go ahead to subsection: [14]; [15]; [16]; [17]; [18]; [19]; [20]; [21]; [22]
14. the ‘five big
mental hurtles’ likely to trip up and trap many
Western-world readers wanting to comprehend the
Jack’s
second pile of
papers, stuffed into a much fatter
manila envelope mailed from
(1)
several of Jack Lorenzo’s first
politico-philosophical rants, every word of which
seemed frightening lunacy to his parents. And it
contained, as well, (2) many of the first big principles
of the Remaking ‘cure’, which too seemed nothing but
‘dad-blamed harebrained idiocy’, as Rev said, especially
if ‘all that nonsense’,
as Jo thought it politer to call it, was to be made the
‘foundation of a treatment program’ or ‘universal cure’,
which was crazier still. For Rev and Jo failed to
comprehend, let alone appreciate, as
the pundits would say, Jack’s (3) extensive use of
pure primate instinct and human intuition (rather than
any established religion, philosophy, or school of
thought) for arriving at solutions to mj’s craziness and
mankind’s. Furthermore, and resulting from this
last, as the pundits would explain, the Lorenzos failed to
see what justified their son’s continuously making (4) huge leaps back and
forth between issues of personal psychology and concerns
of international politics, as if those two huge and
distinctly separate realms of human enterprise, as defined
by modern science, were somehow intimately connected, or
even the same thing.
Unfortunately
for almost all early readers, and especially for the
Lorenzos, Jack’s powers of perception, without Mortimer
around to suppress them, had exploded. Already by
mid-July, less than a month after the electrocution and
auto wreck had fried mj lorenzo’s thinking brain and
overheated the rest of his nervous system too, Jack
Lorenzo had progressed from apparent intellectual
disorganization (the telegram), which had worried the
Lorenzos, to what next seemed like pure grandiloquent
enigma (the Inuvik envelope), leaving them no worse than
bemused, to now (the Fort Good Hope envelope): (5) intuitive
universal structural philosophy describing and
inter-relating everything in creation from magnets to
planets to minds to mankinds, all of which
certainly seemed utterly cuckoo as it flew over the
Lorenzos’ poor, small-town neo-Calvinist American heads,
wanting to nest in their rapidly whitening hair there;
while at the same time, very disconcertingly for them, it
had the ring of being critically essential to
understanding the world they lived in, as Kant and Hegel
and Marx had seemed when the two were in college; or
Nietzsche and Jung, for that matter; so therefore it all
left them very frustrated, even panicked, afraid they
might be missing something terribly important to their
son’s welfare, or their own or someone else’s they cared
about.
“As well they were,” the Remaking pundits would say
with triumph and glee later, explaining Fort Good Hope to
a puzzled and frustrated reading world. And they would
cite one more time for the benefit of humanity the
aforementioned ‘five
big mental hurtles’, or obstacles, to the reading
progress of almost anyone born and raised within Western
civilization who tried to wade into and understand the
Fort Good Hope section of The Remaking; plus later they
added two more.
15. two more
encumbering hassles that boggled even the ‘early
Remaking pundits’ until they overcame them by dividing
the
It
was not entirely the Lorenzos’ fault that they had been so
perplexed by Fort Good Hope, added the pundits. For large
portions of the original version of the Remaking, the one
the Lorenzos kept receiving in the mail over a year’s
time, Jack had composed in such a ‘user-unfriendly’
way
as to render it overly challenging to even themselves,
avid, super-zealous students of it, the ‘early Remaking
pundits’, once they would come across it. That was
why, starting in 1980 and from then on, Sammy Martinez
would work intimately with mj and the pundits: to
elucidate, bit by painful bit, year by harrowing year, as
much of The Remaking as possible, until broad clarifying
statements similar to these, and even entire sensible
treatises, might be put forward and understood without
undue perturbation.
They
confessed and proclaimed for humanity’s enlightenment two
more of Fort Good Hope’s ‘encumbering hassles’ – as the early
Remaking pundits called them: the section’s (6) ridiculously
unwieldy length, and its (7) annoying thematic
disjointedness. Granted, Jack would find a
brilliantly intuitive way to tie it all together, once he
‘finally got to
the very, very end of his dad-blamed pile of papers’, as
Rev put it, but that was too late to help a lost and
overwhelmed first-time reader. Even a masters in sacred
theology didn’t save poor Rev. His son could have
discovered the ‘dad-blamed philosopher’s stone’, for all
Rev cared by the end of the dang pile. What he had been
wanting long
before the last pathetic paragraph of Fort Good Hope –
right from the very first consarned page, in fact – had
been HELP.
And
so in the two later published versions of The Remaking,
Sammy and the pundits would offer sub-section
headings to HELP readers
tackling Fort Good Hope for the very first time. And to
help the author, too, of course, since even Dr. Lorenzo,
after writing the crazy thing, had become world-famous for
getting lost in the Fort Good Hope section of his own
Remaking, even after having read and reduced and hacked
and expanded and interpreted and canonized it to highest
holy heaven hundreds of thousands of times to public applause.
The
pundits’ wonderful sub-chapter headings were offered to
the Dr. and everyone else as follows, therefore:
1.
Relying on his own innate animal instinct and Homo sapiens
intuition, Jack scents out and unearths his eventually
famous ‘burst-out paradigm’. 2. Jack uses his burst-out
paradigm to comprehend intuitively the nature of his
relationship with Mortimer, his nemesis. 3. Jack uses his
intuited burst-out paradigm to comprehend intuitively not
just his own psychological world, but the world around him
as well, starting with the Utilidor at
Using
these seven headings Remaking pundits then presented Fort
Good Hope in the following way in their workshops.
16. relying on his
own innate animal instinct and Homo sapiens intuition,
Jack scents out and unearths his eventually famous
‘burst-out paradigm’
By
the time he had putt-putted his motorized northern-Canada
canoe to Arctic Red River, Jack had begun to try to ‘putt to use’, as
he punned for Rev, whatever ability to comprehend was
left him without Mortimer and that irksome intellect of
his. He was trying to ‘think’ about
who, or what, he and Mortimer were, and how they were
different; and he already had managed to develop his
‘conception’ about the two of them much more snazzily and
eruditely. And though the ‘conception’ itself had turned
out to be earthshaking enough, the steps he had
taken to arrive at the ‘conception’ had been far more earthshaking,
as the pundits would say later, especially the scientists
among them, the speculative physicists and unified
theorists most of all. For those important ‘steps’ had laid bare one of
the intuitive styles of ‘thinking’ or
‘arriving at an understanding’ that would characterize
Jack – and mj lorenzo – forever after.
The
‘early Remaking pundits’, in fact, therefore, once they
finally figured it out, would have to remind themselves
constantly, and especially point out to any
‘newcomers’ to mj lorenzo’s strange and seemingly very
irrational world, that Jack, at this point in his
Remaking year, was trying to ‘think’, or ‘figure out’, WITHOUT (!) the help of
Mortimer’s ‘intellect’, ‘reason’, ‘science’ or
‘Socratic method’, all of which they
themselves, the pundits, and the rest of the Western world
as well, had been taught since birth to use almost
exclusively in order to ‘understand’ anything and
everything about their world, and even in order to
understand Jack and Mortimer. But, and here was the
problem: such endless ‘rational thinking’ had only
mesmerized and messed up Mortimer and mj. That was how
Jack, at least, felt about it.
And
the early Remaking pundits agreed. Whenever they reached
the “Fort Good Hope” envelope with Jack during their mass
evening-meeting communal readings of The Remaking they
would say repeatedly, with a hooray and a sigh of relief
on Jack’s behalf and their own, if not a party or two
drinking wine and smoking pot, “Mortimer is finally
gone. Jack is back because Mortimer is gone. Hope is
back because Mortimer is gone. Jack is back…” etc.,
etc.; and on a few occasions after such meetings they
chanted for hours like this, alternating the words
‘hope’ and ‘Jack’ for they quickly realized that Jack
was the world’s hope.
Or
rather: Mortimer was gone BUT MIGHT COME BACK,
as they all realized at once, correcting themselves: first
Jack; and later the pundits. And so one day, now on his
own without Mortimer, chugging upriver lazily between
Inuvik and Arctic Red River, Jack found himself reading
Mortimer’s notebooks one more time, only this time trying
to use his gut
instinct and intuition to ‘psych out the
opposition’, as the pundits would later learn to
describe this critically important event; for they had
created the expression themselves during their own
instinct-driven political heyday, the late 60’s; and so,
if anybody should know how to ‘psych out’ an ‘enemy’, they
and Jack should. And a certain passage from Mortimer’s
notebook stopped Jack cold.
But
why? It had been written early in the summer of ’63 when
Mortimer had tried to sell cookware door to door while
home from college, at his parents', in the little nowhere
town of Florence. And
it had followed right after a string of passages bemoaning
himself, Mortimer, as a hopeless nothing who had hated
selling cookware door to door. Yet the passage sounded unlike those
others. Rather than describing the pain of trying to sell,
and not being able to sell, it described Mortimer’s
decision to quit selling
cookware, and to spend the summer reading Carl Jung
instead.
Jack
was so excited about discovering these lines he had to
write Rev immediately about the strikingly unusual
passage. He raced around for the right words to ‘dig’, or
to ‘psych out’, i.e., to explain to himself and to Rev and
the rest of the world, why it struck him
as so earthshakingly important. And in so ‘digging’ and
‘psyching out’, he grabbed words from gut and thin air,
almost, managing to write down the following in a
flash, virtually
without a thought:
this is
where Mortimer started arguing
in
a new vein
he sowed the
seeds for future
breaks
or
cracks
in
his rocky
make-up
which grew
and overlapped
into one
continuous indefensible lapse
a garden of
cracked and dusty earth for his mind
for a time
but through
this defect
I burst into
the scene
when
with
his excess
of time
and
shortage of
lines of resistance
he found it
finally too hard
to
shun me
or
put me out
of his fractured thinking
Now
instead of leaving it at that, as any other naked
earthling philosopher with the heart of a child might have
done; instead of rolling along mindlessly with his
speed-perpetuated manic canoe trip, satisfied with his
wonderful newborn powers of observation, Jack wanted to stop and add a step
to his ‘understanding’. And this was where the ‘thought
process’ became so intriguing, so revolutionary and
mankind-changing, as the pundits later screamed and
yelled. He stopped, went back, and read what he had
written to Rev, and was struck by the astonishing
imagery he had come up with, literally without
thinking, in order to represent tellingly this huge
change Mortimer had undergone years before. And his
own imagery
‘blew him away’, starting right from ‘new vein’. Because
it imagined
thoughtlessly, i.e., without a second thought, the
existence of an underground mine, and of a miner who had
discovered a 'new vein' of ore underground, of iron,
maybe, and had explored it; and who, while trying to dig
it out, had caused 'breaks and cracks' in the rock
surrounding it which then had grown into one gigantic
crack, until everything had turned to dirt and dust, as in
a mine cave-in. It had not been a cave-in though, but the
opposite, a mine burst-out,
as if the iron within the rock had heated up and come to
life and exploded up through the surrounding rock and
rubble, up and out to the outside world.
Jack took this imagery at face
value, with as much seriousness as a diviner
would have taken the appearance of whatever object he
had used for divining the future, had it been a bat’s liver, a
tortoise shell; or a group of shaken and tossed Chinese
coins or fallen yarrow stalks, as in the case of the I
Ching commentary, judgment, image and changing lines ‘caused’
when yarrow stalks fell ‘randomly’.2 In
other words, Jack took the mine imagery as not merely a chance
or ‘meaninglessly random’ creation of his own
meaningless inventing, but rather a valid message from the beyond,
a hint as to the true nature of things. And
he accepted the imagery as nature’s gospel.
And then he drew conclusions based on it, about himself,
and about Mortimer, and about how they related to each
other. That was always the final step in any study process
during the remaking year: to apply what was
learned to an understanding of that darn infernal duo,
Mortimer and Jack.
And
at this early point in the year when Jack still possessed
sole power over mj due to Mortimer’s absence, he would
apply any and all understanding so that he, Jack, could govern
the duo, instead of passively suffering Mortimer to
forever govern mj as in the past. For that was Jack’s only goal at this
point in the year. And it would remain his goal until such
time as he should decide that Mortimer might be preserved
in some form, if he should ever decide such a thing.
17. .Jack uses his
burst-out paradigm to comprehend intuitively the nature
of his relationship with Mortimer, his nemesis
The
mine imagery was now understood as nature’s gospel,
accepted as THE STRUCTURE OF NATURE as it applied to
Mortimer and him, his own self, Jack. And this is what it
taught him about the power struggle between them: that he,
Jack, had been inside Mortimer, he wrote Rev,
waiting and wanting to come out like iron out of a mine.
Mortimer was like a shell or cage, a hard-surface covering
that could develop cracks, out through which Jack, once he had found the
weakness, could burst and surprise the world like a
Jack-in-the-Box. Since it was Mortimer's habit and mission
to strangle the life out of Jack, by keeping him
contained, even imprisoned, inside what Mortimer liked to
think of as a 'protective'
shell, it was Jack's habit and mission, therefore,
perforce, if he
wished to have a life at all, to find a way to burst
out. And this he had begun to accomplish, to an extent,
when he had first started talking to Mortimer out loud
along Powelton’s sidewalks and peeling Victorian hallways,
and more so when he had pressured Mortimer to flee
Many
later non-pundit critics of Jack’s ‘thinking’ as
demonstrated in early sections of The Remaking would agree
with Rev. Lorenzo and say that such a ‘line of thinking’,
such an interpretation of himself, especially as admired,
later, by ‘Remaking pundits’, amounted to nothing more
than a fancy disguise for justifying Jack’s and the
Remaking pundits’ own reckless outbursts and craziness,
their social intransigence as a group, their immoral and
often illegal rebellion against ‘the establishment’, and
so forth. But that was beside the point, replied the
pundits. Regardless of who used Jack’s discovery, or how
they used it, the fact remained that this was HOW
it had happened, step by step, that Jack, while preparing
his second envelope for Rev and studying Mortimer's
notebooks as usual, had come upon the historic discovery,
suddenly, that Mortimer's
first weakening ever had occurred at
that precise moment when Mortimer had talked himself
into giving up the odious task which had so depressed
him, of selling cookware, and had decided instead to
spend the summer reading Carl Jung.
This
new construct
of Jack’s, which visualized himself, Jack, inside
Mortimer, trying to burst free and succeeding at last,
once Mortimer revealed a few cracks in his facade, would
prove itself more than useful to mj lorenzo with time,
virtually all-determining, every bit as basic to the
structure of things in his world as magnetic lines of
force were fast becoming in that same world; or as
E=mc² had already been understood to be for three
decades, in the world at large. And even though the new
construct had been drawn so slapdash from thin air,
seemingly, Jack trusted it immediately, in a way Mortimer
had never seemed to trust anything that had
come from himself. Jack trusted his imagery and trusted
where it took him. And lastly, he trusted at once the
implications for his life.
The
construct implied, for one thing, that while Mortimer
might have been non-functional
since the ‘Crack-Up’; while he might have been exploded into a
million pieces even, he was hardly likely to be dead, and was
unlikely to have ceased to be a threat, either.
Jack knew in the living marrow of his bones that Mortimer
still could be found in hard visible objects like pieces
of notebook paper, or pieces of the earth's surface, like
rocks and mountains, or bones and skin, in things
containing little life if any, just as Mortimer had never
contained much life; but things which could be patched together
again, effort once made, to imprison Jack and
strangle the b’Jesus out of him one more time.
Thus the construct also explained the enmity between the
two: each one,
Mortimer and Jack, wanted his own way with mj.
18. Jack uses his
intuited burst-out paradigm to comprehend intuitively
not just his own psychological world, but the world
around him as well, starting with the Utilidor at
Jack
knew with certainty that these were the fundamental
differences between him and Mortimer; that these were the
ways they functioned. He ‘knew’ these things not only
because he had discovered that passage in Mortimer’s
notebooks, and interpreted it intuitively and correctly,
but also because, now that he ‘thought’ about it, he had
found in the world outside
him, too, corroborative evidence that the rest of the
world was so structured as well. For on his
Arctic trip he had already come across a good example of a hard-shelled
Mortimer surrounding and smothering a life-loving Jack:
the Utilidor at
The town of Aklavik, they said,
which stood near where the muddy brown Mackenzie poured
into the blue Arctic, was situated so close to the huge
river it might well become flooded any spring or summer.4
Some Canadians even warned that Aklavik might sink and be
gone forever.
For these reasons the Canadian government, which obviously
felt it needed a viable town in the area for some purpose
that was never declared, an unmentioned purpose other than
pure humanitarian concern for local natives, most likely,
had decided to build a new town on a safer spot and
call it ‘
These non-indigenous Canadians
could not, in short, invent as simple and natural a way of
living as the ‘disgusting’ and ‘inscrutable’ Natives had
come up with. Bright and clever as they thought
themselves, Canadians of European extraction could not
think of a way to create a livable, comfortable and
attractive modern town so far north, where the earth's
surface remained frozen permanently, winter and
summer.
Thus, as the ‘Peace Corps
pundits’ would say later, THESE PEOPLE CALLING THEMSELVES
‘CANADIANS’ SHOULD HAVE WALKED AWAY AND LEFT THE INUK TO
THEIR HAPPY, REVERENT, INVENTIVE SELVES, had they been
thinking right. BUT FOR SOME STRANGE and tragic
REASON, THIS OPTION HAD NEVER BEEN ON THE TABLE, any more
than it had been, ever, throughout the history of
‘Western world man’.
And so, falling back on their
infamous, bragged-about ‘Western’ scientific and rational
Socratic-based, grey-matter cerebral-cortex intellects, as
they had for nearly two thousand years, they reasoned it
out as follows. You could build a house, they said, atop
the ‘permafrost’, and could build it to withstand cold.
But you could not build it with plumbing
in the ground, because the ground was perpetually frozen,
even in summer
(the meaning of ‘permafrost’). And life in the Western
world without plumbing had become increasingly
unthinkable, of course, over recent centuries. So, since
plumbing had always run discreetly underground in ‘normal’ climes,
then logically and rationally, therefore, in
Now: when Jack had first seen and heard that
‘clanky piece of shit’ in
Yet how ‘stupid’ could Inuk have
been, and how ‘barely human’ if, after all, they had
thrived in the
And Western Europeans had gone
on deluding themselves in this way for centuries,
loving to forget that the ‘stupid, barely human’ Inuk and
other Natives had never needed above-ground pipes to live
beautifully, cheaply and even artistically, with aesthetic
appeal, in sweet symbiosis with nature. Nor had the Inuk
or other Natives needed whole libraries to figure out how
to get up and down the Mackenzie. On the contrary, those
‘uncivilized’ Inuk had even been clever enough to survive
in the ‘unlivable’ Arctic for thousands of years happily, EVEN IN
INCREDIBLY COLD PERMANENTLY PITCH-BLACK WINTER, by adapting
admirably to nature, not by conquering and raping nature
in an ugly, disrespectful, Western-world way.
Obviously, the word ‘civilized’
would have to be
officially re-defined as used by ‘Western man’, if
ever, some incredible day, he should want to look at
everything honestly,
finally, without the least little bit of self-aggrandizing
self-delusion.
And
furthermore, asked Jack ‘with profound wisdom’ – as the
pundits would say eventually – in his scratchings sent to
Rev: why did the
British and French want to crowd in on a neighborhood
where Inuk had lived so smoothly and comfortably adapted
to nature anyway? It could never have been in order to humbly
and admiringly GET TO KNOW their neighbors, the
Inuk people, or to ask them with innocent,
agenda-less, childlike curiosity how they lived in those
funny little igloo things, and those big hilarious walrus
skin things. You could bet your bottom dollar on that. Any other normal
healthy caring natural human on the planet would
certainly have shown such normal, innocent and reverent
curiosity, anyone else normally i.e. humbly human who had
just come upon a new and appealing neighborhood and
decided to look for a place to rent or buy.
But
hardly anyone from light-skinned Western civilization ever
would have gone halfway around the world just to meet and get to
know AND LEARN FROM a strange man of darker
color. It was virtually unheard of. Barely a single
recorded instance
existed, of genuine, agenda-less, purely-friendly, HUMBLE
interest in darker man, anywhere in the
history of Western world expansion. BARELY FOR A
SECOND EVER.
No
sirree Bob, not even though these light-skinned people of
European descent considered themselves; and advertised
themselves; and rammed it down their ‘discovered’ people’s
throats that even the ‘discovered’ people, too, had to
consider their great heroic ‘discoverers’; TO BE:
‘brother-loving’; ‘forgiving’; ‘confessing-guilt’;
‘all-men-are-created-equal’, ‘Christ-imitating’,
‘God-worshipping’ Christians. NO, that was pure
unadulterated CARIBOU POOP, to use one of their European
language words. For the fox was the finder, as they said
too, yet those light-colored guys always forgot that they were the
ones who had found
that powerful word ‘bullshit’ and so it had to apply to
them more than to anyone else. And it did. Because all of
those land-grabbing guys, as Jack wrote Rev (with
increasing heat), had come to northern Canada for the one
and only reason that they ever came: to construct a lifeless
MORTIMER around the Inuk Eskimos and other Natives,
and slowly and deceptively squeeze the soul and life
out of that ancient, intelligent and happy people, so
as to dehumanize and debilitate them; just as so-called
‘Anglos’ had done in the U.S.A., coast to coast, for
three hundred years straight without letup, suppressing
indigenous tribe after indigenous tribe.
And
as the Spanish, too, had done in Mexico, starting from the
sparkling heart of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlán; spreading out in
all directions, careful not to miss a single square foot
of enchanting ancient Mesoamerica, solely in order to
lay waste or take away every single thing of beauty,
spiritual meaning, and most of all, economic value.
Forever careful not to miss a single wedge of that big
geographic gold-and-silver pie. Then clamping straight
down to the ground, and even, as many hundreds of feet
INTO the ground as necessary, so as to hold on tight as
heck, for all they were worth, never letting go. SO AS
TO ROB, THEN, every single tribe of indigenous people in
North and South America of spirit so thoroughly, and so
devastatingly, that European Western-world ‘Christian’
‘civilized’ man could eventually steal that people’s
land and wealth AND WOMEN AND YOUNG GIRLS and men and
boys, could rip off every little thing about
those ‘barely human’ people, in short, without the
tiniest little fifth finger being raised, hardly even.
For:
the more Jack understood Mortimer, the more he understood
Western world man, and the angrier he got. And at the same
time, the more Jack understood Western world man, the more
he understood Mortimer, and the angrier he got, even yet, and
the sooner he wanted to preach to these poor dark-skinned
people in northern Canada and save them from their plight:
namely, from the misfortune
of having had to live year in and year out with tiresome,
ridiculous, Mortimer-like Western man surrounding them,
constantly breathing like a cold wind machine down their
poor collective and very
human warm neck.
Mortimer
Lorenzo had done the same exact thing to Jack for
twenty-seven years, so Jack knew better, as he told Rev,
than to think that if some country let a few Mortimers
into their land, those ‘friendly’ Mortimers would merely
‘help out unselfishly’ as promised. Thus Jack wrote to Rev
about
the
Utilidor sulks
on the
brink of no-man's land
perched at
the edge of the endless blue ice
of the
North Pole
in the last
outpost of western man
along the
estuary of this continent's second river system
(flowing
backwards, north, into the icy unknown)
in what was
likely the first area settled in this half of the
world
an area
which persists uninhabited by –
because
still subtly hostile to –
'civilized'
man
except
where he has OVERWHELMED
it
as in
for here
the great
UTILIDOR
astonishing
the ageless native Eskimos
(praised by
anthropologists
for their
extraverted joie de vivre)
is now
erected for the comfort of our modern
businessmen
teachers
missionaries
and
government officials
who are
being moved in by
‘to test
the hypothesis’
that
‘civilized’ western man
CAN brave
the North.....
………………………………………………
and what
does Eskimo
'pre-eminently
man'
as he defines
and calls himself
(‘Inuk’)
think of
this?
but he has
never been asked
and he
lives on oblivious
along the
outskirts
in wooden
frame shanties
or wanders
back to Aklavik
if I wander
back here someday, Rev
I too shall
want to visit Aklavik
which at
last word
has
withstood the annual flood this year
so far
for the
ten-thousandth time
and
continues to stand
humbly
and
un-self-consciously
over on the
far side of the delta
out of
reach
of me
and other
white men
I have been
stuck with ugly
tasteless
horn-tooting
ass-brass
and crass-ass
19. Jack reacts to
Alexander Mackenzie’s journals of northern Canada
exploration, written two centuries before with help from
a ghost-writer, Combe; Jack reads important things into
these journals; he, in other words, draws conclusions
from them – not rationally, but intuitively – that
ultimately will be, according to pundits, ‘cataclysmic’
As
the Lorenzos read these pages of Jack’s, in every instance
of brilliant gut intuition that their son showed, Rev and
Jo saw not a plus, unfortunately, but a minus. For, as
certain pundits would remind later, ‘a prophet was always
spurned in his own bailiwick’, as even ‘the Lord himself’
once observed. That was how the so-called ‘Sunday School
pundits’ would come to put it, anyway, year after year
referring to the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark to
defend their hero mj lorenzo. And they would always get a
thrill adding their “But:” “But Jesus’ full statement
when he was rejected by his own family had been,” as these
pundits said, quoting Phillips’ translation: “‘NO PROPHET
GOES UNHONOURED – except in his own country or with his
own relations or in his own home’!”5
But
Jack cared little at the moment about universal public
reception of his philosophy. He was in his own world
exploring not just Mortimer’s journals but Mackenzie's
too, and showing the kind of highly imaginative reaction,
inevitably, that would characterize mj lorenzo for the
rest of his life. Except that, coming from this new
unrestrained version of mj called 'Jack', now, such
imagination seemed to Rev and Jo like imagination run wild.
It seemed, more bluntly, like what mental health
clinicians called 'major
projection'. For Jack now wrote to his parents that
he had reached the conclusion Alexander Mackenzie had not
supervised adequately the work of his ghost writer, Combe.
This
man Combe was a little known Englishman who had written,
according to Jack, whatever he had wanted to write while
ghost-writing Mackenzie's journals. And Jack's carrying on
about the out-of-control duo of Mackenzie-and-Combe,
instead of convincing the Lorenzos that a single word of
it might be credible, served merely to add to ‘mounting
evidence’ that their son, i.e., ‘Jack’, was paranoid about
‘Mortimer’ somehow being able to find a way to get things
into the envelopes without Jack’s knowledge or approval.
How had that quote from Mortimer about exploding guns and
Buicks gotten on the frontispiece, for example?
The
Lorenzos were in the upstairs offices of the church,
actually, when they had this conversation. No one else was
around. Jo was getting into her choir robe and Rev was
buttoning his elegant velvet-ribbed black Methodist
preacher’s robe and collecting his sermon notes when the
next phase of their discussion popped up; just as if it
must have had something to do with the Sunday morning
church service which was about to happen.
“All
this complaining about ‘ghost-writing’,” Rev reacted, for
his wife’s benefit, “is really about Jack and Mortimer,
isn’t it? Aren’t they the only ‘writing duo’, ‘out of
control’?”
And
Jo looked at her husband in his black velvet robe and
said, “I don’t know, John. If Jack were here it might be
easier to tell. But he’s so far away.” As
if she meant that Rev should add an extra silent prayer
about Jack’s painful absence, tacking it on to something
during the worship service.
Jack’s
thinking did seem convoluted to his parents. It was inevitable
they would make little sense of it. Partly because Jack
was not a thinker,
of course, but a
doer and only a doer, with guts, and they had never
seen their son like this before. Yet, if they had only
understood what was really happening, as psych pundits
said later, they would have expected little better from
‘Jack’, who by
definition could not possibly show ordinary
Western-European post-Renaissance higher-thinking skills.
Or,
as the ‘Sunday School pundits’ added later, maybe the
Lorenzos’ ‘prophet son’, when he wrote such lines as the
following, was ‘on to a new way of thinking
which his parents could
not get, or did not want to
get’:
when Sir
Alex
(who was
knighted for his exploration later)
stood on
the top of
in the
mouth of the Mackenzie
(the River
'Disappointment' as he dubbed it)
staring out
at the icy
rather
short of supplies
yet wanting
to find the
(a whim
which had lured too many to their death already)
but plagued
by dissension
among his
crew
it was
precisely July 14, 1789
and in
had just
stormed the Bastille
the
explorer turned around
and with
his head bowed
as it were
paddled
reluctantly back up to Western civilization
he spent
the winter
with an
Indian girl at
reading and
thinking and planning
for one of
the following summers
a
triumphant campaign of discovery of the Pacific
by way of a
route up through and across the
along the
primary tributary of his discovered River Mackenzie
the
tributary river called
Peace
These
soon-to-be world famous lines would cause the ‘early
Remaking pundits’ to marvel already within no more than a
year of their discovering The Remaking in late ‘71. And
many years later, once they had gotten to know the work
thoroughly, inside and out, the mere mention of
the lines would give some pundits chills, as they
would finally admit with embarrassment in various magazine
interviews between 1995 and 2005. But, as they pointed
out, they were not the only ones excited. For already by
the 80’s and 90’s in the Western world whole books, theses
and term papers had been written in reaction to these
lines. Jack Lorenzo, they said, could pick up a book the
Western world had tossed off as irrelevant, such as
Mackenzie’s journals, and in no time spot within it intuitively
‘an allegory of the
plight and solution of his own life and Western
civilization’s’. He could grab meaning out of it in
five seconds and slap that meaning into ‘a prose-poem’
like the one above, they said, without even thinking.
One
psychoanalytic pundit wrote a whole fat fine-print book
studying nothing but the prose-poem’s six words, ‘plagued
by dissension among his crew’. And a
And
everyone in the whole world, of course, eventually had
something to say about the last paragraph, i.e., Jack’s
summary of what Mackenzie did AFTER he gave up
on the idea of exploring the ice-covered Arctic, turned
around, and paddled ‘back up to civilization’.
The
implications of the last few lines of the prose-poem,
i.e., of Jack’s seemingly offhand summary of Mackenzie’s
upcoming year after he ‘returned to civilization’, were
far-reaching, to say the least, not just for himself, but
for everyone after him. Because: the way Jack would
interpret and use those lines eventually would become,
again, virtually all-determining.
And that, in turn, was because: the words in the few final
lines not only described Mackenzie’s
future after paddling back up the river, but would come to
outline Jack’s future too. And in those words,
therefore, would lie implied all of the events that were
to occur on mj lorenzo’s ‘universally curative trip’
thereafter, the whole story of mj lorenzo and The
Remaking, of his encountering Dlune and Chipewyan; of his
climbing Hungabee’s peak and experiencing visions there;
and everything else. And after all that: implied,
likewise, of course, was what the trip would mean for the rest of
the world that he, mj lorenzo, was presently remaking,
said so many pundits, an item so far beyond every other in
enormity that it was impossible to measure.
But
how could so much of consequence come from anything so
seemingly inconsequential? That was what the Remaking
pundits would ask themselves year after year. How could
Jack Lorenzo have ‘known’ he should put so much energy
into getting little Inuk to grab Mackenzie’s journals? How
could he have ‘sensed’, after reading only a few pages
hurriedly, that: to copy, or mimic, Mackenzie’s entire
year in detail would have the outcome he was wanting for
himself? And how, furthermore, could he have ‘known’, as
definitely as he now seems to have known certainly back
then, that Mackenzie’s choices would be a worthy model:
not just for mj lorenzo but for the Remaking pundits and for the rest of the
world too? It
made no sense whatever, as book reviewers
screamed hysterically in American newspapers again and
again over the years, to say that Jack Lorenzo could have
‘known’ so many things of such enormity so far in advance,
especially when such things looked at first glance to be
so stupid and dismissible.
Perhaps
that explained
why so many theses, term papers and multi-volume studies
had addressed and answered such questions from 1975 on.
And
the common answer found in all such studies, in short,
amounted to this, that: no; of course such things
made no ‘sense’. For Jack’s ‘thought process’ was not ‘logical’
in any normal Western-world way. But logic was not
everything, as anyone in the world who had ever fallen in
love, even once, could testify. And so, for all the many
illogical reasons presumably elucidated in all those
pundit books, theses and term papers, Jack Lorenzo did
mimic Alexander Mackenzie. And his pithy and
seemingly offhand one-paragraph summary of this forgotten
geographic explorer’s trip journals DID end up guiding mj lorenzo on
his remaking trip. And it did change mj
and change the
world around him, both, eventually. Or so the
pundits claimed, anyway, citing a great deal of recent
historical evidence that a whole lot of little-noticed
profound change for the better had
occurred in their world.
And
to describe how in
the world that deep positive change possibly could
have come about, they said, one had to start at the very
beginning of the story.
Early
Remaking pundits explained that Jack was struck with the
fact that Mackenzie had been a ‘man of nature’,
‘unpolluted’ by the ‘boring fineries’ of ‘civilization’,
but driven instead by ‘love of life’, and by a need to
explore the world around him. It was a good and wonderful
thing to be such a ‘natural’ man. But behind him there
stood a second man, little known, who had to be studied
too: Combe, Mackenzie’s ghost writer. This second man had
lived ‘derivatively and unnaturally’, the opposite of
Mackenzie, a ‘parasite like Mortimer’, sucking life from
the real liver of life, Mackenzie. And he had been an impostor, this
Combe.
Not
only had he not
lived the life which he pretended to himself while writing
(Mackenzie's journals) to have lived. Worse yet, Combe wrote in jail,
as far from the adventure of real life and geographic
exploration as one could get. This threw Combe into yet
another category Jack derided. It made him resemble that
famous English Puritan writer, John Bunyan. For Bunyan,
similarly, had written his Bible of Calvinist puritan
morals, Pilgrim's Progress, in jail, laying
out as many very exacting moral precepts as any fussbudget
Englishman could ever have dreamt up. And ‘Pilgrim’s
Progress’ was a book, furthermore, which, though written
all of three hundred years before, had helped enormously
to bring about mj lorenzo’s crazy neo-Calvinist American
world of 1970.6 Yet if Bunyan had
been in jail, then he too, like Combe and Mortimer, had
been writing while merely
imagining the landscape outside, not living in it
actually, like real men did, like Mackenzie did, and Jack.
And so, all of this, in part, explained why Jack reacted
with anger ‘so inordinate’ (as it seemed to the Lorenzos
and the ‘early pundits’, both), why he seemed to over-react to
jailbound Combe's fancy words of introduction to the
journals, especially to the words, "...my papers... are
now offered to the Public with the submission that
BECOMES ME"7 (Jack's italics and
caps). Jack reacted:
if there is
poetry in these paragraphs, Rev
it must be
attributed to a man who wrote for Alex
and from
jail besides
a veritable
John Bunyan by the name of Combe
who angrily
projected his own heroism and Odyssey-mania
onto
unsuspecting Alexander Mackenzie
Combe's
professional friend
whereby
Combe could perhaps then say
that Alex 'BECOMES ME'
(Mortimer
why must I
serve
as the
subject and object
of every one of your diseased
repressed emotions?)
“May
I look at that, John?” Jo asked her husband. For Rev had
been taking his turn reading aloud at the kitchen table
after dinner, according to family custom. She took the
loose handwritten page Rev handed her and looked through
her glasses at it a long time then looked up at him. “‘With the submission
that becomes me’ did not mean that,” she
declared, being a bit of an English language whiz.
“Why
does this not surprise me?” said Rev dryly.
“It
was an expression required by proper etiquette in
Jo
found it complicated to explain but managed anyway, saying
she believed that by this time in English history – the
late 1700s – you could
go ahead and publish without getting explicit approval of
royal censors, but you still, out of respect, had to
include a statement (like this one of Mackenzie/Combe)
within your publication accepting the royal right to
censor your work. You had to say you were willing for the
Crown to withdraw your book from publication if it chose.
So, ‘With the
submission that becomes me’ meant, as Jo understood
it: ‘Since you are the king, and I am just your humble
subject, it becomes
me, it makes me look better, or suits and fits my lower
station, if I submit
myself before thee, if I humbly bow down as I
should, and submit
myself and all my written work to your will, and
say on my gentleman’s honor, “I shall willingly
withdraw these papers if they offend thee”.’
“Go
on,” said Rev, for he knew her all too well.
“It’s
an expression of humility,” she said. “But Jack thinks
Combe is using it without
humility, because Jack understands the word ‘becomes’ in a different way,
to mean ‘changes
into’. So, Jack thinks Combe believes that by
ghost-writing Mackenzie’s journals and submitting them, Combe has become,
or changed into, Mackenzie.”
She
looked at the page another half minute, aware of Rev’s
gaze fixed on her. “No, I think it’s worse, John. Jack is
accusing Combe of believing that by writing Mackenzie’s
journals for him and submitting them for him, and by
having this kind of special relationship with Mackenzie, Mackenzie has become
him, Combe! Or no. It might be even worse! It
might be that Jack thinks Combe believes Mackenzie’s Journals
have become Combe!” She looked up, fighting back
tears by this point.
“Jo…,”
said Rev. He wanted to lighten the crackbrained
atmosphere, so the sympathy he originally intended came
out a little twisted. “You don’t have to make a federal
case out of it. He beats me in Bible Trivia and you in
Scrabble. So what you said just now makes no sense.”
“I
win as much as he does.” She glanced at Rev for a second
then right past him, thinking out loud. “Maybe he thinks
Combe is using it both
ways at once, with his tongue in his cheek. No. No,
it’s Jack who does that. I think he is saying one thing on
the surface and hiding another meaning. That’s it, John.
That’s more like Jack. Because he loves double
meanings. Especially when one meaning isn’t at all
related to the other, or even noticeable, especially at
first.”
“It
has triple meaning,” said Rev without delay, “and
all three are
related.”
She
looked at him, waiting for the axe to crash.
“It
means,” Rev separated the syllables deliberately: “he’s kook-coo too.” 8
But
the Lorenzos did,
in the end, grasp some
of their son’s innuendoes, thanks to Jo primarily. They
got, for instance, the implication that Jack saw himself
as parallel to the ‘natural man’, Mackenzie, who was fully
engaged in the real raw world, while he saw Mortimer as
being like Combe, a man who observed the world from a very
safe distance. What they did not grasp whatsoever at this
point, however, any more than anyone else in the world
ever could, either, at such an early point in their
reading, especially if they had known nothing about The
Remaking beforehand, was: the extent to which
Jack drew the parallel, down to the last detail of the
description of Mackenzie in the north.
No
one ever in a million lifetimes would have dreamt or
suspected, for they would have been incapable of thinking
the thought, that Jack Lorenzo would
eventually use every detail of “some other crackbrained,
idiot-fool explorer-failure’s journals written 200 years
before,” as Rev eventually stated it, not to merely
understand himself, but to even map out his entire
upcoming year, actually, in detail! For who
in the world, in
his right mind, would analogize himself to a 'failed
explorer' and turn the analogy into a concrete living
reality ALL IN ONE BREATH, so to speak? Who would do such
a loony thing? To the Lorenzos it was absolutely unthinkable, so
of course they never thought the thought.
Until
months later only, of course, as chapter by chapter went
by and it finally dawned on them that the loony thing was
taking place before their eyes, on the pages in the
envelopes they were receiving. That is, that: this poor
lost son of theirs had given himself over completely to
crazily DUPLICATING
Alexander Mackenzie’s year in northern
20. Jack, trying to
comprehend and assuage the venomous Mortimer-Jack
enmity, reflects on several of C. G. Jung’s fundamental
psychotherapeutic precepts
By
now, this 'wackiest of envelopes', as Rev called it,
seemed ready and willing to fly in a million directions;
and it needed no further help doing so. Its scattered-ness
here and scattered-ness there was, in fact, one of the
chief reasons every single first-time reader of the
Remaking, year upon year, found Fort Good Hope so trying
at first. Yet Jack took up another new theme still! Laying
Mackenzie aside for a second, he transcribed for Rev some
of his big brother's diary comments on Carl Jung, and
Jung’s insights into the messed up condition of
contemporary Western civilization. The comments were
quoted straight from Mortimer's notebooks, of course, and
came from the moment during the summer of ‘63 right after
Mortimer had given up selling and had begun reading Jung
instead:9
It is impossible, says Jung, when treating someone for
psychic injury, to bring the patient to a stage
of healing more advanced than the one his doctor
has reached. This is part of the reason for my
efforts, a partial explanation for my willingness to
temporarily forgo human contact and finally give up
selling cookware altogether – I should say, for my
inexhaustible desire to study and read and think and
arrive at something that will make me somebody's
better doctor.10
How
nice it sounded, all this devotion of Mortimer’s to poor suffering
humanity. But where had it gotten mj lorenzo?
‘PHYSICIAN HEAL THYSELF
AND LEAVE IT AT THAT', came to Jack's mind. And he shouted it, then
shouted it again,
even louder,
with every milligram of force he could muster, across the
very wide Mackenzie into the Arctic wind, aiming that
vocal arrow straight at Mortimer, of course, wherever he
might be: ‘PHYSICIAN
HEAL THYSELF AND LEAVE IT AT THAT'.
Says Jung as well, man
must learn to reconcile himself with his own
nature, to love the enemy in his own heart.11 I have acceded to the
need for self-acceptance and not self-negation, but
the concept of self-forgiveness
is disarming.
Can I forgive myself for
giving up selling cookware? Could it be that until I
have offered myself this forgiveness I cannot
forgive others?
Thus a man will not
resign himself to it, will not humble himself
before... himself; his brother; the truth; and will
not admit openly to himself or his brother that
self-conscious, conceited, disgusted and disgusting,
he truly is.
Who should expect him
then to love? He must hate himself and live to do
so.
People of his kind will
hate one another because they hate themselves, fear
the other as they fear themselves.
I will fear to meet
anyone if I do not trust myself, or if I fear that I
may embarrass myself.
But if I will be
ready to admit to myself that at any moment I can
easily cause myself embarrassment, and if I
will LAUGH at my ludicrous position, always
forgiving myself in advance, in other words, then I
shall soon stop frightening myself and others.
And
Jack asked Rev by mail, "Am I, Jack, forced to conclude
then, Rev, that Mortimer’s self-hate (hate of me, Jack)
and self-fear (fear of me, Jack) are why I have had to
flee so far in my Arctic retreat?"
And
the pundits upon reading this rhetorical question later
all answered in screaming unison: YES!!!!
Mortimer
had written the comments on Jung in his journal during the
summer between junior and senior years of college. That
was the same summer, in fact, that he had attained a
certain kind of fame among family and friends by quoting
Carl Gustav Jung, as Rev said, ‘as often and knowledgeably
as born-again Christians at summer Bible camp quoted the
Bible’.
But
no harm was to be found in knowing Jung. For Mortimer’s
obsession with Jung, as Jack was finding out by sneakily
reading his big brother’s private diaries, had been
roughly the beginning of Mortimer’s downfall, and of mj
lorenzo’s remaking. There was proof of this again and
again:
Finally
Jung suggests that unless we accept another as
he is, we cannot hope to change him.12
So I add, unless I
accept myself as I am (and love that self, if I
can), I will never be in the spirit best suited to
change.
There
it was. Mortimer’s downfall. The ‘growing crack’ in
Mortimer’s ‘rocky makeup’, in his ‘confining shell’ around
Jack. If Mortimer had just stayed with Rev and Jo’s plan
he could have kept Jack contained and squelched way down
inside that shell forever, maybe. But ever since about his
third year at
All
of these genius bedrock precepts of Carl Jung’s healing
program made immediate perfect sense to intuitive Jack.
First of all (1) the extent of a patient’s possible
remaking was limited by the extent of his doctor’s
remaking. A patient could not outstrip his doctor any more
than a clone could look more handsome than its source
clone. Jack found this easy to grasp even without
intellect. And furthermore, it taught him why he had wanted no
doctor but nature. It was because he had
wanted no limitations whatever on his possible
improvement except those imposed by nature, meaning by
his own human nature, by The True Nature of Things.
And
secondly, (2) one had to learn to love the enemy in one’s
own heart, and forgive that enemy. And Jack grasped this
Jungian point too. You did not have to be intellectual to
understand it. You only needed to have had friends. For,
if you did not get along with your own self, you would be
walking around like a one-man civil war, just as mj
lorenzo had done when dominated by Mortimer. And nobody in
the whole love-based world would want you for company, as
no one had wanted mj in the form of Mortimer suppressing
Jack. Years later, in fact, Dr. Lorenzo would point out
that this Jungian principle helped explain, as it did a
million other related things, why Mexicans hung out with each other,
almost always doing anything they did, not alone, but with other Mexicans;
whereas so many gringos spent so much of their lives
completely alone.
And
finally, (3) in order to work with anybody or anything in
the whole world, especially when hoping to change that
somebody or something, success was far likelier if one
first accepted
wholeheartedly the person or thing as they
were, accepted
wholeheartedly the starting product, in other words.
And this included, of course, oneself, if one wished, by
oneself, to change oneself.
Jack
could not say it all as fluidly as Mortimer or Jung might
have said it. But he got it in his
gut.
He
sensed, as well, that these principles had to be applied
to mj lorenzo in
toto, i.e., to all parties concerned or contained
within mj’s crumbling whole, before that whole mj could be
remade.
But
which one of those two halves of mj lorenzo was humble
enough to take such forgiving steps? The one most
desperate, maybe. The one humbled sufficiently by life.
21. Jack apologizes
repeatedly for resorting to a motorized
canoe; Sammy and the pundits, concerned later that many
readers will not comprehend the importance of this
repetition without help, get to work, for they deem it
essential to add to later interpretive versions of The
Remaking a lengthy reader’s aid that will permit
thorough understanding, ‘right down to the very
canoe-bottom’, as they say, of such multiple apologies
At
this point ‘the naked philosopher’, as Rev called him,
gave up writing about intuitive mental psychological
exploration to write about real physical-world geographic
exploration. Mackenzie was on Jack’s mind, of course, his
‘explorer buddy and co-equal’, as he called him. And
comparing himself with his ‘co-equal’, Jack explained to
Rev that he had already succeeded in progressing south
well beyond Arctic Red River, all the way to Fort Good
Hope, in his “sixteen-foot canoe with eighteen-horse
motor,” “bought” (he lied) at Tuktoyaktuk. He
confessed, with the same elevated tone of self-adoration
that had colored so much of his summer thus far, that
while he, Jack, was certainly an explorer of respectable
repute, he had made a grave mistake already. For, just a
short time before, while ‘so confused’ at the Arctic, he
had thought, dangerously, that he would walk to
the
Now.
This matter of the
motor, said the pundits, kept coming up again and
again AND AGAIN
in Jack’s upriver envelopes, always toned apologetically.
And only a very few pundits in the early days had guessed
there might be a good and special reason for the
repetition. Many of them had not even noticed the
‘senseless un-novel-like repetition’, as critics called
it. And of those pundits in general who had noticed, most
had dismissed it as just one more result of Jack’s having
been ‘zapped in the grey matter’ by an electrified car
wreck. Rev and Jo, similarly, thought their son’s memory
had been damaged by a ‘Crack-Up’ that had been ‘emotional
and maybe physical
too’, and that
was why, they presumed, he kept saying this
‘motor-canoe-to-Fort-Chipewyan’ thing over and over so
apologetically.
Jack
did not explain
the repetition in his envelopes. Like macho types in
general he explained himself relatively little, in fact.
Probably partly because explaining always required heaps
of intellect. Or maybe he thought the explanation in this
case obvious. But the pundits in the early days held frequent weekend
workshops on the matter, since they deemed it
important to an understanding of mj lorenzo’s Remaking. In
fact, already by the spring of ’72, they had begun to
suspect that almost
nothing in The Remaking happened ‘without good
reason’, as they put it: ‘no matter how crazy, senseless,
random, coincidental or inconsequential a thing might
appear to be at first glance’. And so, very early in the
history of Remaking punditry a few of the ‘Jack-loving
pundits’ or ‘Jack-lovers’ had figured out quite a bit
about this ‘wackily’ repeated apology of Jack’s.
Using
a MOTOR, as ‘Jack-lover pundits’
proposed during informal weekend Remaking workshops that
were becoming increasingly popular by ‘72, had broken so
many of Jack’s rules at once it had upset him
unspeakably to have felt forced to resort to
one. And that was why he would mention the motor
repeatedly, just like a guilty man who returned again and
again to the scene of the crime he had committed.
By
fall of ’72, already, some of the most ardent
‘Jack-lovers’ could list during weekend workshops some of
the ‘sacred rules’, Jack’s own rules, or nature’s own (one
and the same, virtually), that Jack had broken by
resorting to using a motor. The most historic and
memorable of these workshops was also, by the way, the very first formally
and fancily organized Remaking conference in the history
of the planet, a very nicely put-together Saturday
night party in the legendary ‘Mummy Hall’ or ‘Mummy Room’
of Penn’s museum of anthropology and archaeology.
‘Poor
Jack’s broken rules’,
i.e., the compromised standards,
said a handful of early Remaking ‘natural healing’ pundits
at this party-like Mummy Hall conference, included all of
the following:
(1)
A well-handled canoe paddle made virtually no noise. But
a motor made raucous, annoying noise right in your face,
to such an extent that it would have been impossible for
Jack to commune with nature by listening to nature
from mid-river, and impossible for him to benefit from the
huge healing impact of nature’s quiet music.
Precisely when, in fact, ‘he needed every form of natural
healing he could lay his hands on’.
(2)
A motor-canoe was far less ‘natural’ than a plain canoe.
For building a motor required ‘a much higher level of
intellect’, including knowledge of modern science. It also
required a tremendous amount of advanced technology,
including Industrial-Revolution-type assembly-line
know-how to be manufactured, maintained, and run.
Furthermore, the intellect
needed for all this was
in fact the least
natural of all man’s faculties. And that was
how a motor figuratively
removed the user way too ‘high’, un-humbly and
immodestly, way above surface-level earth. Just precisely
when Jack needed to remain as close to the earth as possible in order to
heal. He had to remain as natural, and as animal, as
possible, i.e., down low to the earth’s surface, where
other simple mammals walked and licked their wounds. And
most especially, as
low to the earth’s surface as possible so as to be
caught up in as much of the earth’s magnetic field as
possible. Because: magnetism helped healing too (or
so ‘crazy’ Jack Lorenzo claimed, basing his claim on
‘instinct-driven intuition’), as did so many other
rudimentary forces of nature.
(3)
The gasoline smelled
foul, constantly poisoning the pure and natural
northern air with a pungent, irritating, ‘unnatural odor’,
making it impossible
for Jack to smell
pure nature itself, such as the sweet smell of fir
along the river, or the musty dirt of the silt banks. This
ugly smell of burnt refined dinosaur-gut petroleum stood
in the way of Jack’s reaping the natural healing benefits
of nature’s more
natural, positive and lovely perfumes.
(4)
Canoeing with a motor created a class
barrier. It set Jack apart from his poor indigenous
neighbors, with whom he instinctively preferred to feel on
a par so that whenever he bumped into them they would feel
comfortable with him and help him, and he would feel
comfortable with them and help them, which was equally
essential. He wanted to make trades as he had with little
Inuk, and his neighbors in the wild usually wanted this
too. Trades were often absolutely essential to physical
and psychological survival in the brutal north, in fact.
(5)
In addition: using a motor violated Jack’s holy
vow, his sacred promise to his own sacred self to “paddle
the Mackenzie River down and back in one summer, just like
Alexander Mackenzie.”13
A Remaking healing requirement he had invented for himself
instinctually, and sworn to, though he had done so
“without thinking” of possible consequences. Yet: promises
made to one’s source of healing were important. A breach
of promise could cause a breakdown of healing, by causing
conflict or tension within the body and mind, just when
harmony of energy was most needed for a smooth healing. In
fact, jeopardy to healing harmony seemed to be the danger
Jack feared most out of all the dangers mentioned.
(6)
“Furthermore, Jack had stolen that
boat,” a group of wine-tipsy pundits stood up to point out
jointly at the Mummy Hall conference, during the
end-of-night wrap-up session.
“Yes,
but,” others in the audience retorted: “this did not
belong in a list of reasons for Jack’s feeling
apologetic.”
A
few Peace Corps pundits who had lived among ‘third-world’
peoples said it bothered Jack very little whenever he
stole or ‘borrowed’ something without asking, “Understandably, and
rightly, i.e., with good reason.” They took their
turn standing at floor mikes and stressed the point loudly
and provocatively, leaving the conference dangling without
an explanation.
“How
so?” demanded others then, from the same floor mikes. It
always was wrong to take other people’s things without
asking, was it not?
No,
answered the Peace Corps pundits, more provocatively
still, as it felt to everyone else. It was not always wrong,
they said. Because: many species of animals, as well as
those humans whose animal side was less penned up than
that of most educated U.S. Americans, often ‘thought’ or
operated more as packs, or tribes, than
as individuals. And this gave ‘borrowing without
asking’ a significance far less odious than most U.S.
Americans would have liked. Mj lorenzo’s ‘Jack’ side
routinely had operated in such a mode, i.e., in a
‘primitive’ and nature-based realm such as animals of a
pack lived in, or members of a tribe: far more so than
Mortimer was ever likely to have lived; and more than even
a united mj might someday be likely to live; more, even,
than most pundits were ever likely to experience; since
western world and especially U.S. American thinking and
life were derived from principles of rampant
Calvinist-capitalist individualism and competition,
including individual property ownership, not from
principles of communal sharing and cooperation.
The
workshop sat rapt; so the ‘Peace Corps pundits’ continued
talking into the floor mikes, elaborating their
fascinating spur-of-the-moment treatise on pilfering as
interpreted from Western-world versus non-Western points
of view. Throughout mj lorenzo’s Remaking year, they
explained, many of the dark-skinned indigenous people
around Jack, especially those still richly in
touch with their own instinctual human animal natures,
would recognize Jack’s ‘pack’ or ‘tribal’ aspect at once,
instinctively, and respond to him accordingly, often
treating him virtually as one of their own ‘pack’, helping
him as they could, as Inuk had done. Whereas typical
individualistic North Americans of Protestant European
extraction, throughout the Remaking year, whether along
the river or via mail, would see Jack Lorenzo again and
again, whenever they encountered him, as ‘a problem that
needed to be fixed’. They belittled and disparaged
Jack, in other words, seeing him as less human than they
themselves were; as sub-human, in effect; and therefore no
more qualified to speak about human affairs than a dog
that could not stop barking because of its distemper.
The
ease with which Jack would eventually walk straight into
the hands of Dlune’s help, in Fort Smith, was a perfect
example, said the Peace Corps pundits, of what they were
talking about. It showed how tribally tuned in Jack was to
native population.
And
this interpretation from Peace Corps pundits, immediately
celebrated as it was by enormous applause, caused such a
huge stir during and after the Mummy Hall conference that
Remaking pundits in general soon pressed for a prize to be
given annually honoring ‘the best interpretation’ of The
Remaking. They suggested the Peace Corps pundits receive
the first year’s prize. It would be a little longer,
however, before the ‘early Remaking pundits’ would
organize themselves enough to begin a tradition of
awarding annual prizes for the best interpretations of The
Remaking.
A
few of Penn’s non-pundit college students who were present
were duly impressed with the conference nonetheless. A few
freshmen who had never been anywhere more than twenty
miles from Zanesville, unless you counted the car ride
north to the train, the train ride and then 30th
St. Station in Philly and now Penn’s campus, said, “Wow,
we didn’t know
that. The Remaking is ‘outasight’.” And
they became pundits too; overnight.
And
‘reason (6)’ was dropped from the list therefore.
After
this invaluable discussion the ‘healing nature pundits’
summed it all up for the conference. Jack had given in to
using the motor only
because he thought he would die frozen if he did
not. In other words, as they put it in an equally
famous line remembered by Remaking punditry ever
thereafter, ‘If
your values threaten your survival, ditch your values
and not your self, offering apology as feels
appropriate’. Jack, as they said, had
repeatedly returned to the subject of the motor, not
because he was ‘wacky’, but only because
repeating his apology was a way of saying ‘I’m sorry’
again and again to ‘the healing forces of nature’, the
healing forces of his own physical animal human nature,
‘his healing institute executive board’, so to speak, the
‘ones’, even the very molecules, if you would, inspiring,
backing and making possible his Remaking. Repeating the
apology ‘reminded’ his ‘executive board’ again and again
that he really
wanted to show ‘them’ that he meant his regret sincerely, and
that he hoped ‘they’ ‘would bless his remaking despite his
error’.
Intellect-deprived
Jack
might have been incapable of putting so much as this into
words. And this might have been why he never did. For such
an understanding required intellect in abundance. But he
knew all of this instinctively,
below the level of words and rational thought, and behaved
apologetically, equally
instinctively, just as any puppy would have slunk
around, tail between legs, knowing instinctively it
had offended its master. And so, such ‘repeated apology’
was ‘sufficient’ to keep Jack’s healing cure from jumping
track, as time would show, and as many pundits would
eventually agree and point out.
Critics
of The Remaking and its pundits, however, despite such
brilliant, culture-enlightening punditry wizardry as shown
by these two famous groups at the Mummy Conference,
continued to moan and carry on in the world’s periodicals
all throughout the 70s and beyond, saying, “The Remaking’s
‘so-called pundits’ are really just as brain-blitzed as
their beloved book’s author, mj lorenzo.”
22. finally: Jack
again snoops around for a remaking ‘cure’, trying to
penetrate deeply, with his instinctual animal intuition,
into the heart of nature; and he does so indefensibly, from
the point of view of any scientific theory known to
him, i.e. to Mortimer; for Jack remains
particularly enamored of magnetism and magnetic energy,
and returns to it now, suggesting ‘irrationally’, as his
parents will say, that a magnetic field must possess
healing power; he even ‘illustrates’ on the page the
great unifying value of magnetic force, by using a
discussion of the subject of magnetism to tie together,
after the fact, his entire lengthy and disjointed Fort
Good Hope envelope, thereby bewildering his mother, ’gumswazzing’
his father, and astonishing, eventually, academics all
over the world
Finally,
Jack Lorenzo thought it fitting to end the second envelope
as he had the first, with inspiring insights into magnets.
How amazing it was. One small and simply worded entry on
magnets in an encyclopedia could teach a person so much
about the universe and himself. It was so clear and simple
how things were laid out, ‘like a revelation from the
divine, almost’ (italics and underlines are Jack’s):14
Here on
page 4713 of my 1956 ‘M’ volume I see that one way to
make a magnet is to 'Hold a short iron bar with one
end pointing north, and the other end pointing south.
Touch the north end to the ground in a slant, and strike the
south end with a hammer. The [previously
useless] rod at
once becomes a magnet. The molecules are
jarred out of position, and at once arrange
themselves along the earth's lines of force’.
Jack,
helped by his curious new way of ‘thinking’, saw the
upshot of this law of nature immediately,
for all of suffering mankind, even animal-kind, even
tree-kind and rock-kind, indeed for all nature, right down
to the breathing, exposed rock face of granite:
THE
MOLECULES ARE JARRED OUT OF POSITION!
This is
what that crazy idiot Mortimer needs, Rev, to get me
to like him, so I can accept his notebooks as my
own, so I can become my own compass, headed in the
right way, willy-nilly.
Thus
a short paragraph from a 50’s junior high encyclopedia
ended Jack’s second envelope abruptly. The little quote on
how to make a magnet out of a useless little iron bar had
suddenly served in itself, by sympathetic magic some might
say, or forceful imagery more likely, to jar and rearrange,
thereby pulling
together for intuitive Jack,
at least, deep inside his instinctual nervous system, all the
envelope’s widely wandering molecules and iron-filing
threads of analytic discussion on the subject
of daft mj lorenzo. The quote had done this by a method
that was essentially violent (‘jarred’
out of position), but not unkind. For it had literally HIT Jack and
calmed him. That paragraph on how to make a
magnet had violently
rattled all the hopelessly loose instinct
threads of the Fort Good Hope envelope into one fat,
twisted instinct cord which was now finally in harmony
with itself, a cord which now resembled a newly magnetized
rod, a cord in which all the previously crazily wandering
instinct molecules were now finally aligned, for Jack at
least, along
the earth’s lines of force; AND HIS: JACK’S.
For
the earth’s magnetic field and Jack’s were in harmony;
always; said the pundits eventually. Because Jack, by
definition, as natural-animal human-man without
intellect, i.e. without
un-centered Mortimer around to disrupt mj lorenzo’s
lines of force, was by nature always just
as perfectly aligned and harmonized with nature itself,
with earth’s magnetic field and all other natural forces,
as any wild bear; any wild lion; any coyote (and there was
no need to add ‘wild’, for no coyote would ever be
anything but wild); or any other mammal that lived free as
a song in untrammeled mammaled nature.
Who
in the world then (asked the pundits later, once they
finally heard about the Lorenzos’ reaction to The
Remaking) could have expected Jack’s culture-trapped
parents to catch any of the malarkey in the Fort Good Hope
envelope? Jo was the only one who came close to getting a
piece of it, and that was only because of her lifelong
motherly intuitive
connection with ‘her Jack’, her poor, heretofore
instinct-suppressed, mj-son. Thus, as the pundits would
eventually explain to newcomers from the 80s on: Jo
Lorenzo, at this point in her son’s crazy remaking, was
still in the first base bleachers of Jack’s game, happily.
At least at times. But Rev, meanwhile, was out in left
field or who knows where, lost in a dust cloud that
obliterated the Phillies ball park. He was lost out there
somewhere almost ‘the whole damn year’ of ’70-’71. For
Rev, they said, might have wished at times he could
somehow catch this famous home run that his rookie son, mj
lorenzo, was slamming. But poor Rev. Lorenzo, the rattled
Methodist preacher from
Some
proposed later, instead, that Rev must have ‘lied’ about the
Eagles parking lot, and secretly boarded the slow bus to
And
as for those seemingly nice people who always turned into
such freezing wet blankets whenever they heard about poor
mj lorenzo and his back-breaking work at understanding
himself and his fellow humans and universe: they would say
to all this, once they would come to hear about it
eventually, that the pundits’ effort at analyzing and
organizing the ‘Fort Good Hope envelope’ had been a
‘crazy, foolish, utter waste of time’. For ‘the Inventor
of Nature Himself’ had ‘already made it clear long ago’
‘which end of the iron bar was north and which was south’
and needed no further help doing so. And soon, therefore,
The Creator of Nature Himself would ‘jar mj lorenzo’s
molecules until he peed rainbows’, so that the only people
on the planet who ‘really and truly knew God and the
Nature He created’ could live and reign in peace and
quiet. For once. And finally.
1 The word ‘gumswazzed’ came about from the fact that ‘good churchgoing’ twentieth-century neo-Calvinist ‘Christians’ were not supposed to say ‘goddammed’. Even though, as he admitted to Sammy Martinez years later during an interview, Rev. Lorenzo did feel – for a while anyway – literally God-damned after what had happened to his son.
2 Another traditional way
of ‘divining’ the future or ‘divining’ or foreseeing or
‘uncovering’ or ‘figuring out’ or ‘psyching out’ the ‘true
underlying and somewhat hidden nature of things’, not just
future things, but present and past as well, has been by
turning up cards from a Tarot deck and placing them on a table
and interpreting them according to a set of traditional rules
of interpretation. The ‘randomness’ and ‘chance’ are expressed
in the shuffling of the deck. The rules are created and
rigidly maintained by tradition. All methods of divining
contain regulated elements and chance elements combined. Jack,
on the other hand, was trying to get to the bottom of life’s
essential reality without
the help of reason, rules or traditions of any kind. When he
observed the nature of the images and metaphors that had
popped into his mind in order to express what he was trying to
explain to Rev, he accepted these invading images as a Tarot
reader accepted the cards he or she turned up – non-rationally
– in a shuffled deck.
Poets have always divined, on the other hand, by using language, not with Tarot decks or the I Ching. When a metaphor struck a poet as intuitively ‘right’ he or she would tend to trust the feeling and stay with the metaphor until it could be digested better intellectually, even if at first the metaphor seemed very far-fetched or barely sensible at all. In Jack’s case the metaphor of iron bursting out of the earth to find its magnetic partner somewhere was immediately comprehensible, however, and felt ‘right’ to Jack partly because he was at that moment so enamored of magnets; for equally non-rational, non-traditional and un-rule-y reasons. Time taught him, however, that the iron mine imagery was indeed the ‘right’ image, the right ‘turned-up card or coin side’ for many more reasons than that.
For a thorough explication of the psychic/psychological/parapsychological elements involved in divination, Carl Jung’s fascinating “Foreword to the I Ching” (Richard Wilhelm translation) is considered by many to be the standard reference. (C. G. Jung, Collected Works, Vol. 11) (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1958). For a more recent stab at explaining why the I Ching has ‘worked’ as a divining help and/or source of counsel for almost everyone who has ever used it over the past five thousand years, see Deng Ming-Dao, The Living I Ching: Using Ancient Chinese Wisdom to Shape Your Life (HarperSanFrancisco: New York, 2006), p. xxvi, “Introduction.”
Dr. Lorenzo recently attempted to explain his Remaking trip to Sammy Martinez by analogizing it to a Tarot reading. The electrocution, EXACTLY on the Continental Divide AT THE SOLSTICE, he said, had ‘MAGNETICALLY shuffled mj’s mental deck’, cleared him of useless thought and prepared him for a healing parapsychological event, a psychic trip. After the skull-reaming electrocution 'FLIPPED MJ LORENZO'S GOVERNING POLARITY FROM MORTIMER TO JACK', every THING that turned up, every impulse, every intuitive psychic bent, every strange ‘thought’, every twist in circumstances, was treated as one of the turned-up cards which fate had shuffled and designated as his, Jack Lorenzo’s, for redesigning the future; until, that is, by sheer instinct he recognized that the turning-up-of-cards phase of his healing journey had largely ended. At Fort Good Hope, however, Jack was still very much in that phase of turning up more and more grandly fateful and all-determining ‘cards’. That turning-up-of-cards phase of the ‘reading’ would not end yet for quite some time, much later in the year after he left Fort Good Hope, the Dr. observed, remembering his trip of 70-71, forty years before.
3 Inuvik’s massive
above-ground pipes called ‘Utilidor’ may be seen in the
photo collage which introduces ‘the
4 Ibid., p. 33: Aklavik is compared with Inuvik and can be seen in a good aerial photo.
5 Mark 6:1-6 says, in the
Phillips translation (The
Gospels translated into Modern English by J.B.
Phillips) (New York: Macmillan, 1952): Then he left that
district and came into his own native town [
6 In his later years Dr. Lorenzo felt a frequent need to justify his seemingly out-of-date and politically incorrect fascination with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, especially whenever he honored it, but even too when he took the time to criticize it; for most of his contemporaries thought it had been so successfully dead so long, and rightly so, it should be permanently buried forever, out of sight and hopefully out of mind. Despite their glorious opinions, as late in his life as 2010 a 67-year-old but still full-of-fight mj lorenzo was said one Sunday by the New York Times to be feeling ‘delighted’ that important modern and post-modern writers were even yet talking about John Bunyan’s bible of practically-illustrated English Calvinist morality, Pilgrim’s Progress; even though it had been written long ago in the out-of-date 1600s and now, in 2010, sounded at first to any would-be reader to be super-fundamentalist-Christian-religiony and therefore very, very out of date. The Times quoted a letter which the Dr. while ‘retired’ in Mexico had sent El Ojo del Lago, Ajijic’s free English-language monthly, and which had found its way then to The News, Mexico City’s English-language daily; in which he reported that while reading Winston Churchill’s Nobel-Prize-winning multi-volume history, The Second World War (Vol. II, Their Finest Hour, p. 363) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), he had come across a ‘dazzling and spine-chilling’ reference to Christian, the ‘pilgrim’ who ‘progresses’ morally and spiritually from earth to heaven, step by step from front cover to back cover, throughout Bunyan’s story about ‘Christian’. Churchill’s astute and telling reference to the pilgrim named ‘Christian’ ‘proved’, said the Dr., that THE one individual World War II luminary most responsible for having manipulated history so as to save mankind from falling back into global totalitarianism had been raised by his English ‘low-church’ nanny – and maybe even educated at Eton and/or Sandhurst too – on those two allegorical books about ‘Christian’ by Bunyan; and thus young Winston had been dyed English neo-Calvinist right in the wool; whether he would come to like it or not. But 'not like it'? Why? Well, because, first of all, he was born an aristocrat and ‘should’ have acted and been seen as nothing but upper-class ‘high’-church; whereas the Anglican Calvinists were more often 'low-church'; but more importantly throughout his political career he came to feel it advisable to avoid any blatant reference to English religion at all which might drive away voters of any ilk. But despite his usual public reticence on the subject of religion, when it came time to describe in his very thorough and detailed six-volume history of WWII how ordinary Londoners had gone about defending themselves from Germany’s heinous air Blitz, and to lay out in gruesome detail what had happened to them as a result of their attempts to defend themselves, poor Winston was left no option, apparently, but to resort to some very high authority, one poetic and spiritually astute enough it would strike to the bone of every man and woman on the planet who could read; and would especially pound at the hearts of his fellow Englishmen and Americans. And what did he choose? Not even the Bible; but John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a precious moment at the very climactic very-end of the second and final book when the Englishman named Valiant-for-Truth finally crossed the river separating earth from heaven, giving up his mortal life for immortality, and ‘all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side’.
This quote from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
triumphantly placed WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO ITS ORIGIN, by
none other than Sir Winston Churchill in a Nobel-Prize winning
literary work, as the Dr. added, proved something
else too. He said it was proof that Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress,
even with all of its pre-modern and un-modern stylistic and
philosophical outdatednesses, had nevertheless survived as an
important part of the Western world’s ‘canon’ of must-know
stories and literature. That Sunday School story about
‘Christian’, that super-Calvinist Puritan bible of morality,
was still – after
so many hundreds of years of crumbling U.S. American Calvinism
– an essential part of the ‘abominable’ (as
poetry students in Buddhist colleges always complained) yet
seemingly inevitable and impossible-to-eradicate canon of written
wisdom that had to be read and understood and appreciated by
all thinking and leading members of the ‘Western’ world we
live in, the ‘canon’ of tales and ideas which was just
as essential to Western civilization’s thinking about itself
as the hallowed ‘coyote’ tales of Native Americans had always
been to those tribes of people when they attempted to talk to
each other about themselves, or the Jewish Law and Prophets
and Talmud were to the Hebrew tribes for the very same reason.
And of course, naturally, a critic of the Dr.'s wrote a letter
to The Times which
that paper also published, in part, to point out that the Dr.
was 'extremely emotionally biased in his views', and as he got
older was defending more and more his two dead parents (who
had raised him on Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress) in anticipation of going soon to join them
in the hereafter and 'suffer their retribution for his abusing
them in The Remaking
and elsewhere' in his writing. His thinking on 'the canon'
should be 'dismissed' as old-age feeble-mindedness, in other
words.
Later in a follow-up letter to the Times the Dr. chose to leave unmentioned this put-down of his elderly wisdom, but implicitly responded to it when he added another ‘proof’ that John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was still alive and well as part of the Western world’s ‘canon’ of essential tribal lore. In a 1989 or ’90 lecture on William Blake at Naropa’s Summer Writing Program (which the Dr. still preserved on tape), as the Dr. wrote The Times, Allen Ginsberg had taught as part of his lecture that William Blake had been buried in Bunhill Fields, the Dissenters’ Cemetery in London, along with Isaac Watts, John Wesley (the founder of the 'Methodist' Protestant denomination) and “John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress,” and he added: “which Blake illustrated.” The fact that a Buddhist American Jew poet (who “…worshipped the Sacred Heart of Christ the blue body of Krishna the straight back of Ram the beads of Chango the Nigerian singing Shiva Shiva…” as Allen put it in Kral Majales) could not get through a lecture on the English poet William Blake without bringing up the subject of an almost-forgotten book by a flaming Calvinist, John Bunyan, ‘proved’, said the Dr., that neither Calvinism nor John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had yet reached the point of being dismissible or forgettable by Western civilization, much as that fact might disappoint some people of that civilization. If Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had been dismissible or forgettable, said the Dr., then Allen Ginsberg, one of the USA’s most important 20th century poets, would never have taken the decided trouble to mention Bunyan’s first and last names specifically and his book specifically by title, Pilgrim’s Progress, in ANY lecture, let alone in a lecture at a Buddhist school that EXECRATED ‘the canon’, and even less in a lecture on a subject as sacredly personal to him as Blake. For reading Blake’s poetry from beginning to end had dramatically changed Allen’s life by giving him an unforgettable sacred vision and goal. And to put the REAL seal of final 'POOF if not 'proof' on all of this, a kind of intuitive Jackian finality – added the Dr. in his letter to the Times – he offered the fact that Allen had written his poem Kral Majales on a plane on his way to London “to see Bunhill Fields,” as Allen’s poem itself screamed.
7 Mackenzie’s original
full written thought (composed actually, in all likelihood,
by ghost-writer Combe based on feelings Mackenzie had
expressed aloud to Combe) was: “…the apprehension of
presenting myself to the public in the Character of an
Author, for which the course and occupations of my life have
by no means qualified me, made me hesitate in committing my
papers to the Press; being much better calculated to perform
the voyages, arduous as they might be, than to write an
account of them. However, they are now offered to the Public
with the submission that becomes me.” Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from
8
That mj lorenzo had seemed a 'kook' or 'cuckoo' at times was
the chief thing that for decades kept portions of the planet
from respecting his wisdom, scholarship and charisma and
jumping on the mj bandwagon, as his pundit devotees moaned.
They tried to defend his worth always, and his sanity, too,
usually; and they tried to elucidate Jack's intent in the
Fort Good Hope passages regarding Mackenzie and Combe; and
yet they never actually researched the sources as to Jack's
claim in The Remaking
that Alexander Mackenzie had employed a ghost writer to
polish up his journals for publication. Even they,
apparently, assumed that this loco-sounding notion had
blossomed out of a manic paranoia and intermittent speed
addiction psychosis while mj was putt-putting up the
Mackenzie River in 1970. And then during the spring of 2012
yet another article appeared in the Denver Post referring
to 'mj lorenzo's drug-crazed notion' that the very first
explorer of the North American 'West' had not even written
his own published exploration diaries. Mj's son, Freddie,
who lived in Denver and was uncharacteristically offended by
the slur against his father's sanity (one week before
Father's Day and published in the paper the very same Sunday
his Dad had invited him to drive back to Mexico with him),
the next morning walked the six city blocks from his
downtown apartment to the Denver Public Library. He found
several Mackenzie-related references in the computer card
catalog but could not find the books on the shelves, and a
librarian sent him to the Western History reference section
on the fifth floor where books could be researched but not
checked out. Here they asked him to lock up his loose
possessions in a locker, then sat him down in a room
supervised by a pretty young woman and provided him with
four separate volumes of, or about, Mackenzie's journals
including one which said on the opening page: "The published
record of Mackenzie's journal of that epochal year [1789]
was issued in December, 1801, in London and Edinburgh, under
the title... [see footnote 7 above]... Grave doubts about
the authenticity of this work have been expressed by many
students of exploration although Mackenzie seems to have
autographed a number of copies of the book. It appears, from
the best evidence so far available, that the account
published in 1801 was put together by one William Combe."
The editor of this work, McDonald, added a footnote here:
"See Franz Montgomery, "Alexander Mackenzie's Literary
Assistants," Canadian
Historical Review, Vol. XVIII (1937), 301-304. The
Dictionary of National
Biography and the British Museum concur with the
idea that William Combe was the compiler of the 1801 edition
of Voyages. The
Library of Congress does not express an opinion but quotes
the above authorities." The main text proceeds: "Thus
Mackenzie apparently took a course not uncommon in his time
(or in ours), of putting notes, journals, and other papers
in the hands of a professional editor. The fact that Combe
was behind prison bars in 1801 does not necessarily indicate
a lack of conscientious devotion on his part. But the
discrepancies in the text of the book published in 1801 and
the manuscript journal which Mackenzie presented to George
Grenville, first Marquis of Buckingham, and which was bought
by the British Museum in 1883, make it important that at
long last the general public should have access to
Mackenzie's own version.... The British Museum manuscript is
written in at least three different hands. One of these is
definitely that of Sir Alexander Mackenzie; of this there
can be no doubt. The other two cannot be identified...."
McDonald, T. H., ed., Exploring the Northwest Territory, Sir Alexander Mackenzie's
Journal of a Voyage by Bark Canoe from Lake Athabasca to
the Pacific Ocean in the Summer of 1789. Norman,
Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966: p. 3f. Freddie
photocopied the pertinent pages; and it should be noted that
Freddie Lorenzo then, instead of sending a letter to the Post providing this
information, contacted a Westword
writer in secret, who immediately published the information
in a front-page exposé debunking the scholarship of
many local and national periodicals as well as that of some
internationally respected Remaking
pundits, unfortunately.
For which the latter begged their hero's forgiveness and his
son's, both; which were granted, both, and reluctantly: the
Dr. on his new website blog, Freddie in private. Sammy
Martinez, for his part, always the undisputed chief of
Remaking whiz-brains and spokesmen, while he never accepted
responsibility over the years for any of his colleagues'
errors, nevertheless invited Dr. Lorenzo and Freddie to San
Juan Pueblo for the St. John the Baptist saint's-day dancing
at midsummer. Sammy expressed his regrets as soon as they
bounced in from Denver over San Juan's dusty, pothole-y
lanes, right up to his antique wooden front door, only to
find himself being handed a 'birthday present', a new
business card inviting Sammy to visit 'my new website', the
new mj lorenzo site (which had been put together, as they
both knew, not by the Dr. but by Sammy and an unknown named
Duvall).
9 Through young mj's college years
(1961-'65) his chief source of Jungian thought was a 1953
single-volume anthology of short quotes from dozens of
Jung’s books and articles organized into fifteen or so topic
areas such as 'Western and Eastern Points of View’ and
‘Doctor and Patient’. Here we use the revised 1970 edition
of this anthology, C. G.
Jung: Psychological Reflections, edited by Jolande
Jacobi and R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1970).
10
Jacobi and Hull, eds., op. cit. (see previous footnote), p.
90: "An analyst can help his patient just so far as he
himself has gone and not a step further." Drawn by Jacobi
from Jung's 1937 "The Realities of Practical Psychotherapy,"
the complete version of which may be found in Jung's Collected Works, Vol.
16, The Practice of
Psychotherapy, 1996 edition, Appendix (p. 545).
11
Op. cit., p. 92, "Modern man has heard enough about guilt
and sin. He is sorely enough beset by his own bad
conscience, and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile
himself with his own nature--how he is to love the enemy in
his own heart and call the wolf his brother." From
"Psychotherapists or the Clergy" (1932), which can be found
in Jung's Collected Works
Vol. 11, Psychology and
Religion: West and East, 1958/1969: p. 523.
12
Op. cit., p. 90: "...if the doctor wishes to help a human
being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do
this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted
himself as he is." Jung's Collected
Works Vol. 11, p. 519.
13 Mackenzie’s men had paddled him down
the river and back in one summer and Jack had vowed to
repeat this stunt as soon as he had glanced at Mackenzie’s
journals (after they were brought to him by Inuk in
Tuktoyaktuk). Cf the last few paragraphs of the
14 The World Book Encyclopedia Vol. 11 ‘M’ (Chicago: Field Enterprises, Inc., 1956), p. 4713, col. a, paragraph 2.
