I.  Reactions to ‘the fourth attempt’ from ‘experts’

159.  an aspect of The Remaking that embarrassed pundits

Fans and friends of Dr. Lorenzo’s who came to know his story so very well, like the clever pundits who knew his ‘remaking’ inside and out and knew the intimate details of his life after that watershed year, could not deny when asked in public that afterward, once his year full of phenomenal events had ended, he would ‘remember’ from time to time several certain shocking things he had ‘forgotten’ about himself and about his Remaking year. And one of these, the most important thing ever to have been ‘forgotten’ or ‘remembered’ or even indeed believed at all in the first place, a notion that no one else in the world ever forgot once they had heard it, was his deep conviction, widely celebrated and ridiculed: that he had come into the world to save humanity from blowing itself up.

The Dr. rarely brought this little item up in public. But the Remaking pundits did so all the time, of course, especially among themselves during coffee klatches and Remaking workshops, and most of all when intoxicated. It was a perennial bone of contention, a source of political strife between opposing ideological camps within the world of Remaking punditry as a whole. The outrageous claim sat there, right in the original version of that all-important work of his, after all, in several obvious places. And that work, The Remaking, was the Remaking pundits’ number one bailiwick of fame and glory and responsibility. They had to face the ‘doggone claim’ in the chest hairs and it embarrassed a fair number of them. While others it inspired to harder, more dedicated work.

160.  a few of the extremely unusual things mj lorenzo did  

Eventually, though, the fact that mj lorenzo had held such an extreme conviction about himself – ever, for even a second – helped embarrassed pundits to explain to themselves and the rest of the world – at the very least – why on earth he would have taken the pains, ever, for even a second, to have done so many extremely unusual things, things of a kind that ‘normal people’ just did not do, such as: (1) to record in a series of tiny notebooks a dehumanizing ten-year depression, in soul-dissecting detail, day after day, ten whole years running. Or (2) to subject himself to a year-long, life-threatening, sanity-destabilizing, ‘humanity-saving’ journey to the Arctic and back. Or (3) to write an astonishing book, ‘The Remaking’, so as to outline the steps of his own healing process, his do-it-yourself reconciliation with self, a book which SOMEHOW (by intention? or lucky accident, more likely?) THEN TURNED OUT TO BE EQUALLY APPLICABLE TO VIRTUALLY any entity in nature that was divided against itself: from saint to speed freak; to schizophrenic; to manic-depressive; to couple; to family; to church group; to political nation-state; to humanity entire; to the natural physical planet ‘earth’; to the galaxy and the divine universe; and even to God-in-relation-to-man. and then, more outrageously yet, (4) to call the book a ‘sacred text’. and, on top of that, ‘mind-blowingly’, (5) to consider that book’s ‘sacred’ aspect to be ‘experimental’.

Who in the world ever did such unheard of things?

‘Ball-busting gymnastic soul-stunts’ of this kind were a good part of what kept the pundit world hooked and mesmerized despite their embarrassment, as they explained to the world. Spellbinding tidbits like these. The incredible proven usefulness of the book to politicians of camps utterly opposite, to politicos on both sides and on every side, in fact. to politicians – and private citizens – of many foreign countries, western and non-. And the book’s usefulness to science. And art. Both. And to individuals merely seeking inner balance. Yet at the same time to large groups and even to whole nations that were struggling to find a calm and practical balance between the disquietingly opposite poles of their polarized electorates. Things like these served to remind the embarrassed early pundits constantly of the Remaking’s seemingly endless value.

Such and more, in fact. The whole daily growing mountain of commending fallout from the never-ending, constantly multiplying nuclear reaction set off in ‘71 by Rev’s having distributed, so unwittingly, his son’s weird and embarrassing envelopes, photocopied cheaply to help unearth an offspring – as pundits said – ‘gone ape-shit underground’. The whole dang colossal, mega-thumping, lolloping maha-Gargantuan and forever limping-along multi-papafrita-Pantagruelian cheeseburger with coleslaw too, if there was some. As long as it was good coleslaw.

The whole never-ending saga served to keep reminding the shocked and embarrassed, but proud, growing punditry membership of the probability that, as they often said: The Remaking, ‘like Homer and the Bible’, would prove itself worth a relentless effort to comprehend it completely and utterly, top to bottom, inside and out, right down to the last erroneous period and dust mark permanently preserved by excessive Xerox copying, not to mention Jo Lorenzo’s tears, said to have stained the page where her son first got laid, finally, and the Pagano’s Restaurant lasagna red wine sauce on the edges of pages 290-305 thanks to Rev.

 ‘The Remaking’, however, was ‘hard to freaking read’ in its original photocopied version, as so very many of its astute students complained. It was hard even for the most practiced readers of advanced and difficult books. The early Remaking pundits could never deny this very embarrassing point either, when put on the spot about it on TV talk shows. They would answer that there were ‘many perfectly good and understandable reasons for the difficulty, all spelled out in detail in the revisions’. And they would grit their teeth when saying this because the poor pundits always hated to see their ‘poor beloved mj’ hacked to bits by the media.

161.  another embarrassing aspect of The Remaking: ‘rifts’ in the story line

One of the most embarrassing and widely discussed ‘literary indiscretions’ of The Remaking, as first written, especially for anyone not used to the weird, ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’, so-called ‘techniques’ of twentieth-century, Western-world-type story-writing, was the way the author, whether as ‘Jack’, ‘Mortimer’, or ‘mj’, often neglected to spell out portions of the year’s ‘story line’ that were, or at least seemed to most people to be, absolutely essential to know. For example, amidst carryings on of all manner and means, the author might suddenly mention offhand a new physical circumstance that implied a major physical event must have just occurred, and then would leave it to the reader to fill in the blank, guessing what event might have occurred precisely.

This ‘trick’ had been hardest of all on Rev and Jo, this ‘technique’, or the absence of it, for they were used to Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger, and Jo’s very favorite born-again Christian novelist, Grace Livingston Hill. Not to mention all the rest of the western world’s incredible literature, for that matter, back before James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, when writers still followed simple, common-sense ‘writing rules that normal people could understand’, as Jo said.

And of course the ‘pro lapse’ pundits, as their pundit buddies tagged them, tried through the years to justify and even glorify their hero’s ‘lapses in story line’, usually by reminding that The Remaking was ‘not a story primarily’ but a ‘balanced mandalic collage of thoughts and words and personal events’. And therefore, as Dr. Lorenzo himself had said many times, physical location and physical condition were not the ultimate issue, but rather how well one stayed tuned in to healing nature.

This was part of the reason Mortimer had ‘toyed with’ information about his physical whereabouts and health in The Remaking, said the ‘pro-lapsers’ or ‘brain-lapsed ones’, the ‘lapsters’ or ‘prolapsed-pundit-brain Remaking prose pros’, as they were variously nicknamed by colleagues (the last in the Harvard Lampoon). Not, as they said, because Mortimer had forgotten where his ass was, or whether it was completely paralyzed or not, or whether he could get it up, or not. But rather to show that such issues were not the primary issues determining or allowing, or in short contributing to and/or comprising, his ‘Remaking’ and its ‘healing remaking formula’.

But, nevertheless, as they said, BIN THAT AS IT MIGHTA BIN, i.e., ‘despite so much wonderful support from so many pro-lapsed brains’, as Dr. Lorenzo chuckled to a New York Times book reviewer once: he, much later in life, could not deny that he agreed, also, with an opposite gang of pundits and others who felt that such ‘rifts’ in the visible physical structure, or outline, of stories – those ‘rifts’ of the kind frequently ‘left gaping’ by Western world writers in general throughout much of the twentieth century – never should be simply explained away as this or that, e.g., dismissed as ‘just a curious kind of literary technique’, or lack of it even. But rather, as disciples of Carl Jung liked to remind, such lapses and rifts should be examined and weighed as possibly representing hint enough that the psyche of Western civilization was in grave upheaval, ‘mj lorenzo’s own psyche included’, as such pundits felt. If not ‘his own psyche especially’. If not ‘his significantly more so than the average’, at least during the Remaking year, and maybe even after that, ‘let’s face it’.

One of the gravest rifts in the story line had just occurred: when Jack had somehow managed to get out of the Fort Smith hospital’s Six West psych unit as divulged by only the barest mention of it near the end of the ‘third attempt’. Poor Sammy and the pundits would make it their job, naturally, to ‘cover up’ this rift ‘on mj’s behalf’ down through the years. They had filled in this blank for readers bit by bit, inserting more and more margin aids and in-text comments in the ‘revisions’. They had been forced to span not just the ‘time chasm’ for their mj, but the ‘metaphysical chasm’ too, the one between paranormal and normal. And they had needed to do so by speculating – as reasonably and rationally as they could – on ‘how the hell’ (as they put it in private) the paranormal two-bodied mj which had first come into existence in Fort Smith, might have transformed itself over the winter months, back to a more normal one-bodied mj, dominated as it otherwise always had been before, all of mj’s life, first by ‘Mortimer’ and then by ‘Jack’.

162.  the infamous ‘rift’ in the ‘fourth attempt’

And now in the ‘fourth attempt’ one of these reader-bewildering ‘rifts’ seemed to have occurred again. Or that was what English-whiz Jo Lorenzo had complained anyway, and worried about to Rev aloud.

And it got her mentioned, too, eventually, in a French literary review: “In French!” as she screamed in English when Rev read her the notice.

“What did I say?” she demanded to know, but Rev did not know because it was written in French. “What do they say that I said anyway?” But his answer was the same. And she would have wrung his neck 'but for the grandchildren’, as she told Sammy later.

Whatever she had said, Rev assured her, and he again read from the official English notification signed by mj and Sammy jointly: it made her ‘the first in history to have discovered it’, as even certain so-called ‘early Remaking pundits’ ‘had to agree’. For they ‘sure had not noticed that error’ all the way back in 1971, as they had confessed to La Nouvelle Revue Française. And neither had the famous Josephine Lorenzo’s lapse-brained son, apparently, the author himself.

The ‘fourth attempt’ consisted of two startlingly new elements, a recounting of a relationship during medical school with an ‘Indian princess’ named ‘Delkrayle’, and a revelation of Mortimer’s apparent current relationship with ‘Dlune’, also an ‘Indian princess’, as he would clarify over time. These elements alternated with passages from Mortimer’s notebook diaries kept during medical school, passages so tediously protracted and miserably depressing to certain vulnerable readers that a few early Remaking pundits were admitted to psych units after getting lost in them, konking out dizzy and cracking open their heads. That was what they told everyone anyway, especially their bosses.

It happened quite a few times. In reality. To quite a few people. Psych admissions from reading Mortimer’s notebooks.

So it was said.

And the ‘error’, or ‘lapse’ ‘noticeably left out’, Jo Lorenzo insisted, was an explanation of ‘how Dlune had managed to turn up’ at Fort Chipewyan, a hundred miles away, when she was ‘supposed to be always busy working and studying nursing in Fort Smith’, plus helping her mother with a big impoverished ‘Family of Redskins’. She never should have found it so easy, ‘properly speaking’, as Jo liked to say, “To move all around the far north in the dead of black sub-Arctic winter, if she was just a dirt-poor, dark and swarthy Indian” and so forth. That was how the NRF ¹ had quoted Jo as having said it in 1971 (to Rev; quoted in Sammy’s ‘first revision’ of 1980). In English. And Rev had not disagreed with her either back in ’71, as he liked to add. In any language.

But Rev had found no more explanation in Mortimer’s defense than anyone else had. If he had, as Jo observed later: nobody would have wanted his ‘explanation’ anyway.

163.  the missing explanation for the big rift

There was an explanation, however. Namely that after young ‘paleface’ Mortimer John Lorenzo, M.D., Psychiatrist (as his official Dominion letter of appointment had titled ‘the poor fool’), had resigned abruptly his new post as ‘Six West Interim Psychiatrist’, the very minute – as the day-nurses put it – he had ‘left out the door in his Dr. Frankenstein white outfit’, they, the nurses, had dropped everything immediately and called the whole Fort Smith world to plan a really big shift-change party of celebration for the next afternoon at 2PM, right on the unit in the patients’ day hall. They had been used to ‘making do without psychiatrists’, given the shortage of specialists along the northern frontier. And they preferred it continue that way from now on, thank you, after the ‘Lorenzo catastrophe’ as they called it from then on.

And the fact that later that night after the party-planning session, when night staff went to check, the doctor’s ‘younger brother’, Jack Lorenzo, was no longer in his ‘PMC’ seclusion room and could not be found by Mounties in Fort Smith anywhere, naked or clothed, strengthened their conviction that ‘something had been up the whole time’ with ‘those two poop-for-brain Americans’.

And the double blessing now inspired them to invite twice as many to the party, in fact. The hospital administrator and his entire staff had to be included, and all of the Fort Smith and Yellowknife Mounties, though Yellowknife was a universe away in winter. The pharmacist who gave them Valium and other benzodiazepine tranquilizers as needed, for themselves, that is, got an invitation, and every Fort Smith party-lover that hove into sight or came into mind in the next 24 hours.

The unit's boss psych nurse laid it out for an Edmonton reporter a week later, still so upset by the ‘whole Lorenzo affair’ that she forgot herself and breached confidentiality when he called her at home: “How could they turn up here out of nowhere,” she began her rant, quoted in the Sunday Edmonton Journal, “both of them on the very same day, in the remotest, coldest, darkest outpost on earth, not even from our country, let alone from wood buffalo land? How could they look like identical twins, and be so identically crazy and gross the both of them, yet act like they DIDN’T KNOW each other? And then suddenly disappear after just two weeks, on the very same day one more time? And expect anybody with a hare’s brain to consider it anything but a loony American plot?

“We weren’t born yesterday up here in Fort Smith,” she told the reporter. “We get TV too up here and know Americans are always up to something when they turn up in other countries!” And she hoped the Journal’s ‘investigative reporter’ would ‘live up to his name and fame’ and find out ‘what the dash those Americans were up to this time’.

And, well! When Dlune got to work at ten thirty the following night after a day off, and heard the ‘great’ news, that the patient was ‘as gone as the doctor’, she did not react like other nursing staff. She felt sad and vowed to visit her grandfather in Fort Chipewyan. With her commitments and pressures though, including money and transportation problems, she could hardly do so for ten whole weeks. And by then it would be February.

Meaning: the time of the ‘fourth attempt’, as Dr. Lorenzo pointed out.

Those were ‘the missing pieces’ of ‘the story’ as Dr. Lorenzo pasted them together, at any rate, when English Club students from South High in Denver, Colorado, asked him during ‘open questions’ after their 2004 Annual Banquet Lecture: “What really happened at Fort Smith?”

164.  why pundits chided high schoolers for wanting ‘explanations’

And pundits the world over ‘laughed their asses off for three weeks’ when they heard about this, as they told Stockholm’s Svenska Dagbladet and one of Mexico City’s university rags too. Not a few laughed for a year. For Dr. Lorenzo’s answer had been ‘facetious to the max’, as they put it, aimed merely at producing ‘hilarious bemused bewilderment’, like a question from oriental philosophy such as, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

To inform them fully that he was pulling the high schoolers’ proverbial leg, said the pundits, the Dr. had even gone so far as to throw in a witty double entendre, a pun on the word ‘gone’ suggesting that Jack and Mortimer, both, had been ‘head-swollen nut cases’.

Pundits, as they bragged, had always ‘shown better sense than’ – and ‘resisted the urge’ – ‘to ask Dr. Lorenzo such naïve questions’. For they knew that any such ‘filling in’ was bound to result in one outcome only, namely that the magical realism, or ‘paranormal’, or whatever you chose to call it, would have to be stretched to a new nonsensical extreme, just as in this ‘very hilarious’ revision ‘cooked up’ by Dr. Lorenzo (which still left it unclear, for example, why Dlune seemed surprised at Jack’s disappearance if she had been the one to help him escape, as pundits believed she had).

While the frustrating enigma would always still remain, of ‘one being two; and two being one’; just as it still remained, even after the Dr.’s ‘laughable non-explanation’, as pundits called it, of ‘what really happened’.

The South High students, like the rest of the Western world – as pundits thought – indubitably had hoped for a way of scientifically understanding or ‘explaining away’ ‘the paranormal two mj’s’. All questions along these lines over the years, during TV interviews or elsewhere, had been aimed at obtaining such ‘relief’; ‘always’, they claimed. For people wanted to ‘solve and get rid of’ the problem of ‘one mj in two bodies’. But Dr. Lorenzo had always stuck to his guns and kept his commitment to that non-rational kicker, they said, of mj splitting into two separate human bodies ‘for a little bit’.

165.  Dr. Lorenzo’s position on ‘bi-bodihood’ down through the years

The Dr. would never alter his story to appease the public, any time he was given a chance to do so in later life, such as on TV talk shows or during ‘open forums’ in universities. He always asked politely that the pressure be taken off him and placed on the Western world itself, instead. He wanted this conundrum, the most frustrating and provocative enigma in The Remaking, to ‘remain there, lying and wriggling on the floor at the feet of Western philosophy in a bloody mess’, so as to remind the Western world of the ABORTION which that world had created for itself, the ‘total uterine prolapse’, if you will, that it had caused. A problem he described at one web-famous 2001 conference in Berkeley in the following way.

Just as long, he said in Berkeley, as the Western world continued to teach its children to think only in a rational, linear, scientific manner, such a question as ‘what really happened at Fort Smith’ could never be answered with satisfaction. Because the rational Western mind would never accept that ‘one could be two, and two could be one’.

The right question to have asked Dr. Lorenzo, said the pundits, or to have asked anyone who might have known, would have been: “How can we develop our thinking capacity so as to discover the realms of human knowledge you say exist but are inaccessible to us because, as you claim, our organ of thought has grown weak and atrophied by our thinking in one narrow way only, i.e., in a linear, rational, scientific way?”

Dr. Lorenzo always said he would have been glad to save everyone in the world the misery and inconvenience and throw the psych ward out of The Remaking, yet something inside him had kept telling him to preserve it.

‘What something?’ the pundits wanted to know, naturally, for they always had to know everything.

“Artist’s instinct,” he said, “maybe. Whatever that might be.” Or maybe “instinct for the whole human truth not yet fully understood,” he added. Or a need to show that amphetamines, psychotic mania, and/or psychotic depression OR ANYTHING, might play seemingly non-rational games with the mind. How about the fact that many Mexicans still believed certain people could see flying devils or talk with the dead, or that hundreds of millions of Christians still believed in the resurrection? Something, at any rate, had demanded that the so-called ‘scientifically impossible’ remain in his story and that ‘Mortimer’ and ‘Jack’ retain a body apiece simultaneously ‘for a little bit’.

And the pundits were blown away by this down through the years; because they had come to trust IMPLICITLY their hero's power to intuit absolutely true reality. Everybody had. Even some of his enemies.