I:  introduction to the ‘first attempt’

94.  all winter with not a word

‘What the devil happened’, as Rev put it, after the Fort Smith envelope: he and Jo did not find out until May of ’71. And then, as she pointed out, ‘the dumb old news was stale’.

“So much for monthly envelopes,” he said in January.

“Or telegrams,” she added in March.

“So much for any kind of news at all,” Rev beefed in April.

They suffered ‘”All winter with nary a word.” And they were still complaining about it years later. Because even ‘the crazy news’ -- in the ‘crazy envelope’ from Fort Smith – that Jack had landed in a hospital and ‘encountered’ Mortimer, who had then attempted to cure him as his treating psychiatrist, had not reached the Lorenzos until ‘way into February’.

Jo’s poor Jack had sent all that sad stuff from Resolution and then gone ‘silent as death’ for months. And winter would hit hard ‘up there’, and hit early, school teacher Jo knew. But winter ought to give a body more time to write, she realized. Especially if a body was mute as a body claimed, and therefore not socializing, presumably.

“If your naked favorite hasn’t frozen to death,” was Rev’s comforting encouragement.

And during the emotional days of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, when U.S. families all over the globe longed to be home together beneath a warm Christmas tree; and all through January besides: nothing. Not a single word. Not even a little ‘crazy nonsense’, as they complained to each other.

“A bomb would have been better than nothing,” Rev said, letting Jo finish the thought.

“Because he’s having such a scary year!” she said.

Their son had never failed to call or write at Christmas before the terrible year of his ‘ridiculous remaking’. And he would never fail after it, either, as they would see and say proudly one day. But an adult son should make contact at Christmas no matter how standoffish the rest of the year.

Especially if he was having such a terrible year.

They both kept saying these last words because they felt strongly about it. And he certainly had to know their feelings; a fact which only worried them more.

Finally, though, the so-called ‘Fort Smith envelope’ had come, of course, in mid-February postmarked Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, Feb. 7, the boy’s birthday. All written in the sedate handwriting of ‘Mortimer’, every bit. And it had been signed back in November, way before Thanksgiving. And the Lorenzos, though relieved for a second, had to worry all over again as soon as they realized the ‘Fort Smith’ papers described only early November and left them up in the air still. Three months behind and out of touch still. It was even more worrisome now, ‘Because mj had taken a turn for the worse’, as it might have seemed to anybody who read the bewildering stuff in that envelope called ‘Fort Smith’, mailed from ‘Fort Chipewyan’.

And by the way: why on top of all that conundrum would he mail something on his birthday but not at Christmas six weeks before? That made no sense. And another thing: why would anybody send an envelope in February about November and not add even so much as one tiny little word about what had happened since November, during December and January?

“That’s not natural,” Jo complained.

And the pundits agreed, some of them, but only many years later. It seemed so very ‘unnatural’, in fact, that Jo’s complaint would become the centerpiece of the so-called ‘Fiction Pundits’ Controversy’ when it finally hit the tabloids in the 90’s that: if the now famous mj lorenzo had really been at Fort Chipewyan all winter and had mailed the Fort Smith envelope from there in February himself, then ‘naturally’ he would have included a short note about what had just happened between November and February, like anyone else in the world would have done. To the ‘fiction’ pundits it looked, therefore, like mj lorenzo had been in Montana. Or Philadelphia, more likely. Writing fiction.

Or somewhere. Writing a section of a ‘first novel’ at a time, including within it misinformation as to his whereabouts, maybe because he was hiding from the U.S. Vietnam War draft (according to one theory). Probably not in Canada where most American draft dodgers hid, but in the U.S. Because back in 70 and 71, as shrink pundits reminded, if a young doctor had left his internship without draft board permission, he would have become immediately eligible for the draft. Automatically. And so, maybe for this reason he had given – or sent – the ‘Fort Smith envelope’ to someone, to be taken to Fort Chipewyan and mailed from northern Canada.

Maybe, as they said in ‘fiction pundit’ workshops, he had given it to someone in November. But something had gone wrong. Somebody had screwed up. They had drunk up the postage money on the holidays and had not scraped up postage again until February.

But mainstream pundits who preferred the standard view that mj had been in Canada the whole year disagreed. If he had been ‘having such a bad year’, as the Lorenzos said, and as everyone knew to be the case, then why should things have been ‘natural’? He could have been incapacitated. Or depressed or immobile. Something un-natural could have prevented use of arm or hand for writing. Many possible ‘natural’ explanations existed for the posting delay, they said, explanations more natural than declaring the envelopes ‘pure fiction’. Maybe Mortimer had gotten snowbound and hadn’t been able to get off his island into Ft. Chipewyan proper to the post office.

Yes, but, said the ‘fiction’ pundits, this threw it back into ‘fiction’ again, because, as even Remaking middle-of-the-roaders ‘had to admit’, to say there might be ‘other natural explanations’ was the same as saying that mj lorenzo might not have been telling ‘the whole story’ in his book, The Remaking.

At any rate, a few months later in May, the Lorenzos would finally get the entire ‘Part II’ of The Remaking, or ‘Freeze-Up: Seven Attempts at a Meeting’, in a single fat envelope that was so bulky the U.S. mailman felt obliged to ring the doorbell. The monster package was postmarked Fort Chipewyan, May 10, 1971, and everything was written and signed by Mortimer, the whole mind-blowing mixed bag of tricks. And it included the ‘impossible’ first attempt at a meeting and all the other six attempts at a meeting between Mortimer and Jack.

Then ’Part III’, or ‘Break-Up’, got to them on June 30, written and signed by ‘mj’, not ‘Jack’ or ‘Mortimer’, and mailed from Eureka, Montana. But the date was ‘all smeared’ from the envelope’s having been battered in the mail.

95.  ‘Sunday School’ pundits object to the Lorenzos’ prosaic way of referring to their son’s remaking year

Many pundits had a bone to pick with the Lorenzos about an unrelated point, however. From a distance, that is. For they never would have wanted, most of them, to argue in person with parents of their own mj. But a group did go on record with The Philadelphia Inquirer in the late eighties offering the observation in an interview that ‘saying mj lorenzo was having a bad year was like saying Jesus was having a bad day on the day of the crucifixion’.

Most pundits never did take to mj’s parents, usually for reasons similar to this, for things the Lorenzos did that showed they ‘just didn’t GET it’. They purposely kept a distance from the Lorenzos. And Sammy’s ‘first revision’ in 1980, with its detailed revelation of the Lorenzos’ word-for-word reaction to The Remaking, years after the fact, only annoyed some pundits further, over time, even if they did find the parental interactions ‘ball-bustingly funny’ from the day they were published.

But: gradually, over the years, they came to accept that mj’s parents never could have looked at mj or his Remaking in the way they, the pundits, did. And they came to feel less rancorous toward two 'nice people who would not change their attitudes a rat’s ass-hair’, as pundits said in private, yet ironically had given the world a revolutionary son.

And indeed the Lorenzos would always consider The Remaking a problem, not a solution. They would always feel proud of mj’s success as a psychiatrist, as a University of Colorado medical school faculty member, as a husband and father and a Colorado Mountain Club mountain climber and whatever. Yet they would never think of him as ‘writer’ or ‘sage’ as pundits did. For Rev and Jo had been 38 and 33 when mj was born during World War II, and they were more than content to have given the world a son at all. That was miracle enough.

96.  grave warnings to readers of the ‘first attempt’ from Sammy Martinez

As for the ‘impossible first attempt’, as all referred to it: Sammy Martinez, in his 1994 ‘second revision’, would eventually add two notes intended to duly warn anyone about to ‘attempt’ to read and understand it. For the Remaking pundits had always agreed it was the very most trying part of mj lorenzo’s Remaking, for a variety of colorful reasons. He explained:

WARNING TO READERS OF  ‘first attempt’

Reading the ‘first attempt’ may jeopardize the emotional stability of anyone short on time; patience; understanding; forgiveness; humanity; etc., etc.

Because the ‘first attempt’:

1)  is the longest of long chapters, unbelievably long, so long as to require subsection AND sub-subsection headings within itself;

2)  is the most long-winded on any given subject it addresses, or so a vast number have complained, especially those who are little drawn to intellectual treatises;

3)  has drawn, of any section of The Remaking, the largest number of reader complaints of all kinds in general over the years, by far;

4)  has often startled the extremist-Christian right to tears, or at least scandalized them into the next chapter lest they read another disgraceful word;

5)  has been hard work too for the U.S. American left throughout their lifetime of studying it, though they have always understood its crucial role in The Remaking and have always supported it;

6)  is the most emotionally discombobulating and exasperating part of The Remaking, arguably;

7)  is the least comprehensible, in other words (but only in spots) (and less so for certain extremist types who like that about it); and

8)  has always been the very most dry and boring chapter of all, until, that is, spruced up by the Dr.’s first and second revisions.”

And then, as if he deemed even this much warning not enough, Sammy added another strongly-worded afterthought to the 1994 Second Revision, resorting to an attention-getting ‘you’ again and again for emphasis:

WARNING TO ALL SERIOUS  Remaking  COMMENTATORS AND PUNDITS OFFICIALLY QUALIFIED AND AUTHORIZED OR NOT

The next section, the notorious ‘first attempt’, chews up and spits out commentators and pundits just as did THE MOUNTAIN THAT REMADE MAN (the magic expanding-exploding mountain in the Hare tale, mj’s ‘Second Dream’ on Hungabee).¹  Getting ‘chewed up’ by the mountain is not the biggest problem, however. Neither is being ‘spit out’ by it: for, if and when you do get ‘spit out’ and coughed out by the mountain that chewed up and almost devoured you, you should be well on your way to being remade.

There are, rather, several tricks and catches to getting spit out properly and successfully.

Like THE MOUNTAIN THAT REMADE MAN, the ‘first attempt’ expands to infinity, potentially. It seeks to do so by begging more and more commentating and punditing from its reader, just as the book of Revelation and the dreams of Daniel in the Bible inspire endless and varied interpretation.

Once inside this ever-expanding mountain of commentating and punditing, the so-called ‘first attempt’: if you do not at some reasonable point simply walk straight out and away from the bugger’s clutches (the beggar that is begging your commentary and never ceasing to beg), i.e., if you do not at some reasonable moment simply walk away from all your very own infinitely expanding mountain of commentating and punditing on the infinitely expanding mountain of commentating and punditing, the ‘first attempt’, you will remain inside the mountain lost forever and never will be able to emerge to be REMADE.

The magic trick that properly and successfully gets you spit out from the infinitely expanding mountain called ‘first attempt’, and back onto your own individual path of remaking, is your own well-timed walking away from your own infinitely expanding mountain of punditing and commentating on the infinitely expanding mountain of punditing and commentating called ‘first attempt’.

Some people intending to read it must have been chased off by this seeming nonsense of a warning, but well-seasoned pundits who read the warnings laughed like drunken pirates over a chest of jewels because they ‘loved insanely’ the ‘first attempt’ and all of The Remaking for the way it ‘invited punditrizing to no end’. And they loved the way Sammy’s ‘revisions’ had made mj’s novum organum a little amusing at last.

II.  Mortimer in Fort Smith:  fear of practically everything

97.  the ‘second encounter’ was still a live event

Meanwhile the famous ‘second encounter of M and J’ which had kicked off in early November still remained a live event in Fort Smith in late November.

It was not a very successful live event though. Censorship ratings established by psych nurses had hardly saved it. And seating had never been offered to outsiders, of course. Not because it was sold out; but because only the two principals had been allowed official entry since day one.

And yet: “The second encounter was an improvement over the ‘first encounter’,” as certain pundits said after they studied and compared The Remaking’s three ‘encounters’ between M and J. It was important that pundits do such comparative studies, they thought. And it was nice to hear of ‘improvement’ when you were a pundit, even if the news came many years after Fort Smith. For it meant mj’s remaking must have been progressing invisibly, no matter how disastrous things seemed at this point in his year.

Most pundits thought it terribly important what happened to mj lorenzo, of course, then or now. For they believed that humanity’s future depended on him, no matter how improbable or nutty that might sound to friends and relatives.

To nurses though, such future wizardry was ‘Monday morning hockey-coaching’, because in Fort Smith nobody gave a flying puck about future halfwit pundits, as Jack Lorenzo’s nurses would have said, fairly politely, for them. You could hardly afford to care about your own getting home at night, in fact, as they complained to each other all day long. Because as soon as you walked across town in the starry frozen morning and got to the psych unit and took off your fur-lined parka and boots and made coffee and everything else, there was that bat brain Lorenzo case – patient and doctor both, and equally crazy, both, if not more – staring you in the face with all its gravity, anxious to occupy your nervous system all day long without relief. A nightmare it was. No. Two nightmares, two half-nightmares crashed together into one.

To the nurses, the hospital administrator, the medical records secretary, the patients; to maintenance staff and even to housekeepers (whether Indian or Eskimo), during the days that the case dragged on, it looked and felt like a train wreck.

A ‘Canadian Pacific head-on’, as the administrator said to the Mountie by phone around mid-afternoon of the first full day.

“It’s an American plane crash,” the chief psych nurse shouted to the Fort Smith Mountie, whom she knew better than the townspeople realized. And she sort of grabbed the phone from the administrator’s hand to say to the Mountie, “Just imagine if a Cessna crashed into Six West leaving two twin brothers, both half-dead, one’s noggin working without the rest of him, the other’s rest of him but not noggin. One acting doctor, the other patient, both wacky and grosser than moose poop. Each useless to himself and the other, less than useless to the human condition, and I care less who disagrees, Americans-Brits-French-flippin-Queen-herself, now-or-later.”

98.  mj lorenzo’s official psychiatric history made public

Given such an unpleasant to-do, then, if Jack Lorenzo’s psych chart had not included certain important bits of psychiatric history to help his nurses understand him and his doctor, and to help them ‘sympathize’, as psych pundits would say later, it certainly should have. The ‘first encounter’, as they summarized in the early 70s, had started in Philly six months back, when finally Jack Lorenzo had burst out through his other half’s – i.e., Dr. Mortimer Lorenzo’s – thick but cracking shell; had wiggled free; and had gotten de-repressed enough to start a conversation with Mortimer on the street, a back and forth that all of Powelton Village remembered months and years later as if yesterday:

"You think too much!" neighbors had heard, and then, from the very same mouth, but quietly now, "Well,.... I don't kno-ow," with a tone that was musical, and a shoulder twist that no one could forget. And that was Mortimer answering Jack’s accusation, of course. And so both ‘M’ and ‘J’ had been in operation at once and simultaneously at that point, finally, said pundits, and even talking to each other, amazingly, for the first time in history.

That was why in his book, The Remaking, mj had called it ‘the first encounter of M and J’, as ‘psych history pundits’ would say when they made it their job to fill in missing pieces of mj lorenzo’s ‘psychiatric past history’ and keep it updated as more information came in year to year. And that ‘first encounter’ had gone on ‘for a while’, they thought. The meeting between mj’s two halves had lasted until the Crack-Up, as a matter of fact. For after that Jack had gotten complete control of mj and sent Mortimer packing, technically and unofficially placing him on ‘un-requested vacation leave’, as early Remaking savants said with deadpan faces. And so, Mortimer had gone off ‘flying into the atmosphere’, as the joke went, ‘for a while’. Because Mortimer liked ‘airy realms’ so much. And the first encounter had ended.

So the ‘first encounter’, you could say, in sum, had consisted of one very short verbal interchange between ‘M and J’ that had been echoed and re-echoed, or ‘perseverated’, as shrink pundits preferred to put it, ’10,000 times at least’. This psychotic-looking condition had continued for weeks and had ended in an explosion on the Continental Divide, thanks to Jack’s far out and – some said – ‘wacky’ and ‘manic’ notions about space-time, and his self-endangering behaviors based on same. All of which had lost him his job and professional reputation too, maybe, and totaled his father’s beautiful car, and driven his parents mad, and almost killed poor mj ‘and some other people too maybe’, they added.

But it could have been worse, opined a few nutty ‘psychoanalytic psych’ pundits whom the rest of the pundit world found truly trying. “Luckily,” as these brain-dead head shrinks said, “mj had only been split in half.” That was what the heartless brains had pointed out. ‘Only half, not eighths or sixteenths’.

‘OR TWO HUNDRED FIFTY SIXTHS’, they must have forgotten to add.

The one half of mj had ‘merely’ gone off for a ‘little’ while ‘quietly’, explained these shrinks and student shrinks. And the ‘other half’ had been left ‘working’ ‘pretty fine’.

‘JUST WITHOUT GREY MATTER’, normal people wanted to shout, i.e., without intellect or the slightest appreciation of kindergarten-level social graces. But who needed that, right? The ‘psycho’ pundits did not, it seemed. Well, then, how long would they like to go without their grey matter? Would they like to try four months too? And: how ‘lucky’ would they feel to be ‘half a person’ themselves?

These ‘psycho’ pundits were insufferable, in other words. They could use some help recovering from their miserable state, it seemed. A volunteer or two might be found who could help them to become ‘half a person’ now if they thought that being half-personed was a ‘lucky’ thing. And some irritated pundits did offer in circulated handbills to ‘put these psychoanalytic idiots out of their misery’. Would they have wanted to hear such palliation and whitewash of their friend’s tragic condition, if it had been their best friend? Would they have wanted to hear such buffalo-flop analysis about how much worse it could have been?

Which school of Western Inhumanities had those heartless hazards gone to? asked some truly riled mj followers. For they remembered what mj had gone through. Just to help them.

99.  pundits study mj’s prior psych history to estimate possible present danger ‘now’, i.e., during the winter of ’70-‘71

At any rate, given this particular case history and this particular ‘first encounter’, what then might the ‘second encounter’ have brought mj and the world? This was what a few pundits asked, looking back, for they believed that every detail of mj’s remaking year had significance NOW for the world’s future. And maybe they were nuts, and maybe not. Maybe they were freaky leftist activists who had flunked Haute Underarm Couture 101, but at least they cared about the whole world, not just themselves. And that was a nice start for humanity’s remaking.

And so: how much danger, they asked, might their mj lorenzo have been in – in the hospital in Fort Smith – and which part of him was in danger, Mortimer or Jack?

The sad truth was, they estimated, that Jo Lorenzo must have been ‘right on the money’ when she had asked these questions of Rev so demandingly.

For the kind of danger that might have been expected to result from any ‘encounter’ or Jungian ‘auseinandersetzung’ ² between Jack and Mortimer at this point, as the annoying psycho-whiz-pundits now theorized after the fact, the likely danger from a face-to-face meeting and coming-to-terms with each other in the Fort Smith hospital lay in this, they said, that: any discord – or power shifts – between M and J would have weakened mj’s ability to function as a whole person.

Well.

Alright then.

They must have meant that mj was ‘fragile’. But they had forgotten how to say it properly in English, apparently, such as: ‘mj lorenzo had crumbled like a cookie and split completely in half in the past, one time, and he might crumble the same way OR WORSE now a second time’.

In other words, the drastic shifting of almost all of mj’s power from Mortimer to Jack during the ‘first encounter’ had unmasked mj’s essential psycho-structural fragility and produced something that looked, from hindsight, like a manic psychotic break. Which had led to self-endangering behaviors and even gotten mj almost killed. All of which had produced, as the psychoanalytic psychologist-whiz-pundits liked to put it – a bit frozen and a little bit shakily – a weakening of “mj’s ability to function as a whole person.”

Which certainly seemed a prize-winning cretin understatement when you recalled that he was cracked all the way through like a bar magnet cut in two halves with a hacksaw, and his two personality halves now sat in Fort Smith painfully disconnected in two different parts of the universe.

But anyway, following the parallel, and reasoning in the very same bland and spineless manner, these ‘psycho’ pundits, these exceedingly psychoanalytic psychologist-whiz pundits concluded that: now; and presently; during the ‘second encounter’ in the hospital in Fort Smith; as mj’s two sides proceeded to relate to each other in whatever sane or less-than-sane way, and as his two sides theoretically looked for some common meeting ground for starting preliminary negotiations: if a major discord should surface, or if any major shift in power should result, this ‘would weaken mj’s ability to function as a whole person’.

But where did they learn to coldly forewarn dead givens like this?

WHEN THE TITANIC SANK WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES HEADLINE ‘TITANIC MAY HAVE TROUBLE SAILING’?

Families of casualties would have thug-mobbed the paper.

Screw the ‘psychobabble pundits’, the rest of punditry said. That ‘screwed-up’ sentence about ‘functioning whole persons’ ‘had a loose screw in it that fell into the sentence when their psychobabble heads came unscrewed’. Everybody knew that mj lorenzo’s ability to function in this world, by the time he had reached Fort Smith, was already weakened far more than any caring person could ever have wanted him or anybody in this world to suffer. Mortimer Lorenzo, for one, was not the type that any sensible person in the world would have left with the farm. He was not practical. Let’s face it. Or handy. And Jack – well, just forget it. He had disappointed everybody by the time he had reached Fort Smith, even himself probably. It was not worth discussing. And those were the only choices mj lorenzo had at the moment for tending his farm, funny or otherwise: either Mortimer or Jack; either a psycho-fragile intellectual; or a burnt out speed freak, whittled down to sheer id,³ most of that id just a tad bit sexual.

100.  could more Cracked-Up mj’s be out there wandering about? the pundits asked

The world was in sad shape, that is, if more mj lorenzos were out there by chance wandering the planet about to Crack Up.

Many pundit analysts after thinking about The Remaking in depth for years, and after exhaustive scientific research and clinical studies, would conclude there were plenty more such fragile mj lorenzos around, especially right in the U.S., and many looking deceptively normal.

And the world was in worse shape to whatever extent mj’s hunch (and the pundits’) might have been right, that the human race entire, especially Western civilization; and most of all mj’s country; each and every person; was dangerously close to becoming like one half of mj or the other, Mortimer or Jack. If that were the case, then improper and unhealthy distribution of Mortimer and Jack energy anywhere in the world, to whatever extent it occurred, could lead to institutions and governments and organizations of all kinds having to make the same impossible choice mj had been forced to make: between psycho-fragile ideology-dominated leadership (like Mortimer had been); and burnt-out-manic-y, speed-freaky, whittled-to-id type leadership (like Jack).

This was the way most pundits thought about it already by the mid-seventies. It was why they took The Remaking so seriously, irritatingly seriously at times. They did not see The Remaking’s significance as psychological only, i.e., as mj’s private psych-split thing only. The Remaking’s implications, for the pundits, were psychological AND political on a global scale; and they knew that this had been mj lorenzo’s comprehension of the matter too when he had been writing The Remaking.

101.  could mj lorenzo be an avatar? the pundits wanted to know and (though it made their sanity seem questionable too now) they interviewed mj’s parents for clues to the answer

It started hitting some Harvard divinity school pundits at this level, too, during the mid-seventies. They and their cronies agreed the implications were not just individual and psychological, but also ‘political on a grand scale’. Secretly they meant also ‘religious’, but they had agreed not to use this word publicly yet.

This very special and vocal punditry group felt mj lorenzo resembled a messiah or avatar in some ways; but they felt it was not the right time to go public with that shocker. Maybe he was a ‘culture hero’, some thought, a charismatic spiritual leader like Joseph Campbell wrote about.⁴  Maybe he was one who could save the world from cataclysm; unless they too were going half-crazy.

After thinking about it long enough to get over some shock at the idea, they decided to find out more about mj’s past. Who in the world was this mj lorenzo? How could he mirror creation so? How might he have guessed he did so, and gone examining himself therefore, and gone reporting such incredible results? Who in God’s name had told him to do these things?

With such questions in mind, a group of pundits looked up mj’s parents, since mj had made no effort to hide their whereabouts. Nor had Rev. He had asked people to call him if they found his son, and they knew from The Remaking that the Lorenzos lived in the one and only Methodist parsonage in the small country town of Florence in Burlington County, New Jersey, which lay right on the Delaware River below Trenton.

They wanted to talk to mj lorenzo himself in the worst way about all of this, of course, in those first years after they discovered The Remaking; but Sammy Martinez refused to tell them where mj was living. Mj still ‘needed space’, he insisted. And he made them promise not to ask mj's parents.

And so a group of about thirty psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, religion and political science pundits from Penn, Princeton, Haverford, Swarthmore, Villanova, Ursinus and several other east coast campuses visited the Lorenzos and took – from mj’s parents – a sort of combined psychosocial history and one-world-religion history of mj’s life, meeting with the Lorenzos right in the church basement’s main hall used for the bigger Sunday School classes.

And this history should have been on Jack’s hospital chart too, of course, as psych history pundits said, but it came too late. Maybe mj lorenzo’s two sides, Mortimer and Jack, would have been greeted more warmly had the nurses only known the story which the Lorenzos told, that mj had always seemed to be emotionally stable as the happy little boy shown in family photos. He had gotten through high school with no crises, mainly by keeping his nose in a book, for he always was good at that. But at Wrigley in the early sixties he had fallen into depression, as his Remaking missives showed. And soon he had chafed at the tightly tied bonds of family, church and society, as the pundits knew already. And his fear of what might happen if he broke those bonds had worsened the depression again and again.

Then when his country had become so violently polarized between right and left during the late sixties and had nearly pulled apart at the seams, the split in that outer world had paralleled mj’s own inner split between Mortimer and Jack exactly. This was what the pundits realized after listening to Rev and Jo: exactly; reverberating distressingly inside him in sympathy with both sides of his divided country and self; rattling him more than he already was rattled and weakening his Mortimer defenses, until finally it lit a fire under the ‘Jack’ inside him, incubated him all the way to the Jack-in-the-box pop-out stage, and ultimately energized and provoked Jack to action.

And when Jack had finally burst free from inside Mortimer for the first time; when Jack did finally gain control of mj during his internship at Presbyterian Hospital in W. Philly, and when Jack then demanded in May and June of ’70 that mj’s humanity be set free totally, at once, to find its own way of being human, and really human this time, not sham human; and when that breaking free eventually triggered mj’s trip west: the immediate first result of Jack’s escaping from Mortimer’s surrounding shell prison and of Jack’s seizing control of mj, even before mj left on his trip west, long before, was: that mj was rendered so FRAGILE he looked schizophrenic. And FRAGILITY remained a constant pressing issue every single day thereafter, for at least a year, and probably longer, maybe even for many years.

Certainly in Fort Smith, if ever or anywhere.

Mj’s emotional state during the entire year of The Remaking, therefore, was like that of a nation undergoing a revolution, a nation whose revolution rendered it incapable of conducting normal day-to-day affairs; or, was like that of a surgery patient whose surgery saved him from dying but left him robbed of returning to normal life indefinitely. In other words, as with fragile France during the French Revolution, Jack’s revolutionary remaking ‘cure’ threatened the patient’s – the remake-ee’s – very future existence; and no one knew how long it would do so or in what way. Nor was it known exactly how to fix this serious problem.

102.  pundits discover that the one at risk from Crack-Up or ‘fragility’ was and is Mortimer, not Jack

And so, said the ‘psych history pundits’, Jack had free rein to remake mj lorenzo for a whole summer, until Freeze-Up struck in November. And by this time Jack was burnt out from the effort. And suddenly psycho-fragile ideology-obsessed Mortimer was the only part of mj still ‘functioning’. And suddenly Mortimer found himself ‘in charge of’ a strung out and whittled-to-id, non-functioning Jack, at the hospital in Fort Smith.

Mortimer would have preferred the old days when Jack had been locked up inside of him, for he had known how to control everything about that unpredictable animal. But he put whatever heart and soul he could into helping this pathetic, newly liberated Jack, since Jack was one half of his own mj self, come to think of it, though Mortimer was ashamed to admit it. And he tried for two whole weeks to help.

Yet Mortimer’s forte was intellect, not heart and soul. So his efforts were undone at once by mj’s ‘fragility’, i.e., by Jack’s theoretical fragility, his appearance of having broken completely; and by Mortimer’s own undeniable fragility as well. Because anyone who sensed psychic fragility in another or in oneself always tended to get nervous and all the more fragile, and eventually could get destabilized for that reason alone, and finally even undone, if he or she lacked the emotional fortitude to flow with and withstand it, and not be bowled over by it. And Mortimer had no emotional fortitude whatever. Zilch. By definition.

All this fragility in mj lorenzo had been a part of him since the very beginning, by the way. It had been caused by the manner in which his two sides had been sketched out on the drawing board and assigned value from the very day John Calvin had revolutionized and reformed the medieval Roman church’s theology and religious practice. Right off the bat Calvin had drawn on inspiration from the early church fathers and attempted to suppress human sexuality and many other forms of naturally human self-expression. Interestingly, though: if anything, even though those who practiced extremist Reform Protestantism thought it the ultimate kind of Christianity ever, its theology had come to look to modern observers even more personality-polarizing than late-medieval and early-Renaissance European Catholic life had been, as divinity pundits said.

So, mj lorenzo’s split had followed the big conceptual trend lines that had been laid out on the drawing board by his Christian Western world ever since the day when that world view had been born. The fragility, in other words, had not come from genes or from pre-birth trauma or from any kind of rearing that the Lorenzos’ church culture would have considered abusive or unusual. This was the conclusion of the ‘one-world-religion pundits’ after they had thought about their meeting with the Lorenzos for about a year and spent some coffee breaks with psych and divinity pundits. They studied the matter in depth and with breadth over years, in journals and in classrooms, and especially studied what mj had offered on the subject right in The Remaking and its revisions. And later generations of pundits agreed with them vehemently that mj’s fragility had been inherited, not from his parents’ genes – for they and their ancestors had all been seen as quite normal and therefore ‘sane’ within their Calvinist and Methodist and Church of England contexts – but from his crazy extremist-Protestant Western-world culture at large.

And this thoroughly researched understanding in no time became – and forever remained – an underpinning universal tenet of the unwritten Remaking pundit credo and constitution.

All of this earthshaking insight was too late for mj, though. His two halves had already, both of them, run rampant in a hospital in Fort Smith, too overwhelmed by crumbled-ness and crumbled-ability to speculate very accurately, comprehensively or profoundly on what in the world had crumbled his cookie.

Jack, for his part, was hard to read at Fort Smith, actually. He showed no outward sign of being destabilized any further by Dr. Mortimer’s ‘therapy’ in his cell, maybe because Jack had already burnt out and crumbled about as far as he could go, crashing from a speed high and a manic-y high both. No: it was Mortimer, not Jack, who was at risk from all the fragility in the atmosphere, said the psych whiz pundits. His writing showed that when he tried to get close to a naked, non-communicative, constantly sexual Jack, in Jack’s cell, in order to be some kind of ‘therapeutic’ to the poor, barely-functioning creature, some nameless something overwhelmed the doctor, Mortimer Lorenzo, immediately.

Outsiders who read The Remaking later observed, correctly, that 99% of the abilities needed for withstanding and enjoying relationship of any kind lay on Jack’s side of the duality, not Mortimer’s, making Jack the stronger one, even as weak and sick as he looked at the moment in Fort Smith. Mortimer may have been sheriff of the shire of Brains, but Jack was sheriff of the Everything-Human-but-Brains shire. And that was what counted, even if the notion surprised or shocked some people: intellect was not a requirement for friendship. Intellect was not required for life, for that matter, or the planet’s animals would have died out long ago. Whereas Jack’s ‘everything else but intellect’ WAS absolutely essential for friendship or relationship of any kind, therapeutic or otherwise, including: Jack’s animal comfort with his body; the ease with which he experienced and used emotion; his love of adventure and exploring the world, including the adventure of exploring relationship; his intuitive skill in a relationship or in any natural human setting. These were just a few of the thousands of strengths that had ended up somehow being borne by the mis-measured ‘half’ of mj called ‘Jack’; who was really more like ninety nine per cent of mj’s strengths and humanity, not merely ‘half’ as The Remaking often implied. Mortimer possessed none of these very essential skills for being human, with the result that Mortimer, while a heroically willing therapist at first, was an exceedingly feeble one in the doing, since he had little to offer besides tons of lofty braininess and a weird knack with rules.

And so, not surprisingly, Mortimer, after two weeks of ‘therapy’ in the form of daily written intellectual analysis of: ‘Mortimer’; and ‘Jack’; had failed to get even a sigh out of Jack. Whereas, and worse, out of himself Mortimer had gotten to feeling overwhelmed and debilitated. And more so every day. Profoundly weakened by something he could not identify, by something happening inside of him. And Mortimer, consequently, feared HE TOO might go crazy, and longed to get to Fort Chipewyan, yes Fort Chipewyan as fast as possible, so he could write and think in peace all winter. He was not even so sympathetic to his own other half as to want to return to Fort Smith and work with Jack again some day in the future when Jack felt better and could talk. He wrote to his parents that he would ‘commute back and forth’, but he knew perfectly well he would avoid Jack at any cost. And he avoided saying goodbye when he packed up his stuff and left in the middle of the night.

103.  Mortimer disqualified (after the fact; and too late) from practicing psychiatry on self

Mortimer had toughed it out for those two long emotionally exhausting weeks at Fort Smith, though, sharing his writing with Jack. For throughout those two weeks he had not given up yet. But the truth was: Mortimer should not have been practicing psychiatry: period. Ever. Please! Jack could have treated Mortimer on a good day for Jack was human, almost fully human, lacking only in intellect and rules and – at the moment – energy. His intuition for healing was spectacular. But Mortimer could not treat anyone in the world, because all of that whopping ideology-obsessed intellect of his was just a teeny-weenily infinitesimal part of the hugely humungous package of strengths needed by anyone trying to help a psychotic; or for trying to help anyone with any kind of problem anywhere in the world, for that matter.

That was how some of the more experienced psychiatrist pundits put it, at least. And Sammy Martinez and the Dr. weighed in on the subject too, eventually, and agreed. Years later Dr. Lorenzo added that Mortimer’s ‘dearth of humanity’ explained why extremist Western-world Mortimer-type Protestant zealots tended to create havoc on all sides instead of peace whenever they visited the non-Western world trying to do nice ‘democratic and Christian’ things for people. They tended to be like the Wrigley College graduates who went to Colombian jungles as missionaries and got their heads literally chopped off, literally shrunk, and literally worn as a bangle talisman on witch-doctors’ dark brown chests.

And an even bigger error was this, said psych pundits: that someone with no human strength but intellect should ever have been trying to treat his own self, especially when that ‘own self’ was as regressed as Jack; as depressed, mute and sexually provocative; as historically threatening toward the half-self now doctoring; and as psychotic, probably, even, as Jack was right then. The hospital never should have assigned Mortimer the case, since the patient was his very own self, and 99% of that very own self; and psychotic. Mortimer was bound to be unnerved and undone in the first five minutes if not sooner, by trying to treat his own psychotic other ‘half’, i.e., his other 99% actually. And any number of terrible outcomes were guaranteed, said the psychologist and psychiatrist pundits, especially those who knew the clinically heavy end of the field.

Thus the ‘danger’ predicted by mj lorenzo’s psych history was not to Jack but to Mortimer at this point, said the pundits. And they were right about this, as some ex-Anna-Freud people in England would say after some years, and other heavies in mental health around the globe too, all of them after studying The Remaking. The only entity in the world who ever recommended that Jack be treated for even a second by Mortimer was crazy Mortimer himself. And he had not had training in psychiatry yet, even. He was not qualified to offer an opinion. He had not even finished his psych internship. He had walked out of his psych internship because he was emotionally damaged himself. Dr. Mortimer Lorenzo needed admission to the hospital himself as a psych patient, probably more than Jack, as the chief nurse loved telling the town each night when she got back home finally.

104.  Mortimer’s writing during the ‘second encounter’ in late November reflects his sense of impending disintegration and pundits explain why

It was hardly surprising then, that Rev and Jo found Mortimer’s writing at this point in the year barely comprehensible. Later pundit readers who were more objective and qualified than the Lorenzos said that all of Mortimer’s writing during his two weeks at Fort Smith, including the ‘first attempt’, while not necessarily ‘incomprehensible’, did reveal that he felt a sense of impending disintegration.

They blamed the raunchy, smelly instinctual male animal presence of Jack in the tiny, stuffy seclusion room. They blamed Mortimer’s ‘lack of humanity’. And too, they blamed Mortimer’s over-developed talent for intellectually imagining what might be going on inside that silent, un-talkative instinct-driven animal, Jack. Because, silence in others always unnerved people who were emotionally fragile and also highly imaginative, said certain psycho-pundits. And they were right.

But even more factors than just these three were ‘causing’ Mortimer’s disarray. After all, was this not the same Jack who had been sending Mortimer messages of brotherly love all summer, mixed with death threats, as his ‘gut’ had instructed him to do? And had not Jack said that for mj lorenzo to be ‘reborn’, a part of mj would first have to die, and he preferred it were Mortimer? And Jack certainly was the self-fancied poet who had written the lines,

If I were to ask you your origins, Mortimer

If I were to beat you to porridge or pemmican

If I were to rape an incorrigible Indian….⁵

So any outsider had to be left wondering why Mortimer even risked entering the cell without at least three brute male aids, techs, or guards, or naked Indians with tomahawks, always as backup help. In case Jack, on impulse, attempted to act on any one of these past and various threats, each one well documented in certain letters sent to parents. It would have been standard hospital psych policy. Was Mortimer unconsciously suicidal maybe? Was he so hypnotized and enamored of his animal ‘other half’, Jack, that he could not think straight? Was he telling himself that Jack could or would not ever hurt him, not his very own other half? If so, he was deluding himself.

Mortimer’s writing to his parents in the ‘first attempt’, said the pundits, showed exactly how rattled he was. He wrote of whirlpools, splits, ‘crashing and drowning’; and needing to get his feet back on the ground. Then of disintegration, ‘scattered pieces’; and again, whirlpools. And he equated Jack with ‘a whirlpool’, partly because Mackenzie’s journals described a famous whirlpool in the river between Fort Smith and Fort Chipewyan, and so whirlpools were on his mind for that reason; but mainly because Jung wrote about the ‘Whirlpool of Life’ as opposed to the ‘Rock of Thought’, a dichotomy Jung had pulled from ancient Greek myth.⁶ And Mortimer was reading Jung throughout the winter. And it was life that Mortimer feared, not thought. That was why he said he wanted to be somewhere else, far from the ‘whirlpool’. He wanted to be in a ‘border area’ a little higher up the river which meant – logically speaking – closer to the mountains where all the massive amounts of water flowing restlessly across the open northern plains would be less frightening, where he could feel more grounded and stable, feet-on-the-ground, and work on ‘This Book’, his rock of thought for the moment. But by ‘water’ and ‘whirlpool’ he really meant the water of life, meaning Jack, and life with Jack in the world.

“A mandala is an antidote to a chaotic state of mind,” he chanted day and night. For Mortimer’s book, his ‘word-mandala’, like every mandala ever produced in human history, was a device for meditatively ‘centering’ and calming oneself.

Then he listed the frightening things he imagined to be going on inside the whirlpool called Jack, despite the fact that Jack was not saying a word, but only compulsively exciting his pleasure centers. He saw Jack as: ‘younger brother’, ‘Indian brave’, ‘Black Jack’; ‘bigger than I’, ‘less predictable’, and ‘given to excessive outbreaks’. He even called Jack ‘a sick fumbling idiot wrecked by a car crash’; ‘out of hand’, and ‘seductive’; and finally, once again, ‘a whirlpool’.

105.  leftist political pundits gain hope from Jack’s devastating impact on Mortimer

‘Jack did not have to be functioning or sane, even, to do Mortimer in’, the leftover radical 60’s-leftist pundits loved to observe in their political rag sheets in the early 70’s. Because Jack, as they saw, enjoyed an inordinate balance of power when it came to the psychological part of the warfare. He could be locked up in a psych ward psychotic, and still his chief enemy remained dizzy with fear of him. The extreme political leftists among the pundits in the early 70s, those who felt discouraged by Richard Nixon’s sympathy for the extreme right and by his blackballing and persecution of left-leaners including incomparable artists and political activists like folksinger Pete Seeger, got tremendous mileage out of this discovery. It gave them hope again. They had never had any way of measuring which of their political approaches worked best, and now suddenly they saw that certain kinds of psychological warfare could be the best weapons of all.

Why? Because the Mortimers of the world were less at home with their animal nature than the Jacks were with theirs, and therefore could be spooked with animal energy far more easily than the Jacks could. The Remaking taught them that. And they believed it. Whenever they studied the notion on their own, abroad in the world, away from Remaking workshops and co-conspirators, they found plenty of corroborating evidence to support the hypothesis. And so it became a platitude. But they thanked mj lorenzo for having opened their eyes to it in a formally philosophical and unforgettable way.

106.  naturally Mortimer chooses the rock of thought over the whirlpool of life

And so it should have come as no surprise to anyone in the world that Mortimer now started writing with more longing for the island in Lake Athabasca (a few miles from Ft. Chipewyan) where he would love to spend the winter, preferring it, naturally, to Fort Smith. Since Fort Smith was where Jack would have to stay for some time, apparently, locked in a seclusion room. Whereas Mortimer, as he admitted, ‘navigated’ better the ‘rock’ (ancient Greek: ‘Scylla’) of abstract thought, than the ‘whirlpool’ (ancient Greek: ‘Charybdis’) of life, world and Jack. And the hundred-mile, winter-socked white-out distance between the two outposts would probably protect Mortimer additionally from the ‘whirlpool’ of ‘life’, and let him ‘navigate’ the ‘rock’ of ‘thought’ as much as he might like.

Thus he wrote at the time:

Scylla and Charybdis are the opposites which symbolize the split, the duality, the polarity upon which my (Mortimer’s; Jack’s; mj’s) forward movement oscillates, upon which it may either crash or drown. (After his crack-up on solid ground, Jack takes to the water, then at Fort Smith he leaves the water for solid ground again in Alberta, there to consolidate.) These are the alternatives between which it [my forward movement] may choose. Or, can that forward movement choose its way at all, but merely play out its “natural” bent? But if mj lorenzo tends by bent to be more one than the other, to navigate better the rock (Thought) than the whirlpool (Life), and if one-sidedness is a danger, then he needs to sometimes choose to come near to the other side, Whirlpool, in order to “see” it better; as if by such knowledge, occasionally flowering in insight, “epiphany,” he might become more aware of what he was or is or will be.

But such visions will remove the seer from his firm and rocky earth. They are the brief soul-explosions by which the secrets of the universe reveal themselves and strike him with unusual power. He needs to get his feet back on the ground. He enters Alberta.

I (Mortimer; Jack; mj) enter Alberta.

I Enter Alberta

The disintegration of the blue Buick, like the disintegration of Mortimer and Jack under the dubious auspices of each other, is merely a secondary blast, the first one having occurred at birth. The re-entry into ‘the world’ (of Alberta) is not a complete return of scattered pieces, either, as “the petals are still drifting earthward;” and since it is certain that only ‘in this world’ do the best and highest highs occur, so that if Fort Smith is ‘the world’ (and for Mortimer, is Jack), and if ‘the world’, and Jack, are the whirlpool down into which Mortimer is now descending from high in the sky, rapidly,

then

( Fort Smith = The Whirlpool = The World = Jack )

in a sense

we never do come down completely

from the great blast-off (high) of birth

and each rebirth is only a secondary firing

which detains us up there (high) longer

it is therefore in a border area somewhere

that we hope to stay

both

in contact with the ground (world)

and

(high) in the sky

maybe that’s why

only on the fringe of some airy mountain range

can we ever seem content with ourselves

there where

earth and sky

BOTH

filter through skin and guts and lungs

into our blood

and shunt past brain

far down to our bleeding feet

to make them walk in the direction

that we have had revealed to us as

—as in a dream—

ours

Rose Window = Window of My Soul (who coined that phrase?) = My Own Mandala = The Way Up = The Way Back Down from Being Up  = This Book

Hungabee (up close) = Peace Rose (ecstasy) = Rose Window (explosion as ecstasy) = The mountain itself is the way down

These lines revealed, as ‘astrology’ pundits liked to chime, that mj lorenzo knew that a well-proportioned, fully human ‘life’ had to balance elements of water, earth, air and fire. His reference to the ‘four elements’ in his writing at times, they said, showed that his conceptual world was ‘filling in and firming up’ slowly as the year progressed. His personal philosophical system was ‘starting to gel’. And ‘the fringe of some airy mountain range’ would be where he might eventually, one day (maybe in spring), accomplish such a balanced unity. BUT NOT NOW. OR HERE. For here and now, anyway, he felt ‘safer’ choosing the pure ‘rock of thought’: ‘This Book’.

107.  pundits wake up to The Remaking’s world of Native American myth

Mortimer’s drastic language of ‘exploding mountains’, ‘soul explosions’, ‘epiphany’, ‘rebirth blast-off’, and so on, he employed to portray graphically his feeling that he was unready for drastic involvement in life.

The violent imagery here and elsewhere, especially in the Triptique, came mainly from a Hare tribal legend in Petitot’s book, a tale mj included eventually at the end of The Remaking, in ‘Lake O’Hara’, without comment, calling it his ‘Second Dream’ from Hungabee.⁷

In the tale two Dene-Hare brothers spent a lifetime competing for power, drifted apart therefore and met again in old age ‘by chance’, regretted their lifelong error and vowed to ‘repair man’. They ‘entered the mountain’ together this time, which swelled and ‘exploded’, and they came out together as children again to start all over again with a new life in a new world, working together this time, instead of competing for power and resources. The tale explained that from this story had come the expression once well-known among northern tribes: “THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS REMADE MAN.”

One of the most revealing events of Remaking punditry history was how ALL of the magnificently brilliant pundits of the Western world for decades had managed to overlook this seminal source for mj lorenzo’s Remaking imagery, even down to the title word ‘remaking’. Jack had said again and again that he had immersed himself in Petitot’s northern Indian tales. And mj had left this tale word for word in the final dramatic climax of his book. And yet the pundits had missed the hint.

The hint lay there for twenty years, pundits trapsing over it back and forth millions of times, until finally a new young pundit noticed it in the early nineties, shocking and shaming the older pundit world. And suddenly that incredibly hip and stellar world had to confess it never had taken the Remaking’s Indian tales seriously, in reality.

And the pundit world was embarrassed.

An ‘Indian myth’ school of punditry materialized overnight. Yet, all the more astonishing, almost as many decades had to pass again before ‘myth pundits’ finally noticed that this legend contained at least as many large chunks of The Remaking story line as Mackenzie’s Journals did, a different set of chunks: two polar opposite ‘brothers’, first working disjointedly in the world, realized their mistakes and requested the chance for a new life and were given it. They ‘went up into’ the Rockies and ‘came out’ ‘REMADE’, now working in tandem; and started a new world.

It was the story line of mj lorenzo’s Remaking!!!

And so, the universe of punditry was shocked ALMOST TO DEATH by their own almost incurable blindness caused by Western world culture-bias. And suddenly, therefore, there was a concerted effort to dig to the bottom of all Native American tales mj had used. And starting in the nineties a fad developed among newer Remaking pundits to discredit ‘early Remaking pundits’ and add themselves to a growing number who disbelieved mj lorenzo had gone north OR west, either one, and who believed instead that, with help from Petitot’s Indian tales and Mackenzie’s journals and other sources, all probably borrowed from the Philadelphia Public Library, mj lorenzo, as they said, had ‘ripped off his plot’ and written The Remaking (as he had ‘virtually admitted’ at the end of the book in these lines:) ‘in a room in smoggy W. Philly’, “with windows open… to the periodic sonic boom of Lester’s black ’52 Continental, picked up in Maryland for $50 and hangared behind my decrepit Volkswagen with its blue-green flower sticker…”

108.  Mortimer vows to leave Fort Smith and get himself to peace and quiet in Fort Chipewyan

Wiser, more experienced pundits, many of them of that ‘early Remaking pundit’ fame, reminded these contentious upstarts that mj lorenzo’s physical location in ’70-’71 made little difference in the end. Regardless of where or how mj’s book had been written, they said, its wisdom reigned undiminished.

At the peak of the ‘second encounter’, they said, ‘for example’: Mortimer knew he needed distance. He said he was leaving Jack in Fort Smith and going to Fort Chipewyan, but the actual locale of his winter was irrelevant in the end. What mattered, they said, was that mj lorenzo knew at that dangerous moment that he needed distance from himself and he got it. That was the point, not his location.

But regardless of where mj lorenzo spent his Remaking year, said the old-timer pundits in later years, they had to admit they liked the graphic way he had told his story of getting distance from himself.

Mortimer knew he was ‘in Alberta’ in the neighborhood of Jack and would have to meet with Jack face-to-face eventually and undergo all of the ‘soul-explosions’ such a meeting would entail. He also knew that right at the moment he had to get to a ‘place’, physically and/or mentally, that would allow him to stabilize emotionally, and that he would have to worry about ‘unity’ some other day. Sorry, Jack. And sorry, mj.

Mortimer was ‘getting out of Dodge’ and explained himself as follows:

But the greatest split of all is the one between the hitherto more usual me, ‘Mortimer’, and that now suddenly silent younger brother of mine, that Indian brave and Black Jack who is bigger than I and less predictable, more given to excessive outbursts like the one of the past few months. (Would that he could have seen the truth as I, Mortimer, have seen it, here at Fort Smith.) Jack? Who’s Jack? My name is Mortimer. Jack is a sick fumbling idiot wrecked by a car crash… When he gets “out of hand,” I find my brittle Scylla self, Mortimer, more subject to his attack by disdain and allure. When I become more aloof, then he becomes more seductive. When I try to be most rock-like, he becomes a whirlpool to attract me. But when he exceeds in his devices what my conscience can allow, I sever him from myself entirely and assure myself that he is another person, out there, wandering about, not me. Whereupon he assays to pursue me, cursing and insulting me, and wanting to control my thoughts; and if I know what is best for me I shall go quickly and make peace with him, before he finds me and breaks it.

I’ve crossed the imaginary line into Alberta, hoping I, Mortimer, am ready for whatever this uncanny fellow may bring me; for it is in this world that he can practice his mystifying art the very best.

Here is what Alexander Mackenzie says about the Indians of the Fort Smith area: the Chipewyans are ‘…the most peaceable tribe of Indians known in North America’. ‘They believe’, he says, ‘that immediately after their death, they pass into another world, where they arrive at a large river, on which they embark in a stone canoe; and that a gentle current bears them on to an extensive lake…’ (Lake Athabasca? Since I must go beyond even the Indians, I shall have to go beyond this lake, then.) ‘…in the centre of which is a most beautiful island; and that, in the view of this delightful abode, they receive that judgment for their conduct during life, which determines their final state and unalterable allotment’. Namely, if they have been predominantly good, they are allowed to land and go on to enjoy an eternity of debauch; if they are bad, the canoe sinks and they are forced to remain eternally in the water up to their necks (and it’s painfully ice cold down there), watching the frantic fun on the island.

It is on such an island in Lake Athabasca, at Fort Chipewyan, all of which lie at the mouth of the Peace River, that like Mackenzie, with an Indian woman and writing, I, Mortimer Lorenzo, intend to spend the winter…..

And after a few pages of intellectual acrobatics about the difficulty of getting Jack and Mortimer lined up properly for a reunion, Mortimer returned to the subject of his new plan of leaving Fort Smith:

Since my suspended argument with the rapids (they froze up before I could make peace with them), I have decided to ‘portage’ straight to Fort Chipewyan. The motorized canoe stays in Fort Smith, however, and as I walk the distance, in my mind I paddle up the Slave River to Lake Athabasca on the proximal edge of which an island awaits me, as an island awaited the Chipewyans in the other world, holding them there until they might return to this one, reborn. Meanwhile my thoughts and I crystallize with the atmosphere into a different form on the freezing white plains here, and I embed myself in a few of the hard facts:

If the river’s freezing means the Freezing-Up of Jack the seducer, then Break-Up will mean his liberation again…..

And once more, after a few more pages:

….I gladly leave behind a world of melodrama, of overactive acting, of psychotic hyperkinesia and explosion, and enter the island cabin I have chosen on this frozen Lake Athabasca. And before long I believe I shall have found a way to pay for it all.

Mortimer