VII.  Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan:  fear of higher power

132.  yea though it drive the world crazy (and mayhap even BECAUSE it do) bi-bodihood is still Mortimer’s most favorite conundrum

And the massive labyrinth of self-delusion and self-induced forgetting did not, by any means, stop with all the tricks Mortimer had found so far, even though truth was already in a well-nailed coffin in the ground. Apparently he feared someone could or would unbury truth or had done so already.

Mortimer might have stopped writing the ‘first attempt’ before he did, had the ‘second encounter’ (i.e., the two weeks during which the two halves of mj were meeting privately in a seclusion room in Fort Smith) not opened the lid on a pandora’s box of conundrums. The ‘second encounter’ was a field day for anyone of pure intellect like Mortimer. It had to be the most mind-blowing moment in the course of The Remaking. And it remained the biggest chapter of endless speculation forever after, to every single person who ever became affected by The Remaking in any way, starting right with Mortimer Lorenzo himself.

The ‘second encounter’ was the ‘most electrifying’ of mj’s three ‘encounters’, said the pundits, the ‘very most mesmerizing’ because: (1) mj’s two opposite poles could be studied with the naked eye simultaneously, no pun intended; (2) the moment was tensely dramatic, because as the opposite poles drew closer and closer in Fort Smith, the force of the field of magnetic energy between them multiplied exponentially, drawing them in to each other more strongly and violently; and yet (3) each one resisted the pull, probably each in different and complicated ways; and meanwhile, throughout it all (4) one of mj’s two opposite poles was intact enough to reflect on what was happening, and report on it endlessly during and after, namely: Mortimer.

Mortimer knew this was his job. It was a task which, as an intellectual and writer, he adored. And the opportunities for reporting and interpreting seemed endless to him that early winter. His Mortimer-intellect had craved such an opportunity for years, to sink the eye teeth of his incisive mind into one huge monster of a human problem and chew and chew right down to the DNA of that monster-problem, ‘mj lorenzo’, until he saw and isolated the very protons and electrons causing the disaster. There were moments at Fort Chipewyan when Mortimer thought he had died and gone to heaven – a wintry person’s kind of heaven, of course – simply because life had suddenly offered him so many wonderful conundrums for endless chewing. And, better yet, all the while, his studious chewing on all of this Phroom helped him forget his primary problem, his upcoming appointment with DOOM: with Jack. In the flesh.

So naturally, whenever other problems got too easily solvable he could always return to his favorite conundrum of all, as mentioned, the impossible ‘bi-bodihood’, and chew endlessly on it. The breakdown of the original single mj into two mj’s at once, so to speak, i.e., into the pale-faced, monstrously intellectual Mortimer, now in Fort Chipewyan, and the swarthy human-animal Jack in Fort Smith, each one in his own apparent body, baffled and stymied Mortimer more than anything in his strange remaking, just as it did everyone else. He suspected he was the mad scientist who had given birth to such a bi-Frankenstein, but had no proof. For he could not remember how it had happened, and could not find a way to get around it, now that it had happened. So he filled pages and pages and pages with intellectual gymnastics that produced long lists of dichotomies and opposing personality traits, Mortimer on the right side of the page, Jack on the left, with all their associated and opposite traits listed below their names. And he did all of this in an effort, first, (1) to forget his appointment with DOOM; and secondly, (2) to wrestle with the shameful fact that someone had maimed mj lorenzo, i.e., made a side show freak of him, by seeing him in this far-fetched and unrealistic way, as having two distinct bodies, each with a different personality. And lastly (3) to explore the extent of his possible psychotic-ness, a craziness implied by his having participated in the making of such a monster; for it disturbed even him, Mortimer.

Some psychologist- and psychiatrist-pundits, indeed, would eventually try to explain this ‘bi-bodihood’ as nothing but sheer senseless psychosis at its craziest. Whereas other pundits saw it as not necessarily wacko, and maybe even human, e.g., maybe just ‘paranormal’. Anthropology pundits, for example, wondered if mj lorenzo simply had read too many of Petitot’s tales too many times, or heard too many of Chiepwyan’s local Indian myths, or both, until the stories’ super-abundance of paranormal had wiggled into his nervous system and lodged there, affecting the way he thought and wrote about himself and Jack.

No, said others, Chipewyan, Mortimer’s aged mentor all winter on the island in Lake Athabasca, had just made up tales of ‘two brothers’ to help his already bi-bodied protégé feel more normal in the world and calm him down, because Mortimer had been so rattled by his own bipolarity ever since the day he had arrived at Chipewyan’s cabin.

But in fact, said myth pundits, tons of stories about two brothers, or twin brothers, invariably with opposing character traits, had been known to local tribes since time immemorial, and any local would have told such stories all winter long, regardless of their audience. That was what the long black northern winters were all about: telling ancient legends repeatedly until no one could forget them.

In any case, among the pundits there was no agreement for years on how to understand the notion that their beloved mj could have at one time evolved or devolved into two bodies at once, each with a personality opposite the other's. Everyone had heard of split personalities, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But Robert Louis Stevenson, who had created that duality and written that book, had never been so arrogant or lunatic as to claim that those two fictional heroes were in two separate bodies simultaneously. They came out of the same body at different times, as any typical ‘split personality’ would do, and as mj’s two opposite sides had done at the beginning of his trip.

In the end, Mortimer suspected that no one but C. G. Jung might have known how to look at such a psychic Gordian knot and unravel it. And Jung was dead since the early sixties. But he had left his writings, and also his disciples, each one full of ideas which Jung had inspired in them, and they too had written books. And some of these books Mortimer studied endlessly throughout the long winter, trying, or claiming to try, at least, to get some handle on his crazy ‘bi-bodihood’.

133.  Mortimer attempts to comprehend his bi-bodihood via the concept of the Trinity only to feel uncomfortable as God-as-Word

At times Mortimer felt he was coming close to a solution in the Trinity, he wrote his parents (crazily, as they naturally thought), for the Trinity was one place in the universe where one single living entity could be two Persons at once, or even three, and be socially acceptable. In some countries at least. But he was not ready to apply it to himself yet, of course. Or so he thought, at that point when the extreme notion of applying the concept of the Trinity to himself first struck him.

But then one day while exploring Jung, Sartre and others who had made themselves famous by studying uncomfortably split and polarized psychic duality, Mortimer began to study the Bible too. And he tried again and again to wrap his already super-stretched brain around the strange concept of the Trinity. This explained why he resorted to trying to understand his relationship with Jack so often by likening it to Christ’s relationship with ‘the World’, i.e., by likening it to the polar difference between God-as-fleshly-Christ and God-as-Logos, the latter meaning to Mortimer: God-as-‘Word’ or God-as-Thought, i.e., God as the knower of the logic of creation, even before creation was created. He resorted to these neo-Platonic theological constructs in the way of simile and metaphor exclusively, at first. But he liked the results too well, unfortunately, and kept up the pun, working it to death. And soon he feared he was erring in the direction of seeming to suggest that he himself might be Deity, or something in that dangerous ballpark; and such he had never meant to do, of course.

Later in life Dr. Lorenzo would say that grasping the mind-blowing concept of bi-bodihood was like trying to believe that Castaneda’s shaman character, ‘don Genaro’, could really, literally, have leapt from canyon floor to mid-canyon wall, a height of 20 meters perhaps, like a flying karate woman in a movie out of Hong Kong. There were some things the rational and scientific mind, hyper-developed to the nth extreme by ‘the Western world’ over the course of several centuries, had lost the ability to grasp, he was convinced. Mainly because other capabilities of the mind had therefore been sidelined, ignored and left underdeveloped by that ‘Western’ civilization. That was why, for most U.S. Americans, Castaneda’s stories had really pushed the limits of comprehensibility and believability, he said, losing their author much-deserved audience, sadly. And Mortimer had never intended to be part of that party which thought humans could be superhuman. But he was stuck with what he had, unfortunately.

Try as he would, Mortimer could not put his broken Humpty Dumpty eggshell and all its spilled raw insides, his broken raw egg of Mortimer-and-Jack-in-two-bodies, back together, for a long time, either at Fort Smith or at Fort Chipewyan. Somehow, after the egg had fallen off the Humpty-Dumpty wall and broken and spilled everywhere on the mad-scientist lab floor of Mortimer’s mind, the yolk had transformed. Maybe it had multiplied into two yolks and could not fit back into the shell for that reason. Who knew?

Mortimer, meanwhile, had to admit he was not at all certain where he had gotten his own Fort Chipewyan body from, or if he even had a body in all provable actuality. And so the world was stuck with the whole darn meshuga goop it got.

Yet and still, said the wisest World-History-Watchers among the Remaking pundits: such a disaster had been inevitable, virtually. This particular disaster of mj lorenzo’s was precisely the mother of all monsters that had been ‘waiting to happen’ in the Western world eventually, as they moaned ominously. It could have been anticipated as long ago as when some idiot had started building Western civilization, 2000 years ago, back when somebody thought the thought that the foundation of a new and ‘higher’ civilization should consist of Platonic Ideas, not human flesh and blood.

The whole sticky wicket fit with Dr. Lorenzo’s hunch while young, which grew over a lifetime into a rationally defended conviction, that there were vast realms of knowledge the Western mind had lost the ability to grasp. No matter how much his generation read of Castaneda, for instance, said the Dr., even after years of reading Castaneda they still could not make the meaning of his A Separate Reality stay put in their brain’s limbic system for more than a few minutes, before all that incredible insight blew away like dust in the wind. You could not ‘think like a shaman’, he believed, if you ‘thought like a Western person’; or you might be able to do so for a few minutes, if you were as ‘crazy’ as he, mj lorenzo, was himself, at times. But for most Westerners, to become ‘that crazy’ would probably be ‘the end of them’.

Accordingly, one of the doctor’s favorite points in later life was just this: that if any typical citizen of the contemporary Western world had headed out on a trip to the Arctic as mj lorenzo had, looking for a universal cure to universal hyperpolarization, he would never have come back. And in fact, some psycho-pundits would come to feel that mj lorenzo, at this point in his trip, must have been toying with the option actually, of going off the edge of the earth mentally and not coming back. He appeared to have been close to letting it happen despite himself, at this point in his very special year in the north, his year dedicated to the quest for ultimate truth – regardless of personal consequences, as it seemed, at times.

134.  Mortimer tries to solve the problem of his bi-bodihood by toying with conceptual frameworks resembling those theology systems used traditionally to comprehend the Christian mass: only to fear being transubstantiated (physically eaten alive)

In any case, try as he might to explain how one person could be two, or two one, Mortimer could not escape resorting to the extreme conceptual language and symbols of the Christian religion which had defined and pervaded his upbringing. He especially liked the analogy of Christ and Man, i.e., the idea of God and man becoming one substance in the mass; when normally God and man were thought of as two, and separate. This was why he wrote that Mortimer, in the form of his words, was entering Jack through Jack’s mouth then oozing out slowly through Jack’s pores; and wrote, too, of the chick eating its own eggshell.

He ended up outdoing these outrageous images, though. Because on one of his charts of polar-opposite ‘Jacks’ and ‘Mortimers’ that he carried in his funny head, and sometimes on paper, there was one particular ‘logical universal dichotomy’ that grabbed his attention because it placed ‘Christ’ in the same column with him, Mortimer; while it placed ‘man’ (whom Christ came ‘down’ to earth to ‘save’) in the same column as Jack; and since Mortimer considered his mandalic lists to represent a true mandalic reflection of the polarized balance of nature, he was forced to find himself, in the end, stuck with the even more ridiculous and non-rational impression that: just as ‘man’ had to eat ‘Christ’ in the form of bread and wine in the mass, so then Jack, to heal, had to eat not just Mortimer’s words, but Mortimer himself.

Eating Mortimer ‘would have gotten rid of the extra body’, as the pundits said, cruelly by now and laughing at their poor, tortured Mortimer. ‘Had Mortimer allowed it’, they added, knowing he never would have. Because Mortimer was hiding at Fort Chipewyan, as far from Jack as possible.

But the idea did not make Rev laugh. For he heard hidden homoerotic allusions in ‘eat Mortimer’, even though he had never heard the same in any of the various translations from Greek to English, of Jesus’ words to his disciples in the Gospel of John, which his son had already quoted, even as suggestive as those words sounded:

…he who eats me will live because of me.¹

VIII.  Dr. Lorenzo tries to defend the ‘first attempt’ and fails

135.  Sammy Martinez, the pundits’ pundit and commentators’ commentator discovers ‘the high schoolers’

Outrageous concepts and language were not even the biggest problem for readers of the ‘first attempt’ necessarily, however. Intellectual density of material, more than anything, threatened to sink mj’s Remaking at this point (if it had not sunk it already), like that stone canoe of the Chipewyan tribe’s afterlife, right down to the bottom of Lake Athabasca, for ever and ever. And the intellectual density was especially hard for high school students, a select and buddingly intellectual few of whom would get hold of The Remaking somehow, about fifteen or twenty years after Rev first published it.

The Remaking, even after its clarifying revisions were published, kept spreading in its original crazy inchoate version too, secretly almost, as a kind of cult work. The fact intrigued Sammy Martinez when it came to his attention in the early eighties, and he eventually traced how it had come about. Rev’s original ‘71 version, he learned, had survived and been circulated mainly on Penn’s campus in Philadelphia, and had spread to other east coast and Midwest campuses long before the mid-seventies, and to the west coast and Europe soon after that.

Meanwhile, Sammy’s own Xeroxed healing workshop publication from Abiquiu, a copy of the original Remaking which he had begun copying and handing out in the late 70s to participants of his month-long healing workshops (offered during his New Mexico summer vacations from college at Penn), so he could study it with them as a joint healing project, had been spread to high school English and Psychology clubs in the west. By the mid- to late eighties it had reached such clubs up and down the Rocky Mountain west, from the Mexican border to the Northwest Territories, then spread east and west toward the coasts, until a high school club in Georgia was reading it after school, and another in the Yakima area of Washington state.

Mr. Martinez learned that in after-school clubs the question asked by high school students most frequently and most insistently, and asked especially once they had become overwhelmed by the intra-psychic complexity of the work – an approach which mj had favored, of course, over external drama –  was: why – when Jack had discovered in the very first chapter, i.e, in the Inuvik Envelope, that realignment of Mortimer’s molecules was possible, and that they could be made to jive with the magnetic field of Jack and the rest of the planet, and then in the second chapter already, the Fort Good Hope Envelope, had figured out more or less how to make that happen, i.e., by some act of violence or physical roughness – why, then, but why did poor high school students have to be subjected to so many more months and chapters of perturbation in a teapot, i.e., why did it have to take Jack, or Mortimer, or anybody, so many boring winter months to do something about getting those two guys lined up so they could be put back together as one? Why, in other words, did Jack not just ‘beat the shit out of Mortimer’ in Fort Smith, and get the whole mess over with, like you would do if some jerk nerd was a pest walking home after school, so they could all start reading Huck Finn before the high school year was over?

What they really meant by the question, said teacher-sponsors of the clubs, was that they resented Mortimer’s weighing the story down, wraith-like as the ‘story’ was to start with, by including in the flimsy body of that ghost of a story such ponderous intellectual material, especially the endless analysis encountered in the ‘first attempt’. And especially when the rest of the winter’s writing, that which they knew would soon follow all this intellectual density, would be much more palatable, actually; since it would introduce Dlune in more detail; and even Delkrayle, who had remained a mystery woman until now; whereas all the dry, detailed analyses of polarized human duality were a headache, anything but palatable. For they made the going cogitative to the limit; while external ‘live’ action cooled to a below zero temperature and ceased to exist.

The fact was, meanwhile, that everyone in the world wanted an explanation for the darn endless analysis of the ‘first attempt’, even some dons at Cambridge and Oxford, not just high school English and Psychology club students in the Rocky Mountain states. So Dr. Lorenzo finally broke down and agreed to provide explanations to be included in Sammy’s 1994 ‘second revision’, even though nobody had really, literally, pressured him to do such a thing.

And to help him prepare a written explanation in his mind, he had accepted an invitation from Sammy to ‘explain himself’ to a group of New Mexico high schoolers who had invited him to a conference in Española, right in Sammy’s back yard, and who had asked for an explanation of the long and unpopular lists in the ‘first attempt’.

136.  Dr. Lorenzo attempts nobly to defend his universally maligned endless dry analyses in the ‘first attempt’

Part of the explanation for all those tryingly dry lists and analyses, said the poor doctor to a large sunny classroom of about forty hip and very patient, neatly dressed northern New Mexico high schoolers from places like Santa Fe, Los Alamos and several northern pueblos including Taos, ‘must have been’ that: (1) it was winter, and a severe one to boot, simply from being as far north as Juneau, Stockholm or Leningrad, but with no Gulf Stream or Alaska Current to temper the cold such as those towns enjoyed. And the structure of mj’s trip, and of his book as well therefore, was DICTATED not just by Mackenzie’s journals, but by the structure of the universe itself, even more so, inevitably. It had to be, since he had managed to at least halfway succeed in inserting himself into the warp and woof of time and space, by getting electrocuted by lightning – exactly on the Continental Divide exactly at the solstice – and turned into a ‘split human lodestone’. And so consequently, after that, since he now was such an intimate part of nature, then the outline of his life and book had to be dictated by nature therefore.

And all the more so when a writer of mj’s kind found himself trapped in a location more than commonly impacted by nature, e.g. quite near one magnetic pole of a planet; and especially of a planet that oscillated magnetically in a certain way, in a certain kind of magnetic solar system, during that pole’s ‘winter’. In other words, ‘young mj’s’ treatment was dictated not just by nature in general at this point in his remaking year, but more specifically by severe winter. It was going to be a very long, pitch black and cold one, just like the ‘dark side of the moon’. And a writer like Mortimer who possessed no skills other than intellect, yet had to do something with all those months so black you could not see your hand in front of your face outside the cabin during a good part of the daytime, was perfectly capable of staying inside and writing intellectually all winter, i.e., analyzing and analyzing and analyzing more.

The poor doctor had sensed little sympathy from his audience right from the start of this brilliant explanation, so he tried a different tack.

Hardly anything could serve better than a piece of writing like ‘the first attempt’, he told Sammy’s high schoolers, for conveying to a reader the feeling of (2) a long cold ‘winter of the soul’.  To a reader, he said, hardly anything felt longer and colder than long lists placed annoyingly right in the middle of an adventure story. The multitude of reader complaints were proof. The summer’s adventure had made readers look forward to a coming spring adventure, but to get to it they had to trudge with poor depressed Mortimer through ‘seven whole months of deep, snowy drifts of ass-freezing, depressing analysis in total darkness’.

But it could have been worse, said the Dr., than he had made it. The whole winter could have been intolerable. But fortunately for him and for them, it was mostly just late November’s ‘first attempt’ that people complained about.

Later, when the talk was over, Dr. Lorenzo told Sammy that he had felt a terrible coldness coming from the students up to this point. And that was why he had tried a third approach.

The annoying presence of ponderous lists of polarities and large, dense chunks of highly intellectual material in general had to do, too, maybe, he said, keeping in mind he was answering a question from youthful adolescent high school students, with: (3) the need to think things through a bit at times. Maybe that was why the planets had been made colder at more northern latitudes, you could say, facetiously: so that once in a while certain creatures would stop and think. And maybe it was why the more thinking, less impulsive races often ended up in colder areas, than the hotter-tempered races did. For those ‘thinking races’ seemed to like to spend many long freezing and stationary months each year thinking and thinking, then thinking some more, about how to survive a little more comfortably and warmly the next time around. And a few of the discoveries from all that thinking had been useful to the rest of humanity, one had to admit: like the refrigerator. Or no: indoor heating was a more fitting example, he said, finally getting a couple of laughs.

The students found none of the jokes amusing, unfortunately. And Dr. Lorenzo had been notorious through the years for ‘reading’ an audience. But he could not get a grip on this one whatsoever, he felt.

So he added another explanation, just as a shot in the dark. The preponderance of dry analysis, he said, seemed caused, too, by (4) Jack’s incapacity for action at that particular point, an inactivity which affected Mortimer profoundly. And Mortimer was doing the writing, of course, not Jack. Crashing from speed had triggered another major depressive episode in the mj duo, from all appearances. And Jack would be paranoid and depleted of mental energy for months, barely able to think or do anything except stimulate his own flesh. But even sex was hardly fun, as anyone who had ever crashed from an upper, or any kind of sexual high, could confirm from experience. And Mortimer was so sympathetic toward Jack at times, so symbiotically enmeshed with him emotionally, as to virtually experience the same depletion himself at times, the same catatonic inability to get himself moving. This over-identification with Jack may have been the unnameable thing swamping him when around Jack, in fact.

And all of this came on top of: (5) the propensity Mortimer already possessed on his own account, to fall easily into depression year after year, especially in winter, a propensity which was potentially ship-sinking on its own.

So, said Dr. Lorenzo, considering there were this many ‘bummers and downers’, the combination of: Jack’s depression; and Mortimer’s depression; both of them dragging out over a long and inhumanly cold and dark winter: could hardly produce much lively action. Whereas Mortimer, nevertheless, might still be able to analyze, and make lists, even while feeling depressed and bothered by Jack and himself both. He had lived practically his whole life doing as much.

137.  the Dr. likens his Remaking word-mandala to The Holy Bible

The poor doctor was really worried by this point about his audience. And even as good as he was at reading an audience, usually, in this case he did not know what to do. He was getting older and had a white beard and white mop of hair by this point and wanted to 'sound as wise as he looked', as he told Sammy later. So he fell back on an old trick. He never liked to walk away and just ‘lose’ an audience, as he always said.

So he looked at them all and said that the very best of all answers to the Northern New Mexico High School Students’ Association of Advanced Remaking Punditry, i.e., to their formal and official request for an explanation of the admittedly intolerable ‘first attempt’; the best answer without a doubt; and an answer that had been his favorite answer to almost any question on any day of the week over the years, whenever he had completely run out of explanations for The Remaking; an answer he almost always resorted to whenever he, his very own author self, could not remember how to understand something about his Remaking after endless brain-wracking effort, or whenever he was at wits’ end from trying to understand why in the world he had even written ‘that crazy damn complicated and incomprehensible book’; was: that  (6) he, mj lorenzo, had never intended The Remaking as a ‘story’, but rather had written it as a ‘mandala’, meaning he had designed it like a carefully balanced Navajo sand painting or a traditional Native American blanket, as he had said in the Fort Smith envelope, and also on the title page, where he had called it a ‘word-mandala’.

Traditionally, he said, a mandala was a multi-colored pictorial circle-square, most typically associated with the country of India, and arising out of Hindu and Buddhist belief systems: a circle-square which balanced and contained visually all of the energy forces in the spiritual universe of the person who had decided to make a self-calming, meditative exercise out of ‘drawing’ it. It was never aimed at others primarily, but mainly at calmly and reverentially getting to the very bottom of the whole beautiful picture of one’s own amazing self and world. And the wonderful process of creating it was every bit as healing ‘to the soul’ as the final pictorial result, if not more so.

Young mj’s mandala, however, had not been a pictorial one, but a ‘word-mandala’, as was clearly spelled out in the subtitle of the very first version of The Remaking, when he called it right on the title page, ‘An Illustrated Word-Mandala in Three Parts Originally Intended for Private Use by the Author’. Young mj lorenzo had never thought of The Remaking as a novel, or ‘story’, while he had been creating it. There was a story in it, but that story was only part of the overall balanced picture of mj’s spiritual universe, of his word-mandala, or ‘sacred text’.

‘In closing’, said Dr. Lorenzo, ‘The Remaking’, since it was not a ‘story’ or ‘novel’ but a mandala, i.e., a kind of ‘sacred text’, should be compared more properly with the Holy Bible than with any other kind of writing, fiction or non-fiction. In the exact same way as The Remaking, he said, the Bible told one single long but very discontinuous story, namely: of Yahweh preparing the Hebrew people so that they could produce a saving messiah; and after that: of what had happened during the time when that apparent messiah had been in the world; and finally, of what had happened after the apparent messiah had left the world. And that story was ‘discontinuous’ because all interspersed were long and deathly-boring lists of useless antiquated laws; and dry analyses of this and that and many other things, pleasant and not, most of them un-‘story’-like, and each type of thing very different from the other types, like: proverbs; psalms, which were hymns; wisdom; musings; tons of history; creation myth; legend; cosmology; megatons of character-building stories and vignettes; tedious descriptions of disgusting bloody war and cruel sexual maiming of enemies; pleasant romance; manipulative romance; scintillating love poems; crazy depressing prophecy by the mind-blowing truckload; long mind-zapping genealogical lists; bizarre dreams; and even incomparable little entire novellas, like the wonderful character-building story of Joseph.

And with this Dr. Lorenzo said thank you and accepted questions from his audience.

Only one raised her hand, a lovely girl of Native American heritage, obviously, as were almost all the rest. She stood and said that the students had conferred beforehand and had thought Dr. Lorenzo would say to their question, simply, that the ‘first attempt’ was ‘pure unmitigated Mortimer at his very most unnatural and least earthly human’, and would let it go at that and leave them, since the author of The Remaking had to be in great demand and very busy. And so, she said, they were grateful that he had come all the way from wherever he had come from (she felt it must have been far away) and that he had explained crazy-brained Mortimer a little more thoroughly than they had previously seen him with their own simplistic understanding. She was certain she could speak for all the others who were normally rather reserved since almost all were from simple Native American families in the area and were overwhelmed to be in the same room with him, as she was too. And besides, their people had been programmed for generations to hide feelings, especially negative ones, around the white conquerors. And she could say they were terribly grateful for his time and concern. And so, she asked him to forgive them for complaining so childishly about the ‘first attempt’ and to consider returning some day to answer a more mature question of true worth. And she sat down.

He thanked her and the students warmly and the terrible ordeal was over.

And he took the lovely young lady to a classy Mexican restaurant, naturally, with several of her friends, and ‘picked up the tab’.

Whereupon they confessed, finally, that they had been furious with him for ruining a 'whole year' of their after-school club time with the ‘first attempt’, even though it was the teacher’s fault, not his. But now felt better because they liked him and would read it again with a new kind of interest.

138.  pundits offer their response to complaints that the unpopular ‘first attempt’ is ‘intolerable’ and ‘impossible’

Whatever the explanation as to exactly how or why the ‘intellectual density’ got there, however, the fact remained that the boring and tedious and exasperatingly ENDLESS analyses of this and that contained in the ‘first attempt’ were an integral part of mj lorenzo’s book. Pundits everywhere claimed that you had to have seen all of ‘the first attempt’, at least, and gotten to know it a little too, hopefully, if you wanted to understand the real composition of wacko Mortimer and compare him in detail with Jack, preparing yourself thereby for their being reunited later in The Remaking. That was what the zealot pundits believed, anyway. Because, for one thing, Mortimer, they said, was winter-long in the act of trying to make a case for the ‘human breakdown’, or ‘Crack-Up’, of mj lorenzo having been brought about mainly by a wrong turn in the history of Western philosophy, many centuries back. And it was important that any reader fully understood that thesis.

Thus the zealots and cultish pundits who believed in mj’s work as ‘significant’, would always try to paddle faithfully and religiously through this huge and frozen far-northern lake full of icebergs of lists and analyses, hoping not to sink out of sight forever in their stone canoes.

Rev and Jo always skimmed or skipped the intellectual density, however. Since the ‘first attempt at a meeting’ between their son’s two halves had flopped obviously, and turned them off to no end, frankly, by being so ‘indecent’, and since their son had been so kind as to send seven ‘attempts’ in one package, they wanted to see if a ‘second attempt’ might come closer to putting Humpty together again.

No one ever told them, sadly, that the seven sections of Part II had never been ‘seven attempts at a meeting’ at all, but just Mortimer’s attempts to delude himself that they were.

139.  completely done in by his own wacky brainchild Dr. Lorenzo lets Sammy ‘remake The Remaking’

As for Dr. Lorenzo and his indispensable helper numero uno, Sammy Martinez: when they published the ‘second revision’ in 1994, Sammy was allowed finally to bow to pundit pressure and take the universally hated ‘lists’ out of the ‘first attempt’, every last one. And Sammy added a footnote that those lists were worth lifelong study, however, and could be found in the ‘original version’, or in many places on the web. In fact, said the footnote, any Remaking student in the world could do what mj, as Mortimer, had done, and borrow from a library the books mj had used – Sartre, Kierkegaard, Jung, and McLuhan – and make his or her own lists.

The few lists Sammy thought most essential for the ‘first revision’ or any version of The Remaking, he respectfully moved to the ‘third attempt’ where they remained in the 1994 ‘second revision’ too, revered as always.

And of course mj, having taxed his nervous spirit beyond its limit creating the original version of The Remaking, was understandably delighted and relieved by all help of this nature, because the thought of having to redo the entire Remaking in some or ANY form, from very first page to very last, having to sashay and curtsey to so many factors and pressures and whatever, had flipped him straight from frying pan to fire, and even been known to leave him utterly uncharacteristically unsmiling whenever the thought had come up over the years. He could not put his feeling about it into words very well, he said.

But the notorious ‘Sunday School pundits’ made a full-time occupation of trying, out of sympathy, to understand everything they possibly could about Dr. Lorenzo personally, and they said that the closest analogy, with due respect, might have been Jesus having to consider the possibility of being crucified, if you please, a second time, the pope and three top cardinals in conjunction with the presbyters of the Bible Presbyterian Church on Collings Avenue in Collingswood, New Jersey, having informed him jointly, ‘formally and representatively and in desperation’, on official ecumenical World Council of Churches email letterhead (which the presbyters thought odious, but less so than Vatican email, while the Vatican felt the same, thank you), unhackably encrypted (as spelled out in the email), that: regretfully; the first crucifixion, in more or less the same way as a TB skin test, ‘had not taken’.²

Or the resurrection either. And that was no small side show.

And without even having had the decency to mention, or apologize with real not crocodile tears for the fact, that it had been none other than their own people, their own quite corruptible so-called ‘churches’, who had been to blame, by having trumped their Lord’s clear and simple, bold message with really awful offal as soon as he had been sorry-lord-didn’t-mean-it-but OUTASIGHT dead and gone, physically; animal-mammalian-ly; and humanly; speaking.

And of course the usual debunkers of mj lorenzo and The Remaking felt that the ‘first attempt’ was the ultimate in dismissible ‘garbanzo bean dregs’. All of it, the whole ‘incredible trash mountain of infinitely expanding BS verbosity’, as they called it. And one of them paid six figures for a full page in the Sunday New York Times to spell out their veiled venomous hatred of implied murderous dimensions toward the ‘whole sickening gunny sack of putrid pundit beans’, who were already fermenting, as they saw it, in their own ‘phroom bullion’ and needed ‘permanent relocation of remains’. And in this nice and respectable, decently literary and funereal way they reminded all of the Remaking pundit bean heads in the world of their ‘imminent re-interment’.