…for him ever to look at again; fix; talk about in public; or deal with period. He had not planned it or seen it coming in October of ’70 certainly, but so it had turned out.

And the impossible ‘bugger’ had even demanded to be left alone and just as it was: ‘with silent clamor’, the Dr. added, like ‘a miserable puppy refusing a bath’, but ‘too precociously wise at its fledgling age to whine like any other puppy’. It just looked at you with ‘those big baby eagle eyes’, and that must have been why Jack had never been able to look at the thing even as much as one more time before mailing it off to his parents un-cleaned up, and why, once known to everyone in the street, it had always felt to him like the most ‘tyrannically aloof’ member of his Remaking ‘off-(al)-spring’ pack.

Yet all this did not mean that it was okay to forget that miserable monster of a bird-puppy called the Fort Resolution envelope or ‘drop it off at the ABPA, the Awe-ful Bird Puppies Asylum’, as the Dr. said, just because it was ‘sad and stand-off-(al)-ish’. It was ‘indispensable’ to his remaking and had to be ‘let back in’ every time it wanted a little attention.

63.  the sad and legendary Fort Resolution ‘study group’ and what they found

Most of Fort Resolution’s early pundit readers, too, complained that it made them sad. And they emphasized that it did so ‘inexplicably’. For it frustrated them that they could not figure out immediately why it did so. And maybe they sensed the whole time that they would not like the explanation if and when it came to them.

But gradually, as communication among readership increased during the early 70s, some understanding grew as to why Fort Resolution made almost anyone who read it weep in a silent inward way.

One of the very first informal Remaking study groups ever formed, not surprisingly, therefore, was a co-ed mix of Penn undergrads and sundry older pundit friends who met in the second storey lounge of the women’s dorm at 34^th and Walnut in the fall of ’73, with the sole purpose of listing as many ‘credible and appropriate’ reasons as they could find, as to why Fort Resolution made everyone so mysteriously morose.

Reasons like ‘My Aunt Harriet died forty five years ago in Fort Resolution, NWT, while on a naked canoe trip’ were to be disallowed, as handbills floating around campus said. In other words, as participants explained later, since those attending would be forced to stick with ‘credible and appropriate’, and not goof off, they would have to anticipate that the meeting in and of itself might predictably make them all sad, and that the sadness might prevent work on the problem. They would score no date that night. That much was sure.

But they bit the bullet and met and came up with a short list of reasons why, probably, the chapter made people sad, when everyone suddenly got so oppressed with grief the meeting broke up morosely and never reconvened in the history of humanity to date. Known history, anyway.

'Hovering over Fort Resolution', they concurred unanimously in an informal publication that became legend overnight, 'was an atmosphere of impending massive loss’. And they even had begun a list of the things about to be lost: (1) the end of summer; (2) the end of Jack; (3) the end of nature, “unless you considered the upcoming months-long forty-below white-out to be ‘nature’;” (4) the end of very lively, elevated mood, i.e., mania and/or hypomania;¹ (5) the end of human instinct and intuition, divination, scenting out, and psyching out; (6) the end of human animal primitiveness and childlike naked innocence; (7) the end of speed, the stimulant drug; (8) the end of freedom…

And when they all heard the words ‘end of freedom’ and saw it was true, having read The Remaking, each one at least several times; and when they took note that they had never even thought of it until then; and when they wrote it down on the list, and saw it lined up with the first seven losses; and when it registered how many other ‘reasons’ must have been overlooked until now, maybe all as whopping as ‘the end of freedom’, they just simply quit. Got up and walked out.

Probably ninety more huge tragic losses like ‘the end of freedom’ could have been found, they realized afterward, like ‘the end of delicious insanity’, or ‘the end of getting along just fine without Mortimer’, ‘the end of naïve and delighted discovery’, ‘the end of poetry’, ‘the end of everything human’, etc. But who cared? ‘The end of magic’; ‘the end of healing’; ‘the end of magical healing’: none of it mattered. ‘The end of freedom’ was the last straw.

It was far too much for anyone to lose, way too sad to discuss and pointless to dwell on, everything being so obvious. And they went home bummed out for several weeks just thinking about the implications, which were a damn bummer. The implications of Fort Resolution could turn the world upside down, or so it felt. And nobody wanted to think about it. Most who stopped to think about Fort Resolution for any more than a second in a serious way were literally afraid to go on.

Jack, these early pundits said, had been the first one to discover, intuitively, and in such a beautifully brilliant, even playful, animal-instinct way, the wonderful but tragic paradigm of the way he and Mortimer had always interacted in the past. That discovery had been a gift to mankind. And now it was going to happen again, they complained. Mortimer was going to put walls around Jack and choke the life out of him one more time. Was this not true? Had Mortimer not always done as much up until now? Why should it be different this time? No one wanted to think about it. It made everyone mad over the years. Everyone.

Even the few perennially obstreperous Mortimer-lovers, those ‘reactionary’ Remaking pundit cliques, those tiny cells which came to be famous eventually like the ones in New Haven, Princeton and Palo Alto, those who always promoted and praised Mortimer, acting obnoxiously nerdy just to get negative attention: even they were angry about Fort Resolution. Whereas nobody would ever shed a tear when Mortimer died. Somebody might stage an official parade and fly flags at half-mast, and some women might wear black, but nobody would cry. Had anyone cried when Nixon resigned? No. Not even his wife, Pat. Not even when he called upon his experience as a young campus actor, picked up his puppy and held him for the camera, trying to make everybody in the world cry. Nobody cried when Mortimer left at the end of Part II of the Remaking, either. Not even the few silly Mortimer-lovers. They laughed hilariously to see him go, in fact. It was never Mortimer that people sincerely loved and missed in his absence, only Jack.

After all, hadn’t every reader in the world enjoyed a beautiful summer with Jack? The Lorenzos had hardly cherished the fun, of course. Least of all poor Rev. But everyone else in creation had, even Jo at times. And now Jack had to give way to Mortimer, one more darn time, as the early Remaking pundits would moan to each other.

64.  sad Fort Resolution the official litmus test for determining who could be a ‘legitimate Remaking pundit’

The Fort Resolution envelope thus became one of the biggest challenges to the first students of The Remaking, as well as to almost anyone who followed in their punditrizing or reading footsteps in later years.

Fortunately a certain value was placed on this crucial turning point in The Remaking by those first few serious students. Anyone who could not intelligently and calmly address ‘Fort Resolution’ could not be considered a serious ‘student’ or ‘pundit’ of The Remaking. Appropriately, and rightly, the earliest punditry whizzes recognized that persons unwilling to come to terms with the implications of this section must not be serious students of mj lorenzo’s writing, and ‘could not speak about it with any authority’.

Dr. Lorenzo in time thanked the early pundits for all these ground rules, and confessed they had done him and the world a favor. For he had been in no position to govern his readership, nor would he have wanted to be, of course. He could barely govern himself, let alone them, he said with a smile the very first time he met a few of his followers at the Philadelphia airport in 1980. These early pundits did everyone a favor who came after them, in fact, he stated officially later, by laying down a critical and correct standard of scholarship early in the history of Remaking scholarship, helping to establish a fitting moral tone for future study: namely, anyone unwilling to look pain and sadness squarely in the face could hardly be a serious student of The Remaking, or talk about it intelligently or with any authority.

65.  the ‘true but sad’ meaning of Fort Resolution

This stunning discovery of the true meaning of Fort Resolution was difficult for the Dr. when it first hit him in the later eighties, because he had tried so hard at times to see himself, mj lorenzo, as a joke, a joker, a kind of hilarious Coyote figure.² And a lot of sad, sad things about mj were indeed worth a chuckle or guffaw. The whole world knew it. But the Dr. had to admit, when forced to look at his own crazy world in the way his pundit following did, that he had never been able to squeeze even the slightest smile out of Fort Resolution. It fought him with all its might like some kind of ‘growling, drooling, nastily barking, convincingly-lethal wing-ed Cerberus’, he said, ‘soberly standing guard over the most sacred truth in the universe’.

So he thanked his faithful pundits for having helped him finally understand better the mystery of his own underground blockbuster.

And rightly so, said the critical press; for after all, Dr. Lorenzo’s not having had a thorough understanding of Fort Resolution had helped contribute to the world-famous insecurity he had always hated so, that famous self-doubt that would hit him again and again, all his life, inexplicably, that awful feeling that perhaps he did not or could not or would not ‘remember’ ‘correctly’ why he had written the darn book. In fact, as of 2005, he still felt he might have missed something: as if further mysterious inchoate answers might still be lurking deep within Fort Resolution which had never been brought to light sufficiently, even yet.

66.  yet the ‘true meaning’ could not be found on the page

The heavy importance of the section amazed its author and his irrepressible pundit coterie for yet another reason: that it had never existed on the page.

But this they came to understand as simply another example of how The Remaking operated in its original form; how that crazy-quilt patchwork hit you; how mj’s sketchy, understated, mandalic word collage left so many open spaces for the reader to fill in. The Fort Resolution chapter did not proclaim any loud warning to the reader, as maybe it should have, such as:

THIS IS THE LAST TIME IN THE LIFE OF MJ LORENZO THAT THE WORLD, INCLUDING POOR MJ HIMSELF, WILL EVER GET TO SEE THE SIDE OF HIM WE HAVE ALL COME TO LOVE AND KNOW AS PURE UNMITIGATED ‘JACK’, WITH ALL HIS WILD, PRIMITIVE, WINSOME CRAZINESS AND GUTSY, INSTINCTUAL CHARM, AND ALL OF IT WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST COMPROMISING SUBSERVIENCE TO BORING WESTERN HIGHER THOUGHT OR RELIGION.

JACK, AFTER 27 YEARS OF BEING SUPPRESSED TOTALLY, HAS MANAGED TO WIN FOR HIMSELF AND ENJOY TO THE HILT EXACTLY FOUR MONTHS OF UNTRAMMELED SELF-EXPRESSION. AND HE DOES LEAVE BEHIND HIM ‘OFFAL-SPRING’, GRANTED. BUT NOW HE MUST SUCCUMB.

JACK WILL RETURN AGAIN, BUT ONLY IN ALTERED FORM AS PART OF THE NEW MJ LORENZO AFTER SPRING BREAK-UP. AND HE WILL HAVE MORE SAY THAN IN THE OLD MJ. BUT TRAGICALLY HE WILL NEVER AGAIN HAVE ANYTHING NEAR THE ABSOLUTE FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION HE HAS ENJOYED THIS SUMMER.

There was no explanation or warning of this kind anywhere in mj’s original Remaking, observed the early pundits. Not a word. Yet it was true. But the fact might be recognized only after a reader attained thorough knowledge of the work. Reading it the first time you might sense a tragedy brewing in the wings at Fort Resolution, but you could not name what the tragedy might turn out to be until long after reading The Remaking in its totality once or twice at least. Because scarcely could one guess that Jack was about to be replaced by Mortimer, and less yet, what that replacement might signify. 

This explained why when you came to Fort Resolution and began reading it for the very first time you were half-fooled into thinking you were reading the same old kinds of things as in Jack’s preceding missives to his parents: neurotic excerpts from Mortimer’s notebooks; poetic reactions from Jack; corny quotes from Band Programs; gutsy theology from Jack; etc. But at some point while reading Fort Resolution – though not before a total first or second reading, usually – a pall dropped and the realization hit -- : that Jack was about to be replaced by Mortimer.

And what reader ever wanted Mortimer to take over The Remaking and dominate mj lorenzo? Readers of the original Remaking, traumatized by having waded neck-deep through several endless, soul-suffocating bogs of quotes from Mortimer’s notebooks, all came away suffering little affection or sympathy for the one who had created them. Mortimer was not lovable because he was not human and not animal, either one. He was depressed; neurotic; overly intellectual; and tiresomely rule-obsessed. That was the fact, sadly.

All of the rich, lovable animal-mammalian humanity in mj lorenzo lay on Jack’s side of the mj equation. This meant that Resolution was also the end of love; the end of true humanity within and between humans; the end of canine pet company. The pall that dropped was a terrifying one, even if and when you had come to comprehend that Jack would be back in the spring. Because: true, he would be back, in a new form; BUT: would we really love Jack in his new form as much as we had loved that rambunctious puck in Part I?

Thus the real message of Fort Resolution could scarcely be found within its pages. Some early pundits likened the experience to reaching the end of Proust’s enchanting childhood in Combray, then reading on for thousands and thousands of pages, constantly looking for charm like that of Combray and never finding it. Since the world of the adult Proust was never anywhere near as delightful as the world of the child Proust. No warning was offered the reader of that imminent let-down either.

Or they said it was like delighting in Tom and Huck and their whimsy and suddenly, after a few chapters of dionysian cat-poisoning romp, having to attend their joint funeral, not a mock one but a real one, weeping and wailing, and having to actually bury those two immortal boys in coffins, with sprinkling of dirt and all, right down to throwing carnations and then, as one clever group of early pundits put it, having to ‘still keep reading another twice-as-many chapters about the boring mental machinations of the depressed freaking preacher that had just killed and buried Tom and Huck, who was named Dr. Mortimer Scrooge’. You would laugh at Dr. Scrooge any chance you got, they said, but you would much rather laugh your life away at Tom and Huck. And so, from the second reading on and ever thereafter, the last chapter of romp before the funeral would always be, as the pundits put it, ‘a super drag to read’ for all those experienced readers who knew in advance what was left unstated: that, namely, ‘all of this wonderful whimsy would soon give way to pallor’.

67.  hints of the pallor to come

On the other hand, some pundits felt that a certain few paragraphs in the envelope might be said to give tiny hints – maybe – as to the imminent loss that Jack was feeling and trying to hide, heroically. Jack never discussed the matter openly any more that John Wayne would have, so no one could know exactly how much he might have foreseen, therefore. But it could be argued that he appeared to have at least intuited or sixth-sensed looming disintegration or subjection, judging from a certain few paragraphs, those for example where he reacted further to the self-effacing, super-Christian hype on Mortimer’s Band Program from Wrigley:

In Band we seek to rediscover the unity which comes from the knowledge that Christ, not our own self, lives within us, that our music is for His glory, not ours.

No nobis Dominum,³ the expression St. Paul used, Rev, meaning ‘Christ (Mortimer) is a sword and a shield to guard me’ (guard Jack; mj), or rather, more extremely, that Christ (Mortimer) replaces and fills me (Jack; mj) literally, living within me (Jack; mj): such a self-effacing approach to life may be the very notion that originates my (Jack’s; mj’s) frantic duality and search for myself (my real Jack and mj).

If I (mj lorenzo) do not live within myself (mj), then who does? (If I [mj] do not live within myself [mj], then where do I [mj]?) If I (mj) am not writing these lines, then who is? If I (mj) can blame “Christ” for my goodness, then I (mj) can accuse the devil or the communists or Democrats of causing my (mj’s) mistakes. If I (mj) do not live my own life at Wrigley, then Wrigley (Mortimer) lives it for me, and later, perhaps, in a shock of discovery (how?) of who I (mj) truly, truly am, truly: I (mj) explode like a nuclear warhead.

Now in my curious lack of definition I (mj as Jack) must collect the pieces of this self (Mortimer) from their fall-out onto rivers and mountains. Lacking boundary and definition I (now as Jack) must reconstruct myself (mj, especially Mortimer) from diffusion onto characters in books and myths and band programs.

Where is this creature (mj) they once tried to supplant with Christ (i.e., with Mortimer)? If he (mj as Mortimer) is no longer inside me and a part of me, then he (mj as Mortimer) is outside somewhere, floating about, preparing a new assault.

From what did they protect me (mj) but a part of my own self (Jack)? And why was I (mj) subject to their veiled attack?

Is it this strange me (Mortimer), which has split the western scene and then scattered, that I (mj as Jack) am seeking to collect and re-direct by a north woods retreat?

This is the body (Mortimer’s), I (Jack) believe, I (Jack) must eat (in remembrance) to make mine (mj’s).

And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth.⁴

68.  Fort Resolution infuriates and depresses Rev Lorenzo too

Such outrageous notions – and especially these lines perverting the crucial truth of the communion or mass, the line poetically replacing Christ’s fleshly body with Mortimer’s shattered and vaporized one, and proposing that as it re-incarnated from vaporized into solid flesh it should be eaten ‘in remembrance’ by Jack – should have made Rev fear for his son’s sanity. But instead it infuriated him. Not surprisingly. And after that it depressed him.

His son misappropriated scripture. He twisted it with false-poetic and sacrilegious license. The Church, not long ago, would have publicly executed anyone expressing such thoughts, burned him at the stake slowly over fresh green saplings to drag it out excruciatingly to everyone’s delight. And again Rev could not say it aloud, but he thought he heard homosexual references.

And on top of this disgrace, in the next paragraph Jack shot Prof Platz, the director of the Wrigley College Concert Band, whom Jack had looked up to. He did it on paper, only, of course. But it disgusted Rev nevertheless. It was tasteless and senseless and his son was a shining light to no one any more.

The poetry was lost on Rev, but it was not lost on Jack, to whom the murder (on paper only) was another prankish yet purposeful part of an ongoing grand effort to shake Mortimer free of his mental moorings once and for all, nothing more sinister than that. Jack had to keep trying shocks of every kind. No shock so far had been big enough to remake mj to Jack’s satisfaction. Mj lorenzo’s remaking was far from accomplished. The roots of dehumanizing Christian hyper-religion resisted extraction, as did the philosophical roots of Mortimer’s depressive personality and of his depersonalized Western-world way of living.

Jack was convinced by now that mj’s serious personality imbalance was not caused primarily by him, Jack. More and more his tirades were aimed at Mortimer, therefore, not at Rev and Jo only. Because increasingly he sensed Mortimer was coming back together; was hovering; and was ‘listening’ and about to take mj over. And Mortimer did not know ‘shytte from Shinola about remaking shampoo’, as an Irish kid-pundit from a West Philly Catholic high school put it.

69.  why analyzing Fort Resolution made everybody feel bad

But analyzing Jack’s Fort Resolution envelope in this kind of typical and usual way went nowhere with experienced Remaking pundits. Such observations might be true and clever, but if you knew The Remaking like your own heart and approached this part of mj lorenzo’s ‘written work of genius’ thinking such thoughts, you felt like you were ‘eating cake at Calvary’, as the Sunday School pundits said. ‘Theologizing out loud at the foot of the cross with Christ hanging on it in agony’, they called it. It stuck in your craw. Many a pundit in a Remaking discussion had attempted to say just the right thing about Fort Resolution, often along exactly such lines, only to find his audience yawning and squirming and drifting out of the room.

70.  interpreting Jack’s ‘wanting’ to reunify with Mortimer

Furthermore most pundits felt after years of study that Jack did not really with all his heart ‘long for Mortimer’, or ‘wish to be reunited with his lost half-self’, even though he had written such things increasingly starting back before Fort Simpson. He could not wish such, they said. It was impossible for him to want such things. It was contrary to his nature. A wolf in the wild acted in keeping with his nature. Jack wrote these things, they proposed, maybe because he was running out of his addicting amphetamine Benzedrine ‘Bennies’, was exhausted, penniless and starving, and knew Mortimer was about to come back and take over and might know how to get money, food, and/or speed in some form. Or: Jack wrote down these things so as to go beyond himself – maybe – but, if so, only for the sake of preserving and bettering mj; for the sake of peace with a returning Mortimer. But that did not mean it was what he, Jack, really wanted if he could have had anything in the world, just thinking of himself, Jack.

Jack Lorenzo had spent the best years of his life deferring to an intelligent superego named Mortimer who had hidden behind a mask of cardboard, a fake persona in which an ounce of humanity was yet to be found. Jack had not needed or wanted Mortimer’s intellect or rules. Ever. His summer had proven this, most pundits felt. He could have lived much better without Mortimer’s intellect and rules. Nor did he look forward to Mortimer’s Western civilization in Fort Smith, with its hospitals, churches, schools, Utilidors, Inuviks, Mounties, ‘or whatever’. Jack Lorenzo was a human animal with little or no rational intellect, something -- again -- between a chimpanzee and a child. And he was virtually manic. Like a puppy just waking from a nap. No manic ever wanted to give up mania. Jack wanted to live forever, and live exactly as he had this summer, lonely or not. What animal, human or otherwise, and true to its self, would have wanted anything else?

71.  the one and only sad thing to keep in mind while reading Fort Resolution

If you read every paragraph that Jack stuffed into his Fort Resolution envelope, said mj lorenzo’s most expert and respected interpreters, keeping in mind just this one thing, while forgetting all other interpretations and thoughts, then you could ‘hear’ the unspoken funereal message of Fort Resolution: Jack did not want to yield control of mj lorenzo to Mortimer. Almost every single one of the thousands of Remaking pundits world-wide agreed on this point by 2005.

That was why they said as well: in his very next paragraph it was Mortimer whom Jack wanted dead, not himself. And the pundits inserted (in parentheses) mj’s three names and identities into these paragraphs, in order to explicate the statement fully for everyone:

…Somewhere in my (Jack’s) retreat I (Jack) want an instant change of make-up (for mj) such as in this life occurs only definitely, as I (Jack) can see it, with death. Yet the death of Prof Platz on paper has only helped me (Jack; mj) a little. Maybe I (Jack) know now why I (Jack) entered the Arctic permafrost in the first place: to die myself (Jack? Mortimer?)… and after that, I (Jack) think, to be reborn (Jack? Mortimer?) remade (mj).⁵

Why do I hear Abbie Hoffman’s laughter as I write this, echoing in the concrete streets of New York or Chicago? Is he mocking what he considers to be my futile confused escapism? Abbie, I know you can laugh at yourself, and I cannot presently. But you take your laughter too seriously, too. You stake your success on self-derision. Yes, you take your laughableness seriously. What you need is to laugh at your penchant for mocking yourself; then you won’t need to heighten your self-abuse with killer drugs. Do you think my trip to the north is a pleasure? What about these festering cuts and scratches, what about the bleeding mosquito bites? Are your night-stick injuries superior? Will you disdain the underground voice of a dead or routing compatriot? I obtained these marks to cast perspective on yours: may my clotted spiritual red reveal your throbbing political black and blue for what they really are. Keep trying, Abbie, but quite frankly, drop dead… and be reborn. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.⁶

Matthew 4:17   “From that day Jesus began to proclaim the message, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is upon you’.”

Jesus.  Maybe that’s what landed ‘upon’ the Buick.

while I

Jack

am imprisoned within your mind and Mortimer’s and Wrigley’s

Rev

your world and your church waxing rich and powerful

need not account for me

but forgetting me you forget yourself

your hidden other self

your self-doubt

self-hate

and self-destruction

until without realizing

you destroy yourself in a fiery explosion

and are reborn in my generation

setting out to conquer the world

you are conquered instead by your own flesh in protest

escaped from your prison

triumphant having conquered you

I wait in Canada

fashioning firebombs in exile

waiting for you to invite me back

to face and forgive and listen

sullen

rejected

collecting myself

I wait to be collected

God’s country

astronaut country

land of good and plenty

come and get me

and come and get yourself thereby

you have shunned me until I have grown inward

like a gnarled blighted vegetable

you

in your sterile space suits and Cadillacs

in your clean ranch houses and Chris Craft yachts

you in your shiny B-52’s and jet phantoms

and you the bright inventors of gleaming clean precise

anti-personnel bombs

who live in impeccable East Coast and California houses

indifferent to REAL rebirth

it is your voice that you hear from far off in the frightening darkness

crying from the mouth of a deserted cabin in your alter-ego Canada

in a region of wonderful horrifying primitive wilderness

that you do not know

where you have not been

here where there is no landing strip for your clean machine

no traitor but your own child

where the mythologic sun

invisible to you

burns truth into his veins without your apprehension

and drives him to conclusions befitting of his cataclysmic way of life

and foreign to your own

from here he shouts to you

you hear yourself shouting

to BE free

to GO free

to BE free

not to extinguish yourself in a pacification program

but to be peace

not to work at peace

but to be at peace

you have tried artificially to pacify yourself

so you do not yet know that peace (myself)

is there within you

and you do not yet know that you (through me)

are free

that freedom is (by making peace with me)

what you are

and you do not yet understand

why I was once so self-abusive

but am now self-confident

for you have not proposed yourself the questions I have

and because you have created me to ask questions for you

and then have tried to exile

forget

and finally destroy me

I will not be forgotten, exiled, or ever destroyed

I will become more seductive

as you have become more aloof

I will become a whirlpool when you are becoming like rock

when I exceed in my devices what your conscience will allow

when my vague allusions are integrated aptly by you

and you cut me off and tell yourself that I am in a foreign country

out here

wandering about

not you

then I shall pursue you with my (your own) hidden voice

cursing and insulting you

you sterile profligate bum you

listen to me

as I come to you

come to me

and make peace with me before I disturb yours beyond repair

yet for what you and Mortimer have done to me

Rev

I accept the blame myself

for I allowed it to happen

it is I who now would make it good for us

fully and finally

in this confession and appeal I confess to you

who I (you) have been

in dissipating grandiosity trying to get my feet back on the ground

I confess to you

who now I am

I appeal to you expansively

to take me to yourself again

                         Jack⁷

Band Tour Highlights the Year

It’s Easter break! A sheaf of directions, a flurry of last-minute preparation, and we’re on the road!

Illustration: French hornist riding jubilantly two overturned tympani atop a cartload of Wrigley-College-Concert-Band-decaled bags and instruments on a train station platform somewhere past the Mississippi, but still a little this side the Rockies, with various other Band members loitering in the wings, presumably lending moral support from a distance, presumably each filled with the spirit of Christ.

These tours are unforgettable experiences, full of new places seen, old friendships deepened, and lessons freshly learned. We suddenly see the results of a year of labor and prayer.

If the Backbone of the World is the Rockies, Rev, then the ‘shoulder’ of the Rockies on which I later stand to observe them is nothing but Mortimer’s outstretched and hilarious waving arm. Mortimer is the one, that is, who has fallen like regrouping molecules from the sky to be plastered across the western plains and mountains, his feet and primitive tail dragging toward the Arctic, his expanding head in Mt. Hungabee, his shoulder resting on adjacent Wenkchemna like Jesus in the lap of the Madonna, and his exposed spinal cord writhing up and back from north to south in crucified anger and horror at a sick and postured past. This is the early and still bumbling Christ that was in and around me: Mortimer; who has been blown to bits to scatter like shrapnel his twisted body parts across the continent and my way.

Then: is it this imperfect Christ (Mortimer) or I myself (Jack) that I am remaking? Is it he or I myself that had to die to be reborn?”

This very last paragraph, said the pundits, suggested that Jack knew ‘in some form’ of his impending departure and ‘death’, wishing it could have been Mortimer’s departure and death. The knowledge, they said, was not conscious, however, but instinctual; premonitory; i.e., sensed via premonition.

A spring concert, the Band Banquet, final exams, a commencement concert – and the year is over! A new slate of officers begins looking for replacements for departed seniors.

This is where YOU enter the picture. May we take this opportunity to invite you to join us at Band Camp this fall… For details see the enclosed letter. Thank you.

72.  the ‘get-well scrapbook’ and unfunny remainder of Fort Resolution

A raucous and abrupt close to Mortimer’s band program, those little inspired Concert Band Program notes which had kept Rev and Jo company for the entire very loud one-man horn concert they had suffered for way too long now, should have warned them that something was finally ending and something else new and contrary was finally about to come, something quieter and closer to what they considered normal, maybe even a little civilized, for once. Any ‘decent’ and ‘normal’ and ‘nice’ person might have hoped for calm and routine by now.

And therefore the giant get-well ‘card’ that came next in the envelope, actually a series of big scrapbook pages plastered with magazine cutout collages, did indeed give Jo a start, making her sense the civilizing presence of a woman in the neighborhood of ‘her Jack’, maybe a woman he had not written about yet.

Unless it was ‘that Indian woman’ he had said he would ‘spend the winter with at Fort Chipewyan’, just to crazily copy his hero, Mackenzie!

To Mortimer, a Loyal Band Camper:

The other day I looked and you weren’t playing your

magazine cut-out of French horn

and I was

turn page

SAD!

picture of lovely girl’s face filling an 8.5X11” page with one lonely inch-long tear creeping down her lonely left cheek

turn

I opened your

cartoon of one thin, medium height, brown-haired and pale-faced frowning college student wedged into an open locker

but you were not in there

turn

I looked

craggy mountain peaks

high and

billowing sea waves

low

turn

I even tried

a host of close-up ugly glowering army sergeants with hell-bent determination carved into their square mugs

just in case, but no luck

turn

then someone told me

hospital patient with ENTIRE BODY IN PLASTER CAST AND TRACTION

turn!

I was GLAD!

lovely laughing face of same girl licking ice cream off her pretty finger

to know you will soon be back and before long you will be WITH US!

Love,

From each and every individual member of the Band.

P.S.   Hurry back!

Had some beautiful Indian princess in the garb of a Wrigley co-ed written that to Mortimer and disguised it as a gift from everybody, attempting to dilute her love? Or was it truly ‘from the whole band’?... I am going to believe that it was… both.

Here in the lakes and forests north of campus, I am allowed to ask and believe what I please, if it fits and makes me feel better.

But should a beautiful girl be GLAD, hearing that I – or Mortimer –  was incarcerated in a plaster cast?

...................

I have inserted these band mementoes and the pages of my old journals, Rev, and have written you these things merely because they were there inside me, begging for recognition; and I think you should know, perhaps because you may never have felt this way, or may not have realized… the way my universe has been split down the middle and blown up.

These words were written for you, Rev, back in your electro-pastel surge to the suburbs. I have suffered this explosion hoping to sneak in and shatter your futile rapport with TV, to bring you to a realization of the FACTS. Did you know that your own son had gotten this way and was dying to let you know? Do you read my letters alone in the night when the Church isn’t looking? As they sink into your brain, you should gradually feel that I am somehow you yourself (you profligate sterile bum, you, you sickly Mortimer-prototype), that I am the self of yourself you have always avoided.

Were you appeased by Mortimer’s use of religious phraseology? He used to overwork certain words and emotions. But the time has come to laugh at false piety and go free, and to do this, I (Jack) am returning his embarrassing former sorrow to you in the mail, as: “Mortimer’s Sorry Notebooks.” Let his words mollify your good demon (me, Jack, as I creep back into you), not to exorcise him (me, Jack) surely, but to love him (me, Jack), not to subjugate, but to incorporate him (me, Jack). Let me (mj) into your frozen sterile world, Rev, just as I am: (Jack without Mortimer).

                                            Jack

                                 Fort Resolution

………………………..

The man who would learn the human mind will gain almost nothing from experimental psychology. Far better for him to put away his academic gown, to say good-bye to the study, and to wander with human heart through the world. There, in the horrors of the prison, the asylum, and the hospital, in the drinking-shops, brothels, and gambling halls, in the salons of the elegant, in the exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, religious revivals, and sectarian ecstasies, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer store of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him. Then would he know to doctor the sick with real knowledge of the human soul.

C. G. Jung

This paragraph was a shock treatment for me, Rev, and that, in part, may be what is wrong with Mortimer’s back. From its seed of a new spiritual politics suggested by Jung, I goaded Mortimer to leave books, leave silence, leave isolation and leave his past and throw himself and me in ways which even now I can’t admit, upon the world to “see” it.

But ‘perspective’ broke Mortimer’s back like a poorly monitored shock treatment, Rev. And in my retreat from the world to heal, I now long for the quiet, spiritual creature I once was. Where is Mortimer now? What have I done to his concentrated piety, but exploded it into the ether, and beaten it into the earth?

But I think I’ve failed to eliminate him. I believe I hear him moaning from the mountaintops still, his spiritual body strewn across the continent and years, a million positive charges expecting a lightning storm, begging for re-assembly from the Appalachians and the Rockies, to be joined to their negative mates along this river shoreline, to abandon magnetic chaos and unite, hail the sun as ONE, and raise their fist and stamp the earth and hurtle themselves together up this lonesome valley back to civilization, screaming the truth in spirit and flesh to you, Rev, and to everyone back in the Church and the World.

Mortimer, talk to me now!

You know how I have been cut off from a part of myself and how I am coming to Fort Smith to find out what that ‘part’ was.

73.  Dr. Lorenzo defends and condemns his Fort Resolution

Dr. Lorenzo, after decades of painful exposure to the pundits’ severe reaction to Fort Resolution, finally admitted he must have made a ‘serious mistake’ when he had pasted that envelope together. He defended himself by saying that he had hated its sadness so – at the time – that he had not spent adequate time on it. If he could do it over now, he said, he would have Jack ‘resent and resist’ any takeover by Mortimer, at least for a few minutes, at least as a political statement, if for no other reason.

He tried to recall what had made him present himself (Jack) in this way (as in Jack’s last few lines above, for example), as embracing heroically his takeover by Mortimer, and he thought it must have been a conviction, at that moment, that it was impossible to go on without Mortimer’s being re-instated in mj lorenzo in some form.

Dr. Lorenzo always stood by his conviction that Mortimer would have had to be included in the final mj in some form. And he also remained steadfast in his belief that the way they had come back together had been the right and necessary way. The only point on which he ever changed his mind was that: he felt that Jack should have told his parents in his letters that he was going to be ‘resenting and resisting’ the takeover, starving or no, penniless and Bennie-less, or no.

The Dr. sympathized with those who grieved over this part of his remaking. He agreed it did not ‘fit’ Jack’s nature well to welcome Mortimer back, saying, “Talk to me now!” He admitted, in fact, especially after comprehending how strongly the pundits felt about it, that every time Jack welcomed Mortimer back it was ‘kind of bootlicking and false’. The four last paragraphs, from “I now long for the quiet, spiritual creature I once was,” to the end of the section, disgusted him after he had gotten to know his own work well after years of study. He felt they had to be the ‘hollowest, most falsely acted and written lines’ in the book. He thought he must have tried to build a transition to Mortimer’s almost inevitable upcoming return in Fort Smith, but had ended up too worn out by that point in the ordeal to know what the heck he was feeling.

On other occasions he said that Mortimer’s Part II depression might have started ‘leaking’ into Jack’s Part I, making Jack feel weak and unduly yielding at this point. Or, as he would say at times, Jack had been ‘crashing from speed’.⁹  In any case, for whatever combination of dumb reasons, he, mj lorenzo as ‘Jack’, had ended up doing ‘the wrong thing’, and had acted all polite and pacifist-heroic, welcoming ‘the enemy’ back, when he should have put up a bit of a struggle at least.

But ‘no one could undo it now’, as the Dr. liked to remind the pundits, any more than anybody could undo the assassination of John Lennon. And besides, even if he had resisted Mortimer back in ’70, it would have helped very little, in fact. For Mortimer’s return was as certain as winter’s. Mortimer had to be given – Dr. Lorenzo always insisted – one more chance to make up for past sins.

And Dr. Lorenzo did not like to talk about it much beyond this point.

His pundits, however, could not stop talking about it.

74.  one group wants a world of Mortimer-less mjs

During the early and mid-70’s, therefore, a small group was formed in response to widespread frustration resulting from discussion of Fort Resolutiion. The group’s stated objective was to explore the theoretical possibility of creating a world of ‘Mortimer-less ‘mj’s’; or, as some preferred to say, a world of ‘pure Jacks’. It was a mind-boggling concept and had an extremely leftist feel to it.

And the group soon disappeared, in fact. Maybe partly because extreme leftism died a violent death in the U.S. with the Kent State massacre in 1970, when the Ohio National Guard unforgivably (and unforgivingly) lowered its rifles and opened up and mowed down and killed until dead quite a few students on the green at Kent State University, some of whom may have been protesting the Vietnam War, but not all.

YET EVEN SO!

Up until Kent State, everyone in the U.S.A. thought it a relatively safe proposition to demonstrate for, and express sympathy for, leftist or rebellious causes, or just stand and watch other people doing so. But after Kent State everybody had to wonder. And most pundits thought that proposing ‘a world of pure Jacks’ right then in the early 70s, at a time when the country was caving in, if anything, to pure ‘Mortimers’ and pure ‘Nixons’ and the like, would probably have caused its proponents a bad case of paranoia from feeling so out of synch with the dissent-suppressing Nixon administration era, and would have prompted the group to dissipate quickly.

Other pundits believed the group had continued meeting ‘underground’ and had soon figured out ‘how to accomplish what it wanted’. Its members were ‘just waiting for the right moment to resurface and proceed’, more than likely. Because, as most early Remaking pundits said, the ‘left’, in general, themselves included, reacted unhappily to Dr. Lorenzo’s position that ‘Mortimer had to come back’. Mj lorenzo was the last person on earth 'the left' wanted to hear saying such a thing. They just wished and kept on wishing, year after year, that their mj could have eliminated his own Mortimer permanently and shown everyone else in the world how to do the same.

75.  another group prefers the ‘addiction interpretation’

A more viable group formed out of the Fort Resolution discussion as well. Some addiction-wise interpreters wanted to explore the notion that Jack had welcomed Mortimer back only because he had felt desperate for small change and drugs and saw Mortimer as a likely resource. A number felt this actually fit Jack’s foxy character, and/or his situation. A number of pundits took to the theory with élan. And forever thereafter, among the pundits at large, this notion was considered a possibly acceptable interpretation of the otherwise hard-to-explain welcoming that Jack had issued Mortimer at Fort Resolution. Some even felt it lessened the chapter’s sadness to see Jack in this way.

76.  the mainstream interpretation, after years of sad Fort Resolution

In time, however, the whopping majority of pundits came to share the adamant position that, if Jack had been close to giving in to panhandling, just as winter was setting in, then his upcoming fall from grace at Fort Smith looked not happier, but all the sadder and more pathetically miserable.

No one over the years, in other words, by whatever means attempted, ever succeeded in ridding Fort Resolution of its gloomy atmosphere of sad, barely mentionable, imminent tragedy.

A fact which gave the smile-forbidding ‘Sunday School pundits’ and all their kindred lot of Remaking zealots – their whole dead-serious punditry ilk – a quiet sense of triumph.

But meanwhile, unfortunately, plenty of nice-enough-seeming God-fearing people in the world said Fort Resolution was not sad and it was not serious because not a bit of it mattered a blessed whit. You could take all your Jacks and Mortimers and Remaking handbooks for psychotics and do something unmentionable with them, remaking them truly. Because all of these nice people as a group possessed nice weapons that would ‘rot your petty you-know-what’, and did not mind using them either. And so, there was nothing to ‘talk about’ but what was on TV after dinner.