V:  Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan:  fear of the stranger

120.  ‘bi-bodihood’ drives the Western world crazy

The ‘first attempt’ had demanded more noggin work than all other sections of The Remaking, by far, over the years. Everyone agreed. But there was one aspect of the section so complex and difficult to understand it made the many tons of work on the ‘first attempt’, as listed above thus far, feel like tiddlywinks.

The ‘first attempt’ (and the last half of ‘Fort Smith’) suffered a huge conceptual encumbrance that everyone in the world talked about forever and ever. And the Lorenzos had been forced to deal with it too. Namely: that ‘Mortimer’ had described his retiring for the winter to a cabin on an island in Lake Athabasca, from where he could still commute to Fort Smith to visit his patient, ‘Jack’, theoretically. Yet both of these were mj. Or so the Lorenzos understood ‘Mortimer’ to be wishing them to believe. And they were incapable of believing such a thing. There was no way that mj lorenzo could split into a patient and a psychiatrist, two distinct individuals in the same room together, and have it be reality. So Rev and Jo were forced again to see it all as ‘just fiction’, and bizarre, ‘perverted and filthy prurient’ fiction at that. For they knew of no other way to make sense of it.

And the pundits after them were no less bewildered by it all than the Lorenzos. With the result that no one figured out what was going on. Nobody knew who was where, first, second or third base, not the brightest Ivy League philosophers and psychologists of that weird pundit pack, not the punked out pundits, nor the long-haired ones, nor the Abercrombie and Fitch wise guys. Everyone just had to ‘eat crow’, as they said, and accept that – for the moment – starting from some point in the ‘Fort Smith envelope’, mj had become two entities, one of whom, called ‘Mortimer’, was active and nominally ‘in charge’ of the two of them. While the other, Jack, was hospitalized and barely alive.

Mj lorenzo had wanted people to believe, it seemed, that he had truly made this trip and done these things, yet this freaky event ‘lacked verisimilitude’, as all Remaking pundits liked to moan and complain. And it weakened his argument, seemingly, for it made no rational-scientific sense. Yet the pundits could and did continue reading, they admitted, picturing both ‘halves’ of mj in the same place at the same time, for the two looked different, after all, one a deep dark naked native brown, and the other white as snow in a long white and stiffly starched lab coat. And furthermore it was still possible to understand the relationship between mj’s two halves. It was very possible, oddly enough. And the pundits were devoted enough to go that far.

But they did NOT ‘get this two-mj bit’, or like it very much. It embarrassed them, as a matter of fact, especially during interviews with the media.

And Mortimer’s own writing on the subject was especially exasperating, poor thing. He tried to explain it to himself and his parents, but whether he succeeded was debatable. He accepted it, but he did not understand it. So it had to be even less possible for two ‘born-again’ Calvinist Methodists from Collingswood, in very conservative 1971 southern New Jersey, even after their modern, early twentieth-century U.S. American college and university educations, to understand, let alone accept, that their own flesh-and-blood son could somehow split into two entities which functioned independently and simultaneously, each in a separate body.

In Part I Jack had not asked his parents to believe anything so scientifically incomprehensible. And so, back then, it had been a little easier for them to accept, more or less, that ‘Jack’ had been ‘in charge’ for the summer, while ‘Mortimer’ had ‘taken a vacation’ from contributing his skill of thinking and understanding the rules. Eventually they had seen all this as a ‘cute’ manner of speaking about the split in their son’s being. He was playing with words and concepts. But: to be asked to believe that their son had literally, scientifically, split into two simultaneously functioning individuals, each with a separate body, was too much to ask. They assumed that this was their only choice, unfortunately.

It never occurred to the Lorenzos for even one second, for instance, that they might attempt to see the whole sticky wicket as paranormal; or shamanic; or magical. Because anything or anybody that was paranormal, witch-doctory or magical, was not allowed in the Florence Methodist parsonage at 209 Broad Street. That was the basic Lorenzo attitude toward such things. Even though such things were all utterly and universally human. Practically every single person in Mexico, for example, or in most non-western countries, for that matter, accepted the paranormal as a fact of life. Practically everyone in the world did, in one form or another. Dlune and her grandfather, Chipewyan, went with it, and all their people.

The paranormal seemed to be connected in some way with animal instinct, the intuitive part of being human, thought Dr. Lorenzo, saying so later in life. The paranormal was so humanly normal, all around the globe, as the doctor would reveal in lectures, that even his parents had accepted it at times. They had never blinked an eye while reading the Bible at the table after dinner, for example, whenever a very elderly Hannah would give birth to a prophet Samuel, even though ‘the Lord had shut up her womb’ many years before. And when Dr. Zhivago kept running unexpectedly into Lara, the woman Zhivago loved more obsessively than anybody or anything in the world, his whole life, i.e., every time Yuri and Lara ran into each other in the most unlikely places all over the incredibly vast expanses of Russia, always when they needed each other most, again and again and unbelievably again, plus 3 to 5 more unlikely times besides, right on the Lorenzos’ TV, Rev and Jo just kept sipping on Jo’s sugary iced tea.

So it was more like: anything or anybody paranormal was not allowed in the house without proper pedigree. They did not consider Hannah’s womb, or the virgin Mary’s, to be ‘literary tricks’. Those paranormal events had proper pedigree. Yet they gave up trying to accept their son’s ‘bi-bodihood’ as anything but a ‘crazy literary trick’. Because he ‘wasn’t Samuel’, or Hannah or Mary or Boris Pasternak. They refused to think of their son’s eventful split into two bodies as paranormal, or to support it as such, but kept on reading, rather, with one understanding alone, that bi-bodihood was just a trick.

They belittled it, in other words. They disparaged it. And they were, truth be told, just a little irritated by the whole ‘nonsensical’, ‘modernistic’, ‘worldly’, and, as Rev loved to throw in, just to be provocative and attention-seeking like Jack, ‘devilish’, affair.

And they did this because they were above such things, you see: better; cleaner; churchlier; purer, like Puritans, like strict, closed, up-tight upright right-wing Christians of whatever Protestant denomination. Superstitious belief in un-pedigreed miracles was one of the main things debunked by the 'Protestant' attempt to 'Reform' the Roman Christian church in the 1500s. Some denominations took the matter lightly by 1970, but every single church group and denomination had its right-wingers, even the often modernist Methodist church, even the Episcopal, Roman Catholic and eastern churches. So, the Lorenzos disparaged their son’s paranormal bewilderment; and even his beautiful nakedness, by now, and especially his sex. They condemned his psychic distress. They belittled his freaky search for truth. They had put up with his nakedness for a while, but he had gotten too out there for them, too sexual. He was rattling their cage. Between his exposing himself and his ‘bi-bodihood’, they felt they had earned the right to judge and condemn anything he did from now on that pushed their buttons, no matter how human. From now on, they assigned each thing about him a value of plus or minus, always following a system of values that was notoriously and sadly rigid and cold and spirit-confining and utterly dehumanizing. It was the way that the right always did their thing on the left.

Yet: if Jung had been correct, that a doctor could not work with a patient unless he or she accepted the patient as was, then how could a parent work with a son without first accepting him as he was? How could the ‘right’ work in conjunction with the ‘left’ without first accepting it as it was? The principle had to apply to loving and living with children, just as it did to treating patients and solving political battles. How could the Lorenzos ‘work with’ such a product of their own Western world and selves? Their rigidity denied them a relationship, in other words. It denied them a son, in fact, for they would never be able to ‘accept him as he was’ – so outrageously human and ornery and lively and messed up as he clearly was – and that was sad. Their extremist Protestant rigidity denied them a large part of their own life, including their own child, sadder still.

And in dismissing their son’s humanity, then, they disparaged humanity itself, all of humanity. They belittled the whole world’s humanity, thusly, and even their own limping-along humanity, and that seemed even sadder.

Was it any wonder, then, that mj lorenzo had become dehumanized and sad and depressed while living under inhuman Mortimer’s reign of terror? For: the parents had created Mortimer with the sole goal of dominating mj and keeping him from ever becoming ‘overly human’. That was what it was all about. Mortimer’s job had been to follow the rules, lest Jack escape and become too human.

But how could any human being ever become ‘overly human’? Could a puppy dog be ‘overly puppy dog’? Someone should have asked the Lorenzos that question. Who could guess how they might have defended themselves? But that was the crazy way they thought, dadgumit all to heck. And their son was on the way to comprehending it, with the pundits right behind him.

A human being could end up with too little humanity, as Dr. Lorenzo would say in later years. But it was not humanly possible, to end up being ‘too human’. The more human a person was, the more true to self.

121.  instead of simply uniting with Jack, Mortimer turns him into The Incomprehensible and then tries to control what he cannot comprehend (from a distance of course)

Their son’s psychic world got even trickier for the Lorenzos immediately, though. For no sooner had Mortimer asked them to accept the impossibility of bi-bodihood, than he added a second impossibility still more far-fetched. From his bed in his cabin at Ft. Chipewyan he began writing about Jack as if this ‘Jack’, at any point in time, could be something or someone besides the other half of himself. He might refer to ‘Jack’, for example, as one ‘Jack Levy’, whom he considered to be his own psychotherapist. And he knew this was crazy, and tried to explain it away somehow and mollify his parents. He was disturbed at times by the way ‘Jack’ kept changing form, and he claimed to be powerless to stop it. And of course he had to write about it, for this made him feel better somehow. And he sent a copy of this next piece to his parents in the section called ‘first attempt’. It was the last piece he had written while still at Fort Smith, and he had read it to his patient, ‘Jack’, on several occasions at the hospital in Fort Smith, and given him a copy of it too, receiving no response every single time, OF COURSE. And it was so brilliant, too.

Regardless of Jack’s reaction, though, the ‘pundits’ of the seventies adored this little title-less piece to high heaven. They raved about ‘the little title-less piece’ for years, passing it on to friends while smoking pot or dropping acid. They would sit in a circle in the big upstairs back room of the Friends Meeting House on Powelton Avenue near 36th St. or in one of their own run-down Victorian apartments with big bay windows, smoking Lebanese hash and giggling, reading it aloud while all delighted to heck and spaced. For it was so abstruse it practically defied understanding, and that was what they loved so much about it. It left many of them feeling – paradoxically – strangely at home in the universe for the first time ever, as if finally they had come face to face with someone even more bizarre than themselves, if not with The Incomprehensible Itself, and had come away breathless, more alive than ever. Maybe because they felt that no matter how complicated, inscrutable and inexcusable they might be, they could never, ever be as complicated, inscrutable and inexcusable as poor ol’ super-messed-up mj lorenzo. They had thought they were freaks, because that was what everybody had said. And now he said to them, in effect: “You’re not such freaks. Look at me:”

And they absolutely loved and adored their mj lorenzo for this gift of his to them, for he had taken the heat off them. He was the focus of attention now, not they, the crazies of the left. The right was more upset about him than about them, and the pundits understood it as an act of self-sacrifice on his part.

122.  the little title-less piece

In the world of Alberta and the Dominion proper, silent Jack has been transformed most lately at Fort Chipewyan into Mortimer’s friend, Jack Levy. In an effort to cover up the personal defeat of having lost control over Jack and of having had his delicate equilibrium subjected to Jack’s chameleon-like transformations from one fictitious figure into another, and lastly into this one, Mortimer will find it helpful at times, as at the very moment, to speak of himself in the third person, as if he were not Mortimer, but rather someone else, probably Jack, speaking of Mortimer, observing me more objectively from outside, as a person observes his plate of food and devours it at the same time.

In the closeness of their association it should have been expected that the distinction between these two, Jack and Mortimer, would become as blurred as the distinction, say, between body and nourishment, once the nourishment had become mysteriously incorporated; and that Mortimer, though he calls himself by this name rather than by ’Jack’, or ‘Mortimer Jack’, because he feels that a part of himself (I call it ’Jack’) has been lost, will himself be the one who has disappeared and become lost, as disappeared as the food which has gone from the platter, and as lost as the Christ who was taken into the opened grave, and this precisely because Mortimer most definitely IS Jack, and is therefore lost without him.

To grab hold of this confusion let me reiterate that the person writing, though his level of consciousness and the person he considers himself to be, are always shifting, while calling himself ‘Mortimer’, for what that may be worth, in the depersonalized loneliness of the northern winter silence which he imaginatively ascribes to ‘Jack’s absence’, (such a silence and absence as must have enveloped God before his invention of mortals) – this person writing – invents his now widely acclaimed theory of the Professional Friend. And having done so, then, like God-as-Word (In the Beginning) his parallel, in order to fill the space created by his absented other, this writing person conjures up such a friend and names him ‘Jack Levy’, creating a new center of gravity for himself, but losing track, as might have been expected, first, of himself, Mortimer, and then of this professional friend, Jack, and of whether in fact he exists or is only an idea on paper, of whether he does his existing in Fort Chipewyan or in Philadelphia or Fort Smith or Eureka, Montana, of whether he is a doctor looking after Mortimer or he, Mortimer, is the doctor caring for Jack, and of whether at times this caring physician and professional friend is not someone else entirely, an aged Indian named Chipewyan, a blossoming nurse named Dlune, a funky psychiatrist briefly mentioned twice, or Soren Kierkegaard alive and never having died, or is still only a part of himself, that is, of his imagination, which is now neatly imploding like a reversed atomic blast in the western desert.

After all, it can be no great satisfaction to Mortimer, can it? to allow himself to implode and assimilate into Jack only then to ooze out and be eliminated again and again. What does he gain, he asks, more than a knowledge of the strange inner workings of Jack and a brief control of them? But that is precisely what it was decisive that he gain, despite any loss or erasure of face (in the process of scraping past), and what he would now find a way to use despite himself. His brief knowledge of his alter-ego in this so-called ‘second encounter’ awakens him to the encroaching world and himself, and God-as-the-Word has briefly become God-in-the-Flesh. But being then exuded by Jack whether he likes it or not, sometimes he may hasten to step out of him in a number of pieces, stodgily uniting as much of his Mortimer-self as he can gather at a distance; whence the Flesh has changed his mind and is no longer Flesh. He withdraws to Fort Chipewyan and looks back: he sees Jack as an impulsive, unreflecting and therefore mistake-ridden fool, fumbling an affair with the authorities or stumbling up the Mackenzie Valley out of control –  spiritually and geo-politically – and waxing newly ‘spiritual’, finally, in desperation. And from this newfound elevation, Mortimer thinks that he has learned or ‘seen’ something about Jack. The force of Jack’s enigma from this high-up distance has dissolved, he comforts himself. Jack is no longer a pathetic anti-hero to him, but neither is he a source of ready fear. Perhaps Mortimer is suddenly too immune to Jack in these objective periods, such as a large part of the pent-up winter at Fort Chipewyan; perhaps he is already too heady with the pride of small experience in the world, his two whole big Fort Smith weeks with Jack in the flesh; but these ideas he will soon philosopho-theologize too, into further food for the cavernous mental entrails of Jack.

For Jack’s philosophy, this whole time, is that every time Mortimer thinks excessively, and that’s most of the time, Mortimer must be immediately, as it were, put down. Eaten; gotten rid of; tossed in the dark tubular file, the mouth-stomach-and-bowel track. “You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment,” was the way C. S. Lewis said it, as Mortimer recalls. Or as Jerry Rubin cried – i.e.: don’t think about it – “Do it!”

But Mortimer is not about to do anything, as we know. For, as Jack Levy will observe, all claims and indications to the contrary notwithstanding, Mortimer is staying on his ass, thinking about hoping about it, but not doing it; and letting his meager will be overwhelmed at times by outside forces. Why? Because Jack at such times has gotten control of Mortimer like a demon, and has put Mortimer away in shame, outasight, in the tubular dungeon. That’s why Mortimer cannot see or hear or locate Jack. It’s only natural. Mortimer is in the dark tube. And Mortimer resents such a possession, in the end, when he discovers it; that’s why, when he escapes to Fort Chipewyan to discover it, he then, in the same way as a vapor which has just escaped from its own fluid, turns around on this former form and belittles it, and freezes down on it. This is the type of ‘encounter’ or, actually, the type of mutual mistrust, avoidance, and attempt to control, that endures the early part of the winter at Fort Smith and Fort Chipewyan, the so-called ‘second encounter’; and I have described it now, partly in retrospect, and partly in preparation, to set the record straight against those who would say it was otherwise. I was there: it happened to me.

123.  pundits use The Remaking to diagnose the progress of political reconciliation to date

The pundits loved all such Remaking analyses of interaction between Mortimer and Jack, because on any day of the week they could use some of mj lorenzo’s various Remaking paradigms that summed up patterns of interaction between M and J, to establish an estimate of approximately how far that very day’s crazy kind of political stand-off between left and right in the U.S.A. at large, suggested that the two sides might have progressed up until now, if at all, along the course of their country’s remaking.

Another way of saying it was this: you could use The Remaking to chart the entire theoretical course of potential future political stand-off and reconciliation between left and right in the U.S.A.  Some pundits claimed they had done so already. And they explained how. You summed up the phases of interaction between M and J in each chapter of The Remaking, i.e., you outlined each chapter on a separate piece of paper as to the conflict between M and J. Then you put these paper summaries, one after another, in a stack, placing the beginning of The Remaking on top. And voila the total pile of papers in proper sequence would then describe the probable up-and-down course of U.S. political reconciliation between extreme right and extreme left.

This was possible, they claimed, only because mj lorenzo and his two parts, M and J, were an exact mirror of the split in the U.S. American psyche, as had been proven by many things. For instance, by the fact that the 1960s split in the street had provoked a grating and unnerving sympathetic vibration inside mj lorenzo, rattling his inward split grievously. And it was possible for another reason, they said, namely that: mj had made innumerable analyses of his own self during his own reconciliation with self (during his own ‘remaking’) and then he had written the phases of that step-by-step reconciliation into his remaking book. After studying those written self-analyses of mj's, the pundits saw that his own personal split was the same as the split in his country, and also the split in global humanity entire.

124.  pundits propose deliberately fostering political reconciliation by following the outline of The Remaking

Theoretically, therefore, said these extremely politically-minded pundits: if enough people wanted it, and agreed to work toward it, a reconciliation between the polarized political extremes in the U.S. could be fostered by deliberately following a course that mirrored the path Jack and Mortimer had followed as they were reconciling. By simply studying The Remaking, the course could easily be described and anticipated in advance, said the Remaking ‘political pundits’.

125.  pundits use The Remaking to predict future course of reconciliation

The ‘second encounter’ was a good example of The Remaking’s usefulness to political analysts, said the ‘political pundits’. In general the Remaking ‘predicted’, you could say, that if and when the USA’s remaking ever began, if it had not done so already (as well it may have, they thought), it would start off like mj’s had, with Mortimer-energy suppressing Jack-energy for years. And then there would eventually be a Jack burst-out driving everyone crazy, as it had in the late 60s, including the burster-outers themselves. This stage could be dangerous, i.e., life-threatening to someone or something, just as mj’s ‘burst-out’ phase had been extremely dangerous to himself and those around him. And after all of this, Jack-energy would take over and enjoy a ‘summer of freedom’ like Jack's summer of freedom. But eventually this Jackian energy would burn itself out like Jack's had, and ponderous wintry Mortimer-energy would return for a long winter of ‘Freeze-Up’.

Then: just at the outset of this ‘Freeze-Up’, something like mj’s ‘second encounter’ would occur. The two very crazy and bizarre sides would find themselves in a room together expected to talk. But they would get no further than the Mortimer side tossing out pure hype, in broadside after broadside after broadside, all the while pretending to be utterly fraternal, while actually having no real heart for reconciliation whatsoever. And the Jack side would mentally ‘shit-can’ every single instance of hype, treating the Mortimer side as if it were inhumanly hollow, meaning-deprived and full of pure hype; rightfully so; because the Mortimer side was just precisely so, at that point.

And then the rest of the course of reconciliation between left and right would follow the same general lines as the rest of the course of mj lorenzo’s Remaking, as recorded in the remainder of his book after this ‘second encounter’.

126.  The Remaking reveals to the pundits the extensive political usefulness of acting crazy

Similarly then, in the actual Fort Smith seclusion room in November of ‘70, as the pundits now noticed, having drawn such parallels in their minds: every brilliant Mortimer writing production, even if it approached qualifying as the highest cogitation the Western world could produce, maybe, or smacked of same, nevertheless sailed with an easily imagined loud sucking noise straight across the room into the Black Hole called Jack, or, in other words, got no reception at all, and was treated as nought, as nil, hopefully annihilated, by Jack, who, we assume, was hoping this might solve mj’s problem, and the world’s, since it reduced Mortimer’s energy and power to near zero. It was probably what Jack had meant when he had said Mortimer should ‘die’, so that mj could be reborn’.

In other words, said these very politically astute ‘early Remaking pundits’: if everybody – every Jack in the world, in other words – just ignored their own heartless and un-humanly Mortimer’s unbelievable hype, refraining from responding whatsoever to his pure unadulterated cold bullshit, maybe he would just go away, whimper for a while in the corner and die. For this was what had happened in The Remaking. Mortimer had already gone away and was as good as dead, as far as Jack was concerned.

And that realization now made many pundits wonder exactly how psychotic Jack could have been, really. Maybe Jack was just acting crazy so as to drive Mortimer crazy and away from him, they said, just as they, the anti-war demonstrators had done at times in the sixties, hoping to fry the Republican administration’s circuits, until that administration’s massive U.S. military support of just one side in Vietnam’s civil war collapsed, in some form, and stopped irritating the U.S. left like a thorn in the side. And frying circuits had actually worked, they realized, looking back later. For by about ’73 or ’74 practically everyone in the ol’ US of A agreed that U.S. American involvement in Vietnam had been stopped almost totally by one thing and one thing only: by the protestors staging protests so drastically and dramatically for years and years. Even though they had often done little more than ‘just act crazy’.

Not too unlike this circuit-frying trick was the plan Jack had devised in Part I of The Remaking for bombarding Mortimer with mixed messages of love and hate and death, hoping to shake up and rearrange Mortimer’s molecules thereby, and render him more ‘alignable’ to Jack and the rest of the earth’s magnetic field, i.e., hoping to make Mortimer more naturally human and real, in time for spring Break-Up and the planned re-forming of a new, hopefully more viable, real and human mj.

So now in the seclusion room, Jack's loudly ‘shit-canning’ Mortimer’s greatest, most brilliant and ‘caring’ intellectual productions ever, immediately upon production, maybe even before production, one after another after another, might similarly have a shocking and ego-annihilating effect on Mortimer, rendering him more molecule-alignable. He had to be convinced, some day soon, to surrender some of his power in a new mj, and preferably a great deal of his power. And Jack was looking for ways to make Mortimer more tractable and humble, just as the leftists had done with the right in the late 60’s and early 70s. And as mentioned, Mortimer had indeed reacted, just as the almighty and invincible U.S. government had responded in the 60’s and early seventies, thereby amazing everyone in the world, impressing the world as to the incredible PEACEFUL power of constitutionally protected mass peaceful protest in the street.

This kind of psychological warfare waged on Mortimer by Jack, said the very politically astute early Remaking pundits, was roughly in the same ballpark, also, as the semi-absurdist question 60’s leftist leaders had loved to shout at the hundreds of thousands of half-naked radical youth seated on central Washington’s mall grass during anti-war rallies, fully knowing in advance what would be their unanimous shouted answer.

“What would happen,” the leaders would bellow over stadium-size speaker systems, “if they had a war and nobody came?”

And the answer would always be a deafening pre-language animal mob-screech heard in every government office and every news program and paper in the country, a massive hyena pack-animal HOWL! designed to send chills down the warmongering right’s back, especially when they heard the exact question that had provoked it. And that deafening screech was not too unlike the imagined sound of Jack’s shit-can mouth opening, showing that it was ready to annihilate Mortimer’s latest super-brilliant ‘well-intentioned bullshit paper output’.

It was easy to imagine how this kind of circuit-frying could achieve its ends, if you just looked at how the poor Lorenzos had reacted to the Fort Simpson package and its bomb, said these same pundits in the 80s in yet another political journal article. Because the right was made up of tens of millions of nice and sedate religiously respectable and in general therefore somewhat under-humanized people just like the very nice light-haired Lorenzos. And every one of those people was just as equally spooked or startled by human animal craziness, by real and genuine humanity, in other words. How sad. It could not possibly have been Christ’s intention to strip his followers of their humanity. There was nothing in the gospels to even remotely suggest he had hoped for such. He had been quite a wild humen creature himself, the way he had stormed up and down Palestine, always raising a huge ruckus by the things he said and did. He had been anything but ‘nice’ and ‘sedate’ and ‘religiously respectable’. Yet, there they were, the Lorenzos and all like them: somewhat less than fully human followers of Christ. And there were so many of them, too! Their churches had done it to them, even while teaching them that they were superior to the people of the ‘world’ whom they feared, superior to the rest of humanity.

But how could people who were less than fully human possibly be superior to people who remained fully human?

127.  the pundits use The Remaking to imagine potential discoveries in science

Once the Remaking pundits realized (by about the mid-70s) how accurately mj’s word-mandala could measure and anticipate political patterns of reconciliation and conflict, it was bound to be just a matter of time until someone would think of the next logical question. And sure enough, before long a pundit administrative-type asked a large crowd at a workshop in Boston if anyone thought The Remaking might be capable of shedding light on some other ‘realm of knowledge’ besides psychology or politics.

And an American jumped to the floor mike and asked, “What about the effect of the earth’s magnetic field on humans, and vice versa?”

The U.S. Americans who were present knew little about magnetism, they all replied, but Russians in the audience as guests of MIT were struck with wonder at the novel idea that humans might in some way be – or become – magnets or parts of magnets, and took the question home and worked on it.

Three years later the amazing results of the Russian experiments were published in Scientific American, and the pundit world was set to quaking close to 9 on the Richter scale. Who was this mj lorenzo, they wanted to know, more than ever before. How could anyone in the world have created such a written work in such a brilliant way that the paradigm of its psychological principles paralleled the paradigm of the principles of universal magnetism, and also that of the principles of universal politics, with the effect of making these three disparate realms of knowledge look like one single field of knowledge just like snapping your fingers?

What other magic trick was The Remaking capable of performing? Could it parallel every single system of thought in creation? But more to the point, who was mj lorenzo? It was from about the mid- to late seventies, then, that focus began to shift from book alone, to book plus author, and the pundits first began thinking of trying to find mj lorenzo.

It took about a year of this kind of coast-to-coast excitement about the author to provoke someone to respond with a grand and unforgettable interpretation. At a conference held at Northwestern in Chicago a pundit grad student from William and Mary pointed out in a welcoming address to the general assembly that there was more similarity between these two realms of knowledge, magnetism and political science, than at first had been detected, especially if you looked at it from mj lorenzo’s point of view, which always stressed harmony with nature, and reconciliation of self with one’s true human nature. The ‘human magnetism’ findings from Russian research had supported mj’s – specifically Jack’s – instinctual hunch, unfettered as it had been by Western intellect and reason, that out-of-line, out-of-whack human-aberrants like Mortimer, could be jiggled in various ways so that their molecules would line up with those of the world’s Jacks, who, unlike the world’s Mortimers, were by nature more or less already permanently tuned to the earth’s lines of force, since they were by definition far more naturally human. This ‘jiggling’, as Jack had hinted in Part I of The Remaking (via intuited inferences that the pundit world had grasped since day one), would tend to get the world’s Mortimers more aligned with nature, so that they could blend more smoothly and humanly with all of the world’s Jacks to compose new and more smoothly-running mj’s worldwide.

Similarly, said the assembly speaker from William and Mary: the political science findings of The Remaking, for years, just like the psychological findings for individuals, from the very beginning, had always led to practical results along the lines of reconciliation between opposing sides, whether within small groups or large. Thus, in mj’s world, there had been a relationship between magnetism and political science after all, ever since the first pages of The Remaking, as all pundits had known but forgotten for the moment somehow. That kinship between magnetism and political science had been ‘called up out of chaos’ by mj lorenzo himself, said the William and Mary pundit to the Northwestern audience, when he had set out in 1970 to find a mathematical or scientific -- or some kind of -- FORMULA for reconciliation that would save the world, save humanity from self-annihilation, then had found it and published it in the form of The Remaking.

Thus it was no wonder, in other words, that all of the amazing discoveries emanating from Remaking-inspired research and experimentation of all kinds, kept coming up with the same result: more and more reconciliation at every level on planet earth. Because that was what the Remaking had been about since the beginning, universal reconciliation. And mj lorenzo had said right in The Remaking that he had come into the world to keep it from blowing itself up and he would do that by reconciling it with its very own self. So why were all the pundits so flummoxed?

After this conference in 1978, there was more talk than ever of finding the avatar-like author. Yet, strangely, for all the talk, no one did a thing about it; yet. Not even when they interviewed mj's parents.

VI.  Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan:  fear of the friend

128.  Mortimer ‘discovers’ and studies a little-recognized kind of reconciliation already present in nature since the beginning of time and calls it ‘professional friendship’ or ‘professional-friend - ship’

Mortimer, now safely and happily ensconced in Fort Chipewyan and thoroughly isolated from Jack, who was still back in Fort Smith, could begin his unforgettable winter-long heroic intellectual ordeal of PRETENDING to seek rapprochement with his nemesis.

The pundits NEVER COULD FORGET this aspect of crazy Mortimer’s LONELY ‘progress toward unity with Jack’, once they grasped it fully, in all its sick and lonely glory.

The Remaking’s central issue had become one of love, actually, or the lack of it, rather, soon after Mortimer had taken over mj in Fort Smith. Even though he had managed to avoid mentioning the embarrassing fact very much so far.

Jack was less fearful of love than Mortimer. But he was out of commission at the moment. And so the dearth of love loomed large as an issue for Mortimer, as the depressing, dark, lonely winter months crept by. And there were two kinds of people in the world available to be loved,… men… and women. And the first group were a greater problem for Mortimer than the second, it seemed, at this moment in his life anyway. For by constantly talking about ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’, though he claimed these were merely two parts of mj, he looked to be dwelling on the quality of relationship among men, as Rev, to his disgust, had observed already, and as every pundit in the world eventually would take forever granted to be the whole point of the Remaking. Except that the pundits, by ‘relationship among men’, meant relationship in general among humans. Whereas Rev suspected his son of hiding a ‘homo’ relationship of some kind. But Mortimer, nor Jack, neither one had ever yet said the problem was sexual, in the way Rev suspected. Though various pundits would later try to argue that both sides of mj had couched a sexual identity dilemma in hidden language at times, as Rev thought too. But it was otherwise, or so claimed Jack and Mortimer both, and Dr. Lorenzo too, all through his life.

‘MORTIMER JUST WANTED A FRIEND’, was what Dr. Lorenzo would say about it later. This aspect of the winter made the Dr. ‘almost as sad as Fort Resolution’ did, he said. And in later years he mentioned once that: ‘as sad as it was to see Jack about to be replaced by Mortimer at Fort Resolution’, it was ‘sadder yet’ to watch Mortimer abandon Jack and replace him with fantasies and have to ‘run mj lorenzo all alone without any help’. Why ‘sadder still’? Because Jack, even when displaced from power by Mortimer, still had his own very human self to live with. Whereas Mortimer, once in power, having displaced Jack, had nobody, not even his own self for decent company. For he had no human heart. He was not human, but just an empty shell.

And the die-hards pummeled the poor Dr. for ‘breaking a rule’ in saying this. No one should ever ‘feel sorry’ for Mortimer, ever, they shouted at him via email in the year 2000. If Mortimer had been ‘not human’, as the Dr. agreed, then he had no heart for Dr. Lorenzo to sympathize with. Even Mortimer’s writing about ‘Professional-friend - ship’ at this point in the winter, they said, was ‘purely mechanical’ and ‘lacked even the slightest indication of human warmth’.

Whereupon Dr. Lorenzo sent this group of ‘early Remaking pundits’ a fake plastic MOISTR award for their brilliant interpretation, along with a fake gift certificate to a massage parlor, to calm their leader down.  

In any case, Mortimer’s hard work of ‘solving’ the ‘problem’ of how men treated each other in the world consumed a great deal of his energy around this time. First: the problem had to be defined, and of course he loved to beat around the bush trying to define it endlessly, month after freezing grey month.

And this, then, was the famous winter spell during which Mortimer, ironically, purposely spent weeks sitting in bed writing because he was fearing and hiding from FRIENDSHIP, yet while doing so, worked out his belief in the possible benefits of a kind of relationship between two men which he called, again ironically: Professional-friend - ship.

The ironic contradiction between words and behavior was a quintessential example of Mortimer-engendered rightist-type hypocrisy, as the leftist political pundits observed in news weeklies and political journals with glee, the kind of thing which the left always had loved to catch the right napping at, so that they could call a spade a spade and embarrass the heck out of the hypocritical right in the media. The parallel ended there, however, for Mortimer had no critical opposition whatever in Fort Chipewyan. Jack was far removed and mute to boot, still; presumably.

In this mini-treatise, which filled several carefully thought out pages in the end, Mortimer revealed he had ’discovered’ a ‘law of nature’ that defined the rules for how Mortimer and Jack, and men all over the world since time immemorial, must have been using conflict, struggle and entanglement with other men, day in and day out throughout their lives, to obtain a little human love and relationship.

Naturally there was no mention of women in these paragraphs, and naturally all the same accusations about mj’s likely sexuality arose again, as had before, from Rev and certain pundits, accusations which mj lorenzo would answer with denials over the rest of his life, from time to time.

One of Mortimer’s beginning points was that the relationship between ‘Mortimer’ and ‘Jack’ was a prototype for relationships of the kind mj called ‘professional-friend - ship’. That is: men of two quite different character types, or opposite positions in society, would form a friendship or friendly association, one usually paying the other in some form to keep him around, just as a person might pay any professional to do a professional job. And then the two would fall, so often, right into the roles already demonstrated in The Remaking by the polar opposites of Mortimer and Jack, and into, as well, all of the other pertinent laws and rules governing such a relationship, the rules that derived from that basic assumption, as Mortimer would show in this treatise.

Some pundits observed, correctly, that in these pages mj lorenzo had reminded the world of a common occurrence few artistic or intellectual minds had ever made a point of discussing before: that the universal common-sense consensus that ‘opposites attract’ in love, also applied to friendship between men, and that virtually every man in the world loved the challenge and adventure of a good lively friendship with his social-level opposite, or character-type-opposite, and had no qualms whatever about paying – or receiving – money or ‘bennies’ (benefits of an 'in-kind' nature) to get, preserve and perpetuate that type of friendship.

129.  ‘cold thinking squared’ Mortimer’s style of thinking

In these paragraphs Mortimer also demonstrated a peculiar characteristic of his which had lasted his whole life up until now. While presenting a discovery about himself or his life, he simultaneously analyzed every possible personal angle he could remember which had ever affected or resulted from that discovery. In other words, while describing his past act of having discovered something, such as this ‘formula’ for professional-friend - ship, he simultaneously analyzed his past Mortimer-self to the nth degree, while he had been in the process of that act of discovery. The present Mortimer in the act of writing would analyze the past Mortimer as he had been in the act of discovering. With the result that the two Mortimers, past and present, at times almost sounded to be two different people. While the experience of anyone reading such stuff might feel like ‘cold thinking raised to the power of two’, or ‘cold thinking squared’, as the pundits labeled the strange phenomenon.

And it felt all the more ‘cold’ and lonely since Mortimer shied away from first person pronouns and talked about himself usually in third person. And more especially so, when you factored in the other basic condition, that simultaneously, while this cold, lonely, complicated third-person self-analysis was occurring, Mortimer was still, the whole time, discussing the original serious and complicated subject of ‘Professional-friend -ship’, just as if it were any normal Tuesday in the year. And all of it left the reader to deal with not just two, but three Mortimers simultaneously, two present and one past, PLUS the complex subject under discussion: professional friendship.

It was just another example of how ‘out there’ intellect could get, said some pundits, how un-natural and un-human, in other words. Which is not to say that the results were totally useless, either, even after so much grey-matter high jinks.

And, in keeping with such coldness, the first usefulness of the Professionalfriend - ship Treatise, said the ‘friend - ship pundits’, was this: that every single word in every single line of the treatise screamed LONELINESS. This was its greatest value to humanity: to reveal and hopefully teach very loudly how LONELY the world’s Mortimers were.

For which comment, again, the ‘early Remaking pundits’ scolded these renegades far more severely, this time, of course, than they had scolded Dr. Lorenzo when he had said something similarly sympathetic toward Mortimer.

130.  ‘lonely’ Mortimer’s lengthy but not necessarily ‘killer-boring’ treatise on ‘professional-friend - ship’ or ‘professional friendship’

The logical and maybe even mathematical necessity of buying a friendship

Here is a summary of the ‘logic’ by which Mortimer derives his formula for Professionalfriend - ship. He speaks of his discovery as a ‘formula’ in order to be able to believe it natural and necessary  in general, like Newton’s laws, and thereby to camouflage his deeply felt need of it. That is, if it is ‘necessary’, it is so at the moment for him; for he is lonely; and the need is the point. And he would prefer to see himself as not the first lonely man in history, and to think nature must have invented this ‘formula’ as a solution to human loneliness in general, rather than have to think he had invented it just for his own loneliness in particular.

For let me be the first to admit that, while the ‘second encounter’ is, granted, one of ‘mutual mistrust, avoidance, and attempt to control’, the converse is likewise true, simultaneously; and let me be the first to admit, as well, that, in the world of Mortimer-and-Jack, it is passing possible that while hating and fearing and mistrusting each other as they do, they can also love and respect, like friends; and as I said, Mortimer is the first, maybe too fast, and Jack is the last, to admit it.

Jack is the last, not because he is the less feeling of the two, for he is not; but because he is the more revealing of his true feeling, and therefore is quicker to admit HATE first (and love second); and also because Mortimer, by definition no more than a society-created mask, a lifeless, dehumanized, dishonest mask, is so spineless therefore, he is reluctant to admit that he could ever harbor a feeling less admirable than LOVE, especially toward anyone so close to himself, so much like a son or younger brother, as Jack is. His mathematical formulation is just a patent cover-up therefore; a self-delusion; and his avowed ‘friendship’ must become a hate-concealing death-trap into which he later stumbles his very own self. (Just like his parallel, God-as-Christ; who loved, not hated, as we may recall, the hateful world, and walked right into the trap well aware of the situation, as he claimed.)

The usefulness of buying a friendship

Mortimer has also deluded himself that he is ‘in the world’ (“of Alberta,” etc.). Yet in fact he is safely isolated from that world (from Fort Smith, how many miles away, and certainly unattainable by anyone spending his days sitting in bed writing), so finds it all the more easy to speak of love with a clear head, since he is not caught up, bewitched and bewildered, in the throes of relationship, as long as he remains loveless at Fort Chipewyan. And so, having deluded himself successfully in all these ways, he is free from the discombobulating influences of outside emotional energy. He can think clearly and stare certain non-threatening kinds of truth in the face finally. He looks: and in no time he sees something interesting that wants looking at more deeply: he tells himself that he could argue on behalf of the “usefulness that might be discovered in owning a friend who was paid to be a friend and to offer friendship on a professional basis.” A rapid idea-roll gets going. He proceeds to suggest that if he could ‘find’ Jack in particular, he would suggest to him this proposition, that Jack become his ‘professional friend’.

The justifying excuse for buying a friendship

Then he justifies such friend-buying by recalling examples from history and literature, in all eons, of such complementary duos, almost always economically contrived, at least partly, “which must have had an untold effect on the human condition in producing harmony from conflict.” Many a king has had his very necessary private jester or pundit, claims Mortimer, and paid him in room and board. Hamlet’s employed sidekick was Horatio. King John II’s was Thomas a-Beckett; the Connecticut Yankee bounced off the King; and King Arthur depended on Lancelot. Tom Sawyer had Huck Finn and Huck used Jim, and poor Jim had to use his hated father. The form of reward for being so used varied. And in some cases, as in that of the Judaeo-Christian man employed by the Judaeo-Christian God, as such a friend, the reward was not material, but spiritual, i.e., non-material, i.e., the very spiritually enriching privilege itself of association.

In order to justify further the need he feels for affection between men, and for contriving to buy it, Mortimer resorts to the usual sources for all such justifying schemes: religion, mathematics, psychology, and Shakespeare. He finds it easy to imagine that God and Christ not only loved each other but also underwent psychic strife. So must have Christ and Simon Peter, and Peter and his brother, Andrew. A hierarchy of conflict thus extended itself earthward from heaven, down through the universe. And where conflict did not otherwise exist it was eventually necessitated by the practice of what psychology has called ‘projection’.

Projection as part of Professional-friend - ship

The all too common occurrence of projection, as defined by psychology, Mortimer explains, is the tendency to see in another, or imagine that one sees, a thing which actually exists in oneself, more correctly, but which one can not see in oneself. The thing ‘seen’ or ‘imagined’ in the other is usually a defect of one’s own, but can sometimes be an attractive asset too.

For example: whether or not a jester is in actual fact exactly as the king imagines him, and vice versa, makes little difference; when that is the way that he is imagined. Since it is on the grounds of the king’s belief, i.e., his imagination, that any king will decide who or what his jester is, and since the king’s imagination will inevitably feed his belief. And the king is in charge, of course. So: end of discussion.

How does one’s ‘imagination’ affect the friendship?

It is logical, even mathematical, to assume that one’s imagination about the other, and its result in the form of love, or fear, must peak at that point where knowledge-from-experience of the other, is most lacking. And that: in the mathematical formula, there has to be, as a result, an inverse proportion in effect between knowledge-from-experience, and imagination-as-love-and-fear (i.e., imagination-as-attraction-repulsion). Or in plainer talk: the more one knows, from real experience, about the man whose friendship one buys, the less one has to imagine about him, and the less one suffers an unrealistic love or fear.

The hierarchical schema within which friendship is bought and sold

One essential point about the alleged hierarchy of friendships as I see it (and which Mortimer has so far forgotten to state) is that in the case of each pair the one “on top”, i.e. the king-like one doing the employing, necessarily spends the major part of his time playing the role described here and elsewhere as Mortimer’s. While the one “on bottom,” employed to be a friend, has to serve as his knave or Jack. And since there is a hierarchy, a chain of many and simultaneous such relationships, from God through man to Devil, then any individual man, depending on whom he must face in the chain at any given moment, may play first one and then the other of the two fundamentally opposite roles, king and knave, even on the same day of the week. And therefore, the same man in time will likely gain experience as king and jack both: thereby revealing and fostering and reinforcing a duality that was already present in all men by nature anyway.

Variations on this theme are infinite and could provide the subject of another winter’s research, as could also the question of how such a duality, taken in stride by many, becomes in the case of Mortimer Jack Lorenzo a problem, i.e., something requiring study. In other words, why has friendship not just flowed for mj lorenzo naturally, as in the rest of the human world?

The mathematics of friend-buying

Following, below, then, is Mortimer’s last and greatest fling into the simplistic; his last set of formulas; his derivation of a mathematical formula for such a relationship, i.e. for undergoing –which in truth is a formula for protecting himself from – such a relationship. For, while he speaks openly only of his love and Jack’s hate, he discloses his latent hate and fear of the unknown Jack by this formula. Since all formulas are always meant to protect against, and contain by controlling, the anxieties of life; death; and friendship; E=mc² being an absolutely perfect example of this psychological truth.

Discussion

At present it is perhaps preferable for Mortimer to solve this problem with his formula, and not worry where the problem came from. But alas, poor Mortimer: he is already disgusted with this formula since he has just realized that “love” in this or any equation does not decrease as knowledge-from-experience increases; it is transformed. And has he failed to note that like all of the formulas of the Western world, this one can solve nothing, but can only help define and delimit, and at best serve to reduce anxiety in face of, a certain group of possible relationships, the detailed and frightening actualities of which still remain to be experienced, up front and personal?

The usefulness in paying to have a friend, nevertheless, will be seen to necessarily derive for Mortimer in the sad situations where finding a friend by usual means is for any reason no longer feasible, that is, when true friends are absent and when the mind, under the strain of loneliness, creates its own companions by an antiquated “logic.” And this usefulness will be complicated by the fact that the companions so created, being not bound by the natural laws that bind real people to the real earth and real friendship, will be able to expand in the imagination just as far as human imagination-as-love-and-fear is able to go.

It has always been common for people with money to “buy” friends, as others resort to buying books, televisions, radios, and psychiatrists. In Hamlet’s case Horatio was all he could find; so Horatio became, in the way of psychiatrists and characters in plays, and in the way that Jack Levy becomes for Mortimer, a creature of imaginary invention, Hamlet’s. Horatio was Hamlet’s Jack, as Jack has always been Mortimer’s Jack. Yet this king, Hamlet, preferred to have his friend, Horatio, always nearby also to talk to. For had his friend been absent or silent, and therefore purely imaginary, Hamlet would have missed a certain way of dealing with himself that he had long since found could not be replaced,

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,

And could of men distinguish, her election

Hath seal’d thee for herself.¹

He would also have missed a certain imagined black-white balance and contrast, a ballast for his ballooning ego, an earthly man with his feet on the ground,

For thou hast been

As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

A man, that fortune’s buffets and rewards

Has ta’en with equal thanks: and bless’d are those,

Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,

That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please.²

He would have missed a certain natural, unimpassioned way of dealing with the world, of which he was not capable alone and by himself, or at least so he thinks:

Give me that man

That is not passion’s slave…³

and a certain tense warmth deriving from simultaneous attraction and repulsion

…and I will wear him

In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee.  –Something too much of this.—

There is a play tonight…⁴

What Mortimer does not at first find in himself (and always denies being), in other words, he can too quickly see in another. If he had wanted to avoid his undiscovered self, his Jungian ‘shadow’, he should have tried to avoid Jack entirely, avoid any honest intimacy, any confession or attempt at making peace, something in the manner of an entrenched Republican Nixon Administration vis-à-vis a generation of marching street protestors; but we can sadly guess what would have been the outcome then, probably a heightening of tension and a new kind of Crack-Up. And fortunately, instead of avoiding him, Mortimer finds a substitute for Jack in Jack Levy.

Mortimer, like Hamlet, in his ineptness due to inexperience in dealing with Jack’s various forms of passion, must become “passion’s slave” and Jack’s instrument. In his passionate analysis of Horatio, Hamlet too quickly conceives of this friend as at once his opposite (as not passion’s slave) and (by way of him) his goal (as harmony produced from resolving inner conflict), a man of blood and judgment. But in it all he sees his would-be goal more neatly than he sees himself; and he sees himself (or himself in Horatio, only without considering that it is himself, and quite believing it to be Horatio) more clearly, it is likely, than he sees the actual Horatio; who is at best a bloodless prop and foil for tragi-heroic Hamlet, even as devised by Hamlet’s author, Shakespeare.

131.  Mortimer raises the art of self-delusion to dizzyingly insurmountable heights

Mortimer’s treatise on professional-friend - ship revealed, said the psych pundits, that he was aware that when he had hitched his star to Jack’s by attempting to psychotherapize him in Fort Smith, all the resulting love and fear he had felt toward his patient had fed his imagination, and so he had invented things, leading to even more love and more fear, and so on in a vicious cycle, all of it eventually doing him in, and leaving him no choice but to ‘get out of Dodge’. And the treatise showed too, they added, that Mortimer was aware that the only ‘cure’ for such out-of-control imagination, would be nitty-gritty round-the-clock knowledge of Jack.

The ‘cure’ was available. Jack was waiting for him in Fort Smith, or somewhere. But Mortimer was in no way ready for such closeness with his nemesis and continued to give wide berth. Most of the winter he remained in Fort Chipewyan. And to compensate for implied defeat, and to hopefully feel better about himself, since it was not ethical to abandon a patient, especially when the patient was your own self: he tried to convince himself that he was still being a good boy and really trying to meet with Jack all winter, as he should have been doing if he really had been the good-boy-Mortimer his Christian parents had raised him to be.

Pundits asked later, in fact, where exactly the idea had come from that Mortimer should apply his mental capacity to all this convolutedly confabulated self-con. Mortimer could have had no idea at the time how to answer such a question, he was so incredibly swamped in complex self-delusion. But probably the wall-handwriting pundits had gotten it right when they had said that Mortimer was trying to forget that Jung’s Tertium non datur had revealed he was doomed and his days were numbered. Soon he would have to give up control of mj to Jack, and he did not trust the fellow to cater much to his stupid spoiled Mortimer whims, his Mortimer arrogance, for example, or his Mortimer selfishness. Mortimer did not trust Jack to indulge all his crazy Mortimer games that protected him from the ups and downs of real, normal everyday human life in the real world as real people like everyday Mexicans and Eskimos lived it, and trusted him least of all to indulge the current game he was playing, the crazy Mortimer game of self-delusion. For: and therefore: to forget his impending date with DOOM and the fear it caused, Mortimer kept his mind busy with PHROOM.

The political pundits were incredulous in the mid-90s when they stumbled upon this seemingly endless labyrinth of Mortimer’s self-delusion, his existence in Ft. Chipewyan based on ‘phroom’, the word they invented for it. They loved their discovery. They could not believe anybody in the history of the human condition ever could have thought up such a thing, not even mj lorenzo. To their mind it illustrated that the ‘right’ could get duplicitous to the nth degree – or, let’s say, to the degree God or the Devil himself might have been capable of – and still manage to cover it up. They had never realized, they said, just how ingeniously devious the enemy, the ‘right’, could get.

And they were not just tootin’ their hero mj’s horn. For, the fact that Mortimer’s incredibly massive deception had existed and succeeded was proven by the fact that the pundits had studied the Remaking up and down, inside and out for two and a half decades, without ever picking up on what Mortimer had been doing, really, at this point in the winter. He actually had managed to find a way to successfully delude himself and everyone else too, into the conviction that he was really ‘meeting’, or at least ‘attempting’ to ‘meet’, with Jack. He did this via white-collar tricks of intellect, naturally. But Alice! had Machiavelli, the master of political scheming, ever shown such twisted, perverted bat-braininess?

Remaking political pundits internationally from Rio to the Ryukyus partied for months in 1996 celebrating this discovery of theirs, found RIGHT IN THE REMAKING once again.

Mortimer’s construction of a multi-layered labyrinthine apparatus guaranteeing self-delusion had begun when he had turned Jack into a conceptual category placed at the top of lists of things or people that belonged to the category of ‘Jack’, as opposed to ‘Mortimer’. These were lists just like all the other lists in The Remaking. The name/title ‘Mortimer’ he would place at the top of the right-hand column of attributes, and ‘Jack’ at the top of the column of attributes on the left-hand side of the page. And the ‘Jack’ category, though it was labeled ‘Jack’ at the top of the list, really meant ‘Jack-types’, i.e., people who resembled Jack or had most of his qualities; so it included not just Jack but also: Jack Levy, a fictitious paper creation; Dlune, when she came along; her grandfather, Chipewyan; and others. And Mortimer told himself that ‘Jack’ had now assumed these other forms, or was so completely and perfectly represented by these other forms that in effect – or more correctly yet, maybe, in actual reality – he, Mortimer, was still ‘meeting with Jack’.

Mortimer had actually broadened the definition of the word, the designator ‘Jack’, in other words. But he had forgotten to examine his trick of self-deception and had gotten away with it, of course, because no one had been there to stop him. And then, on top of it all – and maybe, said the pundits, so as to not fail to delude himself completely and utterly into believing he was really meeting or attempting to meet with Jack (for what reason he could not even remember any more, he was so twisted in the reins of self-delusion by this time) – he added one last labyrinthine twist of self-deception, the one which would constitute the real nail in the coffin, hopefully, of Truth (for the name of the entity lying in the coffin he was trying to close forever had to be ‘Truth’, obviously). He gave the non-meeting with Jack, or he gave the lie, you could say, a name; i.e., he formalized and institutionalized the non-meeting non-event with a name; and then he aggrandized it further by putting that name in many very noticeable places in a book. And he called the seven sections of Part II of that book ‘Seven Attempts AT A MEETING’, when in truth he never made even the slightest attempt even once the entire winter to meet with Jack after he had left Fort Smith; but rather: he went out of his way to avoid making any such attempt; he kept avoiding meeting at any cost, all winter long. Mortimer was ‘lying on his ass’, as he himself admitted, all winter in Fort Chipewyan, doing other things, because meeting with Jack was honestly – and truly – the very last thing in this world that he ever wanted. If he could have afforded a gated community on his island at Fort Chipewyan, he would have put up a wall with security booth and guards and German shepherds and maybe even Nazi storm troopers at the entrance: all in an effort to keep out – what? – nothing but LIFE ITSELF, which in his case meant ‘Jack’.

The trick was so sharp it was decidedly beyond even classic Mortimer brainspun-duplicity M.O. It was so convoluted and unimaginable that only the very brightest Jack in the world could have noticed such a needle in the shit-stack of Mortimer’s bullshit-perfused mind. And that particular Jack, unfortunately, was out of commission. The sick trick cried out for the loving line, from a loving family member, “Mortimer, you are too smart for your own good!” But that family member was out of commission too, the very same one. And Mortimer, Latin American dictator-type that he was, and left for the moment with total run of the hacienda, was committing truth-murder and dehumanizing himself by so doing, i.e., stripping himself of whatever last tiny trace of humanity he might have had left still, maybe, if he had ever had any at all. He killed truth and any chance at realizing his own humanity in one final twist of the brain, said the political pundits, all out of fear of giving up control.