Artwork © 1970 Mortimer Lorenzo

I.  Magical spa

77.  Fort Smith: a dingy nordic outpost or a magical healing spa

While motor-canoeing upriver all summer long, Jack had spent many hours letting his ‘mind’ wander over maps he had found in the “M” Volume and in National Geographic issues that had survived the Crack-Up somehow. And he had been drawn to wondering about Fort Smith each and every time; but not merely because it was the next big destination on his magical river route after Fort Resolution.

True, it was essential that he made note of the fact that one day in the future when he would leave Resolution and follow the south bank of Great Slave Lake, turn to the right and head south up the Slave, the principal tributary of the Mackenzie; by whatever means; whether by shanks’ mare, motor canoe or mental caprice alone; there would be hardly a settlement for a hundred miles until he got to Fort Smith. So he would have to think about that town, even if only as a place to re-stock supplies.

And – even – as later critics and skeptics of The Remaking admitted: if mj lorenzo had been just hiding in Philadelphia or Montana or hiding out anywhere, merely dreaming up this crazy remaking trip as fiction, he still would have had to think about Fort Smith in the same way; because pretend adventurers, pretend explorers, armchair revolutionaries and make-believe remakers had to think about make-believe supplies, of course.

But Fort Smith’s appeal was not of this kind in Jack’s case. He was obsessed with this nowhere sub-Arctic post of Fort Smith because, to his anti-scientific, un-Western ‘mind’, the little burg was alluring for shockingly illogcal reasons. Fort Smith stood smack dab on the healing river which had taken control of Jack Lorenzo’s nervous system poetically, so to speak, compelling him to re-design his own self and universe according to its course. And it ALSO AND SIMULTANEOUSLY stood on the meaning-loaded  L I N E  between the Northwest Territories and Alberta.

Now:… any regular G.I. Joe of the Western world with a regular thinking ‘kanoodle’ attached to his darn ‘conneck’ would have HAD to find ‘this LINE thing’, as Rev put it (a bit rancidly), just a ‘ka-wirky’ detail; as quirky as the special numbers on the speedometer that had compelled him, Rev, over the years, to slow the car, pull off on the shoulder and stop to say, “Look, Mortimer! Look at that number: ‘99999’!” Regular ‘Anglo’ American baseball Joe-types like Rev knew better than to ‘read anything into’ those unique and funny numbers. And regular Western world thinkers could hardly deny the fact that everyday logic, even common sense, would have to require that Fort Smith pertain technically to one legal jurisdiction or the other, either to the Northwest Territories or to the Province of Alberta, meaning, that is, either to Canada’s territorial possessions north of the line, which still were barely developed – or even explored – in 1970; or to the industrially and politically developed nation proper which lay south of the line.

But such ‘rules’ and ‘laws’ as governed Jack’s ‘thinking machine’ were of a different order. On two of his maps the dot for Fort Smith lay within the province of Alberta. But on all others, including the one he liked to look at the most, the dot or circle straddled the line. And so, one was obligated to acknowledge that the town actually lay in both jurisdictions at once according to most cartographers.

This rare and uncanny condition pushed a magic poetic button in Jack Lorenzo. Fort Smith had to possess – in his magical heart – a numinous aura due to its dizzyingly multi-faceted and multiplied significance: it lay simultaneously in two symbolically opposing regions of his static mandalic year and space: Abstract Symbolic North; and Abstract Symbolic South; while at the same time lying smack dab on the only north-south route of any seeming psychic significance available to that very same Remaking year’s mandalic healing TRIP movement. This put it in the same category as the magical site of the Crack-Up, Logan Pass in Glacier Park, which similarly had straddled a line between huge symbolically opposite regions, East and West, while lying on a rare route over the high Rockies and Continental Divide, the Going to the Sun Highway. To a ‘mind’ like Jack’s, therefore, Fort Smith should have caused foreboding, in very fact. But, instead, he saw it as an otherworldly healing spa (!) 

And he got it right. AS USUAL, as the pundits screamed later. For: Fort Smith possessed even more claim to special energy. Economically, in the real world, it thrived by living in two vastly different and thus truly OPPOSITE kinds of LIFE regions at once: in the wild, backward, undeveloped, under-civilized and under-populated northern Canadian possessions, or ‘territories’; and in the modern, southerly, civilized, developed agricultural and industrial province of Alberta, with its modern model cities of Edmonton and Calgary, and its fabled Canadian Rockies resorts and national parks that served as playgrounds for the rich and famous, for Hollywood stars and for European royalty.

Two neighboring and juxta-butted areas could hardly have been more electrifyingly opposite and therefore magnetically interrelated: to a super-intuitive nervous system like Jack’s, that is.

And, moreover, and even more amazingly: it meant that opposites were no longer opposite: in Fort Smith. Opposites lived as one, rather, because Fort Smith was a place where two became one, and one became two. Two equaled one. Ordinary math no longer applied any more than anything else ordinary did. For: Fort Smith was not an ordinary place. It simply could not be.

And so: Fort Smith had to be the doorway to something grand; tremendously important; and very different; never mind if it looked like a dingy, grey, forgotten winter nightmare to anyone seeing it for the first time, with eerily people-less streets because so cold. It had to be a power spot, like the doorways of the ancient world, which were sometimes so power-souped they had to be assigned special guardian deities and be marked out with statues or carvings of Hermes, just to remind a visitor of the spot’s connection to a world beyond the senses, a connection so doped up with power that so much psychic power might become dangerous if left unrecognized.

So naturally, then, heading his motor-canoe out of Great Slave Lake and southward up the Slave, the biggest tributary of the greatest river of the western hemisphere’s vast northwestern expanse, Jack, when suddenly splashed by turbulent and painfully freezing water, sensed that something incredible was about to happen. And in fact: Fort Smith was the kind of place where, if nothing happened on its own, he would have to make it happen.

What would it be? He was too spontaneous and too trusting to sit around wondering. He could not see through his psychic telescope at the moment anyway, and before he could wipe the icy splash from his intuitive centers, it happened.

Jack had no fear of magic spots, of course, so around mid-afternoon he tied up his canoe; swallowed every last bennie he could find in his bacpack, a whole last big fistful; lifted up onto his back his heavy, book-laden pack with attached rolled-up sleeping bag, French horn and pots and pans; and wandered along the edge of town naked and penniless, addicted and out of drug, starving and skinny practically to liver failure, approaching hypothermia, freezing his soon-to-be-well-recognized deeply suntanned butt off, and it all happened and was over and THAT: was: it.

78.  grand, exceedingly important and very different

Now just what occurred in Fort Smith, just what exactly, in the kind of rational, scientific language most people of the Western world annoyingly considered always essential in this age of science and therefore demanded, in order to feel sure that they fully understood and therefore could believe something they were told: that big question was always a subject of great debate among the cultish group of cogitators who discovered the original version of The Remaking soon after Rev published the envelopes as a book in late ‘71. These commentators and scholars all agreed for years that it was grand and exceedingly important, the incredible thing referred to in the Fort Smith packet of papers. And it was also very different.

But what it was exactly, even Rev and Jo could not figure out at first from the crazy, consarned stuff their son had sent. They merely noticed, as soon as they picked up the pile of papers and read, that nuances of a new world greeted them everywhere. The handwriting was suddenly refined and miniaturist, even legible. The letters were signed ‘Mortimer’, and they referred to Jack as if he were another person, out there somewhere, still wandering about and still functioning: to a certain extent.

All this was clear and agreed upon. No one who got caught up in the debate in later years ever questioned the fact that brainy Mortimer had taken control of mj lorenzo again ‘in Fort Smith’. What was not clear, was where Mortimer and Jack might be exactly, i.e., physically speaking. Not everyone agreed, in other words, that they were even, literally, physically, ‘in Fort Smith’.

There were three possibilities where ‘they’ might ‘be’. Everyone agreed on this much. But none of the three possibilities fit all of the data, seemingly, and everyone agreed on that too, with the result that every commentator or scholar forever thereafter was left to choose one interpretation and cast no aspersions on brother or sister who chose another. And that remained tradition among pundits forever after; for in a sense it made little difference.

Rev, for instance, had never completely bought the claim that his son was in Canada at all. He thought he detected hints in the envelopes at times that his son was ‘just’ in the hospital with a broken back from the Crack-Up, ‘just’ writing a combination of LIES to cover up, and bogus letters to obscure his real feelings about an embarrassing ‘homo thing’, and he suspected the hospital might ‘just’ be in Montana, somewhere near the town of Eureka, maybe, but had not been able to find his son when he had called Montana authorities.

Jo, on the other hand, was convinced beyond possible dissuasion that her Jack, ‘my Jack’, had walked into Fort Smith and been arrested by the Mounties for public indecency and for mixed-up, inexplicable behavior in general. And she was sure he was in a psych ward for this and for his suicidal thinking.

Yet her phone calls to her favorite – by now – RCMP officer in Yellowknife had produced no comforting confirmation. The handsome (she knew) and ‘baritone’ policeman on horseback, dressed, dapper and just as ‘upright’ as Nelson Eddy had been when he had starred and sung with Jeanette McDonald in one of Jo’s most truly beloved heartthrob movie musicals of the 1930’s and 40’s, would say only – after answering the desk phone fully mounted in dazzling red and black uniform on a handsome very dark horse – that first of all, Fort Smith was not in his “N.W.T.” jurisdiction. But since he remembered her from previous phone calls, always worrying about her son, then IF her son Jack Lorenzo had been hospitalized psychiatrically in Fort Smith, and IF he were an adult of age 27, as she had said, then the hospital information would be confidential, and no one, but NO one, would be able to tell her a blinkin’ thing, because unlike ‘some’ ‘rebellious’ ‘young’ US Americans, all Canadians always respected the law, and the red and black Royal Canadian Mounted Police even more than that.

The third possibility was that Mortimer and Jack were writing from a hidden location in West Philly or elsewhere, a theory taken lightly by pundits in early years but examined with increasing suspicion as decades passed.

79.  encounter? what encounter?

There was evidence in the material from Fort Smith, nevertheless, that Jack and Mortimer had BOTH been in Fort Smith, at least briefly, and even run into each other there, astonishingly not as one person but as two. Or so it sounded. But this was the fuzziest news of all, the most out-there psychotic, and the least comprehensible since until now Mortimer and Jack had always been two halves of the same person, taking turns dominating the same body, not two separate people with two separate bodies.

Yet the nature of mj lorenzo’s ‘condition’ might allow such bizarre possibilities, apparently. Or so Rev thought aloud to Jo, not very pastor-ly.

“Where did they meet?” Jo demanded he answer. “How??!! As two people??!! Peacefully? Did he try to kill himself?” she punched with her voice, demanding of Rev, as if he might know something she did not. “He had threatened to do that now and then, by trying to ‘kill’ ‘Mortimer’, hadn’t he?” she demanded loudly that he confirm, as if she were the Greek chorus, and Rev the only stage deity ecclesiastically permitted or equipped to interpret the cryptic oracular scripture of the bozo son.

In other words, was poor bemused mj okay?!!!

Both Rev and Jo thought something must have happened between the two infamous halves of their divided son, because of Mortimer’s title on the first page, which was so unlike others:

                     Fort Smith:  second encounter of M & J

Yet they had just read through the darn Fort Smith papers at the kitchen table in their entirety and they remembered nothing like an ‘encounter’. And so, though they were more mentally drained than usual after reading a package of their son’s papers a first time, nevertheless they began anew, sighing and wondering what had happened and why they had missed it.

How could anybody’s dang son, asked Rev, grabbing the thick bundle of white 8½X11 papers from Jo’s hands across the table, named ‘Mortimer’ or whatever, write so much ‘erudite Bullschweiger’, and never mention exactly what happened between him and Jack? Wasn’t that usually basic? Rev thought no young man would write in such an obtuse way, unless covering something up. And he knew what, he was pretty sure, but he was not ready to say it.

Whereas: Jo was of the opinion that the answer must lie in the Fort Smith papers in riddle form, and their job as the first honored readers of their son’s first ‘modernistic autobiographical novel’ was to help future generations of readers by figuring out the riddle. In other words she had come around to seeing The Remaking as both serious fiction and serious reality for the moment, not so un-astutely, and was politically sharp enough too, by the way, not to say ‘fiction’ out loud to Rev, but only ‘riddle’.

They went back and looked at the first page of the envelope’s papers more carefully this time, but it made no more sense than it had the first time:

On the Border

November

A mandala is an antidote for a chaotic state of mind.

the lines of my Albers Conical Equal-Area Projection of Western Canada

make

a square approaching a circle

which

(the earth is exploding on my map)

like

a rose-window mandala

first shattering

then mellowing

my façade

is

the universal symbol

of transformation

80.  a trip summary so curt and compact as to be comprehensible only barely

Boy. That might be the riddle in question, but it had them beat. They were nonplussed by such verbiage, and they left it alone. Then, on the suggestion of the chapter title, still looking for an ‘encounter’, because an ‘encounter’ might mean that the intolerable movie was over, finally, and everybody could go home to bed, they plowed once more through the densest concentration of absolutely abstruse verbal formulas since MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN. The first page or so was introductory; and the whole thing was called:

Mortimer’s Cryptic Triptique

leaving ‘Jack’

and the Northwest Territories

and entering Canada proper

heading home

I leave an exploding land of fantasy

the petals of the rose that once was I

are still drifting

earthward

the  rose  windows  of  all  France

could  not  together  pacify  me  now

and defenseless

gathering myself together

bound to be wounded again in my exposure

I step again

innocently

into the real world

I think

or

into the world as it is for most people I know

there to crystallize

in a new

‘Mortimer’

Here are some things they are saying about Fort Smith:

(1)  Fort Smith lies on the west bank of the Mackenzie-Slave, on the border between the Territories and the Dominion proper. (Here the sun is not seen for weeks in winter, but northern lights and moon reflect off snow enough that some Indians can hunt and trap at night.)

(2) Stretching sixteen miles south from Fort Smith to Fort Fitzgerald are the only impassable waters of the Mackenzie system between the Arctic and Fort Chipewyan, “The Rapids of the Drowned,” culminating in a whirlpool at Fort Fitzgerald.  Mackenzie writes in his journals that the longest portage, “Portage d’Embarras,” is 1020 paces.

(3) The town is segregated de facto between whites in government houses and Eskimos and Indians in wooden shanties.

(4) And it is in Fort Smith that Dlune lives.

(5) There she attends a college named Grandin, whose stated intention it is to ‘make the Indians into responsible citizens of Canada’.

(6) She walks there daily from her shanty house near the edge of town, near the woods where one of my own trap lines will have to neatly terminate, therefore.

(7) They say she already loves me. (But here I am getting ahead of my would-be story.)

In the time it has taken me to indiscreetly summarize Fort Smith for you, Rev, I simultaneously in my mind have de-riddled and re-mythologized the universe. Here is the formulation as it stands:…

The material that followed was as dense as mj lorenzo ever got, as dense as a Black Hole, and Rev and Jo after one quick look at it for the second time in a night zoomed past the matter at a dazzling speed, faster than two electrons past a nucleus, just to breathe deeply again on the far side as soon as possible and not get sucked up forever into divine solidity and annihilation. When you read the ‘Cryptic Triptique’ as fast as this it was kind of interestingly hypnotic and dizzying.

Yet in months to come they would allow themselves to sink into it and grasp the cryptic trip plan a bit, and even appreciate it. A little. For: it super-succinctly outlined the mandala of the entire Remaking year, outer world and inner world both, and served as a structural guide to the story and mandala, like the ‘map’ ‘key or legend’ Jack had mentioned as necessary for understanding, but had never provided.

Mortimer had finally clarified a million things on one page, proving that, though hardly human, he could be useful. For Jo’s ‘Jack’, as Rev reminded Jo, though Jack might have been truly winsome at times, had never even attempted such an all-encompassing vision. And so, in the weeks and years to come they would sit and look at the thing sometimes during quiet evenings at home, like they might have checked any fascinating key to a complicated, high-intellect game or book, just to see what they might have missed on previous readings. And – any more than they might have done with any informative key – they almost never tried to look at every succinct detail in a single sitting, but preferred to put it aside ‘as soon as their brains reeled’, meaning after a minute or two, usually.

Since so much of it was ‘prophecy’, as Jo said, i.e. a vision of the future like Joseph’s bowing sheaves or any other Old Testament prophecy, they would only be able to really grasp it, anyway, as the real details of their son’s future unfolded. For, as she said (trying to calm Rev down), not a single one of ancient Israel’s children knew for certain what all those funny bowing-down sheave-things meant in the little boy Joseph’s youthful dream until he had suddenly vanished one day and years later the whole family was starving to death and exiled in rags, and there he was too: in kingly robes reigning in a sub-palace of the pharaoh in Egypt. And there they were bowing down to their own far-from-perfect family member, Joseph, bending down to the ground just like a bunch of bent-over sheaves of wheat, begging him for food.

And fortunately for world peace and Methodism Reverend Lorenzo did not catch Jo’s cheeky hidden meaning in that one, as the pundits chuckled later.

Strangely enough, though, the Lorenzos found that once in a great while, when in just the right kind of relaxed, dreamy yet wide-awake mood, they could stomach more than two minutes of this dense legend. And both admitted that over the ensuing years, when these rare and special times occurred, maybe once every few years at best, they were able to absorb something closer to the whole thing, all at once, and absorb it properly, i.e., with about the right depth of openness and understanding. And whenever this incredible thing happened, they said, it was a revelatory, exciting, eye-opener of a marvelous kind, ‘almost as wonderful’ as experiencing the entire upshot of Methodist Communion at a ken beyond intellect, way, way beyond the flavor of Mott’s grape juice; or the dryness of Methodist-preacher-blessed, day-old cubes of white Wonder Bread (laid out on the silver plates on Saturday). Or, a better analogy, they said: it was something like deeply comprehending every hyper-loaded word of the Apostles’ Creed all in a single eye-blinking second. Something like that.

I hereby supply a contrived interpretation of my own self, projecting it into the future as Mortimer Jack Lorenzo.

CRACK-UP (I) – Jack is writing

(soon to be criticized by Mortimer, whom Jack thinks he hates but cannot live without)

FREEZE-UP (II) – Mortimer writes

(about Jack, whom he loves, and who – in love? – therefore can overtake him)

BREAK-UP (III) – Mortimer Jack must write about himself

(sometimes briefly missing a part of himself)

Hungabee = The Mountain = The Mountain = Hungabee

The mountain explodes. (It must later, as it also did earlier at Going-to-the-Sun.)

Any rose explodes (when it blossoms like a Rose Window), then it involutes (involves; implodes) to be reborn.

I explode, periodically, and am in some way thereby (hopefully) refurbished.

Dlune has to explode in order to become known. (I’ll hope to understand this better later.)

Delkrayle and Wrigley exploded with the Blue Buick.

Peace Rose = Hungabee = Dlune = I (at any given point) = (more crudely) Blue Buick Electra = I (at some transition point)

Like 'Nuclear Energy' and 'Mass', these expressions share a common meaning.

They are the exploding object-masses which pacify, but do so only when not exploding, i.e. when viewed from so great a distance they still appear intact.

Dlune (from a distance) = Peace River (from a distance)

Hungabee (from a distance) = Peace Rose = Rose Window = The Mountain

(The Mountain itself is the way up.)

I (from a distance), as in a mirror, objectified, can (narcissistically) pacify (myself).

Every word I write increases the distanced control I have on these explosives.

Because as I conceive these things in words they are whole entire units, each an in-itself in its own very self, en-soi en meme-soi.

But all of them exploded become the subjects known by me subjectively, implosively and painfully, pour moi, for me, i.e. when I am not writing, but living, them.

From a distance, objectively, as objects, they remain intact, pure, pacifying, comforting, projective devices, mandalas (even if originally someone else’s) upon or through which I can arrange my imagination; but once they are known…

Their explosion and my implosion to re-collect them can be pleasant or unpleasant, ecstasy or psychosis. (But even ecstasy can be a loss if it lasts too long, while even psychosis may be good for quite a few amazing things.)

Implosion is a reaction to explosion. It re-masses the energy for a second discharge, and

Eureka. This might be a partial explanation for cyclic manic-depressive people, be they schizophrenic, schizoid neurotic, or like Mortimer Jack, simply ‘de-ranged’.

As the depression of Freeze-Up fades, energy will collect for the shooting and sunburst of Spring Break-Up.

The suicide-murder is a self-amputation, and a rebirth of the poorly controlled passionate brother-self, Jack (that wanted to kill the non-passionate part, Mortimer).

Energy collected in Freeze-Up = Winning of Dlune as companion for the Spring trip = Overconfidence and a coming explosion (a budding rose) = Dies again the controlling conscientious Mortimer, who revives with Spring Break-Up and rises in Part III to reach a new equilibrium with (incorporated in) a more passionate self

Childhood = Innocence = A Rose = An Object = A Blue-Green Fantasy World

Each of which is burst to become: experience, knowledge-as-experience, insight, and special insight like a Joycean epiphany.

The explosion will fade as the energy is spent, if no new energy is being re-furnished. The ideal condition, therefore, will be the steady conversion (E=mc²) of exploding 'Energy' (Jack) (‘E’) into imploding 'mass' (Mortimer) (‘m’), somehow connected by the speed of light, for steady use by a steadily exploding-imploding (but not too catastrophically confrontational) united self (Mortimer Jack).

Extremes of moods and life-styles occur more commonly in adolescence. Within an individual nation-state, they occur in some ‘adolescent’ transition.

Explosions in this universe occur… along the Great Divide:

(1) Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Glacier (“International Peace”) Park.

(2) Peyto Lake Motel in Part III: a near-explosion, when observing the once-exploded-in-anger heaped-up Backbone of the World.

(3) Mt. Hungabee: Wenkchemna Mtn. being his right arm and squaw: in Part III.

Will the spring Break-Up be an unharnessed explosion? No, but it may be the start of one budding.

81.  an encounter in a psych place

Even just glancing at such a dense summary of meaning left Rev and Jo dizzy for the second time in a day and made them wish their son wrote simple adventure romances, not exalted pedantic riddles. For though it might ‘de-riddle’ his be-riddled universe, and they were happy for him if it did, it did not de-riddle their be-riddled parsonage; because they had not yet found the ‘encounter’ loudly announced in the chapter title, the ‘encounter’ that might mean their son was healed-and-whole again, and now everybody could get a break from tiresome duality reality.

So Rev gave half the pages to Jo and they thumbed through frantically, rather than read aloud as they usually did, for that could conceivably take all night, and they were irritated and tired. And in this ingenious, energy-saving way Jo found the ‘encounter’ they sought buried deep within the pile of papers.

Obviously they had slept through it, including the one who had read it aloud. And that did not say much for Mortmer’s writing.

Or so thought Jo as she began reading the ‘encounter’ again to Rev:

Having exhausted himself in a last fit of devouring rage, Jack has fallen mute on a hospital ward at Fort Smith. And… Mortimer, as gathered together previously and pieced together in a slightly different way by Jack, is able to come to Jack’s aid now: as a talking therapist, Mortimer enters a mute and listening patient, Jack, in the form of his WORDS and unfolding system, now and until the two will become again one person.

But in such a case, who should I say has become whose doctor?”

“There,” said Jo. “I knew it, John. Jack’s in a psychiatric place in Fort Smith, Alberta, not a hospital in Montana.”

“And Mortimer is Jack’s therapist!” Rev added with a face that said: ‘And what the Dickens does that prove, oh correct and cheery one?’

And surely he meant that his wry face, as well, should express sarcastic wonderment over the fact that Jo could mention only the half of mj that she always favored, ‘Jack’, though her Jack was so smart he was practically dead from fun. While their son’s decent half, Mortimer, was the only half of him sharp enough to be thinking and writing and making things clear, and even writing to her personally at the moment, answering her questions about his book, and even ‘taking care of’ ‘HER Jack’!

Rev kept this to himself and said only that she was right: SOMEBODY had been in Fort Smith. Maybe. He had not figured out – yet – how one part of mj could be therapist to the other. But when you were crazy, “Any darn tripe can happen you can think up.” He would have to think about it more another day, when he was ‘less dad-blamed exhausted from reading the whole thing two whole times in one day’.

Twice in a lifetime would have been fatherly enough.

82.  inevitable magical Freeze-Up hits the magic spa of Fort Smith

Meanwhile: back in Fort Smith, yet another hugely magical and future-determining event had increased the afternoon’s healing glow, helping explain how such strange and impossible things might occur as Jack and Mortimer both sensed were about to occur: for just as Jack had stepped up onto the top of the green bank to tie his boat to a tree for the very last time, the river had gone click-click-click from noisy turbulence to very silent ice, all up and down the valley as far as anybody could see. It was fall Freeze-Up, in fact, one of nature’s most life-defining, spine-chilling, blood-congealing, marrow-hardening and heart-stopping events, as Mortimer’s writing from Fort Smith spelled out. The event, he wrote, defined the moment on a watery planet when the universe of time was split right down the middle between two vast natural primeval time realms, between that part of the earth’s ‘year’ of circling its sun when its forms of life containing water were most likely to survive near its northern pole, and that part of its ‘year’ when its forms of life containing water struggled to not turn into pure solid ice and ‘die’ near that northern pole; between the warm summer months and the cold winter; between the months when the planet’s north pole dipped toward the sun, and those when it faced away from the sun’s warmth. Because: planets spun and oscillated and swayed with a certain perpetual rhythm, responding to electromagnetic forces that kept them properly ‘tuned’ to the solar system and universe at large: exactly as solar systems flew spinning around the core of a galaxy, wrote Mortimer; and exactly as galaxies flew spinning around the core of whatever you called the larger thing that contained galaxies; and exactly as these whateveryoucallits flew spinning around the center of whatever; and exactly as electrons flew spinning around nuclei, by the way. And inside of those nuclei, again, something else was probably spinning around in the same darn electromagnetic way. And so there was no way to avoid a Freeze-Up, in other words. You had to accept it.

And as for Jack tying up his boat and walking up the green bank, this additional dimension of grand timeframe significance left no doubt in his mind that Fort Smith was every bit as overloaded with implication as the site of the Crack-Up had been. It was even more certain now that at Fort Smith hugely significant things had to happen. For: once again SPACE AND TIME BOTH WERE BEING SPLIT. And if you were there, at exactly the right spot and right split-second, you could weasel your way into the tiny crack in space-time, and borrow nature’s power, get Nature’s Tune-up, and realign your electrons to the solar system. Right in the place where two equaled one. And it was happening NOW. For Fort Smith was the holy doorway between two opposite kinds of life experience that were uniting into one here and now.

And the street light outside the hospital’s psych ward was glowing with increased, and more meaningful, intensity.

83.  inevitable magic Freeze-Up has to hit mj lorenzo too therefore

It all meant a Freeze-Up would have to freeze mj lorenzo up too, not just outside the hospital window, but inside, way inside in the world of spirit; psyche; the mind and emotions. Many cogitative experts on The Remaking would say later that even mj lorenzo’s physical body was experiencing transformative changes at this moment: ‘one becoming two, so that two could become one again all the more quickly’. Mortimer realized the inevitability of it all the very moment his grey matter clicked in and began to work like normal again, right at the moment in the late afternoon when the river froze and Jack ceased to function on mj lorenzo’s behalf, seemingly. He saw that he, Mortimer, since he was the only legitimately credentialed intellectual logician for either half of mj, now or ever, as he bragged, given his vast higher education ‘in the world’s best schools’, would have to think very hard until he comprehended in what manner, exactly, the two of them were about to go cold… and freeze down… on one another.

And this duty which Mortimer understood as his and his alone explained how the Triptique and related analyses had come to exist within less than a day after Freeze-Up. The entire pile of papers marked ‘Fort Smith’, in fact, was Mortimer’s proud effort to explain to himself, to Jack, and to his parents, the startling transformation taking place in the world of mj lorenzo. And as he had proceeded to analyze the likely formula for this clamp-down and Freeze-Up, inching ever closer and closer to the whole truth, he suddenly saw with his freshly awakened mind the outline for the rest of the year to come, right up to the summer solstice of ‘71. He saw what must happen, and began writing it down for Jack; and for Rev; in his peculiar, cryptic way of writing, full of Jungian archetypal symbols of transformation, poetic allusions and Jean Paul Sartrian existentialist distinctions, all brewed together with seemingly loony math formulas from Nearly-Unified Physics Theory and ‘scientific crap from medical school and Marshall McLuhan and God knew what else’, as certain pundits explained later to dozens of periodicals like Der Spiegel and Science and The San Francisco Jung Society Library Journal. That was how Mortimer had come to write the Cryptic Triptique, they said.

Enough of the trip had occurred already, they said, that he could see for the first time all of the major patterns determining the year overall. Suddenly, for the first time, he could see well beyond the winter ‘on an island with an Indian woman’, and well beyond the trip ‘up the Peace’ with ‘that Indian woman’. He also saw there would have to be a ‘third encounter’ with Jack when winter finally thawed. And he saw there would have to be a midsummer’s climb up Mt. Hungabee in Yoho Park, after the trip up the Peace. The experience of having a newly awakened intellect, and seeing everything all at once, as in a prophetic vision, caused him to write about it in a strange and affected way. The whole section of The Remaking marked ‘Fort Smith’, consequently, not just the Triptique, was extreme in its way of expressing things, even for mj lorenzo. 

And as for the chief drama of the moment, the setting-in of winter, that is, and the anticipation of the ordeal of the many dark and freezing months to come: Mortimer’s understanding of it quickly came to be rather complex, but not necessarily impossible to fathom once laid out in plain language. The problem for poor Rev and Jo was that their beloved son rarely used plain language any more. But whether they understood it or not, at least Mortimer gave the impression that he did, judging by the extensive way he wrote about it in his ‘Fort Smith’ pages. And that was better than Jack had done, Rev reminded Jo several times.

There was no doubt, as pundits observed later, that once Mortimer’s great intellect was back in shape, he had quickly figured out the whole complexly frozen relationship he and Jack would ‘enjoy’ during the long, cold, nearly pitch black northern winter. But his descriptions of it were exhaustingly boring, dry and twisted. Cold!!! They left even Rev utterly ‘depleted of humanity’, as he could not help complaining.

“Mortimer’s Darn Frozen Metaphysical Meatballs,” Rev said to tickle Jo, might be digested if boiled down to a simple phrase and ‘put through a strainer’. But then they had to be vaporized ‘in a crematorium’ to ‘get past your mental teeth’, which refused to open in any case.

In brief, you could say, therefore, that: Freeze-Up meant the opposite of expansion and mania. Mortimer and Jack together would have to suffer a depression and contraction during the winter, but a depression for the right reasons this time, by definition, because part of a year-long curative trip, designed to make mj lorenzo a new and much better person. That was Freeze-Up in brief. 

84.  Mortimer analyzes Freeze-Up

Yet Mortimer simply could not suffer any short-windedness to lie around unembellished. There was never any ‘in brief’ where Mortimer Lorenzo was concerned. The best way to anticipate how he and Jack would most likely relate over the winter, according to him, and in ‘just a little more detail’, as he put it to his parents, was to visualize the inside-outside paradigm Jack had intuited and used in earlier mailings. Mj lorenzo’s manic episode, he said, had started when Jack had burst out from inside the stifling shell surrounding him, burst out from inside his ‘Mortimer’ shell, that is, shattering the shell into tiny pieces. And now, as the cold winter’s depression set in, the shell was re-congealing rapidly, and Jack would have to eat that shell, bit by bit, quickly, or he would end up locked inside it again.

The early Remaking pundits would put their own twist on this a year later. Since the shell consisted essentially of Mortimer’s cold, lifeless, humanity-less intellectual conceptual framework put down on paper, as they said, then Jack, spending the winter mute, because depressed, would have to eat Mortimer’s dry lifeless words in written form, those words that constituted that confining conceptual framework shell. Jack, to make sure the shell never succeeded in fully enclosing him, would have to eat those written words month in and month out, or as long as the written words kept coming, only this time unable to comment on them as he had been able to do over the summer.

Granted, yes, he had spent the summer, too, eating Mortimer’s words from his notebooks. But the one in charge back then had been Jack, and he had always had plenty to say about Mortimer’s words. Now, however, Mortimer was in charge. Mortimer was the doctor, this time, not Jack. Jack was just the patient this time around, and Freeze-Up and its implied automatic depression were making him mute.

And heavens! What a patient he was! How upset Jo would have been if she had seen him! It was a good thing that Jo’s RCMP hero protected the poor boy’s confidentiality, if indeed he did, because no parent deserved to know everything. Jack Lorenzo would have divulged the grossest details in letters and even photos indubitably, if he had not been mute and locked up, because in his childlike chimpanzee-ness, he always thought any kinky thing he did absolutely wonderful for everybody in the world to see. But Mortimer left those details kindly out of the envelopes just for that very reason.

¹ Mortimer’s idea that ‘the universal symbol of transformation is a square approaching a circle’ he learned from Carl Jung and the Jungians. Mj’s pundit following over the years usually assumed that mj had carried to the Arctic and back in his backpack both Jung’s Symbols of Transformation and his Psychological Types, given the number of times he referenced these works in The Remaking. Mortimer’s idea that a ‘rose window’ was a kind of ‘mandala’ he would have gotten from Jung too. Cf Man and His Symbols (Doubleday: New York, 1964) (edited by Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz),  Chapter 3, “The Process of Individuation,” which begins on pg. 158 with a picture of “The rose window of the cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris,” and goes on to explain on 163, “…round or square structures usually symbolize the Self, to which the ego must submit to fulfill the process of individuation…” (i.e., the process of transforming oneself into a more completely whole and balanced person).  Mortimer’s idea that ‘a mandala is an antidote to a chaotic state of mind’ he also learned from Jung, but even Jung was a latecomer to that knowledge, for the people of India had known the healing power of creating, studying and meditating upon mandalas for thousands of years. In the same chapter of Man and His Symbols von Franz writes on p. 213, “Among the mythological representations of the Self one finds much emphasis on the four corners of the world, and in many pictures the Great Man is represented in the center of a circle divided into four. Jung used the Hindu word mandala (magic circle) to designate a structure of this order, which is a symbolic representation of the ‘nuclear atom’ of the human psyche…” She adds that some “…communities use the mandala motif in order to restore a lost inner balance. For instance, the Navaho Indians try, by means of mandala-structured sand paintings, to bring a sick person back into harmony with himself and with the cosmos—and thereby to restore his health.”

Mj lorenzo attended classes as a ‘matriculated auditor’ for several months at the Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland in the spring of ’69, just a year before his remaking trip. He never met Jung, who had died in 61, but he knew Marie-Louise von Franz both as a teacher and as his own personal psychoanalyst.

² Early pundit research determined that mj ‘must have’ preserved from his Crack-Up the National Geographic issue from July 1968 with its big, magnificently illustrated 40-page article, “The Canadian North Emerging Giant;” and probably, too, the September 1966 issue with its article, “Canadian Rockies,” which focused attention on the Lake O’Hara area, its rustic inviting lodge, campground and devoted hikers; and contained a big folded map of ‘Western Canada,” probably the map he studied most since it showed everything from Inuvik to Glacier Park to northern Wisconsin in quite a bit of detail. The Dr. never contested these claims, but when zealous followers added that he must have also carried the August 1955 issue with its “Across Canada by Mackenzie’s Track” and the August 1931 issue with its “On Mackenzie’s Trail to the Polar Sea,” he looked up both articles, found them both interesting but unfamiliar and said the pundits were ‘brilliant as usual but wrong this one time’. Most of his ideas on Mackenzie, he said, had come from Mackenzie’s own journals and, to a lesser degree, the tiny article on Mackenzie in the World Book “M” volume.

³ The National Geographic map of “Western Canada.” See footnote 2 above; and “the Wrigley envelope,” Section III, subsection 37, footnote 1.

⁴ The Mackenzie River and its Alberta tributaries had become Jack’s magical water route. Fort Smith was on the Slave River, the principal river pouring into Great Slave Lake, which then emptied into the Mackenzie R. Jack wanted to use the Slave River to go further south because it ran straight north and south; and Fort Smith was right on it, half the distance from Great Slave Lake to Lake Athabasca, his eventual winter destination as it had been Mackenzie’s. Instead of canoeing as far east as Fort Resolution, where the Slave entered the lake, Jack could have saved himself time and work by stopping earlier at Hay River and hopping a boxcar back south the way he had come north from Calgary (through Edmonton and Peace River) in the first place; of course; but as soon as he had read Mackenzie’s journals in Tuktoyaktuk, all of Hay River and Canada’s railways had lost psychic significance for him. They no longer resonated with his de-grey-mattered (and de-Mortimer-ized therefore) animal-mammal brain, nervous system and instinctual centers as the properly ‘psyched-out’ route for his remaking trip. And besides, a mandala was a circle, not a line. It would be harder to argue that his trip was ‘circular’ and mandala-like if he merely retraced his original linear route north, back south to the USA and New Jersey.

⁵ The curvaceous and wandering ‘line’ of the ‘Continental Divide’ marks the exact boundary between waters that flow west into the Pacific and waters that flow east into the Atlantic.

⁶ Royal Canadian Mounted Police, also called ‘Mounties’, the traditional police force for the more ‘natural’ and ‘backward’ areas of Canada. They wore red and black uniforms, rode on unusually handsome dark horses and historically radiated an image and reputation of being perennially impeccable, nobly restrained warriors for good. And since they lived by their reputation that ‘A mountie always gets his man’, and since they had never been able to say to Jo Lorenzo the magic words, “We got him,” the upshot was that the argument of the Remaking skeptics – which collected a great deal of steam over the years – that mj lorenzo never set foot in the Northwest Territories or Fort Smith during his ‘remaking year’, seemed even more plausible.

⁷ When Sammy Martinez interviewed the Lorenzos for his 1980 ‘first revision’ of The Remaking they confessed that their son’s Cryptic Triptique had reminded them of some of Thompson’s one- and two-page ‘keys’ to the Bible. Sammy wrote in the introduction to his 1980 'First  Revision', “Rev Lorenzo got up from the pink and aqua couch where he and Jo were sitting across from me in their Florence living room, went to his preacher’s study and came out empty-handed. He entered the pink-tile first-floor family bathroom without closing the door and instead came back out immediately with a 1½-inch thick book 6¼ inches wide and 8½ high, bound in soft brown leather, the worn front cover of which was engraved in flaking gold with his name, John Henry Lorenzo. The Thompson Bible was inscribed inside – in perfect elegant school-teacher penmanship – to: ‘John— May  this  Book  of  God’s  Word  be  a  constant  source  of  inspiration  and  blessing  to  you  in  your  ministry  is  the  sincere  wish  of  a  loving  heart.   Affectionately,  Jo,   Christmas 1932.   II Timothy 2:15’     This was followed by the title page: ‘The New CHAIN-REFERENCE  BIBLE  SECOND REVISED EDITION CONTAINING THOMPSON’S CHAIN-REFERENCES AND TEXT CYCLOPEDIA TO WHICH HAS BEEN ADDED A NEW AND COMPLETE SYSTEM OF BIBLE STUDY INCLUDING ANALYSIS OF THE BOOKS, OUTLINE STUDIES OF CHARACTERS, AND UNIQUE PICTORIAL CHARTS WITH MANY OTHER NEW FEATURES COMPILED AND EDITED BY FRANK CHARLES THOMPSON, D.D., PH.D’.” (Cambridge University Press: London, 1908, 1917, 1929, 16^th Reprint.) There were 8 pages of introduction, 876 pages of Old Testament and 270 of New, all very extremely elaborately cross-footnoted by Thompson, followed by 22 pages of General Index and, most amazingly and unusually of all, still another 261 pages of an elaborately cross-referenced (i.e., tied to the Biblical text verse for verse and word for word) ‘Cyclopedia’ of topics and texts including “A NEW SERIES OF BIBLE READINGS, AN ANALYSIS OF THE BIBLE, OUTLINES OF BOOKS, BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES, BIBLE HARMONIES, PICTORIAL CHARTS AND OTHER NEW FEATURES.” In this huge book-within-a-book were three ‘trees’ for the lives of Christ, Moses and Paul, respectively, each with a verbal ‘key’. The 'tree' and ‘key’ for Christ’s life alone were both so elaborately detailed with so many branches and sub-branches ‘It would have taken a medieval saint three and a half million eternities in the indescribable peace of heaven’s Olivier Messiaen organ music with all of its contented canting songbirds to probe them to their depths,” Sammy thought. There was an amazing diagram with a clock in the center of a cross showing ‘CHRIST’S HOURS UPON THE CROSS’. There were scores of diagrams and outlines. And after all that, the equivalent of several separate big books combined, there came still yet an 86-page ‘Concordance to the Holy Scriptures’ of the kind found in Jo’s ‘Schofield Reference Bible’, which she went and got from her bedroom on Rev’s suggestion to show Sammy for comparison. After the highly erudite, abstract, detailed and densely inter-correlated ‘concordance’ came a Biblical Atlas with its own separate index of place names. The maps were faded by 48 years of constant daily use and included: where the sons of Noah had settled; the Near East in the time of the Patriarchs; Canaan during the same period; Egypt during the journeys of the Israelites; Canaan as divided by the 12 tribes of Israel; The Dominions of David and Solomon; The Kingdoms of Judah and Israel; Assyria; Modern Walled Jerusalem with every one of its named surrounding hills; ‘Palestine in the Time of Our Saviour’; The Roman Empire in the Apostolic Age; and ‘The Voyages of the Apostle Paul in the Eastern Mediterranean’. On the blank backs of the final several maps were some of Rev’s own sermon outlines in various pencil and ink colors and also notes he had taken during other preachers’ sermons while he was on vacation at Pinebrook Bible Conference in the Poconos, all in his own faded handwriting. The last six map/note pages had rips and tatters which had been patched for.precious preservation years ago with scotch tape, now very darkly yellowed. Further proof that the layout of the ‘Thompson Chain-Reference’ was highly useful to an ardent Bible-loving Christian, Sammy said, was the “…astonishing plethora of underlines and notes in the Biblical text itself. It was incredibly thoroughly laden with Rev’s own circles, lines, arrows, asterisks, number signs, dates and notations in grey, black and red from a  thousand different pens and pencils over the years and also lovingly repaired with scotch tape, yellow and transparent. Certain pages, such as Ephesians 4, Mark 13, Revelation 1, I Samuel 17, almost every chapter of The Acts, every single line of II Timothy and even many, many other Biblical chapters were absolutely workaholically covered top to bottom and side to side with underlines, brackets and handwritten thoughts and yet could still be read,” said Sammy. And he added in his 1980 ‘First Revision’: “I knew immediately when I saw Rev’s Thompson Chain-Reference how I was going to lay out this first revision of his son's The Remaking.”

⁸ Mortimer here is pulling his French terminology from the existential philosophical language of Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

⁹ James Joyce, the early-20^th-century Irish novelist, used the notion of ‘epiphany’ to explain his view of how art got created and communicated, in his early book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

¹⁰ Einstein’s seemingly superhuman discovery, E = mc², might be understood as meaning that the amount of potential energy (‘E’) presently invisible and locked up within a given object is equal to the ‘mass’ (‘m’) in grams, i.e. weight in grams, of that object times the square of the speed of light (‘c²’). Or, in plainer words (but not very accurately from a nuclear physicist’s point of view): if you take a wooden table weighing 20 kilograms and attempt to unlock its potential energy and turn it into real energy, let’s say by burning it, the mass of the table, i.e. 20 kilograms of wood, will result in an amount of heat energy equaling 20,000 times the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) squared; or 20,000 X 186,000 X 186,000 somethings of heat energy, which certainly sounds like an awful lot of somethings of energy from one ordinary table. Or something like that!!! Except that Mortimer ‘interpreted’ Einstein’s formula to mean something a bit different, namely that his own weighty person of ‘mj lorenzo’ as well as the weighty persons of other people, and even weighty events and/or weighty objects, some even as big as mountains, instead of just sitting around doing nothing but weighing down the planet, could be converted into energy, i.e., action, i.e., a new life.

The Cryptic Triptique, said Dr. Sammy Martinez, could be seen as an attempt by Mortimer Lorenzo to combine the languages of several schools of philosophy and/or mid-20^th-century thought into one compact kind-of-formula or kind-of-system for remaking. The schools of thought included Jean Paul Sartre’s existentialist thinking and existentialism in general; Einsteinian relativity theory; James Joyce’s thoughts on ‘epiphany’, meaning an artist’s discovery of the real hidden or not-so-obvious reality of something; Marshall McLuhan’s ideas about the many different and formerly very separate countries of the world ‘imploding’ into one single mass of constantly communicating humanity while their various means of communicating with each other were ‘exploding’; mid-20^th-century psychiatric language as it was used for discussing mania, depression, manic-depressive disorder, Bipolar Disorder, schizophrenia and psychosis; Carl Jung’s observations on the psychological healing purpose of mandalas in oriental religion, and of rose windows in Western religion; Jung’s thinking in his intellectual blockbuster, Symbols of Transformation; Jung’s thinking in general regarding how a person might come to be ‘transformed’ into a new and better, psychologically more whole and healthily balanced person by means of what Jung called ‘individuation via the self’; Jung’s and his students’ study of tribal shamanic psychological ‘maps’ which portrayed the path of transformation for the shaman, for his patient, and often even for the whole tribe (since shamans were often called upon to treat problems that affected an entire tribe, such as a kind of mass hysteria or mass psychosis); Jack’s inside-outside paradigm which described the unhealthy hyperpolarization of mj lorenzo and of humanity at large, where Jack (and Jack-like peoples), in order to live, had to explode out from inside his (/their) surrounding Mortimer-shell, and Mortimer (and Mortimer-like peoples), in order to live – or so he (/they thought) – had to implode, clamp down on and enclose, confine and imprison Jack (and Jack-like peoples); the whole modern scientific idea of using mathematical formulas, equations, mathematical proportions and the like as a way of attempting to express the seemingly more fixed truths about our universe; the language of gardening and botany, including how flowers bud, bloom and die only to bloom again; the language of Northern Canadian Native American (‘Dene’) myth, especially the notion of ‘exploding mountains’, as will be elucidated in more detail in a later chapter; certain concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis; and the symbolic and meaning-laden story language of Greek myth.

The problem with the attempt to unify all of these disparate languages into one understandable system of verbal indicators in the Triptique was that, even after many years of trying, very few people in the world but the hyper-intellectual Mortimer Lorenzo himself could ever understand the blasted ‘Cryptic Triptique’; excepting, of course, those people who had made themselves expert at understanding it, like mj lorenzo’s ‘pundit’ following.

Accordingly, Sammy Martinez summarized the Triptique once in this simplistic way: Mortimer Lorenzo was attempting in the triptique, he said, to explain how mj had ‘grown’ or ‘matured’ or ‘transformed’ from Jack’s explosive spring and summer into Mortimer’s implosive winter of convoluting and devolving back down into his own self. And once he understood that little but very major transformation of his own self (from summer to winter), he then found it easier to imagine what stages might still be needed in order to complete the transformation process and he began to ‘see’ a rough outline of his own mj lorenzo future (from his present winter to his future spring and summer). All of this ‘vision’ he then attempted to condense into as pithy a formula as possible, producing  the several-page ‘Cryptic Triptique’, whose meaning the pundits liked to say was ‘as dense as a Black Hole’.

Most Remaking pundits agreed that one could not really begin to understand all of the multi-layered nuance in Mortimer’s ‘Cryptic Triptique’ until one had read The Remaking in its original version and in its two revised versions, as well, ‘at least five or ten times’; which, of course, practically every one of them had, and more.

¹¹ See footnote 6.