...the mass organizations of our
present day culture actually strive for the complete
extinction of the individual...
Carl Jung
8. Is it the best
idea to write your parents that you are naked and lost at
the
The
very first word after the telegram, the manila envelope Rev
and Jo found in the mailbox from their lost son, mj – who had
started calling himself 'Jack' suddenly – was from this very
northerly Canadian outpost of Inuvik, "As far north as you
could get and not fall off the globe,” as Jo put it to Rev
after checking an atlas and moaning with a feeling of doom. It
was postmarked July 10 and arrived July 20, as Sammy Martinez
confirmed a few years later when he saw the envelope and its
contents; a stack of loose eight and a half by eleven
hand-written pages. It consisted of very little narrative, far
less specificity than the many details of mj’s eventually
world-famous journey which every legitimate Remaking pundit
would be able to recite by heart in later years, and was
packed instead with ‘a mishmash of quotes’, as Jo put it.
Quotes: from the Bible; and from their son’s great hero, Carl
Jung; or from 'Mortimer's' college notebooks; and even from
the World Book
Encyclopedia they had given him; and from a couple of National Geographic
issues Rev had planned to gloss while on the toilet; until,
that is, the day when his very own son had lifted them from
the Florence Methodist parsonage bathroom. And nearly every
page had a strange new chapter title or two. The result
overall seemed abstruse and disjointed. Disappointing. Yet it
began to make a little sense in spots after the Reverend and
his wife had read it a thousand times. And of course in later
months, after they had received more such envelopes, each from
a different remote outpost in Canada’s northwest, each
containing ‘a molecule of narrative and a mountain of quotes’,
as Jo put it, the gist of the trip hung together more; and yet
it did not.
The
language was grandiloquent; or stilted; then sophomoric; and
then plain again and understandable at times; or it was angry
and berating; then suddenly sublime, singing the glory of
untamed northern nature.
There
were strange math-like formulas with double and single colons
instead of equals signs; like
The Divide :: East : West :: Jack : Mortimer
and there
were cryptic, mantra-like condensations of crucial notions,
like those soulful gems in the Methodist Communion or Anglican
Book of Prayer meant to be read antiphonally by the minister
and congregation taking turns, such as this chant-like
formula:
formerly
pacifying
from a distance
the
gun explodes
and
as I sink imploding
into
the violence of its barrel
into
the world reordered and willed to (forced upon) me
by
Jack
I
seek to be remade
formerly
pacifying
from a distance
the
blue Buick explodes
and
as I sink imploding into the violence of its frame and
body
into
the world reordered and willed to (forced upon) me
by
Jack
I
seek to be remade
Mortimer
This
mantra would transform itself bit by bit, month by month, as
mj’s ‘book’ arrived in strange installments from strange
places. It first appeared in the spot that amounted to the
frontispiece, where an author traditionally would quote an
authoritative source on the subject about to be addressed, a
widely respected source like the Bible or Homer. Socrates
maybe, i.e., Plato; or even Freud. But Jack's subject was so
novel, apparently, he had gotten no farther than page one
before finding it impossible to discover a better authority on
remaking than himself; than his own other half-self, more
correctly, Mortimer, the brainy part of mj lorenzo. Jack
Lorenzo was not sure who
had written the lines about imploding into exploding Buicks
and guns, in all truth, or how they had gotten there, as he
informed his folks in the
And Jo
Lorenzo was beside herself. She was well enough read. She was
bright and devout and educated in a teacher’s college or
normal school as they called it in her day. She knew
grandiloquence when she saw it on the page. The sometimes
grandiloquent King James Bible she had always understood
almost perfectly from years of study with a heart full of
sincerity and a mind sharp as a tack. And she had always felt
calmed by that kind of high-soaring language in the Bible. But
her son's grandiloquent writings drove her half-hysterical,
especially the parts she could not understand; and there were
many passages of the kind, like this one which tormented her
for months:
but originally
the west coast of
had been its
front door
and Mortimer
Jack
would take up
where the Indians left off
finding
and undoing
himself
as he beat an
American retreat
from psychic
west to east
"What
does he mean, 'Beating a retreat from psychic west to east'?”
Jo Lorenzo almost screamed at her husband. "Is he coming home,
then, ‘east’!?"
Month
after month went by, as a result, expecting mj’s return any
second. Every maple leaf scraping the doorstep had to be her
son, yet no one and nothing showed up on the doorstep except
manila envelopes from unheard of places bearing always
stranger and more abstruse contents.
Although
Rev thought he might be starting to figure it out. "It's psychic
‘west to east’, not geographic. I think it's a psychic
journey," he said, when he finally thought he had gotten the
idea after days. “An allegory,” he added a day later. “Bunyan
was in jail for his faith when he wrote about a Christian's
trip through this world. But it was really an inner spiritual
trip, as you know.”
Yet
the comparison to Pilgrim’s
Progress made Jo more hysterical. "The envelope was MAILED
in INUVIK,
What
could be allegorical about a post mark!?!?
And
the words ‘undoing himself’ worried them more than ‘beating a
retreat’. Why should he UN-do what had been done so nicely? Such
a fine, multi-talented, soft-hearted young Christian doctor
with wavy brown hair and sincere, penetrating eyes should not
need to un-do himself, said Rev. And Jo agreed. They
were too upset to think right, poor things. So they accused
each other of having profoundly confused mj by calling him
different names. Because Rev had called him ‘Mortimer’,
always, without exception, and Jo had never called him
anything but ‘Jack’. But after a week of scrapping over which
name may have caused their son’s crack-up they joined forces
again just to preserve peace in the parsonage for the sake of
the congregation. They decided the problem had begun, rather,
when mj had consciously chosen during medical school to stop
going to church.
Unfortunately
– or maybe it was just as well – they dismissed as dross the
special note that mj addressed to them months later when they
were almost too drained by preoccupation to think, let alone
act any more. It instructed Rev to publish the grand
accumulation of envelopes as a book and start the book with
this explanation for his ‘Crack-Up’:
Western
Civilization
reached its
culmination and extreme
on the west
coast of
in the decade
of the 1960's
trying to push
further west
the history of
the world caromed off the Pacific
and began a
movement back
And even if
they had understood
it they just did not care for the notion that the course of
history ever might lead a person to 'beat a psychic retreat'
when all you had to do to maintain sanity was ‘trust the Lord’
and keep on shepherding humanity toward His Loving Plan.
Blaming history for a nervous breakdown was a cop-out whatever
your creed, in fact. Presbyterians might play around with
blaming the past for some weakness in themselves because they
were ‘befuddled predestinationists’, as Rev joked. But
Methodists were ‘humbler’ and besides they had free will, he
reminded Jo, when he had thought about this whole nervous
breakdown thing of his son’s, or whatever it was, for a few
days more in all dead seriousness. Methodists went to heaven
if they just ’believed’,
John Wesley had said. They didn’t even have to help clean up
the big open Sunday School room in the church basement Friday
nights after the weekly Potato Salad Supper if there was
something better on TV! And Rev and Jo had raised their son
Methodist! So mj
should have ‘known better’ than to elect idiocy as a
vocation! as Rev put it to his wife a little too
sarcastically.
But mj
had not meant this statement in any of those ways, of course,
at the time when he wrote it one whole year after his
‘Crack-Up’. He suspected, rather, that his disintegration
exactly one year before had been as much the cause of
the reversal of Western civilization's insane expansion as the
result of it;
because Jack had purposely, even forcefully injected
himself into the fabric of time and space, seeking – like a
Siberian shaman – an explosion; or an implosion maybe; some
deep change in the structure of things that would bring about
UNIVERSAL HEALING.
More
to the point: Rev and Jo did not know and could not have been
expected to know that shamans in northern latitudes sometimes
took trips northward down wide long rivers to the Arctic and
back in order to heal their messed up tribesmen, all in their
psychic minds, that is, or by whatever means it was that
shamans did such things.
9. How to comprehend
years later that once a long time ago you were naked and
lost at the
Mj did not know, himself, in fact,
that northern shamans traveled to the
With
thoughts like this mj would explain his 1970 mental
and emotional whirligig to himself, even as much as
ten, even thirty and forty years after the ‘Crack-Up’ had
occurred, having reflected on it coolly ever since.
Yet
these thoughts were, at the same time, the very heart of the
group of thoughts that had always acted as if they wanted to
be forgotten
every time a few months or years would go by. He would
remember them only if he put his mind ardently to remembering,
if and when he reached that point again, the point of wishing
to try to comprehend that crazy book he had written back when
he was still so pathetically immature, The Remaking, or The
Remaking of Mortimer Jack: "Oh no..... why did I write
that damn thing?" And he would try to remember why, one more
lousy time.
Why
did it have to be so hard to understand your very own writing?
Hadn't he written it then? If not, who had? A good and
thorough understanding of The Remaking seemed so elusive
sometimes that someone over the years had placed a short quote
in the very front of the Inuvik envelope, probably mj himself
once he had come back together after the ‘Crack-Up’. Or maybe
it had been Rev; maybe around the time Rev was later about to
publish the book, using the book to hopefully find his son.
And apparently for no reason except to explain WHY
poor mj had had to fall apart in the first place. And
it was a quote from Carl Jung:
...The
great organizations of our present day civilization actually
strive for the complete disintegration of the individual...
Carl Jung2
Now THERE
was a hint as to why mj had written The Remaking. Maybe it was NOT his fault he
had fallen apart during his internship. After he had begun to
disintegrate in Philly, healing Jack must have come to the
rescue and SUBJECTED HIM, mj, TO SHOCK THERAPY -- PURPOSELY,
IN THE FORM OF LIGHTNING ELECTROCUTION -- to repair mj lorenzo
and his whole crazy world. That was how it must have
been.
And
the
shock and
electrocution
occur by
the meeting
of
fire and water
electricity and
body fluid
rain and
lightning
fog and static
and
human flesh
the water of
the plains is facing off
with
the fire of the
sky
the sun and
moon
and
northern lights
and
The Remaking of
Mortimer Jack
must take place
POW
NOW
through the
clashing of opposites
And
so, the madcap trip downriver and back would be the rest of
the cure, the 'UN-doing' of the Lorenzos’ son, mj, as
well as of his schizophrenic world.
BUT: while stranded in the Arctic trying
to get upriver there was no time for intellectualizing about
psychic cures or peregrine UN-doings. Survival was
the matter. And even if intellect had been needed, Jack was
not the intellect in the mj two-brother gang. Mortimer was the
intellect. And unfortunately, or fortunately, rather, as Jack
saw it, Mortimer was not around.
So
first and foremost each day, and most of the bright sunshiny
night too, Jack kept on motoring doggedly up the
10. What to take along
for summer reading when naked and lost at the
There
was time for reading, however, most days. And Jack Lorenzo
would dig into his backpack blindly to see what might come
out. And sure enough almost every time, out would come another
one of those darn little three-by-five pocket notebooks of
'Mortimer's' as if they were in there multiplying like
bunnies. They made a significant presence in the envelope
mailed from Inuvik to his folks in
Jack
called these little diaries 'Mortimer's' because they
embarrassed him terribly. He wanted no part of having
written them. Though even a third grader could see he must
have had some
part since 'Jack' Lorenzo was a part of mj lorenzo,
at least half, by
all account, maybe even more,
the way things looked at the moment.
The
canoe would chug upriver pretty much on its own while Jack
would read. The mile-wide river flowed smoothly and there were
no obstacles. Boats were scarce this far north on the
And it
always made old Dr. Lorenzo so sad and mad years later
whenever he got to this point in telling the story of his
remaking that he would quit in despair over doing it justice
simply because he felt so inadequate at getting the sadness across,
especially when he had started out trying to crack a joke. And
he would feel so
affected by poor young Mortimer's sad isolation as
recorded in those awful notebooks; and by the beauty of poor
young Jack's simple hound-like sincerity later when sniffing
out the Arctic for his long lost ‘brother’, Mortimer; and by
the tragedy of Jack's refusal to accept any ownership of the
journals himself – it was all so pathetic, what he,
poor old mj lorenzo, had gone through – that Dr. Lorenzo at
almost any age after his trip of ’70-’71 might have had at
least one day a year when he felt convinced no one in the
world but he would ever want to know about such grief. Even
though: it concerned the whole world, supposedly, not just
him. And he would find himself with a tear in his eye. He
would forget The Remaking was not about just him and he would
want to throw the book in the psychic trash bin so he could
quit trying to tell that very personal story in a book and
leave it to Sammy Martinez to tell it. If he cared to. Or not.
It didn’t matter. For who in the world really cared?
In
later years he would call Sammy or go see him in
He
must have been practicing his religion incorrectly then, or
he would have felt
better, like all the smiling and extroverted students at
his exceedingly civilized little college. It must have been his fault, it seemed,
because everyone else
looked happy enough. And thus poor old Mortimer at
And
poor old Mortimer at this point in his college journals would
wish on paper that someone or something would just come
along and – you could almost hear him say it but he was too good a
Christian boy, still, of course, to actually say, or even
write in a diary: ‘fuckin’ – "rip me off my
launching pad into the blue joy."
Then
poor ol depressed and emotionally exhausted Mortimer, sitting
in his bed in his room at college or in his bed at his
parents' house in New Jersey during a college summer, would
read the gospel of John in one sitting, still looking for that
missing something. And while reading he would almost begin to
feel the excitement of something or someone truly grabbing
him, only to question whether he deserved happiness,
or any attention whatever
from The Divine; and to question whether it was really the
TRUE happiness the gospel promised that had made him feel so
good, ever so briefly, or whether he was simply imagining it. And he
would beat up on himself again for wasting his short time on
earth in this sick way.
11. How to react to
your summer’s reading when naked and lost at the
Jack
Lorenzo, reading and poring over these sick, morbid,
overwrought, over-thought journals during quiet stretches in
his trip upstream, instead of feeling sad and heartbroken on
Mortimer’s behalf as any half-sympathetic person should have
felt, was royally pissed that any part of his beloved mj
lorenzo might have felt or written such tripe ever. Yet he did
a very nice and surprising thing, indeed, right when he first
started reading those old journals: he forgave Mortimer for
a moment, and defended him before the scoffing world, standing
up for him like a little brother would stick up for a bigger
brother. And he wrote a little piece of warning to whoever
might criticize his stupid big brother:
please
understand and accept the habit
Mortimer once
had
of appealing to
such appalling entities
as 'Lord'
or 'God'
for assistance
it was his
manner of speaking
it was a way of
focusing his amorphous self
onto the
universe in which he found it
it is not fair
for you to cringe and criticize
every time you
hear about his self-righteousness
when he is not
foisting that way upon you any more
you have to
empathize, not destruct
to accept, not
deny
you have to
listen to the other side
I
Jack
have written
this one-paragraph homily
to my critical
intolerant self
me
Jack
And he
described himself, Jack, to Rev in a flowery passage as
“lurking somewhere back here in the pathegamenon patch reading
angrily over Mortimer’s shoulder, watching the river drift
lazily past in cushioned impatience, silenced by a world of
muskeg and tundra and a few deaf jack pines on delta islands…all these many years
since Mortimer cried to ‘God’ for help for the two of us.”
When in fact it had been just a mere six years
since Mortimer had cried that way in his
No one
could deny that this apology of Jack’s was an act of
self-love, melodramatic or not; so the trip was doing some
good, maybe. If Mortimer had failed at forgiving himself, in
other words, Jack might be able to forgive Mortimer on
Mortimer’s behalf.
But
such moments of healing between the two were short-lived
usually. For then Jack would read a little more of Mortimer's
journal. And on the following page of his letter to Rev he
would turn around and condemn
his bigger brother for such ‘tripe’ all over again, accusing
him of bourgeois withdrawal from the world, of taking
"...refuge in an abstract subjectivity, the sole aim of which
is to achieve a certain inward quality," notions he
had “borrowed” from Jean-Paul Sartre3 and hoped to return
someday, somehow, no doubt. And now on the river, exasperated
with himself and Mortimer both, he would swear on the next
page:
Rev
I am going to
make my way through these journals
if it kills me
I would like to
believe
there is
'inward quality' in them somewhere
because they
are all I have left
in my Arctic
retreat
Jack
got so serious right here, all of a sudden, that the whole
planet had to deal with it later, as his pundit admirers would
say. He added that, as his “summer’s occupation,” he was going
to: “swallow and assimilate every word until the notebooks
stop haunting me and driving me to outrage.”
“Mj
lorenzo,” said Jack, was going to become: “a functioning resilient
unit;” a bright idea since mj lorenzo at this point in
1970 was barely functioning, scarcely a unified unit, and
hardly resilient, given the fact that the whole of mj was so
brittle and fragile.
And
he, Jack, was going to: “re-interpret the past and re-fashion
the future.” This was one of his first prophetic passages, it
should be mentioned. But the Lorenzos took stock of the
passage only much later. And when they did they still thought
it was just a tinkling-cymbal promise, or vow, not an actual
prophecy.
“What
other course is left me?” Jack shouted on the page like a
Shakespearean drama prince, unable to see – or reluctant to
think the weak thought, maybe – that he could just call Rev
for a handout, grab a bush flight out of Inuvik, hit the sack
at his parents’ and finish with the whole ordeal:
Where else can I
run
but to my own wrecked and
scattered self?
And that, I am
more and more convinced,
is where
Mortimer must be.
And
with this flowery, hallucinatory phrase Jack began looking at
his lost Mortimer in a new way, as having been ”scattered” like
notebook pages in the air and/or on the ground, an
image that would now become all-determining in the
philosophical world of his funny future and the rest of the
world’s too therefore.
Jack,
the un-self-aware, unintentional world-shaman healing the
world by pure instinct, you could say, was going to follow
standard shamanic procedure and collect and swallow
the poison flowing from the body of his patient, Mortimer; in
order to detoxify it inside himself. And then he would
keep collecting and swallowing
Mortimer’s written words until they stopped making him mad. He would risk his life to
save his patient’s life, i.e. Mortimer’s; and would save his
own life thereby and the rest of his tribe’s, too,
hopefully. It was such an intense concept; and so
intricate, complex and gravely un-amusing, it was no wonder
Dr. Lorenzo in later life occasionally forgot what
the heck he had been doing in the Arctic that crazy summer of
1970, or if he had
ever been there at all in very reality. For as the
Remaking pundits found out later and had to constantly remind
themselves for decades (because it was ‘so incredibly
mind-blowing’): mj lorenzo had known next to nothing
about shamanic medicine in 1970.4
12. Other recommended
reading when naked and lost at the
On
other days Jack would lift his head briefly from Mortimer’s
notebooks and take in the extremely northern surroundings,
pure nature without a trace of nature-destroying man. And he
would read again in French the tales of the local natives or
‘Indians’ in the antique collection he had ‘borrowed’ from the
Hay River library, put together in a book after the tales had
been translated from native northern languages by some
little-remembered and long-dead Jesuit missionary from France
named Emile Petitot. And Jack would write lyrical confessions
to Rev like this one:
I've stopped
having dreams
Rev
(do you understand?)
I want to dream
again
of frightening creeping animals
and dizzying heights
of grizzly bears and elk
and northern lights
of rapids and glaciers
suns and moons
of elaborate teepees hiding Indian princesses
and thunderbirds that swoop down
and pick me up
and
whisper inside information
in my ear
about the other world
of good spirits
and of dangerous spirits
that will suffer me to subdue them in time
so I may go on my way relentless
in this desert
He was
‘not dreaming’, of course, because he was hardly ever
sleeping; thanks to speed, the truckers’ stay-awake pills that
he was swallowing several at a time by now. And he was not
likely to dream of teepees anyway unless he had been born
Native American, of course, and had lived surrounded by
teepees. But interestingly, he was starting to think he was Native
American; as he would reveal in a later envelope. Perhaps he
thought he was an Indian because the dozens of powerful Indian
tales from the Petitot book, full of thunderbirds, Indian
princesses and all, were dropping hook-line-and-sinker into
his nervous system, defenseless as it was without Mortimer
around to ward off such powerful images, or to keep such
stories from hooking his mind entire and running off with it.
And
motoring upriver all the while, he would persist at his
itinerary; while his mouth, as he wrote to Rev, still “leaked
froth and bits of tongue” occasionally from the electrocution
on the Continental Divide at the solstice.
13. Most importantly:
always read about magnetism
when naked and lost at the
Finally
the
He
quoted the "M" volume in his letter to Rev: "Magnet and
Magnetism. A bar magnet keeps its poles when it is cut in
two."5
He wondered ‘if a spinal cord might act the same’. But in any
case, no matter what else might be happening in the world, he
found it reassuring that there always had to be such a thing
as “True North,” as the article said. And he closed the
from the
catacombs of the
somewhere north
of the
if a bar magnet
keeps its poles
when it is cut
in two
then the proper
realignment of the poles
can reunite the
segments later on
and the two
parts
in the meantime
demonstrate
each
a duality
as of the
former single magnet's
In
other words, though mj lorenzo might be cut in two, Jack, by
reading past and
beyond the page of the encyclopedia with that
penetrating intuitive
insight of his, had sensed the great truth
immediately that humans
had to be affected by magnetic laws too, if sadly cut in
half. And so, he and Mortimer, the two halves of
mj, if only they could be ‘properly realigned’
again, would HAVE to
‘reunite’, just as the two halves of a severed magnet
would HAVE
to reunite once they were properly realigned.
And thus he concluded,
Jack and
Mortimer, no matter how they think they flee each other,
are required to pursue
and subdue and contain one another, into the grave.
And
this profound prophetic vision recorded by a half-loony psych
intern escaped from a West Philly slum hospital, would prove
itself to be true too,
in a very short time, not just for mj lorenzo but for everyone else in his
crazy world as well, if for no other reason than this:
that Jack Lorenzo had said it was true, and his
intuitive-psychic perceptivity during the summer of ’70 had
peaked out at a level just about as ‘right on’, like leading
experts said later, 'as human intuition had ever gotten in any
human being who had ever lived in this world'.
And
finally, meanwhile: an important question remained for him to
answer, as promptly as possible, namely: what in the world
might constitute the ‘PROPER REALIGNMENT’
of Jack and Mortimer?
……………………………..
In
answer to which, within just a few years of all this northwest
Canada ‘excitement’, millions of seemingly nice people could
be heard shouting publicly that mj lorenzo and his ‘millions
of misled mj minions’ should have been ‘more properly
realigned’ with the tip of a red hot poker just like so many
raw wieners. For they were, every last one of them, just as
hopelessly batty as Aunt Gracie at age ninety in her sheerest
nightie and God would save them soon from all their suffering.
Or; if not, then, they themselves, the nice and decent people,
would have to save all of the misled ones on God’s behalf by
legislating The Remaking and all affection for it out of
existence.
