II.  the ‘fourth attempt’ itself

166.  a new kind of upset for the Lorenzos: Mortimer’s new ‘book’

By the first few pages of the ‘fourth attempt’, though, most ‘drastic lunacy’ like 'bi-bodihood' seemed to have faded away, as Jo sighed to Rev. Events described in the ‘fourth attempt’ seemed ‘more likely to have happened’ than the psych ward in Fort Smith. All too possible, in fact, as the Lorenzos would feel by the end of the section. And so, ‘drastic lunacy’ WAS ‘a thing of the past’. They were right, this time. ‘Mild craziness’ was all that hung in the air. But that, unfortunately, would only produce a different kind of upset, soon enough.

The ‘fourth attempt’ opened with a strange description of ‘mj’ and his supposed physical reality. Then, a strange dream.

But, ‘All dreams seem strange at first’, as Jo conceded.

And: ‘Physical reality is not what it’s Cracked Up to be, as often as not’, said Rev. And the pun pundits would give Rev a pun prize for this brilliant twist on mj’s famous term, ‘Crack-Up’, finally granting it posthumously in 2003, seventeen years after the Reverend’s death; and partly because he was ‘brilliant enough’ to capitalize the ‘C’ and the ‘U’, as proven by the margin of his notes for that Sunday’s sermon shown to them by Jo.

But ‘the point was’, as Rev and Jo complained to each other after reading the whole section: the opening pages of the ‘fourth attempt’ did not prepare one adequately for what was to follow within that section. The introductory paragraph did succeed in ‘throwing them both for a loop’ for a second, Rev AND Jo both, true. But only for a second, because their son had played cat and mouse with his ‘location and condition’ too many times since he had stolen the car and vanished. They had grown bored with the game by now. They dismissed it and kept reading, evidently proving how much havoc mj lorenzo could wreak on a strait-laced neo-Calvinist psyche in one year and get away with it. For: the Lorenzos, against their wishes, had finally become converts to the un-parent-like belief that a son’s physical location and condition were not important. And their conversion barely dawned on them or upset them, either, at first. That’s how thorough and cleverly wrought by their son the conversion had been.

Mj’s left arm is thrust outward in an airplane splint, while the other remains free to make notes, hand signals, or love (!), as he chooses. A window is cut in the cast at the left shoulder, baring it for intramuscular injections of morphine. Several hours after one of his periodic shots, mj scribbles down the following in one breath, so to speak:

Mj had driven his father’s Buick to a new section of town and run into some hospital nurses in a soda fountain, who were teasing and tormenting him as he walked toward them. He approached the counter and weighed the stool arrangement. Here there were two stools together, but next to one of them sat a corpulent, overbearing nurse; and he shuddered as a destructive urge escaped his spinal cord and bolted to the base of his back. At the far corner of the counter were two empties together, then a single taken, then two more empties. But he wanted to sit with nobody next to him. They had baked a type of ravioli which a barker tried to sell him, with his grey flimsy greasy cardboard box of red and white fleshy pasta opened on top of one of the stools.

Why wouldn’t they let him sit for a soda alone in peace?

He got in his car and drove off, and stopped…. at an obstacle, a precipice. Or maybe he had run into the dump, a wall of trash and garbage. It was barren, wasted, loose, dusty, dull, grey-white soil on all sides strewn with human refuse. As he backed down a two-lane road, anger welling within him, suddenly and finally rage overtook him and drove him out of control in reverse as the car swerved abruptly left and right and his frantic correction of the wheel increased the chaos and he flashed on the unknown number of drivers who commit suicide by auto crash and considered that this was a common mode of self-annihilation, judging from the excess of crack-ups in which lone drivers (or did he imagine a pretty girl in the back?) dove off the road embalmed in their cars and strenuously – for he half-decided he really wanted to dis-involve himself – he stretched toward the right side while he and the car continued hurtling backward accelerating, though his foot was off the pedal, his left hand lingering frozen stuck to the wheel as his right played with the right door handle and he studied the earth and daylight flying beneath the door crack like a movie on rapid rewind which way was he to jump was he to run against or with the car or jump straight out?

It was taking too long to decide to overpower his indecision and the car’s momentum itself as he was under its spell could not escape the reel too quickly rewound would make his exit anyway, and he LEAPT; and Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith left a world behind and made him half a person; with the car’s direction but on an angle out from it and plummeted on feet then in air and then upside down with occasional limbs striking or scraping and finally all of him skidding to a backbreaking halt in a cloud of white dust and splattering garbage and he became aware of his fright and the rate of his heart beat, the sound of low noise-level distant rumbling truck traffic, a bed beneath his aching back, then his blankets and clean sheets and pillow, then of the fact that he had been the subject of a vicious dream, then again of the truth that he was paralyzed with terror. And finally, he began to wonder about the dream itself.

Poor mj had never been quite so acutely aware of his body.

But had he had a body in that dream?

Had it been a blue Buick Electra that had crashed? Had the car bent in half and exploded when it ran into a wall of hill after he jumped? Was there or was there not a certain person in the back? Why should he want to sleep now and forget such questions? How could his body perform what his mind did not conceive first, or his mind conceive of what his body flatly rejected? He felt trapped inside a revolting wasteland, red-white-and-blue, by a superfleshmetal nuclear blue Buick, hurtling alone and out of control through a starry night, about to blow his world into scraps of pasta and cheese splattered by tomato paste, and scare him out of his skin. Something was in the way. Was the old man calling his name, or was he sleeping again?

I have decided to write a sort of book, Rev, and to include this dream in it somewhere, claiming it is the dream of a character, a special character that I am inventing, named ‘mj’.

But the truth is that I’m having dreams again. Chipewyan knows this only too well, but with dreams about blue Buicks and ravioli, I’m short on faith he can help me understand them. His face appeared in front of mine again when I dreamt and heard my name, and he frightened me more than he comforted me this time.

167.  a new kind of son?

Mortimer, in the next section, seemingly the following day in Fort Chipewyan, took up right where he had left off. And such an un-Mortimer-like move gave Rev and Jo the sudden feeling that something was really up this time. Something new and different was energizing their son, finally.

I’ve decided to continue with the book, Rev, and here is another piece of it. I’m concocting a love affair between an occidental doctor and an oriental Indian princess. (“Delkrayle;” Hindu temples; Kama Sutra; ideas are popping out of nowhere.)

I’ll start it now and finish it in the spring and send it to you in pieces to tickle you and keep you believing in something when your life dries up like mine. If I wander into details of sex and love, you won’t be angry, will you? Chipewyan’s Indian legends are prodding my curiosity, and until spring comes and I can move about again, I’ll have to be curious with my mind and not my body.

On the other hand, Chipewyan’s granddaughter, Dlune, came with her mother to check on the old man. Mackenzie describes the Chipewyan women as the most beautiful of all the northern tribes, and I’m prepared to believe him. This one doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going with me in the spring. She doesn’t know she’s going to visit her grandfather and me (and bring me a volume of Nietzsche from the Fort Smith library), that she and I will make a tent and two knapsacks and a double sleeping bag, that her mother will help with this last if she wants her to, and that I’ll show her how to use it, and she, me. She doesn’t know that we’ll be setting out to conquer the Peace River country together and then the Athabasca River, that we’ll head south together past the headwaters of the Mackenzie, beyond the Columbia Ice-fields and down the beautiful Bow. Up and over the Continental Divide into a new world and up the fantastic headwaters of the Columbia River system (far from where it flows in our country) to Mt. Hungabee and Wenkchemna Peak where they straddle the Divide. For it is at the infinitesimal sources of all these rivers, at the mountaintop dividing of waters East and West, that I want to know her. And I want us to find ourselves at once as shadow companions there, at that millimeter to the minus myth from which we emerge simultaneously out of earth, ice, and vapor, into separate individual being. This is where I want to know Delkrayle. Dlune, I mean.  (I’m getting mixed up with my new book.) At this apex of time and space. And from there to flow with her in whichever direction she may take.

But that last idea strikes me as wrong, Rev, and I already know that in this book of mine I am not going to follow the Columbia to its mouth as I did the Mackenzie. And that I am not going to follow Delkrayle. Confound it. I mean Dlune, wherever she wants to lead me, East or West. But that she will follow me, though the details are not clear yet. And I know, though she does not even dream, that she will accept this and want it. But she will begin to sense it with that first time she sticks her finger on the needle with which she will make our double sleeping bag, and when she sucks and tastes the blood from that gentle finger, remembering it was I – ‘Damn him, but what will he do to me, and what and why should I do for him, this’?  -- Yes: I. I, Mortimer, was the one who wanted that double sleeping bag from the first. And she will do it for us and like it.

And I will play in alpine meadows with this one. I’ll run in them and flop exhausted on my side, my sad face turned toward hers. And we will look down at our feet and count the delicate petals of Arnica alpina. We will look together into the hearts of Purple saxiphrage, and then will look into each other’s eyes and know. Because my Canadian National Park brochures explain clearly that these are the flowers on our way. These and Arctic willow, Arctic poppy, Bear grass, Arctic crocus… And I can’t wait for that one. It has to be the very first to break the crust of snow in spring (Pulsatilla ludoviciana). And Cress (Draba bellii), Wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora), and Arctic dryas (Dryas integrifolia). We are going to know something, I know, together, up there.

And avalanche lily. My reference does not include the avalanche lily, but I know it and recall it from my trip up the Going-to-the-Sun Highway.

168.  the Lorenzos were overjoyed, but not for long

The Lorenzos were elated with this, for their son seemed healed!

But the next little bit was a letdown, not surprisingly. Mortimer did not explain his intention, because he wanted them to figure it out. But they never did, quite. He wanted to show that depression still knocked him off his feet like giant ocean waves coming ashore, alternating with calmer, quieter waves of relative contentment. He wanted everyone to know how deadly and tenacious a depression was, how it fed on itself, circling and circling in the same self-defeating thought patterns again and again. And he hoped to present enough detail of his own depersonalization and depression so that others, once they had read his ‘book’, would recognize the thing if it happened to them, and not make the same mistake he had, of failing to identify it when it first struck him in college, and letting it get the upper hand in that way. And too, he wanted his parents to finally understand what in the world, exactly, had made their son bolt from daily routine and live a crazy and drastic year. The answer was: the ugly, ineradicable mental illness described in the notebooks, the clinical depression he had hidden from them for years.

Again the pundits said Jack was operating behind the scenes here. Quietly. Already three months before spring Break-Up. They said it was Jack’s idea, not Mortimer’s, to have Mortimer look at himself in the mirror of his med school diaries. ‘Mortimer’ was letting ‘Jack’ make more decisions like this, they said.

In any case, though Mortimer might have felt and sounded a bit better at times, he still suffered waves of terrible despondency and wanted to show the relentless, treatment-resistant, devastating depression, the feeling of being barely a person, barely human even, caused (according to Jack) by years of SOMEBODY’s terrific totalitarian regime. And to convey it convincingly would call for some detail.

There was no need to write anything new though. The notebooks from med school described how he felt on bad days now. And again, as at the end of his ‘third attempt’, he tossed in a representative few pages because a wave of depression was knocking him off his feet right now, on the island in Lake Athabasca just a stone’s throw from the little village of Fort Chipewyan.

And those passages knocked Rev and Jo off their feet. They made very unpleasant reading when coming on top of the interrupted stories of Delkrayle and Dlune. Every single time the Lorenzos floated away sweetly on a warm love story, they were immediately mowed down by a freezing, breaking ocean wave of depression. And they could not stand it at first. It was not like anything they had ever read. And in fact, as far as they were concerned, it was not like anything anyone should ever have to read. Once a story began, especially a romance, as Jo complained to Rev – day and night, in fact, for she had read Love in the Limberlost and many other lovely stories of love – it should continue uninterrupted, or an audience would lose interest.

“Hasn’t he ever read a love story?” Jo asked her husband. “He has to know better.”

And Rev agreed.

And the pundits too. For they too were terribly embarrassed at times by the intrusion of Mortimer’s vomitously depressing notebooks.

And yes. He did ‘know better’, as Dr. Lorenzo explained to a pundit audience once, years later. But Mortimer, though he would spend the winter hiding from the truth about his reduced role in the future mj, still sometimes was – and at the least convenient times – exasperatingly committed to certain useful aspects of the truth, painful or not. And the sad truth was: he suffered depression now in Fort Chipewyan. He was putting together a collage ‘word-mandala’, not a story. And he was trying to paint into the mandalic collage an accurate overall picture of past and present.

So the format continued, of bowling Rev and Jo over with wintry, miserable notebook entries ‘every dang time', as Rev said to Sammy later, 'that Jo and I began to enjoy a little vacation of pleasant amour’.

And so, the first wrecking ball of depression had to come crashing in RIGHT NOW, right on top of all the delightful spring alpine wildflowers.

169.  the whole world condemned Mortimer’s new ‘roller coaster’ writing technique

No one could say there was not mad-ness in the method, argued pundits facetiously. But they argued uselessly. For, nobody in the whole world ever came around to really liking this ‘mad’ trick of Mortimer’s, even with all the pundits’ joking and theological ‘apologizing’ for it. Many readers skipped the depressive notebook passages wherever they turned up. And the pundits hated the passages too, it was true. Mortimer’s depressing notebooks embarrassed the pundits to tears many times over the years.

But, said the very same pundits, anyone who skipped those passages ran the risk of not grasping sufficiently the nuts and bolts of the driving force behind the making of The Remaking, i.e., Mortimer Lorenzo’s grave ten-year-long depression during his young-adult years.

I reach a point where I am unable to think at all. I can only sit in bed and vegetate. I am also emotionless.

I know that writing this is becoming navel-contemplative, but it may help. I know that I am ill but am too weak to heal myself. I pout inwardly: why this, and why that, I ask. And how I loathe myself and my state of affairs and how can things get better.

Possibly the most interesting fact is that my desire to do anything to change is remote. I excuse its distance with thoughts of more pressing thoughts. This in itself produces despair, when I realize that any experience of the Good must be suspended until later. I conclude that everything must remain the way it is. I have to keep trying to understand myself or I will be out of my room on my ear and then up to my ears in the warring world. That which I think I want to do most of all, which is to live, must be suspended.

But is it not possible to live now, even in the height of devotion to writing my thought? Perhaps, for example, this depression or despair is only a habit, a bad habit, and there is no actual ground for despair at the moment. Why: in fact, this is what I find, and this is what increases my despair. My depression comes to my awareness and that depresses me, for I see it as uncontrollable. I do not think of it objectively or analytically, saying, “How interesting. As I sit here I find myself despairing. Isn’t it interesting that I am human and can act and despair at the same time?” On the contrary, despair impedes action and I vegetate in helplessness. Woe is me. I pity myself.

Perhaps what I should say is that I do not accept despair. Of course I realize I am only repeating the other statement: “I despair over my despair.” The point that I am making this time is that I do not accept myself. To despair is not sufficient cause for alarm. But to despair of ever being able not to despair is worse. It is not accepting the original despair with a grain of salt.

It is at this early stage of despair that I can catch myself by the tail, saying: “As I sat here a moment ago I suddenly felt ashamed of myself for writing all that Kierkegaard clarified 100 years ago so cleverly and persuasively, and that I apparently failed to incorporate when I read it:

At the second and theoretical succeeding stages of despair I cannot catch myself and have no desire to or hope to; my thoughts go something like this, with a mental grown and a pout: ‘When will I ever learn to accept myself as the dunce that I am? When will I ever get out of this terrible state of nothingness in which I hate myself and everything? Oh, how I hate myself for even saying this!’¹

And here is the greatest blow of all! As I lie here in fact literally at this moment, not necessarily do I, having made these observations and analyzed myself presumably correctly, not necessarily do I even feel like inaugurating any movement for reform. This is after all my thinking, which did itself come with difficulty, be sure; for I began trying to think yesterday, even last week or last year, with limited understanding. Situations such as this encourage my belief in fate and the uncontrollable mood. “For some reason or other,” I am in the habit of saying, “I feel better today,” or “worse,” as the case may be. I habitually accept moods as inevitable and only conquerable with the greatest difficulty, if at all.

170.  Mortimer pushes his ‘roller coaster’ technique on his readers

Lest the Lorenzos get too terribly depressed, Mortimer – quick! – zapped them with an upper as promised. And he continued to hound them with this mind-bending, gut-wrenching format for the rest of the ‘fourth attempt’:

Here is the first installment of the love affair I am concocting for my Book. And I force myself to this endeavor, Rev, because I realize that I must learn to write plot-fiction first and other things after. It is all that people will read without complaining, really. One day, I think, even before I die, it may be the only way left to communicate in writing. College texts may be replaced with historical, sociological, psychological, religious, etc., novels, because students will not, will simply not, will be unable to, read pages one through twenty-eight (my age and Mackenzie’s his winter here, roughly), unless the word is out that shortly after page twenty-nine will come an encounter between the sexes to beat all encounters, and that the suspense, moreover, will not climax but only begin there.

I have to be able to construct an ordinary story line with suspense.

So there they were, our friends, Delkrayle and the Western doctor, of opposite worlds if ever there were two such worlds. But there I go again, interpreting the book before I write it.

I am going to continue referring to the doctor as ‘mj’, so that you may be sure that it is not myself that I am writing about, since that is a booby-trap for starting authors.

Delkrayle was the pretty name attached to the younger of two daughters of an Indian raj or prince-king-ruler in the state of (???), close to Delhi, whatever that North India sub-district is now named. Let us call it ‘Rajna Puth’, although the ‘h’ is silent, and the ‘u’ is, or was: for that “state” exists no more, excepting in the mind as a polite formality. The family is thriving today in Delhi in a wealthy neighborhood, in a palace indeed, although their visiting friends can scarcely concentrate on the fact, and neither did Delkrayle when she was there, though she could never forget it either: she… lived in a… palace. She… was a… princess. The mahabat, or maharani, or something. I forget. But: the princess of Rajna Put(h), a defined geopolitical area near her family’s residence where her subjects, if truth be told, were hardly feeling they were any rich family’s ‘subjects’, and would not have wanted to think it for a moment. Because these people were subjects of India only now, and were growing more and more outwardly anti-raj, anti-prince, anti-wealthy-home, and even anti-Delkrayle.

But as for Delkrayle growing up: because the British and Irish or French – who can count all the restless European peoples? – came to take advantage of the defenseless Indian subcontinent and dominate it, her parents sent her to a Catholic school. But they and she were Hindu. Then how could she have syncretized the sexually uptight nuns in their body-erasing floor-length habits, with the delightfully twisted, love-making postures of carved, naked, phallus-aroused gods and nipple-erect goddesses in all those temples that were meant to inspire an Indian girl to worship her Indian understanding of The Creator, that super-sexy, forever-dancing, constantly-meditating, perfectly energy-balanced and nervous-system-focused – brain to bum – Creator?²  Or did she become a lovely lively unresolved duality? No, the Indian way superseded, I think. And so, in ‘66, with that sensuous-spiritual, very-Indian unity-of-life pumping in her veins, she stepped out the door of the plane at John F. Kennedy Airport, to study political science out there between the Appalachians and the Rockies.

I’ll defer telling you about ‘mj’ until the next episode. He’s the less alive and convincing of the two, so I should paint him in more detail, and that will require patience. But what could we have expected of this death-ridden one, this would-be medicine man from that up-to-date country, that whole-planet-dominating country, that Christian Western-world country, about to clash head-on with Delkrayle, the fragile and beautiful, sensuous yet elegant, end-of-the-line oriental quasi-princess?

And there were more thrills before the next icy water-dunking:

Was Delkrayle, then, as acknowledged as she deserved to be, whenever she walked the crowded dusty streets of her city in those rare and costly, obviously-princess, gorgeous silk sari’s? Yes; and not unlike a movie star; but safe from sidewalk stampedes. And was she beautiful? Like the morning star, indeed; and far, far more than her sister; and surprisingly, if one met her parents. And intelligent she was as well, yet not a little spoiled because, I regret saying, she knew every bit of this all too well. She knew it because at the age of five she had been carefully ‘engaged’ by her family, in cahoots with the (family and) king-raj-ruler-would-be-quasi-ex-potentate of another neighboring ex- and vanishing Indian ‘state’, to some day marry his son and shining prince. And with this prince, Delkrayle had even taken painful care to become exceeding good and natural friends. And with the memory of this dusty, bejeweled fairy tale inside her, it had to be: she stepped off the last aluminum rung of the airline loading gate onto United States and very material – and (Lord!) oh so costly to spirit – New-York-Brooklyn real estate.

I should add here that Delkrayle was no stranger to the Western world, either, since she had spent the summers of childhood along with her parents in a European capital, during the years when her father had been an Indian sub-ambassador. Then could she have met the soon-to-be late John Kennedy when his father was U.S. ambassador in London? Or does it matter? It is a stretch, Rev, but in retrospect the idea appeals to me, so I’ve concluded she must have. And even if she may have forgotten doing so, her mother must have reminded her in November, 1960, and again, sadly, in November, 1963,³ and occasionally during the years after, but this unnecessarily, since Delkrayle could never forget it, that: she, she knew the Kennedys.

And I like the idea, too, because it helps explain why Delkrayle chose a JFK pet project like the Peace Corps and stopped for awhile in the mountains near mj and Philadelphia, at the India-Peace-Corps Training Camp in the Poconos.

When Delkrayle walked, her beauty was absolutely unmarred, for that was the nature of the beauty of the Indian sari. Her body was undivided. It walked entire upon the sidewalk, top to bottom a single harmonious willowy unit, not a seeming top and bottom, not a sequence of head, neck, breasts, waist, hips, legs, and feet, in that and no other order, but a single sensuous field of magnetic resonance there moving, waiting, attracting, responding in unison, wanting to be met and touched and felt. Thus to touch a passing part of Delkrayle’s silk costume was to feel the most intimate part of herself, not because she was totally shielded, but because she was totally open and whole.

But I have to summon reality now to show me this Indian princess. For she was undoubtedly spoiled. She knew her special-ness. She was aware of herself. And therefore she was lonely. And occasionally she was nasty too. But it is hard to remember such times, I admit, and difficult to imagine them. Let us say, then, that she was at times too easily hurt, that unless attention was channeled to singling her out and inviting her to enjoy a night on the town with the Peace Corps trainees she would not simply get up and happily go. Her defense should have been that she expected a special invitation because she was a princess. But since she had revealed that fact to no one yet she was deprived of that excuse for feeling slighted. Should anyone criticize her mood, or her gilded sari silk, she was left to refer to the fact of her family’s wealth, while selfishly harboring the secret fantasy of a would-be prince within her. She would try to remain alone and aloof, and to that extent, self-centered. And then she would look for something to knock her off-center. She would love to lose her balance and fall, would like to love. She would like to try a volunteer from Shreveport or Sheboygan and reject him. And then she would be happy to meet up with mj.

171.  the Lorenzos are ecstatic

The Lorenzos were swept away! They could not have been more charmed and seduced, for there was romance! And better yet, a sensuous atmosphere of impending sex! And they liked sex, after all. Who would not?! But only in secret and in private because they considered it bad taste and un-Christ-like to reveal or ‘advertise’, to use their word, that they liked it. And their son’s way of referring to that politically super-sensitive area, for a Calvinist-Methodist preacher’s family, remained discreet and acceptable in this case, for once. ‘ALMOST’, as they always qualified, by which they meant, obviously, ‘almost except for the carved stone erections’. Yet it was all surprisingly sensuous ‘SOMEHOW’, as they put it, by which they meant ‘even with those dang unmentionable carved stone things’.

How had he succeeded in seducing them? They could not have said aloud what they were feeling, ever: that he had used the aroused stone gods and goddesses to get his sexy point across without offending them.

Yet – however he had done it – he was not supposed to have been capable of anything close to it, if you asked them. First of all, he had grown up with them, a smiling, delighted little Christian boy. That alone should have stopped him from implying sensuous sex in a book. Secondly, everything at Fort Smith had left the impression that anywhere near the matter of sex the Lorenzo son lacked poise and discretion. And these were the reasons then, presumably, why they were so enraptured by their hapless son’s sudden great success that, despite what should have been their reaction, to their minds, they wanted to read it in church. ‘ALMOST’! Jo did anyway. For a minute or two. Or three.

Dr. Lorenzo said years later that when he first read this description of his parents as prepared for Sammy’s 1980 ‘first revision’ of The Remaking, and realized Sammy would not have made up anything about ‘young mj’s beloved and respected parents’ – for Sammy actually liked the Lorenzos a lot (and they were very fond of him too, at least as much) – he laughed himself sick for a month, actually giving way to tears at points. Because when Sammy conducted the interviews in 1980, Rev was already 75 and Jo 70, and no one could say how long they would be around, doing and saying their usual funny things.

172.  Dr. Lorenzo explains how Mortimer ‘got away with it’

And the Dr. swore that as soon as he had a minute’s time he would share with Hollywood the amazing secret to getting sex past sex-startled censors and audiences. The way to present natural, raw animal-human sex to flesh-freaked U.S. American Christians or anyone haunted by the ghost of penis-less Victorian Puritanism, was to show the thing being done by stone statues. Love-making gods and goddesses of India served well enough. The more ‘foreign’ and ‘stone or steel’, the better. And the less human, i.e., the more inhuman, or non-human, the better. And most importantly, the less ‘Western world’, especially the less Protestant- and Calvinist-looking, the better; meaning, the less racially northwest-European in appearance, the better. Since right-wing Calvinist-type U.S. American Protestants descended mostly from people of that funny, i.e., strange, part of the globe, northwest Europe, mostly from English stock. And the English were the most flesh-freaked of all Europeans, as E. M. Forster had loved to remind.⁴

A statue of two aroused white youths, therefore, naked and modeled on a known young white couple from Florence, N.J., could never, ever, have done anything but trigger the by now virtually genetically-endowed ‘haunt reflex’, or ‘startle reflex’, possessed by certain funny kinds of censorious, sex-condemning Americans, obviously. While a statue of two aroused Mexicans, on the other hand, a swarthy young man and woman with Aztec facial and body features, might actually have passed censors of the ilk of the Lorenzos, especially if the young man had worn a big neck chain with obvious medallion of the Virgin of Guadalupe, distancing himself even further from people like the Lorenzos. But not, of course, if the statue were ‘erected’ in Florence, N.J. Only if it were ‘stood up’, ‘parada’,⁵ as Dr. Lorenzo joked in raw Mexican Spanish, along East River Drive in Philly, maybe. But it would have to face the river, not the Drive, so that most flesh-freaked U.S. American Christians like the Lorenzos would never be forced to suffer the disgrace of actually seeing everything ‘all hanging out’ there as they drove by on East River Drive: just two harmless naked asses. And the juicy fronts of the couple would be seen only by young male college crews team-rowing skulls in the Schuylkill River.

Dr. Lorenzo could go on for hours on the theme, actually, icing the cake thickly the whole time with double entendres. And he did in fact present on one occasion a fall-on-the-floor funny ‘lecture’ on the subject at Southern Cal in the late nineties, in the USC film department. Which a USC undergrad then published on the internet, the Dr.’s transparencies of stone and steel disgrace and all, having videotaped the whole lecture. And Dr. Lorenzo never objected to the use of his material in such appropriate ways. The web page, he said, was presented in good taste and with a noble goal. For the Dr. saw his purpose in the world, by the late nineties, as being to prod – in any way he could – any and all sincere and intelligent discussion of whatever kind that might be needed to keep the world from blowing itself up. And he was convinced that the emotional disarray produced in the Western world by catching sight of real, fleshy human-mammalian genitalia, most notably in extremist Protestant and very conservative Catholic U.S. American ‘holdout households and other uptight hangouts like churches and church colleges’, had a whole heck of a lot to do, as he said, with the entire world’s constantly hovering on the brink of final annihilating explosion.  

173.  the Lorenzos accept punishment for so much questionable fun

Anyway… the Lorenzos were surprisingly won over by the story of ‘Delkrayle’. And fascinated, too, to get the details, they assumed, of the affair their son must have had with ‘that Indian girl in the sari’ he had brought elegantly sidesaddle on his Honda 50 all the way across the Ben Franklin Bridge and up Route 130 to Florence that one unusual day several years ago. It was best – though sad – that a relationship ‘like that’ had broken up fast. But they were thrilled with the writing, so thrilled they bowed their heads to accept their deserved and allotted, even scheduled punishment of depression, ‘like an old married couple running for joint papal sanctification’, as Rev said drily.⁶ The promised dose of misery was all the more warranted now, though, in all seriousness. For they knew that they were not supposed to have enjoyed ‘risqué sex’ that much, least of all in a son, and even less in front of each other. So Mortimer’s perfectly designed, scheduled punishment for them had to come swiftly, of course. He knew, apparently, that they would need it quick! Before they could ever go on and enjoy any more such chaff. And more such ‘chaff’ he did indeed have in store.

The notebook entry chosen as punishment described once again the depression which had plagued mj lorenzo since early college. It showed he suffered from two things, (1) an ongoing and seemingly unavoidable overdose of protracted formal higher education due to a feeling that he had to do what was expected, including at times even his perceived mission of saving the world by writing; and (2) an under-dose of real get-down, earthy, natural, simple human life; that is, love, friendship, and natural, friendly, flowing, lovely relationship of every natural human kind. And it showed the depression, depersonalization and dehumanization that had resulted from all of that.

Despite any contrary appearance, I experience life as a lack, as something incomplete. I am not content. One could hardly say that I am happy although I am not at the moment seriously depressed and have given up my bitter passing comments to contemporaries.

Each moment is experienced as a deficiency of something, a premonition that something is wrong and may never be right. Each event that fills time, one upon the other, I realize is slightly pointless. My friend comes to my room and I attempt to make conversation. This is in order that everything will not collapse about me. My natural tendency would be to hurt him, to annoy him by being no fun whatever. I feel that our conversation is not complete and justifiable in itself. Why have we done it? Why am I talking about what does not interest me?

I am slightly uneasy, slightly tense. My mind is not fully given to this conversation, although it’s not busily occupied anywhere. It is diverted into the channels of a vague anxiousness, and only a part of it remains for handling passing circumstances such as friends. Being too conscious of its activity it does the activity only haphazardly, half-heartedly, awkwardly. The rest of it is grieving vaguely over its own almost-death.

The windblown cold falling snow outside my window does not belong with the boisterous screaming music that comes through my walls from the radio, or with the voice of someone next door nasalizing with it. Planes droning overhead confess to me that their white snow world is not pristine. It is not the soft mother we might want. A white snow-laden steeple-punctuated dorf⁷ in central Europe may be mother to someone. The elegant, centuries-permanent kirche,⁷ just as reassuring, is the certainty of what will be next for each peasant. None of these is mine now. I have no church here, no seeming mother, home, town, country, or permanent set of close friends. Wherever I am now, it is by my self.

There are always those things I cannot express, these things. They line up and stand between the outside world and me in the form of a wall. I give them a sign of recognition, tolerate their standing there, but they do not go away, and each time I try to pass around or through them I feel my efforts falling back. Enough of my striving gets through to people that my isolation is not disclosed acutely, or therefore, painfully. Only an astute person, one who has experienced what I have, may realize. Others will draw their conclusion: he is a quiet person; he could not hurt anyone; he seems to think a lot.

While all of this is taking place, I am holding something else back. I have not tried to dig it out, but I feel that it is there. For as I now re-read the above, I begin to feel a certain wasted-ness. I do not feel it passionately. I have played the tape backward, and transferred to paper the thoughts of three days. But where am I? I am not in those thoughts. I am a machine that has operated at given hours and tried to give the proper answers on request. I will never go berserk; I will always do my duty. I am fairly predictable, for I conceal my unpredictability. And I lack passion, am uninteresting, and a bore.

But this is all a part of my relentless illness. One day soon I will have to stop writing and resume my professional martyrdom. I chose a half-unwanted vocation and am caught in the contradiction which resulted. I shall go to sleep late and rise early. The ringing alarm… I will not want to get up on that day, but I shall pretend to want to. As I close the door behind me I shall secretly rejoice that I have beaten half the world to work. Being a doctor must not be a bad job, after all, I shall think. It’s better than suicide probably, and it gives me a head start on the rest of the world in the morning. I can suffer the drudgery of learning to listen to hearts and look into eyes, and allow it to fill up begrudged afternoons.

But I shall not be able to defend one single thing that I do. I will merely act now, and disparagingly, in the half-hearted hope that later an explanation might arise. My faith is in myself, my future self.

I might even believe as well in my present self, its capability of bringing me to a later resolution, or directing me towards it at least. I will grant it its difficulties, having as it does a limited time in which to work. Its time has been sacrificed to a medical vocation, perhaps itself a waste of time, but an investment on which I cannot bear to lose the down payment, for I am afraid it would be a mistake of equal size to that of having made the down payment to start with. I simply do not know. I feel that I do not know, cannot understand, can not resolve these thoughts. And right now I dispassionately do not care.

Meanwhile I go on. I do not bathe myself tonight because I did so this morning. I shall study medicine a bit more in order that the day may have been balanced. Too much dreaming and not enough work may be embarrassing later. How do I accept all of this? How can I endure it? Mountains are gleaming in the distance. Tiny villages are peaceful in Baden-Württemberg.⁷ A hundred thousand peasants here and there all feel their life is right. I feel that I have been born to a life that is wrong, which I must bear, either temporarily or permanently. I feel that to happily enjoy a fine mountain or a small town will be a deception of my self, an escape from the matters that must be settled before I may enjoy life peaceably. But I fear that the matters may never be settled and that beauty, instead of making me happy, will make me angry as it conspires to tantalize me. Does it want me to believe that the world’s, or my, life may be, like itself, beautiful? Have my happy moments not been mere escapes from a fundamental anger?

'The doctor is well aware that the patient needs an island and would be lost without it'.              C. G. Jung⁸

I do not know whether to attempt to be “normal” or to resign myself to eccentricity. Perhaps it is wanting both that causes the cleft. I totter daily, momentarily. I am one on the outside and the other, in; I have sought to model the inside on the outside. If the outside slipped toward inside-like-ness, I sought further outside myself for the tiny 'island' ⁸ of remaining sense on which I could found my outward behavior; and started over. At times I was closer to wandering onto the ice and dropping in.

Hell may be like this.

And then, as his new roller coaster technique required, Mortimer returned to his ‘new book’ without warning.

Mj was no lady-killer. He was a would-be lady-killer, however, just emerging from the pages of his Old Testament, textbooks, and Kierkegaard, who from reading and watching television had learned to smile and act like one. He was a fake, trying to require that a dream become real, but having to accept – yet could he? – an interim substitute in the shape of a daydream. But in truth he was less and less content with such a solution and wanted to explore the waking world. Delkrayle was his second attempt at a love. The first was her everyday stateside roommate.

It was mj, visiting the Pocono Peace Corps camp,⁹ who sensed the pique of the rejected princess in Delkrayle and persuaded her to go to the movies. He insisted that he would buy her fancy ice cream. It didn’t matter if ‘they’ wanted her with them or not. He did. That mattered. He wanted her with him. He was growing intense. He was about to detect that he might care, or rather not to detect at all, but only to act as if he cared somewhat, discovering it only later back at school when she was still at the Indian Summer green and yellow mountain camp of cool fresh weekend air, lake, and woods, and all that Philadelphia and he could not be, on a hot humid pharmacology-lab Indian Summer day, realizing that he did care.

Delkrayle (pouting): I won’t go on their silly outing, the silly Americans.

Mj (would-be lady-killer, smiling): Why won’t you come? Come be with me, then. I’ll buy you ice cream afterward.

Delkrayle: I don’t want to see “The Pawnbroker,”¹⁰ misery and hate. I’d rather stay here by myself and think, for a change, in peace.

Mj (the doctor): You know, Delkrayle, it seems to me you’re hurt about something.

Delkrayle (silent… a look of… embarrassed exposure, as her eyes meet for the first time his; not with love; yet): What makes you say that?

Mj (acting himself for once, stumbling into a confession): At meals, and around the camp. I can’t keep my eyes off your beautiful sari [your beautiful you] and long dark hair. I want to touch it. How about if we both stay here and talk?

Delkrayle (rebounding): That’s all-right. You can come to my room if you like and look at some pictures of my family. (She was homesick and thinking of India, no doubt, not of mj, who knew nothing of it.)

Mj (the doctor-suitor blissfully trailing the Florentine lady-patient to her boudoir, dizzy from mystery, not subjection; but where was the mystery in a few photographs, a sari, long dark hair, and an Indian-British accent, when medical school left hardly a minute to discover it?)

Delkrayle (in her room, which was her roommate’s as well, overlooking the lake and campgrounds from the second story, she suddenly found herself with nothing to say; flushed and embarrassed, in her room, with a strange foreigner she had too carefully watched since his first weekend visit to the camp, she located the photographs and sat down next to him on the bed): These are my parents.

Mj (her roommate had kindly ‘warned’ him that Delkrayle was a ‘trickstress’; did her parents’ eyes reveal it? Here was her sister, less attractive. The subcontinent was throbbing with dusty life. He wanted to study maps, climb to hill stations in the sun, attend her family’s parties. He would sink into the Indian way of life like Siddhartha in the Garden of Kamala, and forget the tedium of classrooms and nostrums. He was almost overwhelmed, mj was): Delkrayle... aren’t you homesick?”

I don’t know where to take them from this point.

I know that mj would have dropped the subject in order to keep his visit simple. More than likely they talked about India and Philadelphia, their knees bumping, or their fingers, in passing photographs. And one time her hair may have brushed his shoulder without his feeling or knowing, except to scent a presence. He looked into her eyes occasionally, and she into his more often, no matter whether he looked toward her or across the room somewhere or out and down at the camp. She seemed to wait with her eyes for him to define himself summarily, irrevocably. But he owned no photographs, and no more than a few stories to tell, and seemed to prefer for the moment to hear from her and feel remote.

Altogether the meeting must have ended indecisively, and today I am trying to discover what happened. Where did the Western-world doctor go once he reached the room? His spirit and will must have flown out the window and drowned in the lake, following a few practiced moments of doctor’s concern for her mood. It appears he was suspicious of something or other, but I have yet to learn of what.

Plus the due punishment:

What is the smile?

I realize the smile is not mine. It glowed ten blocks on West Philly’s Market Street and five on 40^th, and has not died. A shock might shake it off. I sense the incongruity of appearance. The smile is… a lie? But not premeditated, nothing that should justify contrition. But all the same, was it not shame over such a smile that for an instant… spread down my face? Tugging at the corners of my mouth, relaxing my cheeks and progressing to my shoulders to free them?

What is the feeling of disjunction, the feeling that my flesh is pale, my face is young, and I am being seen but discounted? Yet: the look of composure, the look of innocence when passing near without a word, concealing a rapid pulse and a frightened brain. The stiffness in a neck, if it were studied at such a moment, would reveal that there is not innocence, but fear. And guilt.

What is the disjunction when I wave and smile? I know that she might as well be dead, or an Orinoco Indian, black hair or blonde. She and her hair could go to perdition. I’m not involved.

The city looks like the pieces left by disaster, dropped back into rows somehow, but the parts still out of place. Railroad bridges full with working trains canopy the main street. Georgian massive Provident Mutual is dropped in the heart of slum. The sidewalks of Market Street, second broadest street in the so-called brotherly-love city, are un-peopled, windows boarded or dark as if either the wideness or decadence belonged elsewhere. The air is crisp. The sun comes in under the clouds and the wind comes with it up your back.

If the storm is over, then why is the city pavement full of trash? Are they the small pieces that could not fit, that cover the ground? Have the clouds married the sun and dropped confetti? Or is it the end of civilization, the rear end, sitting in motionless distress. Indisposed.

What is the disjunction of wanting but fearing, wanting but fearing… each thing, each person; each action: torn by this. What is the disjunction… between the idea and the actuality, between the emotion and the response…?

The smile is the brief finger-hold on reality. The disjunction is the need for this, just this, as you compare this with all the rest. This is the disjunction.

And then again more ‘book’, and so on….:

What Delkrayle surely knew but did not hint that she was troubled by, was that mj was seeing her roommate. What mj knew but never admitted to her or himself that he was troubled by, was that Delkrayle knew, but never hinted that she was bothered by, the fact that he was seeing her roommate; that he had come that weekend to see her roommate, but the reason he was free now was that her roommate was tied up in a meeting; and that he was obviously torn between his feelings for her… and for her; that that was why his mind had wandered and disappeared for whole parts of minutes at a time; and that – probably – he should have liked it to remain this way so he would never need to make a commitment either way.

But on the contrary if he could have pulled these two into one, he might have been ecstatic with the solution. One was the logical sensible prosaic arrangement for him, the other an absolute dream. One was a little too easy for him, the other was much too hard. One went beseeching to his feet, the other rushed to his head. This was one situation where Kierkegaard’s ‘Either/Or’ could not apply. He wanted both. One would serve him. The other he would serve like a pageboy. And who would not serve a princess?

Did he serve her then, when her roommate went back to her home near the western mountains and he found himself on his way to see Delkrayle finally this time with no complication? Did he serve her whenever he tried to steer the car and she grabbed him around his waist and bit his ear? Did he serve her whenever she praised him for this or that, or built him up to be (only possibly) broken down later, or flattered him in order to (also only possibly) hurt him later, and slowly collected her overpowering world around him only to…

Then why did he suspect that he had only served her? I suppose for the reason… that he had.

…………………………

Even though, Rev, I may have left the impression that I am spending the winter with Chipewyan, in truth I’m spending it with myself. There are places in the cabin where I can get away from him and thoughts of him and from everything. There is an extra room with a bed where I can read the notebooks and conjure my fantasies. Sometimes I retreat in my mind to the outhouse. Sometimes I walk outside, not knowing for sure where the island stops and the ice begins. But it’s all the same, a pristine cold glassy whiteness, diffusely reflected, and I am alone. I can cut myself holes in the ice and fish for food. I can check the nearby traps, and I do so mechanically on periodic trance-like trips in all directions.

For the longer lines I need a backpack, several days, and a vague sense of the terrain and of who might befriend me on the way. And on one of these trips through the woods I have come to Fort Smith and returned the visit paid me by Chipewyan’s granddaughter, Dlune. We have slept in the same room. Need I say more? We didn’t sleep at all. I didn’t, and I believe from her breathing and turning that neither did she. She cooked our breakfast and I continued on my startled way. What does her warm brown body have to do with the trap lines and my bleeding fingers, the snow and the ice, or the absence of birds singing, or the gray poverty of sunlight? I am seeking within myself the means for uniting these worlds.

Girl, I will check my lines more often. I will fit you into them whenever I can. I will cross and realign the route so that you are at every paltry junction, at the end of every semi-dark day. So that you can help me by removing my snowshoes and heavy parka, for which I have temporarily traded in my sleeping bag, so that in time I can reverse the interchange, inviting you to share my special sleeping bag with me. Will you like it, girl? Will you come as easily to that world as I go to yours? Where do you attend school? How do you live your afternoons? How did you learn to make breakfast like that?

…………………………………………….

My mind is compressed, my shoulders stiffly strained, and my face hides a pained frown beneath a Mona-Lisa-like peacefulness. As I sit apparently comfortable, I am un-relaxed, respiring rapidly. My mind writhes, but not this time in the centers of intellect. Somewhere beneath the conscious cortex is a mass of currents seething in their efforts to get out. “In which way is this energy to be turned?”

A hundred thoughts pass. I can sense them turning just beneath my conscious surface. Many thoughts on many subjects, both sides of many arguments fight for the single pathway to daylight. But I, myself, whether controllably or uncontrollably I cannot tell: I am not letting any one win.

Where does the capacity to write and think like this come from? For, as it proceeds, it senses that something beneath it far more powerful and important is about to depart the womb, rupture into life and be born.

How is it possible to feel like dying, to be aware of it, to not wish otherwise, to not have energy to alter it? White walls, bland radio music, gray dusty world of things and people. Not a spark. No hope.

Sweaty pits, greasy hair, an eyelash irritating my sclera, unable to remove it as long as I am writing, I drool.

The perfect act goes on and no one knows the actor is dead.

I hold my eyes open and no one around me suspects….  …except my hired friend.

………………………………………………………….

I can see, Rev, that I am going to discover that this Dlune is a princess; because her father was a chief. The one whom I will have treated like a slave, and who will have served me ably as a slave (she is in fact half Slave tribe and half Hare-Chipewyan, but was raised in a Blackfoot tribe), is really anything but a slave, though she will wait a long while before telling me that. Why: because it is only important to her for the moment to serve me? No, for that will make her unattractive. Because, among the Indians there is no honor in being a Slave chief’s daughter? No. That’s a self-deception. Because, she knows I am not ready to handle her as a princess, that were I to know, I should explode and lose my way, that I would flounder without my supposed superiority, and that only in time would all of this be not so, in order that I could more gradually adjust to the painful duality which she represents and truly is, a duality I could not accept until I had accepted the duality of myself….?! Yes. That’s getting really close.”

Dlune: Mj, I’m a princess. (Mj has been telling about Delkrayle.)

Mj: I know, baby, you are a princess, thanks, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t. How could I enjoy the flowers without you? How could I even sleep without you? And why else would I feel so much like a prince?

Dlune: Mj, won’t you slap the mosquito on my back? Here, did you want peanut butter or cheese in your sandwich? Mj, I don’t know how this might strike you, but: I AM a princess.

Mj: Peanut butter. (‘slap’; a long pause; and less dramatically) I know. Your father was a Slave chief.

Dlune: Oh, mj! I knew you were ready for the truth. Now I’m happy. (cries)

Mj: Really, baby, it doesn’t matter any more. Don’t cry. Here’s the wrapper. In a setting like this big things suddenly become small – the olives are rolling for the cliff, Dlune – and small things big. You got ‘em…

Pause. Both breathe heavily following rescue of the olives. And they think while taking in the setting, which consists of a grassy alpine meadow of about thirteen acres, surrounded on three sides by high rising cliffs, while the fourth drops steeply to the Peace River.

Within barely twenty yards of them amble a family of elk, and further away in all directions are grazing elk and buffalo, many with young. A spectacular spring waterfall pours over the rear cliff, and its stream bubbles twenty yards from them in another direction. Flowers speckle the lawn and tickle their picnicking calves. The sky is blue with a yellow sun, and Dlune is wearing a green, yellow and blue cotton dress and a matching Indian bead necklace touched with red. Her hair is lazy and black and her face is beginning to assume the dignity of an Indian princess.

Mj (interrupting the silence of the waters): Dlune. Let’s study the flowers.

There is commotion in the grass which the animals accept. They can’t miss the ensuing nude dash of two brown bodies toward the plunging waterfall and into it or the shrieks that accompany all this. And in time they are left alone again to contemplate the flowery peace.

…………………………..

A ‘crisis theology’ is a system of thought designed to deal with critical events in men’s lives, not with everyday situations. That is how I like to use the term anyway. I believe Reinhold Niebuhr first invented the term to describe Karl Barth’s theology, which may have been, they said, well suited for unusual times like wars and revolutions but was insufficient for guiding everyday men.¹¹

And I have discovered another type of ‘crisis theology’ related to this one. It belongs to the type of person who can deal with people only when they are under stress and in need of help. It knows how to stoop the knee and bow the pitying head, shaped in profound understanding. “The Rock during times of crisis,” it is called. In reality, however, it is inability to react emotionally to great human need. It is lack of compassion, lack of a sense of what being daily human means. How is it that people will seem to appreciate the act nevertheless? Could they not sense the separation, the schism between the real and the unreal, the natural and the unnatural, the felt and the thought?

A person with such a theology may want to become a priest or preacher, or even a revolutionary. He may feel his calling to bow the pitying frame and stretch the soothing hand. He is well suited for baptizing; and for blessing marriages, for raising the benedictory palm, for Sunday mornings thumping the pulpit with clenched fist and later at the door shaking everyman’s outstretched hand. His theology and politics contain concise interpretations of all imaginable crises, to the last detail of which he must faithfully adhere, remaining therefore at peace and emotionally vapid during these great, or potentially great, moments in his and his people’s lives. And his feigned emotion will forever be an act of generosity.

Wanting to be a doctor at all betrays a ‘crisis theology’, but wanting to be a psychiatrist especially, as I do… Could it mean that? Able to sympathize with only (mental) ‘disease’. Not able to enjoy a healthy natural give-and-take with others, or to touch their flesh and help it live, or to make fleeting acquaintances pleasurably. To require longstanding relations, chronic pre-planned crisis, the distance of a desk between, the contact of minds and not bodies…. Are these not symptoms in themselves? What is that restlessness I feel when I think of those in this profession?

I fear a kind of ‘crisis stagnation’. I have seen mistaken ways and views and the unhappiness about them. I have suspected a tendency to perpetuate, to languish, and to not think or ask, and most of all, to not do.

……………………………………………

I have also learned to reason as follows, Rev: I have exchanged my sleeping bag for a parka and bed. If Dlune helps me off with my parka and into my bed, then won’t I in turn want to help her off with her parka and into my bed? Thus my words of deduction must bring me face to face with a fleshy truth: that to be loved is still not so great XX#!%X as to love.”

……………………………………………

I am not going to the discourse with my confessor-friend. I am sitting in the big bed in my room, my denuded room. For yesterday I became resolute, tore myself from my bed, and ripped the silly maps of North America down from the walls, threw the three scenes of Canada’s Rockies in their box, and hid a dozen of my most disgusting books in the closet. I even used some old Bibles and Sartre to prop up the center of my sagging mattress from below. In short, I executed a mild revolution. Such a revolution is superficial, but it may offer me a chance to think clearly. These books and maps and pictures exercise subtle controls on our lives. They hang over our heads and sit looking at our waists and demand that we remember the past. Our rooms become places in which it is only appropriate to read and re-read the same old books.

I need to be reminded of the present, not the past or future. I have been living in past and future tense for a revolting lifetime. Notice, too, that the past and future were always absent geographically: they were in India, Baden-Württemberg, or Peace River country; or worse yet were in a fantasy world of “religious” notions up in the sky. And the stinking paradox is this, that: these un-real places were most present here in my most-present room; or wherever my room might have been, wherever I could be alone with the past and future. Which is not to say that when I left the room I went out to reality. Nor is it true that the reality-present did not impinge on me here in the room. For if the past and future are present, they have to be present in the present. It is not possible to be anywhere but where you are when you think it. But on the other hand it is possible to wish or hope or worry about the past and/or future, letting the present and then the future slip by nebulously into the past. Then you can only look at what is past. And you can look at it through various color filters. You can play with it as a toy, manipulate it, dissect it, interpret its symbolic inferences, like Charlie Brown¹² on his back ineptly reading a cloud, until you are dizzy and drained because there is so little substance there to handle. And while you’ve tried, a few more inchoate clouds, indifferent wisps, of future have drifted by the present into the plaything past to make your efforts more abhorrent. The past then consists really of only empty present and future. And the present in which you consider this fact consists only of empty past and future. And you can look to the future if you choose. But you are likely to expect that it will only be more of the same empty present and past. For only the present can be felt. And what is not felt is empty.

But the present may also be empty, as I’ve tried to explain. For instance: I stated that leaving the room would not return me to reality, any more than being here could require my separation from it. Because, if I leave the room and step into the hard cold concrete world, don’t I take my room with me, with its four walls and their maps, pictures, and shelves? And as I follow my usual route, don’t they trail along with me on all four sides with floor and ceiling? And as I tour the white sterile-hospital world and even speak to a “friend” or two, are the walls not there with their fears, wishes, and memories, as if I were a patient being wheeled on a litter under light anesthesia, and the “friend” was a narcotic specter who pierced my walls and left me, unnoticed? Or he may have thought that I was the specter; for, as he is now deciding, he was touched by nothing.

Ha-ha! There go I with my four-walled room, bed, books, garbage and Canadian maps enclosed, like a surrealistic circus through the snow. Can you see what all this hides as I clown by? Does the masked expression on my face describe the box I am in, the flat walls you can only see if you study me? Can you sense that I am even short of breath from the weight, the stiffness and stuffiness; that it presses in on me with physical force until I frown and frustrate? Now do you understand why I am nervous to the breaking point and must return to my room in a panic to catch my breath? How can I get out? Do you think that at a time like this I can concentrate on the hospital or on the lofty ideals proposed in a discourse? What appeal could scientific and religious maxims, lost in their matrix of past and future and book-bound fantasy, have for me now? I am not rejecting them intellectually. I am just despising them in my heart. For now I prefer my little stage cubicle. Even though it is not entirely unreal, it is less real than human people. It is even less real than God. But it is more real than any maxim. And for the time being I and my box prefer to perpetuate this condition. I can flatter myself more easily this way.

Now can you see why I have cleaned my walls bare? All that remains on them are shadow silhouettes of goose-neck lamps and bottles, and an extension cord dangling from the room’s only outlet in the ceiling. You don’t think I can fashion a pantomime from electric cords, whiskey bottles, and stark goose-neck lamps!

 Watch out!

But it was a desperate futile gesture, this surgical debriding of my room.¹³

I am angry because I can not focus Jesus Christ onto this moment. Besides, if I should try, I might succeed to my humiliation. I was taught once that at a time like this he cannot help except in the form of a flesh-and-blood person. You won’t try to tell me that the form of his human person nineteen hundred and thirty seven years ago could break down my walls now. And either that teacher was wrong, or I am triumphant, for there is no person in here now but myself, and that finally settles my claim that I am utterly alone…. most of the time.

Can you imagine how I should communicate? I feel that no one respects this world of mine or divines its peculiarity. I am unusual! I can empathize with the esoteric writers of my day! Is my every day not esoteric? I despise my peers and teachers, their books and the outlines of their habitat, as mundane and un-savable. I want to owe my time to myself-in-my-room: my room, my box, my cubicle. Here, where I can think and be alone, all alone. Here where I can create life, manipulate it, describe it, and interpret it. I can lie on my bed and deplore it. I love this. I love the pain in this life, the colorless pain that reminds me I am barely alive. I love the new barrenness of the walls. I love the emptiness outside the window. I hate the world, and here is where I can hate it best. Here is where I have the time to ponder it. I love it! I love to hate the world. I like to think of the pain of my poor communication and communicate it. This is my life. I may make it impossible to understand, and that may comfort me.

How can I ever leave this room again and reach out? Don’t they understand that I, I have become a reclusive self-disguised Artist? I can communicate only from here in my room. My excuse for not communicating outside is that such is not my taste or talent. I am not adept at describing or altering the progress of winter or the smoggy outline of Philadelphia, so I will not try. And I cannot love. But I can sit, lie, wander about in my room and create here, here create the correction, the communication, the clowning, and the love I long for that will remain unknown to me when I go out there. Disgustingly I flatter myself. Ugh. Ugh. Disgust and scorn and self-hate! What do I care if nobody discovers me? I despair of the possibility. What if I am dispensable? What if, no matter how well I describe myself, I am neglected? Well, disgust, despair, and hate. Let them throw me out. I expect no more or less. I can go back to becoming professional. Maybe that alone will be my calling, though it remain an act of duty and not of love.

174.  and at the end of the wildly up and down ride the biggest shock of all

From the bed of:  DR. M. J. LORENZO

Dear Rev,

I know this will upset you after all I’ve written for months and months. But I feel I must tell you the real truth, that Chipewyan’s granddaughter, Dlune, is a practical nurse at the hospital where I am paralyzed, entombed in a total-body cast. And Chipewyan comes to calm me the nights I’m most lonely, the ones she’s not on duty on my floor and is working a double on another. Because when she’s off at night, she sits with me herself.

And also, that I’m on the ‘surgery-orthopedic’ floor in a hospital outside Glacier Park, because they decided not to send me to a mental clinic across the mountains. But I’ll be released soon and will be out of reach by the time you read this and try to write. I need to be left alone a little longer, so I can start over.

The crash was a disaster. But I’ve had time to recoup and I think I’m ready for action that I don’t want you to interrupt. And she knows what that will be, when I emerge from my straight-jacket cocoon and into the world of the living flesh, hers and mine.

The rest has been fantasy, I admit, as it occurred to me here on my back since the first envelope, which Dlune mailed to Inuvik to a Hare friend of Chipewyan’s, who mailed it to you from there, and so on, to give you the slip. I never left the country, you see. It was all complete wonderland and trickery, based on partial fact, and on the possessions truthfully left me, the books, journals, gear, and so on.

The sleeping bag I said I walked in last summer represented the cast in my mind, and I doffed it to pretend I had left my creaking inertia behind.

“Jack” and “mj” are allusions to my own self.

The police took the photos of the Buick that are enclosed, and the smile was to hide the pain.

I crashed at the summit of Going-to-the-Sun Highway. Remember that glamorous spot? I was looking at the scenery and handling the two women at once that I’d brought along and have dreamt about since. Neither back seat nor front could contain their demands. And now they’re dead, poor things.

And do you know what else? They’d have been glad to take me with them, too. My body was sapped of strength when we reached the pass… and the sky fell.

Who time-bombed the motor, misjudging her exit?

I might have saved them…

Now I remember details. The crash of glass. The bodies in avalanche lilies, mangled. The car with wheels whistling in air, steaming and groaning. The smell of gas, then of gas dripping, everything about to light in flames. The utter silence which dropped after that like a death sentence, un-appealed until today.

Because all noise left my life. Traffic; voices; harangues, jets, radio; rock and roll; television. In my room I have forbidden all sound but the soft conversation of Chipewyan and his granddaughter. And I’ve long since been moved to the end of the hall, far from patients and nurses, to a bed where I can look out a window all day at a frozen lake and peaks in Glacier Park.

I think Chipewyan said they towed the car to Eureka. But I don’t understand why they left me in it so long as to take my picture… Or how, if it burned…

(Later:) In truth, Rev – and I only realize it now – I could never have imagined any of this before. The nightmare I had of the crash did not come this close to the truth. Only certain time periods have been accessible. The distant past. The present here in the room. The uncertain future. But now the last year is beginning to answer to my searching.

How can I tie it all together without the essential piece that is still just a blurred fragment of a suspicion? I need every bit of what I can get and more, in order to rise out of this unholy cast!

The doctors said my bones were healing slowly since my spirits were in disrepair. But the X-rays are showing more callus as of this month.

Come on, you phosphate salts! Get me out there to that soul-setting sunshine. Spring is coming. The lakes and rivers are going to melt, and I want to be there when it happens, in the flesh and in the spirit.

I’ve taken to drinking largish amounts of milk to get the protein and calcium I’ll need to handle Dlune. I exercise my toes; and my right wrist, index finger, and thumb are overdeveloped due to writing. I likewise accept the milk of human kindness: from her. I can’t talk, can barely move my lips, and have to communicate with written notes. And my new friends have given me paper notepads, every single sheet of which is respectfully stamped: ‘FROM THE BED [not ‘desk’ or ‘office’] OF DR. M. J. LORENZO’. Inimitably cute: right?

But this part is true: Dlune and I are going to climb the Peace in a canoe when I’m released from here, if her granddaddy approves. We’ve talked about it, she aloud, and I with all the ingenuity and persuasion remaining in my eyes and right hand…

Here’s a sample of an evening we spend together. She… enters my room, dark flesh, dark hair trailing, dark eyes. Fresh from a day of succor in another part of the hospital. I follow her liquid progress with my eyes, past the bureau and the mirror without get-well cards, past the grey steel foot of the bed beyond a mound of white stiff plaster, which is me, past the steaming radiator and the (sometimes steaming) bedpan, with which she sometimes helps me (and more), to finally stand warmly between me and my view of the tips of distant mountains, distracting me into the very here and now, waiting for me to respond.

And can I reject the first flower to bloom in spring?

Not me.

Warmly I ask for the bedpan she just passed.

And after this strange intimacy we feel even more electrochemically bound than before, and she announces to me, ‘Mj’…

I write: ‘Dlune-tta-naltay….’.

I confess that’s her complete name. She is ‘Breast-full-of-rats’, or ‘Rat-breast’, or I suppose more loosely, ‘Rat-woman’. Just ‘Dlune’ in Canadian government archives. And the spelling is French-Indian, from the book of Indian tales by Petitot. She doesn’t know how to spell her full name in the original, since her people had no alphabet; so she has to accept this paper compromise.

“Accept it! She’s palpitating after it. She gives me milk through a straw and I accept it.

I, because of the way her name sounds in English, prefer her Indian-French name.

I write, occasionally stroking her eyes with mine: ‘Dlune. Please sit on the edge of the bed. It won’t hurt me the least little bit. Please let me hold your hand!’

For this I have to lay down my pen, and we just look at each other a while, and hold hands, and our palms become sticky, and so do a lot of other parts of me, as they must her.

Eventually I break this up by writing again: ‘Dlune’, which really literally means ‘Rats’, but she doesn’t realize it yet. (Why won’t she communicate with her grandfather on more important levels?) ‘Dlune, I missed you today. I thought of you all day, looking at the mountains. A flock of Canada geese flew past. Do you realize what that means? It means you and I must soon follow them’.

I use this primitive Indian imagery with her because it works! She responds!

’Mj’, says she, mending the fractured silence (‘Mj’ is what she calls me, for I’ve told her that if I’m ever born again from out of this cast, I want to come back as ‘mj’ and forget there was ever a Mortimer): ‘I have to ask my grandfather. You know that’!

I grab my pen. ‘Well, ask him, then’, I scribble. ‘What are you waiting for? Break-Up? I’ll be out of here in three or four weeks, they say’.

I think about the time schedule a moment, attempting to bite the pen, and decide to leave it all somewhat vague; so I write:

‘Soon after that we must go on our trip up the Peace, and we have to start getting ready now. I can’t stand the uncertainty of Chipewyan’s hung up approval. He might suspect your sewing a tent like that – day in and day out – if you don’t explain it. Not to mention: a double sleeping bag. I mean: ask him’.

I feel a belated need to soften all this somehow, so I look into her eyes and write: ‘Please, Dlune, my lovely Rat-breast’ (I cringe when I see it on paper; but it works, on special occasions), ‘I’m getting impatient’!

She looks at me with sympathy. But she is troubled by the expression, ‘hung up’. She fears it’s an American expletive.

’ASK CHIPEWYAN’, I scrawl violently, and she gets the message.

’Yes, mj’, she reacts with consolation, caressing my hair.

Why do I lose my temper so?

I’m choked up or something.

The intricacy of the whole crazy fantasy is starting to get to me, Rev, I think.

Something like that.

Mortimer

175.  the Lorenzos were crushed and truly furious, at long last, for the very first time

Mortimer lost his first two converts¹⁴ with this huge twist in his story, regretfully. His ‘physical location and condition’ were issues again immediately. It all sounded terribly real to Rev and Jo, a hundred times more real than anything he had written all year. He must have used ‘some literary trick’, maybe a more convincing writing style than before, they told Sammy later. For suddenly everything leading up to it seemed ‘fabricated’, leaving the paralysis-and-body-cast talk too awfully real. It gave them something, at last, very specifically unthinkable to be worried about unfortunately. And they did not need that terrible something.

Furthermore: it was especially frustrating to get this ‘letter’ – for that was its format, and it looked like a real, sincere letter, more than any of the other crazy missives – just when he had begun to sound so much better. Of course, his mood and mind did seem better; undeniably, even within the letter; and the Lorenzos ‘thanked the Lord’ for that. But what about his ‘poor body’, locked inside a ‘total body cast’? They would have to fly out there to the hospital! That was all there was to it!

But he had not named ‘the hospital’; and Rev had already called Montana seeking it, just on suspicion. And worse, their son did not want them to fly out, and had it planned, that he would be gone before they could show up. All of this was in the dang letter too!

“He was perfectly clear about it,” Jo reminded Rev plaintively and then with an exasperated sigh, once she had calmed down and remembered a few of the letter’s quieter and graver details.

And anyway, finally she realized the ‘letter’ had been written three months in the past, presumably, because they got the whole darn super-fat envelope in May, and the ‘fourth attempt’ had taken place way back in February supposedly. That cute trick really irritated them both, the three month delay in informing them about all of this. The more they thought about it, the more they worked themselves up about it.

“Three months.” said Rev, finally. “Eleven months ago, more like it. That’s when his confounded ‘Crack-Up’ was, supposedly.”

They had been dragged down a primrose path for ELEVEN months. Apparently. Who knew for sure? How many times had they been toyed with, and in how many ways? They were flummoxed absolutely for days after reading the ‘fourth attempt’. And uncharacteristically, they left the fifth, sixth and seventh ‘attempts’ all unread for weeks, untouched and sitting there on the kitchen table, right where they had last dropped them.

They spent those weeks trying to persuade themselves that physical location and condition were not the critical issue, because he had left no choice. But Rev and Jo disliked playing games with health and whereabouts, and vowed they would tell him that bit to his face if ever they ever saw him again in this life. In fact, while at it, they had lots of things to complain about. And they made a list so that they would not forget one doggone thing or item. And they got a lot of satisfaction from that list too. For, as they both thought suddenly, with more dad-blame outrage than they had gotten in touch with all year, ‘If he was feeling so darn much better, then he should be able to stand a few legitimate complaints from his own parents’.

“Right?” Rev asked.

“You may be right,” she admitted.

And this was the period of time, in fact, when the Lorenzos found themselves, for at least two weeks, surprisingly close to not caring to hear one more crazy word from that darn Mortimer John Lorenzo ‘in any of his nefarious forms’, as Rev put it so artfully. Even though an unsightly wad of unread 8½X11 white sheets of paper still sat in the envelope; and the boy had promised more after that, unbelievably. But they had lost interest in remaking mj lorenzo, son or not.

¹ This word-for-word quote of Mortimer’s from Kierkegaard presumably came from Sickness Unto Death where The Dane super-psychoanalyzed the forms, phases and stages of human despair. Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness unto Death, translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, 1941. Cf: “Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as sickness of the body consumes the body… Thus it is that despair, this sickness in the self, is the sickness unto death. The despairing man is mortally ill. In an entirely different sense than can appropriately be said of any disease, we may say that the sickness has attacked the noblest part; and yet the man cannot die…. To be delivered from the sickness of death is an impossibility, for the sickness and its torment—and death—consist in not being able to die. This is the situation in despair….” Robert Bretall, editor, A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946). Excerpts from The Sickness Unto Death are on pages 339-371, the quote here p. 344 passim. This idea of being trapped by life itself and all of its imperfections like world wars, plagues, world-weariness, imbalanced and hyperpolarized people and nations, etc., etc., was a constant theme of the ‘existentialists’. Some Kierkegaard fans among Remaking pundits have suggested that mj’s one overriding problem during his Remaking was ‘feeling trapped by life’, Mortimer having to live with Jack and vice versa, the only real escape being suicide; and instead of that the two decided to resolve their conflicts by working out a compromise. For another example of Kierkegaard’s brilliance, check the little slogan with which he opens Sickness unto Death:  “… The consciousness of sin is the condition sine qua non of Christianity.” In other words, if individual human beings had not been suffering from some sense of moral imperfection (like that which Kierkegaard felt in himself and called a ‘sickness unto death’) back around the time when Christ came into the world, Christ would have seen no need for teaching the kind of love and forgiveness which he taught.

² In Hindu belief the creator and destroyer of the universe and of everything in it, including human life itself, is a ‘god’ (in the pantheon of gods) called Shiva; he is also the god of sexuality because sex ‘creates life’. Shiva is also the god of yogic meditation; and one of Shiva’s meditations, according to Hindu mythology, and especially to the Tantric interpreters of that mythology, is a focusing-of-conscious-attention upon the feeling of one’s own and one’s partner’s arousal its very self. Not surprisingly, therefore, foreplay, love-play, sexuality and sex in the Hindu universe are all sacred. A nice description of this belief may be found in John R. Haule’s Pilgrimage of the Heart: The Path of Romantic Love (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), p. 150ff.

³ November 1960 was when John Kennedy was elected president. November 1963 was when he was shot dead during a Dallas motorcade.

⁴ In Forster’s novel, Maurice, for example, when Maurice goes to a doctor for psychological help, the doctor warns Maurice, in a very decided statement, about the English and their perennial discomfort with the human body and especially with its naturally-human animal-mammal sexuality. See E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 211 (p. 3 of Chapter 41): “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

⁵ See Appendix B for translation of Spanish language terms.

⁶ Rev was remembered for this statement later in a Notre Dame University student rag.

⁷ The German word dorf means village; and the German word kirche means church. Mortimer is returning here to the theme Jack introduced in Part I, of naive, unquestioning, Christian peasant innocence, the kind of Christianity he felt Wrigley College had been constantly promoting for its students. He is trying to communicate, by resorting to the imagery of a dorf and its kirche, a tiny rural village and the church which towers over everything, town and countryside both, the impression a young American student traveling with a friend all over Europe on a Vespa for the first time takes away from the mother country: that life at one time in the distant Western-world past must have made much more sense than it does now. Baden-Württemberg is an area of Germany which has many such villages, and which mj lorenzo visited on his grand twelve-week tour of the Continent between freshman and sophomore years of medical school, in the summer of  '65.

⁸ From Jung's "The Psychology of the Transference," (1946), which may be found in his Collected Works Vol. 16, The Practice of Psychotherapy (1954/1966), p. 374. Young mj had found the quote in the Jacobi-Hull anthology of Jung's extensive writing (see Bibliography), p. 83. A larger portion of the paragraph gives a fuller picture of what Jung meant by 'island': "...The doctor [-psychiatrist/psychoanalyst/psychotherapist] knows these well-defended zones from his consulting hours: they are reminiscent of island fortresses from which the neurotic tries to ward off the octopus. ("Happy neurosis island," as one of my patients called his conscious state! The doctor is well aware that the patient needs an island and would be lost without it. It serves as a refuge for his consciousness and as the last stronghold against the threatening embrace of the unconscious. The same is true of the normal person's taboo regions which psychology must not touch. But since no war was ever won on the defensive, one must, in order to terminate hostilities, open negotiations with the enemy and see what his terms really are. Such is the intention of the doctor who volunteers to act as a mediator. He is far from wishing to disturb the somewhat precarious island idyll or pull down the fortifications. On the contrary, he is thankful that somewhere a firm foothold exists that does not first have to be fished up out of the chaos, always a desperately difficult task. He knows that the island is a bit cramped and that life on it is pretty meagre and plagued with all sorts of imaginary wants because too much life has been left outside, and that as a result a terrifying monster is created, or rather is roused out of its slumbers. He also knows that this seemingly alarming animal stands in a secret compensatory relationship to the island and could supply everything that the island lacks." (In the case of Mortimer, the excluded and missing but essential 'animal' or 'monster' out there on -- or in, or beyond -- the water surrounding Mortimer's 'happy neurosis island', was, of course, Jack.)

⁹ Roughly between the summer of 66 and the fall of 67 mj lorenzo spent a great deal of his free time, especially weekends, with the instructors who were preparing Peace Corps Volunteer trainees for one- or two-year assignments in poor rural India. During his third year (of five) in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania (the institution which sponsored this particular India Peace Corps training program) he had been invited by another Wrigley alum to a party kicking off the training program and was drawn to it and to them from that day on. The training camp was in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains a couple of miles north of Shawnee-on-Delaware.

¹⁰ "The Pawnbroker" was an award-winning movie which came out around the time when mj lorenzo was visiting his friends on weekends at the India Peace Corps training camp in the Poconos, the camp sponsored by his school, Penn.

¹¹ The Swiss 'Neo-Orthodox' theologian, Karl Barth’s 1956 letters and addresses to prelates and laymen in the ‘Reformed’ (Calvinist) church of Hungary were published later, entitled Gegen den Ström, or “Against the Stream.” And here again he offered an attractive theology of revolution. His intention was to inspire the 1956 Hungarian freedom-fighters, many of whom were extremist-Protestant Calvinist fundamentalists, during their struggle against the communist USSR’s political and religious suppression of Hungary. Barth’s earliest attempt at trying to find a theologically correct Protestant church answer to modernist and liberal theological trends had been during the thirties when Hitler and the Nazis had attempted to re-structure the German church in a way to suit the political goals – including anti-Semitism – of ‘German National Socialism’.

¹² Charlie Brown, the central character in the 'Peanuts' comic strip world created by Charles Schultz.

¹³ When a doctor 'debrides' a wound with metal instruments, he cleans it of all useless and half-useless material that is likely to interfere with a clean rapid healing and self-repair, such as dirt, clotted blood, loose or half-loose flesh, etc., in other words, all of the trash in the wound

¹⁴  See section #166, which opens this 'Section II' of the 'fourth attempt'. Rev and Jo have grasped increasingly over the months that their son is attempting to convince them that his exact physical location and physical condition are not the central issues of his life, and not what parents should be concerned about, but rather only the state of his thinking and feeling. And by subsection  #166 of The Remaking, as we read there, they have almost fallen into the trap completely, of being 'converted' to his way of thinking, But, by the end of Section II, subsection #175, after, in other words, this letter finally explaining the alleged tragic 'reality' of his tragic physical location and exact terrible medical condition, their 'conversion' to that teaching of his, that his physical condition does not matter, comes undone; because, the details of this new story about his supposed ACTUAL tragic physical condition and location are way too upsetting for them to go along any longer with his crazy claim that they are 'not the most important thing'.