II.  A bizarre duo

85.  one bizarre duo

The bizarre duo had done a few things right, you had to admit. They had passed through the magical doorway that was Fort Smith precisely at the magical moment of fall Freeze-Up and landed magically smack dab together in the same psych ward, one as doctor, the other as patient, both a bit stunned to find themselves there, for they clearly had not planned or foreseen such a reunion in such a place. Jack had made it there on an excess of intuitive physical, emotional and sensual energy, partly by way of a psychiatric disorder called mania, partly by using speed. And Mortimer had made it by sheer reason, he said, trailing Jack down the Mackenzie and back like a cloud of vaporized grey matter, just biding time until winter returned and foolish Jack burnt himself out. Mortimer did not acknowledge the fact that Jack had been claiming that he had been very kindly and purposely helping Mortimer regroup by reading Mortimer’s notebooks a lot. But in any case Mortimer had kicked back into fullest bloom the instant Jack’s overtaxed system had puttered and failed most.

And the most amazing of all successes, maybe, was that both had arrived at Fort Smith within the same twenty-four hour period. They even had found their way to the same hospital in Fort Smith, so you could say that they had arrived virtually together.

But the big thing that they had NOT done right was to get there as one person. It was a pretty basic consideration for most people, one had to admit, to get somewhere as one person. And this was a source of frustration for every sympathetic reader of The Remaking. Mortimer and Jack, after twenty seven years of belonging to the same mammal-animal Homo-sapiens primate unit called ‘mj lorenzo’ still had not learned how to function together as a unified unit, one person. Like Repulicans and Democrats in the U.S., the two still took turns DOMINATING so absolutely, in such a crudely selfish way, that 99% of the time only one of the two sides was really operable or functioning. Every time the two tried to inhabit and share the rule of mj at the same moment, they created in no time an explosion so huge it blew poor mj to bits. The only reason Mortimer looked as good as he did at this very moment, was that Jack looked as bad as he did, and vice versa. Anybody in the world could see that the two would have to learn to team up and operate mj in tandem, not tyrannically. That was the task before them. But the constant possibility also remained that they might do themselves in while trying to team up, and might end the life of poor mj lorenzo in the world. And in fact they would wobble on the edge of that possibility all winter.

86.  bizarre Jack

But again: Jo would not have been so happy about Jack’s condition. She was content in the belief, largely intuited, that her Jack was hospitalized in a psych sanatorium, not just because the belief made her look more right than Rev, but mainly because it allowed her to see her Jack in her mind’s eye as being in a safe place finally. And that was comforting. She had been to Alberta and gone as far north as Edmonton and could picture the landscape of the north. And this helped reassure her too. She could picture the green foaming rivers. And she knew what modern hospitals looked like in the Philadelphia area so she could picture her son in a hospital gown on a hospital bed or maybe walking in pajamas and a robe, or getting dressed and attending a therapy group.

But the picture was far from that.

Lord have mercy!

Biography should not prevaricate but stick to the truth, the whole truth and nothing BUT that truth. For concealing truth about the human condition might help one or two selfish people for a few days, but it never benefits the whole of mankind in the long run. And Mortimer, naturally, in his envelope from Fort Smith had left out most of the gory sexual details that might have sent his parents to the emergency room with heart attacks, for he had been raised to make things easy for them. But the truth was that a little while after Jack had taken his last fistful of bennies, Dlune, as she told some pundits later, while walking to work after an early afternoon sunset, had discovered Jack standing naked and dazed and sort of masturbating – she thought – maybe – on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, illuminated by a single street light. She had put her long fur-lined parka on him, for snow was in the air, and had walked him inside. She worked in psych. She knew where he belonged.¹

Jack, walking the hospital corridors with Dlune, took off the hot parka and could not, or would not stop his sort-of masturbating naked wherever he went. But he willingly went with her to the psych floor, and then, with nursing staff, to a seclusion room IMMEDIATELY ‘for a bit’, as they told him, since they all assumed this funny little problem of his would pass. And he was most happy for a tiny bit of water and food. But they could NOT get him out of the locked seclusion room even after many hours of trying, because he refused to dress or cover up, and would not or could not stop ‘doing that’, as Jo Lorenzo might have said, had she been given details. Except that it was something no mother would have wanted to know, of course.

Yet, as pundits thought later, very scholarly, professional and respected men and women pundits both, it was not as serious a condition as many another ailment that might have befallen a woman’s son in the world. All that unsociable masturbating was unlikely to do him in, or leave him maimed, even. It was largely a social nuisance, and even then only to those who declared it one. It could be a personal setback too, as in this case, if a person ‘did that’ and did little else, as Jack was doing. For not much else could be accomplished in the world at that rate. He could read a book or map maybe, holding the map or book with left hand, while doing another thing with the right. But unless he were ambidextrous few useful things could be accomplished in the world while compulsively masturbating.

Yet, as the pundits repeated defensively, it should not have become a threat to his physical or emotional future, necessarily.

87.  bizarre Mortimer

And Jack was at least alive, thank heavens, as pundits added, if not perfectly well yet. And there was more good news for the world too, for he remained in a perfect position to be salvaged. Even Mortimer said so, assigned as he was to be Jack’s treating psychiatrist the very next morning. He explained to the treatment team in a morning meeting that Jack Lorenzo’s job was nothing greater than to listen to what Dr. Mortimer said to him, and read whatever he gave Jack to read, until he had incorporated Dr. Mortimer’s words, his thinking, into himself. And that thinking would make him better.

Jack had been mute since the moment Dlune had found him, by the way. For that reason, finding out what Jack might have considered to be ‘therapeutic’ was out of the question, as of yet. That was why Mortimer would visit him at times, and just talk to him. Or he would leave things he had written for Jack to read – while Jack masturbated, if he chose, as he had done throughout the entire length of every single visit so far. For he simply would not or could not stop, it seemed.

But you had to accept a man as he was, as Mortimer explained to the nurses, if you hoped to change him. Carl Jung had said so, the greatest sage of the twentieth century, the greatest psychiatrist in history, greater than Sigmund Freud even, since he took psychiatry to a ‘much higher level’. So it made no sense to tie Jack’s hands, as some nurses recommended. You had to lock his seclusion room door, of course, or he would come out and walk around naked ‘Jack’-ing off, as Dr. Mortimer put it. And you had to cover the window in the seclusion room door with something so as to discourage patients – or even nurses – from lingering at his window. And any 8½ by11 page of notebook paper should do that trick.

But once these precautions were in place, said Dr. Mortimer Lorenzo, M.D., Psychiatrist, little remained except to wait, and see when Jack would tire of the compulsion. In the meantime, Jack certainly could not go to therapy groups ‘like that’, and female nurses could not be sent in to stay for long, or often. Or alone, certainly. ‘If at all, really’, as Dr. Mortimer added when he saw his nurses’ faces. Which meant that the only kind of official sanctioned therapy possible would be the one Mortimer was offering. A male doctor had to knock and enter that smelly, very close, very male atmosphere, occasionally, and spend time trying to ‘create a therapeutic alliance’ by talking to the mute male-animal patient. The doctor could leave a few things to read and then depart, wishing the male animal patient well, and promising to return as soon as he could. And that was Mortimer’s noble mission with Jack.

And then later that very same day, Mortimer initiated Jack’s official course of therapy, naturally, by reading him the pages of the Triptique. He unlocked Jack’s seclusion room door from the outside, pulled in a chair, sat down and read, and then talked to his patient in a soothing and caring voice, trying to act as if Jack’s ceaseless masturbation, even while he, Mortimer, the doctor, talked, was just something he, Mortimer, the doctor, was professional enough not to be bothered by in the slightest degree.

Many of the nurses, however, thought this was abominable. Some were scandalized to high heaven. Already by the end of the week they had exhausted the far north’s pharmaceutical supply of Valium trying to self-treat their own whacked out reactions to this bizarre duo.

But Mortimer reasoned that if he forbade the activity during his visits he would soon learn just how little his visits meant to Jack and they would be out of treatment options altogether. So he kept the meetings up, a couple of times a day. And when therapy time was over he removed his chair, wishing his patient well, quite sincerely, and handing him a copy of the Triptique, or whatever, for later consumption. It was a constant, untiring effort by one side of the broken duo, to communicate with the other side of the broken duo, looking for some way to therapize the huge canyon-like rift between them.

88.  bizarre nurses

And it ‘didn’t work’, as nurses said. Or it did not seem to work, at least. Not at first certainly. And day after day went by filled with masturbation and supposedly great-rift-filling talk. And the nurses complained about this crazy stateside doctor, just picked up off the street and allowed by the hospital to work on their unit, the very same day (oddly) that the craziest patient in history was admitted, also from the U.S. of A., naturally, AND WITH THE SAME LAST NAME, strangely. But not really so ‘strangely’, said the chief nurse, for U.S. Americans were the craziest, least natural and normal people ON the planet, for the Mexicans had told her so, every Christmas when she went to Puerto Vallarta, and neighbors knew neighbors, and Canada and Mexico were neighbors of the U.S.A. and knew what those USA people were really like. So therefore, they wanted a ‘more effective’ treatment plan, some of the nurses did. They wanted to restrain Jack’s hands. They wanted to roll a gurney into the room, lay him on his back, and tie his hands to it, if not his feet too, or anything else that stuck out; for the current treatment approach ‘was not working’.

But the new stateside doctor kaiboshed this. And he was the one in charge of treatment, of course, not they. Masturbation, he opined very professionally, was not a valid or ethical reason for leather wrist and ankle restraint, unless skin was coming off. So the nurses got books from the hospital library. And they said ‘Freud himself said’ that excessive masturbation caused serious neurasthenia, whatever that was. But it ‘sure didn’t sound good’. And they pointed to the page. But Mortimer said it was an old Viennese wives’ tale and Freud was a sex-obsessed cocaine addict. And anyway, if masturbation could cause such damage, then maximum damage from that cause had already been inflicted and suffered, both, without a doubt, and tying the patient’s hands would only cause a new and different and worse kind of damage. So Jack remained in the hospital in this bizarre state God knows how long, masturbating naked in public without letup, unbeknownst to Rev and Jo Lorenzo, fortunately, or the outside world.

And in the beginning, after Jack first got there, several days a week he would receive a visit from his doctor, his ‘professional friend’, you could say, who would try to reach him through his wonderful, doctorly, hopefully healing intellectual analysis of things, somehow or other.

The evening and night shift nurses were as tolerant of Jack’s very human problem as the doctor was, of course, as tolerant as psych hospital off-shifts usually tend to be, and especially night shifts. But the official-protocol-obsessed day shift nurses were not finished yet. They put up with this crock of elk and wood-buffalo doo-doo for as long as they could stand it, then announced that they needed the seclusion room for ‘other more deserving out-of-control patients’. And they insisted the doctor get his ‘sexed-up’ U.S. American patient out of ‘their seclusion room’ immediately, if not sooner. So Mortimer negotiated on the phone with Housekeeping. And then with Maintenance. And he moved out of his very own private office just given him by the hospital, furniture and all, and gave his space to Jack as a ‘Private Masturbatory Chapel’. That was what the day nurses called it, anyway, the ‘PMC’. Though actually it was an emergency make-do seclusion room.

And as soon as they had turned their backs and walked away, all of them, Jack was in the hall behind them, naked as the Greek god of sacred doorways, Hermes himself, and even sort of emphasizing his hermetic doorway role for every single patient and staff to see, male and female. Because a regular office door, unlike a seclusion room door, could be unlocked from the inside, you see, and everyone had forgotten this very basic detail in their confusion and upset.

The day nurses almost yelled at the doctor – as he walked the other way – that there was not enough money in the budget to change the lock. They ushered Dr. Mortimer’s wandering treatment disaster back into his special room and gave up very important and essential nurses’ duties to stand there feeling weary and demeaned, doing their own RCMP² guard duty outside the blitzy half-shrink’s former office door, even though it was NOT in their Dominion OR Provincial Health Job Description, either one. They waited there for Dr. Mortimer to (quick) run outside and down a few blocks himself and bring back, himself, a lock, huffing and puffing and covered with snowflakes. And the Maintenance team ran in from somewhere on official ‘emergency status’ to install the new lock, huffing and puffing and covered with snowflakes. And the bizarre but official treatment plan for history’s most bizarre patient was finally back on track, huffing and puffing and covered with snowflakes.

89.  a very ‘human’ nurse

There was also a bizarre but unofficial treatment plan for history’s most bizarre psych patient, one that no one knew anything about except just two people, Dlune and Jack. Now Dlune was attending college during the daytime and working nights. She was not trained as a nurse, as of yet, but she did qualify as a non-professional aide. And unlike the daytime nurses she did not think Jack’s perpetual Hermes-like display disgusting. She had been drawn to it the very second she had first seen it down near the river, in fact, and felt sorry for him, so would visit the former doctor’s office where Jack was secluded, down at the end of the hall, far removed from the rest of the ward. And she would do this whenever the other night shift person was very, very busy, and would try to help Jack feel a little better. And eventually, as all U.S. pundits would agree, 100% to be exact, male and female (and trans-gendered and international pundits too): this, as they felt and said openly, though many very good, decent people deemed it very improper (and illegal, of course), was a very nice and ‘human’ thing for Dlune to have done.

And what were her techniques? Not medically sanctioned ones, naturally; just Native American ‘Indian’ secrets, women’s secrets, drawn from ten thousand years of tribal common sense, from Dene, Slave and Blackfoot (and even a tiny bit of Swedish) tribal wisdom to be specific; from her healing talent, which was part of her unique nature; from her heart, of course; from knowledge of life, not books; from the experience gained growing up in a large extended family cramped in a small space for extremely long winters, but roaming the vast primeval northern nature during short heavenly summers; a tight-knit, densely packed family situation where a certain amount of tolerance of idiosyncratic primate behavior from all the many family members of all ages, each one being different, and each one unique, was the best way to keep the peace and enjoy life. Drawn from living, in other words, something like a family of orangutangs in a zoo cage; orangutangs with intellect, of course: drawn from a mammal setting which was both natural and human.

Or, in plain, pardon-begging French, Dlune had grown up aware of sexual sport of all kinds. And she had understood it as one natural part of being human, and as fun and healthy and wonderful and funny and lovely, just as long as it harmed no one. Dlune was the very kind of real, natural, genuine human being, in a word, that could cause aberrantly over-Mortimer-ized, i.e., apparently de-animalized humans like Jack’s parents to ‘shit cows’, as some of the very youngest 90’s pundits put it once. And that must have been why no one in the whole world had ever had the heart to tell the poor Lorenzos the details, even though the whole rest of the world would come to know the juicy details eventually and maybe even shit cows if necessary to feel better and be re-made in turn. But who in the world could wish the poor Lorenzos to shit cows? So no one ever told them, not even Sammy. ‘Least of all’ Sammy, as he put it once.

Anyway, Dlune would unlock the seclusion room door and pull in a chair, just as Mortimer would. Except she would not sit in her chair necessarily. There was never furniture in the seclusion room, not even a bed. Jack lived on a bare mattress on the floor. He had sheets and a blanket which he would use at times to partly cover himself if chilled by the bitter air leaking in around the window. He never wore clothes or hospital pj’s or gown, as his Mommy had taught him to do and imagined he must, but instead felt at one with nature in his natural state, of course, just as he had all summer. He was deeply tanned from his months in the sun with shades of dull green, grey and liver-failure yellow. The ribs could be counted, and his muscles stood out like sinews, after nothing but outdoor exercise and loss of body fat. And Dlune thought him magnificently beautiful to look at.

But he was about to crash ever so miserably from speed. He was nigh upon DEEP into amphetamine withdrawal, and was not much fun because of that, for he knew that hell was coming. Yet she understood this somehow and knew he would recover from the withdrawal and crash, so was patient.

Once she was in the room with the door locked from the inside (there was no see-through window, for it was not a regular seclusion room), she would kneel by his right side and lightly place the fingers of her right hand on his right wrist, and let her fingers ride lightly with his wrist as many minutes as it took him to decide to stop moving it. Once his grip had relaxed, she would pick up his wrist and lay it on the mattress and pat it gently, and take up where he had left off, gently, caringly, looking in his eyes as often as he could accept. And this was the bedrock principal of her new medical discovery, her as yet unpublished treatment technique, the approach she had discovered miraculously, said some pundits. But in all truth, she always said, she had ‘discovered’ it simply because it was dictated by a genuinely, naturally gifted healer’s intuition for what was necessary.

And she would speak a few words now and then, too, just to be natural and human and, specifically, womanly and nurturing. But he would never respond verbally, of course, for he had lost his mania and high, and was sorry and mute, miserably down, and hurting around the right kidney from withdrawal. Yet she would do this same thing every night she worked, then leave as quietly as she had entered, as soon as she felt she might be missed by the only other worker. For she knew she could be fired, or blackballed for life by the nursing profession, and be sent to prison by the government. But she believed she was doing the right thing to help this poor psychotic man who was so good to look at, but so sadly lost and forgotten by his heartless people.

90.  an overwhelmed doctor

And during the very first few days of the very first week, when all of this was starting, the doctor, too, Dr. Mortimer, felt just as concerned as Dlune and over-identified with his patient so much that he immediately lost all track of whether he was the doctor or the patient, and was so bolixed up in all his brilliantly gleaming grey matter ‘he thought he would go fucking ape-shit’, as the early Remaking pundits put it later in an interview with Rolling Stone.

These bewildering early winter events, in fact, forever stunned the small sect of zealots who made a cult of The Remaking after it finally came to light and spread a bit on Penn’s campus and other U.S. campuses during the early seventies. For all said it was 'impossible' that mj lorenzo could have been two people at once! Ever!

And that was how Mortimer felt too. He agreed. And he could not sort it out. He felt responsible for it and blamed himself. And he tried and tried with that incredibly impressive intellect of his to undo it; or redo it; whatever. And he ended up wasting a great deal of the winter on the theme in his head, too. A lot of the writing he did was aimed at deciding if he were the patient or the doctor or both, and more to the point, if he were one person or two people. It was a very confusing situation for everyone. But once he had written a piece, Dr. Mortimer would take it to Jack and read it aloud, then pass it on to him for assimilation at his leisure. And the ‘Fort Smith’ packet that Mortimer sent eventually to his parents consisted of the first batch of pieces that he wrote for Jack and himself, as the two began to pass the awful and nerve-wracking northern winter, trying to understand and ‘remake’ themselves in frustrated parallel.

The next piece he gave Jack was a rather long and complicated one. No one understood it. Not at first anyway. Even Mortimer struggled to hold onto its meaning, a fact which revealed, of course, that already in 1970 he must have been not unlike the future Dr. Lorenzo who would struggle to remember the real importance of The Remaking his whole life long.

Since these brilliant and poetic paragraphs were so very intellectual and forgettable, however, they drew no response from Jack, naturally, despite the superhuman I.Q. effort that had produced them. So on another day Mortimer read another piece he had just written. And even Rev and Jo agreed, eventually, that this piece was the clearest and most successful attempt their son had made yet, indeed, to describe the complicated and confusing picture of what would be going on between Mortimer and Jack throughout the winter Freeze-Up. It was so successful in semi-clarifying things, that it actually succeeded in clearly conveying the atmosphere of utter confusion better than it clarified anything else, as pundits observed later, with the result that the Lorenzos could find themselves sometimes almost comprehending what it felt like to be their own overwhelmed son, to be so twisted up as to whether he might be Mortimer the doctor, or Jack the patient:

Harlequin  =  The River  =  …

Do you remember this Wrigley-son-turned-doctor, Mortimer, the one, this tragic one – not Jack – who abandoned his practice deferring to Jack, and fell apart in the crash, when the Crack-Up turned Going-to-the-Sun into a bad trip? For Jack had burst and fractured his Mortimer-shell on a mountain in Glacier Park and had survived intact as primary writhing drive along the Mackenzie, like a Black city riot gone unchecked, alive, not dead by suicide, merely burning itself out, and had left Mortimer strewn like scraps of white notebook paper across the western plains and mountains to be pieced together again and be preserved. To be silently picked up, ingested, and absorbed by Jack, like an eggshell cracked and eaten by its hatched chick, so that neither of them might be lost.

Well: at the moment, having exhausted himself in a last fit of devouring rage, that very Jack has fallen mute on a hospital ward at Fort Smith. And that same Mortimer, as gathered together previously and pieced together in a new way by Jack, is able to come to his 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?

In the Beginning was the Word…³

And the Word was made flesh…⁴

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.⁵

The Word is Mortimer, that is, a Christ-parallel, hung up on a cross and bleeding like Abbie Hoffman in Chicago. And he must become embodied inside Jack, be eaten and re-collected into a single locus, in a new electro-molecular balance, into a livable White-Black suburb-city system, Word-made-Flesh.

And then while Jack is temporarily now on the outside, “out there,” devoured Mortimer will leak and sneak out slowly through his pores, where he will linger and surround him in an imprisoning Freeze-Up, until the two are once more clinched in one, now in a different way, as water locked in ice, and that is the particular state of tension out of which their violent loosening up will take place best again later; that is, at Break-Up: when all the water will burst its wintery shell.

Freeze-Up: Mortimer, man of words, will write from Fort Chipewyan, from somewhere inside and outside Jack, coming out as slowly as he still goes in, commuting to Fort Smith and back, finally freezing up and contracting, like white country-suburbs slowly choking off their black inner city, into Jack’s cold thick Mortimer skin.

And the Word was made flesh…⁶

And he came unto the world and the world knew him not…⁷

Jack means ‘the world’ to Mortimer, the world of Alberta and Fort Smith and Philadelphia. But this Jack, Mortimer’s ‘world’, will finally refuse to acknowledge and receive his own icy skin, Mortimer. And there’s the rub.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.⁸

91.  an unresponsive patient

When Jack failed to respond in the slightest degree to this most brilliantly poeticized of all theology pieces, Mortimer wrote still another piece trying to persuade Jack that he, the white doctor Mortimer, really was sympathetic toward dark-skinned people like Jack. He hoped that might get a rise out of Jack. Because Jack, before he fell mute and all anti-communicado, had written a few short notes suggesting he saw himself as Native American and/or Black, rather than the deeply suntanned white Caucasian he certainly appeared to be.

….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…                Jung⁹

When Jack Lorenzo left Wrigley for medical school in the lower Delaware piedmont town of Philadelphia, the first time he encountered the world, as he later said, and wanted to enjoy the rest of his life free of the morbid fear of dark-skinned people, he moved into a Black West Philly ghetto. He idly observed as the red-hot mama across the street stabbed her lover, then suffered the consequences, a bloody night spent regarding him in the emergency room. He lent his mattress to a poor Black neighbor family and bought a sleeping bag because he couldn’t rid the returned mattress of urine. He helped in a heart operation on a Black twenty-eight-year-old stabbed by a brother, lost him on the respirator and saw it as a bad omen. He treated a fourteen-year-old Black kid for out-of-control behavior and the kid went home and shot himself in the head. He took his ideas and research projects to the Black community and got served free beer and a Black Eye. So he put extra locks on the doors and welded one-inch fencing on the windows and looked out at a chess-board sky on which Black was winning. He made periodic forays into White suburbs to preach inner-city love and made the headlines of the South Jersey God-and-Country Free Press. He visited a Black rally where he learned to turn self-hate outward. He gained a growing fear of eggshell White surrounding and controlling him. He grew critical of White doctors’ institutions, quit his hospital training job, shouldering fear and hate and rage that were completely out of focus and off track, and when last heard from in June of 1970 was barreling West to find out why. ‘Six West’. A wing in a western institution, the numerical name of which reminded Jack, he said, of six-guns and crazy violence, two of his private passions. As his doctor-friend and brother I caught up with him there and record the following synopsis of our Black-White conflict.

Lying perfectly flat and emotionless in a padded cell in Fort Smith, Jack wrote a note explaining to an Indian nurse that he had cracked up in a blue Buick and broken his back. He claimed that he was a Philadelphia ‘Negro’, but sometimes could be an ‘Indian’, if he wanted. Finally, he insisted that his name was “Jack,” not “Mortimer,” and he proceeded to call me, his doctor, “Mortimer.”

Black : White :: (Red-Brown-)Mud : (Blue-)Green :: Jack : Mortimer

It is only a step from thinking of the West as madness to regarding madness as the true West…. And we have been learning that into this territory certain psychotics, a handful of “schizophrenics,” have moved on ahead of the rest of us – unrecognized Natty Bumppos or Huck Finns, interested not in claiming the New World for any Old God, King, or Country, but in becoming New Men….

If a myth of America is to exist in the future, it is incumbent on our writers, no matter how square and scared they may be in their deepest hearts, to conduct with the mad just such a dialogue as their predecessors learned long ago to conduct with the aboriginal dwellers in the actual Western Wilderness. It is easy to forget, but essential to remember, that the shadowy creatures living scarcely imaginable lives in the forests of Virginia once seemed as threatening to all that good Europeans believed, as the acid-head or the borderline schizophrenic on the Lower East side now seems to all that good Americans have come to believe in its place.

Leslie Fiedler¹⁰

Conflict Dynamics

In West Philadelphia, as in Fort Smith, Alberta, Mortimer is as frightened of Jack as Jack is, by Mortimer. The only way to resolve this stand-off is to get them together. A fighting auseinandersetzung¹¹  is in order, as Jung says, a butting of bull horns until they can come to terms with each other.

Because Mortimer does not know of what Jack’s life truly consists, he can only imagine, wonder and fear. This ends in romanticizing and paranoia. Since Jack can no longer live with Mortimer without his help, and vice versa, Mortimer must try to live with Jack until he overcomes his fear of Jack and the sometime worship of him. He must try either to live for a brief time like Jack, moving from crisis to crisis, or to live with him in intimate contact in Fort Smith or West Philadelphia, locked in a cage, in a ghetto, in a prison, preserve, or special ward with him, to fight him there on his own ground, so that the fear of his darkness, the irrational overpowering fear, or its converse, the idealization, will not grab hold of his (green-white) rational controlling business-professional intellect-personality, “Mortimer,” and rule his life by obsessing its thoughts from remote control. Mortimer’s assignment is to suffer intimacy and contact, to be even willingly brutal and physical, as for example when opposite poles of two magnets attract, not stopping at a hair from touching, they crack heads. To be happy to fight in a limited fray with dark-skinned Jack, as the Americans did in divided Asian countries, “in order to stem a wider conflict,” and to learn the enemy’s strength, is going to be Mortimer’s thankless job with Jack.

This may mean that Mortimer can not go home at the usual hour, leaving behind instructions that the local help restrain and feed Jack sedative pills, but must stay late to deal with this temporary problem himself, with this lack of control and need for Mortimer’s kind attention in another form than control. Control is the issue upon which Jack, as he comes to consciousness, will want to test. And he will test it to the guerilla limits, until he is convinced that Mortimer is willing to attend to whatever is in him, and willing to do it in front of his face there on the cell pad, no matter how frightening it may seem to either of them. For Jack fears also his own uncanny power over others, especially over Mortimer. And he is becoming addicted to his fear.

Though the dissipated patient’s name is actually Mortimer Jack, he wants to be called not “Mortimer,” but “Jack,” because “Mortimer” threatens his manliness, which lies in his slowly returning physical strength and seductive power. Mortimer threatens with such barely human things as books, papers, names, labels, categories, treatments, institutions, investigations and reason(s). Such a Jack does not want to be reasoned with because he has never learned to reason. He wants to fight because he is good in a fight. If need be indeed he can kill. But in weaker moments he admits his fear of his own power to do so. No, he would rather test Mortimer’s strength than overpower it. But why won’t this sheltered unphysical Mortimer meet with him squarely and fight? Mortimer’s cringing intellect must fear the loss of its life. Then Jack’s fear of his own power is multiplied by an outside fear.

If Mortimer fears Jack from afar, if he fears Jack’s power to destroy him to such an extent as to remain removed from Jack, then Jack will think he (Jack) is in fact dangerously destructive, and his self-fear will become confirmed and defining. Jack will diagnose himself as a monster and will kill himself instead of destroying Mortimer. And he may protract his suicide across a lifetime.

But if instead Mortimer fears Jack from proximity, Jack will respond to his closeness and prove that he, Jack, is as easy to bear as a Black communist in a two-man junta. Mortimer may make the mistake of teasing Jack by belittling his prowess, but still, if he is willing to skirmish Jack in order to feel and know his prowess, then Jack will preserve his friend’s life despite Mortimer’s error.

But: if Mortimer belittles and pacifies Jack from a distance, not fighting, then Jack may want to kill him dead.

92.  an IN-human doctor

This handsome piece of writing – which analyzed polar duality from a cleverly germane and timely point of view, the medico-sociological, i.e., the doctor-patient point of view –  left the patient as cold as the windowpane and Mortimer had to think (quick!) what to do to keep looking doctorly. A very natural and human doc might have exploded in frustration and broken through Jack’s wall in that surprise way. But Mortimer was not about to do such a human thing, of course. Later pundits said that this was because Mortimer was not human. As for Mortimer, he said that getting angry was ‘not professional’; or ‘seemly’. And anyway, anybody could see that Mortimer was composed of intellect, not human heart. It was not so much that he did not show emotion. It was that he barely had any. So the next seven times in a row that he visited Jack in his seclusion room he read him the same short passage every single time. While, of course, it goes without saying that the smelly patient continued to masturbate naked and uncovered throughout:

Mortimer Jack: the Great Blast-Off of Birth

Part I  ::  Jack (and Mortimer)  ::  Exploding duality  ::  Crack-Up

Part II  ::  Mortimer (and Jack)  ::  Imploding duality  ::  Freeze-Up

Part III  ::  Mortimer Jack  ::  Explosive-Implosive Unity as Continuous Energy-Releasing Confrontation or Auseinandersetzung  ::  Break-Up

Either a map or a book can become a mandala, if I prefer. When the earth explodes and maps and books open up, I can see anything that I want in them, and the results that I make are what I’ll be living with.

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.

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

Mortimer got no response whatever during, or even after, any of the seven times in seven days that he read this piece aloud, so he left a copy with Jack and on the eighth day read him something else, while Jack did his usual thing, of course:

If the river’s freezing means the Freezing-Up of Jack the seducer, then Break-Up will mean his liberation again. Precisely. But then how will he seem to thaw at the end of winter a little prematurely, when spring Break-Up has not quite arrived, and the red-brown liquid tiger as Peace-Mackenzie, still is sleeping?

And will this tiger be the same one that at Wrigley was the picture of green “innocence”? It must. All the water comes from one source, the melting mountains. And that neat late-summer innocence, as we now know, is a deception, just as the river is, in its apparent duality of green and mud.

This is becoming complicated, Rev, because I cannot tell any more who I am. I’ll try this formula:

The Divide    ::    Muddy Water = Pure

But something besides equality must be hidden in that double-dash, as the Continental Divide itself is more than a dividing formula. (Later I’ll have to mention Dlune’s dividing backbone and her bare shoulder at Wenkchemna in keeping with this equation theme.)

I’ll try a different formula.

Harlequin…..

…is one color on one side, and another color on the other. He is split down the middle from top to bottom (see representations of Harlequin all the way from medieval woodcuts to Picasso)¹² and plays both sides to his own advantage. His backbone and the nerves within it are only appropriate as a site for his real angry self to erupt. If his back were to have broken in the Crack-Up it should come now as no surprise. (On Hungabee he plasters his back straight up flat out against the bare rock for support. The coldness does him good. His debilitation is extreme. He dreams. And he comes back – down – intact.)

Harlequin  =  (Seeming) Duality  =  The River  =  I, as I Appear (Muddy and Pure)

The Divide  ::  East : West  ::  Muddy Water : Pure   ::   Jack : Mortimer  ::

The World : The Church

This feels better. In a shockingly new math formula, as when Einstein proposed E=mc², the apparent unworkable heterogeneity of separate expressions will arouse disbelief at first, but even more so later when the whole formula really works. And the latter is the excitement that counts.

The far north knows no real spring or fall, certainly not the three-month kind seen often in the states. ‘Spring’ here in the far north, they say, comes and goes in a day at most, a day when mountain snowfields melt and push into streams and rivers hidden by thick ice all winter and the combining waters break and explode the ice into huge chunks which crash downriver scraping and groaning and banging in a turbulent flood.

And ‘Fall’, shorter yet, comes and goes in an almost instantaneous hardening of racing rivers and rippling lakes into countless sleeping bodies of ice. Suddenly the days are short and dark, not long and light, and you may resent the lack of warning. You might resent the shock, if no one has told you such a drastic involution would occur so abruptly.

I barely remember last spring, Rev. And fall in the Delaware Valley always lasted two or three months. But I have expected and longed for the far north’s shocking Freeze-Up and I hereby declare myself thrilled to leave behind a world of melodrama, of overactive acting, and of psychotic hyperkinesia and explosion, so I can head for a quiet island cabin on frozen Lake Athabasca as planned (when hospital work permits). And I believe I shall have found, before long, a way to pay for it all.

                                                                         Mortimer

93.  who could prefer Doomsday to Remaking? only dehumanized and IN-human people

And fortunately for mankind, as Remaking pundits liked to wisecrack, THAT was the end of Mortimer’s highly intellectual pile of papers entitled ‘Fort Smith, second encounter of M and J’, because the average person could stand just so much of a good thing. And anyone who had stuck by mj lorenzo this far deserved the reward of watching him get past Fort Smith with all due alacrity and continue on his path toward remaking.

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

And that was no one, BUT NO BODY, said a lot of seemingly nice, decent people. Because what those ‘stuck-it-out-this-far’ parties really ‘deserved’, they said, was a quick Doomsday.

And it was coming, they said. And it would not be long now.

Because they – themselves, their friends, and even some enemies – were fashioning weapons to do ‘all remaker types’ in.

For, as they said, what was the point of remaking yourself and remaking humanity? Why ask anyone to compromise customary values and beliefs, when values and beliefs could never be compromised? What was the point of analyzing craziness in the world so as to ‘heal’ it, when certain nice and decent parties NOT crazy had solutions already to the world’s craziness?

Go remake yourself and leave us alone, they said. Shut up about it or we will shut you up.

But a number of mj lorenzo’s most devoted Remaking pundits simply would NOT shut up. They got louder and louder the more fundamentalist traditionalists complained. They got louder as the eighties and nineties progressed, and even more numerous and vociferous during the 21st century. They wanted to ‘help mj’, they said, to ‘save humanity from destroying itself’, as their mj lorenzo had proposed to try to save humanity from self-annihilation. Too many very crazy traditional religions and ideologies had left too many people IN-human, they said. IN-human people could not make the world human again unless they first changed and became human again. That’s why the Remaking pundits were NOT going to shut up about anything. Thank you for the offer, but they believed strongly in and practiced free speech and open – and painfully honest – inquiry.

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

                                         Logo © 1970 Dr. Mortimer Lorenzo, M.D., Psychiatrist, Fort Smith, Alberta