38. the message for
anyone contributing to mj lorenzo’s problem, especially
Mortimer: change now
or BE changed
Jack’s
‘
(1) the ‘newspaper article’ supposedly
published in the
(2) Jack’s surprisingly sane analysis
of an Almost Revival
at
(3) his Naked Sermon to
Clothed Indians which all of the world’s official
holy bodies condemned as ‘degenerate’, giving it fame.
A
unifying theme, however, could be found, amazingly, threading
its way through these three crazily patched-together quilt
blocks, now noisily, now quietly; and that was ‘self-reforming
change’. Throughout the
And at
the end of this
(4) the pundits’ views on Dr.
Lorenzo’s revolutionary concept of achieving personal change
via Therapeutic Fireworks, a note which was
tacked on – and rightly so – to the end of every printed copy
and version of Fort Simpson produced in the world from 1994
on.
I. The article
in “The
39. all parties but Jo
Lorenzo believed the article was written by Jack
The
heavy air mail package from
Yet no
one needed to have bothered to find out exactly what
the commotion was all about, thought the pundits. That was why
none of them had ever taken the trouble to ask Dr. Lorenzo
about it, once he emerged from private life in 1980. After
all, most literary style analysts who had looked at the
bewildering ‘newspaper article’ during the seventies had said
that no one in the Lorenzo gang but Jack had ever written in
that inflated, grandiose and seemingly nonsensical style. Or
it might have been Mortimer Lorenzo pretending to be
Jack, a few allowed. Except that, according to Jack, Mortimer
had been knocked out of commission during that time, starting
from when Jack had burst out from inside him during the
Crack-Up, blasting him to pieces.
Mortimer
and his rational brain with all of its structure-providing
rules had been blown by lightning electrocution into the
earth’s upper atmosphere in the form of ‘vaporized’ notebooks;
and disintegrated ‘broken’ pledges, covenants, promises,
contracts and laws plus broken human structural tissue in the
form of skin and flimsy backbone, according to Jack. Which
were still floating ever so slowly and lazily downward like
invisible snowflake molecules, and had not completely finished
re-condensing into solid icy flakes of paper and solid
structural tissue yet, let alone whole solid notebooks or
palpable human integument and hard backbone made up of solid,
intact and properly interconnected vertebrae.
And
anyway, as they said, Mortimer usually wrote in a style more
sedate and intellectual, not like Jack’s emotional and run-on
style, not like this very ‘nutty’ ‘article’ and the almost
‘hysterical’ reaction to it from Jack.
It had
to be Jack then who had imagined up the article, just as Rev
too would think, right from the day he got it in the mail.
“Who else,” Rev asked Jo, could have come up
with the far-fetched invention that mj had left Philly ‘with two women friends in
the back seat of’: my
blue Buick Electra?”
“Who
but Jack,” Rev asked again hours later, knowing the answer,
“could have intuited
THAT monkey wrench?” Who else “was that loony
tunes?”
Not
his Mortimer, certainly.
Jo,
protecting ‘her Jack’ as usual, still thought it might have
been Mortimer, of course. Even though he was considered by
Jack to be ‘indisposed’, locked by mistake, as it were, in the
stratospheric bathroom. For that was how she tried to think of
it. Since ‘vaporized’ sounded ‘too final’.
“Mightn’t
Mortimer,” Jo asked Rev, “have pulled himself together for
just five little minutes,” and come out of the heavenly
bathroom and written that “zany” newspaper article, left it in
Jack’s papers and disappeared back into the sky-blue pink
bathroom again?
It
made her “crazy almost,” trying to think in the same exact way
that her “poor crazy Jack” had begun to think. And she
complained to Rev about the way the effort to do so was making
her feel “mentally wobbly.”
In
fact: the very first time Rev and Jo took turns reading aloud
through the very Bizarro contents of the package mailed from
Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories, they looked at each other
aghast – at a certain point – and agreed it was ‘crazier than bat
doo-doo’. And they did the same thing every crazy dang time
they read it thereafter, too. It was falling apart at
the seams with anger! in their opinion. It lacked
cohesion from other causes too, they thought, such as from “addressing too many
topics at once,” for one thing, as Jo practically yelled
with consternation.
Worse
yet, it failed to console a poor parent in any way except with
the news that violence to self, as a theme, had slipped into
the wings for now.
But scenes of
violence in general, meanwhile, had multiplied: a bloody
Christ on the cross popped out of nowhere into the action; and
a bloody Abbie Hoffman’s head decorated the 1968 Democratic Convention in
And
then too, not to forget: there was a bomb in the
package!
40. why the Lorenzos
forgot the bomb
Darn it anyway! They kept
forgetting the bomb for some impossible reason. They felt crazier than
bat guano, almost as brain-lapsed as their son, every time they
realized they had forgotten ‘one more dad-blasted
time’, as Rev said, that their own son had actually sent them a bomb in the
mail !
How
could a sane person forget
such a thing as that and keep
forgetting it, over and over again?! What had happened to
them?
“It’s
all just so unbelievable,”
Jo sighed. And they both wiped their foreheads.
Even
years later whenever they were reminded of this little
incident which they wanted to forget they would take off their
glasses and wipe sweaty grease off their faces with white
hankies, Rev’s torn from a back pocket and Jo’s drawn from her
bosom and really quite pretty with hand-tatted pink and yellow
edges.
“No wonder we always
forget the bomb,” she would say. “It’s an unthinkable thought. How could he
have done it?”
Months
later when mj still
had not returned home, Rev would prepare the material from all
his son’s monthly envelopes and packages for copy machine
publication as a ‘book’, hoping to find his son in this
manner, i.e., by putting mj’s writing on public display,
almost the way the FBI would publish its ‘wanted’ photos. And
Rev would decide to introduce Jack’s
Note:
The shoe-box-package we
received from Jack in October 1970 enclosed a real incendiary
bomb made of gasoline. It was padded with the pages of his
September writing, the following note on top of everything:
shall I meet force with force?
shall I build a Wrigley rocket launcher
and rain verbal bombs of burning
na-
PALM ON O-MA-HA
TUS-CA-LOO-SA AND
SPO-KANE WASH-ING-TON
and then watch the television playback
horror-struck by the results
but righteously inured to the necessity of
my message?
“What
the heck is the poor boy so upset about every day of the
week?” Rev wanted to know.
41. Jack psychomagneto-analyzes
and sociomagnetologizes
himself
The
poor Lorenzos would ask such questions again and again,
bewildered, benighted and be-darned. The source of the poor
boy’s rancor changed in every paragraph, practically; and now
he was back on magnets,
and the way that magnets, or parts of magnets, related to each
other in such nicely balanced and rhythmic ways:
Polarity
of Magnets. Dr.
Gilbert showed that the magnetism of any magnet was stronger
at the ends than at the middle. The end which pointed north he
called the North, or ’N’, pole. The end which pointed south he
called the South, or ‘S’, pole. If the N poles of two magnets
are brought close together, they do not attract each other.
They fly apart as soon as they are released. Two S poles will
do the same thing. But if an S pole and an N pole are brought
together, they attract each other strongly. These facts
allowed scientists to state the law of poles, which says: Like
poles repel each other, and unlike poles attract each other.1
….
(A) bar magnet keeps its poles when it is cut in two.2
These
were, as Rev observed, a benign couple of paragraphs to any sane person reading
them, without a doubt. But
to Jack they had to constitute a call to psychomagneto-analyze,
as Rev said, or psychoanalyze
magnetically, to the nth degree, his very own self,
mj lorenzo, Mortimer AND Jack. And of course Jack had needed
to fluff up the psychomagneto-analysis,
or magnetic
psychoanalysis, with a sociomagneto-logical,
or magnetically
sociological thesis
on how the two sides, Jack and Mortimer, if split off from each
other ‘just like any other crazy dumb iron bar cut in two’,
as Rev loved to put in, would
proceed to relate to each other anyway, under various
conditions. And especially, how they would attract and repel
each other, ‘just like any other two stupid sticks of
metal’, as Rev had to throw in, HEAPING EXECRA on Jack’s
claims, for those claims were becoming ever clearer to Rev.
Lorenzo.
The
bonkers boy was claiming that: (1) the laws of magnetism
paralleled those of psychology, and even (‘God forbid’, as the
Reverend said to his wife) paralleled the laws of international politics.
And he was claiming that, as pundits summed it up later in the
Village Voice and Playboy, both,
insisting this was one of the central points of
The Remaking: (2) “MJ LORENZO WAS NOTHING WORSE OR
BETTER THAN A FUCKED UP MICROCOSM OF THE WHOLE FUCKED UP
MACROCOSM MESS:” Thus Jack wrote:
When Mortimer
Jack was finally sundered in
Depending on
how they turned to look at each other, then, and on how
they turned themselves to be seen, they were alternately
either strongly attracted or repelled.
One of the two
presented himself as ‘Jack’, and when feeling and acting
this way, appealed to Mortimer, if and when this other was
his most Mortimer self. On the other hand Jack, when
turned around and feeling more Mortimer-like sometimes,
hated Mortimer more than ever, wanting him to be more
’Jack’.
Jack and
Mortimer, the expansive and the contractile, had they only
remained simply such, should have been as drawn to one
another as opposite poles of two bar magnets; always.
Jack, when
feeling his most effusive self, and imagining Mortimer to
be his opposite, liked him; but when feeling least
himself, imagining Mortimer to be as emotionally
distraught as he felt, destroyed him, however he could, in
a fit of anger. Mortimer, on the other hand, tried to
imagine his anger out of existence, whenever Jack let his
fly.
While Jack used
his mind in fits and starts, Mortimer concentrated. When
Jack concentrated occasionally, he perceived Mortimer too
well, and disdained him. When Mortimer finally
concentrated and extrapolated on Jack, though, he cut him
to pieces like a jigsaw puzzle, and left him unsolved.
But despite
everything, whenever they were most simply at one with
themselves respectively, they were in love.
Only a
few of the first early readers of The Remaking thought these
blithely contentious lines sane. Some psycho-magneto-analysts
finally made sense of them with time, though. And years later
a physics doctoral candidate at MIT would publish a thesis on
the paragraphs, thanking those ‘obviously insane lines’ (as
Rev had designated them) for helping science uncover new
principles governing how electromagnets made permanent magnets
‘turn in circles’, thereby shedding light on nearly everything in the
universe that rotated or spun, from car engines and
supercomputers to planets and solar systems and universes and
galaxies and even electrons.
42. Jack explodes in
rage over the article about him that everyone but Jo Lorenzo
believes he wrote
Yet
Rev had no idea his son would be famous for all this craziness
one day and he groaned audibly when Jo read him the paragraphs
aloud, barely able to conceal his disgust. ‘Mortimer’ and
‘Jack’ sounded for all the world, suddenly, like two very stupid men. And
the Reverend felt less then flattered by the thought that a
son of his might write something sounding even the least
bit ‘homo’.
And,
as if hearing Rev’s thoughts, Jack wrote:
Rev, did you
have to distract me by writing me here?
Then, as if thinking
the best defense to
offend, Jack went on:
You make me
feel I’m being watched.
Are you going to follow my route on a map and bribe the
Mounties, or Americans, to pounce on me at each new ‘Fort’
I have to enter for supplies? Are you going to torture me
with memories of you and
And, for Jesus’
sake, take back this article. What the devil do you think
they know of me, anyway, these suburban Scribes and
Pharisees? Who asked them for their spying TV cameras?
Rev, you’ve done it again. You’ve introduced anxiety into
my pristine world. Let me do it myself! Don’t send any
mail, no matter how ‘relevant’. Who asked you? How do you
know what’s pertinent up here? Do we have to know all the
gruesome facts? Can’t I remain innocent of something? I
was trying to forget your world and the Crack-Up. And by
the way, stop sending money. Everything I buy with your
money reminds me of you and your judgments.
DAMMIT I was
going to FORGET the CRACK-UP.
Jack
Rev
could not defend himself in any court devised by man, he said,
against such bizarre charges. So, instead, a whole year later,
in October of ’71, when he finally began to prepare his son’s
‘book’ for publication and found himself still upset about
this ‘psychotic’ accusation of Jack’s, he tried to explain
himself to hoped-for readers.
October 25,
1971
Dear reader trying to
help us find our son:
Below is the ‘article’
which my son, Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, said I ‘sent’ him last
September, ‘70. Clearly I never could have sent it, not
knowing where he was, since ‘mj’, as he used to call himself,
was all over the map
at the time, blasted to bits by lightning and a car wreck.
In a way I have gotten
used to such strange letters from him, unfortunately, ever
since his ‘Crack-Up’ occurred. Yet each new one hurts. Is he
reacting to me,
really, or just to some
crazy idea he has of me? Why can’t I write to my own
flesh and blood? Why won’t he just call me on the phone, even
after a whole year? How can I wire him money? What has become
of all the affection we felt for each other? Doesn’t he know
that I haven’t condemned his ‘Crack-Up’, as he always calls
it, never failing to capitalize the ‘C’ and the ‘U’? And as of
his last envelope, which came from
And yet I can not be
angry with him.
Can you please add your
prayers to his mother’s and mine, to help us end this fighting
and separation?
Here is the ‘newspaper
article’ he says I ‘sent’ him:
The
Thursday,
August 1, 1970
Editorial
Comment: “Preacher’s Son Vanishes”
This is to confirm that Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, son
of Rev. John Henry Lorenzo, Methodist pastor of Florence,
County of Burlington, in his father’s familiar blue Buick,
and escorting two unidentified women friends, one of them
of dark complexion, the other dressed in Green and Blue,
has left the area ‘for the time being’. Owing to causes
unforeseen, he, of all good men, has been apparently left
wanting. The spiritual and political vicissitudes
involved, while momentous in his eyes, no doubt, need
clarification in ours. Such clarification is impeded,
however, by factors now easier to pinpoint: he was said to
have said he was struggling in a civil war; but he
declined to reveal which
civil war, and officially at least,
there was no such war in his country at the time.3
Mortimer Jack
was last seen by authorities at the east entrance station
to Glacier National Park on midsummer’s eve, about to head
up the Going-to-the-Sun Highway despite bad weather; but
as for the rest of the story, investigators at the scene,
witnesses, and commentators have all observed that
critical elements of the story are simply lacking. This is
an understatement to say the least. A story as such is nonexistent.
There IS no story. There is only speculation as to
what has happened, and the participants, Mortimer Jack
most of all, not to mention his blue Buick and women, are
still lost in the Rocky Mountain fog.
In TV
interviews relayed here via satellite from Montana, the
former local good boy, Mortimer John ‘Jack’ Lorenzo
(Florence High’s ‘60 valedictorian, with track letters in
pole vault, long jump, etc. etc.), was seen to say that he
himself was not
present at the scene of fighting. This statement has
cast doubt on his integrity of mind, since cameras showed
he was in
And so: We, as
the Clergy, the Elders and the Spokesmen, on behalf of our
bewildered people, would like to know one thing and one
thing only: What meaning exactly lies in this ‘civil war’,
not just for Mortimer Jack himself, but also, and more
importantly, for those of us still back home here in
simple towns like Florence. Most of us (50 per cent of 2)
are inclined to suspect, ‘None’. Others (50 per cent of 2)
insist the question is ‘irrelevant and impertinent’. Those
more constructive (0) claim it’s ‘the start of a new era’,
that ‘anything is now possible’, and that ‘only time will
tell what might come next’.
(These are the results of a live, in-home poll
taken yesterday of our regular
Finally:
whatever comes next, it seems clear Mortimer Jack Lorenzo
himself will not be in it. He has disclaimed involvement
by his attitude, and, as it were, abdicated. In short, he
has left us.
And….: we are
inclined to think…. he has left himself.
(Signed by seven local preachers,
two priests, a rabbi, and by someone illegible, all: 'On
Behalf of The Elders of the Area Free Bible Baptist
Churches; Presbyters Of All South Jersey Bible
Presbyterian Churches, Large and Small; and Spokesmen for
the Roman Catholic Diocese of South Jersey No. 9;
Constituting, As They Do, the Editorial Board of This
Paper’.)
And in
the for-publication version of his son’s monthly envelopes
which Rev prepared in October of 1971, he would insert still
another note at this point in the ‘book’, denying one more
time that he had ever mailed anything to his son:
P.S. I did not send this
or any ‘newspaper article’ to Jack. The first time I saw this
strange ‘article’, it came to me in Jack’s own penmanship, the
same comic-book scrawl ‘Jack’ used all last summer writing me
letters. And the ‘Press’ denies steadfastly ever having
printed anything of the kind. And I never wrote the boy or
‘sent him dollars’ either, as he claims, as much as I might
have liked to, because since June of ’70 his mother and I have
not known where to find him. The Mounties have claimed many
times they never heard of him.
And if I may say so,
frankly, I think Jack must have written the blessed ‘article’
himself.
In
Christ, Rev.
John Henry Lorenzo
43. the Lorenzos get
the ‘great idea’ they might be reading fiction
Now,
it did finally occur to the Lorenzos a few days after reading
through the
‘No’,
he said, it had actually occurred to him for the first time weeks before, that it
was all just fiction,
like a crazy nightmare. But, claimed Rev, this very sensible
idea ‘of his’
had gotten ‘swamped in all the endless wailing and gnashing of
teeth’. And so he claimed credit with his wife for making this
‘great discovery’. For: as he said with a grin surprisingly
convincing, the idea, ‘like so many other Nobel prize-winning
ideas’, was too ‘great’ an idea to have been discovered by one
person only.
It was
‘a great thought’ to the Lorenzos, though, not because they
hoped their son by means of such fiction, if it were fiction, might
make some significant contribution to intelligent discussion
in the world, or help
save mankind from nuclear self-annihilation. For such an
unlikely possibility would occur to them not until at least
ten years later, once they heard the contribution had already
happened. But rather, as Jo explained later, they thought that
the idea of the envelopes being fiction was ‘great’ because:
if mj had been experimenting, merely, with writing a ‘modern novel’, as
she assumed such confusing truck might be properly labeled,
then, as she told Rev (for she hoped it would console him and
prevent a heart attack): “It’s the world that’s crazy, NOT our poor
lost son.”
This
‘great’ idea raised a whole new world of greatly
troublesome issues, however, very sadly, which then led to a great
new kind of disaster in the Florence Methodist preacher’s
parsonage.
If indeed it were fiction, said Rev, after
thinking about it very gravely for about three days, then it certainly was not
very pleasant being on the receiving end of such
fiction. It was not considerate of one’s parents. ‘Was
it?’, he pressed Jo. ‘No matter how you
looked at it’. That was Rev’s comeback, or the gist of
his thinking.
And Jo
was silent, for she could think of no further defense
whatever for her Jack. Not yet, anyway. She had to ‘think some more’,
she said.
Their
roles toward each other regarding their son had changed
suddenly, or something.
Rev
spoke again later. “You would have to be worse than just loony,”
he said rather loudly and out of the blue, “to write fiction in this way.” And
still another twenty-four hours later he added loudly in the
same tone: “And send it to your parents as real.” For he
and Jo had remained in a state of shock, basically, due to the
bomb and what they had read, both. They had not been talking
in a normal way for days. “Sadistic!” he said finally an hour
later yet, after searching for a word the whole time.
“Unless
it was a joke,”
said Jo, inspired as she felt – by this gloom of Rev’s – to
try and see a brighter side than her pastor husband could
find. “Maybe we should be laughing at mj,” she suggested.
“Maybe we missed the joke.”
“It’s
not son-ly to joke with parents like
that,” Rev reacted at once, quite a bit more
loudly and firmly. It was not the bomb he was thinking about at all, of course,
for both of them always forgot
the darn bomb. He meant the dad-blasted writing.
“It offends a
parent. Insults:
is not too strong a word,” he added, quite loudly this time.
Reverend
Lorenzo was trying to avoid showing too much tread-upon
male ego. He tried to show, instead, just enough sort-of-scary
male indignation to have an impact on a too sympathetic
mother. And so he forced himself to downplay how enraged he
would actually be
one day, if it turned out his son had actually been sane the whole time,
after all, not crazy: given
the amount of grief this son had caused by ‘merely
pretending to be crazy’.
IF that was to be the ‘new
theory’.
“I
suppose so,” said Jo, but unconvincingly; for she was feeling
defeated, not by a son this time, but by a husband.
“Maybe
we should be honored,” said Mrs. Lorenzo after a few more
hours, “to be the recipients of such a cruel joke. I really
think he might be trying to lighten us up, John.”
“He’s
crazy!” Rev shouted, exasperated. “Quit making stuff up, Jo.
You’re as bad as he is. You deify him.”
“You
make him a devil,” she complained. “I’m just trying to give
him a chance.”
The
respectable faces they had worn up until now, trying to deal
with the apparently awful situation of their son, had drifted
out the window on some undetected draft, as it were. And now
they found themselves in a new world where dissension befell
them like a plague. And they had not seen the cloud of locusts
swarming darkly toward their house. And so, having had no
warning or time to prepare for this disaster, naturally, they
kept botching their reaction to it. First they reverted to
old, previously useful behaviors and searched for a way to
join up against a reprobate mj; just as they had done before,
back when they had decided to quit arguing about their having
called him different names, and pin the problem on him
instead, on his having consciously decided to stop going to
church. But this time that trick would not work. Their upset was his doing
this time, not theirs. That much they had figured out long
ago. That much was simple to see. But what kind of doing was
it? That, properly stated, was the bone of
contention.
If it
were fiction, as
they preferred and were beginning to accept, rather than insanity, then: was
it an honor, as Jo
said; or an insult,
as Rev complained; to have received that fiction in the mail
before anyone else saw it? They could not agree on this. And
so they came up with no
way to unify the
Many
dark days passed. Dissension ruled, an extremist Protestant
welter of silent disagreement. Neither could back down. Rev
should have done so first, for most of the animus lay on his
side, encumbering his carefully thought out argument with
useless baggage consisting of pure irrational resentment. This
meant that time was on
Jo’s side. And well she knew it. For the longer he held
out, the more it looked like a childish temper tantrum, a male
ego out of control and dangerously close to the edge, and the
more his cause was bound to suffer morally.
It was
of this, precisely, that Jo accused him, in fact, three weeks
into the miff. And he had seen it coming, of course. That was
how it happened that Reverend Lorenzo backed down, finally,
after a fourth week of ‘thinking about it’. He had to resort
to some strange swallowing of words and underwater escape
artistry Houdini-style, but at last he broke free of whatever
whale had swallowed him down there and splashed up intact on
shore, barfing some of the words he had swallowed, just as he
hit the beach:
“Maybe
the problem is ours,”
he spewed, including her as a cause too. And she chose to
thoroughly ignore this gross gesture, fortunately for world
Methodism and peace. “Maybe
we should be laughing,
as you said,” Rev elaborated, to show his good little wife
just how big he could be (and all wet and slippery
too), whenever it came to something involving both of them as
much as their son. “It’s just that it’s hard to laugh at a
perverted joke when it’s aimed at you,” he said
confessingly; and pretty pissedly too, by the way.
“Well
you could pray about it,” she said. “You could think about
praying about it. You could try to forgive him. Maybe you
could get over it. I think he’s chosen us as the first
audience for his first writing. That’s what I’m starting to
think, John. And if I’m right, it’s an honor. We should be
honored.”
“The
first victims of
his writing, more apropos,” said Rev, sighing. “Look what your
little god’s writing has done to our marriage.”
“It
doesn’t upset me like it used to,” she said. “Maybe you’ll
feel the same eventually once you calm down, and then we won’t
be arguing so much any more. Try to forgive him, John.”
“Or
maybe you’ll support your pastor,” he said, still adversarial,
still abusing pastor power, still refusing to back down all
the way a hundred percent by climbing all the way back down to
the humble filthy earth, Christian sword of St. George and
all, from the high horse he had mounted immediately once he
had hit the beach escaping from his whale.
The
rift sat there gaping like a
Not
just Reverend Lorenzo, though, but even a neutral observer
like a later pundit might have wondered to what lengths Jo
Lorenzo might have been capable of letting herself go while
trying to cast her grown boy in the best light somehow. Would
she have gone so far as to give up her faith like Jack had, if
she had thought it necessary, just to help Jack feel properly
supported while trying to ‘find himself’? Rev certainly
thought she would have. She was really pushing his pastor button this
time, the part of him that had to deal with keeping the flock
intact.
“He’s
just trying to find himself,” she said Thursday night at the
kitchen table, as if minister and wife had been talking it
over ever since Sunday without letup, when in fact they had
not been talking at all, about anything whatever, not even
about Wednesday night prayer meeting at their church next
door, which they had forgotten completely due to not talking so hard.
Yet it felt well-timed, for they had argued in their heads. So
Rev was fully prepared with an answer.
“Then get him a shrink,”
he said, his humor returned in a rougher form, with quite a
bit more vehement sarcasm than before, more than a good pastor, meaning a
good ‘shepherd’,
should have shown during a time of flock-fragmentation. For, a
good shepherd
always rose above earthly clamor even when the lead ewe left
her pew to amble in strange pasture. Whereas pastoral sarcasm
frightened the poor
sheep, revealing the shepherd’s frightful bear-like side.
Rev,
though, could not deny he felt righteously indignant
over the ‘offhand’ way Jack tossed the Savior into his
‘risqué’ writing: ‘preaching’ to the
Indians, as Jack called it, when he was no preacher, but the
farthest thing from it. And doing it cute-butt naked, to
boot, right at the
One of the
women blown to bits in the wreck was voluptuous-demure
inflaming mothering-smothering-mother’s-son, Wrigley. And
it is her bones and the other’s, their raiment and the
scent of their perfume, that I have trailed south in my
trek up the Mackenzie.
“There’s
a loony bin awaiting him in Ancora,” said Rev, making Jo frown
at the mean thought of her son in a nearby state mental
sanitorium.
Except
that Jack was not trying
to look sane, of course, as Mortimer certainly would
have been trying to do and always had done to please his
parents. Jack, rather, was simply ‘trying to find himself’,
as his mother had said. Rev’s Mortimer had never given ‘her Jack’ any space,
she knew. That was why Jack found it necessary now to vent
twenty-seven years of pure pent-up boy-spirit in just a few
months’ time. That was why he needed to throw about sixteen of
Mortimer’s morose, brooding, suffering-saintly Wrigley College
notebook passages into the pile of papers for evaluation right
exactly at this point,
since the subject was
still Wrigley, after all.
44. Jack sympathizes
with and cares for Mortimer in the midst of all the turmoil
And
then, right after this plethora of sickeningly introverted,
depressed, life-sapped notebook passages of Mortimer’s,
hand-copied for his parents’ eyes, Jack wrote –
sympathetically, then angrily – several shockingly passionate
and embarrassingly melodramatic pages about his beloved other
half, Mortimer, as if the perennial bore, Mortimer, was worth
saving after all:
Dear folks. Do
you sense the disintegration looming in these paragraphs;
the isolation; the appeal to fantasy persons, but not to
real ones, for help; the self-deprecation and
self-annihilation; the willingness to be displaced by an
alternate person?
Oh, what can I
do for that poor creature that felt like this once and
gave in and cracked up? His voice is crying in the
wilderness still, from peaks of fantastic Yukon mountain
ranges, from the razor’s edge of the Continental Divide,
echoing in the gaps and canyons, dying finally on the
floor of the canoe here, beneath my feet.
my eulogy to
that part of me which has died
or surrendered
or deserted at
the very least
I prepare now
to be echoed back
to offer
respect for
that which was
but is no more
that almost
inhuman determination
that bitter
faith
that
schoolmaster soul I sometimes hated and still do
that pathetic
lack of humor
if he will
come back to me now
I will try and
face him and help him live a little longer
Eulogy to the
Living Mortimer
Wherever he lies
or trails me:
Wherever I must
go to find him.
Breathing is in
order to be.
When I want to
know what really is, I am.
When I am
lonely, I lack.
Will my friend
ever take me back?
With a good
friend, I can see.
Infundibular
Mortimer Jack
Wended his way
to the Pole and back
Pounding the
gun-flak out of his head
Wondering were
he dead.
“Eureka’s the
answer, my friends,” he finally said.
If I were to ask
you your origins, Mortimer
If I were to
beat you to porridge or pemmican
If I were to
rape an incorrigible Indian
Would you wake
up?
Would you know
the difference between me and us
And would you
care from your speeding bus
About your
speeding past?
Live at last.
Jack
Rev
might have had a point about the ‘homo’ possibility actually,
some pundits ventured to opine years later. Maybe Jack had been hiding
something. At the beginning of the summer, when he had first
started writing, he had called ‘Mortimer’ his ‘other side’,
the temporarily lost side of his total personality ‘mj’. Later
he had called Mortimer a ‘brother’, affectionately, or ‘bigger
brother’. And now in this ‘poem’ and ‘eulogy’, three months
later, he was referring to ‘Mortimer’ as ‘my friend’. So here
was arguably, they said, at least a progression toward
separating Mortimer and Jack into two distinct persons,
implied by the language being used anyway. And so it was all
the more understandable Rev had thought such unpleasant
thoughts, and had wondered who Jack was talking about in
reality, himself, i.e., a part of himself, or an outside
party, like some secret, unnamed, beloved ‘friend’ or lover.
A few
pundits expressed such an opinion anyway, quite a bit later.
But for a first-time reader of The Remaking, said most mj
lorenzo experts, more than enough trip and year were still
left, as of this point in the story (the ‘Fort Simpson
package’), for answering such a question: simply by studying
the rest of The Remaking yet to come.
1 The World Book
Encyclopedia Vol. 11 ‘M’ (Chicago: Field Enterprises,
Inc., 1956), p. 4710 col. b, par. 3.
2
Ibid., p. 4713, col. a, par. 1.
3 This line was forever quoted by the early Remaking pundits as ‘proof’ that one of the things upsetting Jack Lorenzo most in 1970 had been the Vietnam War. He was so extremely worked up about it, they claimed, that he could barely mention it by name the entire Remaking year. The so-called ‘psych pundits’ even claimed that he was so emotionally traumatized by his country’s prosecution of the ‘illegal and immoral’ war in Vietnam that for many months at a time he was unable to barely even remember the source of his emotional undoing, and that was why he only mentioned Vietnam by name once or twice in the Remaking writings he sent home that year. Later an entire school of Remaking interpretation grew up around the notion that mj lorenzo had gone to Canada to flee the draft and escape forced induction as a doctor; so in the year 2000 Dr. Lorenzo shared with the world a copy of the letter he had sent his draft board requesting 1Y (conscientious objector, i.e., pacifist on religious grounds) status early in 1970. And he explained that he had not had to go to Vietnam because he had been granted 1Y status; but had been unaware of this draft board response until he finally returned home at Christmas of 1971 and his father handed him his mail.
Later, in the
year 2000, the Dr. confirmed that a chief source of his
extreme emotional upset in 1970 had been the illegal
Remaking
pundits claimed once again that mj lorenzo’s intuition was
‘right on’ when it came to
Eventually students of mj lorenzo's The Remaking were able to find many more
references to Vietnam than even the early Remaking pundits had
noticed. What about the very first poetic mini-tirade of the
Fort Simpson package, for example: "Shall I rain verbal bombs
of napalm?" This was nothing but anti-war language of the
Vietnam years. In which war was the USA's use of napalm so
famously controversial? Vietnam! Napalm bombs, by the way,
were and still are a variety of gasoline bomb, which helps
explain why, in the Fort Simpson 'package', a big shoe or boot
box, Rev and Jo found not just the usual envelope of writings,
but also a gasoline bomb. (See Encarta article, "Napalm.") As his ire rose
and rose, bombs real and figurative were on Jack's mind, and
he knew that his parents, like most Christian conservatives,
supported the Nixon administration's prosecution of the war in
Vietnam as a means of preventing, hopefully, the spread
of atheistic Communism all over Southeast Asia, a
foreign affairs approach mj and his generation despised and
ridiculed; since it denied the people of Southeast Asia the
U.S. Constitution-declared 'human right' of determining their
own fate, right or wrong, Christian or atheist, democratic or
totalitarian, capitalist or communist. To mj's left-leaning
generation it was the height of hypocrisy to praise and adore
the U.S. Constitution everywhere we went all over the world,
and at the same time to behave internationally like tyrannical
warmongering barbarian children, willing that the
Constitution's declared human rights be applied only
selfishly, within the borders of the elite U.S.A.
