III.  Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan:  fear of losing control

109.  Mortimer by thinking very hard at Fort Chipewyan finally remembered that the universal remedy for painful duality had always lain right in his backpack in one of Carl Jung’s heavy tomes

Rev and Jo Lorenzo felt they had swallowed a huge pill of undigestible philosophy in the first several envelopes from northern Canada. Yet the fat one from Fort Chipewyan in May – finally, after no word since February – was the ‘rudest philosophical remedy imaginable’, as Jo put it. And she meant mainly the first whopping section, ‘first attempt’. For she and Rev knew little of Kierkegaard or Jung, or of Sartre, or of other sages whose works Mortimer kept paraphrasing and analyzing with so much familiarity throughout the ‘first attempt’. They read words on the page but did not follow what the boy was getting at most of the time. They were dizzy no more, just numb and dumbstruck. And yet they could see what work he had put into thinking and organizing all winter. And they hoped against hope, naturally, that it would lead him to some place constructive and – please, oh Lord – to a place which they could endorse.

Mortimer wrote repeatedly that intellectual research and analysis had, in fact, helped him, and that he now knew what had to happen in order to end the intensely competitive and bizarrely discombobulating conflict between Jack and him. He wrote this several times in the first winter section from Ft. Chipewyan, the ‘first attempt’. The clearest and simplest statement occurred during his written analysis of Jung’s brilliant classic, Psychological Types, or, ‘The Psychology of Individuation’ (1923), where the greatest sage of the twentieth century, as Mortimer called him, Carl Jung, had written:

If the individuality… is not differentiated from the opposites, it becomes identified with them, and is thereby inwardly rent, i.e., a tormented disunion takes place.

And Mortimer added right here, very importantly, an explanation of what this meant for mj lorenzo:

‘Tertium non datur,’ is what Jung always liked to say to his patients and students at this point, a Latin expression meaning ‘no third option or step is offered’,¹ or, ‘Sorry, Bud, you’re stuck with an impossible choice’. And, implied in Jung’s tone and facial expression too, no doubt, would have been the obvious jab: ‘You will just have to live with it’. Jung used the Latin phrase when treating obsessive-compulsive patients, and meant when he said it that for someone snagged on the horns of Dilemma, unable to choose or combine choices, either one, the opposites could never be resolved by obsessing rationally; because reason and intellect always led, for such people, to an impasse, the ‘Sorry, Bud…’; such that: they were left in a spot where the impossible choice between opposites could only be resolved irrationally, meaning non-rationally, through a new way of living, let’s say, which might channel the energies of both extremes in a new way; and this meant, for Mortimer, who was a perfect example of someone who constantly thought in conundrums, dilemmas and irresolvable opposites, that the opposites (M and J) had to be resolved by way of THE WORLD’S GREATEST MASTER OF NON-REASON, Jack, whose unpredictable instinctual irrationality was, by nature, his forte: and who, to Mortimer, was therefore life itself;  for, as Mortimer liked to chant, writing down the chant in his pages again and again just as he wrote down his mandala chant again and again: “for THAT was the way of the world, and of living in the world; and ‘Jack’ meant ‘the world’ to Mortimer." ²

110.  having so quickly been offered a cure by Jung, Mortimer just as quickly declined to avail himself of it

BUT: while Mortimer could think and write a beautiful little meaning-packed paragraph like this preceding one, thereby solving every single problem he had in the whole wide world in one unusually short – for him – summary, on paper: he could not do it off paper. He could not, or would not, take the leap into relationship with Jack, giving up some control to his alter-ego and nemesis. He could not do –  just yet – what he admitted Jung had said would be necessary for someone like mj lorenzo, who was caught on the horns of a dualistic dilemma, to do; to: subject himself to an irrational, i.e., non-rational solution; i.e., a living day-to-day-life solution, not a paper or book solution.

Mortimer understood correctly that Jung’s ‘non-rational solution’ might include a flesh-and-blood relationship, maybe a loving relationship with SOMEONE; anyone; male or female; even with your own other half if you were that friendless; it hardly mattered any more, when you realized that avoiding love would be living death. He understood this, but he could not –  or would not – do anything about it.

And this terrible ailment of Mortimer’s was nothing short of tragic and disgusting, moaned Remaking pundits forever. It was the same sad frozen and depressed years-long condition which had led to his Crack-Up in the first place.

In Mortimer’s defense, however, a number of respected pundits, some of whom had been admittedly ‘nerdy’ and super-intellectual in their now rejected pasts, liked to remind that this ‘reaction’ of Mortimer’s to his current situation was perfectly understandable, and even ‘natural’. After all, Mortimer was nothing but (1) pure ideologizing intellect and (2) socially acceptable outward form based on that ideologizing, plus (3) the tendency to feel constantly very depressed. And so, he possessed none of the traits or skills NEEDED for real down-and-out nitty-gritty relationship, or for living in the world in any real genuinely human and heartfelt way. Jack knew this. And Mortimer knew it too. And who wanted to hang out with someone who was never anything but (1) super-brainy and (2) depressed and (3) constantly conforming? No one did. The rough definitions of ‘nerd’ and ‘Mortimer’ had to be those three same things, didn’t they? So: naturally, Mortimer hid from the world and from Jack in Fort Chipewyan, getting more depressed even still.³

111.  ‘handwriting-on-the-wall pundits’ are among the very first to finally ‘get’ The Remaking and they win a much-deserved MOISTR prize for it

This lovely pundit interpretation of Mortimer’s self-imposed isolation was a very palatable one and had a ring of finality about it, so it held sway for ten or fifteen years. But surprisingly, the ‘handwriting on the wall’ pundits eventually outdid it by a million and one degrees. And they were adamant. And seemingly right. Theirs was one of the most exciting discoveries to come from The Remaking during the mid-80s. They stressed the converse of the above, and it got them much further.

Even this early in the winter, late in November, they said, Mortimer ‘already saw the handwriting on the wall’. He was starting to ‘get the picture’, in other words, that he was less essential to fabricating a new mj lorenzo than was Jack, his implacable eternal nemesis. Given Mortimer’s exceedingly sharp intellect, they maintained, there was no way that he could not have grasped immediately the upshot of Jung’s Tertium non datur, which was that: Jack was more essential than Mortimer to a new mj. Mortimer must have been thinking just this, said they, when he reacted to ‘the Tertium’ by writing to his parents his inevitable conclusion drawn from it, the words: ‘the opposites must be resolved for Mortimer by way of Jack, whose unpredictable instinctual irrationality is by nature his forte’. The intellectually-unsolvable dilemma had to be solved irrationally, non-rationally, in other words, without resorting to much thought; it had to be solved by Jack through a way of living, not by Mortimer via a way of THINKING, and so Mortimer now became virtually expendable. Mortimer had to see this. And this was the explanation, said the ‘wall-handwriting’ or ‘got-the-picture’ pundits, for Mortimer’s refusing to budge. Mortimer had frozen up with fear. Mj lorenzo’s winter Freeze-Up was not simply depression but really depression caused by fear, said they. Because he had finally ‘gotten the picture’.

It was becoming ever more obvious to Mortimer that he would be expected to give up a lot of control to Jack in a new mj. And he feared letting anyone else have power over him, for some reason. All of his life he had been in control of mj and, after all, as he told himself, deluding himself: he had ‘managed okay’. But this was a lie. What kind of ‘managed’ was his? Mortimer had made a freak of mj lorenzo, whom he had modeled like a ventriloquist’s dummy after his own extremist-Protestant Christian parents, calling his dummy ‘Mortimer’ right up until June of 1970.

The early pundits already by the mid-70’s, in other words, were beginning to ‘get’ mj lorenzo’s Remaking, i.e., to ‘get’ the way it was supposed to ‘work’. When they argued their points – just as these ‘got-the-picture’ pundits did in the mid-80s eventually – they would do so through the years with increasing double-awareness of the meaning of terms, and would use, for example, the terms ‘M’ and ‘J’ to simultaneously mean political ‘right’ and ‘left’. Then too: by always keeping in mind the ‘burst-out paradigm’ Jack had given them, they became even smoother at graphically picturing (Mortimer ‘outside’ and Jack ‘inside’) and going back and forth in their heads between: ‘M and J’; and ‘right and left’; and smoother too at listening to someone say ‘M’, while thinking ‘political right and religious right’. For this, they said, was how mj lorenzo had meant his work to be used.

Eventually in the 80’s the pundit world would study extremist Protestantism in depth, once the 1980 ‘first revision’ revealed the ‘cute stodginess’ of mj’s very caring parents. And after that experience, the wall-handwriting pundits would find it all the more easy to believe that Mortimer was indeed afraid in this way. For they could never forget from Sammy’s first revision certain surprisingly extreme reactions shown by mj’s parents (upon whom mj had been so closely modeled by Mortimer) toward various fairly normal AND NATURALLY HUMAN aspects of life in the world. The ‘left’ had never before understood such strange things about the extremist Christian ‘right’, oddly. But with the help of The Remaking and its revisions they increasingly, during the 70’s and 80’s, ‘got it’: anyone who was as startled as much as mj’s parents were, by what the rest of humanity took to be normal everyday life events, had to be as terrified of life and relationship in the world as Mortimer was at Fort Chipewyan.

Such fearful people as the Lorenzos would naturally fear the results of yielding control to anyone else. For, then they would have to suffer the whims and fancies of the people who got that power, people who were far more comfortable than they were with ‘everyday life in the world’. Whereas people more trusting of life could tolerate better letting go of power, even to people who did not think like they did. People who were relaxed with life were more flexible than Mortimer and his parents. This was probably why conservatives voted in elections more consistently than liberals did: conservatives were more uptight than liberals were about the prospect of not having things their way.

To folks like the Lorenzos whose whole life centered on the church, only two kinds of people existed: ‘churchly’ and ‘worldly’, as the subtitle of Part I of The Remaking reminded. And the Lorenzos were ‘churchly’ and felt wonderfully comfortable around churchly people. Whereas the vast number of the world’s people with whom they felt un-comfortable, many their own next-door neighbors, were invariably thought of as un-churchly and therefore ‘worldly’. This was why, said ‘handwriting’ pundits, the first part of the Remaking had been subtitled ‘The Church and the World’. Up until Fort Smith a ‘worldly’ Jack had been forced to wrestle with his opposite, ‘The Church’, or Mortimer. But then in Fort Smith, once-churchly Mortimer suddenly HAD TO wrestle with his opposite, ‘The World’, or Jack.

YET HE REFUSED TO DO IT.

So the wall-handwriting pundits took the pundit world by storm in the mid-eighties. Because their simple interpretation of this one event, Mortimer’s refusal to budge from the horns of his own self-concocted dilemma because he feared ‘the world’ and ‘world-ly’ people, was one of those million dollar interpretations that ended up explaining a million and one other important things too. And for their discovery the pundits as a whole in 1985 voted this small group the most important prize in the pundit world, one that had become an annual tradition with international Remaking punditry: the prize for the Most Outasight Interpretation of Something in The Remaking, the ‘MOISTR’ (which rhymed with 'oyster' and 'cloister'), a prize reported in the world’s periodicals every spring and highly regarded among the planet’s thinking people already by 1985.

And so Mortimer knew intellectually what he had to do, but was postponing it as long as he could, understandably, and his analysis of his very own depressing situation dragged on and on, tediously; boringly; intellectually; AND depressingly; for he knew it was merely a cowardly way of demurring, week after week, on the essential assignment of leaping into life with Jack. And so he tried to make it look – to himself AND others – as if he were productively occupied with a noble cause, one he liked to think of as ‘elucidating the structure of the universe’, and most particularly, ‘the structure of humanity’; and more particularly yet, “the structure of those portions of humanity – society, group, couple, or individual – for which or whom conflict between two opposing positions had taken over life to the point of supplanting real life with nothing but ‘tormented disunion’.” And all of these were phrases or concepts he had 'borrowed', i.e., stolen, from Jung’s dazzlingly brilliant and highly meaningful Psychological Types. And he hoped to return them some day; of course.

IV:  Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan:  fear of the body

112.  but the Lorenzos found it much easier to ‘skip’ than to ‘look at’ Mortimer’s ‘hard thinking’ as displayed in the ‘first attempt’

The Lorenzos might have just dismissed as ‘stupid’, as Rev called it, Mortimer’s dragged-out, long-winded and detailed ‘multiplicated exegesis’ of polarized duality in his ‘first attempt’. But in the end they ‘accepted’ it as something he had needed to do ‘to find himself’. And they were right, at least in their diplomatic phraseology. But accepting was not understanding. For it took pundits many years to absorb this part of mj’s mandalic handbook for psychotics, and it took the Lorenzos even longer. Partly because they repeatedly skipped over the funny pages of long, laborious lists of differences, distinctions and contrasts between ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’ a bit impatiently, not from disrespect, but because those awful lists⁴ looked awfully dull and there were so many expressions they did not understand. And also because they knew it would not be long until they got to the next chapter, ‘second attempt’. For a glance through the foot-thick envelope that came in May from Fort Chipewyan had turned up a story of sorts in those later chapters; plus a woman or two.

And they were goaded away from the ‘first attempt’ by another distasteful element, a factor yet more critical to the world’s future, as pundits saw it eventually. For Mortimer’s endless analysis of ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’ may have applied in general to mj’s two halves in the abstract, meaning their relationship over time, and that was fine. But it seemed to apply most of all, at the moment, to Mortimer’s relationship with that particular ‘Jack’ who was his naked and sexually inappropriate patient at the hospital, i.e., his own supposed other half, the other very important part of the Lorenzos’ ‘mj’ son.

True, Mortimer deliberately spared his parents gross details about street lamps and nurses and seclusion rooms and Dlune. He only mentioned Jack's nudity twice, once at the beginning and again at the end of 'the first attempt', so as to make certain that his parents got the point that Jack had remained naked throughout this period. And whenever he was about to write 'incessant naked masturbating' he censored himself down to 'arousal'. But Mortimer’s occasional mention of Jack’s ‘arousal’ all throughout the ‘first attempt’, whether fiction or reality (or self or lover or whatever), was objectionable by extremist-Protestant Radical Reformation and Calvinist standards. Just the word ‘aroused’ mentioned once in a book, merely in reference to an absolute stranger having no connection to their son, would have been objectionable enough for the Lorenzos, as it would have been for so many other Protestant U.S. Americans of their extreme ilk and theology and personality. And they would have condemned and trashed the book outright because of that one single word, ‘arouse’, let alone Mortimer’s larger and slightly more detailed, three-word mental picture: ‘incessant naked masturbating’.

Yet the Lorenzos needed the book to find their son. So they were left without any recourse of ‘just tossing it’ and were forced instead to compromise, to just skim lightning-fast whenever they thought they might be approaching another occurrence of that horribly soul-freaking word, arousal. In this way they would try to get to the next section, ‘second attempt’, as soon as they could: on principle. And driven by panic. Both.

And meanwhile, both parents condemned the author silently. For they could not stand to mention the subject aloud of ‘arousal’, one to the other.

113.  the ‘startle reaction’ to sex as displayed by a world famous couple

The Lorenzos’ sexual standards were strict and condemning, though they were nice loving people if you didn’t offend them. Their standards were a variation on Scarlet-Letter-type sexual-behavior standards.⁵ They were Puritan-like standards and they had picked them up, inherited them from the ineradicable Puritans and other Puritan-like immigrant church groups from northwestern and north-central Europe (and their descendants) somehow; and now they unconsciously honored those Puritans still, amazingly, so many hundreds of years since this early Colonial Puritan group of persecuted religious zealots had supposedly, technically, hopefully, bitten the dust to the world’s relief, back when their descendants had quietly slipped away and disappeared into the warp and woof of cultured New England society.

But what exactly was this about, the poor bewildered pundits asked year after year. For they had wondered for years why so many of their countrymen, mainly on the ‘right’, that strange and incomprehensible side opposite their own, had such a prudish and priggish feel about them. Mj had never mentioned in The Remaking how his parents would be likely to react to Fort Smith, even though he must have known perfectly well. Their real reaction had been unknown until 1980, when Sammy Martinez talked with them and published his ‘first revision’. It had caused a stir. Every single Remaking pundit in the world, of course, had bought the ‘first revision’ and read it fifteen times at least.

But even more years had gone by after that, and the pundits still could not grasp the terrible significance of the fact that both Mortimer and the Lorenzos had walked away from Jack in Fort Smith. They had not yet grasped that it was largely because all three of these Mortimer-type Lorenzos had been driven away by Jack’s sexual energy, and simply could not help themselves, even if it meant abandoning their own family member.

The pundits may have ‘gotten’ mj’s clever ‘M’-‘J’ ‘left’-‘right’ thing in The Remaking eventually. But they just could not ‘get’ this sex thing for a very long time. Because most had grown up a little more liberally than mj, with more sexually relaxed folks, like Irish or Italian or Polish or Hungarian Catholic working class parents, or politically liberal Quaker families, or more liberal Protestant and Jewish families, all of whom were at least a little bit more at home with their animal mammalian humanity than extreme right-wing conservative U.S. American Protestants tended to be.

And so, once the pundits had found Dr. Lorenzo, after 1980, he filled them in. For he was an expert on the subject of the weird, socially gauche, prudish priggishness of so many right-wing Christians. You could write a whole book on it easily, he had said many times. A whole hilarious library, without a doubt. But to 'save them from another mj lorenzo book', as he put it, he gave them a brief outline in 1985 during a lecture sponsored by the History department at Penn:

(1) Many conservative American Protestants of various denominations, said Dr. Lorenzo, showed what could be called a socially gauche ‘startle reaction’ to various manifestations of normal, healthy, animal-human sexuality. (2) The ‘startle reaction’ could take many different forms, obvious or subtle, planned or unplanned, etc. (3) Many such prudish persons would try to explain away their socially gauche startle reaction, with minimizing statements like the ones his parents had often used, such as, ‘We’re just more old fashioned than you’, or ‘We like sex; we just don’t like to advertise it’. (4) The temptation to laugh disbelievingly in their faces had to be resisted. Yet such claims should certainly be disbelieved. (5) For their startle reaction actually arose from a very deep part of their nervous system, making it hard for them or anyone to explain in a few words. That is, the reaction was thoroughly irrational. (6) It appeared, in fact, to be virtually neurological, i.e., physical, but was complicated with psychological, moral and religious beliefs, behaviors and complexes, all perpetuated in the Western world for twenty whole centuries. And so some factors explaining the reaction could be at least partially comprehended via ordinary, scrutinizing, Western-world analysis. (7) A large part of the explanation for the ‘startle response’ to sex could be wrapped up in a millisecond by saying it was ‘Mortimer spooked by Jack’. It was sheltered, unphysical, overly-brainy, overly ideologized, un-animal and unnatural Mortimer-energy, freaked out when it suddenly ran up against normal earthy Jack-energy, which was always animal, physical, intuitive, instinctual and very quintessentially human. That was why the ‘second encounter’ was indeed a ‘head-on train wreck’, Dr. Lorenzo pointed out. It was by definition a ‘worst-case’ scenario, because, at the hospital in Fort Smith: pure unadulterated Mortimer energy in extreme quantities was running up against pure unadulterated Jack energy in extreme quantities. (And for this graphic, razor-sharp observation Dr. Lorenzo would be presented a MOISTR at the annual awards in ’86 [with all due press fanfare], purely as an ‘Honorary Lifetime joke’.) (8) The startle reaction resulted partly from the Western world’s ‘too overly-civilized drift from nature’; BUT, since one Western world group was more sex-startled than another, it had to be coming mostly from something else; and that left only one possibility. (9) The so-called ‘startle reaction’ shown by right-wing Protestant Christians to close encounters with human sexuality in all its forms, had to derive from their own extremist-Protestant Christianity and related thinking, the roots of whose prejudice against natural human sexual behavior in all of its amazing and wonderful variety went back not just to the Protestant Reformation 500 years in the past but even another 1500 years to the very earliest seminal beginnings of Western world philosophy and Christian religion in general.

114.  the famous ‘tenth point at the History lecture at Penn’

(10) It made sense to look first at the birth of the Christian religion itself, said Dr. Lorenzo, and then at the philosophical movements which had impacted Christianity in its infancy. Within the four gospels, he said, i.e., the group of four ‘books’ in the Bible that described Christ’s life and teaching, AND FAR AND AWAY THE MOST VALID AUTHORITY IN THE WORLD ON JESUS’ LIFE AND TEACHING, he insisted, and therefore, on the pure essence of what ought to be Christian belief, there was no evidence that Christ had ever put down sex in any way. On the contrary, when a crowd of rowdy and self-righteous Jews were about to stone Mary of the town of Magdala for some kind of sexual behavior to which they objected (and tradition had it probably rightly that they were ‘objecting’ to ‘prostitution’ or a kind of ‘sexual loose living’ forbidden by sacred Jewish law), he stood beside her, in harm’s way himself, and said to the stone throwers, who had raised their stones to the ready, “Whoever has never broken Jewish sacred law (never ‘sinned’) may throw the FIRST stone.”

Dr. Lorenzo looked up at his audience here and abandoned the notes on his lectern. He had been calm and organized, but sounded energized and inspired suddenly, without saying ‘disorganized’, though a few burnt-out ex-speed-freak pundits afterward went further and thought he must have been high on crystal meth to be ‘that punchy’. In any case, the “Tenth Point,” or “Tenth Point at the History Lecture at Penn,” as it was known thereafter, went down as mj lorenzo’s greatest moment on earth, to the pundit mind. His 'Sermon on the Mount', as they called it. Some who claimed to know scripture and ancient Roman history said afterward in Sunday papers across the world that ‘no interpreter but Jesus himself’ could have understood or presented this vignette from the gospels better, in every way. For it was true to theology; true to history; true to Hebrew and Greek scholarship; true to church history, and even true to authentic ‘Jewish street-cholo lingo’, as Dr. Lorenzo called his favorite lingo for light-mood use.

But the Spanish street lingo had made the homily sound irreligious! other pundits complained. And might have caused a ‘straighter’ crowd to assume the Dr.’s lecture lacked scholarship, therefore! But Jesus must have sounded irreligious too, in his day, in ancient Palestine, pundits comprehended, bit by bit. And some divinity pundits reiterated that Dr. Lorenzo’s interpretation had not abused scripture one iota, but had made the best possible use of it rather.

While a larger but quieter assemblage of pundits considered arguments about ‘scriptural authenticity’ silly nonsense, and called the Tenth Point ‘anecdotal moral fiction of an exemplary kind’.

At any rate, Dr. Lorenzo, they said, since he came from a conservative family of well-educated and brilliant Philadelphia-area preachers and now faced this motley but adoring audience of burnt-out brainy east-coast ex-hippies and ex-revolutionaries, was ‘absolutely in his element’ that night. He was so relaxed and inspired, he admitted later, that he could not resist when his ‘Jewish street-cholo’ ‘started coming out’.

Dr. Lorenzo continued:

When not a single cholo⁶ threw a stone, Jesus said to Mary the Magdalene very loudly, so that all the trigger-happy Jewish street cholos could hear, “Now don’t break any more Sacred Jewish Law!” (don’t ‘sin’). And once he had gotten a visible enough nod of promising agreement from her, one that the whole dangerous crowd of street cholos and self-righteous stone-throwers could see perfectly well, he put his arm around her in exactly the way Dlune had put her arm around Jack, when she had found him under the streetlight naked pero con la otra chaqueta: and he walked Mary far from the hateful cholos y jefes, whispering in her ear, “Unless you do it in private; with me.” ¡Sí mon! And the four gospel writers had left that little last juicy bit out because they knew the right-wing followers of Christ would have vomited and passed out, aspirated and kicked the chingada bucket. And their estate lawyers would have gone looking for the turd who had written such a thing, swords and staves in hand.

But while the gospel story downplayed Jesus’ and Magdalene Mary's animal natures to some extent, said Dr. Lorenzo, the two of them were not fooled. They remained close friends forever after, partly to register for the sake of the four future gospel writers’ notice a joint heartfelt protest against their inevitable future sanctification into ethereal wisps of fleshless nothings. But also because they enjoyed each other like any young healthy and naturally mammalian human couple would, of course. And they stayed such close friends that she would get on her knees in the evenings, once Jesus had sat down and relaxed after a full day of prophetic and priestly ministry, and she would take off his dirty sandals and would wash his dusty smelly regal feet, slowly and lovingly. And then she would dry his regal feet with her hair, a vignette the four gospels HAD FORGOTTEN TO LEAVE OUT of their slightly uptight-with-respect-to-sexual-detail reports of Jesus’ life, amazingly, considering the political power of sexually uptight right-wing Christ followers even way back then.

Though oddly this extremist group had not expunged the vignette even after two thousand years, so maybe there was some natural mammalian humanity left in them after all, said the Dr. But on second thought ¡olvidalo! forget it! the extremist neo-Calvinists and other right-wing Christians had undoubtedly convinced themselves by now that there had been no passion or turn-on whatsoever in feet-washing for these two, just because church tradition had so successfully stripped the two of all fleshly humanity and elevated Jesus and Magdalene to dwell on a lofty and unreal, unnatural, lack-human ‘spiritual’ plane every minute of the day for eternity by naming and painting them as ‘beyond human’, or, as Dr. Lorenzo said, by ‘condemnng them to sainthood’, as a result of which not just all right-wing neo-Calvinists but millions and millions of Catholics too had ever since always dismissed the animal human natures of the two and considered their sexuality to have been thoroughly spiritualized to the nth degree, whatever that possibly could have meant. Nobody knew what it meant, because so much of the crap the church taught right from the beginning it invented from thin air or from Socratic philosophy, which was practically the same thing (as the Dr. threw in).

Jesus never said he and Mary of Magdala were ethereal, bloodless, bodiless and sexless. Nor did the ONLY valid authorities in the world on Jesus’ life, the authors of the four gospels, say so. Physically speaking, in fact, Jesus practically leaps off the page of those four gospels. It was not part of Jesus’ teaching to ever diminish the animal human fleshly-ness of anyone’s human body, least of all his own. OBVIOUSLY. Because, if he had done so, it would have watered down his whole message.

‘Think about it’, said the Dr. to his audience, about Jesus Christ’s physical human suffering, his crucifixion, his body and blood offered as bread and wine. He wanted his body to be noticed with good reason, not just because he was young and good-looking and manly, but because he was offering his living young body, his fleshly animal human life, to the world. WHEN YOU GAVE WINE TO A FRIEND YOU DID NOT WATER IT DOWN, shouted the Dr. with a bite the audience remembered afterward. And so Jesus did manage to succeed in his goal of getting his body noticed, ON PURPOSE, despite constant spirit-izing opposition; and via various earthshaking tricks including suffering crucifixion and enjoying intimate feet-washing.

But, said the Dr., all of the apostles and church fathers who were pretending to cut off their own balls (but hadn’t done so in reality) resented unconsciously all the attention Jesus and his body were getting. So to steal his thunder they had the balls to add huge ego-aggrandizing footnotes to Jesus’ brief, clean and very simple message. They were trying to steal from him his body and thunder; and that was how the crazy concept of ethereal, bodiless, bloodless sexless saintliness was invented by the early church. It had no parallel whatever in the real human everyday world of real men and women ‘like Christ and Mary Magdalene and you and me’, said the Dr.: it existed only in the mental world of ‘lack-human aberrancies’ like Mortimer and the sexually weird church fathers: people like that.

And therefore, said Dr. Lorenzo, and regretfully, the extremist right-wing Protestants had flunked the humanity test again. And way too many Catholics, too, this time, and every time, right from DAY ONE. He was sorry for having uncovered the shameless, selfish behavior of so many ‘famous and supposedly hallowed’ Christians, but no one could deny that they had done it. And it was essential that history address it NOW before the world blew itself up thinking stupidly that it too, the physical world known as planet earth with all of its race of humanity, was nothing but pure spirit.

Anyway, Jesus had found it unavoidable to deal with the religious insanity of his time, Dr. Lorenzo continued. Any religion could grow insane over time, doing far more harm than good. And many religions down through humanity’s history had done that very thing. ‘Every spiritual master in human history had found it essential to confront the religious insanity of his time’ said the Dr. loudly. Often it was their chief mission. And the religious insanity of Jesus’ time was Jewish law, because the Jewish legalists had pumped it up to insane extremes at the expense of the human heart, exactly as Shylock had done in “The Merchant of Venice.” And so Jesus’ mission on earth was to BREAK SACRED JEWISH LAW, AS EVERY JEWISH STREET CHOLO IN JESUS’ PALESTINE KNEW PERFECTLY WELL. That was why he broke it so openly and frequently, to make a graphic point. But now, instead, in the Magdalene situation, Jesus had to show respect for Jewish sacred law at this particular moment, to get this Mary out with her Magdalene skin. And such a ‘180’ made him look ‘duplicitous and disingenuous’. That’s what educated Jews of those days considered it to be. And the Jewish street cholos called it something even worse: ‘two-faced’, ‘¡Navaja de doble filo!’

Jewish ‘street cholos’, Dr. Lorenzo explained for the benefit of those who had never heard of them, were much, much better educated than L.A. Mexican ‘street cholos’. ¡Sí mon! Jewish street cholos read all five Roman newspapers every day and knew, as ALL PALESTINE KNEW, that Jesus’ mission on earth was to BREAK SACRED JEWISH LAW and replace it with THE NEW LAW, THE ‘LAW OF LOVE’. Because, as even the least chingón cholos knew from reading all five Roman papers every day: Jesus had read “The Merchant of Venice” before Shakespeare wrote it, so he knew that love humanified, and law dehumanized, when stretched to extremes as by his Jewish uncles, right in his very own day. ¡Sí mon! There could never be such a thing as ‘too much love’. ¡Sí mon! But ‘too much law’ was not just a possibility but virtually an inevitability in any highly structured society. And so: God the Father, up in Heaven, had taught Jesus this very basic principle before sending him down to his mission: ‘Love beats the law for ruling’. ¡Sí mon! But Jesus had never really believed it coming from the mouth of a Yahweh who had threatened to burn all Nineveh right down to the women, children and dogs, UNTIL OF COURSE HE READ “THE MERCHANT OF VENICE,” which he could, because, he was Logos, THE WORD, as Greek philosophy and John the Evangelist had proven ("a little this side of philosophical certainty"). He could read “The Merchant of Venice” before Shakespeare conceived it, because before Shakespeare knew that there were words, Christ had already been THE Word, from the Beginning of Time, as John’s gospel proved ("a little this side of philosophical certainty"). That’s why Jesus had left heaven and come to earth, in fact, because where he and God the Father lived, way up there, so high you could see everything and it all looked pinche simultaneous, past present and future all at once, hombre, it was very boring, living like that year in and year out. Because you already knew everything before it happened. It took the darn surprise out of life ¡ojala!

And so, Jesus had volunteered for excitement, to live like a real human being and die like a perro chingado, because those fool humans never knew what was happening next. They didn’t even know what kind of chingaderas Jesus and Mary M. had been up to, before Jewish street cholos and Sacred Law freaks rounded Mary M. up for stoning. Lord only knew. ¡Ai Dios! But after that: he hung out with women less in public, seeing how it damaged his chingón reputation on the street.

Dr. Lorenzo stopped for a sip of water here, and the pandemonium already well underway octupled. His people had shouted and clapped and stamped their feet, and now they stood and bellowed and hollered and carried on whooping it up, cat-calling raspberries and sour creamed cranberries and even running up and down the aisles. And after the event was over everybody wanted to know why on earth the clapping and nonsense had lasted so long. And Dr. Lorenzo explained it later, though everyone who had been there denied his explanation equally: that the people who had lain on the aisle carpet to relax, about ‘99% of the audience’ in the beginning, as the Dr. said, because they were all so tired from the sixties, still, even fifteen years later, all kept waking up from utter snoring stupor and adding to the clamor, one by one, each one trying to make it look like they had heard every word. And so of course they kind of overdid the enthusiasm, and had no idea the applause should have stopped an hour ago. But finally everybody relaxed and the Dr. had more on his mind, now that he had so cleverly succeeded in getting his audience ‘100% awake, finally’.

And he said that a few decades back Jesus had begun to sense that the Christian world was about to make a formal ecumenical decision that it wanted him back again on earth. And he had not made up his mind yet, even though he knew everything ahead. He was just pretending to himself he did not know how he would respond to the invitation, because he liked to pretend to be human once in a while, and not know the answer to things, just to inject some human excitement into his life. Because it was boring to know everything in advance all the time. So, just in case he would someday agree to return officially, he paid a surreptitious visit to earth and rented a machine that played movies and looked at some movie versions of “The Merchant of Venice” just to remember why love was better than law (and anyway he liked to compare the transvestite scene in various versions). And while he was shopping for movies he had heard some talk among some teenage boys, in a lingo that caught his fancy. And the boys had told him they were speaking ‘Jewish street-cholo’ and he had thought it the hippest lingo he had ever heard on earth. So he had decided he wanted to learn to speak it, since he was Jewish, after all, even though he could have just snapped his fingers and done it in a second. But he wanted to feel more human and learn it, so he studied it just in case he came back someday, for he had not made up his mind yet. But: he knew that if he did come back he would need every last trick in the book to communicate properly with the whole planet. Because he could not get his point across ‘acting like Jack’. You could make ‘some points’ that way, but not most. And so, said Dr. Lorenzo, Jesus was now studying ‘Jewish street-cholo’ in all his spare time.

This provoked deafening racket that looked for all the world unstoppable. A history professor feared the campus police might be called, and the poor Dr. thought it wiser anyway to end before he got any more out of control. So he had some people pass out printed copies of his lecture and left to so much pandemonium that no one even missed him ‘until an hour later’, as he told the story forever after. The rest of the points were:

115.  the rest of the history lecture at Penn

(11) The Western world’s un-relaxed reaction to its very own sexuality down through two millennia had not come from Christ’s teaching, therefore, but from apostles and church fathers who were revered but wrong because they had ‘sprouted horns of hubris’ and tried to outdo and outguess Christ and teach bull-butt tripe of their own inventing, then lie and say Christ would have wanted that.

(12) But in a sense they were just victims of their times, for during a period of several centuries at least, in the ancient world, there had been a philosophical movement afoot, as Mortimer would spell out carefully in The Remaking’s ‘seventh attempt’, to airily spiritualize human life away from its animal earthy naturalness ‘ever upward’ toward the unnatural, non-physical, non-animal, unearthly notions of ‘purity’, ‘pure thought’, ‘the Good’, ‘Ideas’, ‘the incorruptible’, and other such brainspun nonsense. And, out of all the philosophers and religious movements responsible for this drift away from natural and humble, simple earthy humanness, Socrates and Plato were the worst culprits, merely because they impacted ‘the most and the best’ people in the ancient world, thanks to their educated braininess and their ‘dialogues’ which they told and wrote with such amazing art and even wisdom.

(13) Unfortunately and sadly, this philosophical and religious atmosphere then affected the Apostles and church fathers immeasurably, to such an extent they actually – without a qualm – ‘screwed to bits’ the teaching of their beloved and revered Christ. They would, in fact, eventually succeed in dwarfing Christ’s simple gospel message, and obscuring it ever increasingly, merely by adding to it whole cloth from outside, constantly tossing in bullshit fad-thinking of the times and other baloney of their own selfish creation, claiming they had the authority, in effect, to ‘read Christ’s mind’ and outguess him as to how he would have wanted his followers to think and live. Even though Jesus had already made his teaching clear; and four various followers had written it down in four ‘gospels’, and all four had agreed basically on the content of Jesus’ teaching. Yet this had not been enough for St. Paul and other tons of very bold and fat church fathers. They had wanted to be as famous and loved and revered and remembered as Jesus, apparently, so had just gone and changed his teaching out of sincere but shameful hubris.

(14) And this philosophical atmosphere during the first few centuries after Christ, when the church and Western civilization were in their infancy, this intellectual ambience which carried along with it an implied cluster of beliefs and thinking tendencies never taught by Christ, grabbed hold of the early church and affected immeasurably and irreversibly the Christian world that was to come in the future. And that particular implied and effectively endorsed cluster of beliefs, which was never taught by Christ, demeaned human sexuality, physicality, animality, mammalian instinct, materiality, etc., all of which were fundamentally part of being human and always had been, as anyone with any common human mammalian sense could see. And so: the Zeitgeist of the ancient world ended up pressuring the church’s founders to promote only silly airy meaningless bloodless fleshless spirituality. And as a result: sex got thrown out with the dirt and grime and flesh and blood, in order that wifty, airy, white-gown-blowing spirituality could be preserved and emphatically obsessed upon by the sick, damaged people who founded the church. And this they did: not until after apparently-sexually-healthy-and-earthy but spiritually-hip Christ had left the earthly world, just so he ‘would not notice’, with the result that: natural animal-human simplicity suffered loss of respect ever thereafter in the Western world, even though Christ had taught none of this seriously wacko and dehumanizing malarkey.

(15) And then, once humanity’s natural, human, earthy, animal common-sense simplicity had been laid out neatly in the coffin, “Saint” Augustine lowered the coffin lid gravely and drove in 49,000 golden symbolic nails, more or less, with his ingeniously brainspun claim that if you read between the lines of the Bible with enough of Augustine’s special kind of obviously authoritative if not infallible monkish bishop’s wisdom, you or anyone could see that your making love to your beloved and lovely and beautiful young wife was sinful and awful, and that your existence on the planet really could not be very wonderful because it had been created in awful and disgustingly sinful conditions, because you were born of your father’s having made disgusting dirty sinful awful love to your young beautiful and sexy mother, and likewise your children would be born in ugly awful sin, because it was sinful and dirty and fornicative for you to enjoy sex with your lovely and beautiful young wife. And once the monstrous non-Christ-taught church-created blight of incurable white-gownophilia and sexophobia had reached this immense dimension of perversity it could only get graver, more spirit-killing and more heartbreaking, which of course it did, worsening century after century after miserable sex-hating century, and that brings us up to the poor, suddenly easy-to-understand-and-forgive, sex-startled extremist neo-Calvinists like Rev and Jo and other right-wing extremist-Protestant Christians.

(16) Any questions?

Dr. Lorenzo would have gotten a tremendous ovation for these final points in the history department at Penn, had he ever delivered them.

No wonder his pundit followers loved him so.

116.  Dr. Lorenzo cuts the protective skin right off ‘the extreme U.S.A. Christian right’ with surgically sharp eagle-eye perceptivity

The good doctor was not finished digging into this infamous can of worms he had opened, however. He returned to Penn after many years and added a million-dollar kicker-footnote to his previous History department lecture. It was the spring of 2001, in fact, and the Christian right had just gained unprecedented political power in the U.S.A., so he felt that they ‘had to be’ knocked down several pegs as soon as possible, quick! Before they blew up the world thinking God had sent them to create Armageddon on behalf of the world’s wacky neo-Calvinist Mortimers.

Right-wing extremist American Protestants, the Dr. said, had gotten ever more trickily locked in to their ‘startle reaction’ to human sexuality because of an additional inbuilt reward system that was so utterly irrational it sounded crazy when ‘explained’, meaning, ‘too illogical to be real’. And, he said, trying to explain it live in public therefore exposed him to the risk of being thought wacko and in need of psychiatric hospitalization for ever having believed he had ‘discovered’ it, and worse yet, for having said it out loud in a formal university-sponsored lecture. But nevertheless he believed that the thing did exist and that he understood the phenomenon reasonably correctly after a lifetime of study, so would proceed with his outrageous understanding of this ‘darkest little corner’ of Western world history. For after all, he said: he was not the one who had ‘made the spiritual core of the Western world this crazy’. He was simply reporting it like a CNN news reporter.

Prior to the Victorian era, he said, no mother or father in the Western world would ever have dreamt of circumcising a baby boy unless they were Jewish. It was exclusively a Jewish custom, a sign (as even Christians understood) that the Jews believed that they were ‘God’s chosen people’. Which meant that to the Christian mind for about 1900 years, only Jews could ever be so extreme in their beliefs as to do such an unthinkable thing (shudder) as to cut off part of their poor little baby boy’s penis. Never Christians. And this attitude had not altered one bit after the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s either, not even when Calvin had said that his followers from his lifetime forward would be understood to be God’s new chosen and favored people on earth to replace the Jews.

But then Victorian-era Protestant U.S. doctors of the late 19^th century came along and unscientifically and hysterically linked the foreskin of the penis to the newly discovered world of germs, and pushed and promoted a world-wide frenzy of pointless lopping off of this very important and personal part of a man’s body, of his ‘wonderful and sacred sexual apparatus’, as Dr. Lorenzo said. And soon most English-speaking countries were lopping off the natural animal human-mammalian foreskin of every newborn man-baby in sight, and of some adults too, even, and they were calling this insane and truly criminal procedure by the fancy name of ‘circumcision’ as if it were a legitimate medical term and procedure.

Yet by 2001, fortunately, all predominantly ‘Christian’ countries had long since stopped the unconscionable practice of male infant circumcision, considering it indefensible by any standards. And many Americans had given it up too, finally (though much too lately and reluctantly), most of them having accepted too, finally, that it was pointless and indefensible. Though the Jews of course continued, for purely religious reasons. AND ONE OTHER GROUP OF U.S. AMERICANS continued to do it too, said Dr. Lorenzo to his audience, tauntingly, looking at them with wide, questioning eyes that said: “Guess who?”

“Guess who?” he asked without waiting. “The extreme Protestant Christian right,” he said, and this was because circumcision tied in, usually utterly unconsciously, with the extremist Protestants’ crazy belief, also usually not very conscious, that they were God’s new elect and chosen people, God’s favorite people on earth and his lackeys, a notion that went back to Calvin and Zwingli and other founders of the ‘radical wing’ of the Protestant Reformation, all of whom had been very clear about this crazy belief of theirs that they had been elected by God to replace the Jews as his ‘chosen people’, who had failed at the job when they refused to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah..

And, as mentioned: God’s former favorites, the Jews, whom this ‘new Israel’ of Calvinists was now replacing, had been circumcised too. And so, traditionally in the Western world, circumcision had always been understood as ‘proof’ of chosen-ness by God.

Thus, by a nervous system leap, an incredible, irrational, barely comprehensible leap: every time an extremist Protestant felt a ‘startle reaction’ to sex, he was reminded – at some barely conscious level – of his unusualness and special-ness of various kinds. Other people did not startle at references to sex in public, only his kind of people, extremist Protestants. So he was reminded that he was one of God’s chosen, those helping to erect and eventually run Christ’s kingdom here on earth, right now. He was so special that he was even circumcised, he might remember at such a moment. And that was another thing unusual or ‘special’ about him. Other guys in the locker room were not circumcised. In fact, all the ones who did not startle were not circumcised. And the ones who were not circumcised did not startle. So both his startle reaction and his circumcision set him apart and made him different and unusual and ‘special’. And both of these special things had something to do with sex. And in fact his sexual different-ness, i.e., his circumcision, in addition, could be said to physically prove his unusualness and special-ness in the sight of God, when you thought about it, just as it always had for the Jews. He was not only chosen, and physically marked as chosen, he was also elected and expected to run the kingdom of God on earth, a further step upwardly removed from social awkwardness. In fact, he was so superior to the people who were laughing at him for his startle reaction, he was not even going to mention his superiority. That was his biggest secret: he was one of God’s very special secret favorites. And when the kingdom was fully in place, and he was in charge, 'the secret would be unveiled' and those others would finally see who was doing the laughing.

All of which meant two things, said Dr. Lorenzo. It meant that (1) such a man was dangerous, because he was part of a very large group with a shocking secret agenda, namely: to set up a brainspun man-made weird-religion-based empire on the earth and run it, whether anyone else in the world wanted this or not. And it meant that (2) such a man was rewarded for showing the startle reaction publicly, rather than embarrassed as he should have been, for doing so. For his startle reaction ought to have made him ashamed of his social awkwardness, of his discomfort with his own animal humanness and other people’s too. For ‘normal’ people had no such strange and unmanly and exaggerated and negative reactions to human sexuality as he did. But au contraire, he would predictably continue proudly to feel uncomfortable with human sexuality whenever he felt like it, because actually it constituted a political rally cry for all like him nearby to hear. His extremist-Protestant buddies were inspired – every single time he showed his startle reaction to sex – to work harder toward realizing their terror-provokingly anti-human kingdom on earth. And political enemies were thereby frightened and weakened, because they could not figure out what the heck kind of weird irrationality they were dealing with.

Thus, said Dr. Lorenzo, the strange, gauche, out-of-date behavior got perversely reinforced and perpetuated in some of the country’s best educated and seemingly otherwise modern leaders and institutions, simply because every time their nervous system overreacted gauchely to natural human animal sexuality, all the perversely unnatural and anti-human private hidden rewards for their reacting so, exceeded any punishment that came to them in the outer world for acting like sexually uptight human freaks. And the U.S., he said, was stuck with this problem and all of its weird and internationally embarrassing political and social consequences, until it studied the thing thoroughly and figured out what should be done about it.

And that was the end of Dr. Lorenzo’s second lecture at the History department at Penn.

117.  a few famous examples of the ‘startle reaction’ to sex

Meanwhile, then, given all this well known history of the Western world, it was not surprising that in Florence, New Jersey, whenever Mortimer’s father, Reverend Lorenzo, thought about the ‘first attempt’ his son had written and sent him in the mail, he simply could not bring himself to laugh, but instead felt forever chagrined by those paragraphs mentioning naked daft Jack’s ‘pagan behavior’ in public. Even when he tried to tell himself it might be fiction. And even though, again, Puritanism should have been dead and buried long since, if only Rev and his countrymen had possessed any ordinary, natural, human common sense. And even though Jack must have been sick and crazy and not himself at the time. Rev was chagrined even though it was just normal animal human behavior, in a sense, but ratcheted up a few notches due to Jack’s emotional and mental state and their son Mortimer’s sense of what was required in his ‘Remaking’ book.

And the pundits found themselves asking each other questions about this, when they heard of it later. Could Rev and Jo not shake their sides at a grossly ‘risqué’ joke even in the privacy of their own kitchen? The Lorenzos were normal animal humans, were they not? At least maybe on the day they were born, or for a few innocent Jack-like childish years? Until Puritan thinking somehow grabbed them, robbing them of naturalness and relaxed, all-around-animal humanity? After all, what might it BE about incessant naked male arousal that could possibly be so freakifying to a normal, healthy human being? It was a known psychiatric disorder. And Jack was in need of help. No one was forced to read about it in graphic detail, page after page after page. There were no porn photos.

“What was their problem?” the pundits asked after reading Sammy’s ‘first revision’ with its description of the Lorenzos’ reaction. For, after having met the Lorenzos, some of the pundits were pretty sure they were human beings. So that left only one possibility: mj’s parents must not have been normal and healthy. And that was exactly how their son, Jack, felt, about his parents, and about their surrogate, Mortimer, as well, and a good bit of the rest of their ilk.

And so, the Lorenzos – mainly out of fear and shock over Jack’s natural raw animal-human instinct, which was, granted, a bit off-kilter, about as off-kilter and harmful as a dog that would not stop humping a piece of furniture or humping a man’s pantleg with his leg in it – would race through Mortimer’s ‘first attempt at a meeting’ so they could get to the ‘second attempt’, where a cabin awaited them on a lake island, offering some peace and tranquil sanity. And in so doing, they mirrored the half of their son called ‘Mortimer’ perfectly, interestingly, the side of their son whose humanity had become as watered down as theirs; naturally; since they had taught it to him; for Mortimer had already done the same thing. He had been the first one to abandon his sick and disturbed other half, Jack, so as to find peace and tranquility on an island. And Rev and Jo, his parental look-alikes, now were the second and third.⁷

But they were not the only ones who would have done such, as Dr. Lorenzo wanted the world to understand. Every one of the millions of people in the Western world like them, who spent their entire lives constantly suppressing raw animal-human Jack-energy within themselves and around themselves, would have skipped out of the ‘first attempt’ at that point, spooked from reading it further. These were the very same people who had a related reaction when in the Rome subway and pressed from all sides by commuting Roman construction workers; or on the beach in Mexico when accosted by swarms of dark male vendors; or observing how many poor Mexican youths’ makeshift swimwear revealed their genitals. They were the same ones who came into the city from the white-flight suburbs to pick up a relative at the Philadelphia airport, let’s say. When they decided to get a sandwich on the way through South Philly and parked and walked to get a famous original Philly cheese steak at Pat’s Steaks or somewhere. And took a wrong turn off South Street onto eighth and around another corner, looking for the car they had parked in a place they had ‘thought safe’, back when it was still light out. But who now in the dark suddenly felt threatened by animal-human Jack-energy in a darker-skinned stranger. A dark man exposed, let’s say, drunk and peeing unthreateningly against a wall.

They panicked and ran, even if the person they stumbled on was relatively quintessentially normal and human and too drunk to walk or talk and never had startled anyone who lived in his own South Philly neighborhood his whole life. These emotionally and morally fragile people were always spooked by human animality.

The entire Western world might have suffered some negative reaction to Jack’s masturbating naked incessantly, granted; but not to the extreme, on the average, that did the group Rev and Jo represented. The more your style of life removed you from intimate knowledge of raw animal-human nature, your own and the world’s, the more you showed the startle reaction every time you ran up against raw nature’s human-animal energy, stumbling upon it either inside yourself or outside. And life in the Western world, in general, more and more, was tending to remove people from raw nature, including their own raw nature, far, far more than life in the rest of the world was tending to do. And right-wing extremist neo-Calvinism and other extremist Protestant theologies removed you ten times as much as did simply living in the Western world.

This was one of the discoveries the pundits made while studying mj lorenzo’s The Remaking. And as discovery piled upon discovery over the years, precious find upon precious find, they felt an increasing sense of urgency to do something about it all, having been social activists by nature since adolescence, a good many of them.

118.  the pundits ‘understand’ ‘the right’ sooner than themselves

The fact that mj’s Remaking could help the pundits make discoveries of such a deep and significant kind; the fact that his ‘word-mandala’ could increase their wise understanding of the split U.S. American character and their own split character, for example: such multiple and life-practical benefits spelled The Remaking’s success for them, and explained their love of Dr. Lorenzo. Prior to The Remaking, for instance, there had been no handbook for navigating between the extremes of political left and right. But once these young zealots ‘had gotten to know’ Jack and Mortimer and the Lorenzos and Wrigley College ‘almost like family’, just from studying The Remaking, they felt they could handle anything that the right might dish out, especially after the 1980 ‘first revision’ took them inside the Lorenzos’ Calvinist-Methodist parsonage. Their new confidence dealing with the right made negotiating with them easier. Granted, the very best knowledge of the opposing side always came from living with its people in intimate contact, as the Remaking stressed repeatedly in different ways. Mj, as usual, had done it right, growing up with one side, then living with the other. Most leftist pundits could not claim this kind of intimate knowledge of the other side of life, but at least they had gotten to live with ‘the right’ VICARIOUSLY, thanks to mj lorenzo’s Remaking. And now they could outwit or work with ‘the right’ as they chose, a bit more smoothly in either case.

They had thought the extremist right inscrutable, incomprehensible and mean before The Remaking. Then suddenly the ‘first revision’ had come along and exposed conservative American Protestantism in a way nothing had before. People had known there was a connection between extremist Protestant Christianity and the extreme political ‘right’, but no one had understood exactly what it was. And the left felt they would be bored to death if they researched it. What life-loving young person would want to research the religious, historical, philosophical, and psychological roots of Darth Vader’s icy nature? You would freeze to death trying. So the left had never looked at the dehumanizing impact of conservative Protestantism on the daily life of humble human individuals like mj lorenzo, or on the daily life of the Western world in general, for example. Maybe the knowledge had been out there floating around, but The Remaking had gotten the pundits interested in the myriad ways in which these two idea-systems, Western philosophy and extremist Protestantism, both tended to rob people of humanity.

Both belittled the paranormal, for example. Who would have thought that such a thing as belief in the paranormal might be important to U.S. or world politics? By the 1970s practically everybody in the Western world had belittled belief in the paranormal, including the pundits themselves. No one was giving it a second thought any more, hardly.

The radical left, prior to mj lorenzo, hardly would have dreamt they needed to seriously look at such matters in order to understand politics, of all things. Yet The Remaking had shown them they did. They had thought it sufficient for activists like themselves to grasp the extent of racial inequality world-wide, let’s say, or learn the techniques of non-violent Ghandian sit-down protest so as to hopefully undo racism or abuse of political power. But mj’s Remaking was telling them that this was not enough. They also had to know and understand the opposition.

Mj lorenzo had opened a door to their understanding of ‘the enemy’ as human and workable, but damaged and suffering like mj himself, and particularly like Mortimer. Maybe that was another reason they loved Dr. Lorenzo so much. He had taken the trouble to devise a way to get their attention, a magical way to motivate them to develop themselves. And now, thanks to him, they felt more human. And he had done it with one book only; for he rarely came out of his rat hole and spoke.

And then an amazing thing happened. It was around 1985. The pundits on east coast campuses had tracked mj down in 1980 and gotten to know him by inviting him to conferences. They had told him their history. The sixties had drained them of energy for life. But The Remaking had come along and revived them somehow. He had saved them from meaningless wandering from this to that, right when the sixties revolution ended and they lost their inspiring causes and leaders. He had inspired and helped them. And now they wanted to help him. So they had found him air time on talk shows, and helped him promote his ‘first revision’ after 1980. And that made them feel good. Their life had been warmed by his presence on the planet during their lifetime. And they were wiser and more human now, enough to appreciate the richness of being able to share life with someone of quality. And they had grown so fond of him by the mid-80s, they had begun to think of him as theirs; as belonging to them; like a special darling, a feather in their cap; as they were one in his, they were sure.

And one day they heard that ‘the right’ had taken to mj too, and were studying Part I of The Remaking, analyzing Jack exactly the way the pundits had studied Mortimer in Part II for years. And the right, said the Washington Post, were now going to use their insights newly gained from studying Jack, to drive a harder bargain with the left, or even trick them. And the right had even invited mj to conferences in Washington. And he had actually gone there and hung out with them.

And to shorten the tale, the pundits were heartbroken. But eventually they saw, and really for the very first time, finally, that mj lorenzo had tried to work with both sides, so as to mould the two into a smoothly working unit. They had ‘known’ this, ‘sort of’, once. But now they grasped it with wisdom and grief. They had wanted to live forever without opposition, like Jack had wanted, as they had assumed. They had wanted to never have to talk to the ‘right’ one more time, somehow. It was not that they feared the extreme political right. They disdained them, rather. And they had thought mj had chosen them, somehow, as his favorite side to take over the world. They had not known that they were thinking such crazy thoughts, actually, until the tables felt turned suddenly, and they noticed these funny thoughts leaping about in their heads.

And it took them some years to get beyond it all. But in time most of the leftist, mostly campus-based Remaking pundits world-wide did get over this hurt and could talk to Dr. Lorenzo again at a conference as they had before without feeling sheepish and bent out of shape and guilty and stupid and pissed and hurt. And they even felt more human, too, in the end.

119.  what the pundits did for their hero

The Remaking pundits had put themselves through a lot for their hero over the years. They thought so at least. This was one of the reasons they loved him so, probably. When friends struggled together it bonded them. And the ‘first attempt’ had been one of the biggest joint struggles of all, and one of the biggest eventual bonds with their mj. They could have abandoned him at any point while trying to tackle the ‘first attempt’, but they did not. And it made them feel good, more tied to the author than not, whom they never got to see as much as they wanted, ever.

Those poor workhorse-y pundit souls over the years, in having to deal with just this one chapter in The Remaking, the ‘first attempt’, had been required to compare encounters between Mortimer and Jack. And they had had to estimate theoretical risks at the time of the second encounter in Fort Smith. And they had felt required – by themselves, not by anyone else – to study mj’s fragility. It was not mj lorenzo himself who was driving them to do these things, of course. Nor was it anyone representing him. He had not even been around in the early years. Each of these little missions that they had dreamt up and assigned themselves and accomplished, they had invented and carried out under their own recognizance in response to their own ‘crazy devotion’ and no one else’s.

They had had to predict what might have resulted, had the whole world been made up of Mortimers and Jacks in the extremely crazy state those two had been in, while at Fort Smith. They had even had to interview the Lorenzos, mj’s parents. That was their own idea, too, though, and nobody else’s.

They had gone looking for the source of mj’s fragility, and found it in extremist Protestantism and in their own Western world’s belief system which was out of human balance ever since the day Christ died and other people began twisting his message of peace, love, forgiveness and sincere brotherhood among real fleshly animal-mammal human beings. And then they had felt it essential to analyze why Mortimer could not collaborate with Jack, and why he had walked out on him after only two weeks. They had seen it as required to understand exactly why Mortimer had felt so overwhelmed and pathetically fragile around Jack.

And all this time; through all this exacting work; year after year: they had never even realized that mj lorenzo had been using them, the stupid fools. He had set them up to co-thrive intelligently with the right, in the theoretical future. Their time spent ‘studying Mortimer’ so terribly thoroughly, had been preparing them so that the two ideological extremes could become one again some day.

They also had felt it necessary to answer the ‘tricky-ass question’, as they called it, why Mortimer could not take the leap into relationship; which meant: with Jack; with THEM, in other words. That is, why the right could not reach out and relate to them, the left. The right’s fear of losing control, they had discovered, was the explanation. And then they had studied the Lorenzos’ strangely-out-of-date Puritanism and the funnily-named ‘startle response’ that people like the Lorenzos so often suffered, when confronted with merely-human sex. They had asked rhetorically, why in the world could Rev and Jo not take a ‘raunchy off-color joke’? And then had been forced to answer their own question.

They had also learned that Western civilization kept losing a little more of its humanity every time it lost another piece of its raw nature.

They had also compared and contrasted the political ‘right and left’, and learned how to draw the parallel between those two parties and The Remaking’s ‘Mortimer and Jack’ ad infinitum. And in the middle of all this work of theirs, mj had tricked them into accepting that the right was as inevitable as the left, in the real world, just as in the book. And that had been harder work than any of their other chores. Some of them still could not understand or accept it.