III.  Should The Remaking have stopped here?

176.  the universal reaction of ‘letdown’ after reading the ‘fourth attempt’

Loss of interest in mj lorenzo's remaking trip after reading the 'fourth attempt' would eventually be a problem reaction among pundits and high schoolers too, not just Rev and Jo.

Even the author was a bit bewildered and let down after his ‘fourth attempt’, in a way.

The common reaction of ‘letdown’ after reading the ‘fourth attempt’ came to be understood in a certain way by the pundits. It probably arose, they thought, from a normal expectation in the Western world that once the main sources of tension in a story had been resolved the story would come to an end. Everyone eventually agreed, even mj lorenzo, that the ‘fourth attempt’ resolved most of the graver kinds of tension in the story line of The Remaking. Little doubt remained that mj was finally looking more naturally human. ‘Mortimer’, too, who had been the one writing at the time, ostensibly, was startled by the loss of tension, once it hit him, actually. And he wondered how it had happened so suddenly, so early in the time structure of his ‘word-mandala’, and especially so soon after the insanity of Fort Smith. It was partly why he threw the tale of Delkrayle in at this point, to create a side plot with suspense. For the old sources of suspense seemed to be evaporating fast.

While, in the long meantime, the mandalic outline decreed by the Cryptic Triptique would require five more chapters at least.

Nobody was seduced sufficiently by the ‘side plot’ of Delkrayle either, however. The amount of suspense created by a U.S. medical student meeting an Indian princess was nothing compared with the sensation mj had caused when, as an intern, he had flipped out and cracked up. Anyone who had made it as far as the ‘fourth attempt’, said the pundits, had done so only because they had found mj’s craziness intriguing, if bizarre, and had wondered if the ‘poor, somehow likeable guy’ might pull through. Could anyone ever really recover from such an extreme breakdown? And furthermore: why would a ‘nice white doctor from a nice country town’ who cared so much about his poor dark-skinned urban ghetto patients have gone so nuts? And so, as they all had said: they had stayed around to get answers to questions like these.

Now, after the 'fourth attempt', they felt reassured mj was on his way to recovery. And so they felt like putting the book down. It was a natural reaction, said the pundits: it was bound to happen in the contemporary spirit-neglected Western world, with its passive love of gory sound bites and its constant channel-surfing of other people’s madnesses, and its perpetual laziness toward any amount of active, purposeful, self-disciplined, deep, meditative, protracted philosophical contemplation of one’s own universe, either solitary or in groups.

177.  even Mortimer is puzzled by so much success

Even Mortimer himself was bewildered at first that he felt so much better suddenly. He wondered how it had happened all at once, just simply while writing the ‘fourth attempt’, as it seemed. Even Jo had voiced, back at the end of the ‘third attempt’, what her son had felt while writing it, that things were not looking very positive at that point. Mortimer had not noticed any progress either. He was opposed to progress on principle, in fact. ‘Then what had gone wrong?’ Mortimer asked his very own Mortimer self. Where had his story line gone? Why did he sound so much better, even to himself? He actually spent many days in a row at Fort Chipewyan checking traps after this surprise, chopping and hauling wood, and thinking about nothing else but this: why was he feeling so much more ‘human and alive’?

The days had gotten a tiny bit lighter, and there had been some beautiful, spectacularly starry nights, some with moonlight, some with red and green aurora borealis, all those nights bright enough for checking traps.

Chipewyan, though shockingly mum when not story-telling, and barely causing a ripple with his personality which was quiet as intergalactic space, had made a big difference all the same, as those weeks of black and grey, bitter northern winter had dragged by. The presence of a friendly caring human being, even if silent, must have been a tonic. And his tribal myth-tales had enlivened Mortimer too, somehow. Mainstream pundits who believed their hero had spent the winter in Ft. Chipewyan, not crippled in a hospital in Montana, said the old man's woodpile and traplines would have kept Mortimer busy and moving, out of bed and outside, at least once every day. That had to be it, then: Chipewyan and his trap lines and stories.

But no. It was Dlune. That was it. Finally it hit Mortimer after several days of solid thinking and wondering, and did he ever feel stupid! Dlune had shown love for Jack and Mortimer both, impossible as it seemed and freaky as it was. And THAT had to be a heck of a formula for healing a manic-depressive’s psychosis or whatever had ailed him. He could see the cover of Science magazine: “Love: The Very Best Cure for Severely Dehumanized and Bananas Splitzophrenics.”

Dlune had actually liked, and seemingly loved, both weirdo halves of mj. And that amazingly therapeutic move of hers not only had been, but even SOUNDED LIKE IT WAS RIGHT TO HAVE BEEN, a plausible, believable, logical, realistic and unsurprising cure, if ever he had wanted to make up a fictional cure for the purpose of a story or novel; or if ever a real, healing cure might have been discovered or imagined in the history of humankind or myth, in any instance other than this incredible one of mj lorenzo’s. What an unsurprisingly perfect solution to mj’s life of grief: that a victim of a case of Severe Dehumanized Banana-splitzo-phrenia be discovered by someone capable of sincerely loving BOTH HALVES OF A BI-BODIED PARANORMAL FREAK.

Was she crazy? She didn’t seem to be; and yet: Dlune had supported ‘the whole meshuga mj lorenzo: in everything he ever freaking did’, as a man with AIDS summed it up once in a healing workshop hosted by Sammy Martinez.

178.  the ‘banana school’ of punditry

A whole so-called ‘Severely-Dehumanized-Bananas-Blitzophrenia school of punditry’, in fact, a very bizarre ‘school’ of Remaking thought, was therefore founded in the nineties on the extremely bizarre ‘shared conviction’ that Dlune ‘must have’: helped Jack escape from the hospital; harbored him for two or more deep-winter months in her family’s snow-covered, rambling, trashed-out and junked-up, husky-guarded wooden shanty compound on the edge of Fort Smith; and she must have fed and clothed and bathed and pampered and made love to him there until he had re-channeled his weird exhibitionistic and onanistic paraphilia, OR WHATEVER IT WAS. For she cared less what it was, finding Jack’s ‘incessant naked whatever’ in and around the shanty compound as hilariously entertaining as all her aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews did, ages one to ninety-nine.

Beyond agreeing on this much about Dlune and Jack, the ‘weirdo pundits’ of the banana school were split down the middle, naturally. By definition half of them said that Jack had shared his brown, be-ribbed body so completely, so intimately, and so many, many times with Dlune here and there about the freezing shanty compound, JUST TO STAY WARM, if for no other reason, that he had been absorbed by her entirely. The ‘two brown bodies’ ‘had become one flesh’ as even Jesus had said when describing what happened when woman and man made love. And so, Jack had gone with her in that manner -- as 'ONE FLESH' -- to Fort Chipewyan, when Dlune had gone there hoping to hook back up with Dr. Mortimer. And as soon as she had ‘hooked up’ with Mortimer, Jack’s body and overabundance of humanity had begun to return from inside her to join Mortimer’s weird mind, until, on exactly the one thousand and first time Mortimer and Dlune made love on that sagging bed of his, along about in May, about five minutes before spring break-up, in fact, the very last molecule of Jack’s Jackian humanity had returned to join Mortimer’s weird mind, finally, and form a new ‘mj’.

The other half of the group protested that this so-called ‘Theory No. 1’ was ‘rank’, ‘misogynist’, and ‘disrespectful of Christ’. Theory No. 1 laughed at the beautiful meaning behind Christ’s term ‘one flesh’, and saw women as ‘consuming and devouring’. Dlune, they said, had done no more than Nordic-ski with Jack to her grandfather’s, along one of Mortimer’s traplines. She had hidden Jack in the ‘outhouse’ then, behind its indoor woodpile, until she and her grandfather could think of ‘a shamanic formula for getting Jack’s dynamite body to re-connect with Mortimer’s incredible mind’. Which they had done pronto, but not before she and Jack had made love a few thousand more times waiting for Mortimer to finish his ‘Book’.

Needless to say, these two groups of pundits were forever be-nomered ‘the severely dehumanized Bananas Blitzophrenia pundits’, ‘group 1’ and ‘group 2’. And at last count in 2005, BB1’s and BB2’s were alive and well in large numbers all over the globe, even in such far-flung places as the Ryukyuk Islands, as mentioned, the beaches of Thailand and Costa Rica, the remote amber-producing jungles of Mexico’s Chiapas state, and the deeply remote savannah interior of coastal Colombia which is reachable by river launch only, all of this proven by membership websites and the subjects those sites chatted and chafed about.

And meanwhile, the whole mind-blowing MATTER of ‘transitioning from paranormal to normal’, ‘smoothly and realistically’, even ‘believably’, i.e., ‘scientifically-believably’, was said to have ‘seized and consumed’ one of the branches of Carlos Castaneda’s following too, presumed to have been holed up physically somewhere in the Sonoran desert of northwestern Mexico. The enormous matter had ‘walked off with that group of wannabe shamans in its entirety’, not scientifically-believably, of course, but ‘just paranormally’, i.e., not physically but ‘meta’-physically, for about seventeen hours, it was said, and wafted them to somewhere between Timbuktu and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, while these Castanedans had been doing peyote. Unless, of course, it had been a desert-type mirage. But they had all ‘seen and felt it’, said a website on the subject: every last one of them.   

Meanwhile, Dlune had saved mj, but ‘ruined his book’ – his story – as so many pundits would quip eventually.

179.  Mortimer defends Dlune against those who would accuse her of ‘ruining his book’

Mortimer, still in charge and control of mj lorenzo at Fort Chipewyan, found it essential to convince himself otherwise. Dlune had not ‘ruined his book’. Dlune resolved some tension in the story maybe. But she could not have ‘ruined the book’. Because ‘the book’, taken as a whole, was ‘not a story primarily, but a word-mandala’, as he insisted. And the universe of mj lorenzo had to be represented in toto before the mandala, i.e., the book, could ever be considered complete. Which meant, as Mortimer wrote to Rev, that: certain major wrinkles still had to be ironed out.

For instance, though he was giving Jack some say in the ‘fourth attempt’, and though it looked like Jack was pacified at this point in the winter, there was no guarantee he actually was pacified, until he was actually heard from ‘personally’; i.e., in person physically speaking. Jack was too wily and even violent, maybe, too husky-like to be left wandering about anywhere he wanted, and had to be brought in from the cold and encouraged to express his desires in flesh and blood. Mortimer would have to overcome his fear, and his weak way of loving from a distance, and ‘get strong’ and listen and respond, until they made peace ‘face to face’. Mortimer knew it had to happen eventually; theoretically; he was just postponing it as long as possible. He had figured this out when he had written ‘Conflict Dynamics’ in Fort Smith.

And: another piece of knowledge needed for ‘completing the mandala’, was ‘whether, or how, Mortimer and Jack would work together’. The layout had been irrevocably and correctly determined in Fort Smith by the Triptique, Mortimer reminded Rev, thereby reminding himself too, even more importantly. And that meant that a concluding ‘Part III’ was needed in which mj would operate more healthily, as ‘mj’, i.e., as Mortimer and Jack combined. His two sides had to know whether or how they would achieve unity actually, on a day-to-day basis. This was where Dlune became important, if she remained, for that was not certain yet either.

It was essential to find out how, exactly, the new mj would live with Dlune’s love on a down-to-earth everyday basis, if she ‘stuck around’, and if he wanted her to. For that was not in the bag either. But if she did stay, mere theories and generalities would not do, such as: ‘They lived happily after that’. Mandalas were always complete pictures. Healing had to be complete, too, portrayed in detail as part of the mandala, until all details of mj’s healed universe could be properly placed, and properly balanced, one force balanced against the other, with the final picture in no way mal-proportioned. Mj lorenzo was a fragile operation after so much trauma and could disintegrate within less than a chapter, if the process of healing was not completed carefully, with love and devotion to detail. The Remaking was a healing trip, a healing RITUAL, first and foremost, and a ‘story’ only secondarily. The healing ritual had to be brought to completion just like any ritual had to be followed to its end, regardless of how that impacted ‘the story’.

180.  Mortimer likens The Remaking to Holy Scripture

Wrapping up The Remaking after the ‘fourth attempt’, said Mortimer after nearly endless thought of this kind, made no more sense than ending the Bible immediately after Jesus’ birth. Nobody read the gospel of John because they ‘loved the suspense’ leading up to the crucifixion, and wanted to know ‘how it might turn out’. They read it for other, deeper, and more meaningful reasons. He complained that too many people of the Western world ‘required suspense in a book’, in order to stay interested.

With music it was different, he thought. They could listen to a symphony and enjoy it to the end, even though its structure had more to do with balance than with suspense. A symphony was a mandala in musical sound, in fact. But if you created a mandala in verbal sound, using words, if you wrote a book that was structured around balance, not suspense, nobody wanted to read it, because ‘for some dumb unknown reason’, as Mortimer thought, the public insisted a book should be held together and determined by suspense and only suspense and nothing else.

181.  modern Western civilization’s problem with sacred texts according to Dr. Lorenzo

Mortimer thought about his words, ‘dumb unknown reason’. And later, mj thought about it too, for years. The latest version of Dr. Lorenzo’s theory, as of 2005, after it had percolated and brewed in his nervous system for thirty-four whole years, was as follows. That: a symphony’s mandalic structure, though it might be felt, or experienced at a deep level, was barely perceptible to most listeners. It was abstract and non-verbal. While a mandalic book’s mandalic structure was of course verbal; and in fact, if that book had any decent mandalic structure at all, resembled a sacred text, in that its job was to present the sacred individual’s WHOLE SACRED TRUTH, not just enough of the truth to keep an audience on pins and needles. And the Western world had developed distaste for sacred texts, Dr. Lorenzo said. The Bible had proven to be a disappointment to the greatest minds of Western civilization. Their greater respect for modern science had left their civilization’s sacred text appearing childish, full, as it was, of what they considered to be ‘silly unbelievable miracles’, and ‘ridiculous paranormal events utterly lacking in verisimilitude’.

The Western world had disliked ‘sacred anything’, in fact, ever since the day it first experienced disenchantment with its own religion, ‘Christianity’. Since that point, every ten years or so it would try on some new religion like a fad, then drop it and try another new one. As if: it had been so traumatized by its original religion, Christianity, it could not trust a new religion for even so much as eleven years.

But: this strange reaction was perfectly understandable, said Dr. Lorenzo, because the Christian church had indeed traumatized the civilization, right from its infancy. The core belief of Western civilization from its birth should have been the message of Christ; and indeed it was for a few minutes. The message had been clearly and simply wrapped up in four different gospels, which essentially agreed with each other, thereby hammering home the point that they constituted Christ’s message. And yet, sadly, immediately after Christ’s departure from the physical world, the ‘fathers’ of the ‘Christian’ ‘church’, right from Paul onward, had obfuscated that gospel message of Christ’s, and abused Christ’s followers by cavalierly adding the church fathers’ own personal baloney to the pure stuff of Christ’s message and ramming that false invented baloney down the followers’ throats right along with Christ’s original message, or even entirely without Christ’s core message at times; a fact that followers were still only beginning to grasp even after two thousand years; because so much baloney had been stuffed in their heads so hard by the ‘church’ ‘fathers’, for so long, it had balonified the real gospel story in their hearts and minds.

182.  Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘Oregon’ lecture

The metaphor of ‘balonification’ did not go far enough to satisfy Dr. Lorenzo, however. The severity of the trauma, he said, perpetrated upon Western civilization by its own religion, right in that civilization’s infancy, was, as he said, ‘equivalent to having your genitals mutilated at birth, only to discover the fact at age fifty, after a lifetime of wondering why things were not working’. He amplified the simile on many occasions, but most famously in a lecture at Willamette in Eugene, Oregon, in the fall of 2002, which he repeated the next evening after an annual dinner for med school faculty at the University of Oregon.

The psychic trauma to Western civilization caused by having Jesus’ message twisted to heck by his own followers and by the ‘Christian’ ‘church’ itself, he said, was like having your God-given foreskin lopped off without being asked if you might want to consider the pros and cons first, i.e., lopped off ‘without informed consent’ as they called it in the medical profession. In other words: the ‘church fathers’ had never offered 'informed consent'. They never had said to prospective early followers of Christ’s, most of whom could not read or write and depended on the ‘apostles’ to tell them the truth: “Do you want Christ’s gospel pure and simple? We can read it to you again and again and you can see and hear for yourself what he taught and how he lived. Or would you prefer our balonified version of it? Here are the pros and cons.” They had just gone ahead and hacked the gospel to bits, then mixed or replaced it with their own personal garbage and called the thing that resulted: B.aloney S.ausage: ‘Christianity’.

And to Dr. Lorenzo’s mind, the fact that the U.S.A. had hacked off foreskins of practically every boy born within its boundaries for over a hundred years of its modern history, without the slightest valid reason, either medical or religious; and without asking permission of the prospective mutilated one, even worse; and despite the well-known fact that most other ‘Christian’ countries – all of Europe and Latin America, for example – thrived perfectly well with their normal God-given baby-makers and without resorting to such reprehensible behavior as ‘cutting off an important part of every boy’s genitalia without even asking his permission’, was all the proof needed for indicting certain portions of ‘Christian’ Western civilization on charges of ‘grave inhumanity to man’, or ‘grave inhuman aberrancy’. And there were ‘thousands’ of other proofs of ‘dis-humanized aberrancy’ in that same Western world, he said, worth a library full of books. And this aberrancy of Western civilization’s, he said, was ‘an aberrancy’ set in motion; i.e., was ‘an abortion; or miscarriage’: begotten unhealthily and unnaturally upon humanity: by ‘church fathers’ immediately after Jesus’ ascension. 

In other words, he said, IT WAS NO ACCIDENT that the same line of unnatural crackpot thinking that had negated Christ’s earthiness and had etherealized his body and blood into pure wispy spirit and watered-down humanity, had then gone on to disparage beautiful and human and natural reproductive organs and sexual acts as dirty and base and sinful, and then finally ended up producing the equally unfounded and unnatural belief that a man’s foreskin was an inconsequential piece of crap and expendable. All of this insanity, this ‘miscarriage of intellect’ had been born from the same source, the aberrant Mortimer-type super-rational thinking which Western civilization had idolized and over-utilized since day one.

And so, in summary, said Dr. Lorenzo at both of his Oregon lectures: just as some of the ‘finest born-again Christians’ in Christendom STILL sexually mutilated their children AT BIRTH without batting an eye; similarly: their spiritual ancestors, the ‘fathers of the Christian church’, had unconscionably and without batting an eye mutilated AT BIRTH ‘the bride of Christ, his church’ (as all of those ‘fathers’ had always called that following of Christ’s, the Christ-ians): by balonifying, i.e., mutilating Christ’s message as soon as he was not around to stop them, thus mutilating Western civilization in its infancy, and producing ‘the abortion’, the ‘totally prolapsed uterus’ and the ‘hacked up penis of a civilization’ we now had.

And so: the Western world, handed, as it had been – not the simple heart-saving message of Christ, but – a brainspun crock of crap that looked crackpot for many reasons; that Western world, at this point in its history, said Dr. Lorenzo: mistrusted ‘sacred religion’ and ‘sacred text’ both, except for the die-hard Christians, of course, and even they were at times skeptical and bewildered by their own balonified belief system, as Jo Lorenzo herself demonstrated occasionally.

183.  an experimental sacred text for the whole world based on sacred nature

And the best place to run for comfort when all ‘sacred’ ‘religion’ looked like an abortion, was to pure nature itself, or as close to it as you could get. For no one on the planet could argue or prove successfully that pure nature was not sacred.

That was why, meanwhile, back in Fort Chipewyan, Mortimer had been envisioning a ‘sacred text’ since November, albeit an ‘experimental’ one, which he wanted to complete and present to that civilization, as well as to the rest of the world. And, although he had to feel let down for a few minutes, once he saw how much of his story’s suspense had apparently evaporated by the time of the ‘fourth attempt’ – evaporated from him, his trip, and his book – he now remembered his mission: to lay out mj lorenzo’s entire universe, not just to create pins and needles of suspense and nervous-system excitement.

But as a matter of fact, certain kinds of suspense did remain. How could he and Jack resolve differences, for example? Maybe they could not. Maybe Jack would kill Mortimer yet. And what role would Dlune have? As soon as Break-Up came, there would be a trip up the Peace. And he had a sense of it, but knew few details yet of the really big climb up Hungabee at the solstice, and how Dlune would fit in. But maybe he would do something stupid and lose her, and then her lifesaving help would be gone. Although: something did tell him otherwise, he had to admit. For, he sensed constantly these days that the worst part of the hellish nightmare was behind him.

And in thinking all this through Mortimer noticed that the ‘fourth attempt’ was the middle section of the middle third of his three-part word-mandala. It was the organizational mid-point, the structural halfway point of the book and year’s story precisely. And he was struck by the fact that his own bailiwick, ‘Western civilization’, was bound to want only one half of his book, the first half, where everything was bananas, crazy, tense and bizarre, and even juicily sexed up at times. While Western civilization was likely to find the second half of The Remaking uninteresting, because less exciting. Because, so much tension would be resolved, and things would be calmer and quieter. And this ‘discovery’ in February of 1971, occurring on his birthday exactly, affected him as much as any discovery he ever made in his life. For he had carried around inside him for some time a suspicion that his own Western world was in dire straits. And after this ‘discovery’ he was convinced of the truth of that suspicion.

184.  final thoughts on ‘the fourth attempt’

Dr. Lorenzo said once, by the way, to Sammy Martinez, much later in life, that he thought one of the funniest things he had ever written was in the ‘fourth attempt’, when Mortimer wrote to Rev:¹

“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.”

There were so many sick, self-mocking, convolutedly leg-pulling jokes in that one sentence, he said, one on top of the other, some pulling Rev’s leg and others Mortimer's very own, that however bad things got, he could read or recall it any day and make himself smile, at least. One time he had kept himself awake all night laughing at it, ‘completely beside himself’. And another time he had laughed a whole week off and on. This one bone-jiggling joke, he said, and the fact that he could think up such a ‘ringer’, were ‘proof’ that by the ‘fourth attempt’: Dlune, though he barely knew her, had to have been saving his life literally; and totally.

Though: even as he told Sammy this, seemingly nice people of various grave persuasions all over the planet, people who thought their weird world superior to everyone else’s weird world, were still thinking of Dr. Lorenzo’s life as ‘not worth saving for a second’, to put it mildly, then or now. Unless, of course, he changed and swore by their kind of weird world. And worse: some had it totally in for him and his fine banana-blitzed phrenzy of a crew and sent them threats of same, asking how they might like THAT as a ringer of a bone-jiggling and penis-trimming joke.