The roughly circular outline of Jack’s envisioned trip to the Arctic and back was fast becoming the initial rough circular outline of mj lorenzo’s circular ‘mandala’ of words.

       the early Remaking pundits

I.  Peace:  universal respectful sharing of nature is universally healing

23.  how some readers took to the first part of Jack’s Wrigley envelope glorifying nature but hardly anyone could relate to the second part attacking his college

Later punditry helped Sammy Martinez organize ‘the Wrigley envelope’ into two large sections followed by a smaller third section. They called it Jack’s ‘war and peace’ chapter; although it was more correctly his ‘peace-war-peace’ chapter because it began and ended peacefully enough, but the middle portion contained mj lorenzo’s very first of what would become a long list of famous published verbal artillery assaults on the militant extremists of the world.

Those who would eventually manage to possess a nearly sacred underground copy of The Remaking in the early seventies, having obtained it by hook or by crook, would study it to the nth degree then, and would come to understand the first of the Wrigley envelope’s three parts ‘implicitly’, as they would claim, most of them. While the second part, they would say, the ‘war’ part, they ‘hardly dug at all’. And that second part would remain ‘a problem’ for years.

The first part reflected Jack’s love of nature. And though these avid early students of The Remaking found Jack’s nature prose ‘a great sleep aid’ at first, they ‘sympathized with it’ for personal and collective reasons, mainly because as a group they had been jolted to painful reality by the Ecology Movement as soon as it had kicked its way into general consciousness around ’69 or ’70. Prior to then, very few people had worried about the future of earth’s natural environment of Nature Itself. But suddenly, ‘overnight’ as it seemed, worry was everywhere and overwhelming on all sides. And somehow worry had even been organized already into a ‘movement’ which all of these ‘early Remaking pundits’ found only natural to support with all their hearts.

Thus the early ‘pundits’ could ‘dig’ the first part of the Wrigley envelope, because it was part of the zeitgeist to revere and worry about nature. But from the second part, where Jack belabored his ire over the intelligently conservative Protestant Christian college he had attended, these same scholars maintained a respectful distance. Since, as they admitted, in such matters most of them possessed little know-how and were as green and innocent as the spruce and fir trees along the Mackenzie River. Most of the Protestants among the ‘early Remaking pundits’ were of more liberal backgrounds. And the rest of the pundits had come from Catholic, Jewish, Native-American or other non-traditional family backgrounds. So that anything having to do with the world in which mj lorenzo had grown up, the world of American neo-Calvinism, meaning right-wing extremist USA-Protestant ‘evangelicalism’ and ‘fundamentalism’, the so-called ‘Christian right’, left the early pundit sub-groups cold and mystified for years to come: despite the fact that this was the world in which their hero mj lorenzo had grown up.

Had any of these smart interpreters of mj lorenzo’s Remaking ever wished to develop an understanding of the world of mj’s childhood they would have found it difficult to know where or how to begin. Only an insider could possess knowledge so specialized, so esoteric and private, seemingly, so ‘right-wing-occult’, as they liked to call it; and yet so important because of conservative ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘evangelical’ Protestant American Christianity’s ongoing and inordinately huge impact on U.S. American politics since day one,¹ and because of the U.S.A.’s ever increasingly huge impact on the rest of humanity after that. And so, regrettably: the all-important second half of the Wrigley envelope, the ‘war’ part, had to lie neglected by the pundit world for years before they would discover its relevance to planetary geopolitics.

Mj lorenzo was a rare entity, they claimed, to be so hip to the causes usually considered ‘leftist’, while remaining forever acutely attuned to the right-wing conservative, extremist-Protestant world he had grown up in. And that bizarre combination put people off at times – even mj’s most dedicated followers. Each time mj lorenzo expected a reader of his Remaking to follow him into that bizarre realm of know-how, to wander with him into that strange and goofy world which the ‘Christian right’ had created for themselves, these early readers of his could barely keep up, devoted though they might be to mj.

BUT: who in the world with any heart could not have sympathized, and understood? – that just as soon as ‘Jack’ Lorenzo had burst free of his conservative prison, i.e., of Mortimer, he would naturally have wanted to sing the glory of nature and of every other love that had ever set him apart from Mortimer, that freak who had locked him, Jack, up, thereby locking up his very own nature? The pundits had more than enough heart to relate to such a celebration, both early pundits and later ones. They saw that as soon as Jack found it possible during his remaking year or after, he would want to raise heck celebrating every single affection Mortimer had denied him until then.

And so of course Jack, unlike that bookish, super-compliant, failed-saint elder brother of his, cherished all kinds of natural-ness, immense and local. He loved wildflowers, birds, huge lakes and raw rivers, empty spaces, indigenous people and animals, and all of it in a natural state. He loved primitiveness and of course nakedness therefore. And he loved to learn the technology needed to live off the land without scarring it. He even felt affection for the science of geography; not because he could apply it with his mind, for he could not without Mortimer around, but because it awed him. Jack felt a connection with the modern science of geography, as with anything that encouraged a reverence for raw nature without ruining it in the process. And so inevitably he would want to sing the glory of the vast, raw, virtually unmolested natural geography around him, that part of the earth’s terrain which the people of Canada had named ‘Northwest Territories’.

And Rev and Jo liked this part of their son’s writing too, for their own reasons. They basked in it, in fact. Partly because his thinking seemed, said Jo, ‘so much simpler for a few minutes, thank the Lord’. And so, the first part of the Wrigley envelope would become a favorite of theirs. And some nights when they missed their ‘former son’, as Rev referred to mj, his ‘favorite’ (because only) son, as he joked, trying to get at least some tiny hint of a smile out of Jo; and when they worried themselves sick – sicker than sick, even – the two would take turns reading to each other after dinner at the kitchen table what they called their son’s ‘lovely nature paragraphs’, in the same very devoted, reverent way they had read the great character-building tales of the Old Testament to their growing children at the very same kitchen table after dinner every evening; and had read the entire long English allegory called Pilgrim's Progress to mj and his sister as the two had been developing as children, every single doggone pity-sake night without fail, year after year, all four Lorenzos seated around the table after supper, carrying on a strict yet pleasant, sacred, family-educational tradition largely forgotten long- since by most U.S. Americans, a tradition which had been brought to the colonies from the Continent and England by John Calvin-inspired Puritan pilgrims.

24.  how the Lorenzos were so blinded by the here and now of their own belief system that they had lost critical perspective on where they fit into the world’s politics and history and on how much they shared in common with all of humanity

The Lorenzos never recognized how extremist-Protestant, how neo-Calvinist they were, actually, in a sense; how much the extremist habits of the John Calvin-inspired French Huguenot and Dutch Reformed protestants in the early New York area, and of the evangelical, non-Lutheran ‘Reformed’ Germans in the early Philadelphia area, and of all those countless Baptists with their little wooden ‘Bible’ churches on every darn little corner in every dang little area, everywhere in the whole huge country, as it seemed, how all of those very extremist Protestant sects and denominations must have infected the land and its history and politics and zeitgeist from era to era and influenced even Methodist evangelists and preachers, and rubbed off on their own theologically less extreme Methodist thinking over the centuries. Quaker traditions of colonial New Jersey and Pennsylvania had left an extremist mark too. And most unforgettably of all, the very extremist Puritans of nearby New England somehow had managed to engrave their thinking more indelibly – probably – than any of the other self-righteous church-reforming sects, upon how so very many people and groups in U.S. America still thought and acted, even after four hundred long years of those puritanical people being dead and buried-regretfully-not-forever.

But the Lorenzos had not even noticed any of this about themselves, ironically. It had even slipped their minds that Rev’s French ‘Lorenzo’ progenitor in the colonies had been a ‘Huguenot’, or that the meaning of ‘Huguenot’ was ‘French Calvinist who fled France due to Catholic persecution’. They just kept on thinking of themselves as loyal Methodists, year in and year out, always remembering that their sacred Methodist tradition was carved whole-cloth by the Wesley brothers straight out of Anglican rite and the state-run Church of England, while failing to note the whole time how other Protestant sects that had existed in England and Europe and the colonies, all far more extremist than the Wesleys and far more independent and grass-roots-democratic than the crown-run Church of England, had influenced so many aspects of their Anglican-Episcopal-Methodist tradition over the centuries. And most damaging to their understanding of themselves as sacred physical-animal Homo sapiens on the planet was the fact that they were surprisingly ignorant, oddly, of what and how much tradition they shared with other kinds of believers in general, were they Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, ‘pagan’ or whatever.

Jo, for example, was scandalized to smithereens one day in the 70s when Rev informed her 'how Roman Catholic she had been' her whole life without ever knowing it! She never would have dreamt that almost all of her deeply cherished, richly and elegantly worded Methodist Communion² had been discovered recently to be shockingly identical with the Roman Catholic mass – as if blessedly kissed and donated intact to the Methodist Church by the sinfully papist Roman pope – word for beautiful poetic word. Hardly a comma was different, even after twenty centuries of scandalous popes and Henry the VIII’s messing around with Jesus’ gospel and pretending pompously to presume upon people’s natural right to merge with God directly all by themselves.

How could two liturgies of two church groups 'so different' in Jo's mind be so alike? Was it a miracle, or a mistake? Poor Jo Lorenzo had lost precious sleep, after hearing about this shocker, until she got to the bottom of it. Finally after a week of shaken faith in herself and her universe she called the Bible Presbyterians in Collingswood. They never sat around satisfied like Methodists did. They kept up with anything and everything that even slightly threatened the Kingdom of Christ on earth, anything at all that worried its new-and-even-circumcised Chosen People, God's new Chosen People (to replace the Jews), the American Christian right; and they had done so at least since the 1950’s, those halcyon days when their biggest hero ever, Senator Joseph McCarthy, had fought communism on the U.S. Senate floor. The Bible Presbyterians in Collingswood would have to be in possession of the answer to this question of hers, therefore, and understand why she was so upset.

“HOW,” she asked the Bible Presbyterian church office secretary by phone, her voice breaking as if talking to her own (dead) mother in a very intimate way, “CAN EVERY SINGLE WORD THAT JOHN PRONOUNCES, wearing his long black robe ribbed so elegantly with black velvet , personally and lovingly passing the big sterling silver plate of white Wonder Bread crumbs, and the big heavy sterling silver plates of tiny little individual glasses of Concord Grape Juice cups, to each precious parishioner of his as they kneel at the altar rail for Methodist Communion on the first Sunday of every month, BE EXACTLY THE SAME AS WHAT THAT DARN OLD CATHOLIC PRIEST SAYS, handing out weird-tasting stick-in-your-throat unleavened wafers and real red alcoholic wine (!), to slurp down drinking alcohol right in church (!), out of a great big SHARED cup that everybody HEAVENS drinks from, passing around all those filthy gum germs, every single time they have their unedifying, because virtually sermon-less, fifty-times-daily-to-keep-up-with-(unthinkably-but-truly-condomless)-Catholic-population-explosion ‘mass’ down the road at ‘Roman Catholic No. 9’? What do you think of that for a scandal?”  

But truth be told, Rev and Jo were a little out of date, and no longer typical of the Methodists of their day. For, most people of that denomination no longer intellectualized or quibbled about pedigree much, if indeed they ever had. Methodists in the U.S.A. in the 1970’s, in general, rarely looked down their noses on anybody. Most Methodist church congregations in mid-twentieth-century America came closer than any U.S. denomination to representing a broad swath of the population, and thus constituted a very average or median and unpretentious U.S. group, including, for example, large numbers of both whites and Afro-Americans, sometimes even under the same church roof. Nor did most Methodists bother to look up with jealousy to their rich and sometimes snobbish Presbyterian and Episcopal cousins. For Methodists were middle-of-the-road and satisfied. It was just a very small percentage of the somewhat more conservative ones, i.e. the Calvinist-leaning Methodists, like the Lorenzos, who tended to become quite a little infected with that Puritan zeal for judging and feeling a little more pure and worth preserving than certain other Christians: like one Christian disaster ‘who shall remain nameless’ – or ‘two, maybe’ – right in their own family, as they told the Wednesday night prayer meeting, ‘just learned about’ from reading ‘something we got in the mail from Canada’.

25.  why the Lorenzos loved Jack’s passages glorifying nature

It was a failing to think like this, of course, not a strength. But the Lorenzos forgot that point when it mattered most not to judge. They forgot that judging made you tiresome and tired. All they knew was that they liked Jack's writing about nature. They had no idea why, because they did not ask why.

But maybe, as Dr. Lorenzo himself proposed in later years, it was partly because, for once, during just those few minutes spent reading their son’s nature passages, they felt equal to other Protestants and even Catholics and Jews and even equal to Muslims and Hindus and ‘pagans’ and whatever, and even equal to their own son – amazingly – for once. For nature was a leveler. Anyone might revere nature, no matter what station in life, or degree of wisdom, no matter how Mary-loving, papist, predestinationist, Unitarian, scepter-wielding or infidel. And so, Rev and Jo during these moments could relax into a sense of community and sharing that was universal. And sharing was healing, whether they knew it or not, especially universal sharing. Universal sharing was universally healing. And so, communing with nature was good for whatever ailed you, especially if you communed with nature right along with those special human beings on the planet who lived with nature most intimately, like the northern Canadian ‘Indians’ and the ‘Eskimos’.

The Lorenzos knew from experience, even as circumspectly narrow as they tended to be during most days of the week, that communing with nature was good for your health, physical, emotional and spiritual; and especially sexual. And so, without thinking about why, when they read Jack’s nature pieces they agreed with every word he said for once. And their nervous systems relaxed into heavenly calm. Because suddenly, for a change, they were un-stimulated and unfettered by the hormones and what-not, by all that adrenalin triggered when a belief system might imagine itself threatened.

Communing with all mankind in all naturalness by adoring sacred nature reverently they felt safe and unthreatened for a few minutes.  

Granted, ‘naturalness’ could go too far sometimes. The Lorenzos, for example, objected to Jack's butt-nakedness in public; Rev more so than Jo. But hardly anybody had seen him in that state yet, said Jo. Or so ‘Jack’ claimed, anyway. Therefore, there was less cause for worry, wasn’t there? And anyway, they could not deny he was good-looking ‘like that’, as she said to Rev, since Jack was young and came from them. So if any of those funny people sitting way up there on top of the globe in fur-lined parkas should end up catching a glimpse of Jack ‘like that’, well, she said, at least they would be spared the trauma of viewing an ugly specimen.

So these were some of the reasons, though strange, surprising, and maybe even ‘funny’ (to the pundits, at least; when they heard about them later), why the Lorenzos loved Jack’s writing almost unconditionally, for once, when he wrote as he did in the first part of the Wrigley envelope. They were so relieved and swept away they hardly even noticed the various silly ways he wrote, sometimes grandiloquent, as mentioned; or stiff; or sophomoric and wordy. Maybe because Jo had grown up on wordy, early Victorian romance such as Victor Hugo and Melville, and Rev had dabbled in Horatio Alger and Dickens’ David Copperfield during the few minutes he had not worked or studied. In short, they had been born close enough to the nineteenth century to feel kinship with outdated, purple-dappled prose, Mortimer’s or Jack’s.

And as for Jack’s affection for western Canada, the two of them were the ones responsible for it, they reminded each other proudly. They had honeymooned in the Canadian Rockies and had shown him their pastel-tinted black and white photos, still very lovely but faded and yellowed now in their old tarnished tin frames on the bedroom wall. And later they had taken their boy ‘out there’ as a high school graduation present, ‘out West’ to see those incredible green lakes and rivers of western Canada for himself. And that, by the way, was the second time the three of them had gone up and over the Going to the Sun Highway together, in Glacier National Park. For the Lorenzos had first gone there with both children when mj's sister had been fourteen and he, 10.

This was yet another reason why they could hardly act surprised at his very reverent descriptions of wild west nature.

What did unsettle them rather, in the months to come, was the extent to which the simplest, most seemingly innocent notions drawn from his most seemingly innocent moments revering nature could get blown so sky-high and beaten so to-death over time. This new aspect of their son bewildered and worried them quite a bit all year long.

26.  how Jack’s nature prose put the early Remaking pundits to sleep

And then, a whole year later, when mj’s envelopes to his parents were published in late ’71 – accidentally, in a way – and The Remaking finally circulated on the street a bit for the first time, the very first non-Lorenzo readers would think the nature pieces at the beginning of the Wrigley envelope ‘boring’.

Mj’s non-family readership, of course, had never known him or cherished him dearly, hoping that his life in the world would be as lovely as imaginable. And later pundits would take the ‘earlies’ to task for this ‘early mistreatment’ of their beloved mj, but the fact remained that non-family readers in the first few years tended to drift into detached sadism, relishing Jack’s suffering and Sturm and Drang, if only he wrote about it well, and finding that his happiness, on the other hand, made them restless, like his psalmody, rhapsody, and nature hymns. But this was only because, as the ‘early pundits’ would say later in their own defense, ‘nobody in the world really knew yet, in the early 70s, what the heck was really up with poor old mj lorenzo’.

In any case his parents, when they first fought their way through The Remaking, preferred their son’s written passages of travelogue, so they could picture him plainly, as happy and active. Whereas non-family readers, when they first got drawn into The Remaking, often preferred a trip through hell with him. For it was hard to find much excitement in ‘static, wordy and pedantic’ nature prose. And once the latter group got to know mj’s writing, and him, of course, this changed. Those who stayed with him and studied his writing and him, would grow to appreciate and value exactly how important meditating on and communing with nature was, in mj’s world, and why.

27.  why nature was so important to Jack and why intellect therefore was not

Nature was important in a number of critical ways, most of all right now in the Arctic. For it was basically all Jack had to work with as he tried to get his ‘remaking’ underway: nature outside him; and nature inside him. He had been stripped of everything else. There were no institutions, no people. Civilization was elsewhere. And he had nabbed a couple of books but was using them non-intellectually. For, intellect, too, had flown the coop along with Mortimer, and that too was fine with Jack. Everything he had been stripped of he was delighted to be without, from brains to briefs.

Intellect was arguably the least natural thing about nature, as Dr. Lorenzo would maintain over the years whenever he tried to explain Jack’s 1970 summer of fun. The one and only place intellect popped up in nature was in the grey matter of the brain of one measly species, as the Dr. said again and again, and not even a very respectable species. For Mortimer was perfect proof of how unnatural, even anti-natural, Homo sapiens intellect could get, how scandalously disreputable a single species could become. ALL NATURE WAS AT RISK FROM INTELLECT AND FROM THE SPECIES THAT POSSESSED IT AND USED IT WRONGLY, Jack knew in his gut already in 1970. And most of all, that part of nature comprising the one measly species that possessed intellect WAS AT RISK. For: that very weird species increasingly used intellect destructively, unnaturally and tyrannically, not reverently. The only planet in the universe where intellect was known to exist was jeopardized by it in toto. That was how ‘terrific’ the ‘gift of intellect’ was, that intellect which the Western world had always ‘worshipped unthinkingly’, as the Dr. said.

And for all of these reasons Jack, starting from scratch to remake mj, was beside himself with glee. For: suddenly and finally he had the chance to start his remaking from a place lower down in the nervous system than intellect, that ‘high-up’-in-the-order-of-biological-things, ugly grey outer cortex of the human brain. Because: healing of anything human, he knew deep inside, should never start from high, or close to the outside surface, or just barely within the bony skull. It should never start from the flaking outer crust of human being, like intellect, or skin, but from much lower down inside, from the solid animal core of human being: from intuition, i.e., from instinct and gut and heart. Jack could never have put it all into words. But he knew it instinctively.

He could see it in his animal confreres in the north. When a wolf or husky suffered injury it instinctively lay as low as it could lie. It did not wheel-chair itself to the nearest library full of books seeking a remedy. It crept to its den or enclave and stayed there lying on the floor, licking its wounds as instinct taught it to do, until its body healed itself according to nature’s laws.

And Jack’s animal nature, finally allowed now to fly out and about, free from Mortimer’s hard confining cage of intellect and intellectually derived rules, was in the process of communicating with all of nature around and within him. And by means of such intercourse with the root of his being, he was now, finally, in the process of constructing a healing remaking plan as natural and human as any injured beast – human or otherwise – could ever want. Simply because: the healing plan’s blueprint had been built into his instinctual core from the beginning of animal time.

28.  why Jack’s ‘natural’ Remaking ‘cure’ looked absurd to others

This was why Jack’s treatment planning and ‘thinking’ looked so absurd to parents and other ‘Westerners’, i.e., to regular people of Western civilization. It appeared absurd because: none of them could help but look at it in any way but ‘purely Western-world-rationally’. Their own brainy ‘Mortimers’, their own intellects were still functioning. And they had been taught to worship those Mortimer-intellects, and always show them great deference. And so: it ‘made no sense’ to the Lorenzos, for instance, for their well-raised, well-educated, highly civilized son to vow to spend the winter on an island in Lake Athabasca ‘with an Indian girl, planning a trip up the Peace’, ‘just because Alexander Mackenzie had done that’, as Rev said, or for Jack to insist on believing this should somehow remake him into a very much better human being. This was truly and utterly IRRATIONAL. ‘Ridiculous!’

Yet: Jack’s treatment plan entire was constructed of such ridiculous ‘tripe’, as Rev called it, who did not comprehend, and never would, probably, that it was non-rational but still valid; gut, in very fact: it was as ‘gut’ as ‘tripe’ was; just as tripe was gut in very fact. And as time would tell, every single ‘crazy’ ‘absurd’ ‘full-of-tripe’ IRRATIONAL ridiculous notion that Jack would pull out of his invisible hat of gut instinct, constructing with childish glee his ‘full-of-tripe treatment plan’, as Rev called it, would prove most valuable to mj lorenzo’s step-by-step healing-and-remaking.

So: naturally, meanwhile, as the world turned, so to speak; and as the early Remaking pundits would advertise later in their characteristic sixties lingo, quite correctly: ‘the whole freaking time that everybody was bitching and moaning about poor Jack’s crazy, irrational Remaking’, the unsurprising truth was: earthshaking healing MEANING lurked in even the most innocent-sounding lines, just waiting to be mined like gold for all it was worth.

29.  how ‘earthshaking healing meaning’ lurked in even the most innocent-sounding lines about nature

Right in the first paragraph of the Wrigley envelope, for example, there was already talk about ‘East’ and ‘West’, one of Jack’s most gripping and electrifying polar-opposite obsessions. He did not explain it right there on the page, but you understood after you had studied The Remaking again and again in toto, as the early Remaking pundits had done already by late 1972. Jack insisted on associating himself only with a movement toward the East. And that meant for him, most often perhaps, a movement toward the reversal of expansion of European white man on the planet. Away from the westward-moving, insidious takeover of the planet by rational, scientific and materialistic, ‘Christian’ Western civilization, where Mortimer-energy had always attempted to dominate Jack-ian energy, too often succeeding, just as it had in mj until June of 1970.

In other words: intra-psychically, i.e., in his ‘inner world’, or ‘belief world’, Jack wanted less of the Western world, ultimately, not more. Physically speaking, on the other hand, in the ‘outer’ world, he knew that before he ever could go back East successfully, home to Philly and Jersey, he would first have to go physically west in the spring, up the Peace River, for a while at least, in order to come to terms with Mortimer and mj’s remaking. Just as Mackenzie had eventually needed to go west up the Peace River, to come to terms with his dream of finding the Pacific, before he could return east to retire in his homeland, Scotland. All of which ‘helped explain’, said the early pundits, why Jack wrote Rev:

"The irony about my trip up the river is that the entire time – and if you check a map carefully you will see that this is true – I am myself, like Mackenzie, in fact, by this very river traveling not west overall, but east.”

30.  how Jack dragged so much heavy meaning out of so many simple and innocent things: did it mean he was crazy?

“But,” as the early pundits eventually asked each other, “how could Jack ‘know’ that he would have to go up the Peace?” The Lorenzos never bothered their heads with asking such a question, as they explained later. They dismissed Jack’s ‘knowing’ as ‘cuckoo’. And so did the very first handful of pundit readers, in fact. They too thought Jack Lorenzo ‘a little teched in the head’ at first. But as the decade of the 70’s progressed the ‘early Remaking pundits’ suspected increasingly that something more than psychosis lay hidden in Jack’s method. And they launched a campaign of discovery. They began asking ‘how’ that ‘crazy’ ‘thinking’ of his ‘worked’. And to the amazement of many, they were able to unearth the following ‘formula’.

All anyone had to do, they explained, was start with the statement made above: “…earthshaking meaning lurked not just in nature pieces, but in all the most innocent-sounding passages of The Remaking, just waiting to be discovered…;” and then instead of the words “The Remaking,” substitute the words “Mackenzie’s Journals” or “everything Jack read or contemplated” or “anything that came to his mind.” That was the trick.

Except that to Jack it was not a ‘trick’, but dead serious work. He read Mackenzie’s journals now and then while putt-putting up the very river named for the man he was reading. This created a sort of ‘analogical’ connection to Mackenzie. Some said later it was a ‘psychic’ connection, others, a ‘spiritual’, others, a ‘sympathetic-magic’ one. But whatever you called it, that ‘connection’ multiplied the potential value and meaning of the Journals’ contents for Jack personally, as he saw it. Not in the way that any average rational thinker would have understood such a statement, but in a way that defied the Western world’s usual preferred way of using its brain and nervous system, i.e., in a way that defied reason. His method was non-rational; and he could indulge this method because overly rational Mortimer had left him in peace, for once.

And also because: Jack’s experience, this wonderful summer in the Canadian north, was showing him, every day more blatantly, that his intuition, his instinct, and his non-rational skills at interpreting and anticipating events in the world, amazingly, as the pundits put it: ‘were right mother-freaking on’.

And so he kept on piling intuitively derived meaning upon intuitively derived meaning, all of it outlandishly and outrageously non-rational, i.e., every bit of it defying the modern Western world’s cherished over-commitment to ‘normal logical thought’. Jack, to wit, was not only traveling up the river named for the man whose journals he was reading. He was also traveling up the very river which that man had ‘discovered’. And later, that same man, Mackenzie, had reported his own discovery of that very same river in those very same journals. There was meaning heaped upon meaning. And Jack was using the same kind of boat Mackenzie had used, namely a canoe (though granted, regretfully, and so very sadly, it was unnaturally motorized). And he was doing so during the summer, as had Mackenzie. This resulted in meaning heaped upon meaning, analogy upon analogy, uncanny connection laid upon uncanny connection, all intuitively-instinctually derived. And he was on a panicked deadline, just as Mackenzie had been, in order to survive. And he planned to stay at the same lake on the same island on the same deadline for the same length of time, and even with exactly the same kind of woman as Mackenzie had. ‘Crazy’ meaning upon ‘freaking crazy’ meaning. And in such a ‘Mad Hatter’ ‘crackbrained’ ‘mind-blowing’ way, a way that would variously enchant or exasperate his poor future readers, depending upon who they were and how ‘open’ to such ‘wackiness’ they might be, the Journals of Mackenzie took on heaped up meaning of a non-rational kind for poor old lonely Jack Lorenzo.

31.  Jack’s principle of ‘weightfully-striking multiplied significances’

While he read, then, forever chugging upriver: if a particular something, anything, leapt out at him immediately from the Journals; or if, the next day, still chugging upriver, a line from Mackenzie’s Journals, or from anything he had read yesterday, kept preying upon his ‘mind’ today: he took notice and gave such content all the more weight. And later still, he might try to descry what the upshot of that ‘weight’ might be specifically. Thus, when he had read enough of Mackenzie’s Journals to realize and be weightfully struck by the fact that Mackenzie, after his winter in Fort Chipewyan, had eventually needed to go west up the Peace River, in order to come to terms with his dream of finding some kind of western route or passage ‘to the Orient’, before he could return east to retire in his homeland, Scotland; and when the feeling of being weightfully struck by this historical fact did not leave Jack’s mind in peace for several whole days: then Jack felt ‘forced’ to draw a vague, for now, parallel with himself. And then, gradually over time surmising the result of such, he would eventually explain to Rev what he had discovered about his own future thereby, namely, that: “just like Mackenzie,” he, Jack, before he could ever successfully go back East, physically, ‘home’ to New Jersey, would first have to go physically west in the spring, up the Peace River, into the Rockies in some way, ‘for a while at least’.

The reasons were no clearer than the details, as yet. But Jack sensed one reason would be to come to terms with Mortimer in some way. And he trusted the future to reveal more method and meaning. Since this ‘discovery’ had come to him in the very same way any ‘intuition’ might strike any human on the planet, i.e., full of weighty multiplied significances reverberating here and there, logical or not, scientific or not, then, he could not ignore it. And it had to be adopted into the slowly developing outline of his healing trip, The Remaking, therefore.

Later analysts of mj lorenzo’s mind and work agreed that this principle of weightfully-striking multiplied significances, though never spelled out by Jack explicitly, must have been driving his creativity through all of Part I of The Remaking. No wonder, they said, he appeared to be leaping about creation like a revved up mosquito, his nervous system’s intuition centers constantly jacked up and searching, inside and outside himself, for any kind of situation that might be meaning-laden. He had to make inferences and draw conclusions about his life in the world, and particularly about his remaking trip, and about how that trip might help him salvage his hitherto disaster-ridden life. And he had to do so very quickly. He had to set in motion a universal treatment plan as complete and inescapable as possible, and do it in such a way as to entice Mortimer to feel drawn to it, then bound to it, despite his wishy-washy, spineless Mortimer self.

Jack sensed all of this intuitively. He was beginning to comprehend that he, Jack, probably would not retain power himself once winter came. He suspected Mortimer was gathering strength already and would soon return. And he alluded to this hunch constantly on the pages sent his parents in those envelopes. His treatment plan, therefore, had to trap Mortimer in its web when Mortimer returned, because it had to be the right plan for mj lorenzo as a whole, not just for himself, Jack.

It had to be the right treatment for the world as a whole, in fact. Since Jack was not trying to salvage himself, mj lorenzo, merely, but the whole crazy world too, the world at large. And the ‘whole freaking extravaganza’, as some of the early pundits designated it, was ‘an abysmally tall order’. That’s why, eventually, its seeming success, as suggested by world developments in later years, kept the pundits returning to The Remaking for the rest of their lives, believing, as they did, that even more valuable essential metal must be hidden in its depths.

32.  Jack stupefies creation by reading his future in maps

Jack, imagined the early pundits, must have ‘blown the minds’ of his parents even more than he had blown their own circuits, the early pundits’ minds, with all this irrationality, already, so early in his Remaking work. Indeed, as pundits added in the years to come, such an approach as Jack’s could not help but ‘blow the mind’ of every single potential Western world reader. And yet, they said, for all the reasons mentioned, he could not stop there, and felt compelled to move on, to toy with yet one more ‘mind-blowing’ way of demonstrating the validity of his, as yet, un-conscious and thus unformulated and unstated principle that: “earthshaking meaning lurked not just in nature pieces, but in all the most innocent-sounding passages of The Remaking, just waiting to be discovered,” doing so, this time, in a new kind of bizarre way of responding to a paragraph from the World Book on ‘Map and Map Reading’:

If art is making the ugly beautiful, then I should like to set off this particular letter with another excerpt from the World Book 'M' volume I am finally learning how to use the way it was meant to be used:³

MAP AND MAP READING.

How to Read a Map

Symbols.   Some facts are easy to read from a map. But careful study is needed in order to understand a map and to know what it can show accurately. In order to make intelligent use of a map you must know the map language. This is a language made up of symbols of various kinds. Each symbol stands for a condition or a feature of the landscape.

...A good map always has a legend which is the key to the symbols used...

The most useful single map for information about the character of the landscape is a good political-physical map...

There was ‘not an extraneous word in The Remaking’, the pundits would say after probing its profundities for years. And: these paragraphs from the World Book Encyclopedia teaching a young person ‘how to read a map’ must have tickled Jack to death when he inserted them in his envelope to be sent from Wrigley, knowing as he did how packed with secret meaning they were. For: every single word offered crucial assistance in understanding his Remaking. His game was to ask himself: who might be the first wise guy to figure it out someday? And the answer, of course, would turn out to be the first ‘early Remaking pundit’ who ‘got’ it, whoever that might have been. It appeared to have been, rather, a small group of pundits from Philadelphia-area college campuses and their pot-smoking friends who had worked on it together and ‘figured it out’.   

Rev and Jo certainly had not ‘gotten’ it, as the pundits said eventually. They had not unraveled this puckish hide-and-seek game of Jack’s, this delight of his in saying things in such veiled form, even using innocent genres of writing for mysterious ends. And the ‘world of letters’ would never have ‘gotten’ it either, certainly. For: the ‘literary world’ had already officially banned, even scorned, all written forms of communication by 1970 that contained ‘hidden meaning’, the Beat poets having been a good, representative example of the many Western-world literary groups who had declared themselves on this issue. But no one had informed Jack of this revolution in ‘Western’ letters – fortunately, as the pundits would say later – and even if they had informed him, he probably would not have been able to stop himself. For, complex communication of multi-layered meaning was ingrained in mj lorenzo’s nervous system by now.

And his own parents, of all parties, since they had been the very ones to train his brain in this old-fashioned way (by teaching him, for instance, that the Old Testament ‘pre-figured’ the New in so many millions of details), really should have known better, by this fourth month of reading his crazy cryptic missives, than to think that their son would deposit this short encyclopedia paragraph in the envelope thinking only of ordinary maps. They might have made some effort to read between the lines. Yet they never ‘got the joke’, as the pundits put it, which was that Jack was thinking here about his own writing, his own internal nervous landscape, and was telling his folks in plain language, plain to him, that is, that if they wanted to understand him, they would first have to fix a map-like picture in their minds of his world and how it was laid out, a sort of ‘map’ of his basic focal points of energy. And secondly, they would have to find somewhere in his writing, the ‘legend’, the key, the secret to that ‘map’, the summary or summaries of symbols he used and what they represented: ‘East’ and ‘West’ being only two of the simplest examples.

Or, as the pundits eventually realized and summarized it, pithily, referring to the famously inscrutable (to some) subtitle Jack had given The Remaking since the day he had started writing things down and stuffing them into envelopes:

The roughly circular outline of Jack’s envisioned trip to the Arctic and back was fast becoming the initial rough circular outline of mj lorenzo’s circular ‘mandala’ of words.

Certain zealots actually spent money to have this pithy key to The Remaking’s structure engraved on coffee mugs and tie-die T-shirts. Most pundits would have printed it on lapel buttons and handed them out to friends, had it only fit on a button. That was how excited they had been once they had finally figured it out. Finally: after a year or more of very exasperating joint effort, by 1973 they were beginning to see where The Remaking was headed.

33.  some of Jack’s nature writing that Rev and Jo liked so much

Yet mj had always been fascinated with National Geographic magazine and geography. So Rev and Jo saw the World Book quotation about maps merely as that. Just as, with equal naiveté, they saw the following piece, for example, as a pure nature piece, when Jack meant it not just as that, but also as an artfully subtle reference to other and more critical things:

I can describe my location better by looking at a map, Rev, than by any other method; since I can only be present in one spot at a time, and don't have the means to climb neighboring mountains for an overview. But I can unfold the National Geographic map of Western Canada, after lifting it from its proper corner of my backpack, and can read the place names and imagine my virtually being there. How I would love to paddle my canoe up the pure bright green Bear, which I passed yesterday, to Great Bear Lake; a lake greater in size than the entire eastern half of Pennsylvania from Altoona to Shawnee-on-Delaware; a body of water every bit as large as lake Michigan, yet surrounded and ensconced in absolute and total private wilderness, just as Lake Michigan was before cities were built along it. Imagine how many spronds of Arctic lichen are brushed there daily and delicately by chilling Arctic winds, as they circle bearing bevies of geese, ducks, and quail over rocky lake-strewn pre-Cambrian Canada. Other than the few inhabitants of the usual rare forts, there are no humans at all but a few flown in for luxury fishing at expensive lodges.

The Lorenzos did not see this as ‘horribly boring’, as the pundits after them would. It thrilled them. It caused no shame to a parent, for one thing. And for another: since Jack let it stand without comment, allowing them to naively think it travelogue for now, if they chose to do so (while assuming, as he did, that they would ‘get it’ eventually), then quite naturally, that was exactly what they did. For this was the easier and more enchanting thing to do. They found it convenient to ignore his subtle, because cryptically disguised, hints of beliefs or head games or problems, such as: that he might have been prevaricating about his whereabouts (for: if he found it necessary to look at a map to describe ‘where he was’, then maybe he ‘was not really there’, as Rev and some pundits said later); or, that he might have been fictionalizing about his moving around (since, as he said, he could only be present ‘in one spot at a time’); or, that he might have felt hemmed in by something he was not ready to mention (for, as he said, he did not ‘have the means to climb’; and yet he claimed to have legs, presumably the chief ‘means’ needed).

But I have to convey to you the nature of the place in a way that when I write the word 'humans', you will be startled because you will have forgotten there were any; because on my trip here, day in and day out, I never see a human being except in rare encounters in the wilds, or at ugly forgotten 'forts', those bleak outposts of civilization where a dying Indian race lives off a government dole; yet even they are barely visible now, for, from what I read, in summer they take to the land as their grandfathers did, trying to eke a memory of an existence off elk and caribou herds, which are decimated like themselves; and every year they meet with less success, retiring to such ‘forts’ in the winter to live as they can.

I’ve become the naked lending library of the north, trading in used for new at each post, where I usually don my sleeping bag to be civilized; though it is stained and worn suggestively in spots, and gives away primitiveness against my will, just when I was trying to hide it; and so the missionaries foist clothes on me, but I prefer my own kind of jaunty couture, and trade off their clothing to rare Indians for gasoline, meat and lessons in living.

In this way I’ve learned to catch fish (and eat the eyes raw), to ‘gum’ my canoe and repair its motor; and I hope to master the bow and arrow, but I haven't met a single Indian brave who could teach me it; for most are cringing and dispirited, and they’ve forgotten the special art of adapting to nature; and instead, let white men keep them alive by subduing nature for them.

But I can’t paddle up the green Bear, for there are rapids, according to this map's symbols. I’ll barely make it up the Mackenzie, even with a motor, and with violating my vow to duplicate Mackenzie’s trip to the letter, by doing so. Without the motor, though, I’d never make Slave Lake by freeze-up, let alone Lake Athabasca and Ft. Chipewyan; and, as they say:

JACK as FRO-zen SHAKE in LAKE

DOTH-not A re-MAK-ing MAKE

Meanwhile, I’m followed – and teased – on my right side by the snow-splotched Rockies; partly unexplored; even otherworldly; and stretching off behind me 600 miles as the rare trumpeter swan flies north to the Arctic and Alaskan coast, early in the summer; and 1000 more swan miles south as it flies before me now, into the states. On the left is a secondary ridge of hills that blocks Arctic winds and keeps the valley warm enough to preserve poor unprotected me and the poor taiga stands of spruce, fir and white birch; and also warm enough for the poor naked mosquitoes, on whom, Rev, I’ve quickly spent up most of your appreciated dollars for insect repellent; but without whom the one hundred species of birds could not live, so that – you see – I don't mind. There are always birds, great flocks of them, wheeling overhead: eagles and pelicans; scattered gulls and black ravens; and although they are not migrating south with me yet, there is a cold anxiety in the air with each occasional August snow flurry, with the stronger winds, and the lessening hours of sun, now down to eighteen in a day.

Approaching Wrigley the river is muddier on the western bank than on the eastern. Upstream, tributaries draining the Rockies on this western side of the wide river must be carrying brownish silt from upturned, un-vegetated, prehistoric layers of poorly compressed earth, into the ageless flowing river. The once milk-green Mackenzie River (green being its color before the mud), as I think I remember it from a fugue-like trip down (why is my mind a blank for back then?) is here, after it passes Wrigley, struggling to preserve its original pure green self. Further downstream the river will fight even harder – as I did, coming up, when I went without drinking water from it, for a whole day – because of the oil drilling at Norman Wells; so it can absorb that imperfection too. The poor ol’ Mackenzie is the sole bearer of everything for the North; and occasionally I’m passed by a steamer pushing a long row of barges laden with oil, or provisions for Inuvik and the coast; but I shouldn’t mention this or you’ll think I’m not alone; for here there’s nothing but birds and trees and me, the clouds and sky, and the cold Harlequin river making its bi-chrome way down, as I try to go up; and the darn ubiquitous mosquitoes.

The Mackenzie is 1200 miles long from its icy mouth in the Arctic to its misty source in Great Slave Lake; but its major tributary, the Peace, extends its virtual length another 1500 miles up the foothills and finally – after skirting the Rocky Mountains for all that distance – swerves and penetrates the Continental Divide into British Columbia, where it continues being born in a dozen mountain ranges.

Harlequin  =  The River  =  Dirty and Pure  = ...

XXX!  I know too much about this land now! My curiosity has led me into a tedious and morbid knowledge of the facts, and the country has faded away into lost Indian tribes, ugly deserted villages, and the statistics of geography and natural life which can have nothing to do, however, with how it must feel to be a spruce or caribou. What am I doing to myself by this laborious research, Rev? Didn't I feel better when I knew less and could just read a National Geographic article and dream about the region? Why do I have to make myself unhappy? And yet I know I won't stop, Rev. For when I finally know all there is to know about the Mackenzie, then I think I should like as Alex did to conquer the Peace. But God keep me from ever disturbing it! (Rev, will you please try to have my trip up the Peace, if ever I get to it, published under the title, not of ‘Conquering the Peace’, but of 'Disturbing the Peace'? Much obliged. Jack.)