a look at the life & creative artifacts of mj lorenzo: volume 1: a look at mj's first book, The Remaking: pg. 23: third attempt

to get to where he could make sense of
himself and Jack

go ahead to subsection: [145]; [146]; [147]; [148]; [149]; [150]; [151]; [152]; [153]; [154]; [155]; [156]; [157]; [158]

145. Mortimer was deemed ‘the problem’

The third section of Mortimer’s overwrought and overweight tome of winter writing encouraged Jo Lorenzo less than the second section to believe her son had progressed toward making a new and lovelier person of himself.

But she was wrong. She did not understand the ‘third attempt’ because of its offhand brainy style and she thought Mortimer’s lying in bed the whole month of January ‘to think’ was a bad sign. Whereas in reality he was using the month to get to the bottom of things once and for all and was discovering that he was not to blame for mj lorenzo’s problem after all. This was important stuff for the future of humanity, said pundits, if the human race was to avoid annihilating itself and have any future at all.

On the other hand, meanwhile, Jo Lorenzo was starting to get the idea that Mortimer was indeed mj’s problem, not ‘Jack’. Because Mortimer would never be much use to the world or mj ‘without someone around to liven him up’, she told Rev when they read the chapter the first time. Mortimer could never do much that was useful or interesting without Jack. Or without somebody with life, she clarified. ‘Stuffy old Mortimer’ would not have made it to the island without Jack, for example, she claimed, if Jack had not by the Lord’s love and grace been a geography nut. Even Mortimer’s ‘inspired’ idea, the ‘rule’, as he called it, that he was to ‘spend the winter’ – ‘like the geographic explorer Mackenzie’ – ‘on an island in Lake Athabasca with an Indian woman preparing for a spring trip up the Peace River’: had all of it been dreamt up by Jack and passed on to Mortimer BY JACK all the way back at the Arctic! She was a little heated about this.

And Jo had also figured out by now, as she told Sammy Martinez years later, that mj’s first experience of freedom in his life, his western and Arctic spree, had ‘burnt Jack out’ quickly. It was part of the reason she sometimes felt like favoring the ‘Jack’ side of her son. Mortimer had sneakily ‘gotten rid of Jack’ one more sad time by simply letting him have his heyday and burn himself out, she said. And now ‘dull old Mortimer’, as she called him, stumbling along lifelessly, was dismally drained of spunk. Jack was the only part of mj that had any ‘spirit’, she thought. And that was why the third section of ‘Part II’ of mj’s ‘first stab at a modernistic novel’, as she called The Remaking for the rest of her life, also came off as just one more half-hearted ‘attempt’ to get his two sides working together. Because poor old half-dead Mortimer always wearied of life in no time without Jack around to ‘inspire’ him and keep him stimulated in various ways.

146. but where WAS Jack? what had happened to him?

Adding to Jo’s belief that Mortimer was ‘half-hearted’, and to the pundits’ same belief eventually (many of whom said Mortimer had no humanity or heart at all), was the fact that by this point Mortimer had stopped writing to his parents about that infamous part of mj that was supposedly locked up on a psych ward. Mortimer rarely mentioned ‘Jack’, as if he thought he could get rid of him in such a way. And when he did refer to Jack’s physical whereabouts he mentioned him not as a patient in a psych unit, but as a specter-like figure lost in a foggy white-out, stumbling around a vast, empty, snow-blown flatland, an imagined dagger in hand, as it were. Mortimer wrote his parents in the ‘third attempt’, in fact, that Chipewyan had helped him set up trap lines in a pattern radiating out from their cabin across the lake ice and down the Slave toward Fort Smith. And whenever he went out to check the lines he feared he would run into Jack and be killed.

In time, because of hints like these, a remarkable thing became apparent to some of the earliest pundits, though Mortimer had never spelled it out in the pages sent to Rev and Jo. To many it seemed that Jack must have escaped from the psych unit.

147. Mortimer glorified Reason

But whatever had happened to Jack, nothing was about to stop Mortimer from writing or from using his head to solve the world’s problems. He was not about to leave it to unthinking Jack-types to determine the world’s future all by ‘them-thoughtless-selves’. His ardent brainstorming of EVERYTHING was a given in the same way that endless brainy theologizing about Jesus Christ AND EVERYTHING ELSE had been a given for churchmen like Paul, Origen, Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, John Calvin and so on. Such serious addiction to mentation had been a given since the day centuries back when Western civilization had decided that dwelling in airy realms of mind and spirit, pretending to be ‘God-as-Logos’ (as some theologians called this power to thrive in pure and airy thought-realms), was the most valuable, beautiful and important thing under the sun, the ‘highest’ profession in the land.

148. Mortimer used Reason to analyze savior complexes and impotencies

The ‘third attempt’ glorified reason, therefore, the pundits made clear. But it studied two other traits of Mortimer’s too, his ‘savior complex’ and his ‘impotence’. And those two sub-sections, both of them at the end of the ‘third attempt’, sailed straight over Jo’s heart when she finally got to them, all worn out, by then, from Mortimer’s profound thinking. It was more than enough to keep up with his many various analyses of great sages. She saw no need to think of her son as any kind of ‘savior’ when he could hardly get out of bed. And she was not going to listen to the slightest reference to sexual impotence in any man she knew, least of all in her son. When the topic came up at the end of the section, therefore, all of the Puritan Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock rushed forward to rescue her; and Queen Victoria hovered above them floating in the air, sponsoring them in a frumpy dark skirt that seemed to have stayed in place Victoria’s whole life. And just that fast Jo jumped to the assumption that the ‘impotence’ Mortimer referred to was his own powerlessness in general.

149. how Mortimer used the universally hated ‘lists’ to answer his number one question

So the early pundits had to clarify that, while Mortimer may have been ‘half-hearted’, as Jo said, when it came to dealing with Jack face-to-face; he was anything but half-hearted when it came to dealing with Jack on the written page. From page one of the ‘third attempt’ Mortimer showed an impressive quantity of reasoning capacity despite any ‘half-heartedness’ shown without Jack around physically to keep him company. Just six months after the Crack-Up his ability to use his head for cogitating looked substantial again, more than enough to do the job. And so, using his reasoning faculties as he had for years he examined again and again those soon-to-be infamous and hated ‘lists’ of polar-opposite character traits, lists he had constructed by studying scholarly books written by Kierkegaard, Jung, Sartre and McLuhan.¹ Sitting in the cabin Chipewyan had built and on the bed the old man had made by hand, he stared for hours at a time at his sketched list-summaries of those four authors’ thinking. Maybe it was true that he had done so already a hundred times. But one more time he had to try to finally get to the very, very bottom of the central matter of his existence, seemingly: THE ISSUE OF OPPOSITES.

150. but what WAS the number one question? it was: ‘what is Western civilization’s number one problem?’

This time – as he wrote Rev – he was going to finally solve the problem by asking the right question, hopefully. Which he now thought might be this question: why did so many of the greatest thinkers of 19^th and 20^th century Western civilization preoccupy themselves with splits, shifts and imbalances in human character? Each had his own take on the problem, of course. But all shared the same concern that within the Western world the polar opposites of human nature might not be distributed or blended properly within individuals or within society at large. They worried about the possibility of extremely exaggerated one-sidedness in individuals; and in society; and about the likely destructive results.

And at the same time wherever the two opposite sides were seen as being nearly equal in power, each despising and fearing the other and/or acting unwilling to compromise and share power, all these sages worried about the possible destructive consequences for individuals, and for society, resulting from such ‘hyperpolarization’. So: that was it. That was the name Mortimer gave to this problem which all of his favorite sages seemed to be describing, ‘hyper-polarization’.

151. Mortimer defines the number one problem as ‘hyperpolarization’

For years Mortimer had relished studying the brilliant minds of history and suddenly it hit him that in the past hundred years, at least four of his favorite thinkers had all sounded the same alarm: that his very own Western civilization had been handing its members a set of cultural values that steered their character development along a path of hyperpolarized choices, starting at birth, in a way that made it hard for them later in life, if not impossible, TO MAINTAIN HEALTHY EMOTIONAL BALANCE.

152. Mortimer analyzes hyperpolarization as described in scholarly works by Sartre, McLuhan and Kierkegaard

Sartre in his thick book, Saint Genet (1952), for example,² which amounted to an exhaustive quasi-psychoanalytic study of Sartre’s contemporary, the French novelist and playwright, Jean Genet, maintained that Genet had been tormented throughout his life by an urge to act outwardly like a jokester criminal while he continued to feel inwardly like a tragic Catholic martyr. This split in identity was so extreme and difficult to heal, said Sartre, it would have buried any Frenchman but an artistic genius like Genet. And for the suffering which it kept causing Genet, Sartre blamed the aberrant, flesh-disparaging, dehumanized crackpot Western-world way of living life in the world, as Genet had experienced it growing up in conservative, old-fashioned Catholic Christian France.

Later, in 1964, a Canadian English professor, Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, wrote about this ‘split’ in the character of Western civilization in a different way, claiming that this civilization was dysfunctionally split and hyperpolarized because, on the one hand, it lived its day-to-day life in an up-to-date way as part of a planet-wide tribe of Jack-types who vibrated spirit-connectedly as one electric body (constantly connected to each other by a nervous system of telephone, TV, radio, etc.); while on the other hand this Western civilization continued using its mind as it had for centuries, the way a dry, out-dated, machine-minded Englishman such as Isaac Newton (or Mortimer) might have used his thinking machine.

And meanwhile, as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Kierkegaard, in Either/Or and other works,³ had criticized a too carefully structured Scandinavian society which had become split and hyperpolarized because it had, on the one hand, overdeveloped in its citizens an excellent talent for establishing rules and living by them, just like Mortimer; while it had, on the other hand, left its citizens with an under-appreciation for Jackian realms of human living, for beauty and spirit, including art, the body, and ‘true’ religious feeling.

153. Mortimer’s favorite sage of all, however, remained forever Carl Jung

Most important of all, however, was Jung, insisted Mortimer. Carl Gustav Jung had maintained throughout all of his long life, through all his innumerable scholarly works, with incredibly detailed supportive documentation amazingly unearthed from just about every field of knowledge known to man, that Western civilization was dangerously off-kilter and therefore had become hyperpolarized in a variety of ways. In Psychological Types (1923), he had pointed out that Western civilization had been given a kick-off by church fathers who literally cut off their testicles to feel holy, because they could not figure out how to enjoy sex and God at the same moment; and who sacrificed a love of rational philosophy in a desperate search for heart, because they could not figure out how to think and have heart, both, at the same time. And now, twenty or so centuries later, the ‘Western’ civilization that those unbalanced souls had set in motion long ago, was still so sickly and imbalanced and over-polarized, therefore, THANKS TO THOSE VERY SAME IMBALANCED EARLY CHURCH FATHERS and their look-alike philosophical offspring down through the centuries, it was at risk for chemically obliterating itself into nothingness, if not the whole rest of the world as well. Because its individual members and component societies still overdeveloped some parts of their human nature and of their psyche (parts of the mind, personality and emotions) in a way which de-humanized them, while they left other parts of their human nature and psyche that were equally important underdeveloped, thus de-humanizing themselves even further. Jung’s treatment program had been carefully designed for fixing and balancing the whole of Western civilization, therefore, as much as for fixing and balancing out-of-balance individuals.

154. Jung said hyperpolarization was Western civilization’s fault not Mortimer’s

Suddenly it seemed obvious to Mortimer that if his whole civilization suffered the same malady he did, then he did not have to blame himself for mj’s disintegration. He felt a little less guilty about mj lorenzo's ‘hyperpolarization’ and past.

But what about the future? How much more harm might a Frankenstein’s monster of such enormity as ‘the Western world’ cause? And anyway, bucking against the momentum of such a Leviathan as one’s whole civilization, and such a powerful civilization, too, in the world of Mortimer’s day, what could one little Mortimer accomplish? Or even, forgetting civilization for the moment, what hope remained that mj lorenzo might ever balance his own little individual hyperpolarized self?

Mortimer asked himself these questions rhetorically only, of course; for by this trick he could resemble a great sage like Jung, who could ask the most weighty questions imaginable; while at the same time Mortimer did not have to work hard in the real physical world like the real psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung, M.D., solving difficult problems explicitly, since Mortimer remained in bed, avoiding the real physical world and its people and psychiatric patients.

But, always lying on his bed, of course, he never gave in to hopelessness completely, and for that he deserved a little credit at least, said his defenders. He did manage to answer his own big questions implicitly, in his own way, by never ceasing to use his power of reason, and by never failing to write down the results of his thinking. His continued thinking implied, in other words, that he thought the answers would be found some day through his continued thinking!

Apparently it was hard to shake loose from Mortimer a certain deep-seated conviction which was part of his make-up as mj lorenzo, namely: the conviction that he had been born into the world to save it with his reason and his writing about that reason, notwithstanding any failings he might suffer, including severe depression, pitiful one-sidedness and grave life-depletion.

155. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation receives Mortimer’s first prize because it gets Mortimer off the hook

All of these discoveries had improved Mortimer’s understanding of poor ol mj lorenzo and of mj’s sorry split into two very different ‘halves’ that warred with each other constantly. And that was ‘great’, Mortimer wrote his parents. But: Carl Jung, he said, in his Symbols of Transformation, had pegged Jack and him better than any portrayal he had ever come across. The ‘list’ in the envelope at this point, the list of polar-opposite traits he had taken hours and hours to ferret out and jot down, drawn from that tome of Jung’s, might look short to some people, but the list made up in accuracy and completeness for anything it ever may have lacked in length, he said. Because Jung’s handy conceptual dichotomies cut right to the heart of the matter and did so succinctly, elucidating the very most telling distinctions between mj’s two sides, Mortimer and Jack. Jung captured the essence of the battle between Jack and Mortimer better and more completely than McLuhan, Kierkegaard, Sartre or anyone he knew. Maybe because instead of using everyday language as those scholars did, then combining it with their own new philosophical language, Jung restricted himself to the original conceptual language of Western civilization’s humanities and sciences, i.e., the language of Greek myth, of Western philosophy and Christian theology and, eventually, of science, meaning especially of modern anthropology and psychology. And all of these more complex terminologies represented and reflected the very conceptual constructs which had come to (1) define ‘higher’ Western thought and (2) ‘screw up the Western world’s mental health’, as Mortimer put it, far more than any kind of everyday ordinary language or modern philosophical movement would have done. This explained Jung’s triumph over the others, thought Mortimer.

The early pundits raved in agreement with this observation about ‘plain language’. And those who joined their growing numbers in the eighties and nineties raved likewise. All forever said a loud amen; and eventually they added that had Western civilization simply stayed with ordinary human language and ordinary human thought, then its whole civilization, ‘right from the get-go’, would never have dehumanized Christ’s teaching and thereby dehumanized the Western world’s people and history. If Western civilization had not so quickly tried to unburden itself of its own human animal nature, if it had not so soon succeeded in stripping itself of its own real flesh and blood, it might never have had to end up in such distress and imbalance as it suffered presently, intra-psychically, politically and even electromagnetically.

C. G. Jung: Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia. (1956).⁴

Mortimer's list of polar opposites
gleaned from Jung's 'Symbols of Transformation'

Sometimes when Mortimer went down this eventually famous ‘list’, he blushed with shame that the world could look at him and know he was the ugly twin of the duo. He was the dry, cold and lifeless ‘Mortimer’, the one of the right-hand column, the emotional cripple, the ugly one so pathetically handicapped when it came to relaxing and enjoying the wonderful and delightfully human Jack energy in the world.

And on one of these insightful occasions, he wrote a poem to his opposite:

Eulogy to the Living Jack

(Wherever He Goes and Leads Me)

I thought I had watched you changing the patterns

of trees and other living things.

They told me you knew where I could find

designs that no one knew existed.

I went to look and forgot to find

the object I was seeking.

I waited and pondered the possibility

of finding what I had missed.

I feared that now was too late.

I feared that I deserved to miss,

or that this must be my fate.

Former friends had claimed my nature

described the boundary of my chances.

I asked them to define my nature

and was left believing there was more to say.

This was what I had missed.

It was also what I could not say.

If I were to hear from you the news that I seek (of that ‘more’)

I might weep with regret. For the strength of your insight

Would tempt me to stubbornly stand by my former self

In envy. I would then out of fear deny you the truth

Of my feelings, and forfeit chances by shirking risks.

If I were to tell you how much I believe in my matter

I might awaken slowly,

Gradually encircling the sun,

Passing into another form.

Then I would have a new didactic and a new request,

And you would be my friend.

156. meanwhile Mortimer found other tricks for forgetting Jack including describing his own depression in detail

At this point in his remaking trip, however, the less Mortimer dwelt on Jack the better he felt. When his mind was occupied with other things he felt relieved. For then he could avoid obsessing on the haunting image of Jack, separate from Mortimer, strutting about in a body deeply suntanned, unlike his own pale anemic one. Whenever he thought about other things, he succeeded in forgetting the shocking image of Jack at the end of his wits, naked on the floor of a cell, self-absorbed day and night. Maybe this image of Jack was a visual hallucination; or a psychotic delusion, as some said later; or an artist’s surreal vision, as others said; or a ‘spell’, as ‘primitive’ or Bronze-Age-type societies might have called this vision of Jack lying in a cell. But none of that mattered at the moment.

The point to remember was that the more Mortimer dwelt on it, then the more of his mind energy he fed that mental image; and the more real it became; and the more threatening to his equilibrium, mental and emotional; and the more anxiety-provoking and the more incapacitating.

And similarly, the less he thought of Jack as that other person, not him, out there wandering about, jacking off for the world to see, crossing the snowy plains with a dagger, ready to kill Mortimer; the less, in other words, he saw Jack as anathema; then, the more Mortimer opened up the door to Jack to return home de facto, slowly and imperceptibly, bringing with him all of his needed skills for living life in the world, to quietly move back in again, bit by bit, alongside Mortimer in the house called ‘mj’, there to populate that house as it was meant to be populated; so that they could live their life in the world more humanly, working out differences at closer and more realistic quarters, trying to find a healthier distribution of resources between them than their old way of ‘getting along’ had offered.

Anything that completely took his mind off bizarre images of Jack, therefore, alleviated the pain of his obsession. And it was a comfort and a step forward. And so, Chipewyan’s ancient Indian tales were a relief. And Mortimer’s invention of an imaginary psychiatrist-friend named ‘Jack Levy’ was too, and writing about him. And likewise, reading and studying his own diaries, ‘Mortimer’s notebooks’ from medical school days, helped too. He imagined for a while that he might even busy his mind by describing his current depressed mental state in sickening detail, something like Sartre’s Nausea, just for his parents’ edification. But there was no need, for he had written it all in those depressing notebooks already, years ago.

So instead, whenever he felt ‘super down’, he would just stick an old notebook diary passage in the ‘third attempt’, one he had written way back when, back in medical school days, one day when he had felt close to the way he felt now, this day in Fort Chipewyan. He was shocked by how easy the trick was, so shocked it made him see that he had not come very far at all since medical school. And he saw as well what a long, long way he had to go ever to remake himself to Jack’s satisfaction.

One abnormally dark and cold day in January he copied off and tossed in for his folks a notebook passage from about his third or fourth year in medical school, 67 or 68, because at that very moment he was feeling similarly in Fort Chipewyan.⁵

I want to believe that the present act of writing represents the start of a great surge upward for me, a climb up some mountain peak, be it short and easy or long and hard. Recently I have stumbled over more truths about myself than St. Paul could have shown me in twelve epistles to the Corinthians. Can this mean that I am being given another chance to change, or must I think of it as only an embittering episode, embittering because so brief, so near to being real, so unlike the mediocre drag that surrounds it in time, while still not the real thing?

How shall I ever avoid depression? How can I avoid not caring to find an answer? I despair of my state and do so eighteen hours a day. When does it occur to me to take hope? In my sleep?

But I think of this “despair” not as such, but as a resignation to accepting myself as I am. “This is the way I am,” I will say. “I cannot talk with people. I am glad to stay in my room. I will always have trouble with people,” I say to myself. “Perhaps I will never again know how to strike up a conversation with anyone including myself.”

But what I constantly have to shout aloud at myself is that I truly am in a dilemma. I want to think I am not. I prefer to avoid the pain a dilemma will produce, once I admit it exists.

Although I have just washed and lie here on the bed in relative comfort, is it just the same now as it always has been, or am I lying in an important moment?

The time passes and my mind remains static, not answering this question, and thereby making an answer unnecessary. I might as easily turn out the light and sleep. I might read, listen to silence, look at pictures of mountains, watch the snow falling outside my window, or contemplate my toes… What is the real problem? I am inclined to think… nothing.

But no wonder. How likely is it that there should be a problem in my room? The problem is when someone knocks at the door. Or when I leave the room like a ghost and amble along my usual route grinning self-consciously and studying the faces of rare persons I meet. Or when someone passes me or comes in the room and sits down beside me on the bed. These are no longer people to me. I have made them into passing things. I must shut them off as I shut off thoughts of my problem, which I have also made into a thing. They are my problem and are therefore a thing, in the way, I suppose, that any disease is a thing.

Or is it because they are “things” that they have become my problem? This little circle is growing vicious. The more I think of people as my problem the more a problem they become; and the pattern is going to persist until I find a solution, until I can replace this circle with one that is larger and more comforting to me.

My mind does not want to handle any of this at the moment. The “problem” is not painful enough. But wait until I meet my friend or my psychiatrist in the morning, or perhaps at this very moment. I can not think of this without fear. What should I say? What nonsense should I play at discussing?

I want to stay here alone where I can ruminate on truth in peace and find an additive to my idea collection.

Eureka. Perhaps the real answer does lie in this room and not out there….

Or maybe it does neither.

Some might say it lies in me, others that it resides “in God.”

But how can this psychologically fantasized theology save me?

157. how the ‘rooster pundits’ (later) interpreted Mortimer

Finally, at the end of the ‘third attempt’, came the last two of Mortimer’s discussions, the ones that made his mother uncomfortable, the ones mentioning his ‘savior complex’ and his ‘impotence’, respectfully. And in them, as usual, he referred to himself, Mortimer, as if an observed other party. He spoke of himself in the third person, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’, so it seemed to Rev and Jo as if someone else were writing about Mortimer. But it was just the way he did things, said many a pundit: with coldness and aloofness of intellect and style.

Some pundits, however, felt this interpretation of Mortimer’s cold style too simple. They said his use of third person when writing about himself revealed an ability to allow an outside party such as Jack to criticize him from an opposing point of view at times. They claimed that a number of Mortimer’s criticisms of himself in these paragraphs sounded like ones Jack might have leveled against him.

These so-called ‘rooster’ pundits were of the opinion, indeed, that the ‘absent Jack’, at this point in the winter, not only had ‘partially returned’, but even had taken over Mortimer’s thinking for a few minutes, more than Mortimer had realized at the time. ‘Rooster’ pundits argued that all these final ‘third attempt’ paragraphs, though presented in two separate mini-sections, each with its own title, actually constituted a single Jackian tirade against Mortimer, similar to the tirades Jack had written and mailed from Fort Resolution, rants in which he had complained that Rev had abandoned him, but focused this time, instead, on Jack’s feeling abandoned by Mortimer.

In time this became the consensus pundit opinion. Mj had never resolved the issue clearly in the original Remaking, they said, but had merely left hints that already by January’s ‘third attempt’ Jack had begun quietly to return home to roost, feather by imperceptible feather, alongside Mortimer in the rooster house called ‘mj’.

The ‘unsolvable’ problem of ‘bi-bodihood’, in other words, according to these pundits, was about to be solved after all, apparently, in the following manner: (1) some time after Mortimer had made his very last therapizing visit to Jack at Fort Smith, maybe later that night even, Jack had ‘escaped from the psych unit’ and was now ‘in an unknown location in Fort Smith’, maybe with Dlune even. And (2) piece by piece, month by month, all the ‘embodied mj humanity’ which Jack had always owned, and which Mortimer had always lacked, 99% of mj lorenzo’s humanity to be exact, was crossing the snowy plains ‘somehow’ from the previously overvalued body of Jack in Fort Smith to the presently undervalued body of Mortimer in Fort Chipewyan.

Physician, heal thyself

Mortimer has never had time on his hands as he has now, now that Jack is gone again. And that is the source of his peculiar situation, his stillness and sick impatience. He is finally overwhelmed with the emptiness of time and himself, and attempts to obliterate the space by populating it with words. Of course he realizes that, as the favored elder son, he has a savior-complex. Whereas we know by now that it is first of all Mortimer himself who needs help.

He feels that he must rescue space and time and Jack, in that order, out of the clutches of whatever. Why else might he have become so orderly and respectable, so well restrained, so organized and programmed for understanding, so self-aware and self-controlled, unless he has decided to believe that he is the incarnation of Rescue, and only by proper deportment will ever fulfill his mission, be heeded, and derive his needed self-satisfaction.

That is why I say that he must come down from his self-imposed pseudo-elevation following Jack’s escape from Fort Smith, and must love in closeness with Jack and Dlune, once he has found them again, in order to re-orient, by deflating, his own grandiosity.

One mistake that Mortimer made, and this is how he lost track of Jack, was to assume that he had finished coming out of Jack, to attempt to collect the pieces of himself over against Jack, in order to look back and criticize what he had once wanted to know and save but now again, despite the pain of his recent learning, insisted was something outside himself, not him. The call to Mortimer must be to never finish coming out, to never abdicate and ascend alone somewhere like Moses and Elisha, but to live and die with Jack there to be his savior in the form of an altered attitude and style of life between them and to come out and leave, if ever, only in agreement with Jack.

If Mortimer is going to insist that he is hope he will have to demonstrate it, and stop running away to lose himself in his – be it however genius and spiritual triumph – cold and critical conquest of his brother and himself, while this brother goes and gets lost without him.

But all such advice comes late. For by his act of inaction here and now he abandons his friend-and-brother to a lack of (the bread and wine of) meaning and hope, not to mention possible Love, and therefore to psychic malnutrition and starvation.

Jack’s premeditated reaction at their inevitable last and upcoming meeting may be understood, therefore, as one of justified retaliation in the face of a spoiled promise.

…………………………………

Suburbia versus the Vagabond

Here is the formula Mortimer seeks. (And he would have found it sooner if he had just studied his Neurology properly in medical school.)

Mortimer = Jack is Silent = Mortimer is Impotent (With Rage?)

When is it going to occur to Mortimer that his impotence and his friend Jack’s absent silence are one and the same? When will he get to see the connection between his mind and his body and admit that the Crack-Up was total: meaning, mental and physical too? When do you think he might admit that his inactivity and confinement are a spinal cord that has gone lax and lies enclosed in a sagging bed of bone, limp and lifeless. That the anger that would keep his brain alive has left his nervous system in silent consternation and is slowly nibbling at the marrow of his backbone, disrupting the life cycle of red cells and making his flesh as pale and his mind as anemic as the snow outside the window. That the hate of his spinal cord toward his thinking brain is vagabond but ungentle and if left unrecognized (like a delegate unrecognized at a convention) will gradually, if indirectly, disrupt its function by disrespecting its laws.

’Where is Jack?!’ he asks.

Jack is a missing brother, a fractured vertebra, a severed cord, a trip gone bad, an exploded continent, a mountain turned ugly, and a countryside in ruin; all of which have begun to touch Mortimer with their silent and painful reality, all of which Mortimer is reluctant to acknowledge and openly face.

Writes Mortimer on one occasion, briefly remembering his med school Neurology, “If I could believe, Rev, that my back had been broken and my spinal cord cut in the crash at Going-to-the-Sun, I might then have found an explanation for this alternating spasticity and flaccidity.⁶ But where would such an explanation bring me?”

‘IF I COULD BELIEVE’???!!!

Mortimer has always been impossibly expert at hypothesizing his way through inactivity and straight – IF he chooses – into the grave.

158. everybody has something to say about broken backs

“See?” said Rev, looking at Jo. “Right there you have one more argument for his being on a bed in a hospital in Montana with a broken back. He hints at it all the time, Jo.”

“Let’s get some sleep, John,” was all she could say. She was going to say that ‘broken back’ was a poetic image, for she feared and told herself inwardly there was ‘no room LEFT in her heart, not even one tiny-weeny corner, for a whole new, completely different disaster’: a real broken back. Yet in voicing such exasperation so succinctly and so consciously, and with such deftly described emotion, she made room for yet another disaster already, whether she realized it or not. For she had to know, after years of knowing ‘her Jack’, ‘my Jack’, as only a mother could know a son, that her colorful and loveable offspring, Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, was a sneaky coyote of a shape-shifter and completely capable of such a trick as hiding in a Montana hospital with a broken back while making the world think he was living in another country.

And as for those crazy die-hards who forever waited in line right behind the Lorenzos to read and interpret their son’s litanies, the so-called ‘early Remaking pundits’, those ‘tripped-out nut-case Remaking wiseacres’, as a South Beach tabloid referred to them once, would come to claim that the several paragraphs entitled “Physician, heal thyself” constituted ‘as telling a jeremiad against dangerously hyperpolarized geopolitics as mj lorenzo had ever prophesied’. But then again, they added gravely, in ‘dissecting that hyperpolarization so deftly’, he had, in effect, ‘thankfully laid out the cure’.

And otherwise seemingly nice and decent people everywhere said that they themselves, too, had a cure for a broken back called ‘More of the Door’: The Door to New Life, meaning that they would be glad, if only asked, to finagle a way to get the whole Remaking crew thrown out the door while on a free, one-way spaceship trip to a planet called Permanent Annihilation; as a thank you for consuming so much of planet earth’s available energy resources worrying about ‘reconciliation’. Who needed to ‘reconcile’ when you had The Big Fist? They knew who. EVERYBODY BUT THEM. Because with them, there were no Two Ways About IT. IT was ‘My Way or The Big F’, as they had been heard to say more than once.