140.  the early Remaking pundits survive the ‘Fort Smith chronology’ workshop

In the early 70s a few Remaking psych pundits – or psycho maybe – survived a whole warm spring weekend holed up in a funky bay-windowed Victorian apartment in Powelton Village smoking Lebanese hash, popping white crosses and workshopping Parts I and II of The Remaking trying to organize a calendar of sequenced ‘second encounter’ events.

When the ordeal was over and they were found alive, amazingly, they celebrated by composing a letter announcing and outlining their triumph ‘joint-ly’, then mailed the darn thing to High Times¹ and never saw it published (sadly but fortunately for the future of mj and Remaking punditry). And so, after a year of reading High Times cover to cover looking for the thing and never finding it they gave up and typed up their outline more carefully this time and handed it out to pundits at workshops free. And it spread worldwide and became a standard reference for Remaking punditry.

The Fort Smith Chronology Outline’s reasoning went as follows. If Freeze-Up had hit mj lorenzo in early November and if Mortimer had stayed in Fort Smith psychotherapizing ‘Jack’ for two weeks and then ‘split’, Mortimer must have reached Fort Chipewyan before U.S. Thanksgiving, about November 20-23.

141.  the old man and the island

The rest was easier to sort out: Dr. Mortimer, a few days before 'derelicting duty' and disappearing, had mentioned to a nurse longingly how much he wished he could ‘spend the winter on an island in Lake Athabasca’. She had passed it on to friends and at least fifty far-north-style poop-brain witticisms about snowblown frozen head-shrinks with the IQ’s of Arctic terns had been spun from it in hours, some on the night shift where Dlune heard about it.

She ran over from classes the next day and knocked on the doctor’s door. They talked in his makeshift office in the storage closet and before she left she suggested that he might find her grandfather who lived ‘on an island in Lake Athabasca’ very close to Fort Chipewyan and who probably could help him find a place to stay for the winter.

Mortimer found both island and grandfather because few others in modern electrified Canada would have been ‘out there’ enough to live on that backward isle for the winter. And the old man, who had been a medicine man, a ‘shaman’ for the Chipewyan tribe all his long life practically, took Mortimer in.

Luckily for posterity, as early Remaking pundits sighed. For mj had been dangerously near disaster; but good things came from this big break. And the old man who bore the name of his tribe would be THE beginning, finally, of ‘Mortimer’s re-humanification program’, they said.

Other pundits disagreed, however. They claimed that Dlune, more correctly, was the beginning of mj lorenzo’s ‘becoming human’ finally; because she had sent Mortimer to the man. She had gone out of her way to do so with just that in mind. And everyone agreed in the end that it was Dlune who had saved mj’s life, more than the old man. But it was impossible to measure such a thing with certainty, of course.

The old man would prove to be ‘very important’ to mj’s survival and remaking in any case. And Mortimer’s ‘second attempt at a meeting’ began with two allusions to the man, allusions that were vague and indirect, as often had been mj lorenzo’s manner of saying the very most important things, whether writing as Jack or Mortimer.

And after these two very indirect allusions to the old man Mortimer suddenly became uncommonly plain about his circumstances, as if an important nerve had popped back into life inside him finally. Pundits liked to say that Mortimer had acquiesced for a minute, finally, and surprisingly, to descending from that highfalutin Logos language locus where he had lived until then, from that windy, craggy high place where vague and abstruse intellectual references to books and concepts kept ‘circling and wheeling and banking like flocks and flocks of Arctic terns’, ‘periodically alighting in complex but analyzable patterns’. Finally, they said, Mortimer was going to ‘talk plain’ about the kinds of things the rest of the world talked plainly about every day, like the weird old geezer living in the house; or the young foreigner visiting the neighborhood. Mortimer was going to let everybody relax and feel at home for once, so they could work less hard at understanding his freaky communication. He seemed ‘almost kind-of normal and human for a page or two’, actually, said the pundits, though stiffness in his writing style showed through (especially compared with Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘Jewish street-cholo’ of later years). And other humanifying changes would follow, they said, one by one as winter progressed ever so slowly.

But this moment of light, they said, was the very, very first glimmer of light, the first flower to pop up through the snow of Mortimer’s deeply frozen humanity.

142.  I’m living with an old Indian in northern Canada

from Fort Chipewyan

If what McLuhan says about the ‘Global Village’ is true, Rev, that all earthly humans now live in ‘one great electrically connected village’ covering the entire globe,² then that ‘village’, like any normal tribal village, must have a tribal medicine man ambling somewhere around the village, as it seems to me.

And the doctor is hope, as they say.

And hope is magic.

And Jung writes at length on the archetype of the ‘magician’, the one who magically heals.

And as far as I can tell, though he never claimed the title, he, Jung himself, has got to be the ‘global tribal magician’ I refer to, the global-village medicine man.³

…………………………………………………………..

The following lines, Rev, are from a section of Mackenzie’s Journals called ‘A General History of the Fur Trade from Canada to the North-West’:

It is not necessary for me to examine the cause, but experience proves that it requires much less time for a civilized people to deviate into the manners and customs of savage life, than for savages to rise into a state of civilization.⁴

The European trappers in Northwest Canada, says Mackenzie, were called ‘Coureurs des Bois’, woods-runners. And they were ‘….so attached to the Indian mode of life, that they lost all relish for their former habits and native homes’. After a trip of 12-15 months into Indian country they would return to civilization and squander all earnings in a short month, with the result that they would have to go back to the forest immediately and stay there another 12-15 months if they wanted any pocket money again. Yet they cared not at all. So in no time they were living like Indians all the time, practically, and as ‘civilized’ Europeans hardly ever; because, apparently, living with Indians had toggled their nervous system totally, somehow.

This indifference about amassing property, and the pleasure of living free from all restraints soon brought on a licentiousness of manners which could not long escape the vigilant observation of the missionaries, who had much reason to complain of their being a disgrace to the Christian religion…. They therefore, exerted their influence to procure the suppression of these people, and accordingly, no one was allowed to go up the country to traffic with the Indians, without a license from the government.⁵

Good grief! What a solution.

Who needs a license to meet with his own soul, Rev?

……………………………………………………………..

The truth is, Rev, I’ve been lucky enough to run across an ancient wrinkled ‘Indian’, a doctor like me, a medicine man named Chipewyan, and he has been teaching me to hunt and trap and catch fish Indian-style through the ice, and give up my crazy diet of berries, wisely, since there are no berries now. He has let me live with him rent-free on the understanding that once I am broken in I’ll help him this winter to stay alive – by chopping and hauling wood mainly and keeping the fire going. He is undernourished, tottering at death’s doorstep, probably. But who am I to think less of him for it? I’m in worse shape and have no patients either. Nobody comes to either of us for help these days. But they are the fools. Because his limbs may rattle, and his voice, but his mind – his balanced, calm mind – has been sharpened  like an arrowhead.

And with that sharpness he tells me his tribal legends, helping me get through the dark depressing midwinter days, an endless affair. But I screw up and fall asleep while he is rattling on and on and I dream ancient northerly dreams. I can’t tell one day from the next, daytime is so dark. I try to remember the tales so I can write them down later, but I get confused about what I have heard and what I have invented or dreamt, and it makes me mad. So I try to stay awake and keep him happy and me too, because he is in some kind of timeless tribal heaven when he is telling these stories, Rev, and that affects me.

Yet I fall asleep again invariably. I’m restless when I sleep and I shout and cry from the bed and wake the poor guy up wherever he has gone, usually to the other room by this time to sleep on the floor where he sleeps always. He hobbles up and I see his parchment face and flat eyes in the darkness barely, waiting for an explanation from me, probably. He is patient, Rev, if you ask me. He is superhumanly patient. He never complains like I always used to whenever dredged up at the hospital to go and do ghostly intern acts in the night.

“Because you’re sick,” he says. That’s what he thinks. So I need to be ‘visited’, he says. And I am ‘dumb’ too, he thinks. But I’d have to be in his world. Yet in mine too? He doesn’t say so, but yes, he knows I am dumb in my world too, anybody’s world. And he figures I’ll sleep better and bother him less if I’ve seen his face, old and beaten as a big northern tree, as the bark on the wood of the dock-post tree, the one that was here half a millennium already when Mackenzie climbed out of a canoe to put in the winter of 1789 in this spot and tied up his boat to that tree. He guesses I’ll be more content and won’t startle in my sleep again, and he might get to sleep the rest of the night for once, poor guy, if he just gets up and comes to ‘visit’ me whenever I freak out like that in my sleep.

What is happening to me, Rev?

143.  the first part of the story Chipewyan told

I’ve written down the first half of the story Chipewyan told me – a few hours ago, I think. It’s his best yet. And that made me stay awake and write it down.

There’s still a lot I don’t understand about his world probably, like how they tell stories and what things mean. I thought at first when they got whisked to the higher place that Chipewyan called ‘heaven’ or ‘sky earth’ or ‘foot of heaven’ they died. But then they came back; always; and Indians have never been into resurrection to my knowledge. So finally I got the idea that the high place must be the one where you go for visions or a new perspective, to learn a lesson, get insight or have a breakthrough in understanding everything about your universe.; that kind of thing; like an ‘Indian’ or ‘Native American’ ‘vision quest’ when braves used to go into high mountains and expose themselves to nature in the extreme to weaken their mind and body so as to dream dreams that gave them and their tribe wisdom and power.

Then there’s another pattern that runs through the tales. Often there are two heroes who are polar opposites, most often older and younger brothers; and such a trick works to suggest two sides of a person or tribe. So the Chipewyans, or ‘Dene’ actually, as they call themselves in their own language, probably are not so unlike us in basic ways. They just have their own unique ways of talking about it, that’s all.

I make an exercise of hanging out in Chipewyan’s world of legend in my head. So I don’t go out. Just to the post. That’s all. And I buy things that relate to that world of the tales. I try to buy items which represent or remind me of the phantasmagoric world opening up like a fantastic flower popping through the snow.

The stamps on the envelope I’ll mail you eventually will be of Indians. The paper you are holding right now is made from pulp at Yellowknife by Indians. The pen I am using to write this is the pen Chipewyan’s son-in-law, his daughter’s very much older husband, used when he was a young man in the early 1900’s to sign a treaty with the Canadian government when he represented the Slave tribe as chief. The bed table was made by one of the wives of Chipewyan’s famous grandfather. And the bed was made by me, skeptically instructed by Chipewyan. ‘Skeptically’, because: if he sat and slept on the floor his whole life, how could he know how to make a bed, right?

I may be coming around, though, to spending more time on the floor too, because I feel too high up in the air on this bier-y bed of a litter, especially around an old guy who enchants with stories always telling them sitting the whole time on the cold, humble floor.

“Oh, old Indian, get me back to the earth again, please. Can’t you, some time soon?”

Chipewyan’s people usually learned a tale by hearing it over and over then telling it time and again until they got it down. They had no alphabet or writing, of course, so had to pass down knowledge by storytelling. It’s easy to picture the scene. The men of the tribe gathered around a campfire, old ones clouting young when they made a mistake relating a tale. This was why stories suffered little alteration over centuries sometimes.

Unless, of course, a group wandered off to new territory and remembered everything wrongly because they had no one with them who could remember it right, like the Navajo and Western Apache when they wandered off from the far-northern tribes and went south. The ancestors of all three groups are thought to have spoken one language at one time, called ‘Athabascan’, and to have lived near or with each other. And since the native race of North America is thought to have gotten here by crossing the Bering Strait, then it must be that the Navajo and Western Apache are descendants of a group that broke away from a tribe here in the north and went farther south looking for a better life.

Today we ate Chipewyan’s meal of elk venison and a trout’s eye and we puffed on an old medicine pipe which may have affected me. And then while the stone-dead silence of a hell-black universe surrounded us and our island hut, and the rich, sweet-smelling fire crackled and shot sparks, Chipewyan, in his droning, cracking voice told me this tale.

Did it all really happen, Rev? Or am I just dreaming?

TTATHE DENE

The Appearance of Man⁶

ELTCHELEKWIE ONNIE

The Story of Two Brothers

Origin of the Beavers, a Chipewyan Sub-tribe

In the beginning there was an old man who had two sons. One day he said to them: “My children, climb into your canoe and go hunting, for there is nothing here to eat.”

The two sons were obedient and set out immediately to hunt. The old man said to them: “You shall set out toward the West, for there is where you shall find your original land of birth, and there alone is where you shall be happy.”

Thus they departed.

By the fourth day of their journey they arrived at a waterfall named Eltsin nathelin, or The Whirlpool. There they caught some game birds: but by the time evening had come, they knew not where they were and had quite lost their way. The following day and the days thereafter, the two brothers made little headway. However, they had eaten their little birds, and advanced along deserted and steep river banks to the Great Slave Lake, on the shore of which they discovered a mountain named Dene-cheth-yare: “the mountain which holds man.”

“My brother, my older brother,” said the younger of the two to his brother, “this country does not resemble at all our own. Where do you suppose we are?”

“Alas, my younger brother,” returned the older, “I do not know any more than you; but don’t worry, just keep going.”

All of a sudden the two brothers heard voices from underground, the voices of gigantic people (Otchore), who lived along the northern shore of the lake. In front of the mountain a little giant and sister were playing together. This conical mountain was their teepee.

“Oh, what small people,” they cried with joy, when they noticed the two Dene brothers. They ran to them, took them in their hands and placed them inside their mittens, and one carried them in this way to their parents.

“Look, mother, father, what little bits of people we have found along the shore,” they said cheerfully.

“Don’t you make fun of them,” said the gigantic father, who was a strong brave man. “My children,” he added, addressing himself to the two brothers, “stay with us, for no one will do you harm.”

This saying, he served each of them a trout’s eye, from a giant trout.

The two Dene thus stayed and lived at the Dene-cheth-yare, on the north bank of the Great Slave Lake. They got to look at the fish hooks and the filleting of fish, along with the children of the giant, and never lacked for anything.

But in the end they grew weary of this life of ease and asked if they could go on their way.

“Of course,” said the giant.

He made them pemmican of fish and gave them each two arrows.

“With this male arrow, you may kill the male elk,” he said to them, “and with the female arrow you may pursue the female. The two arrows are both very powerful. They return of their own accord after they are shot: therefore don’t go running to fetch them, or evil will befall you. I swear this to you absolutely.”

The two brothers promised to do everything as told and left.

Upon their departure, the good giant indicated the setting sun as the point upon the horizon where they should find their country of birth and counseled them to head in this direction.

Shortly after their departure from the home of the good giant, the younger of the two brothers espied a squirrel perched on a large fir tree and let fly one of his arrows. Then immediately he ran to fetch it.

“Oh, my young brother, be careful; do not even touch it,” cried the elder brother. You know that they have sworn to us not to. It is quite bad, one should think, to disobey.”

But the younger brother was obstinate.

“It is within reach,” he cried to his brother, “I can get it.”

He then put out his hand to grasp it, but it shot upwards in pursuit of the squirrel, who was making fun of the hunters.

“Ah, see if I don’t get it!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

But it escaped and shot away again, and always again. Finally the young brother seized the arrow. But it shot away like lightning and aimed straight for the sky, dragging behind it the poor unfortunate younger brother. The arrow introduced him into heaven.

Above us there is a higher country in all appearances like that which we inhabit. When the young man arrived there, he found it frozen over, and on top of the snow he saw a great number of footprints of animals whose flesh is edible.

He saw there also a great white road, bordered by trees in fruit and by roadside markers. By the road were a pair of freshly made snowshoes planted in the snow and apparently waiting for him.

The young brother, carried far away from his homeland by his disobedience, slipped on the snowshoes and followed the white track. He thus arrived at an immense tent inside of which he discovered three women who gave him hospitality.

The eldest, the mother of the other two, said to him secretly:

“My son-in-law, I warn you that my daughters are evil. They are unfaithful to men. Therefore do not trust them. Do not ever sleep with them, and do not even look at them sleeping.”

Having said this and in order to prevent an alliance between the young man, whom she found handsome, and her daughters, the woman blackened his face entirely with char, hoping that he would not be liked by them.

In the evening the two heavenly daughters returned from the chase, for they were like Amazon huntresses. The one was named, “Breast-full-of-weasels” (Delkrayle-tta-naltay); the younger, “Breast-full-of-mice” (Dlune-tta-naltay).

When they caught sight of the little black man who was seated in their mother’s tent, they could not keep from laughing out loud, and mocking him.

The old woman was triumphant. But the following day, the young man, stung to the quick, washed his face and hands and appeared so attractive to the two sisters that they both cried together:

“I want him! I want him! He will be mine.”

In vain the old woman made opposition to their union, for the two daughters threw themselves upon the handsome young man, leading him away to their bed and making him sleep between them.

But they had no sooner passed one night together, despite the mother’s interdiction, than there opened up beneath the young man an abyss, and he was swallowed up alive into the breast of the sky-earth.

“Nari!” (“Poor fellow!”) cried the woman, when she saw that he had disappeared.

“There goes another beautiful young man whom you have ravished away for me, you evil enchantresses, you!”

144.  excellent moral fare

Jo Lorenzo flipped through some pages that came after Chipewyan’s tale. “What happened to Jack?” she asked, for the next page said ‘third attempt’.

“He’s still in Fort Smith, isn’t he?” Rev responded.

“It wasn’t much of an ‘attempt’ at a meeting,” she said. “It was a short letter for once, anyway.”

“But what was it about?”

“He seems different,” she offered.

“But why the Indian thing? Is there a message?”

“He seems a little bit better maybe. Don’t you think, John?”

“Is that the message?”

“It could be.”

“But why ‘favorite story’? Game birds and giant teepees? When I tell a story from the pulpit there is a reason that has to do with the message and I make the reason clear to the congregation. I don’t get it.”

Jo didn’t either. “He says he’s ‘in an Indian world’.”

“So?”

“Maybe he’s getting better, John.”

“By copying Indian tales out of a book by a Frenchman? Mortimer doesn’t write like that. Neither does Jack. They are not his words.”

“Let’s read more and see. He’s trying to fix himself, isn’t he?”

“Yes," Rev allowed. Now that he has found himself, meaning now that he has found ‘Jack’, that is. I think he needs to be fixed. Yes,” said Rev, clearly associating his son with an un-neutered dog.

But Jo heard a gentler meaning or pretended to. “Is he a little better, then?”

“"Well, I don't kno-ow," said Rev as if he had heard someone else say that and mimicked him. “Beats me,” he said in the same way. The shoulder twist was familiar too.

“Then we have to keep reading until we do know he is better, John. Don’t we? He sent us five more ‘attempts’ here.”

“Attempts to drive yoo-coo-koo-too,” he said with the mouth of a big cuckoo.

“Attempts at fixing himself,” she said carefully and softly, as if as soft on Mortimer as on Jack. And as on Rev.

“I’ll vote for that. You read, then,” he directed less acrimoniously. And as she separated out the papers of the next section he said again, in the same annoying drone, “I just don’t get the whole Indian thing.”

“It’s two brothers on a trip, isn’t it? One obeys his elders. The other does not and he suffers. But others can learn from his mistake and suffering and that’s why the tribe tells the story, John. Just like you used to read the stories of Horatio Alger and David Copperfield and today we’re not poor any more.”

“Groucho Marx went to synagogue smoking a cigar. Does that make me a pillar of fire?”

“‘Don’t make fun of them, John’,” she stared at her husband, “as the giant father said to the giant children about the two tiny brothers.”

So they stretched their sacred Puritan tradition of reading excellent moral fare at the kitchen table after dinner to an unprecedented extreme and plowed straight into the ‘third attempt’ of The Remaking, though it was after midnight already.