one tiny little worthless rat-eaten book title?’
(1)
13. What were the
‘Watergate scandal’ and the ‘White House tape scandal’ really about?
(50,905)
14. Was Dr. Lorenzo’s
fourth book, Exactly
How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas
Concert, meant to be considered ‘sacred text’ in the same way that mj lorenzo
said his The Remaking was ‘sacred text’? (1)
15. Was it true, as some
have said, that mj lorenzo was attempting to found a new
religion? (85,601)
16. What did the
‘religionist’ pundits say about mj lorenzo’s fourth book?
(1)
17. Did the correspondence
between Dick Nixon and Fred Waring really occur?
(356.019)
19. Using Lajos Egri’s
criteria (in his book, The Art of Dramatic Writing),
what was the ‘premise’ of mj’s work, Exactly How Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert?
What, in other words, was the
number one thing the author was trying to show? What was the
main point he was trying to make when he wrote and published
his fourth book? (1)
20. What, for that
matter, was the purpose of mj lorenzo’s entire artistic
oeuvre? of all of his creative productions, in other
words; or, even more broadly: what was the purpose of mj
lorenzo’s life? And: have the actualities of his life and
creativity supported his claims about the purpose of his
life? (1)
21. Did Fred Waring give
Bill Blackburn the White House correspondence he said he
would give Bill as a 35-year ‘guarantee’? Could that have been how mj lorenzo came to learn of the
correspondence between Nixon and Waring, instead of via Bill
and his Secret Service friend? (1)
22. Did Dr. Lorenzo not
abandon verisimilitude and forgo all believability at the
end of his fourth book? -- (assuming that the
correspondence between Waring and Nixon was fictional, as so
many pundits and readers have felt) -- when he portrayed
Fred Waring as suddenly admitting imperfection, quoting Bob
Dylan and an Indian guru, defending his nemesis, Bill
Blackburn, and so forth? Or was this not, rather, a change
in character too drastic and sudden for the reader to
believe possible? Was the author not, in other words, merely
manipulating – by altering temporarily – the character of
his childhood hero, Fred Waring, in order to satisfy some
plot or character need of the author’s? (1)
23. Why did Dr. Lorenzo
always have such a bigg bugg up his axx [sic]
[or, as the stuttering usher said, ‘Mardon me padam, but
you’re occupooing the wrong pie’] about Calvinism? Did he rebel against his parents’
religion or something? (1)
26. How could a young
(31-year-old) Dr. mj lorenzo ever – for
even one minute
– have been able to open up to the idea of listening to some
fourteen-year-old kid from Hinn-Doo [sic] India telling him how to
find Ultimate Truth and Love? (506,893)
27. “Mr.
Martinez, is Dr. Lorenzo getting senile?” (1)
1. The Zeitgeist. (asked in
various forms an estimated 1,387,687 times by Canadian and
American high schoolers in their after-school reading clubs,
e.g., “What was it like in 1972-74?” or “Was mj lorenzo
typical of his time?”)
‘Zeitgeist’
is a word in the English dictionary borrowed from German,
where it means ‘time spirit’ if translated literally, or ‘the
spirit of the time’, i.e., the thought-trend atmosphere of a
given decade or historical period. And the author’s
pundit-devotees always liked to rave about how
his fourth book ‘reflected the spirit of the time’, the
‘zeitgeist’ of the early 1970s, which they said was: ‘an
atmosphere of radical late-60s mass-movement
in-the-street social and political reform, which was
trying to transform itself into a much quieter mid-1970s-style
individual self-reform’.
The book, as
the Dr.’s ‘pundit following’ said, ‘constituted a kind of
literary historical record of a significant portion of the
Western world’s zeitgeist as it existed during the years the
book was conceived and written and published, roughly 1972
through 1985, as that zeitgeist had been experienced by the
part of mj’s generation with which he had identified most
closely at the time’. He identified with a large worldwide
group, they claimed, – (and the author confirmed this on
several occasions), – that amounted to a good chunk of
forward-thinking people near his birth age (but mostly
younger) around the world, and of course included his own
devoted ‘Remaking
pundit’ following; who loved ‘Legs’ and all of his writing
passionately for that reason as much as for any other. This
group, mj’s ‘60s generation’, as all sides called it, had
begun to mature in new ways during the ten years of 72-82, to
marry, settle down, have children and seek more peaceful ways
of bettering their world than their notorious, in-your-face,
late-60s ways.
Mj lorenzo
was a ‘rare’ bird in many ways that were both celebrated and
maligned, of course; but in one particular way he was
‘typical’, said his pundits, of the huge percentage of that
rebellious 60s generation which during the 70s ‘finally
transferred their energies from radical political and social
reform to quieter self-reform’.
And mj’s pundits must have known whereof they spoke when they
said such things, since, as even outsiders agreed, ‘they were
talking about themselves’.
Mj lorenzo’s ‘generation’ had
first achieved fame as the 1960’s ‘generation’
(love-‘em-or-hate-‘em) of students and dropouts (and others)
that had never quit rebelling, and protesting, and
demonstrating, on campuses and streets from Europe to the
United States to Latin America and elsewhere, against every
kind of objectionable old ‘established’ way of doing things,
especially whenever that old way perpetuated a
disenfranchisement of ‘non-established’ groups, i.e. of groups
with less power than the ‘established’ groups. They had been
the irrepressible ‘teenager-ish’ rapscallions who had never
ceased to complain loudly and demand year after year that
disenfranchised and suppressed groups of whatever kind,
everywhere in the world, must be re-integrated
into universal society and treated with utmost respect as
equals (at the very least), everywhere, instead of with
disdain as inferiors and subordinates. They had, for example,
agreed with Martin Luther King and demanded along with him
that racial segregation in the
They had
insisted that the U.S. quit its ‘illegal and immoral’ Vietnam
War aimed at helping Christian South Vietnamese resist
Communist North Vietnamese in that country’s civil war; for,
as they ranted, the ‘established power’, ‘the political
establishment’ of the Western world, meaning the U.S.A., by
sticking its big, snotty, messy – and messing – nose into that
civil war at all, had merely demonstrated once again its
all-too-frequent condescension toward non-established,
non-white, non-Christian, and/or non-Western peoples; thereby
revealing their own lack of respect for such peoples’ ability
and right to solve their own problems in their own ways, at
their own rate of speed, via their own civil wars, or
failings, or whatever.
Mj’s
generation had also demanded, among many other things, that
colleges and universities (and even some high schools) be run
not solely by half-dead and behind-the-times ‘establishment’
administrators but – also – by ‘disenfranchised
non-establishment’ faculty, and by students too, even; and
especially by students when it came to matters of campus life
and the choosing of appropriate subject matter for courses and
majors; and they had won many of their demands by means of a
concerted, internationally organized effort that had shut down
many of the Western world’s institutions of higher learning
until the administrations of those many schools had caved in
to rebelling students’ demands.2
And these
efforts of theirs had created a zeitgeist to which the
subsequent zeitgeist of 1972-82 became a kind of reaction.
And so by
about 1972, it could be argued, this very well organized and
highly rebellious generation felt they had probably made some
progress with a few of the political and social changes they
had wanted; although they had only been at it for a few years;
and so it was a little soon to tell for sure. They could be
proud of their effort,
at least. But had they gained ground? That was the question.
Yet, as time
went by, and the 70s passed, the answer seemed clearer.
Should they
not have been impressed, for example (especially at their
young and impressionable age), with the way their united front
had at least begun
to change the world for the better? The longer they reflected
and matured, the more it seemed to them that, of all the young
generations in history which had banded together to try and
create a future world more to their liking, their own
generation might have been the one that had succeeded the
most. By 1972 it looked as if they might have actually helped
replace racial segregation with integration in the South. By
1975 they knew for
certain they had stopped the Vietnam War without
violence, mostly by (1) marching in the street and protesting
publicly in various legal
ways; and also by (2) staging illegal, limited and
highly calculated, extremely well-organized, well-timed,
non-violent resistance, Mahatma-Gandhi style, breaking laws
deliberately. For example, they blocked major
If more
people had tried the same pacifist tricks earlier in the
century, two abominable world wars might have been avoided.
But this was
not everything they did. The ‘radical 60s generation’ had also
helped found a world-wide Ecology Movement aimed at preserving
the natural environment, the health of the planet as a whole.
And they had certainly changed the way colleges, universities
and high schools treated and educated their students; and had
won the beginning stages of many other important social and
political victories, including fairer treatment of Native
Americans and people of Mexican descent in the United States;
of gays; and of women: all of these having been suppressed and
abused groups until then.
And suddenly,
one day, as it were, for reasons that should be elucidated
better so as to learn something from what happened, and to
understand why...:
in 1972, roughly, all these millions of highly organized
rebellious people all over the Western world just stood up and
changed their way of doing things, almost to a man and woman,
all on a dime. What caused this sudden change exactly? Maybe
they had wearied of
that kind of demonstrative external struggle to
make the world a better place. But: did they weary of it
because they found new ‘spiritual pursuits’? Or, did they look
to new ‘spiritual pursuits’ because they had wearied of social
struggle? In any case, many of them suddenly had found a new way of
struggling to make the world a better place, and that was by
changing themselves,
internally, as individuals.
Although, it
could be argued that they were, thereby, many of them, not
only trying to improve themselves as individuals,
but also still
trying to improve
their group and improve their generation
and improve their world,
given the fact that such a huge percentage chose to better
themselves as individuals by joining various
large groups all formed at the very same time for
the very same purpose. In other words, though almost all of
them said
they were now pursuing improvement of themselves as
individuals, a huge percentage nevertheless preferred the company
and support of a group while doing so. They
preferred this to going it alone, for example, in individual
psychotherapy with just one therapist as company. And in this
unexpected and seemingly unplanned, spontaneous, maybe even
intuitive way, it could be argued, a huge portion of mj’s
generation ended up perpetuating the incredibly sensational
group experience they had enjoyed during the 60s; and they
perpetuated their own concept of themselves, as well as the
impression they had left upon outsiders since the beginning,
that they were a
generation united as a GROUP by a meaningful cause,
that of making the entire world a better and fairer and more
peaceful place.
And so, all
of this constituted the zeitgeist of sudden drastic cultural
loosening up in which mj lorenzo was living and working
and thinking and dreaming while putting together his Waring
trilogy, the three books that told the story of Bill Blackburn
and Betty Ann McCall: how they – with Bill leading the way –
had run right up against, and battled with, traditional,
old-style, rigid ‘establishment’ authority in the persons of
Fred Waring and Richard Nixon, and then tried to settle down
and consolidate their revolutionary gains. And these three
books told the story, as well, of mj lorenzo’s own reaction to
the Blackburns’ little microcosm of a revolution-in-a-nutshell
(with emphasis on ‘nut’,
since revolutions tended to drive both the changers and the
stick-in-the-muds nutty).
In the first
book of the trilogy, Tales
of Waring, mj had spelled out Bill Blackburn’s
Huron-tribal-style personal
stand against Fred Waring’s
wealthy-and-powerful-white-guy employee abuse in excruciating
detail; but the author had left this conflict so frustratingly
unresolved at the end of his book that many readers came away
feeling that they had experienced a nightmare; and that it was
a nightmare that had finally ended only because the interview
and book had come to an end, not because any tension in the
story had been resolved. Mj, too, for his part had been torn
apart by the experience he had described in this first book of
the trilogy; and had been left hanging emotionally by the
experience, and by trying to write about it.
In the second
book of the Blackburn-Waring trilogy – which mj lorenzo
referred to at first as ‘The Fight’; or as ‘Never
Psychoanalyze a Huron Indian (especially if his new beautiful
blonde wife is present)’; or, later, as ‘A Nice Story About
Fred Waring’; and/or ‘The Second Disastrous Blackburn
Interview’; but, in the end, as ‘Grandfather's Tomahawk’
and other tales from the last great Huron storyteller and
the last great Swedish-American Big Band blonde-bomb
madonna-orphan storyteller – mj had revealed the
content of his second interview with the Blackburns, showing
how his misguided effort had left their marriage in shreds and
left him even more at loose ends than he had been after the
first interview.
And so by the
time the third and last interview was approaching, the one
that resulted in the third book of his Waring-Blackburn
trilogy, Exactly How
Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert,
mj felt he had to find some way to resolve the conflicts and
tensions in the trilogy once and for all. And he chose to do
so via the zeitgeist of
self-improvement being created for his generation at
that moment by gurus and self-improvement wizards of every
kind. These gurus and wizards included everything from ad hoc
Protestant preachers creating new churches for Hippies and
‘Jesus-freaks’; to revered traditional gurus from India
teaching Hindu and Buddhist techniques for ‘escaping maya’ by
‘surrendering ego’ and merging ‘true self’ with ‘Ultimate
Truth, Peace and Love’. And since mj was just at that moment
in the middle of experiencing the latter, right then and
there, he used it to help himself resolve, in a certain way,
Bill Blackburn’s until then seemingly irreconcilable
confrontation with the U.S.A. ‘establishment’ in the persons
of Fred Waring and Richard Nixon. And thereby, it could be
said: the author showed how the guru’s teaching might possibly
have something to offer the 60s generation or a future
generation: if they should ever choose in some way, as he had
done via his writing in subsequent years, to continue
confronting ‘the
establishment’ by demanding equal, fair and humane treatment
for all.
Mj lorenzo
had demonstrated in his fourth book, his pundit devotees said,
several ways by which Joey’s guru’s teaching might help make
the world a better place. It could (1) calm a person down,
first of all, the way it had calmed down the interviewer,
young mj, by helping him be less emotionally attached to the
outcome of the interview. And once the interviewer had become
calmer, others around him had tended to become calmer too; so
it could (2) calm people down in the environment around a
person as well. Also, once everybody had calmed down, the new
calmness seemed to (3) help all of the newly calmed people to
organize themselves and each other better, clarify their personal goals, and
win better support from each other for attaining them; and to
define group goals
and organize themselves better as a group in order to attain
group goals.
The peace and
contentment kept spreading and multiplying, creating an
atmosphere conducive to resolution of conflict of every kind:
not just tension that might be hiding in the
And it was
fitting that mj lorenzo would have chosen to resolve the
story’s conflict in this current-zeitgeist-y way, said his
backers; because he was also ‘in tune with his times’, it
showed, not just a man for all ages.
(It is
noteworthy that by the time teenage Guru Garland had reached
his fifties – in the 2000s – he had been invited to speak to
the Italian senate, the Brazilian senate, the European Union,
The United Nations and other august governing bodies around
the world, as if in confirmation of the healing impact he
could have upon large conflicted world bodies; and in fact, as
early as the seventies already he had been invited to address
the U.S. Senate Prayer Breakfast, and his address had been
published in The
Congressional Record. It was ‘interesting’, said
pundits, that mj lorenzo had latched on to a guru with
sticking power, and not on to one who came and went with the
wind. Mj lorenzo ‘recognized a kindred spirit’, they said.)
2. Mj’s ‘search for
ultimate truth’. (1,386,547 questions from
Dr. Lorenzo’s
intense search for
‘ultimate truth’ in younger years gave his early life and
writing ‘a special
kind of intense fiery luster’ that his later life and
writing would not always show, claimed pundit-devotees. But
this seemed not necessarily all bad, if you remembered that
once he had found something that seemed to him a satisfying
enough version of ‘ultimate truth’, he and his writing ‘calmed down’,
as they said; and each of his subsequent books confined itself
to a more reasonable subject range. And Mrs. Nixon’s Legs,
agreed the pundits, was the turning point in this development.
Mj’s search
for a workable philosophical and/or religious approach to life
(‘workable’ for mj; and for his followers; both), as Remaking pundits
insisted over the years, ‘could never
again’ impact the content of his writing the
way it had his first four books, The Remaking; Tales of
Waring; Grandfather’s Tomahawk; and Mrs. Nixon’s Legs.
Granted: the
world’s religions, philosophies and ideologies and their
comparative pluses and minuses, once put into practice,
continued to concern the Dr. in his later life too. You could
not take that away from a hard and serious thinker like mj
lorenzo: especially at a point in world history when
thinking-and-belief systems were clashing so very dangerously
all over the planet, that the very
future of the human race itself was at stake;
and especially when he believed that his purpose in life was ‘to keep humanity from
destroying itself’. Belief systems and the way
they affected people’s behavior were therefore probably the
single biggest focus of mj’s life and writing, just as they
had been for many of his intellectual, spiritual and moral
heroes, like Nietzsche, Jung, Sartre, Toynbee, Ruth Benedict,
Margaret Mead, Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda, Allen
Ginsberg and even Guru Garland and dozens more. Most of the
people mj admired and studied had looked at the world by
comparing one ideology’s practice with another’s.
And mj, it’s
true, like many of those mentioned (and others besides them
too numerous to list), was additionally fascinated in later
years by ‘crazy’ or
‘half-crazy’
applications of ideology. One of his favorite peeves in this
category was the revolting U.S. American habit of sexually
mutilating newborn boys, a custom he saw as not just
‘senseless’, but actually ‘criminally sexually-abusive’;
unless, however: it were a religious attempt, conscious or
unconscious, to confirm U.S. Americans as God’s replacement
for the Jews, as God’s ‘new chosen and circumcised race’. But
this was a ‘crazy’ ‘neo-Calvinist-type’ claim he said
Americans had no right to make.
Another
‘favorite’ target of the Dr.’s in later years, an even more
‘dangerous religious or ideological practice’ that he placed
in the ‘crazy’ category, was the way conservative USA
Christians kept pushing their country toward war here and
there (Vietnam for example; or Iraq when invaded by junior
Bush) so as to establish democracy, capitalism, freedom, and
conservative Christianity, meaning Calvinist-Fundamentalist
extremist-Protestant missionary work, around the globe,
despite the fact that such military aggression, when pushed so
obviously by the USA’s conservative Christian groups more than
anyone else in the country, was bound to look and feel to the
rest of the world – and especially to the Muslim world (or to
any large ideological faction in the world that felt naturally
threatened by an aggressive USA) – like a kind of holy war against them;
and therefore was bound to increase global tension and
emotional temperature in an already overheated
nuclear-powder-keg-gy environment; and could easily get
EVERYBODY burnt to nuclear potato chips, including all of
those prettily-dressed, frenetic, and aggressive churchgoers
who kept urging their president and congressmen to go to war.
In other
words, mj loenzo continued using his head throughout his later
writing career too. It was not that he had stopped thinking
after discovering Joey’s guru and settling down spiritually,
said his followers. He simply was not as lost
any more; that
was the chief result of his running into the Indian whiz kid;
and so his writing did not have to scour the whole universe of
life’s reality again and again, on each new page in each new
book, searching desperately for some way to comprehend each
new subject and every new wrinkle in a story action, as he had
done in his first four books (and especially in The Remaking and Tales of Waring).
Nor did mj,
in subsequent years, stop – after discovering his guru –
comparing the impact of one ideology with that of another via
anthropological, theological and philosophical observations.
He remained a moralist, and his moralizing actually increased
with age. He felt duty-bound for the rest of his life – and
more so with each passing year – to knock certain ideological
notions and their supporters, if he felt they were misguided,
and to commend those notions (and supporters of same) that he
thought commendable. He loved to poke ‘harmless’ (hopefully)
fun at ‘so-called-saint’ Augustine, for example, as he did
throughout his book, Hooked
on Cocaland, after his first trip to Colombia in the
1990s; or at anyone like Augustine who denigrated healthy,
animal-human sexuality ‘in any of its infinite and
entertaining, harmlessly varied manifestations’, as the Dr.
would say; especially when such silly scoundrels did so, ‘like
Augustine, in the name of some crackpot religious or
ideological notion of their own distorted egotistical
inventing’.
And it is
true, as well, that mj, throughout all of his life and art,
might wander away, from time to time, from a ‘truth’ or two,
or a ‘practice’ or two he had once claimed to have
‘discovered’ and ‘made his’; just as he wandered away from
perfect mental sanity a little in that same book, Hooked on Cocaland,
and in any number of his books. He was depressed at times too,
be it known, probably even ‘psychotically’ depressed at a
point in the late eighties and/or early nineties; and
throughout his life he evidenced a number of symptoms, in one
year or another, of one psychiatric diagnosis after another as
outlined in the DSM III and IV, the official diagnostic and
nomenclature workbooks of the American Psychiatric Association
during those years. He clearly qualified for a diagnosis of
‘Cocaine addiction’ at one point, for example; or ‘amphetamine
addiction’ ten years later (as well as during his 1970 trip to
the
But – and be
all of that as it might-of-were – whatever temporary form of
lost-ness (or directionless-ness; or wrongheaded-ness; or
psychiatric disorder; or half-crazy searching or
experimentation; etc. etc.) might have occasionally come to
possess mj lorenzo as a writer, and to impact a book or two
throughout his life, after
his first four big-theme books: that lost-ness would
never again overwhelm or swamp mj lorenzo’s WORLD OF
WRITING to the degree it had in his first four
books. That was ‘THE
BIG DIFFERENCE’ after ‘The Turning Point’: as pundits came to
call Mrs. Nixon’s Legs,
eventually (in November of 2001). For so they called ‘Legs’ --
'The Turning Point' -- during a great convocation on the
thirtieth anniversary of the publication of mj’s ‘first and
greatest book’, The
Remaking. That was ‘THE BIG
THING’ that distinguished mj’s first four books from the rest
of his ouevre
starting after Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs. And as a matter of fact, on this
particular point, for
once, the critical press (literary, political, religious
and so on) agreed with mj’s ever-supportive pundit following,
surprisingly.
Almost all of
the world’s mj lorenzo observers, in other words, by the early
21st century, critics and supporters alike, thanks
to the vantage point of thirty years’ hindsight, could see
that Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
marked a distinctly noticeable turning point in the Dr.’s life
between his earlier years (and art) of greater, much graver,
almost ‘tragic’ (as some said) FLOUNDERING; and his maturer
later years (and art) of lesser, though still ‘interesting’,
‘very important’ and often even ‘amusing’ ‘PETTY-FLOUNDERING’
(as ‘Number One Pundit’, Sammy Martinez, phrased it famously
from a stage mike, right to the whole world, including the Dr.
himself a few feet away, where he sat in the front row of that
thirtieth anniversary ‘party’ of ten thousand at the
Philadelphia Convention Center in November of 2001).
In other
words: stumbling upon Guru Garland would come to make as
enormous a difference in mj’s life as it had in his friend
Joey’s. It would impact profoundly not just the content and
mood of mj’s fourth book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs, as
already observed, but also the content of every book and the
meaning of everything about his life from that point forward.
Many critics
claimed that the huge change in mj’s life brought about by the
guru had ‘weakened’ his writing by ‘removing struggle from
it’; and his most ‘extremist’ devoted pundit followers
disagreed with this ‘criticism’ at first, of course; because
they disliked the notion that anything in the universe might
‘weaken’ their superhero in any way. But in the end they could
not deny that they themselves had repeatedly insisted, year
after year, that mj lorenzo’s ‘greatest’ book had always been
and would always remain his first, The Remaking; and
that his second and third greatest had been his second and
fourth books, Tales of
Waring and Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs. It was an insistence which left them
defenseless against outside critics on the point; unless, of
course, they could see fit to change their opinion
regarding which books of his were his ‘greatest’ and could
ever try to boost his later writing to more importance. But
they had never been able to bring themselves to do this, not
as of 2013 anyway, when the present ‘look’ at mj lorenzo’s
fourth book went to publication in its present form; because
those first four books contained mj’s ultimate search for
ultimate truth; and mj lorenzo’s pundit followers and admirers
were ultimate nuts for ultimate truth, especially as it
related to their hero.
3. Mrs. Nixon’s Legs on
Broadway. (9,762,832 questions from high schoolers)
The Broadway
musical adaptation of Exactly
How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved The White House Christmas
Concert – by a composer-lyricist of highest rank –
opened in London in 1995 to raves, and again on Broadway a
year later to acclaim; but mj’s Remaking pundits and
Legs pundits
would not touch the subject, they were so disgusted by the
‘shallow’ script (as even mj’s harshest critics called it),
which drew on the book’s ‘Victorian-style melodrama’, while
leaving mj’s guru out in the cold. That script was written, of
course, by a script writer, not mj.
Just as in
the book, the play consisted of two parts, (1) Bill the hero
in the first part (‘Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs’) defeating the ogre Fred, with the help of
the President’s wife’s legs, so as to win the bride Betty Ann;
and (2) Bill the hero in the second part (‘The White House
Christmas Concert’) defeating the ogre Richard Nixon,
again with the help of the President’s wife’s legs (meaning:
with the help of Fred Waring’s reaction to President Nixon’s
reaction to Bill’s reaction to Mrs. Nixon’s legs), so as to
win his bride Betty Ann a five star honeymoon at the White
House, where they banqueted in private in the President’s own
dining room, waited on by White House staff as if royalty, and
then danced the night away with the Nixon Administration
bigwigs.
The two parts
of the musical were separated by a single long intermission
(during which everyone went out in the street and ‘vomited
from an overdose of superficiality’, as pundits told The Village Voice).
And not a single one of
mj’s following ever attended the musical or saw the 2003 movie
adaptation, even though the Broadway version won Tonys for
best musical and best play (!) and the movie won Oscars for
costuming, dance, cinematography and best supporting male
actor.
The round
number of ’zero’
may seem an outrageous, over-generalized and
impossible-to-believe statistic; but in fact, The New York Times
and San Francisco
Examiner both
confirmed via surveys that no mj
pundit-devotee could be found anywhere who had felt drawn to
these theater experiences. The only good thing about mj
lorenzo’s having made it to Broadway, his people said, was the
fame it had brought to his writing and global moral
leadership.
4. How mj’s admirers
felt about his guru. (150,398 questions from high schoolers)
Mj’s
following reacted positively to his affection for Guru
Garland.
5. How Carl Jung
helped mj lorenzo stay cool (and not ‘have a cow’) (or a
psychosis) over his guru’s alleged godly-incarnation-ness.
(2366 questions from high schoolers, e.g., “How could mj
lorenzo have believed that God could incarnate in anyone
besides Jesus Christ?”)
In 1987, an
informal group of Jungian analysts from Philadelphia and New
York – who were also ‘early Remaking pundits’,
i.e., original mj lorenzo experts of the highest caliber – put
their heads together after picking up on a hint from Sammy
Martinez (during a symposium on ‘self-healing’ techniques),
that the young Dr.’s initial difficulties in accepting a
teenage guru from India as ‘spiritual master’ had been allayed
by his understanding of Jung’s thinking regarding ‘the
archetype of the Self’. They sent Dr. Lorenzo a very carefully
worded letter asking for a clarification of Sammy’s comment
with all due respect, therefore, and received a detailed reply
from the Dr.:
Dear
respected pundits and friends. I am happy you asked me to
explain what Sammy was talking about. It was a simple thing,
really. But I like to tell the story, so it may grow longer
than you would have wished, and I hope you will forgive me if
I go on so long that I bore you to distraction and weeping and
wailing and gnashing of teeth.
By the summer
of 1974 I knew little more of Guru Garland than what Joey
Rosenblatt had told me about him, and even my understanding of
meditation and my use of ‘the wave’ was wrong, as I found out
in ’78 when I finally received formal instruction from one of
the guru’s ‘initiators’ in Denver, Rich Neal.
Yet, despite
my stupid early misunderstanding of Guru Garland’s meditation,
my life between ’74 and ’78 was enriched by one of the guru’s
least famous devotees, Joey, by means of the few things he
mentioned to me about his own experience of his guru and the
meditation which his guru taught, as the GUULP version of Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
attests.
I plan to put
together a book about Joey’s finding his way to ‘Truth’ one
day soon, and when I do I will describe him in colorful
detail, so this is not the place for that. (Some of you may
know him better than I do, by the way.)
Anyway, by
’75, when our little family of three-and-a-half moved from
The problem
for me, as I began to discover, was that I was still caught up
in Western ways of seeing things, very possibly to my own
detriment. According to our thinking in the Western world,
Deity incarnated ONCE in the form of a human being and that
was Jesus Christ, and it never could happen again and never
had happened before. Whereas in
One day I
remembered what Jung had said about the archetype of ‘the
Self’. And when I would go to the meetings in the evenings and
would listen to people talking about their experience of the
‘Beloved Great King Guru’ in glowing terms in the same way
James or John might have talked to others about Blessed Jesus
the Christ, Savior, the Son of God, to get past all of it, I
just chalked it up to their ‘talking about their own
experience of the archetype of the Self which lay
embedded in their own and everyone else’s primordial psychic
structure’ (as Jung might have stated it, or as any
Jungian might have phrased this kind of psychological event).
This was how I got past the traditional Christian mental
roadblock in my head that screamed at me the traditional
Christian theology that great spiritual teachers could NOT
claim to be anything more than preachers or evangelists, NEVER
any kind of divinity, or even quasi-divinity. Guru Garland had
once said – as you may recall from Mrs. Nixon’s Legs –
that he was ‘in permanent God-consciousness’; and even that
had been hard to digest, both intellectually and emotionally;
but in Denver in ’76 his followers were making much stronger
claims to his divinity than that; and rather than walk away
from a spiritual food that was most delicious and more healing
than anything I had experienced as a Christian so far, I just
found a way to get around the divinity stuff for the moment,
until I could decide what to do about it.
Jung is very
useful when it comes to things like this because his system of
understanding is not theological or philosophical, but rather
psychological. In
other words, he coined and used the psychological term,
‘Self’, to refer to the ‘archetypal’ psychological
experience of ‘God’; or of God-like, of god-like
and/or of Higher-Power kinds of entities, whether outside or
inside oneself, and whether imagined or real. Jung would never
have had to discuss whether or not ‘God’ existed in fact, and
did not do so in public, it’s important to note, until very
close to the end of his life when he was interviewed by the
BBC for a documentary. He was a psychologist and psychiatrist,
not a theologian or philosopher. His field of study was not
‘what really exists’, i.e., metaphysics, but rather, what we
‘experience’, i.e., psychology. And so, in Denver, in ’76 and
'77, I could sit in the evening meetings called ‘satsang’ and listen
to people describing the guru as some kind of god and water it
down in my mind to their
own psychology, so as to not get into a battle with them
or myself, or my father and mother, in my mind, over whether
this was really possible theologically and/or metaphysically.
I certainly found it acceptable for them to think they had met a
god, if they wanted to think
so; because we had just been through the 60s, after all, when
many kinds of permissive doors had opened up, allowing us all
to think in new
ways; and ever since the late 60s millions of people my age
and younger were in a radically new groove, ready for more and
more experimentation, the more the merrier; so I went along
with such claims on these grounds, and on the ground of
psychology as prescribed by Jung, and I survived the divinity
claims for years in this way; long enough to finally receive
formal instruction from one of the guru’s officially
designated instructors, Rich Neal, without having a heart
attack or mad psychotic crackup from thinking I might be
committing some kind of unpardonable heretical sin.
(For which I
should be burnt until carbonized black as a
So I hope
these thoughts answer your question. If they don’t, please get
back to me and I’ll add as much as you need until you reach
the level of understanding you desire (a level bound to be
quite high, as I know from your questions in the past).
Thank you as
always for your interest in me and my writing. I will never be
able to describe adequately, I’m afraid, how comforting it is
to have people at my side year after year like you, tracking
my successes and failures as I walk down the path of this
life, and trying to keep me from falling blindly into any more
open manholes than might be useful. I hope there has been, and
can be in the future, ever more a true partnership between us.
Yours very
sincerely,
mj lorenzo
6. Was the Bill
Blackburn Secret Service File really real? (this question was
asked more than any other by high schoolers: 50,854,344 times
at least)
Please see
the chapter, “The Exasperating White House Tape Scandal
Fiasco,” starting with the paragraph which begins: ‘Live television coverage
of Dick Nixon’s plunge from American grace, bit by bit, as
scandal over White House tapes grew and grew...’
See also the second
volume in the present series (a look at the life and
creative artifacts of mj lorenzo): a look at mj lorenzo’s
second book, Tales of Waring, specifically the chapter
entitled “I Want that Book Stopped,” which details involvement
of the U.S. President, Richard Nixon, and the CIA, FBI, and U.
S. Secret Service, in the lives of Fred Waring, Bill Blackburn
and mj lorenzo, in June of 1974.
Also: please
see question number 17 below.
7. Could U.S.
President Richard Nixon really have been psychotic? (the
second most frequently asked question by high schoolers:
50,582,962 times at least)
Dr. Lorenzo’s
fourth book ‘seemed to pretend’, as TIME magazine put it, that
Nixon had been suffering a ‘psychotic nervous breakdown’ off
and on for months or years before resigning the presidency.
No one had
ever made such a claim before Dr. Lorenzo did.
But by his
sixties (the 2000s) the Dr. was speaking in public more
frequently about the ease with which – in the crazy political
atmosphere that had been infecting the world for decades – not
only individuals but even nations entire, or
whole groups of people within nations, could slip into
psychotic thinking and behavior. He seemed to be acting alone
on the subject however; and the lack of support for his claim
from contemporaries in the intellectual community, especially
colleagues in psychiatry, left him exposed to undue amounts of
criticism from diehard Nixon defenders and others. In fact,
Dr. Lorenzo, by 2010 – unlike his contemporaries or anyone in
the history of Western thought that people could recall having
heard about – believed that what he called 'mass psychosis'
had happened innumerable times in the course of history, and
that it was not merely happening every day ‘right now’ but was
happening ‘more and more every day’.
Attacks on
the Dr. increased therefore, naturally, until Sammy Martinez
came to his defense in a position paper that was soon adopted
by ‘the early Remaking pundits’ as ‘a definitive
interpretation’ of their hero’s thinking on the matter of
‘psychotic subcultures’. Sammy’s 2011 paper was addressed to –
and posted on an internet
website for – mj lorenzo’s pundit-following around the world.
It read as follows:
Dear friends
of Dr. Lorenzo:
I have
consulted with the Dr. carefully and at length, and he has
approved this summary of his thinking on 'psychotic
subcultures'.
Psychotic Subcultures
Psychiatry
teaches its practitioners, the Dr. has explained to me, that
if a woman or man comes into your office and claims that they
are a god or goddess or are God himself or Christ in some new
form, the way to rule out the possible presence of a psychotic
illness is to determine if any large number of people support
the claim. Thus Jesus, if you adhered to this ‘criterion’ for
making a diagnosis of psychosis, could not have been diagnosed
‘crazy’ by a psychiatrist (if psychiatrists had existed in his
day); since Jesus or his defenders could have established that
a very large following, including some highly respected Roman
citizens and Jewish community leaders, supported all of his
seemingly very outlandish claims to being the right hand of
God.
Hitler could
not have been declared crazy on this basis either, however;
since such a large portion of the German people believed his
every crazy word.
Nor could the
American, Mr. Jones of Jonestown, have been diagnosed
psychotic, for the same reason: because hundreds of followers
supported his claim to have achieved a special connection with
God; and even though he understood this alleged ‘connection’
to be telling him that he should kill all of his followers and
himself; and even though all 900, including 250 children,
cooperated willingly at his behest in a mass cyanide suicide
of unprecedented proportions in 1978 in Guyana, South America.
You couldn’t even call the man crazy posthumously if you
stuck to traditional psychiatry profession criteria.
But clearly
Jones was psychotic and led his followers into mass psychosis
and suicide along with him, was how Dr. Lorenzo understood the
event; just as Hitler was crazy and led scores of millions of
Germans and other Europeans into mass crazy thinking and mass
suicide and homicide right along with him. So there had to be
something wrong with the U.S. American psychiatry profession’s
method for distinguishing between ‘psychotic’ and ‘not
psychotic’. And this discovery of the Dr.’s opened up the door
to his very independent and courageous subsequent thinking on
the subject.
The way to
determine if a ‘shared group belief’ were psychotic or not,
according to the Dr., was not by using the
simple criterion psychiatrists traditionally used (that an
unusual belief, if shared by a large number of people, could
not be considered psychotic), but rather by reverting to a
common-sense grasp of what was ‘good and physically and
mentally healthy’ for individuals and groups and what, on the
other hand, was likely to wipe them off the face of the planet
in short order. Mass suicide and homicide were not good and
healthy behaviors for anybody, plainly and simply, and had to
be seen as the byproduct of disturbed and crazy thinking
therefore, the Dr. said.
The U.S.
American wish for revenge after the 9/11/2001 airliner-bombing
of the Pentagon and Twin Towers also reached the level of
‘mass craziness’, according to the Dr., as proven by the fact
that the thinking and behavior of the U.S. American people and
especially the U.S. president (Bush II) and his advisors and
most ardent voter-supporters after that event were not healthy
but were likely instead to lead to grave retaliation against
the USA and even, therefore, the destruction of humanity in toto. Granted: to
invade Afghanistan
when the mastermind behind the terrorist bombing of the Twin
Towers and Pentagon was almost certainly hiding there, seemed
a reasonable response to average common-sense people around
the world, he said; but to invade Iraq at the same
time, when Iraq had had nothing to do with the attack on
the U.S.A., was ‘virtually suicidal’. Why?
Because it
was almost certain to provoke very serious retaliation from
many and various parts. Why?
Because,
around 1990, the USA had finally defeated the Communist World
in the 45-year-long so-called ‘Cold War’, making the USA the
first unchallenged global superpower in the history of the
world. And ever since that day every human being on the
planet had been watching closely, the Dr. said, (1) to see if
the unchallenged-superpower USA would use its suddenly immense
and ‘unchallenged’ (because virtually unchallengeable) power
around the globe for
everybody’s benefit, or would abuse this
power for the USA’s (or some of its citizens’) own selfish
advantage; and if the latter, (2) to decide how people in
other countries should react. The Muslim world was especially
wary of this new extremist-Calvinist Christian megamonster.
Everyone in the world was on pins and needles waiting to see
what the
Thus – right
after the Cold War ended in the late 80s – when Bush Sr.
invaded Iraq in 1990, most common-sense people around the
world decided that that
invasion was for the benefit of the whole planet, since Iraq
had invaded Kuwait unprovoked, simply to possess its oil
fields; but Bush’s son’s second invasion of Iraq thirteen
years later looked the opposite to most common-sense people
around the globe, since Iraq, this time, had done absolutely nothing
to warrant such invasion.
And if this
second invasion of
The Dr. saw
radical Muslim terrorists as ‘crazy’ or ‘psychotic’ too, for
the same reason: that their wacky violence against innocents
would provoke reactions from all over the world that could
lead to humanity’s destruction, including the very people, the
very same Muslim families and friends and communities in whose
name and for whose sake the extremist Muslim terrorists
operated. Anyone who claimed to be acting on behalf of others
and/or self, and did so in a way most likely to
get the very same people on whose behalf they were operating killed or ruined, had
to be considered legally crazy by psychiatric definition,
unless proven otherwise, said the Dr.; and the principle
applied to all parties:
USA or whomsoever.
IN A NUCLEAR
AGE WHEN SOME IF NOT ALL POWERS POSSESSING NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE
(1) TRIGGER-HAPPY; (2) UNSTABLE EMOTIONALLY; AND/OR (3)
FANATICALLY RELIGIOUSLY SUICIDAL: ALL ACTS OF
AGGRESSION HAVE TO BE LOOKED UPON AS VERY POSSIBLY CRAZY,
as Dr. Lorenzo says, AND NEED TO BE EVALUATED THOROUGHLY IN
SUCH TERMS. ALL RADICAL RELIGIOUS GROUPS PUSHING FOR MILITARY
VIOLENCE IN SUCH A FRAGILE GLOBAL ATMOSPHERE SHOULD BE VIEWED
AS POSSIBLY CRAZY, AND MUST BE EVALUATED FOR CRAZY PSYCHOTIC
THINKING AND BEHAVIOR.
The
best-known example of a leader guiding a people down the
primrose path of mass suicidal and homicidal psychosis was
Hitler goading the Germans, the Dr. said. The Germans felt
treated ‘unfairly’ by the Treaty of Versailles after the First
World War; and Hitler taught them to believe that they had a
right to seek revenge in the form of ‘ethnic cleansing’ at
home, and world war on everybody else in the world that
resisted their might. At first, after
But the Dr.
went still further than this ‘common-sense approach’ when
evaluating whether a group of people might be jointly
psychotic. He used the official diagnostic manual of the
American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-IV, to show that
Hitler and his followers ‘shared’ a set of beliefs that were
delusional, homicidal, and suicidal, and therefore met the
criterion for the DSM-IV’s diagnosis No. 297.3 on page 305,
“Shared Psychotic Disorder (Folie a Deux),” where a person
suffering a delusion induced another person to believe the
same delusion. To make the diagnosis, the first person, Hitler
in this case, had to be psychotic already according to DSM-IV
criteria, be it from schizophrenia, delusional disorder,
amphetamine abuse, some other psychosis described in the
manual, or any combination of these. Once a second person,
Goering or Goebbels let’s say, joined up to share in Hitler’s
delusional thinking, the diagnosis could be declared to be ‘folie a deux’ or
‘shared psychotic disorder’. The DSM-IV, said the Dr., even
allowed for the possibility that the delusion could be shared
by more than two, a
whole family even; but the American Psychiatric Association
should have gone further, he said; for students of history
knew that in the course of human history entire tribes,
nations, or large groups within tribes or nations, had worked
themselves into crazy frenzies and crazy behaviors based on
collective thinking that was not sane or healthy.
What about
all of the poor bemused Englishmen who supported their kings
in believing that, technically speaking, the throne of
Any set of
beliefs shared by any group on the planet could be subjected
to the criteria listed in the DSM-IV, the criteria which
defined the difference between craziness and mental sanity,
between mental ‘disorder’ and ‘non-disorder’. Common sense,
however, guided one as to which group beliefs needed
questioning and which did not. Common sense, as mentioned
above, told most sensible people around the world that Bush
Sr.’s invasion of Iraq in 1990, for example, was warranted and
not ‘crazy’ or a sign of ‘disordered’ thinking; since Iraq had
invaded Kuwait and seemed to be about to invade other
neighbors, and had to be stopped. Whereas, the same common
sense told most people around the world that Bush Jr.’s
invasion of Iraq in 2003 was nuts since (1) Iraq, still weak
from being beaten in 1990, had attacked no one this time; and
because (2) any less-than-super-justified invasion of a Muslim
nation was certain to provoke Muslims and others all over the
world to resent the neo-Calvinist Christian USA and to
retaliate for the sake of their own future freedom and well
being; to the point where, in the psychologically fragile
nuclear Armageddon-obsessed atmosphere then current, just
about any crazy outcome from Bush Jr.’s invading Iraq could be
imagined, including mass nuclear destruction of humanity; and
this would defeat Bush Jr.’s original purpose, obviously. If
most or all or even just many U.S. Americans
were dead and maimed from a retaliatory terrorist nuclear,
chemical or biological response, then Bush Jr.’s invasion of
Iraq would certainly be confirmed from hindsight one day as
crazy, if it hadn’t been already by that point. And: if anyone were left
alive to comment on it.
As for
Nixon’s being crazy, many people blinked and changed the
subject when it popped up in Dr. Lorenzo’s book, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs;
but a few chided the Dr. for such ‘talk’. So, one of his
comebacks was to look at what might be the exact technical
diagnosis of a Hitler or a Jones.
In Hitler’s
case he ruled out schizophrenia as a possible diagnosis
because Hitler’s condition was not ‘debilitating’, meaning, he
could still function in a social and work atmosphere. And no
known medical or brain condition was present that could have
caused a psychosis; except that quite a few historians claimed
Hitler was addicted to amphetamines given him by his personal
doctor. This use of ‘speed’ could have made him crazy or
worsened a craziness present already. But the likeliest
diagnosis was ‘delusional disorder’, said the Dr., because it
was so easy to pin “Criterion A” on Hitler: “Nonbizarre
delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life,
such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a
distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease)
of at least one month’s duration.”4 Hitler’s delusion that the Jews,
gays and gypsies were ruining
When you
specified the ‘type’ of delusion as required by the diagnostic
manual this was easy too. “Grandiose Type” seemed appropriate:
“delusions of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or
special relationship to a deity or famous person.” And
“Persecutory Type” too: “delusions that the person [Hitler]
(or someone to whom the person [Hitler] is close) [the
Germans] is [/are] being malevolently treated in some way.”
Once you
absorbed the shocking fact that craziness, even outright
medically diagnosable psychosis, had gripped all too many of
history’s leaders and peoples, said the Dr., it was easier to
accept that a U.S. President and his helpers might have
succumbed to the epidemic too.5
8. Did Bill
“Yes, it made
Bill think like an Indian,” the Dr. said to Sammy just before
publication of the present work. And, “Yes,” agreed Sammy: who
himself was raised as an ‘Indian’ on Indian land, specifically
a full-fledged Tewa-speaking member of the San Juan Pueblo in
northern New Mexico, and indeed an authentic tribal shaman.
And Sammy had met Bill Blackburn and gotten to know him during
the late 70s. And both the Dr. and Sammy reminded mj’s readers
that the proof of Bill’s Huron roots lay in the second
interview which Dr. Lorenzo had turned into his third book. In
that book, Grandfather’s
Tomahawk (the second book of the Waring trilogy), Bill
recounted his keen interest in his heritage, meaning,
surprisingly, his mother’s Huron tribe. As a young man he had
gone to libraries and researched the history of his tribe; and
at age 44 he still remembered a number of things about the
Huron well enough he could present them as stories and
vignettes to mj that night of the second interview. And he had
his own favorite Native American hero, Chief Joseph, whose
story he told mj in detail that night.
And there
were any number of other
psychological and historical factors, too, said Sammy and the
Dr., that might have helped foster such a result: that Bill
would see the world, whether he realized it or not, in many
ways as an ancient Huron would have seen it. The Huron side
was his mother’s side, and Bill often said that he did not
respect, admire, or look up to his father in any way, except
for his physical
strength, a factor which did not endear Bill to his father
(for reasons which good psychoanalysts, pro and lay, might
enjoy trying to unearth). His parents separated when he was
still a kid, moving him even closer to his mother; especially
when, during the summers, they would look up family members of
her old tribe, whether on reservations or elsewhere, and spend
summer vacations with them. This put Bill in touch with his
mother’s parents’ generation of elderly Head Men, the chiefs
and priests and shamans of the leftover clan and tribe, and
with all of their stories of the past, lovely, funny and
tragic. And, unless he had been a big reader of books like mj
was (and Bill was not), he would have been more or less
confined to these men for his summer’s entertainment; for this
was before television. And his mother had moved him back
further into the Bronze Age of men’s oral lore, and
men’s oral
education, when males lived in a male world and females lived
in a female world, except for the few hours the two sexes
shared in bed at night together, under an animal fur; and a
young man learned how to be a man from the tales told by the
tribe’s older men, just as in Homer’s Greece and Joshua’s
ancient Israel; and in Sammy Martinez’ native pueblo.
9. Would it be worth
reading The Children of Aataentsic? that
impressive (and very long) classic in the field of cultural
historiography to which Dr. Lorenzo kept referring in his
Waring-Blackburn trilogy? (asked by high schoolers 3,548 times
at least, mostly by those of indigenous background)
Yes, agreed
both Dr. Lorenzo and Sammy Martinez. For one thing, they said,
Mr. Trigger’s book was a thorough and very respected scholarly
documentation of the kinds of huge and dangerous
misunderstandings that could arise between two peoples when
one culture bumped up against another culture full force.
Secondly, the
two agreed, Trigger’s study of the Huron was a beautiful
illustration of how much detailed information could be
unearthed about the history of an ancient, even extinguished
and dead tribe, when the will was present to unearth it.
Thirdly, the book helped one
reflect on how one’s own group did things, and how another
group of people might do the same things quite differently.
For instance, said the Dr., after moving to
And there
were more differences, many more, many of them even more
profound than this one. For example, further along in the same
paragraph Trigger wrote, “Both sexes did much of their work in
teams and the differing nature of this work meant that men and
women spent much of their time in the company of their own sex
and apart from each other.” This helped again in understanding
21st century
A book like The Children of
Aataentsic could help Americans think about themselves
and the way they did things, and about whether the American
way was really superior or not, as they all too often thought,
so arrogantly. A little more humility of this sort, said Dr.
Lorenzo, could save the human race from extinction.
And
furthermore, he added, if his own people, the U.S. Americans,
did not spend more time reading and thinking about such books
(as Trigger’s The
Children of Aataentsic) and their insights into human
existence, then they very well might suffer extinction as the
Huron had. For, as in the case of the Huron and the French
Jesuits, it was vain and egotistical ignorance and
condemnation of the other side, on both sides, which brought
about the extinction of both sides.
On one
occasion the Dr. addressed the issue in one of Sammy’s
workshops for Native healers at Ghost Ranch in
10. How does the
Western view of the individual person differ from the eastern
(oriental)? (a question asked at least 5,109 times by high
schoolers in after-school reading clubs, by Sammy Martinez’
measuring)
Sammy
Martinez, a trained and credentialed Jungian psychoanalyst,
offered to save the Dr. the work of answering this one for the
present ‘closer look’ at the Dr.’s fourth book:
Of the many
areas of human knowledge which the sage Carl Jung gave himself
over entirely to understanding, as extensively and intensively
as possible, one of the most important was the difference
between ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ ways of thinking. He was one
of the first in the Western world to attempt to understand
thoroughly the two different ways of seeing the individual
person. The main difference, as he pointed out again and
again, was that in most of the countries that constituted the
present-day civilization we call ‘Western’, the individual
person was so highly valued that individual personhood was
preserved even during ‘life after death’. And even during life
before death the
person’s individuality was something that should be never any
more than briefly farmed out here or there for ‘development’.
The individual person, in other words, had tremendous value in
the Western world-view. Whereas in the Eastern, especially
India, individual desires were more often than not seen as
obstacles to general human progress and development, and
energy was applied to dissolving, merging or disappearing the
individual and her or his egotistical desires into a larger
matrix of some kind, such as into God or a god, a guru, a
state of psychological bliss like ‘Nirvana’, Brahman, and so
on. Buddhism, for its part, all over the orient, also stressed
the lessening of
personal ego, and of the ego’s individual and personal
pursuits on its own egotistical, selfish behalf. Jung
addressed the matter in many of his written works. For
instance, once when attempting to draw some distinctions
between the ‘oriental’ and ‘western’ world-views, he wrote:
The Christian during
contemplation would never say “I am Christ,” but will
confess with Paul: “Not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Our [oriental] sutra however, says: “Thou wilt know that thou art the Buddha.”
At bottom the two confessions are identical, in that the
Buddhist only attains this knowledge when he is anātman, ‘without
self.’ But there is an immeasurable difference in the
formulation. The Christian attains his end in Christ, the
Buddhist knows he is
the Buddha. The Christian gets out of the transitory
and ego-bound world of consciousness, but the Buddhist still reposes on the
eternal ground of his inner nature, whose oneness with Deity, or
with universal Being, is confirmed in other Indian testimonies.
(from “The Psychology of Eastern Meditation” (1943), which may
be found in Jung’s Collected
Works volume 11, Psychology
and Religion: West and East (1958/1969), paragraph # 949.
In other
words, the Christian, even when maximally surrendered to
Christ, still refers to a ‘me’, retaining a definite amount of
individuality within which ‘Christ’ can ‘live’ (Paul’s letter
to the Galatians chapter 2, verse 20); whereas the maximally
surrendered Buddhist has lost all personal identity by
becoming identical with the Buddha and therefore will word his
situation differently, saying, ‘I am Buddha’. His ‘ego’ or ‘I’
is gone and only Buddha remains.
11. What does maya mean exactly?
(asked 1,786,012 times by high schoolers)
The Dr. and
Sammy agreed this had been answered to some extent in the
present work itself, starting on the first page of writing
after the table of contents, and continuing in the next
chapter (‘Four Famous Points’); but especially in the chapter,
“How Mister Frog Did (Almost) Ask Miss Mousie to Marry Him,”
beginning at the top of that chapter with the words:
* maya
in Hindu thinking
was
the deathly
TRAP
that life caught you in
the beautiful spider’s web you wove
for yourself
thinking the whole time you must
have been a genius at the art of living
to have spun anything so wonderfully
perfect
only to discover one day that you
had become TRAPPED in
your own breathtakingly beautiful
web
your own sorry self
The chapter’s
definitions of maya
continued from there: being caught in maya meant you were
caught up in things that really did not matter, i.e.,
peripheral things, and had forgotten to focus your attention
on what really mattered in life, i.e., the real center and
whole entirety of your being.
And after
this came an explanation of how oriental spiritual masters had
addressed this problem in their teachings.
And then, in
addition to that, mj’s fourth book in its entirety offered a
number of examples
of persons who were caught up in maya and needed
rescue from it: not just from outside, via someone who could
help them; but also from inside their own selves, if they
would only shift attention to what really mattered and
keep their attention focused there as permanently as possible.
The Legs
pundits’ GUULP version of
mj’s fourth book (as also offered in the present work, ‘a
look’ at it), as the Dr. and Sammy agreed, started out by
offering Dr. Mortimer John Lorenzo himself as its first
example of someone who had gotten caught up in maya. One way to
interpret the Legs
version was to see it as the story of how mj lorenzo had gone
about trying to free himself from the trap of maya, and as the
story of what had been the fruitful and pleasant consequences
of that effort, the interview and book itself.
In addition,
they said, the Legs
pundits’ GUULP version
presented other examples. Bill and Betty Ann had gotten caught
up in the maya of
Fred Waring’s road show, Fred’s dysfunctional tour bus family
of musicians and friends-since-birth-or-soon-after, and all of
the ins and outs of that total emotional mess of slightly sick
relationships which had produced, on the average, as evidence
of its sick state, at least two new alcoholics
per year during almost a century of music-making. Furthermore,
Fred himself was shown to be caught up in a web of maya of his own
making; and mj, as author, had in his book brought the
character of Fred from darkness to light (from lost-ness in maya, to found-ness)
by describing him as realizing, at the end of the story, the
state of his lost condition, and as acting in a way to free
himself from that maya.
And finally, Richard Nixon, as well, was shown by mj at the
end of his book to be still
caught up in a maya
of his own making. ‘And Heaven only knows’, as Sammy put it,
‘if poor Dick Nixon ever found his way back to what truly
mattered’.
The Legs
pundits, as the Dr. and Sammy also agreed, therefore, had been
right in pointing out that mj’s fourth book had been
essentially a study of maya
and of how a number of famous Americans had gotten caught up
in it to their detriment, and then had managed to find some
freedom from it. Even TIME magazine had agreed with them.
However, some
students of mj lorenzo’s writing, including a number of
reputable pundits, and even some important Legs pundits, found
these responses to the question about the meaning of maya insufficient,
they said: ‘since they came from the author himself and his
pundits, few of whom’ as they felt, ‘could hardly represent
themselves convincingly as experts in the religion,
philosophy, psychology, art, and/or civilization of the
orient’.
Humbled by
this, and provoked as well, the good Dr. answered the question
anew with the following piece of writing for the present
discussion:
In the great
and famous books of the best modern scholars who write on
It has to be
a very important thing to understand the meaning of maya, therefore, if
we ever want to understand the orient and its people. I’ll
start with some simple short definitions and end with my own
experience, which is usually the best teacher.
Microsoft’s
Encarta Dictionary
offers two fairly simple definitions for the word ‘maya’: “1.
illusion of material world: in Hinduism, the material world,
considered in reality to be an illusion; 2. ability to create
illusion: in Hinduism, the ability to create illusion through
supernatural, magical, or sacred power.”7
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary
offers three possible meanings of the word ‘maya’: “1: an
extraphysical wonder-working power in the Vedas; 2: a: the
illusion-creating power of a god or demon; b: the powerful
force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal
world is real.” And then, the unabridged dictionary adds
synonyms: “broadly: MAGIC, ILLUSION.”8
The Encyclopedia Britannica
Ultimate Reference Suite 2008 CD offers a little more
on the subject of ‘maya’:
(Sanskrit: “wizardry,” or “illusion”), a fundamental concept in Hindu philosophy, notably, in the Advaita (Nondualist) school of the orthodox system of Vedānta. Maya originally denoted the power of wizardry with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion; by extension it later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real. For the Nondualists, maya is thus that cosmic force that presents the infinite Brahman (the supreme being) as the finite phenomenal world. Maya is reflected on the individual level by human ignorance (ajñāna) of the real nature of the self, which man has mistaken for the empirical ego but which is in reality identical with Brahman.9
Will Durant
in Our Oriental
Heritage also tries to get at it intellectually in a
couple of paragraphs. To the mind of the Indian, he says:
The world exists, but it is Maya— not delusion, but phenomenon, an appearance created partly by our thought. Our incapacity to perceive things except through the film of space and time, or to think of them except in terms of cause and change, is an innate limitation, an Avidya, or ignorance, which is bound up with our very mode of perception, and to which, therefore, all flesh is heir. Maya and Avidya are the subjective and objective sides of the great illusion by which the intellect supposes that it knows the real; it is through Maya and Avidya, through our birthright of ignorance, that we see a multiplicity of objects and a flux of change; in truth there is only one Being, and change is “a mere name” for the superficial fluctuations of forms. Behind the Maya or Veil of change and things, to be reached not by sensation or intellect but only by the insight and intuition of the trained spirit, is the one universal reality, Brahman.
This natural obscuration of sense and intellect by the organs and forms of sensation and understanding bars us likewise from perceiving the one unchanging Soul that stands beneath all individual souls and minds. Our separate selves, visible to perception and thought, are as unreal as the phantasmagoria of space and time; individual differences and distinct personalities are bound up with body and matter, they belong to the kaleidoscopic world of change; and these merely phenomenal selves will pass away with the material conditions of which they are a part. But the underlying life which we feel in ourselves when we forget space and time, cause and change, is the very essence and reality of us, that Atman which we share with all selves and things, and which, undivided and omnipresent, is identical with Brahman, God.10
Joseph Campbell gives it a shot too,
perhaps the best so far:
In the experience and vision of
The best way
to understand maya,
however, is probably through the stories that have been told
for thousands of years in
The first story I ever heard about maya was told in
person by an instructor who worked for Guru Garland. And later
I found a version of it in Zimmer’s book, mentioned above,
chapter 2, “The Mythology of Vishnu,” section 2, “The Waters
of Existence.” Zimmer too started out intellectually (in
chapter 2, section 1), but finally got to one of the classic
stories of old India, that of the disciple who, trusting his
spiritual master implicitly, begged him to please help him
understand, please show him, the meaning of maya. Well, this was
a trap. If the young innocent had known what had been the
standard response for centuries and eons untold, he might not
have asked, because it was bound to drag him to hell and back,
meaning, straight through maya.
So the archetypical story about maya, I have to
conclude, based on my own personal experience of the stories
that have turned up in my life, begins with a sincere and
innocent young man asking an old guru or pandit to ‘show’ him
the meaning of maya;
who instead of offering platitudes or exercises, as had been
anticipated, or even a story, sends the poor thing off on a
wild goose chase beyond imagining, which literally ‘shows’ him
maya. But another
form of the trick is to lead an audience of one or more
innocents into the trap of getting to hear and experience this
story, before anyone has told them what kind of
outcome to expect from the story. I get the impression from
Heinrich Zimmer's version that the core of the story is often
approached stepwise, as if peeling an onion, or as if passing
through layer upon layer of unveiling the veiled and hidden
real core truth of ‘whatever is maya’. But in any
case, the crucial object of the storytelling is that both the
subject in the story and the subjects listening to the story
should experience the same thing eventually, a profound,
sinking, gut wrenching, dawning realization that at that very
moment they are experiencing maya for all it is worth. That was what happened
to me the first time in my life I experienced the story in any
form, in this case told live by one of Guru Garland’s
instructors. I was shaken to the core that night, as is
obvious from the fact that out of all of the thousands of
important stories I have heard from preachers and patients, or
read in my life, this one I have remembered incomparably well.
After the youth asked the question,
as I remember, the next step was that the guru said something
like this: “Well, you know, I was hoping we would come to an
understanding of maya
soon. I figured you were about ready for it. But before I
begin, I wonder if you could just go down on the plain, to the
edge of that river, to the little village we can see there,
and bring me back a nice big drink of cool water with a couple
of drops of lime in it, because I’m dying of thirst and won’t
be able to get very far teaching without a nice supply of
water.” The youth, trusting implicitly, as always, and
innocent beyond belief, had never heard mention of this part
of the teachings and so complied as requested by his spiritual
savior, only to be waylaid by a million and one things of this
world which at the moment seemed very important, once he got
down to the village, like marrying the lime girl, having kids,
etc., etc., and so forth: until finally one day, years later,
he was on the verge of recalling he had been sent on a mission
by his guru to get him some water and had never gotten back to
the poor thirsty old man. He still didn’t 'get it', in other
words. And just then a flood struck the little village which
he had entered years back in search of a drink of water for
his guru.
The major part of the story was now
told from this point forward. It occupied far more time than
all the above took to tell. The flood was horrible. The water
came up slowly, and step by step the poor youth, now
practically a middle-aged man, was forced to choose whom to
save and whom to let go, as he tried to carry his wife and all
of his kids to safety, all of whom had come into and out of
his very own life while he was forgetting to get his guru a
drink of water. The storyteller at this point, by dwelling
upon the excruciating details of the flood and the
excruciating choices, the suffering it caused, must make an
effort to delude the listener into believing that this
horrifying flood is the heart and essence of the story.
Something close to this is told by
Zimmer to illustrate the meaning of maya, in the chapter
“The Waters of Existence.” As you see, the term ‘water’ here
has at least two different meanings at once. One kind of water
is the kind the guru asks to be fetched him. The other is the
flood. And both waters teach a lesson.
Lesson 1 is: if your guru tells you
to do something, do it. Don’t get distracted.
Lesson 2 is: BUT: if you do get
distracted and end up in the muddy emotional flood of maya, try to remember
the very last question you asked just before you were sent for
the water. That might help you understand why all of this has
happened to you (you poor miserable whoreson, as they would
say in Sahuayo,
Lesson 3 is for those who can’t
remember what question they asked, and those people are
referred backward in time several paragraphs. But most people
‘get it’ somewhere in the middle of the flood when it’s just
growing more and more unbearably intolerable as a story told
by a guru’s instructor. You find yourself asking yourself why
in the world, if somebody just wanted a simple explanation of
maya, the instructor
went on and on like this about the horrifying details of a
flood and a poor man’s losing one crying, beloved helpless
family member after another, watching them get swept
downstream, screaming and drowning, one by one, wife and every
single child including the most recent precious and innocent
baby; and suddenly it hits you he is answering the question
via the story itself about the flood the poor man gets caught
in, despite all of his greatest intentions, some of which had
put his loved ones ahead of his guru and his own search for
truth. In fact, he was so distracted by life in the world he
totally forgot about his guru and that he ever had asked his
guru a question. All he remembered, and only rarely at that,
was that the guru had asked for a drink of water with lime.
And it’s impossible to forget the
story no matter how hard you try, I suspect. I’ve heard
thousands of stories in my life, having been a psychiatrist
and a practiced listener with friends, and most of them I have
forgotten. But I can remember, even now after years and years
of having not wandered onto this story in my mind, many, many
details of the ancient Indian tale, and all in the right
chronology. It has to be one of the best and most essential
human stories ever told, therefore, would be my guess, right
up there with the three which Tolstoy said were the greatest
stories ever told – the life of Joseph told in the book of
Genesis; the life of Christ; and the life of Buddha – this
life of this generic seeker of truth who asked his guru, his
spiritual teacher and master, to please, please ‘show’ him the
meaning of maya.
Bur for those who don’t ‘get it’
during the flood, there still may be salvation. As I recall,
after the flood something like this happened: the poor young
man was the only one of his new family to survive the flood.
His wife and all of his several children had been washed away
forever, his whole town, in fact, his whole life. He went up
higher on the side of the valley to sit and dry out and
collect himself emotionally, physically and even spiritually,
as distraught as he was, having just lost the entire family
and life that he himself had created and nurtured with love
and food and protection; and there on the hillside he ran into
a very, very old man, who asked him what had happened to him.
He started recounting his tale, going on and on in great and
horrifying detail about the flood in particular, and when he
came to the words, “It all started when I was on this very
same hillside with my guru and he asked me to go down to that
village that used to be down there on the plain, by the river
which has now washed the village away, and get him a drink of
water,” and the very old man said, “I’m that guru and you had
asked me to ‘show’
you the meaning of maya,”
finally... finally:
his stomach sank and it dawned on the poor sucker (who was
much, much older now) that he had just been successfully
taught the meaning of maya,
though it had taken fourteen hundred million years, as it
felt, to accomplish the learning.
“And,” wrote the Dr. in final answer
to the question about the meaning of the term maya: “any freaking
body who doesn’t get it by this point flunks the course and
has to repeat it as many times as it takes.”
And with that, the Dr.’s written
piece answering question #11 ended.
12. How many ingenious, punsterous, pun-loving
interpretations could ‘pun-ditzies’ milk from Dr. Lorenzo’s
book title SENSIBLY, or humanely,
meaning without offending human sense and sensibility, without
provoking a legally sane person to ask with exasperation:
‘Could, really, a
legally sane person intend so many utterly different weighty
matters by one tiny little worthless rat-eaten book title?
(asked famously by one student in Sammy Martinez’ after-school
reading club at Española High)
When the
‘lost generation’ sat themselves down by the rivers of Seine
after The ‘Great’ War to weep; when they sat down in Paris
cafes and heaved loud long sighs of relief and desperation,
and painted surviving humanity in the shape of weird cubic
blocks, wrote surviving wisdom inscrutably, and reflected on
Armageddon somehow or other after that vomitous mess of a
‘war’ ‘to end all wars’, Ernest Hemingway recounted some of
their wanderings and wonderings in a book he called The Sun Also Rises,
thereby fomenting discussion for years over his title. For it
was borrowed from Solomon’s “Preachings,” the part of the
Jewish-Torah ‘Bible’ that Protestant Americans like Hemingway
had always called ‘Ecclesiastes’ and that Dr. Lorenzo once
upon a time rephrased with poetic license, in order to help
his two kids think about some important things. This is how he
re-worded Solomon’s wisdom for his young kids:
1. These are the words of an old lifelong
preacher, king of
2. Ego ego ego, everything under the sun is your own ego and mine.
3. Nothing but pure ego is man’s work under the sun, all of it; nothing but pure worthlessness.
4. One generation bites the big mustard gas death, another grasps at life like a planted and watered mustard seed; but the earth just keeps rolling and rolling along under the sun like Old Man River Mississippi, never stopping from generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation to generation (so far, anyway).
5. The sun also goes up in the sky impressively high and has its great big time of brightness up there too, just like human ‘man’ and his big pride-swolled ego.
6. And the wind blows south but it turns north later. It whirls around endlessly with great bluster and returns whence it came like a ‘man’ and his big vain overblown airy hollow ego so insignificant, so puny in all reality.
7. Rivers flow endlessly to seas, yet seas never fill up; and in fact, to the place from which all rivers come, all rivers also return; like ‘man’ and his empty vain ego; running around a track circle; yes: ‘progressing’ in a great big vain and egotistical zero-shaped, zero-destination circle.
Some said
that Gertrude Stein, being older, wiser, and raised on the
Jewish Torah, had given young Ernest this title for his book
and he had no clue what it meant. They said she meant that
Hemingway’s ‘lost generation’ had to ‘get over the war’ or
they would never grow up. Everything went in circles including
life, as Solomon said in Ecclesiastes. Losing yourself in
details like wars or lovers was ego, nothing but ego. Face it,
she said by giving his book this title: You are born and you
die, and you might make things a little better for others in
between, if you try hard enough, maybe even by writing manly
action novels in your weird, male-ego Hemingwayesque
news-story style.
Others said
Hemingway came up with the title from his own upper middle
class Chicago-suburb Protestant background, and meant it to
refer to the vanity of making war. And the discussion went on
from there.
The titles of
certain books have always provoked deep thought, in other
words.
Jack
Kerouac’s book title Desolation
Angels suggests bright-spirits-become-depressed; and
Jack may have intended that meaning, because it was a
recurrent theme of his life and writing. But any
interpretation of the title also has to acknowledge that his
book described in massive mental detail the summer he spent in
a Forest Service forest-fire lookout tower atop Desolation
Ridge in northern
So that might
have explained the ‘desolation’ part of the title, plus the
fact that he missed his writer- and carousing-friends in San
Francisco, and had not the foggiest notion, at first, how to
spend fruitful time alone in nature. That too was a kind of
desolation.
But: if he
were alone for weeks on a beautiful ‘Desolation Ridge’ of many
meanings, both outer and inner, then who were the ‘angels’?
Spooks? Ghosts? Or, more likely his boozin’ and benzedrinin’
writer friends and all of their goof pals like Neal Cassady
populating his imagination and memory? Maybe? Probably so.
Because his books were usually about his friends and their
at-times desolate, desperate, way-past-the-fringe lifestyles.
But: the best
place to find out what a book title means should be within the
matter of the book. Shouldn’t it?
That didn’t
work for The Sun Also
Rises, though, so it might not work for Kerouac. You
have to know more about an author, sometimes, maybe, than
about a book, to understand a book’s title.
Solzhenitsyn
explained somewhere in Gulag
Archipelago what he meant by that strange title, or
mankind might have floundered in the dark for centuries, since
geographers would have found no such string of islands on any
map. For it was not a geographic location as it sounded to be.
It was a clever name for a group of Siberian prison camps
isolated by enormous freezing distances from each other, as
Arctic islands are isolated by distances of impassable icy
ocean and ice from each other.
The title of García
Márquez’ One
Hundred Years of Solitude mystified Dr. Lorenzo himself
until finally – after decades of perplexity – a top-notch
biographer, Gerald Martin, explained that it was about “a
hundred years of Colombian history” as experienced by one
Colombian family in García Márquez’ own
childhood town. But what was meant by ‘solitude’ exactly?
Gerald Martin mentioned ‘aloneness’ only once in that
biography’s chapter, when he described the connection between
the personality of the main character, Aureliano
Buendía, who was “…solitary, egocentric
and ruthless…” and the personality of García
Márquez, the author who created that character and
novel, who was apparently like Buendía in that respect:
“solitary, egocentric and ruthless.”
Well, was that IT, then? Was the
mighty ‘solitude’ nothing but the lifelong loneliness which
the author felt from being the only person anywhere who saw
his childhood town as it was in reality, and the only person
who could communicate its plight to the world? Or was the
‘solitude’ the whole long year he spent alone in a
smoke-filled room writing the book, the second kind of
solitude Martin refers to in that chapter? Or was it the kind
of solitude captured in the following phrases, some of the
best in Gerald Martin’s biography of the Colombian author:
….A man who had always suffered every twist and turn, every small technical and psychological decision in each of his books, was playing with his life: fusing his grandfather with his father with himself, Tranquilina with Luisa Santiaga with Mercedes, weaving Luis Enrique and Margot in and out of several characters, turning his paternal grandmother into Pilar Ternera, smuggling Tachia in through the character of Amaranta Ursula, and fusing the history of his entire family with the history of Latin America, uniting his Latin American literary ingredients – Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo – with the Bible, Rabelais, the chronicles of the Spanish conquest and the European novels of chivalry, Defoe, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway. No wonder he felt like an alchemist; no wonder he fused Nostradamus and Borges – and himself, García Márquez – into the figure of the great Writer-Creator Melquíades, another genius who locked himself away in a small room to encapsulate the entire cosmos in that enchanted space, at once transhistorical and intemporal, known as literature….12
And so, not to be outdone by all
this, the devoted followers of mj lorenzo felt compelled to
come up with a similar question with regard to the one author
they took, out of hand, to be THE author of significance for
their generation: what did the title of mj’s fourth book mean
in all reality?
At first they took it to mean what
it said, the exact story of how the 1972 Christmas Concert at
the White House, sung by Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians,
had been ‘saved’ by Mrs. Nixon’s ‘legs’ in some way; whatever
that meant. Saved by her ass more like it. Or her ass saved
the concert. Both. Exactly
How Mrs. Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas
Concert just couldn’t mean that many different things,
everyone said at first. Except it left you wondering what on
earth the expression ‘saved the concert’ really meant.
They suddenly found themselves in
the world of paradox, labyrinth and mystification, and it
bewildered mj’s pundit following. Mj had played another trick
on them with a book title the meaning of which seemed obvious,
then suddenly not.
The pun ditzies heard about this
hoopla and they notified the world of mj lorenzo that they
would settle the matter via punning. It was in their nature to
problem-solve anything from the size of nails to the stink of
ales, by punning. And because they knew that mj lorenzo was
the grand master of punning they figured that if they could
match their brains to his, somehow, they could figure out what
on earth he had meant about any given thing under discussion
among the worldwide pundit mj followers.
So, in short order, one of the
punditzies discovered that if you quote-ed each of the
two ‘stories’ in the title you came up with a very
different-sounding book title:
Exactly How “Mrs. Nixon’s Legs” Saved “The White House
Christmas Concert”
As if some force in the universe had
been trying to ruin the second story in the book and the first
story had needed to intervene to save it, whatever that meant.
Save it from infamy. Neglect. Being undervalued. Or something.
This interpretation was the best to
come out of the punditzy effort and won a coveted second prize
in New York at the annual MOISTR awards banquet honoring grand
insight into mj lorenzo, a prize whose winners were nominated
by committee and voted upon by the worldwide establishment of
mj lorenzo pundit interpreters, just like the Oscar award
winners were elected by the grand body of cinema production
workers.
Few interpretations were outstanding
that year but one got third prize at the same banquet: the
quotes could have meant, said a little-known pundit, that the
content of
the first story had saved the content of the
second. Maybe that was closer.
Maybe Fred’s scolding Dick via
correspondence, said another pun-ditzy, saved Bill Blackburn’s
interest in Pat Nixon’s legs from remaining Dick’s morbid
obsession throughout the White House Christmas Party, a mental
sickness that could have relegated that important concert,
important legs included, to infamy instead of glory.
Important legs? Yes, because they
were an important part of an important story that captured a
critical moment in
And mj lorenzo wrote that story.
And so thirty-three Legs
title insights showed up on an internet website within a year
of discovery of this punning game. Merely using quotes, or not
using them, in the title, gave you eight more punsterisms
right there.
It seemed silly at first; but most
admitted that the jokingest mj lorenzo pundits came up with
the most brilliant mj insights quite often, rendering John
Calvin’s extremist-Protestant objection to joking about God or
religion uptight-neurotic thereby; when in fact joking was
often quite eye-opening, even about God at times.
Or you could turn it all around and
say that the concert had saved the legs: the concert itself
(and the correspondence spawned in preparation for it) had
saved Pat’s legs from being remembered as part of a bad story
instead of the good one Bill told; and that the concert had
thereby ‘saved’ the Legs
story for posterity; both. The concert had done this by being
a situation where Bill and Pat would meet again, with all of
the implications of that for Dick Nixon and Fred Waring and
the world.
And we would definitely – for the
sake of our readership – punt the rest
of the thirty-three putts
down Fred Waring’s famous golf course toilet; but we are punning ourselves
to sleep. Adios.
And anyway it’s all on the internet.
Except that: Dr. Lorenzo did not
approve the above paragraphs for publication as they stood. He
wanted to add his own commentary on his title.
Maybe what he had meant by it primarily, said the
Dr., was that the concert-and-party had been ‘saved’ from the point of view
of Bill and Betty Ann; for they had been able,
after all, to enjoy their own private honeymoon banquet at the
White House and had been allowed, after all the crazy
egotistical nonsense, to dance with the rest of the guests;
even though someone had ‘lost’ Bill’s tux, maybe on purpose;
and even though Dick Nixon, at one point, had asked Fred to
help him keep Bill ‘tied up’ in the basement of the White
House with the Secret Service throughout the party and
concert. The efforts on the part of the White House staff and
Secret Service had won the Blackburns this triumph of
banqueting and partying in the White House; and maybe even
Dick Nixon, behind the scenes, had backed down from his
intention to exclude Bill from the event.
How could ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ be
credited for this triumph?
In the author’s mind, as he said,
‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ meant the entire episode; the event, at
the Wilkes-Barre Flood Telethon, of Bill’s befriending Pat
Nixon and Fred’s reacting with barely-concealed egotistical
jealousy and rage; the entire story exactly as described in
the chapter entitled “Mrs. Nixon’s Legs.” As Fred explained in
his letter to Dick, that event had provoked his, Fred’s, ego.
But once Fred saw how much it had provoked Dick Nixon’s ego
too, he had realized that his own egotistical Fred Waring
first-reaction had been unfair to Bill and wrong for the White
House and the American people; and so he had asked Dick to
back down just as he himself had. The party and concert were
thus saved – by the legs – so that Bill and Betty Ann – and we – could enjoy
it, in the end, as all of us should have been allowed to enjoy
it from the beginning.
And the roots of that saving could
be traced back to the events at the Telethon, and the
friendship formed between Bill and Pat and her legs.
Unless, added the Dr., you wanted to
trace the roots back to Fred’s mother who had raised him
properly, nurturing in him an ability to own up to a mistake
when the ‘shit was hitting the fan’ and he was the source of
the problem. But, said the Dr., he thought
Exactly How
Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
Saved the White
House Christmas Concert
would sell more books than
Exactly How
Fred Waring’s
Mother
Saved the White
House Christmas Concert.
And he thought he was right, he
added. For, unlike most of his books, his fourth book not only
was published by a mainstream
In fact, as the Dr. told the Mullica
Hill, New Jersey, Odd Fellows and Rebekahs in 2005, he
invented the ‘catchy’ title primarily as a trick to sell
books.
A few days later, accordingly, Dr.
Lorenzo remembered another tidbit. He explained to the
editorial board of the present work that for a while his title
had been: ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs and the White House Christmas
Concert’. And one day he had decided to try to tie the two
together via cause and effect, thinking such a title might
arouse more curiosity and get more people to read the book. So
he had tried
Exactly How
Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
Saved the White
House Christmas Concert
and had liked the sound of it so
very much better, he had been unable to abandon it ever after,
no matter how hard he tried, even though such a title ‘made no
sense’. He had tried and tried over the years to make that
title make sense, as he explained, but never had succeeded!!!
And this may sound to some people
like the most ‘honest and sincere’ because 'confessionsl' of
the Dr.’s various explanations, some of which appear to
contradict others (if a work of art as highborn as the present
work may be allowed, in all humility, to admit to such a
thing). But, as Sammy Martinez said when consulted on the
matter, it would only be fair to state that any one of the
Dr.’s ‘explanations’ for his enigmatic title – or all of them –
might have been a ruse;
since the Dr. was a ‘known coyote of a trickster’ at times.
And anyway, as the Dr. told Sammy
once (just after Dr.Lorenzo's trip to Moscow, Russia, in
January of 1992, to deposit his daughter Nico safely in that
country to study ballet at the Bolshoi), a Russian friend on
that Moscow trip, who was a little bit of an mj lorenzo
pun-ditzy pundit in his own right in that Russian corner of
the globe, had told the Dr. he thought the title of his fourth
book had something to do with ‘pulling your Legs’.
13. What were the
‘Watergate scandal’ and the ‘White House tape scandal’ really
about? (asked 50,905 times by high schoolers)
The answer:
Real and shocking criminal corruption in very high government
places, including the Presidency. Really. Right in the holy
Notes on
chronology of political events:
Encarta says:
Watergate, designation of a major
The burglary was committed on
June 17, 1972, by five men who were caught in the offices of the
Democratic National Committee at the Watergate apartment and
office complex in
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006. © 1993-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Article entitled: “Watergate.”
And Dr.
Lorenzo adds:
According to
Encarta, the cloud
of Watergate scandal began to mushroom significantly in the
direction of the White House already by mid-’73. By October
’73 government investigators and prosecutors were asking for
access to White House tapes due to suspicions that the
Watergate and related scandals had been choreographed from the
highest levels of the White House, by Nixon’s aides, in other
words, meaning Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and maybe even by the
big cheese himself. The Cheese got himself into deeper hot
water in October ’73 when the so-called ‘Saturday Night
Massacre’ occurred (a firing of many administration
officials), at his direction, in order to delay or prevent
release of any and all White House tapes to one board of
review or another.
Evidence was
mounting that the White House had been trying to ‘cover up’
its connection to the scandals, and this cover up then became
a new and greater scandal still. The White House tapes, it was
supposed, would clarify everything, because such tapes
recorded every conversation at the White House. More and more
attention was now focused on the tapes, not merely the
Watergate break-in, so that the ‘Watergate scandal’ gradually
was becoming the ‘White House tape scandal’, a much more
gravely serious abuse of position being implied, including the
likelihood, seemingly more and more probable, that the
President himself had assisted in the disappearance and
unavailability of the White House tapes. As Encarta specifies,
the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was precipitated by Nixon’s
desire to find a way to avoid turning over White House tapes
to various prosecutors and/or congressional investigators.
So the tapes
were already a huge issue by the fall of ‘73, but it took
until August of ‘74 to back Nixon into such a corner over the
tapes and related scandals that he felt he had to resign.
Perhaps it was impeachment proceedings that constituted the
final pressure on him. Although, Encarta says that in
July of ‘74 the Supreme Court voted 8-0 that Nixon must turn
over the tapes, so perhaps that was the last
straw that made him resign.
14. Did Dr. Lorenzo consider his fourth book,
Exactly How Mrs. Nixon’s
Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert, to be
‘sacred text’ in the same way that he said his The Remaking was
‘sacred text’? (This question was asked by the after-school
reading club of
In a word,
no. Not in exactly
the same way. For more details please see the answer to
question 15, which follows.
15. Is it true, as
some have said, that mj lorenzo has been attempting to found a
new religion? (asked 85,601 times by high schoolers as of
April 1, 2013)
Mj lorenzo
wrote to Sammy Martinez in a 2006 email:
When I’m
feeling really good about myself I don’t cast aspersions on
the latest versions of The
Remaking and Tales
of Waring, the recent versions you sent our
Certainly I
think my goal has always been something other than to
entertain. It ain’t even to teach, merely, if ya ketch mah
drifftt. It has always been, more accurately, to CELEBRATE my
life and the life of humanity on planet earth. This places the
original versions of the books, conceivably, in the realm of
religious ritual, which is a celebration. A ritual is a
celebration of something over and over, again and again. I
think my books are meant to steer people in a new direction,
to a deeper place in themselves. I would like to hope that
reading one of my books could be an experience in discovering
one’s true Self, or discovering Truth, which is the same
thing. And the style we are using in the ‘look at mj’ volumes,
in the latest versions of Remaking and Tales, as given the
agent, is not merely to study
mj’s writing, but to reflect
and meditate on his teachings, to celebrate him and his
teachings, to celebrate the life that he himself celebrated.
So, maybe the books in this series of ‘studies’ of mj’s
writing (and of his other creativity) are not merely studies or meditations but
actually, more correctly, ‘a CELEBRATION of the life and
creative artifacts of mj lorenzo’.
This would
mean we should quit worrying about finding a way to make mj
lorenzo’s writing ‘likeable’ by a broad audience, and instead
should try to write to a particular audience, his audience,
the people he knows will understand him; much in the way you
could assume Castaneda did. Castaneda must have known that a
great many people would not be drawn to his subject matter, a
lengthy, multi-volume, in-depth study of his long, multi-year
apprenticeship to Don Juan studying and learning the tricks of
shamanism. Castaneda must have accepted the fact of limited
appeal, instead of trying to find a way to water down his
material to the least common public denominator. And so he
never was read by a broad swath of the reading public. Only
seekers and savants were drawn to him, only the ‘spiritual’
wing of the hippie tribe, who themselves were only a small
part of the Western world numerically at the time when he was
publishing, though they were a very noticeable and exceedingly
important part, granted.
The problem
is, I don’t know who might want to publish such a thing as my
kind of writing at this time.13 And we only have our agent to work
with, and she is dropping hints that she wants us to write
more like Charles Frazier, as in his Thirteen Moons,
whatever that writing is like; and I can just imagine: pure
novelistic prose style, in the tradition of Hemingway. No
‘pontificating’, as she calls one of my tendencies that she
thinks hard to sell; and no ‘repetition’, another tendency of
that sort.
And Sammy
wrote back:
How can
someone who is ‘creating a new religion’, as some people say
you are doing, not pontificate or repeat himself?
To which the
Dr. responded:
I was
thinking she was telling me I didn’t know how to write. But if
these people are right about my ‘wanting to start a new
religion’, that might be the explanation for the way I write:
maybe mj lorenzo is proposing a new religion; and ‘a look’ is
promoting that new religion by writing its ‘study of’ or
‘meditations on’ the life and art of mj.
If that’s the
case: How can a meditation not repeat certain themes? When you
‘meditate’ on something, usually what is meant is that you
concentrate your energy on something, focusing on it again and
again and again.
Or is she
saying I repeat myself in ways not befitting even a meditation?
Sammy
responded with a brief emailed paragraph:
The problem
is I don’t know what she is saying. There is never enough time
to ask. She’s always in a New York hurry, with all kinds of
things to talk about that have nothing to do with your book
specifically or her literary agenting of that book; as if she
might like my company more than your books.
Dr. Lorenzo
emailed back:
Here’s
another stab at a subtitle for the oeuvre: ‘Reflections on 20th
and 21st century life in the Western world’.
Sammy wrote:
It seems to
me that our ‘look’ at your ‘creative artifacts’ is not so much
‘novel’, or even ‘scholarly analysis of novel’, as the agent
might prefer, but more correctly ‘New Age Religion’. But as
with any religion’s creation, there’s a story to tell, and
that is the story of how mj lorenzo came to be the important
visionary and teacher he became. We have been telling this
story by studying your life and works, and by analyzing and
reflecting and meditating upon it all. With the result that
sometimes it all does resemble a novel, just as Tolstoy
thought the story of Joseph in the Old Testament resembled an
exemplary novel, or just as the story of the life of Christ in
the New Testament resembles a novel in some ways. But that
does not mean that the Old Testament, taken as a whole,
is a novel. Or the New Testament, either. They are both sacred
text. Right?
Dr. Lorenzo
wrote:
Yes.
No one can
‘look’ at my books and have that come out like a novel,
strictly speaking; any more than Carlos Castaneda could write
his books about the Mexican seer, don Juan Matus, without long
expositions at times resembling anthropological analysis of
how someone might think in another, very different,
non-Western culture. Always at those points in his books, it
seems to me, he ‘forgot’ to stick with traditional novelistic
technique. And this is why book stores never knew where to put
his books, probably, and still do not. Were his books
anthropology? Were they novels? Were they fiction, or was he
telling the true story of what really happened to him,
‘Carlos’ under the tutelage of don Juan? So in the end many
book stores decided to classify Castaneda as a kind of ‘New
Age Religion’, and they put him in a section they called
‘Metaphysical’, as they did at the Tattered Cover bookstore in
Denver, along with books by gurus and founders of cults.
Because in the last analysis, ‘fiction or non-fiction’ became
a secondary issue, just as with the Bible’s Creation story and
Garden of
And Sammy
wrote back:
Maybe the
point is not whether mj lorenzo ever existed or not, or ever
did the things the books about him say he did. Nor does it
matter, maybe, whether the books are ‘story’ or ‘analysis of
story’ or ‘meditation on story’. Maybe the point is that
certain books written about mj lorenzo by certain people, in
whatever format, and for whatever original purpose, may, over
time, have come to constitute the sacred text of a new but
very old religion. Maybe, in other words, the pundits who say
you are ‘trying to found a new religion’ are right. Usually
the pundits ARE right, as you have told me many times.
But not
always, of course.
And the Dr.
wrote Sammy:
There is,
then, also another way to think about the ‘look at mj lorenzo’
books. Since it is not always clear exactly who is writing a
given word or page, and since it is not clear, either, whether
the creator of this ‘new religion’ is mj lorenzo or someone
else writing about him: maybe it becomes appropriate, and
maybe even necessary, to look at the series of books about mj
lorenzo as a blueprint
of the origin of all religion. How do religions come to
exist? This is a very important question, and in fact it is
one of the bedrock questions on which my writing is built, and
the ‘look at’ series too. How have the ‘great religions’ come
about? Pretty much as mj’s world-view has. Take a look at this
multi-volume story of mj lorenzo, and you will be closer to an
answer.
And the
question of where religions come from (and its corollary,
therefore: whether religions should be taken seriously or
not), is of enormous significance at the present time, since
two of the world’s ‘great’ religions, Christianity and Islam,
or at least weighty blocs of believers in those religions,
constitute major threats to world peace and the survival of
the human race. These two blocs seem at this point in world
history to be bent on forcing their beliefs on humanity at
large, no matter what the cost to the human race. With the
result that they are then at odds not only with each other,
but with humanity at large; and are at odds in a way that
constitutes a threat to planetary peace and the welfare of
all. Power blocs from within one religion or the other could
wipe out all of humanity within the foreseeable future.
Thus the
pressing relevance of mj lorenzo’s writing, and of the ‘look
at’ series; since the focus of both is how to depolarize a
hyperpolarized humanity so that it does not annihilate
itself.
Of course, it
might be hard for some to read about such a subject. Few
people want to believe or agree that cataclysm might be
imminent or even possible. It will hardly be a ‘popular’
subject. Not much fun. And this may be part of the reason that
your friendly literary agent seems to be stumbling over the
books, or parts of books, we give her.
BUT IN THE
MEANTIME: if cataclysm is imminent, or even just possibly imminent; if
the human race is THIS CLOSE to annihilating itself, then is
it not appropriate to pontificate???!!!!!
Jesus, for
example, pontificated when the scribes and Pharisees asked his
disciples, insinuatingly, why he hung out, and even ate his
meals, with disreputable ‘sinners’ (people who broke sacred
Jewish law) and with especially hated Jews who were wringing
hated taxes out of other Jews to hand over to the hated Roman
emperor who had subjected the Jews. Jesus said,
It is not the fit and flourishing who need the doctor, but those who are ill! Suppose you go away and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ In any case I did not come to invite the ‘righteous’ but the ‘sinners’.”14
No doubt the
Pharisees thought this pronouncement of his ‘pompous’, or too
‘oracular’-sounding, and ‘excessively dignified’, as the
dictionary defines the word ‘pontificate’. Nevertheless,
verses like those about Jesus’ pronouncements inspired people
for the next two thousand years to live a better, cleaner,
humbler and more thankful life, a graced and gracious life.
Someone should speak loudly and firmly if
cataclysm were imminent. Someone should pontificate with striking
pronouncements, and they should probably also repeat
themselves numerous times. Harper’s Bible Dictionary
says that “...the many literary conventions identified in
diverse Old Testament passages.... include [the literary
convention of] extensive repetition....”15
‘Meditations
on the life and art and sacred writings of mj lorenzo’.
‘Meditations
on the sacred writings of mj lorenzo’.
‘A
celebration of the sacred life of mj lorenzo’.
Several days
later the Dr. wrote again when he had heard nothing back from
a very busy Dr. Sammy Martinez, PhD., Certified Jungian
Analyst, founder of the world-renowned Abiquiu AIDS Group
Healing Workshop, and so many other meaningful projects that
kept him occupied. Dr. Lorenzo wrote:
But, Sammy,
how could mj’s silly writing be sacred text? So much of his
writing seems silly to me on certain days of the week when I
am feeling weird and diffident. How could Bill's silly story
about Mrs. Nixon’s legs, for example, ever be considered
'sacred text'?
The answer,
I think, is yet one more question: How could the story of the
Pharaoh’s captain’s wife’s attempting to seduce Joseph ever
have become sacred text?16 Because: for one thing, it
explained how Joseph got locked up and met the Pharaoh’s
cupbearer and baker in prison, who then recommended him to the
Pharaoh as an expert interpreter of dreams; and this explained
how Joseph came to be so highly regarded by the Pharaoh, and
ended up in such a high government position that he could even
save his Jewish family when they came to Egypt begging for
food, and could thereby save the entire future of Judaism
including its messiah. Furthermore, the story of the attempted
seduction of Joseph also served as a character-building lesson
in resisting dangerous sexual temptation. IN OTHER WORDS, it
comforts readers of Scripture by illustrating how current
events which seem at the moment to be hellish and/or
meaningless, often turn out, later on, from hindsight, to have
been very important.
Finally Sammy
wrote back:
Likewise, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs:
that little story of Bill’s befriending the First Lady in a
human and down-to-earth, natural way serves as a
character-building lesson in essential lorenzian human values.
And Bill’s natural way of dealing with everyone, even with the
U. S. President’s wife, and the results of that naturalness, a
brief friendship with her, all illustrate a way of undoing a
tyrant non-violently, a subject that comes up again and again
in mj lorenzo’s teaching and books; since tyranny is a major
threat to humanity’s future and to the set of values which mj
teaches. And furthermore, Mrs. Nixon’s Legs
becomes sacred text because it is part of the lore that
recounts the creating of the still developing culture hero, mj
lorenzo, and thus of his following as well, also a matter of
sacred importance.
Even if a
reader could figure none of that out, he or she might still be
able to see that if mj lorenzo wrote and published it, it must
have been of SOME sacred importance; just as you could say
that if my namesake Samuel, the Hebrew judge, priest and
prophet, thought the story of his mother’s making by hand a
brand new cloak for him every year and presenting it to him on
the same sacred holiday every year when he was a boy..., if
that little story was important enough to tell to his people
again and again when he got older, then the story must have
been worthy of being included in Jewish sacred text. Because
Samuel was who he was, someone of great importance in the
history of the ancient Hebrews, a great model for them in
perpetuity. In other words, anything that turns up in mj’s works can
be assumed to be of sacred value. If we can’t figure out the
value at first, it simply behooves us to do some work and
figure it out. Turn it over to your pundit following and
they’ll figure it out fast! ‘Sacred’ in mj’s world does not
mean church-like. Heaven and earth save us from that.
And the Dr.
wrote back:
But still:
how can you call mj’s ‘teachings’ a ‘religion’ and his writing
‘sacred text’? Isn’t it grandiose to claim such a thing?
And Sammy
wrote:
You yourself
subtitled your first book, The Remaking, an
‘experimental’ ‘sacred text’. And you discussed it as
such many times throughout the years, though even your most
ardent followers shied away from doing same. You repeatedly
likened The Remaking
to the Bible’ and you and your admirers, both, repeatedly
compared you to or contrasted you with Christ. And secondly,
you always have agreed that your second book, Tales of Waring,
essentially amounted to a ‘Handbook for Backsliders’, just as
your early followers recognized, and as it had been called in
unofficial parlance, meaning ‘on the street’: in other words,
a guide book to help former believers or followers of mj
lorenzo’s teaching who had wandered off and gotten lost, to
find their way back to the fold, meaning to mj and to his
humanistic teachings, to his humanity-centered (not
divinity-centered) religion.
It is not
far-fetched or grandiose to see mj’s teaching as religion. By
the mid-seventies a number of your followers, especially the
‘culture hero’ pundits, insisted on placing you right along
with Christ and Buddha in a special category of human being
defined by Joseph Campbell as ‘culture hero’. And by the early
eighties any number of divinity students in
And when your
book, which back then you were titling ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs and
the White House Christmas Concert’, was being prepared for
publication in 1984, something occurred which made the point
clearer yet to those, like yours truly, who were not afraid to
see mj lorenzo as the founder of a religious movement (though
such people remained very few throughout the early years).
When you showed your pundits the manuscript, a few of your
east coast backers hooked you up with a New York literary
agent who upon seeing the first draft of that book informed
you that you would have to remove the ‘pontification and
repetition’ and ‘other literary errors’ and stick to standard
novelistic story-telling style a la Hemingway, “If you hoped
to see your ‘novel-like
book’ published by a major publisher.” And these pundit
followers encouraged you to do this, so you could gain the
notoriety that might hopefully come from being published
mainstream finally, not just underground as hitherto. They
made a list of the changes that would be necessary, and when
you saw the list you balked. They defended the remaining
skeleton of a tale as a ‘parable’, the meaning of which would
have to be elucidated by readers, not spelled out in black and
white over and over by the author, YOU, right within the
story, as you preferred to do in your usual ‘pontificating’
and ‘repetitious’ style. Christ taught in short parables spare
of word, they said.
“Yes, but
Christ’s disciples didn’t understand his parables,” you said,
surprising your pundits with unwanted news. “Jesus’ disciples
would come back to their teacher in private, after he had told
a parable in public, and ask him what the heck the parable had
meant; for they had come up with some ideas of their own about
it, among themselves, as they explained sheepishly, but they
wanted to be sure they got his meaning one hundred percent
right, lest they lead some precious lamb astray who loved him
very much. And so Jesus would have to spell the whole thing
out in detail, what the wheat stood for, what the chaff stood
for, the good steward and the sloppy or deceptive steward, all
the symbols and hints in the tale, and especially what was the
upshot of the parable, the bottom line, the main lesson to be
learned. And these were some of the brightest men in history,
supposedly, as you said; yet they weren’t sure what their
teacher was teaching them and had to have it laid out boldly,
told to them in both forms, parable and exposition both, to be
sure they got it right.”17
You then went
on to tell them that ‘subtlety in expressing oneself was often
a plus, but subtlety was foolish during a grave emergency’,
like when Allen Ginsberg was mugged and thrown down a stair
well on the Lower East Side and it was time not to shout his
brilliant poetry but to scream to passersby for HELP!!! If the
world was on the brink of total self-destruction, you said,
and immediate change was required to save it from itself, then
someone should ‘scream bloody murder’. And since possible
imminent self-destruction of humanity was the very thing
triggering you to write, constantly and forever, you saw it as
wisest to start out
subtly in your writing, but at the same time somehow, in some
form, ‘as soon as possible’, to spell things out as clearly as
hell for all of those who, like Jesus’ brainy disciples, were
so exceedingly bright that they would be sure to draw some
very crazily far-fetched and brainspun theological conclusion
from their beloved mj’s simple earthy stories, The Remaking and Tales of Waring. The
meanings of those two stories, by the way, as you threw in at
the last second for free, should have been easily understood
by any illiterate goatherd in
We have all
of this on tape, mj. I’m not making it up.
Your sage
rebuttal of the pundits’ ‘parable argument’ provoked them to
more discussion. Do you remember? We had a meeting and taped
the meeting. They wanted you published and accepted
mainstream, and a debate ensued. Of all you had written so
far, they said, ‘The White House Christmas Story and Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs’ had the best chance of selling mainstream, being
an entertaining romantic comedy packed with a cast of
celebrities including two U.S. presidents. If you were only
willing to give up some paragraphs of ‘dry, boring explanation
and pontification’ and some other ‘out-of-date habits’, as
they put it, you would certainly compensate for the loss with
all the fame
that a mainstream publishing company, with all its marketing
know-how, would bring to your cause. Fame would bring you a
wider readership plus royalties from the publisher, as
publishing underground could not, and that money could be
spent on furthering your cause, critical as all your most
devoted pundits agreed that your cause was, ‘saving humanity
from physical self-annihilation’.
But you
disagreed. Do you remember? To publish any story without
simultaneously explaining it, you said, would damage your
reputation more than help it. And the reputation of mj lorenzo
‘and his cause’ could not afford such a blow.
They were
nonplussed. How could a writer’s reputation suffer if he
published an entertaining romantic comedy loaded with
celebrities? It ‘made no sense’, as they said.
“Because I am
not a writer first and foremost,” you said. “Should Jesus have
acted like a clown to get a bigger crowd?”
I’m writing
this conversation down from the tape!
“But even
Jesus did normal things sometimes,” they said. “He went to
weddings. Took boat rides. Went to synagogues, celebrated the
feast days.”
“Yes,” you
said. “I do ‘normal things’ too, but when Jesus spoke to a
crowd he stuck to business. And books are my way of getting my
message out, of communicating with my crowd. As soon as I
publish for commercial reasons I become a commercial artist
and my writing, past, present and future, can be misunderstood
easily from then on as ‘just commercial’. Whereas until now
everyone has understood clearly, even the critics, that I am a
man with a message. Isn’t it true? Isn’t that one of the
things you liked about me?”
“Yes,” they
answered. “Your first two books addressed the fragile future
of humanity and its desperate plight,” they said.
“The Remaking,” you
said, “presents humanity’s plight as if it were a severe
psychiatric disorder requiring elaborately special psychiatric
treatment. Tales of
Waring portrays humanity’s situation as if it were a
farce that has turned into a nightmare. And now, if I publish
a third book as romantic comedy without any explanation
whatsoever as to why it is not really funny for humanity, in
all truth; if I ignore or downplay the psychotic and
nightmarish backdrop against which the comedy is taking place,
I’ll confuse everyone as to who I am and what my writing is
meant to be about.”
To these soon
famous words your ‘mainstream publishing’ pundits had no
answer. You seemed to have nailed the coffin shut forever on
the matter, with that succinct and telling analysis of your
three most important books. They said among themselves that
you could do whatever you wanted with all your ‘pontificating
and repeating yourself’ in Mrs. Nixon’s Legs.
You could do whatever you wanted with all the paragraphs the
literary agent wanted deleted from the book, as far as they
were concerned. And so you re-submitted your ‘Legs’ to the
literary agent in 1985 with little change. And for some
baffling reason all of your repetitive, pompous,
un-Hemingway-like, un-novelistic prophesying was tolerated,
published, and even reviewed in the Sunday Times with
some favor, and mj lorenzo enjoyed his first mainstream
literary success.
And the Dr.
quickly answered Sammy via another email:
Yes, I agree
that we were lucky to get ‘Legs’ published as it was; but I
still do not think I have been creating a new religion. I
see myself as trying to delineate a new and healthier world-view, a
new Weltanschauung,
a better way of looking at life in this world, a way with
better values and ways of doing things which might produce a
better and healthier way for billions to live their lives.
16. What did the ‘religionist’ pundits say
about mj lorenzo’s fourth book? (This question, like 14, was
posed in 2010 by Sammy Martinez’
Sammy
Martinez answered the question a month later with a typed
Reading Club handout he had drawn up himself. He passed it out
to the club members:
Dr. Lorenzo
never endorsed the views of the ‘religionist’ pundits. He once
disagreed with them in a simple way, as I will show. But also,
it’s important to note, he never went on the warpath against
them.
By the time
mj lorenzo’s fourth book had reached publication and come to
enjoy sensational success with the mainstream press and even
Broadway, and by the time it had been studied thoroughly by
the pundits, his second book, Tales of Waring, had
already been available underground more than long enough to
have driven away his most ardent and extremist (until then) mj
lorenzo fans, the ‘culture hero’ pundits, leaving ‘Legs’
without the benefit of their usual telling analysis of things.
Little, therefore, did it surprise me (Sammy Martinez) or
other students of mj (and of the intellectual subculture his
writing produced), that almost as soon as mj lorenzo
interpreters worldwide saw ‘Legs’, a new extremist group of
interpreters formed to ‘replace’, as critics said, the
‘culture hero’ group. Other pundits quickly dubbed this new
group the ‘religionist’ pundits, because they bluntly claimed
that mj lorenzo was ‘attempting to form a new religion’. His
book, ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs and the White House Christmas
Concert’ ‘was proof’, they said. It was ‘obvious’, they
claimed, that mj, in ‘Legs’, was implicitly scoffing at the
‘old religions’ for having failed to prevent the grave
situation which humanity now faced. Earth’s ‘old’ religions,
as mj could be shown to be arguing ‘subtly’, they said, (by
the manner in which he used the characters of Nixon and
Waring) repeatedly produced extremist groups that kept upping
the ante on selfishness, meanness, bullying and violence on
earth, leaving the human race in ever graver danger of
annihilation from man-made catastrophe, whether nuclear,
chemical, environmental, or whatever.
The
‘religionist’ group did not agree with the ‘mainstream’ mj
lorenzo interpreters who claimed that mj in ‘Legs’ was
endorsing Joey’s guru, and would be glad to welcome anyone who
wanted to follow him, mj, in learning the meditation and
learning the other spiritually self-disciplining practices the
guru taught. Mj lorenzo was ‘bigger’ than that, said the
religionist pundits. He was ‘too big’ to simply follow someone
else’s religion or spiritual discipline and let it go at that,
no matter how much he might seem to like or respect or admire
that person’s teachings; or even employ them to his own
benefit. Indeed they agreed with almost all other mj lorenzo
pundit interpreters that mj had shown up on planet Earth to
‘save mankind from self-destruction’, as he had stated
explicitly more than once in his first book, The Remaking. But he
was ‘bigger’ than to leave it up to someone else to provide
the philosophical or religious framework needed to do all that
‘saving’.
Hinduism,
after all, they said, despite its tendency down through the
centuries to absorb other religions calmly rather than come to
blows with them, had nevertheless inspired somehow a huge
amount of violence over time, as the endless bloodshed during
the partition of India in the nineteen forties ‘proved’. Mj
would ‘never’ simply endorse one of the old major religions,
they insisted. He would ‘naturally and inevitably’ provide his
own ‘understanding of things’, they said, an ‘understanding’
that was ‘tantamount’ to a ‘new and very different kind of
religion’, as his book, ‘Legs’, ‘helped make clear’.
And this was
where their outrageously insightful interpretation got
interesting enough to cause a stir in academia worldwide so
sensational that the mainstream press noticed the stir and
furthered it.
The
And so they
decided to address, in a formal statement, ‘The Place of Ritual in mj
lorenzo’s New Religion’.
Why, they
asked in their ‘statement’, had mj lorenzo stressed ‘the ritual aspect’
of his routine visits to the Blackburns, and especially of the
particular visit which came to constitute his first taped
interview with them and led to his second book, Tales of Waring? He
could have simply mentioned the ritual aspect of their
proceedings once or twice and let it go at that; but instead,
as the religionists liked to point out, he had purposely ‘stressed ritual’,
and not only during the first part of the evening and book,
but all the way through the book, right to its very end. The
whole evening had come to seem ‘to have been like’ or ‘to have
actually been or constituted’ a ritual celebration
of something, as it had come to seem to mj too
with time; and so he had stressed the point by the way he had
written and re-written the book over the years, they said.
And then he
had done the same thing with ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs and the White
House Christmas Concert’. He had ‘gone out of his way’ to
emphasize the observance of sacred ritual events throughout his
writing of the book.
Mj lorenzo,
in short, claimed the religionists, was trying to ‘pull off a
double whammy’ in his writing. He was trying to show how
humanity’s religions came into being. And he was also trying
to show how he could make up a religion if he chose to do so.
And perhaps, they suggested, his intention had only been
facetious or facetiously scholarly at first. But the simple
fact remained that by the time he had reached the end of his
fourth book he had made it perfectly clear to the world that
he had not only come to
save his culture and the rest of the world from instant
overnight extinction, as he had stated many times
quite clearly, he had come to do something else, too,
something he had not been quite as clear and open about at
first. He had come to show
a disciplined,
ritualized way of accomplishing that feat, a way that
amounted to a new kind of religion, whether he called it a
religion or not, and whether he was aware of what he was doing
or not. But he ‘probably was aware’, they said, for though he
‘played dumb’ at times, there seemed to be ‘very little about
himself and his writing of which mj lorenzo was NOT aware’.
And in short
order, after publishing these viewpoints in academic press
worldwide, the ‘religionist’ pundits asked mj lorenzo point
blank in a series of widely published communications whether
they were right. And he replied that ‘essentially’ they were,
a reply that caused a storm in the press, needless to say, for
now mj lorenzo had gone on record, just as Christ had, for
example, and admitted that he had come to establish a ‘new
order of things’, as the religionist pundits summed it up, and
was ‘suggesting a more or less ritualized way of establishing
that new order’, as they put it.
In the same
way that mj lorenzo and his wife, Dlune, and their friends,
the Blackburns, had ‘ritualized their friendship’, ‘ritualized
their great moments together’, and ritualized even two of
their three interviews for a book or books, said the
religionist pundits, any
human being could similarly ritualize his or her own life,
not just its great moments but its simple ones too, until
even the most simple and animal practices and experiences
could seem sacred and holy. Because human life
itself was sacred, and so the sincere and sacred
celebration of that life could take on a million equally
legitimate forms, a million or ten thousand
billion forms, meaning as many forms as there were individuals
to think them up in their own individualized and creative and
worshipful ways. That was how mj’s fishing with Bill had
become a ritual. That was how the Blackburn courtship and
marriage, the Blackburn honeymoon and the first night’s
interview and the last night’s, had all become elaborate
rituals in mj lorenzo’s mind: just as elaborate and sincerely worshipful of
their own divine humanity as had Jack Lorenzo, in
Canada’s north during the summer of 1970, been worshipful of his
own divine naked humanity and the Energy – or the
various energies together – that had created it.
This was the
‘religion’, said mj lorenzo’s religionist pundits, mj had come
to teach; and it was the one he was in fact still at this very
moment not hesitating to teach around the globe, everywhere he
went, though he might hesitate to call it a religion or
hesitate to announce what he was doing. He was purposely
teaching religion in a downplayed form due to the black eye
the word ‘religion’ had earned for itself around the world,
especially in recent times.
Meanwhile, if
you ask me (Sammy Martinez), there was even more possible
evidence he was possibly trying to establish a new religion,
evidence the ‘religionist’ pundits never mentioned. A lot of
literary buffs had been complaining bitterly for years about
mj’s use of 'collage'
to intersperse Waring concert songs with Bill Blackburn’s
storytelling and other ingredients, ranging from Castaneda
quotes to word-for-word descriptions of the live ritual
boiling of ugly white naked Jesuit priests, quotes which were
pulled whole-cloth from Bruce Trigger’s Children of Aataentsic.
The pundits
defended their hero and his controversial ‘collage’ technique
as well as they could, while the hero himself left the matter
alone for the most part. One time, however, he mentioned to me
(Sammy) in private that he had read through the three books of
his trilogy so many hundreds of times while re-writing,
re-working, editing and altering them, fine-tuning them ‘a
smidgen at a time’ for publication, that the pieces of song
had come to fit and belong, at least in his own mind, just as
absolutely perfectly with the pieces of story and quote they
now stood next to on the page, as the sung responses of a
Catholic or High Episcopal church service had ‘fit’ with the
read-aloud scripture and other priestly utterances emanating
from the pulpit during a highly ritualized church service. The
mix-up of genres during a Catholic or Episcopal mass fit
together so perfectly that he had accepted the final version
of collaged ingredients ‘instinctually and at once’, the times
in his life he had attended a Roman Catholic or High Episcopal
church service. Similarly,
in other words, he had come to accept the mix in his three
Waring-trilogy books as being just as natural and automatic.
His own books seemed to him, after years of familiarity with
them, just as naturally blended as the Methodist communion
ritual he had been raised on, with all of its back and forth
between preacher, congregation and choir, its back and forth
between sitting and standing, and its respectfully
choreographed filing forward to kneel and partake.
I shared
these comments of the Dr.’s with a small group of ‘early Remaking pundits’,
the elite of punditry; and the story got out.
Naturally the
‘religionists’ had a field day with this off-the-cuff remark
of mj’s to such a ‘trusted friend’, probably in a ‘weak
moment’, as many people thought. Who knew for sure how to
interpret the comment?
Nevertheless,
the religionists were certain it ‘proved’ a point that they
had been trying to drive home for years, namely: that mj
lorenzo had been, since the very beginning of his writing
career – and
still was, for that matter – attempting to create a new
religion.
While the Dr.
was, and has remained until today, 2010, infamously dubious of
their claim.
His most
succinct statement on the point he sent me in a 2006 email: “I
still do not think I have been creating a new religion. I
see myself as trying to delineate a new and healthier world-view, a
new Weltanschauung,
a better way of looking at life in this world, a way with
better values and ways of doing things which might produce a
better and healthier way for billions to live their lives. And
my writing, or some portion of it, constitutes the sacred text
for that new world-view.””
Once he said
to me that the word ‘religion’ had begun to become a dirty
word already before he was even born. But during his lifetime
its reputation had become tarnished virtually irreparably.
Because, in the minds of the public at large, the words
‘religious’ and ‘religion’ had become inextricably entangled
with the Muslim and Christian extremists all over the globe
who thought their ‘religion’ more sacred than life itself, as
demonstrated by the fact that they routinely sacrificed their
own and others’ lives in the name of their religion.
I mentioned
to him the fact that Jesus too, like modern suicide bombers,
had been virtually suicidal. He could have run away and
hidden, or he could have fought back with violence. Peter had
wanted to defend him with the sword but he had forbidden his
disciples to intervene against the Roman soldiers and
authorities.
“Yes,” the Dr. said. “Of course. But
Jesus saw everyone else’s physical human life as sacred and to
be preserved as long as possible. He died so that others could
live as fully as possible, not
just spiritually, but also physically. The Spanish
churchmen understood this when they arrived in the
I then asked
him about the early Christian martyrs, who seemed, in
retrospect, about as suicidal as the Muslim Al Qaida suicide
bombers of our own day.
“No,” he
said. “They were not suicidal. They were killed by people who
hated them. It’s true that they risked immediate extinction
for standing up for their beliefs. But their conscious purpose
was not to end their own lives, as is the conscious purpose of
the suicide bombers of our own day. The conscious purpose of
the martyrs was to stand up for what they believed in,
regardless of the consequences. In most of those cases their
only other option was to renounce and repudiate
their faith in public, not merely stop practicing and talking
about it; and the early Christian martyrs refused to renounce
in public and were killed for that reason.”
“And they
never took innocent bystanders with them, did they?” I asked.
“No. That’s
another important difference between the early Christian
martyrs, or modern church martyrs like Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
and the extremist Muslims and Christians of our day who try to
solve the world’s problems without concern for ‘collateral
damage’, meaning without concern over how many innocent
bystanders are killed, maimed or ruined in the process, even if it be all of
humanity. Rarely if ever did early Christian
martyrdom involve ‘collateral damage’ for which the martyrs
could be blamed after they were dead.”
And then Dr.
Lorenzo added an aside on ‘collateral damage’ and
self-sacrifice that related to ‘Legs’. He said, “Some
fuzzy-thinking defenders of Nixon claim that even he
was a kind of martyr. They say he sacrificed his presidency so
that his Republican administration’s policies could be
continued without him, and it ‘worked’: because his Vice
President, Ford, took over when Nixon resigned, and then Ford
was elected president for four more years. But these fuzzy
thinkers always forget to mention that Nixon was, himself, all
alone and by himself, personally
responsible for the killing of 100,000 innocent Cambodian
rice-farming bystanders, because he himself, illegally, i.e.,
without permission of Congress, decided to secretly order the
secret bombing of Cambodia, hoping it would help the USA win
the war against the Communists in neighboring Vietnam. How,”
asked the Dr., “can we call someone who kills 100,000
innocents and then lies about it a ‘martyr’? Isn’t ‘lying freaking
mass murderer’ the proper term?”
17. Did the
correspondence between Dick Nixon and Fred Waring really
occur? (asked by
Certain of mj
lorenzo’s pundit following claimed that the Secret Service
once let slip during an “off-the-record” response to pundit
digging, that the file of 1972 material on Bill Blackburn,
including the pictures of him with Pat, and the back and forth
between Waring and Nixon, “...if it existed, might have been
‘lost’ when Nixon ‘lost’ his other White House tapes in 1973.”
The best
pundit snoops speculated
that Bill’s ‘friend’ in the Secret Service, the agent he had
befriended in the White House basement, could have delivered
the file to Bill at some point in time after the Christmas
Concert; and that Bill could have lent the file to mj some
time between 1974 and 1983. Mj could not have divulged that he
possessed it, of course, they said; since that might have led
to charges and jail terms for the agent; Bill; mj; and also
anyone else, such as Betty Ann or Dlune, who might have known
about the breach and been therefore an ‘accessory to the
fact’. These pundits speculated, and most
people thought they did so reasonably, that the White House
could have felt forced to come to grips with the issue after
the book’s publication in ‘85, and could have decided to agree
with the large portion of the public that considered it
fiction, and ignore the claims of mj lorenzo and the majority
of his devotees who said that 99.9999999% of his writing was
always ‘real’, not fiction.
The ‘snoop’
pundits published these thoughts on the internet; and this
version of things became a popular interpretation of how the
author had managed to come up with ‘such a fine final extra
layer of fairy tale to slip-slap (like so much confectioners’
icing) on top of Bill’s already highly sweetened wedding cake
of a romantic Huron storyteller’s tale’ (as the website put
it). It became standard lore among many mj lorenzo followers
thereafter. It satisfied perfectly their criteria for
interpreting their hero, and they ceased to question how mj
lorenzo, who always had claimed to have chained himself
sacrificially to the ‘real’ facts of how things had happened
(no matter how exasperating the results, once in print), might
have managed to come by such a winning formula for his fairy
tale, that it almost seemed he must have, for once, created
fiction.
In short, as
these ‘snoop’ pundits said: ‘We do not consider it fiction,
because we believe in mj lorenzo’s sincerity; BUT: IF it is
fiction, then fiction
is more believable than reality’.
Please see
also question 6 above.
18. Exactly how many wonderful things in this
world did mj lorenzo’s fourth book celebrate?
(Sammy Martinez once asked this question of his after-school
reading club at Española High in northern
Dr. Lorenzo’s
fourth book CELEBRATES
:
Mrs. Nixon’s legs.
The U.S. American tradition of The
Annual White House Christmas Concert.
The 1972 White House Christmas
Concert and Party for Cabinet, Staff and Special Guests (like
Mrs. Eisenhower).
Bill and Betty Ann’s marriage; and
love; and their falling in love; and their marrying and
staying married despite obstacles.
Fred Waring and his incomparable
singing and music-making ‘Pennsylvanians’.
A live Fred Waring concert.
Fred Waring’s musicianship.
Betty Ann McCall Blackburn’s
musicianship.
Bill Blackburn’s exemplary humanity
and jack-of-all-trades-ship.
Oriental philosophy and religion,
especially Buddhist and Hindu.
U. S. American folklore.
Fred Waring’s triumph of seeing
around and past his selfish ego, finally.
Mj lorenzo’s search for truth.
The search for truth in general.
Mj lorenzo’s life.
Everybody’s life in this world.
Mj’s wife and new baby.
Friendship of every kind.
The promises made by marrying
couples.
The arrival of fall.
The traditional art and practice of
live storytelling among friends.
Bill Blackburn’s storytelling
technique, art and depth.
Native American tribal history.
The Huron tribe, defunct though it
be.
The writer’s mind and heart,
including the ability to research, to see connections and to
tell a story with a valuable message for our day and for all
time.
Mj lorenzo and his mission in this
world.
Good moral leadership (mj; Bill;
and, in spite of everything, Fred).
Art.
Nature: the beautiful natural
setting of sunsets, mountains, rivers, lakes, creeks, forests
and wildlife surrounding Stroudsburg, East Stroudsburg, Spring
Lake, Minisink Hills, Shawnee-on-Delaware, and Delaware Water
Gap, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Planet Earth,
Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, Our Universe, Creation.
The ability of Native Americans to
see Western civilization from a refreshing new angle.
The importance of periodic, sacred,
total-tribal/group/societal ritual for
total-tribal/group/societal spiritual health.
The happy tradition of a society’s
HAVEs helping its HAVE-NOTs.
Local aristocracy (be they ever such
buffoons).
The grounded, simple, very human,
natural common good moral sense of a local, down-home man like
Bill Blackburn.
Good government.
The
Sacred text, i.e., sacred tribal
lore and writing, such as this book.
Mj lorenzo’s guru and his brilliant,
enlightening, life-changing teaching.
The genius of the writer, Carlos
Castaneda.
The ‘psychological finesse’ of
Native American tribes.
The clownish buffoonery of modern
daily American life, president to peon.
The moral character and
accomplishments of an exemplary past leader like Ike
Eisenhower.
Bill Blackburn’s subtle and uncanny
knack for inspiring so many people, here, there, and
everywhere he went, to do the right thing.
Good discipleship: The devotion of
followers to an inspiring leader, be it spiritual, political,
moral, artistic (via music; writing; storytelling) or other.
Comedy.
Good music, especially well-written,
-composed, -arranged, -conducted and -sung songs.
Maya.
Family.
The existence and very life and
survival of the human race.
The kind of ‘Knowledge’ revealed by
Guru Garland.
The kind of Christian Calvinist
‘faith’ on which mj lorenzo was raised, be it ever so
imperfect.
Life.
Sammy
explained to his students that their act of creating this list
had been a ‘sacred’ act; just as the group-creation of the
present tome, in which he had participated, had been a sacred
act; and mj’s writing of the original version had been a
sacred act; and the Legs
pundits’ GUULP version; and
the third interview in the Blackburn living room itself had
been a ‘sacred act’ which celebrated so many of the things in
the list. Every step, he said, of the process of creating the
present ‘look at mj lorenzo’s fourth book’ should be
understood as ‘sacred’; because the purpose of everyone’s work
on it had been sacred, namely: to honor, improve, and save
from self-destruction, humanity. For: human life itself was sacred,
as nearly every religion in the world testified.
19. Using Lajos
Egri’s criteria (in his book, The Art of Dramatic
Writing),18 what was the ‘premise’ of mj’s
work, Exactly How Mrs.
Nixon’s Legs Saved the White House Christmas Concert?
What, in other words, was the number one thing the author was
trying to show? What was the main point he was trying to make
when he wrote and published his fourth book? (This question
was devised and disseminated by Sammy Martinez to be asked of
high school after-school reading clubs all over the
Answer: Properly educated and channeled non-violent effort dispels darkness and confusion and defeats tyranny.19
20. What, for that
matter, was the purpose of mj lorenzo’s entire artistic
oeuvre, of all his creative productions, in other words; or,
even more broadly: what was the purpose of mj lorenzo’s life?
And: have the actualities
of his life and creativity supported his claims about the
purpose of his life? (asked by a student in Sammy Martinez’
after-school reading club)
Sammy re-worded the question as:
Using Egri’s definition of ‘premise’, what has been the
‘premise’ of mj lorenzo’s entire life? Meaning, what is the
main point he has been trying to make by living and writing
the way he has lived and written?
Answer: Properly
educated and channeled non-violent collaborative effort
prevents Homo sapiens self-annihilation.
And: have the
actualities of mj’s life supported his claim that to teach and
accomplish this was the purpose of his life?
Answer: “Has
humanity annihilated itself?” Sammy asked the student who
asked these questions. “If you are worried about your future
and everybody else’s, maybe you should help him out.”
21. Did Fred Waring
give Bill Blackburn the White House correspondence he said he
would give Bill as a 35-year ‘guarantee’? Could that have been
how mj lorenzo came to learn of the correspondence? (asked of
Sammy Martinez by one of his high-schoolers)
No one but mj
lorenzo and Bill Blackburn could ever answer such a question,
just as only they could ever have said whether, if the Secret
Service file on Bill Blackburn really existed, they ever saw
it, or a copy of it. Bill died in the early 2000s, and neither
he nor Dr. Lorenzo ever wanted to say more than: “It could
have been,” or, “It must have been.” To many observers, mj and
Bill always seemed to be trying deliberately to avoid any
statement such as “It’s fiction,” or “It’s not fiction,”
either one; since the first might get them in trouble with
mj’s readers, most of whom believed everything mj wrote was
true, as he claimed; and the second might get them in trouble
with the U.S. government.
22. Did Dr. Lorenzo
not abandon verisimilitude and forgo all believability at the
end of his fourth book -- (assuming that the correspondence
between Waring and Nixon was fictional, as so many pundits and
readers have felt) -- when he showed Fred Waring suddenly
behaving uncharacteristically, admitting imperfection, quoting
Bob Dylan and a 13-year-old guru from India, defending his
nemesis, Bill Blackburn, and so forth? Was this not a change
in Waring’s character too drastic and sudden for the reader to
believe possible? Was the author not, in other words, merely
manipulating the character of his childhood hero, Fred Waring,
in order to satisfy some plot or character need of the
author’s? (a few of Sammy Martinez’ pre-writing-major high
school students put their heads together and framed this
question carefully to put to him in early 2013)
The answer would have to be
constructed in two parts, Sammy told his students: (1) if the
correspondence were real; and (2) if it were fiction.
But on second
thought, when he remembered how much work it would be to think
his way through all of those ifs, ands and buts, he said to
his student readers: “I’m not going to answer it. You know
why?”
“No, why?”
“Because,” he
said, “you guys are the first ones who ever asked this
question, as far as I know, and I have more confidence in mj’s
regular readership than in you wise-guys.”
But on the
way home, alone in his car, he thought better of this put-down
approach and began to rethink:
Should we
be surprised if Fred scolded the President in the way that he
did? Fred constantly scolded and mistreated people whom he
felt were stepping on his toes, as Bill’s stories in all three
interviews revealed. Nixon was stepping on Fred’s toes. In the
correspondence with Nixon, Fred revealed he had invested a
great deal of his wealth in Dick Nixon’s getting re-elected,
and if Nixon did not perform well in office, it could cause
him, Fred, negative financial fallout. In addition, we know
that when Nixon was Ike’s Vice President, Ike thought Nixon
‘too slick’, ‘glib’, and not ready to run the country. Stephen
Ambrose’ biography of Ike confirms this.20 And so does Michael Korda’s.21 Fred Waring, therefore, almost
certainly must have agreed with Ike that Nixon was too
‘slick’, ‘glib’, and immature to run the country. Fred had
always associated with the slightly more liberal Ike
Eisenhower camp of the Republican Party, the ‘Old Guard’, not
with the Nixon camp, which was a new kind of
hyper-conservative, to Fred’s mind..... So, there are many
reasons we should not be so surprised at Fred’s letter and its
many separate and varied postscripts and sub-paragraphs which
he wired to Nixon the night of December 15th, 1972.
But it is a surprise
ending, Sammy thought. I remember thinking that, the first
time I read it..... And I have always liked that surprise
ending....
But he
wearied of this and by morning had come up with a response of
an entirely different nature.
The next time
Sammy met with his high school readers, he said:
I think what
you mean to ask is: Regardless of whether the Nixon-Waring
correspondence is ‘real’ or ‘fiction’, is the change away from
Fred’s usual
arrogant behavior as
shown in previous chapters of the book, the change to the
suddenly much humbler kind of behavior which occurs at the end
of the book, too drastic and uncharacteristic to qualify as
good dramatic writing by Egri’s standards? Would Egri consider
it a ‘jump’?
He got
several vehement nods on this.
I believe he
would. Wouldn’t he? Does anyone have a copy of Egri handy? And
besides, shouldn’t Fred be a little more humble than usual
when communicating directly with the President of the
Okay, Sammy
said: While Bernie gets his xerox copy of Egri from his ugly
orange low rider with all that unnecessary chrome, let me say
this. The whole idea of a conflict between the President and
Fred Waring pops up suddenly for the first time just in the
last few pages of the book. The whole fact of a correspondence
between the two has to be a surprise to most readers. I
remember that it was for me, the first time I read it. But I
always liked that about mj’s book. Because that little twist
at the end really entertained me. And I never felt it was
unlikely, or hard to believe; even though it was very
surprising.
And I just
this minute remembered that a few months ago Dr. Lorenzo and I
were talking about it and he likened it to Hechizo’s death,
his full-time house and travel helper for the previous year
and a half in Mexico.
He said,
Hechizo’s sudden death at 24 in a Mexican small-town street
fight shocked and upset the hell out of him for months and
months, but when he thought about it, he realized he had already
foreseen the possibility of it, given the kid’s
tendency to drink too much and get into brawls on weekends,
ten against one, he always being the outnumbered ‘one’. He
even told Hechizo once he would ‘get himself killed’ if he
didn’t stop doing what he was doing. But the Dr. kept
dismissing his worries as just coming from his own
over-protectiveness. He suppressed the thought and put it out
of mind. So when it did happen, he could look back and see it
had been ‘foreshadowed’.
And maybe
that’s how readers react to ‘Legs’, the Dr. said. Once Bill
Blackburn hooked up with Pat Nixon, and the Secret Service
took pictures of him looking at her legs, no reader could
claim total shock at the end of the book when the President
was still reacting to the pictures of Bill and Pat, or when
Fred scolded the President for that reaction of his, at the
very end. It should have been apparent to even a casual,
inexperienced reader, that when Joe Everyman has a photo
moment with the First Lady’s legs, there
could be serious consequences. That’s a kind of foreshadowing,
in other words.
On the other
hand, said the Dr., most readers might not expect that The U.S. President
will get all crazy over something, though, right within the
book they are reading. Most books and movies about
Also, readers
will tend to expect, since most of ‘Legs’ is down on an
ordinary jaw level with band leaders and their crew and
friends, that a book’s action will not suddenly 'jump' up to
higher realms, least of all to the President himself.
I told the
Dr. I liked the fact, however, that he had waited until the
very end of the book to resolve that tiny bit of tension in
that particular sub-plot of his story. I always liked that
little surprise.
“I suspect there were other ways in which the 'denouement' was ‘foreshadowed’,” he said. “From the beginning of Part II, for instance, the reader is forewarned that Nixon might be about to lose it. The only thing missing is any suggestion that Fred Waring might end up being the one who has to try to 'treat' Nixon’s craziness. That’s the surprise. But it has already been mentioned several times (in early chapters of the book) that Fred Waring is famous for pushing grown adults around like they were defenseless children. We just may be surprised that he would try it with a sitting U.S. President. But: as it is happening, we are simultaneously being shown how Fred chummed with Eisenhower, talking him into running for President, talking him into huge birthday parties, buying his wife’s dresses, and so on, and probably chummed with Nixon some too. That helps prepare the reader for the surprise ending too. Chums chew each other out sometimes.”22
A week later
Sammy reported to the club that he had brought up this
question to the author again, via Skype, who had expressed
another entirely new and different view:
In the Bible,
the Dr. asked Sammy, should the writers of Second Samuel (or
Samuel himself, if he had been the writer) have left out the
story of Bathsheba from the history of David’s kingdom? Simply
because there was nothing in previous chapters to suggest that
a lovely shepherd boy could turn into a ruthless
neighbor-killing tyrant, in order to lay the neighbor’s wife,
whom he had watched taking a naked sexy bath on her roof, from
his roof next door? Did they stick it in there for prurient
reasons?
No, said Dr.
Lorenzo. They were not
writing fiction, and neither is mj lorenzo. I keep
trying to remind you guys of this. Okay? That story of David’s
sudden and unexpected abuse of kingly power has been a lesson
to Jews and Christians for millennia. And so will be the story of Fred
Waring’s saving himself, by the grace of God, from eternal
infamy, even if he surprised everyone on the planet when he
did so!
But on second
thought, Sammy told his reading group, Fred Waring HAD to
change his usual behavior for two obvious reasons. His
affection for Betty Ann would have practically forced him to
help the President find a way to be kind to her and her new
husband on their honeymoon, for one thing. And of course the
reader knows pretty much from the beginning of the book that
Fred loved Betty Ann for years with all his heart. And another
thing: Fred’s devotion to the Republican cause, his huge
financial and emotional investment in the party, and his
multi-generational belief
in the Republican Party, handed down by his forebears, would
have practically forced
him to come to terms with an out-of-control Republican
President in the White House.
But maybe you
are right, Sammy added, that there is not very much obvious
foreshadowing in ‘Legs’ on this latter issue. For example,
most of the information on Fred’s finances getting wrecked by
political contributions to Republican presidential campaigns,
is in Tales of Waring,
not ‘Legs’.
“But here’s
Bernardo with his ragged xerox copy of Egri from the tiger
orange low rider with so much chrome it drags its tail!”
Dr. Martinez
read aloud about half the chapter on ‘Jumps’ and all agreed
that Fred’s change of character at the end of mj’s fourth book
probably did qualify as the kind of ‘jump’ or sudden change in
character that Egri said would ‘ruin’ a well-intended play or
story by weakening its dramatic structure.
But, reminded
Sammy, his own namesake Samuel of the Old Testament had done
the same thing when telling the story of David’s life. So,
maybe the Dr. was right, he said, that what was not allowed in
pure dramatic writing might be unavoidable in sacred text.
This got several loud male groans, especially from the one who
asked the question, since he and several others (all of whom
were future writing majors) felt strongly that mj lorenzo:
“had started out trying to write fiction, not ‘sacred text’,
but did not know how to write fiction and refused to learn
how, so called his writing ‘sacred text’ as an attempt to
cover up his fiction-writing inabilities.”
And for
this Sammy said he would recommend the whole group for a
MOISTR23 award when he went to
When the
reading club met the following month, however, he proposed
that he would prefer to nominate the boys ONLY IF they agreed
to the following changes in their interpretative statement,
namely, that mj lorenzo, “WHEN HE HAD STARTED WRITING HIS
FIRST BOOK, THE
REMAKING, had started out trying to write fiction, not
‘sacred text’, but did not know how to write fiction LIKE
ERNEST HEMINGWAY and refused to learn how, so called his
writing ‘sacred text’ as a FACETIOUS attempt to cover up his
fiction-writing AVERSION, ONLY TO REALIZE YEARS LATER THAT
UNWITTINGLY HE REALLY HAD BEEN WRITING ‘SACRED
TEXT’ THE WHOLE TIME.”
The boys
laughed and agreed to think this one over. Sammy repeated his
re-phrasing so they could record it on an i-phone for study at
home, and the protracted discussion proceeded from there.
The next
month the group’s leader got up the nerve to express something
she had been feeling. “I always thought,” she said, “that
Fred’s 'uncharacteristic' behavior at the very end was
explained by the fact that mj had put an apology in Fred’s
mailbox in which he quoted a famous guru mentioning Fred’s
famous invention, the Waring Blendor. That massaged Fred’s
ego. And it helped Fred get humble. Women use the trick all
the time to get what they want from men.”
“If you’ll
write that up in a single sentence,” Sammy said, “I’ll submit
it to the MOISTR board too. I’ve never heard anyone mention
that angle on Fred’s turnaround, but you must be right! In
fact, you know what? I’m going to ask mj tonight if he put
that in there for that very reason. Okay?”
“Maybe that will make up for the way we treated him when he came here ten years ago,” she said.24
“If you keep
this up,” Sammy quipped, “some of you are going to get famous.
Somebody in this room is going to get an article published in
a journal!”
“Me! ME!!”
shouted several at once.
By the time
a third MOISTR-deserving brain had said mj's books were a kind
of 'gonzo journalism' which the author 'dreamt up' because he
hated writing like Hemingway, Sammy was tearing out his hair.
23. Why did Dr. Lorenzo always have such a
bigg bugg up his axx [sic] [or, as the stuttering church usher
said, ‘Mardon me padam, but you’re occupooing the wrong pie’]
about ‘Calvinism’? Did he rebel against his parents’ religion
or something? (asked by a student in Sammy Martinez’
after-school reading club at Española High in northern
New Mexico, one late January afternoon when they were
discussing Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘Legs’)
Afterwards,
Sammy jotted down the discussion that had taken place in his
reading club and emailed it to Dr. Lorenzo, thinking the Dr.
would be interested. It is presented here, edited only very
slightly.
Why did Dr.
Lorenzo always have such a big bug up his axx about
‘Calvinism’? Did he rebel against his parents’ religion or
something? asked a student named Raimundo, the one who was
always most restless to ascend beyond mj lorenzo’s books to
bigger and better things like Tom and Huck and the runaway
slave and Injun Joe. Or he would have accepted Robinson Crusoe, or
A Confederacy of Dunces,
or A Farewell to Arms,
or Slaughterhouse-Five.
He would have accepted even The Lion, The Witch and
The Wardrobe. His favorite was The Man Who Killed the
Deer by Frank Waters, however, since it was about
northern
Ye-ah, said
another reading club student. Dr. Lorenzo always said that the
And another
voice said, A lot of people here in this state still practice
the old
First of all,
Sammy offered, it can’t be ‘did’ and ‘said’; because it’s
‘does’ and ‘says’. Dr. Lorenzo is alive and living in central
Second, Sammy
added, do you remember when we read ‘a look at The Remaking’ last
year, what was said about mj’s parents’ Calvinism in that
book?
None of the
twelve present that day ‘last year’ remembered.
In the
Wrigley envelope, sub-section 24, we read that even Rev and Jo
did not realize how Calvinist they were. And they were about
as Calvinist as anyone got, a point mj lorenzo has documented
in his writing many times. Most of his elaboration on
Calvinism, by the way, occurs in his Posts from Chockawhoppin,
the email news-and-reflection ‘zine’ which he has sent out
periodically since he moved to central Mexico in 2001. Most of
you don’t get the Post.
I do, so maybe I can help a little with this.
What was
Socrates’ most famous dictum? Sammy asked his reading group,
surprising them by answering their question with a question.
You mean,
‘Know thyself’? one said.
Right. Now,
why would that be more important than knowing your neighbor?
It’s not,
said almost everyone. If you don’t know your neighbors, you
won’t know how to get along with them on this rapidly
shrinking planet. Dr. Lorenzo said – says – that too.
That’s true,
Sammy conceded. But the Dr. has told me many times that it is
more important to understand yourself than to understand your
neighbor. First you have to know yourself. The second step is
to know your neighbor. Why did he put it in that order?
Nobody in the
room answered. One said it was ‘counter-intuitive’. Most of
the group were part or full Native American, and they believed
their tribes had survived semi-intact only because they had
made a super-human effort to understand the European peoples
who had conquered them. This was a going belief in northern
So, Sammy
asked, when so many people think your way, why then would two
famous thinkers, Socrates and mj lorenzo, feel the opposite,
that it was more important to understand yourself than to
understand the white man?
Our people,
said a student, had to understand what they believed in,
before they could figure out how to adapt those beliefs to the
beliefs the Spaniards and Anglos were ramming down our
throats. Is that what you mean?
Exactly!
Dr. Lorenzo once told me he had a pair of rose-colored
glasses, literally. They were sunglasses and he loved them
because they made the world look rosy-colored and more
fantastically warm and loving, driving to work in the morning,
up in
It has to do
with ‘reality’, someone said, and how you view the world.
Exactly!
Sammy raved. It has to do with ‘world view’. One of the Dr.’s main complaints
about the American people has always been that they do not
know what their ‘world view’ is. They constantly forget they
are wearing tinted lenses. They see and interpret all of the
other peoples all over the world from the point of view of
their own kind of ‘world view’, and don’t even know they’re
doing it.
What do you
mean by ‘world view’, said a newer member of the group.
Another
reading club member explained that the concept of ‘world
view’, as Sammy had taught them, had come mainly from German
scholarship in the fields of history and sociology.
You have to
include German-speaking ‘religion’ experts and ‘psychology’
experts, too, Sammy added. Carl Jung frequently addressed
‘world view’ issues in his early writing. He was a
psychiatrist from the German-speaking part of
Yes.
Silence
lingered a second.
I asked what
‘world view’ meant and you never explained it, said the
original asker, I don’t think. Unless I missed it.
It means
Weltanschauung, Sammy teased.
Come on!
The German
word ‘Weltanschauung’, translated literally, means
‘world-upon-looking’, and translated into smoother English
would mean something like ‘looking upon the world’, but
somehow it got translated as ‘world view’. And the dictionary
says that both ‘Weltanschauung’ and ‘world view’ mean exactly
the same thing. Here it is in my laptop: Merriam-Webster’s
Unabridged Dictionary.
He took a
second to find it, then read aloud the definitions of weltanschauung:
1 : a conception of the course of events in – and of the purpose of – the world as a whole, forming a philosophical view or apprehension of the universe : the idea embodied in a cosmology : outlook on the world — called also world view
2 : philosophy of life : IDEOLOGY
3 : the cosmologic conception of society and its institutions held by its members26
Dr. Lorenzo’s
position has always been that the U. S. American world view is
essentially ‘Calvinist’, not ‘Roman Catholic’ or ‘Jewish’ or
‘Judaeo-Christian’ or socialist or communist or pagan or
humanist or secular-democratic or Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu,
Confucian, etc. Do you think that our Catholic view of the
world is something that dominates American life?
Hardly, said
some Catholic students. There aren’t very many Catholics in
high positions in the
What about
Jewish?
Same thing.
And who
founded the country? Whose religions and philosophies became
the bedrock of the American dream?
The English,
and they were Protestant.
Many of the
English who came to the colonies were Anglican, said another,
but Anglican is almost Catholic.
True, said
Sammy, but Anglicans and Episcopalians in the
What about
all of the Muslims in this country? asked a student.
Dr. Lorenzo’s
argument, said Sammy, is that Calvinists do not have to be in
the actual majority of the population for their world view to
dominate. The question is not how many Catholics or Anglicans
or Calvinists there are, or how many Muslims, but which
group’s values dominate the American way of life. The Dr.
bases this part of his argument on Arnold Toynbee’s concept of
the ‘dominant minority’. In the Roman Empire, for example,
slaves from the orient and from barbarian and conquered lands
made up a larger percentage of the population with every
passing century, Toynbee observed, and they practiced every
religion imaginable, and yet the original founding group of
Romans from Italy, and their descendants, with their pantheon
of gods from Jupiter to Mercury, continued to direct the
course of Roman Empire history, even though by then Romans and
Italians were certainly in the minority. The people mj calls
‘Calvinists’ and ‘neo-Calvinists’ in this country may
constitute an actual minority, but their world view
nevertheless still dominates and directs the USA’s way of life
and historical course, partly because their world view was
built into our founding documents, including the Constitution,
and the Declaration of Independence; and partly because that
group remains so powerful.
And another
thing the Dr. has been saying a lot, ever since he moved to
The American
historian, William Graham Sumner, put it this way a century
ago:
The mores of
What about
Locke and Montesquieu and all those guys?
Well, you can
look them up and read. Could you do that for us between now
and next week’s reading group? See what you can find in their
biographies as to how Calvinist their backgrounds were. Daniel
Defoe was certainly Calvinist, the English author of Robinson Crusoe.
Schwanitz reminds us of that fact several times in his Bildung, and in some
places in that history of Western culture he presses the point
home with extensive details. Now, let’s get back to our book,
can we?
But you never
answered why Dr. Lorenzo was always so annoyed by Calvinists
or Calvinism. Did he rebel against his parents’ religion?
It’s not that
Dr. Lorenzo is ‘against Calvinism’. He did rebel in college
and med school, if you remember him writing about that in The Remaking. But the
older he got, the more he appreciated how his parents had
raised him, because, as he has told me many times, it made him
‘incredibly strong’.
It’s more
correct to understand that he is ‘against’ and ‘rebelling
against’ people in his country, the USA, not knowing where
they come from.
Like you guys
here, all of you, pretty much know where you come from, what
your parents and grandparents believed and taught, and what
you believe yourselves. What mj lorenzo has griped about the
most is the way too many voting U.S. Americans these days do
not realize where they’ve come from, namely, a Calvinist world
view. They are programmed by the past and don’t know it. They
are unwittingly acting out a script written five centuries ago
by a Protestant French theologian named Jean Cauvin (whose
name in English became John Calvin), a script altered only
slightly over the centuries by John Knox, Thomas Cranmer, the
English ‘Puritans’, ‘Separatists’, ‘Dissenters’,
Presbyterians, Quakers and all of their spiritual cousins and
descendants, including Dutch, Scottish, Irish, French, Swiss
and German Calvinists, Pietists and Baptists too, all of whom
settled the English colonies in large numbers.
Since so many
Americans don’t ‘know themselves’, they can hardly begin to
understand anybody else on the planet; because they have not
learned to think historically and comparatively about
themselves; so they can hardly manage to see others in any
sensible historical and philosophical perspective, either.
They’re lost, in other words. They don’t know who they are or
what they believe. All they know is that they want an
automatic washer and dryer and at least two weeks of annual
paid vacation and enough money to retire comfortably.
And in a
complicated and dangerous, nuclear-powder-keg-gy world like
ours, where people are killing themselves and others right and
left over religion and ideology, that simply is not enough to
know, if you are to vote intelligently.
The reading group cheered Sammy for
that touché as they packed up and left suddenly. Sammy
had forgotten the hour, and everybody else had too; and
suddenly, since it was January, it was quite dark.
24. Why would a writer as cool as Dr. Lorenzo
waste three heavy important tomes on anybody as outdated,
lightweight and utterly forgotten as Fred Waring? (asked by
one student in Sammy Martinez’ after-school reading club at
Española High; and answered by Sammy)
Many times the Dr. said that Fred
Waring was important to him, mj lorenzo the writer, NOT primarily
for his forgotten fame as an artist, or his new techniques for
choral conducting, or his published music arrangements, or his
educating America in how to sing, or his invention of the
Waring Blendor, or even his helping to ‘make’ two Republican
presidents, Eisenhower and Nixon. Waring was instead important
to mj-the-writer primarily
for his serving as an example of a USA-type arrogance when
dealing with less privileged individuals and peoples at home
and abroad: a kind of arrogance that was hurtful to the future
of the United States and the world, hurtful when it occurred
anywhere in U.S. society, but all the more dangerous when it
popped up in circles of powerful USA elite.
Other things about Waring were also
worth noting, of course. The Dr. and his advocates put forward
dozens of other explanations over the years for mj’s almost
obsessive interest in Fred Waring, and new ones kept popping
up all the time. Many of these explanations may be found in
the answers to previous questions and in the trilogy itself,
and they prove that the author did not consider Fred Waring
‘unimportant’.
As of 2013 the latest current ‘new’
explanation for the interest in Waring was that the Dr.’s
first four books helped him come to terms with his parents and
their generation and their ‘old-fashioned’ times and
attitudes. Waring’s music was mj’s parents’ old-fashioned,
pre-rock-and-roll music. Once The Remaking and the
Waring trilogy were done with, however, he started addressing
other themes that virtually excluded his parents: the
kidnapping of his kids; his trips to
Another way to answer the question
briefly is this: although the Waring trilogy appears to be
‘about’ Fred Waring, it is not. Mj merely used the subject of
Fred Waring to get at many other subjects that concerned him
much more, the most critical of which, probably, was extremist
religion (or ideology) and the restricted world-view it
produced, its devastating impact on international relations,
and its threat therefore to the future of the human
race, which was the core, the fundamental, and the
ultimate concern of all of mj lorenzo’s writing; since, as he
loved to ask his audiences: “Of what point is the ‘right’
religion or ideology, once we are all dead from somebody’s
‘right’-eous arrogant ‘right’-ness, and the human race no
longer exists?”
Any more questions?
25. How does Dr.
Lorenzo – today, 2013, at age 70 – jive his Christian
upbringing with his affection for his guru? (3) (asked of
Sammy by a group of three friends, high school students in his
after-school reading group)
And Sammy answered: Actually he doesn’t. He’s stopped trying to answer the complicated question. He just accepts his affection for his parents’ Biblical Calvinist Christian ‘faith’ and way of living; and his affection for his guru and the guru’s ‘Knowledge’; both; as givens. He sees them as gifts given him, to help him through what he calls his ‘lifelong stay on earth’, a ‘journey’ that’s not that easy, requiring lots of special help. He has stopped trying to understand what most people on the planet would probably consider a complicated contradiction; and so your putting a time frame on your question actually makes the question more interesting, because his thinking has gone through several stages over the years.29
One of the
earliest of those stages we have discussed before (as
described in Question #5 above).
Another
occasion when the two seemingly very different world-views
crossed paths inside him, was when he became aware one day
that being around a guru and his followers was leaving him
with a ‘virtual revelation’ of what it had been like to be a
disciple of Jesus, like James, John, Peter or Andrew; and the
rest. He has mentioned it more than once.
Another
famous occasion when something similar happened was around
1977 when he went to Europe as a relatively new father with
his wife and Dlune and their two babies, Freddie and Nico. He
came home before the other three because of work demands at
the hospital. On his way home alone he visited Notre Dame
Cathedral in
And there are
other points where the two worlds have crossed and merged
inside him, down through the years, too many and important to
enumerate now. A project for another book about mj lorenzo
might be to attempt to show how he has managed to find room in
his heart for two rather different approaches to Higher Power
at once. It was not just ‘two’, in fact. He has been friendly
toward Native American views of Higher Power, too. And anyone
familiar with Tales of
Waring recalls his obsession in that book with
polytheistic ancient Greek mythology, and his affection
especially for Dionysus and things Dionysian.
26. How could a
young (31-year-old) Dr. mj lorenzo ever – for
even one minute
– have been able to open up to the idea of listening to some
fourteen-year-old kid from
Hinn-Doo [sic] India telling him how to
find Ultimate Truth and Love? (506,893)
Sammy Martinez was asked this
question so many times over the years, not just by high school
reading clubs, but also by his patients in individual Jungian
analysis and in his group healing workshops at Ghost Ranch in
Abiquiu – (and also by a number of mj’s many close relatives,
from his parents and sister, to his nieces and nephews and
aunts and uncles and cousins, one of whom worked for the CIA,
and many of whom were active in Christian education) – that by
the late 80s already Sammy had developed a standard approach
to helping people understand such a ‘shocking’ and/or
seemingly ‘un-American’ – and above all apparently
‘un-Christian’ – ‘behavior’, as many people tended to think
it.
First of all, he would say, if they
had read The Remaking,
they might have become aware of certain things that could have
helped explain mj’s ‘shocking behavior’.
(1) First of all, already as early
as college in the early 60s, mj lorenzo had begun to realize
that although he had been taught with a great amount of love
how to practice his religion, a strict kind of very
conservative Calvinist Protestantism, he was still, at age 18,
19, 20 and 21, more unhappy than happy, for some unknown
reason. This unhappiness he recorded in his ‘notebooks’, some
parts of which appeared in The Remaking.
(2) An on-and-off depression
continued throughout medical school and into his psychiatric
internship, all the way to age 27. Reading philosophy, going
to church, exploring friendships, dating, working, and even
psychotherapy, all failed to make a very big dent in that
down-mood approach to life.
But then, finally, his family’s
Calvinist theology, which mj considered to be a major part of
what he called the ‘Mortimer’ side of him, lost its grip on
him in the spring of 1970, allowing the other side of him
which he called ‘Jack’ to take over; as the opening chapter of
his The Remaking
described; and suddenly he opened up to just about anything
out there that might help him understand himself and his life
in this world. The door was opened and he was overwhelmed at
first by a myriad of philosophies and religions, and
especially by anything that had the word ‘Indian’ in it, as
his Remaking book
made clear. Perhaps his ‘manic mood helped’ in this, as many
pundits postulated, or the speed and pot he was using at the
time. But the main thing that ‘helped’ him reach such a point
was his depression and disappointment in his own experience of
Christianity.
Late in life Dr. Lorenzo warmed
again considerably to his strict Christian upbringing,
however, feeling that (a) his parents’ deep faith; (b) the
‘deep psychic revolution’ that occurred inside you when you
‘humbly asked forgiveness for being an asshole’ and then
experienced the forgiveness ‘filling you up’; and (c) the
detailed moral example set by so many Biblical and religious
heroes and prophets, both Jewish and Christian, whose stories
he had been raised on since birth; all together, gave him the
psychological strength to do all of the physical and spiritual
exploring he had done throughout his long and active life. So
it is important to see his attraction to Guru Garland as just
a phase in his psychic and spiritual development, albeit a
very, very important ‘phase’, since the guru’s overall impact
on him to this day remains fundamental and positive.
(3) Also, if you remember from The Remaking,
several years before mj ran into Joey (in ’72) and Joey’s guru
(in ’74, via tapes) he had already fallen in love with a
college-age young woman from India, the ‘Delkrayle’ he
described in the second part of that book. And the Dr. has
always said that, while (a) travel to very
‘foreign’ countries is highly recommended because essential to
mutual understanding and peace on the planet, nothing would
foster acceptance and deep knowledge and comprehension of a
‘foreign’ culture as much as (b) ‘falling in love’
with someone of that culture; while even better for deep
comprehension of a ‘foreign’ spiritual and cultural world, he
has always said, would be (c) a sexual romantic
relationship with someone of that culture, since
it ‘grounded you with and in the substance and soul’ of that
culture. So, using that language, though he was never explicit
about how far his relationship with Delkrayle went, we can
conclude that even before hearing about Joey’s guru from
India, by late 1966 already, mj had come somewhere close to
the experience of being ‘grounded with and in the substance
and soul of India’.
(4) Helping this process was the
fact that even before meeting 'Delkrayle' – as is explained in
detail, so far, in none of the Dr.’s books – he had been
hanging out for weeks in ’66 with Americans who either (a)
were in training to become India Peace Corps volunteers, or
(b) had just returned from serving a stint of one year or more
as Peace Corps volunteers in India, and were now back in the
states and training new volunteers. He was eating Indian food
cooked by Indians, and also forming deep emotional attachments
to some of these India-loving Americans.
(5)
But, even before all of that – and, as you can see, we are
working backwards in time – mj lorenzo first became interested
in the philosophy and religion of India from reading during
college a fat but beautiful anthology of hundreds of brief
excerpts from the writings of Carl Jung. That happened in ’61
and ’62; and thereafter, mj’s enormous fascination with Jung
and his writings continued throughout all of his college and
medical school years until finally, in 1969, he studied at the
Jung Institute in Zürich, Switserland, and underwent a
brief Jungian psychoanalysis with one of Jung’s most intimate
disciples, Marie Louise von Franz. And anyone who knows Jung
and his followers (‘as I do’, as Sammy would always say) knows
that among them the philosophy and religion of
If we look carefully at this Jung
anthology30 which constituted mj lorenzo’s
first real exposure to C. G. Jung’s writing (and copies of it
are floating around still today, if you know how to find
out-of-print books from the 50s, 60s and 70s), and in
particular the chapter that deals with India and China, ‘On
Ultimate Things: Western and Eastern Points of View’, we can
see the very steps by which Jung might have subtly and
gradually broken down young mj’s hitherto overly rigid
fixation on Christianity and Western philosophy and prepared
him for a more global ‘point of view’ or ‘weltanschauung’, one
which ‘accepted’, or at least regarded with keen interest,
Indian philosophy and religion. Here are some of Jung’s
psychological steps on the path of opening oneself up to
(a) Everybody in the world
has a ‘weltanschauung’, teaches Jung, a ‘world view’, a way of
looking at the world and one’s life in it; there are as many
ways of looking at the world as there are people, you could
say; but at the same time, in any large group with shared
values, most people share roughly the same weltanschauung; and
in our ‘Western’ civilization at any given time over the last
few thousand years, a dominant core in the Western world have
looked at the world in roughly the same way, with roughly the
same weltanschauung.
(b) During the Middle Ages
we looked at the world from the point of view of ‘spirit’,
meaning Medieval Catholic Christian religion and superstition.
(c) This was a lopsided
point of view, psychologically speaking, and there was a
reaction against it therefore. Since about 1780 in the Western
world we have gone to the other extreme and attempted to
discard or downplay the Christian viewpoint and look at the
world and understand it almost exclusively from the point of
view of ‘matter’, i.e., ‘scientifically’; this too was an
extremely lopsided approach, and, since it disregarded
mankind’s ‘spirit’ or ‘spiritual’ side, psychologically
speaking, it led to a multiplicity of philosophies and much
confusion and psychological lostness and emptiness.
(d) One of the greatest
problems with all of these world views mentioned so far, was
that each one claimed to be the only correct one.
(e) Since no person or group of people is perfect, there is no such thing as a single ‘correct’ weltanschauung. “To have a Weltanschauung,” as Jung put it in the anthology mj was reading, “means to create a picture of the world and of oneself, to know what the world is and who I am. Taken literally, this would be too much. No one can know what the world is, just as little as can he know himself. But, cum grano salis [taken with a large grain of salt, as the expression goes], it means the best possible knowledge—a knowledge that esteems wisdom and abhors unfounded assumptions, arbitrary assertions, and didactic opinions. Such knowledge seeks the well-founded hypothesis, without forgetting that all knowledge is limited and subject to error.”31
(f) Another reason there can be no ‘perfect’ or ‘exclusively correct’ world view, Jung said, was that the world was constantly in flux, including our own view of it: “The picture of the world can change at any time, just as our conception of ourselves changes. Every new discovery, every new thought, can put a new face on the world. We must be prepared for this, else we suddenly find ourselves in an antiquated world.... We shall all be as good as dead one day, but in the interests of life we should postpone this moment as long as possible, and this we can only do by never allowing our picture of the world to become rigid.”32 One can easily see that Jung is preparing himself, his analysands, his patients and his students, the latter including future readers like mj lorenzo, for letting go of rigid Western ideologies, at least a little bit, and opening up to what might possibly be learned from other cultures: because, “...matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of [healthy psychological] equilibrium.”33
Now that the young Dr. Lorenzo’s
ages-old Western-world prejudice against “Oriental wisdom” was
alleviated somewhat, hopefully, Jacobi could present a few
quotes from Carl Jung that might whet mj’s appetite for more
knowledge and understanding of the East:
(a) “The East teaches us another, broader, more profound, and higher understanding—understanding through life.... Texts of this kind do not consist of the sentimental, overwrought mystical intuitions of pathological cranks and recluses, but are based on the practical insights of highly evolved Chinese [and Indian] minds, which we have not the slightest justification for undervaluing.”34
(b) “Everything requires for its existence its own opposite, or else it fades into nothingness. The ego needs the self and vice versa. The changing relations between these two entities constitute a field of experience which Eastern introspection has exploited to a degree almost unattainable to Western man. The philosophy of the East, although so vastly different from ours, could be an inestimable treasure for us too; but, in order to possess it, we must first earn it.”35
(c) “Western man is held in thrall by the ‘ten thousand things’; he sees only particulars, he is ego-bound and thing-bound, and unaware of the deep root of all being. Eastern man, on the other hand, experiences the world of particulars, and even his own ego, like a dream; he is rooted essentially in the ‘Ground’, which attracts him so powerfully that his relations with the world are relativized to a degree that is often incomprehensible to us.”36
(d) etc., etc.
(6) But: why would an
eighteen-year-old mj lorenzo, barely more than a boy, and
right while being financially supported through a strict
Evangelical Christian college by conservative Calvinist
Christian parents whom he knew loved him very much, have given
any credence at all to some guy named Carl Jung, a Swiss
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, whom his parents had never
recommended mj read, nor would have, had they ever heard of
Jung and anticipated the likely result? Sammy got this
question mostly from mj’s family, all of whom had known Sammy
since the late 70s, when he went east for an education at
Penn, and proceeded to spend most of his weekends for four
college years with mj’s parents, Rev and Jo Lorenzo, in
Florence (as described in The Remaking). And
mj’s parents and family always apologized profusely for
‘bothering’ Sammy with such questions; but, as they complained
very quietly (often whispering it in his ear), they found
Sammy much more ‘approachable’ than mj.
The answer to this was simple, said Sammy, much simpler than they could have guessed. As they knew, he had said since five he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, and they had encouraged that wish more than they had encouraged him when he’d said ‘fireman’ or ‘preacher’; so to a certain extent his choice of career was their ‘fault’, as Sammy kidded. But in the spring of ’61, during the second half of mj’s freshman year at Wrigley College, a famous Swiss doctor and psychotherapist had visited Wrigley for the annual ‘Graduate School Lectures’, and mj had heard him speak more than once. He was a ‘Christian’ doctor, conservative enough in his theology that the Graduate School, which produced mostly strict Calvinist preachers and missionaries, would feel completely comfortable having him float around campus for any number of days, hanging out and sipping coffee in the Student Union and Cafeteria with Wrigley’s undergrads and grad students, whom Wrigley protected from the ‘Modernist’ wolves assiduously, in loco parentis, just as they had promised the students’ parents they would do. Paul Tournier was completely Calvinist kosher, therefore.37
And mj, before leaving
In the second book of Tournier’s
which mj read that summer, Guilt and Grace,
there were as many references to Jung as there were to Moses.
Only ‘Christ’, ‘Jesus’, ‘Peter’, the Apostle ‘Paul’ and
‘Abraham’ got more mention than Jung and Moses did, as keys to
understanding psychotherapy of the soul, with its suffering of
‘guilt’, and its cure by ‘grace’. The same heavy dependence on
Jungian psychology pervaded Tournier’s next book that mj
bought, too, A Doctor’s
Casebook in the Light of the Bible.40 (And many years later, therefore,
Dr. Lorenzo was not surprised when he heard that Jungian
psychology was the backbone of
It was impossible to comprehend mj
lorenzo’s future life as psychiatrist, thinker and writer
without knowing about Paul Tournier, therefore, Sammy told
mj’s family. Tournier’s Meaning of Persons was the first book about
psychotherapy which mj ever read, and he went through it more
than once during the early sixties. Already on the second page
of the book, Tournier mentioned a book which was essential
reading if one were to ‘understand human beings, especially
our patients’: the Bhagavad
Gita, a sacred text of India to which Guru Garland would
often refer during his discourses later, in the 70s and 80s.
And as early as the third page of his writing, Tournier was
already delving deeply
and at length into Carl Jung’s ‘analytical
psychology’ for understanding patients and their emotional
complaints.
It was safe to say, therefore, Sammy
would sum up, that already by page 3 of his summer’s reading
for an eighteen-year-old, mj lorenzo was ‘hooked’ on Jung.
Sometime that summer, possibly on a side trip from the shore
to a bookstore in Philly, or when he returned to campus in the
fall, mj then bought the Jacobi anthology of Jung which he
proceeded to read through slowly over the first few months of
his sophomore year in college, attempting to absorb as much of
its deep knowledge of the global human psyche as he could. He
signed up for a course in psychology and wrote a term paper
comparing Freud’s psychoanalytic approach with Jung’s, a
subject which had come up in Meaning of Persons
already by the twelfth page of Tournier’s writing, and a
subject which Tournier had proceeded to explore throughout the
rest of his book.
(7)
Add to all of this the very important fact that in the 60s the
top rock group, The Beatles, had famously gone to India
looking for ‘truth’, and George Harrison in particular had
come back the convicted follower of a guru, a news item which
the rock group had publicized liberally in interviews and
elsewhere (partly to explain why Harrison played an Indian
string instrument called a ‘sitar’ on certain hit rock songs),
and you have about as much explanation as can be found for mj
lorenzo’s openness in 1974 to the taped satsangs – or ‘truth
talks’ – of a child prodigy guru from India. Mj’s hip, hipster
and hippie 60s generation soon learned that a number of cool
famous folks from the Western world had gone to
(8) But all of this says nothing of the impact of the kid guru
himself upon his followers, which young mj witnessed and
experienced first-hand in Denver, starting in 1976. Not just
Joey, but most of the guru's followers, told stories of having
been 'lost' before Guru Garland came along. Many had been
seemingly hopelessly lost in drug or alcohol abuse, or other
sick obsessions.
(9) And finally, there was the impact of the kid guru himself,
not just from listening to him speak on tapes and reading
about what he did and said, or hearing about him from others,
but also from seeing and listening to him in person, once that
occurred. Mj was bowled over when he first saw and heard the
guru in person, an
event which occurred in 1978 in Rome, interestingly. And he
could not bring himself to ignore the good that all
of this was doing his 'heart of hearts', as he has said many
times.
27. “Mr. Martinez, is Dr. Lorenzo getting
senile?” (1) (asked by a freshman in
“I don’t think so, why?”
“Because, Charlie Rose interviewed him
on the public television channel and Dr. Lorenzo said his
‘genre’ in ‘Legs’ was “liturgy for ritual celebration” and it
had taken him his ‘whole
life’ to figure it out.”
“Once in Philadelphia,” Sammy began,
“in the late 80s, just a few years after ‘Legs’ was published, a
group of ‘early Remaking pundits’ and ‘Legs’ pundits rented the
‘Grand Old Lady of Locust Street’.” He stopped for a second.
“What are you talking about?!!”
“That’s what they call the Academy of
Music in Philly, affectionately. It’s an old elegant opera
house. They rented the beautiful old Academy for one night and
rehearsed for weeks and performed an experimental version of
‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’ free,
for friends. They had a full choir, a full Fred-Waring-type
choir, in fact, trained by their own musician selves, Romanian
violinists from Eugene Ormandy’s Philadelphia Orchestra and
professors and students from the Curtis music school in Philly.
Then Julliard music school, hearing about this in their board
meetings in
Sammy’s students looked bewildered.
“And that was how ‘Mrs. Nixon’s Legs’
got to Broadway with such elan and elasticity and not a single
varicose vein,” he added.
“Huck huck,” chuckled the freshman.
“But what does that have to do with ‘liturgy for ritual
celebration’?”
“They ‘celebrated’ ‘Legs’
using musicians for the interspersed musical lines; poets and
orators for the quotations from the Bible, Castaneda, Trigger,
Guru Garland and others; a solid experienced narrator with a
soothing bass voice for the omniscient-narrator passages,
pulling it all together; plus appropriately chosen actors who
read the lines of Bill, Betty Ann, mj, Fred, the Nixons and so
on, subtly acting those lead characters in an unobtrusive way.
And it came off like a “liturgy for ritual celebration,” just as
mj lorenzo always experienced ‘Legs’ inside of himself, if you
can ‘grok’ that.”
“Maybe,” said the freshman, who lived
in San Juan Pueblo in a low-ceilinged, 500-year-old,
break-your-neck hovel like Sammy’s. “Sounds like our church
service” and he stared at Sammy, staring him down until he got
an acknowledgement.
“Raimundo and I bump into each other
at the little old Franciscan church in
“Could we
try performing it here?” asked the girl whom the rest saw as
leader.
They did. And it was an
And in
But who could make a movie adequately
conveying mj lorenzo’s inner world?
Nobody knew the answer to that.
1
McIntire was one of the driving forces, if not THE driving
force, behind the politicization of the
2
Much scholarly literature is available on this subject. A good
book which Dr. Lorenzo often has recommended is Dietrich
Schwanitz’ Bildung.
But it still had not been translated into English as of 2013,
so he always used the Spanish translation of that book, La Cultura. See:
Dietrich Schwanitz, La
3
For many more details on the ‘culture hero’ pundits’ 1980s
abandonment of their hero, mj lorenzo, see volume 2 of the
present multi-volume ‘a look at the creative artifacts of mj
lorenzo’, entitled, ‘a look at mj’s second book Tales of Waring’,
especially the chapter ‘A Formal Complaint against mj
lorenzo’; and the chapter ‘The Nightmare Confession Defense’,
which describes the events which led up to the culture hero
pundits’ ‘formal complaint’ against their hero. (This second
volume of the present series of ‘look at mj’ books will be
published eventually at the present website.)
4 Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (‘DSM-IV’),
5
In further support of his argument that the American people
suffered a mass group/national psychosis after 9/11, and that
in the history of the world many large groups of people had
been psychotic as a group at one time or another, the Dr. in
later years liked to cite Winston Churchill’s description of
his own people, the English, during the 15-20 years after the
1st World War and before the 2nd.
Winston Churchill, The
Gathering Storm,
6
Bruce Trigger, The
Children of Aataentsic, A History of the Huron People to
1660,
7
Microsoft Encarta Dictionary, Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2006.
© 1993-2005
Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Encarta
® World English Dictionary © published: 1998-2004
Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for
Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
8
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary, 2003,
Merriam-Webster, Inc., entry for ‘maya’ (computer CD version).
9
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc.
Entry for ‘maya’.
10
Will Durant, Our
Oriental Heritage,
11
Joseph Campbell, The
Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Harmondsworth
(Middlesex,
12
Gerald Martin, Gabriel
García Márquez, A Life,
13
In 2006, when Dr. Lorenzo sent this email to Sammy, they had
just been told by a New York literary agent that New York
publishers, given current 2006 market factors, would only
publish books that they were convinced would sell in large
numbers; and such publishers felt that a work like The Remaking, which
was so very beautifully ‘literary and/or artistic’, would NOT
sell for that very reason; and much less, a ‘study of’ or
‘look at’ such a work. As part of the ‘market factors’, the
Dr. understood they were reacting more specifically to a drop,
over the decades after the seventies, in the numbers of people
‘who liked to read literature’, or, in fact, who could read at
all; who could focus their attention on anything in this world
‘for more than about a minute’, except fast-action movies and
video games; or who wanted to think profoundly about the
meaning and purpose of their life ‘for any longer than about
five seconds’; etc., etc.
14
Matthew 9:12-13, J. B. Phillips translation. Tradition has it
that Jesus is referring to the scripture verse, Hosea 6:6.
15
Regarding the use of ‘repetition’ as a literary device, on
page 566 of Harper’s
Bible Dictionary, in the article entitled, the New Testament as
literature, we find the sentence: “The solemn and
repetitious language of Jesus in [the Gospel of] John seems to
emphasize the importance and many-sided meaning of the central
concepts and symbols used in this Gospel.” And in the same
article, on the next page, we find a discussion of Paul’s
letters: “There is renewed interest in analyzing the Letters
of Paul in light of patterns used in Greco-Roman rhetoric for
the composition of speeches and letters.... His methods
include lively dialogue..., appeal to authoritative
writings..., the string of balanced phrases with repetitive
emphasis (I Corinthians 13:7),...” etc., etc. In the next
article, the Old
Testament as literature, we find again, on page 568:
“Other conventions include extensive repetition, within which
variations receive special attention; repetition of key words
within a unit or between units; wordplay, i.e., the text’s
attachment of special significance to certain words by
repeating their sounds...” Paul J. Achtemeier, general editor,
Harper’s Bible
Dictionary, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985.
16
The reference is to the story of ‘Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife’,
which begins at Genesis 39:7.
17
There are many examples in Scripture of Jesus’ disciples not
understanding him. Mark 8:14-21 is just one. Another excellent
example may be found at the end of the parable which begins at
Mark 4:2. Verse 10 describes the moment when the disciples,
having waited to get Jesus ‘alone’, “...asked of him the
parable...,” as the King James Version puts it; or, “...asked
him about the parables...,” as J.B. Phillips translates it;
whereupon Jesus explains its meaning. Yet another parable
begins at Matthew 15:11, and 4 verses later, in Matthew 15:15,
Peter feels compelled to ask, “Declare unto us this parable.”
(King James version.) And Jesus answered, “Are ye also yet
without understanding? Do not ye yet understand....?”
18
Lajos Egri, The Art of
Dramatic Writing,
19
A close reading of Egri’s book is needed for understanding the
meaning of the concept of ‘premise’, and applying it to the
understanding of writers’ works. The book is useful to writers
and readers in many other ways as well.
20
Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower:
Soldier and President,
21
Michael Korda, Ike: An
American Hero,
22
In a later conversation the Dr. reminded Sammy that in his Tales of Waring too,
in the chapter “I Want that Book Stopped,” Fred treated
President Nixon rather roughly.
23
The tradition of granting MOISTR awards annually had
originated among the ‘early Remaking pundits’ during the very
earliest years of mj lorenzo interpretation, the early 70s.
‘MOISTR’ stood for ‘The Most Outrageous Interpretation
of Something in The
Remaking’, but over the years the purpose of the
award had morphed considerably and by 2013 it was being
granted for ‘a highly perceptive interpretation worth
seriously thinking about, regarding anything to do with mj
lorenzo’. The annual spring awards ceremony was celebrated in
a hotel in midtown
24
A reference to the Dr.’s visit to Sammy’s after-school reading
club around ’93-’94, described in sub-sections 135-137 of The Remaking.
25
Slaughter-House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; The Lion, The Witch and
The Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis; A Confederacy of Dunces,
by John Kennedy Toole; Cold
Mountain, by Charles Frazier; A Farewell to Arms,
by Ernest Hemingway; Robinson
Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe.
26
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged
Dictionary,
Version 3 (for computer) Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003. Entry
for ‘weltanschauung’.
27
“Thirty-nine Articles.” Encyclopedia
Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite.
28
William Graham Sumner, Folkways:
A Study of the Sociological Importance of Manners, Customs,
Mores and Morals,
29
For more on young Dr. Lorenzo’s attempt to reconcile the
seeming contradictions between his Christian upbringing and
what his guru taught, please see the answer to Question #5
above.
30
C. G. Jung, Psychological
Reflections: A New Anthology of His Writings 1905-1961,
Jolande Jacobi editor, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1970 (updated from the 1953 Bollingen
Foundation publication of the same title).
31
Carl G. Jung, “Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung”
(1928/1931); later included in The Collected Works of C.
G. Jung, Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
(1960/1969), paragraph 698.
32
Ibid., paragraph 700.
33
Carl Gustav Jung, “Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology”
(1931), later included in The Collected Works of C.
G. Jung, Vol. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
(1960/1969).
34
C. G. Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’”
(1929), in The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies
(1968), paragraph 2.
35
C. G. Jung, “The Holy Men of India” (1944), in The Collected Works of C.
G. Jung, Vol. 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East
(1958/1969), paragraph 961.
36
C. G. Jung, Psychology
and Alchemy, 1944 (The
Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 12, 1953/1968),
paragraph 8.
37
Please see, “The Graduate School Lectures of 1961: Dr. Paul
Tournier,
38
Paul Tournier, The
Meaning of Persons,
39
Paul Tournier, Guilt
& Grace: A Psychological Study,
40
Paul Tournier, A
Doctor’s Casebook in the Light of the Bible,
