go ahead to: [subsection 185]; [186]; [187]; [188]; [189]; [190]; [191]; [192]; [193]; [194]; [195]; [196]; [197]; [198]
185. the huge and
perennial ‘levity versus gravity’ controversy
When
the Lorenzos finally dug into the heavy May envelope
from Fort Chipewyan again, knowing they would almost
certainly ‘miss something important’ if they never did
so, the next section – the fifth – seemed like ranting
nonsense at first. Many fledgling Remaking pundits too,
especially in the early years, would think the ‘fifth
attempt’ further reason to abandon interest in mj
lorenzo’s The
Remaking before making any worse fools of
themselves.
‘They
were about to do so in either case’, said Dr. Lorenzo
aptly, years later in a wily mood. Usually he considered
the matter of whether his readers stayed with The
Remaking ‘to the bitter end’ a serious matter:
‘for psychiatric
attention’, as he would add. The fact was, he
could hardly mention the ‘fifth attempt’ without hamming
it up and getting prankish. Honeymoon-getaway kinds of
gaffs. Immature bachelor-party stuff, in short.
Unenlightened
or premature critics of the ‘fifth attempt’, however,
often took it much more seriously than the author did.
They complained, for example, that romance was as
hopelessly undetectable in it, as it had been
palpitating in the ‘fourth attempt’. Granted, a brief
mention of a woman could be found on the last page,
Mortimer’s letter to Chipewyan asking permission to
marry his granddaughter and take her away. And on the
first page too, the legendary Dene huntress named Dlune
appeared in one of Chipewyan’s Dene tales. So, a woman
named Dlune opened the section and closed it. BUT a
number of early Remaking critics complained about what
lay between. And they were quoted in a 1972 Village Voice
article: “Between these charming feminine bookends
clamors a writhing bedlam, a mad library of male
scholastics climbing atop each other as in a pit of
vipers, just to prove who is more right. And ‘Jack’ is
nowhere in sight because, interestingly enough, the
scholastics are not ‘arguing’ in actuality. But rather,
Mortimer, by himself, is ‘arguing’ with them, purely in
his blinkin’ damaged noggin.”
It
was one of the first formal descriptions of the ‘fifth
attempt’, a joint statement from a weekend workshop at
Yale, from early Remaking experts of that infamous kind
referred to by other pundits as psycho-pundits, or
‘psychos’.
And
it was wrong,
said others. The entire ‘fifth attempt’ was aimed at winning
a woman’s hand, in fact, they said. The
‘psychos’ ‘had not given the section a thorough study’,
or so the religion pundits accused. For instance, they
said: most of the theological and Biblical allusions,
and the jokes based on them, had gone over the psycho
pundits’ heads. That explained the inappropriate gravity
with which the crazy psychos spoke at the workshop, when
they announced in a told-you-so tone: “Mortimer insisted
rightly in the ‘fourth attempt’ that the trip and book and cure
could not be declared complete, until enough time had
gone by to reassure mj lorenzo that all of
his conflicting and competing energies were finally and
fully in balance, i.e., in proper, well-established
and settled-in balance…”
‘Those
poor psychos’, said other Remaking pundits in a TIME
magazine review, ‘might have gotten applause if they had
just shut up right there. But it was beyond their
capacity’, and so they had to add: “…without any
‘idiocy’ popping up suddenly, such as the ‘fifth
attempt’ appears to be;” and it was not idiocy;
of course. Yet they continued in the same wrong vein:
“Mj lorenzo,” they said most gravely, “in the spring of
’71 was a delicate proposition, as people are beginning
to grasp now finally. Because: once he was ‘cracked up’,
he did not duct-tape together easily.”
186. Jo Lorenzo’s
unusual ‘problem’ with the ‘fifth attempt’
Jo
Lorenzo, too, thought at first that Mortimer had
‘tripped the loony switch’ one more time when he had
written the ‘fifth attempt’. But then, a few days after
they first read it together, Rev heard her chuckling
around the house without explanation, and it went on all
week starting Tuesday. Even Sunday morning.
In
Sunday School the Methodist Women pinned a pink orchid
on her pinkish lace Sunday gitup for being an easy
preacher’s wife to be friends with. She was in a pretty
spring dress, pale rose and lacy, looking short,
matronly and distinguished as usual, and she sat two
pews from the front of the church during the service,
right below Rev at his pulpit, fanning madly with one of
those folding painted paper fans that banks and funeral
parlors donated to churches with their name printed on
hoping for business. It was a
The
special event in Samuel’s life that Rev was
hermeneutically explicating had occurred, of course, as
Jo knew perfectly well, while the boy Samuel was about
eight and in boyhood-long training to become a Jewish
Levite priest, a rabbi. And it was an extremely precious
and sacred event, nothing to laugh about at all, one of
the sweetest, most touching moments in the whole
incredible Bible, when this exemplary little boy – just
because of his mother’s faith and devotion to God and
devotion to him, her boy, as well – had been blessed
with the privilege of sleeping – at that tender,
precious age – in the holiest spot in the universe, in
the sanctuary of the tabernacle, near the Arc of the
Covenant and its mercy seat.
And
yet: each time, upon hearing ‘mercy seat’ – to Rev’s
dismay and the congregation’s delight, especially that
of her shaking pew-mates – Jo would half-cough and
half-sneeze her stifled cackles, rumbling the pew until
she had to rush, finally, all the way up the center
aisle with the open fan spread over her bosom and mouth,
outside the door to explode hilariously across the
grassy lawn and down the street. And she never stopped
laughing the rest of her life, poor thing. ‘Poor’
because she had another 35 years of life to go, and that
was a long time to have to laugh at a single joke.
Even
when she was 95 in the Methodist Home, suffering
subacute old-age isolation and brainlessness, you had
only to say ‘mercy seat’ if you meant ‘bed’, or say
‘altar of burnt offering’ if you meant ‘outhouse’, and
she would come back from her special brainless land to
yours laughing.
Fortunately
for Rev and the congregation the ‘altar of burnt
offering’ was outside the tabernacle in the ‘court of
the gentiles’, and for that reason never was mentioned
in the boy Samuel’s story. For if it had been, Lord
knows what she might have done in church that day,
Mortimer’s ‘fifth attempt’ had twisted her nervous
system’s reaction to those holy verbal tags so.
187. even Rev
Lorenzo could laugh at religion under the right
circumstances
Rev
laughed too, actually, when church was over and he got
the picture finally. He was not a bad guy once in a
while, like when he was with his same-age cousins and
felt his old natural boyhood self, for example. As a kid
he had been much more real on a much more regular basis.
He had spent his childhood summers in the lower
Shenandoah with farm cousins that picked corn all
morning for sale at market, played after lunch, then
picked again, this time husking enough for dinner,
meaning for Rev’s aunt and uncle and their ten boys and
four girls, plus teenage Rev and his two brothers and
two sisters from up north in New Jersey. All ten of the
Virginia boys were Rev’s age or younger and – once corn
was picked for hauling to town, around mid-afternoon
when air in steamy north Virginia got thick as pea soup
and made you drip buckets – they were the kind who would
doff jeans and swing on fat tree ropes out over the
Opequon Creek, let go, plunge, and splash around naked
in and out of the flowing water until dinner.
They
were not awash in formal education like the northern
Lorenzos, but were no dummies certainly, and loved to
think up outhouse and
itinerant-southern-horseback-preacher jokes,
‘circuit-rider’ jokes, tinged with Bible or church
images sometimes, like the one which they all remembered
still, even when old.
“When
the wise old swayback horse of a
George-Whitefield-style,
underarm-Schofield-Bible-toting, Calvinist-Methodist
circuit rider finally brought its poor preacher rider
home and into its horse stall late one Saturday night
after carrying the man for days or weeks on a circuit
tour of his various churches in several Shenandoah
towns,” went the joke, “that itinerant preacher was
alive but nowhere near sober, for he had been drinking
in the saddle the gift of some of his parishioners, a
neat bottle of whiskey. He managed to dismount in one
piece intending to finally sleep in his own bed with his
own wife, but later came half-awake, lying on the filthy
straw of the pigsty cuddled up to the mother sow,
bleary-eyed and still drunk as an Appalachian alcoholic
skunk. And what do you suppose were the words that he uddered?”
And
other such highly erudite cow-flop, the answer being, artfully slurred:
“Why, dearie! I didn’t know you had buttons on your
night-ie!”
188. the
unforgettable Yale workshop on the meaning of the
‘fifth attempt’
Yet,
though even the Lorenzos got the joke of ‘mercy seat’,
drawing for once on childhood earthiness, the over-educated
psych – or ‘psycho’ – pundits insisted on remaining
unenlightened all day long Saturday at the Yale workshop
in November ’72, despite numerous loud objections to
their interpretation. Their critique waxed more and more
mistakenly specific: Mortimer had not sunk down into
waves of depression in the ‘fifth attempt’, like he
usually might have, said the psychos, but instead had
floated up into clouds of grandiosity. He had been ‘too
successful with Dlune for his own good’, speculated
they. He had been so successful he was ‘coming
un-duct-taped’, ‘talking like Jesus Christ’,
‘interpreting scripture and placing himself at the
center of it’.
Then,
“As often happened with grandiose psychotics,” the
psychos pointed out in confident culmination, “he would
slip into paranoia too, imagining that somebody he
referred to as ‘they’
were coming from across the border to haul him away as ‘they’ had
hauled Dr. Zhivago away; to doctor, against Mortimer’s
will, some extremist contingent in a delusional ‘civil
war’ Jack too had mentioned, a contingent Mortimer did
not necessarily support.”
Mortimer
was so ‘wacko-delusional’ at one point in the ‘fifth
attempt’, claimed the psychos, in other words, that he
thought the U.S. and Canada were one country divided at
the U.S.-Canadian border into north and south, just like
Vietnam was divided between leftist north and rightist
south. Crazier still, they said, he suffered the
‘paranoid delusion’ he was living with and doctoring the
north’s equivalent of Ho Chi Minh1
in the person of Chipewyan. And that was
why the contingent from ‘the south’ wanted to haul him
away, he thought.
A
separate group of psychologist, psychiatrist and
psych-related pundits, therefore, a group less often
accused of being ‘psycho’, and one that understood
Biblical and theological allusions better, managed to
wangle a representative onto the Yale Saturday-night
wrap-up panel. And this representative, a turncoat
Calvinist Baptist minister converted to hip, New-Age
career psychotherapist at age 50, used up a sizable
chunk of the wrap-up time admonishing these confused
early Remaking psycho-pundits to ‘just relax and take a
deep breath now’.
“Didn’t
you ever have a Bible in your outhouse growing up, like
we did?” he began. For: the ‘arguing’, ‘idiocy’ and
‘grandiosity’ of the ‘fifth attempt’, he said, were not that at all,
but “just one
great big outhouse-Bible JOKE,” the enormity
and elaborateness of which showed how much better
Mortimer really was feeling overall now. For he
sported a whopping sense of humor, even under pressure.
Mortimer, said the ex-preacher, was not crazy.
He had just found a colorful way – though an unusual
way, granted – to reduce his anxiety over whether
Chipewyan would or would NOT decide that he,
Mortimer, ‘deserved’ the right to haul Dlune off at
Break-Up. And ‘deserved’ meant: ‘was of high
enough caliber to merit an Indian princess’. And so, to
assure himself, and especially Chipewyan, that he was indeed
‘deserving’, Mortimer had decided to pile up
enough credentials to merit being born of the Queen of
Heaven herself. And he hoped this would rid all
concerned parties of any and all qualms left lurking in
dark corners, regarding his potential husbandly worth.
Thus,
said the turncoat Calvinist, one purpose of the ‘fifth
attempt’ was to ‘show
how’ Mortimer had done this: how he had managed to
amass sufficient credentials to deserve a
real princess, at the very least. And
furthermore: (1) the clever trick of
piling up credentials, as well as (2) the spectacular performance
he gave in the course of revealing the trick; both of
these things: amounted to additional credentials. In
fact, these last two ‘bonus’ ‘credentials’ were really the only
credentials that mattered. For these two bonus
efforts of his proved without a
shadow of a doubt, not hierarchical status but heart status:
i.e., sincerity
and intensity of wanting to marry Dlune. Thus the
entire ‘fifth attempt’ was about a woman. It was an
‘attempt’ to win and marry Dlune.
Incontrovertible
proof that this was what the ‘fifth attempt’ was about,
said the ex-Baptist preacher, lay in the fact that
Mortimer informed Rev right within the section, that he
had presented the crazy crock pot of credentials to
Chipewyan, but did not know yet what the old man’s
decision would be.
Whether
this Baptist preacher’s interpretation was right or
wrong, the audience gave him a much warmer reception
than they had given the psycho-pundits earlier; which
was all that mattered, really, of course, said Dr.
Lorenzo, when he heard about it later, kidding again,
naturally, as always when it came to the ‘fifth
attempt’.
189. the ‘proper’
interpretation, according to Dr. Lorenzo
Dr.
Lorenzo in later years never answered, when asked, which
interpretation was
the ‘proper’ one. For throughout his life he was always
so happy and
relieved, and above all grateful, that anyone at
all still hung in there after ‘the nearly ruinous fourth
attempt’, as he always referred to it, that for years he
shied away from legislating Remaking interpretations of
any kind beyond that point in The Remaking. For if
people knew his book only as far as the ‘fourth
attempt’, he said, the value of the book was lost. And
the last thing in the world he would ever want to do was
‘chase poor readers away with over-explaining’.
Whenever
the Dr. responded to such questions of interpretation in
this sort of non-committal way, as he did more and more
in later years, he reinforced in his readership their
right to find their own understanding. That is, he honored the
mandala of The Remaking and its ability to
withstand the opposing forces that it portrayed and
would inevitably attract. He treated it as a mandala
that was big, strong and healthy enough, i.e., mature,
wise and balanced enough, feet-on-the-ground enough that
it could
withstand a few creative and respectful punches, even
a few false accusations and conclusions now and then,
from sincere individuals who contemplated and wrestled
with it face to face. And no one need fear that
the world of the mandala would crack in half from
‘errors’ of this kind.
190. the views of
‘mainstream’ pundits and of ‘sacred pun
ditzies’
Most
pundits, in time, despite Dr. Lorenzo’s refusal to take
sides in the controversy, came to see the ‘fifth
attempt’ as not ‘silly nonsense’, however, but clever
wizardry which helped move Mortimer further along, right
down his path and much closer to many of his goals at
once. In fact, as most came to feel, the ‘fifth attempt’
was so critical and essential to mj lorenzo’s progress
at remaking himself that every single November in years
following the infamous ’72 Yale workshop, a few more
zealot interpreters, in a silly annual ceremony in a
back room at St. Thomas’ church on New York's Fifth
Avenue, would formally and loudly (thereby to
symbolically and mock-ritually protest opposing camps
such as the psychos) add themselves to the holy ranks of
those early ‘extremists’ who had courageously defended
mj lorenzo’s ‘fifth attempt’ as being NOT PSYCHO but
rather zany mj
lorenzo sermon wizardry at its VERY BEST,
right up there with the ‘Tenth Point from the History
Lecture at Penn’, and the ‘Naked Sermon to Clothed
Indians’.
These
holy laughing and wholly laughable zealots were none
other than the ‘sacred pun ditzies’, in fact. For: the
aficionados of Remaking ‘puns’ had been called
the ‘pun ditzies’ already by the early 70’s; and so (needles to say),
their younger siblings, the forever laughing SERMON
wizardry idiots, then had to be named by colleagues,
absolutely immutably, the ‘SACRED punditzies’:
where a ‘sacred pun’, in Remaking pundit lingo, meant
any joke, or pun, or humorous twist of meaning, derived
from sacred text, that enhanced
respect for the sacredness
of all forms of natural, humble animal-human life
on the planet, rather than lessening such respect.
So
naturally, of course, given their comedic extremism, the
sacred pun ditzies had to claim that the ‘fifth attempt’
was not just brilliant zany sermonizing, but was more
correctly: a single solid ‘sacred pun’ sermon from start
to finish.
And
they were right, said the rest, after they had reflected
on the crazy claim for a few years.
191. Petitot’s
'The Story of Two Brothers', cont'd; and his infamous
'introduction' to the volume of northern tales
The
‘fifth attempt’ opened with an Indian tale excerpt, a
continuation of the lengthy and unfinished Dene tale of
Chipewyan’s that Mortimer had begun to tell in the
‘second attempt’, the one called ELTCHELEKWIE ONNIE, or
‘The Story of Two Brothers’. The reader was required to
remember how that partly-told tale had left off, or else
go back and look it up, for otherwise this new piece
made little sense at first. It was the tale in which the
younger Dene brother had been pulled up off the earth,
right through the sky-earth into the above world, by
shooting an arrow skyward and by chasing it
disobediently; and then, once in the above world, had
allowed his face to be charcoaled to hide his appeal
from the two daughters, Delkrayle and Dlune. And when he
had – disobediently, once again – removed the charcoal,
the daughters had ‘ravished’ him all night long between
them in their bed. Whereupon, first thing in the
morning, he had fallen back into a hole in the
sky-earth, where he had remained for a long time, stuck
between two worlds, as it were, neither here nor there,
until the next part of the tale began:
ELTCHELEKWIE
ONNIE
(L’histoire des deux freres)2
(A
story of two brothers)
Part
2
However, an
enormous wolf happened upon the scene, who, sensing that
there was human flesh in the place where the guilty
young man lay, took to digging up the sky-earth with
powerful paws. By digging, he freed the man, who finally
left his horrible sepulcher. He met, along the white
road, Dlune-tta-naltay, Breast-full-of-rats. He wanted
to avenge himself but could not kill her, for she was
immortal. So he ripped up her clothes and tore them to
shreds, and all the mice, the rats, the moles, snakes,
worms and other malevolent beasts that were buried in
her breast, left her and spread out over the earth,
where they have lived up until this day. It is because
of this that there are so many evils on the earth, so
many sicknesses, famine, compulsory fasting, death, and
cold. All of this has come to us by the disobedience of
the young man and the malice of the woman.
I’ve
discovered,
Rev, that the book of Indian tales collected by
Petitot authenticates Chipewyan’s tales to some
extent.
To
some extent!? It verifies them verbatim.
And Petitot’s ‘Introduction’ seems to contain
information about the tales….
Traditions Indiennes3
du
par
Emile
Petitot
Ancien
Missionaire
Maisonneuve
Freres et Ch. Leclerc
25,
Quai Voltaire, 2
1886
Tous
Droits Reserves
Gathered up slowly, patiently, and with a kind
of scruple for the slightest particularities, during
twenty years of sojourn in the Northwest Territories of
the Dominion; gleaned from here and from there with the
veneration of an antiquary for the ruins of the past,
for the debris of people, but persevering in its goal
and determined to discover the American origins;
translated literally, like a version of the classics,
with the aid of Indians who taught me their language;
then finally rendered in… [my own language]… with all
the fidelity and the conciseness compatible, on the one
hand, with the genius and the characteristic for
reversal peculiarly Indian, and on the other hand, with
my maternal tongue, in order that my phraseology might
present a meaning understandable, exempt of all
equivocation, understudy to the reticence of Red-skins,
totally familiar with their original laconism, I dare to
hope that my collection will amuse the public and
interest science.4
“Ha!
That’s very good!” Mortimer wrote to his parents. He was
impressed with Petitot’s super-educated language and
with his apparent great respect for the northern tribes.
The legends
contained in this book prove to us once again this
consoling truth: that there is no people, be they
however isolated and ignorant, who have not received
from heaven, in their past, a sum of truths sufficient
for them to hold with dignity their place in the world,
to constitute, if they so wish, an honorable society,
and to bring into effect the spiritual welfare of their
members, without having recourse to their neighbors….
Petitot
even valued the natives’ religion and applauded their
practicing it. This was generous indeed for a ‘retired
missionary’, a church foreign missions veteran, as he
said he was on the title page, especially for a Jesuit,
as he almost had to be. For French Jesuits had been sent
to
…The theogonies of
savages the most ignorant prove that God was faithful to
his creatures and revealed himself to them by love and
commiseration, far from being the product of a powerful
imagination….
More
amazing yet: the old Jesuit seemed to think Chipewyan’s
tales were directly handed his tribe by a loving and
sympathetic God. This seemed a very kind gesture
of respect indeed, a sign of a man truly well educated
in the liberal arts, in the best sense; and Mortimer
reacted with a thought that was noticed and studied
later by Native Americans:
Why
don’t
the Indians of the North today look to themselves for
salvation from misery and not rely on the white man?
The wisdom of eons of living out their myths has been
lost on them, as they sit unemployed beside rotten
cabins along banks of rivers and lakes, mesmerized by
the flow of water down to the
Petitot
goes
on to assert in his introduction, Rev, that there are
remarkable agreements between the Indian legends and
‘the Genesis epic recorded by the Hebrews’. Yet he
denies he is promoting the Bible.
Mortimer’s
tongue was firmly in-cheek here. For: Petitot, while
denying he was promoting the Bible, in the very same
paragraph praised
the Bible to high heaven as incontrovertible,
period. How strange for an educated man. Apparently
French universities of the 1800’s taught their students
that one way to demonstrate education of high degree, if
not erudition, was to say one thing and do
another. And yet, Mortimer would still be surprised by
what followed:
…Moreover, these
similarities can no more prove the truth of the sacred
history, than their parody would strike its dying blow.
The Bible carries its proofs with it. It defies
denegations and incredulity, erroneous tergiversations,
and impious railleries….
What a vocabulary!
…It has no need to
demand proof of testimony from these obscure and
illiterate savages who by their accord with it prove
nothing but this: that we may know that the Pentateuch
was known and believed in their original place of birth,
and that the Synagogue has always known diffusion, as
has the religion of Buddha, as have Christianity and
Islam….
What??!! Lord
Almighty. No wonder the Dene plummeted to ‘obscure and
illiterate savages’ after all that praise. I get it
now!
192. Petitot’s
infamous betrayal of the northern tribes
Mortimer
was blindsided and the deceit infuriated him.
The old Frenchman had turned on Chipewyan and his Dene
tribe, turned on his very own congregation and flock, as he had been
planning to do the entire time, the snake. First
he had praised the Dene for the magnificent wisdom in
their tales, buttering them up, making himself look
magnanimous, and making every Frenchman and Canadian
admire Dlune’s tribe, the Dene or Chipewyan, for two or
three seconds. But the whole while he had been sneakily
– snake-ily – planning a dirty trick from Latin school
rhetoric. For now he turned on the dime he had
secretly set in place, and right in front of the whole
world ripped off
the Dene of any possible credit for ever having
originated that magnificent wisdom themselves, and
granted all the credit to his side of
the world instead.
HE
‘COMPLIMENTED’
THE DENE AS YOU MIGHT PAT A DOG
FOR WEARING
THE LOVELY COLLAR HIS MASTER MADE HIM. The Dene
could not possibly
have discovered their own myths and legends from within
their own hearts, according to Petitot. Those myths and
legends were too
magnificent, and their hearts too bestial.
It
was all too obvious to Petitot, for Common European
Knowledge told any European as much. And besides, the
retired Jesuit missionary had checked one
well-known antiquated book, Josephus’ History of the
Ancient World, when he had gotten back to
193. Mortimer
Lorenzo’s famous review of Petitot’s ‘scholar’-‘ship’
Mortimer
was livid.
Furious. Petitot had to be one of the most despicable
‘malevolent rats’ let loose from the mythical
Dlune’s mythical liberated cleavage in Chipewyan’s tale,
and Mortimer would make rat hash of
him. If missions veteran Petitot could use a
privileged education to think loosely, so could he,
Mortimer. And off
he went! Whoopee! From here on, it was a toboggan
ride, out-of-control with equally loose ideas.
Rev,
when
I go back and re-read Petitot’s Introduction more
carefully, a lot of confusing things fall into place.
I see in a flash that Chipewyan is a Jew, that Dlune,
as his granddaughter, is a Jewess, that this cabin is
a tabernacle, and that our island here is the Court of
the Gentiles. Here’s how I figure….
Mortimer
would have a wee
beastie field day with Petitot for his parents’
entertainment. He would make field-mouse
mincemeat of him.
He quoted the ‘malevolent
beast’, Petitot, one more time:
…However, this one
incontestable fact is uncontested. Even since the time
of Josephus, the Historian, ‘there has not been a land
where there has not been a synagogue, not a shoreline
where there was not established a Jewish colony’; and
Dan, as Moses said prophetically: Leaps forth from
Bashan, Dan, the navigator, the emigrant, the nomad, Dan
has not awaited the Roman invasion in order to carry
abroad his curious and vagabond campsites….
Petitot
had really done an astonishing thing, as Mortimer
explained to Rev, and he had done it partly through
careful planning. When he had started to think through
his never-published treatise, Emile Petitot’s
Sincere Search for The True Source of Dene Wisdom,
he had begun with logic,
the universally revered Western world thinking
discipline: by
dismissing it. Next, apparently recognizing
some kind
of logic would be needed, he had picked a more
useful one: Common
Knowledge. For after all, just about every
educated person in
For
example, priests and settlers from Spain three centuries
before, upon first meeting the ‘Indians’ of the
Caribbean islands which Columbus had discovered, had
practically declared them sub-human. They were ‘pagan’,
they told the King and Queen and Pope, hardly useful for
anything but sex and slavery. One entire thought-school
of privileged Spaniards including priests considered
them not human in very fact. And so, before long
everybody in
Which
all meant that before
Petitot even got started, before he even left France
to go to Canada, it was already a given that the
Dene of northern Canada could not have created their own
tales from their own storehouse of tribal wisdom. If
they possessed any impressive tales, those tales must
have come from elsewhere.
Logical, right? He had hardly needed to get out of bed
to figure this much out.
In
fact, it was thoroughly realistic, as later pundits
observed, to assume Petitot had figured out these
preliminary steps of his ‘plan’, using his kind of
‘logic’, in his
sleep.
Now,
all that remained was to find out where the
‘elsewhere’
was, that the tales had come from. And to do so,
Petitot, on return from Canada to France to publish his
tales, had researched ONE ancient historian, Josephus, in
a Sorbonne library. And he had also, luckily, already
possessed since birth the cleverness to conclude one book was
enough to research. And combining these two
extremely clever talents, he now felt qualified to claim
voila! He
had found the ‘elsewhere’; that the wisdom of the
Dene had come from the Pentateuch, the first five books
of the Bible, the ones the Jews called ‘The Law’,
carried abroad by the Jewish tribe of Dan, because they
were the ‘wandering’
tribe, as Josephus and the Bible, namely Moses, had
said. How else
could the wisdom have wandered
from the Old World, which Common Knowledge proved
to be the source of Dene wisdom, all the way across the
huge continent of Asia and then the enormous Pacific to
the ignorant, barely human Dene in the cold outback
north of the
And
if the ancient manuscript was in the Sorbonne, his university,
then Petitot must have interpreted it properly,
right? And if it was in his university library it should
be sufficient
reference, right? Why should he have to double-check or
verify with living nineteenth-century German or American
experts in myth or anthropology? One of them might have
said, “Josephus only knew of the
What
would Petitot have done? It would have made him all mad.
All of his careful 'research' in Josephus' History of the Ancient
World would have been for nought.
After
all, his self-respect was based on the lie that he and
his neighbors were superior to dark Indian
barely-humans. And anyway he was busy with church and
state and family. He was building Fabulous Western
civilization. And he was a retired missionary, was he
not? A missionary never made things up or invented false
theories. He was a good, well-intentioned fellow. His
family would be proud of him, and his church and state
too. He had quoted Josephus and Moses both,
to support his
discovery that proved the Dene were stunted humans.
If he quoted scripture, went to the Sorbonne and was a
missionary blessed by the Pope, then he COULD NOT HAVE
SAVAGELY TWISTED THE DATA TO SATISFY A RACIAL PREJUDICE,
right? Never! That was what gave him the right to rave about his
discovery, and cheer for his team, the
Western world (and for his superior
religion, which created clever beasts like him).
And
now: That Western world (because of Petitot’s wonderful
magnanimity and scholarship), eighty years later in 1971
was sadly losing the Wee Beastie Field Day tug of war
to their opposition, Mortimer Lorenzo and his Canadian
henchmen, surprisingly real humans called Dene. And
there was no surprise in that, really. After all, was it
not from the human breast of such ancient earthy
'barbarian' peoples as the Dene, that all modern
'civilized' ones had leapt in the first place, including
Petitot and his European people?
All
the same, Mortimer loved to weigh every angle and give
the other side as much credit as possible. And he was
struck by the similarity between the words ‘Dene’ and
‘Dan’, so asked Rev what he thought.
Could the Dene have been the Jewish tribe of Dan, as
Petitot suggested? Heavily miscegenated with Indians, of
course, to the point the Dene no longer used kosher
matzo? Rev had been Mortimer’s very first pastor, and
his de facto
first teacher in Biblical hermeneutics, therefore, since
a preacher’s kid had to sit in church every Sunday as a
model of decency and respect, listening to his father
preach, i.e., interpret
scripture. So, by asking Rev what he thought, he
roped Rev in as a co-equal Protestant, a
Calvinist-Methodist buddy, a toboggan teammate sliding
on slippery ideas, an oath-comrade, an Eidgenossen =
Huguenot-of-the-Covenant,5
who recognized the right they both possessed to go
directly to the sacred text and interpret. It
was an ancient Protestant privilege and sport to
interpret scripture yourself, that had been granted to
you by the sixteenth century spiritual forefathers of
the Reformation,6
men like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and the
whiz-kid French Picard theologian, Jean Chauvin,
or Caulvin,
whom English-speakers called 'Calvin', all three of
whom, like Petitot, had been educated 100% in Catholic
universities, rife as they were with bizarre, twisted
intellect like Petitot’s. And so they were going to have
some fun together, son and Dad, Mortimer and Rev:
What’s
all
this about Dan and his vagabond campsites? I’ve looked
it up in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament, Rev,
and here’s what it says:
Judges 17:7
Now there was a young man of
i.e.,
of the tribe of the kings, just as Christ had been,
for the same reason: ‘of
194. how
Mortimer’s ‘review’ got transformed into ‘something
else’ as pundits said
Mortimer
let Rev know, with this impatient turn of the toboggan
into a heavy snowdrift of hermeneutics, that he was
going to interpret the dickens out of every single
verse, no, every
darn word, just like every Bible-pounding American
preacher and evangelist for generations had done for his
congregation, invariably thrilling them. It was a showy
sport.
…who was a Levite;…
…so
that this young man was already priest and king and only lacked in
being a prophet in order to become, like Christ,
simultaneously Prophet, Priest, and King.
And
so now: Rev stood completely
informed – already,
after only two seconds of slippery sermon – as to what, exactly,
Mortimer was out to gain from his toboggan ride of loose
ideas. Credentials!
And Rev knew from traditional sermon structure that
Mortimer would eventually make clear for whom he was
amassing these credentials, and why. But for
now, Mortimer had informed him he was on the prowl to
amass, by hook, crook and slippery thinking, the holy
triple combo referred to by Protestants as
‘Prophet, Priest and King’; the only one to have amassed
them before having been Jesus Christ himself, as all
Protestants had been drilled to understand. And
actually, somebody else must have done that amassing for
Jesus. Because Jesus had been born with those
credentials. And Mortimer had not. But it did not matter
because he knew an easy way to get them. And that was by
God’s grace,
which French-university-educated John Calvin had said
was also
Mortimer’s, by virtue of his participating in the
Calvinist Huguenot 'Covenant-with-God' to be one of
God’s elected instruments.
Mortimer
was part of God’s new
chosen people on earth, the neo-Calvinist American
Protestants, every one of whom possessed the
priestly right to interpret scripture for himself or
herself, without having to rely on the mediating
function of any ordained
and official priest or preacher. In other words,
he was going to amass his credentials by brilliantly
interpreting the most insignificant and forgotten little
scripture in the whole Bible, all by his little but not
insignificant self, bending that
scripture to his sacred purpose like any
ordained preacher would have done. And he was
going to do so just as creatively and sloppily as
Petitot had interpreted his own limited knowledge of
history and the Bible; when Petitot had bent the data to
his UN-holy
purpose, that sneaky goal which had been in Petitot’s
evil-beastie mind from the get-go, of helping his
European brethren rest assured, that the Dene
were an inferior,
lackluster, barely human race, so that poor
Europeans did not have to feel bad about robbing Dene
land and livelihood and therefore Dene life
any more than they felt bad about robbing beaver life
with their traplines, and could sleep at
night with a clear conscience despite having
raped and pillaged and plundered and murdered and
destroyed and left destitute an entire innocent race
of men created lovingly by God ‘in his own image’,
to use the language of Genesis, the first book of the
Bible.
And
why had Petitot not considered THAT very
Christian and logical and scriptural explanation for the
Dene having ended up with their divinely wonderful
tales? That the Dene were ‘made in God’s image’
just as much as the French and the Jewish tribe of Dan?
Well, maybe Petitot had hobnobbed with filthy rich
beaver trappers a few too many times to be so stupid.
(Did he seem to have a little bit of unexplained
(beaver-pelt) wealth for a missionary?)
Judges 17:7,8
…[he]… arrived in that area of Ephraim, looking for a
good place to live. He happened to stop at Micah’s house
as he was traveling through.
9 “Where are you
from?” Micah asked him. And he replied, “I am a priest
from
10,11 “Well, stay
here with me,” Micah said, “and you can be my priest. I
will give you ten dollars a year plus a new suit and
your board and room.” The young man agreed to this, and
became as one of Micah’s sons. 12 So Micah consecrated
him as his personal priest.
13 “I know the Lord
will really bless me now,” Micah exclaimed, “because now
I have a genuine priest working for me!”
Mortimer,
at this point, interrupted his reading of the scripture,
as preachers often did, to talk with his congregation
more buddy-buddy and sincerely about his own mixed-up
self. The poor, suffering congregation, Rev and Jo,
would be spared spending the whole week to come,
erroneously thinking that they were the only ones going
crazy. What a painful delusion! No, their preacher too,
Mortimer Lorenzo, as he wanted them to know, was
terrifically mixed up about this particular scripture
sometimes.
How
is it that with this Bible story, Rev, I become
abysmally confused as to whether I am the old man or
the young, the priest or the parishioner, the father
or the son? How can a young man be father and priest
to an old? And yet I persist in imagining myself in
the dusty, sweaty, smelly sandals of that young
priest, and the fine distinction between Chipewyan and
me becomes more blurred than ever, because I had
intended to fit him
or his Old Testament forefathers into those sandals,
accepting the part of Micah for myself.
In
my assumption of the role of thinking dreamer, can I
have so soon exceeded Chipewyan in spirituality? Then
which of us is the other’s what? Are we two separate
persons or one? And are the Danites an ancient Jewish
tribe gone wandering in search of inheritance; or a
present-day band of outcasts of a divided homeland
anxious about their country’s disjointed identity and
come to take me away as a captive medicine man, a Dr.
Zhivago to heal the guerilla guards? Is the
U.S.-Canadian border a demilitarized area bisecting
what is essentially one country, north and south, like
Vietnam, and Chipewyan the spiritual leader of the
northern half, where I am held as either a prisoner or
a patient, while the Mackenzie-Peace entices me onward
and upward (and southward, like the Mekong) toward
certain death in a great cause of liberation, the
precise nature of which, including my own role, is not
yet clear to me???
Or
further,
I reserve the possibility that Jack Levy, M.D., might
himself be that lost priest who has re-discovered his
calling in silently paying attention to my
confessions, while I play the role of spirit-starved
old-man Micah, which suits me well in my present
impotent state.
But why
have I lost the ability any more to distinguish
between my own self and the self of others? Has my
petrifaction become at last so grandiose and heroic
that Sphinx-like I shoulder the character of human
dignity in all of its ponderous and grinning forms –
priest, doctor, prophet, king, and would-be lover – at
once?8
The
preacher, Mortimer, had now publicly made humble
confession to his congregation, Rev and Jo, as to how
addlepated he was at times in trying to understand this
very special scripture passage. The confession proved
his humility as the bombast proved his intelligence;
while the insanity proved his craziness. But out of the
darkness he emerged triumphant, for by God’s grace he finally
perceived the true
meaning:
No. It
must be that Chipewyan, as Dene shaman and tribal
priest, is descended from this Levite whom the tribe
of Dan kidnapped from Micah on their way north!...
Since the myth of his own Dene tribe confirms that his
birthplace and denouement lie ‘where the sun sets’,
i.e., in the ancient Orient…9
This
interpretation finally worked to the satisfaction of
Mortimer’s poor heart. He was content, at last, and set
free from confusion, to get back to work quick! on the
next soul-testing verses:
Judges 18:1 As has
already been stated, there was no king in
Am I being pursued here?
…they took him
aside and asked him, “What are you doing here? Why did
you come?”…
I am trafficking with my
own soul!
…4 He told them
about his contract with Micah, and that he was his
personal priest.
5 “Well, then,”
they said, “ask God whether or not our trip will be
successful.”
6 “Yes,” the priest
replied, “all is well. The Lord is taking care of you.”
Now
the preacher raised his glistening, be-spectacled
forehead from the Holy Bible which lay on his pulpit
opened. He peered over those spectacles, down at his
poor expectant people, so as to impart precious items
from his storehouse of wisdom. They had been waiting for
it. It was not the
punchline yet, but a pre-punchline:
In
these early days of the priesthood in the Promised
Land, priests such as this Judges Levite served the
twelve tribes at once as priest AND
prophet. The original and all-time unbeatable
example of this combination was fabulous Moses, a
Levite himself, that is, of the priestly tribe of
Levi, who functioned also as the first and foremost prophet
of the twelve tribes of Israel, while still
functioning as their original priest,
experiencing the backside of Mt. Sinai as the original
Sanctuary; and returning with THE LAW. Later the
priestly function was passed to his less charismatic
brother, Aaron, and to Aaron’s descendants, 'the
Levites'. The prophet Samuel too, then, also a Levite,
when he came along, for example, would be both priest
and prophet. But none of these very special
leaders who acted as 'judges' were yet called ‘kings’,
for Israel had no king yet. The nation was still in
its youth, and that would come later.
But
where does Chipewyan belong?
He
is the descendant offspring and heir of the very same
Levite priest-prophet from Judah, who migrated
north as described in the book of Judges already, and
was kidnapped from Micah by the tribe of Dan, as they
moved further north themselves: as we shall read in
the scripture in a minute. And later, according to
traditional belief, as Petitot proved beyond the
shadow of a doubt in his great ‘Introduction’ to
northern Indian tales, they went east, through all the
vast regions of Asia, miscegenated as Jews always
have, intermarried with Siberian shaman daughters and
crossed the Bering Strait under the new name of
‘Dene’, not ‘Dan’, into the Canadian Northwest and
waiting mouth of the River Mackenzie. They canoed up
the Mackenzie naked in one summer, reading their
Torahs and Mishnahs without letup, and settled around
(Naturally,
Chipewyan
denies any
of this calmly; while at the same time diplomatically
embracing my fanatical insistence it be true.)
BUT WAIT:
because this emigrant Levite priest was ‘of Judah’
and was born in
Bethlehem, the birthplace of kings (long before
King David was born there, and way before Christ the
King was), he was also, as I said, would-be king;
for each tribe had its role, and the tribe of Judah
supplied kings, and every member of the tribe
of Judah was of regal blood, a potential king.
Then this priest, like Jesus, was after all Prophet,
Priest and King, and therefore
so is Chipewyan as his offshoot (according to the Old
Covenant, THE LAW), and also as his pupil so must
I be, according to the New Covenant,
which supplants The Law with LOVE and accepts me, in
spite of the Law and in spite of bleeping everything,
forgives me, wacky neo-Calvinist offspring of
John Henry Lorenzo, minister’s son, poltroon, weary
traveler and struggling lover, regardless of how I
botch it, united in this triple function of: prophet;
priest; and king; to my very own self.
AND
TO
MY PEOPLE:
FOR THE NEW COVENANT RENDERS CHIPEWYAN’S CABIN
A TABERNACLE, MY ROOM THE HOLY OF HOLIES, AND MY BED
THE ARC OF THE COVENANT CONTAINING THE TESTIMONY, THE
TOP OF THE BED BEING THE MERCY SEAT WHERE THE LORD
MEETS THE PRIESTLY REPRESENTATIVE ‘OF HIS PEOPLE’…
AND IT MAKES THE OUTHOUSE, OR THE BEDPAN, WHICHEVER,
THE ALTAR OF BURNT OFFERING.
To
prove his stellar credentials, the charismatic and
convincing hermeneutician Mortimer Lorenzo had found
support even in Petitot’s
ratty research. Touché.
Judges 18:15,16 So
the five men went over to the house and with all of the
armed men standing just outside the gate, they talked to
the young priest, and asked him how he was getting
along. 17 Then the five spies entered the shrine and
took the idols, the ephod, and the teraphim.
18 “What are you
doing?” the young priest demanded when he saw them
carrying them out.
19 “Be quiet and
come with us,” they said. “Be a priest to all of us.
Isn’t it better for you to be a priest to a whole tribe
in
20 The young priest
was then quite happy to go with them, and he took along
the ephod, the teraphim, and the idols….
Mortimer
had suffered besmirchment of reputation via the writings
of a graduate of an acclaimed French university, who had
accused him falsely and very ungentlemanli-ly, and
indirectly, of associating indecently with
barely-humans. He had defended himself
successfully without counsel; in a legitimate kangaroo
court of his own making; by establishing his own
shocking credentials, practically irrefutably; by
interpreting scripture convincingly (i.e., with
perfect bombast); and he had done it in the very same
manner taught his accuser and every other student in
that very same great French university ever since the
Middle Ages (i.e., with the same intellect-twisting
dogma-baloney and mind-boggling legalistic
scholasticismosis); and ever since the humanistic
Renaissance too (i.e., with heart-wrenching abuse of
classical rhetoric). And he had done it all accurately,
indubitably; for after all, Mortimer had gone to a
sincerely great and greatly sincere Christian missionary
school too, Wrigley; and had been declared a Doctor by a
great humanistic university too, the one founded by the
great Enlightenment humanist Benjamin Franklin, in fact,
and therefore never would have purposely misled a flea,
let alone a human (although maybe a rat).
And so; now:
having proven his credentials, Mortimer could once again afford
to show humility. And he wrote:
Rev,
it chastens and mortifies me that I could have thought
I was replacing the old with the new by exchanging
Chipewyan for you as a teacher, and that now,
ironically, his Indian legends have dragged me
full-circle back to the starting idea, that this
Christ of yours remains for me a central issue, an
inescapable, if ineluctable, indispensable factum factorum;
and that I, as he did, must eventually leave the cross
of my bed to return to my people.
But,
to return to the hospital and my cast: the reason I
crave Chipewyan’s approval for our trip is that the
old shaman, for all his kindness, may not see fit to
send off his lovely granddaughter with an odd,
up-tight, accident-prone and reclusive east-coast
stateside miscreant newcomer to all the time-honored
flow of Dene élan and soul, even if I do claim
to be prophet, priest, and king. Or should I say,
‘especially if’? For, I don’t know yet where
Chipewyan’s thinking honestly lies regarding my
newfound grandiosity.
…………………………………….
Dear
Papa Chipewyan,
As
you know, your flower girl and ward, Dlune, and I,
have been spending many happy nights together in my
room, and we have concluded that we would like to take
a trip together in the spring, up the Peace and into
the Rockies and back again south toward the states,
and after that… well, we are not sure now what or
where. In my territory it is sometimes still the
custom to ask permission for such undertakings, and so
I am writing you this note:
Dear
Papa Chipewyan,
Your
lovely
granddaughter is an exceptional girl, and I know that
you will be sad to let her go, but still I am going to
have to ask you to do just that, because I love you both
too much to leave Fort Chipewyan, I mean Montana,
without at least her. And soon I shall complete my
training to be a medicine man and will have a practice
and be able to care for her as I should and bring her
to see you.
I
am having trouble closing this note since I know that
I shall be handing it to you in person here in my
hospital room. In short, I’ll be anxiously awaiting
your approval.
Love, from your Son and
Father,
Doctor, Prophet, Priest,
and King,
Mortimer
Many
Remaking pundits over the years experienced ecstasies of
delight from the way The Remaking so often surprised
them. Right when they thought they had interpreted
everything in it to the nth degree and fully, i.e.,
beyond all human recognition (yet accurately, of
course), some huge new area would pop up inviting more
interpretation. This was partly because in the original
version mj had left most of his thoughts no more than coyly
implied somewhere in the vast empty spaces between the lines,
rather than spelled out. With the result that the better
you came to know mj lorenzo and his Remaking, the better
you got at catching these subtly but definitely
implied things. Unfortunately, getting to know mj or his
Remaking promised to take a lifetime at least, since he
and his work, both, were so multi-faceted and complex.
195. the sixteen
points made by the ‘fifth attempt’
And so it was only natural that
differences of opinion persisted among pundits over
the ‘fifth attempt’. Since The Remaking’s ‘vast empty
spaces’ inevitably led to that. But the experts agreed
on the whole that the ‘fifth attempt’ made the
following points, though sometimes so very
subtly, a reader unaccustomed to mj lorenzo’s writing
might have missed a few of them:
1.
There was no harm in bashing Christianity and
Christians, since Christianity and Christians had been
bashing every people and religion on the planet for two
thousand years, a perfect example being Petitot, the
revered French Jesuit ‘veteran’, meaning ‘retired’
missionary, who bashed and vilified the Dene as too
un-European and too un-Christian, too pagan and bestial
and sex-loving, in other words, too slavish, and too
like beasts of burden, yet at the same time too lazy and
dumb, to have invented a mythology as beautiful as the
ones the Western world could produce, like the one where
you ate an apple and suddenly felt ashamed of your
genitalia. The Dene were too unashamed of their
sexuality to have created anything as beautiful as the
mythology which they claimed as theirs, in other words,
according to Petitot: if indeed the Dene belonged to the
race of humans at all (this last inference being a clear
case of the pot calling the kettle ‘black’, i.e., a sick
case of projection,
since it was Petitot’s humanity that deserved
questioning, not the humanity of the Dene).
2.
Intelligent evaluation of ‘Christianity’ and
‘Christians’, and a thorough knowledge of their
all-too-often low, sub-human, sneaky tricks and
inevitable rapine, was sorely needed in secular, as much
as in ‘Christian’, circles.
3.
Mortimer had learned from his winter in the north the
same lesson Roald Amundsen had learned, finally, when
that Arctic explorer had run into Eskimos while
searching (like Mackenzie before him) for the Northwest
Passage and had decided to get to know them
and their knowledge and wisdom THOROUGHLY.
Thanks to the experience, Amundsen ended up trashing the
traditional approach of Mackenzie and Franklin and so
many other Western world explorers who had relied
stubbornly and solely on Western knowledge of science,
‘reason’ and mechanical contraption, like sailing the
Just
as Amundsen learned crucial things about human existence
from aboriginal people whom Petitot considered barely
human, Mortimer too learned crucial things about human
life in the world from people most of the Western world
considered expendable because ‘barely human’. NO ONE IN
THE WESTERN WORLD with all its fancy-schmancy
science-schmience and reason-schmeason KNEW HOW TO STAY
WARM IN THE ARCTIC, how to stay NOURISHED in the Arctic,
how to stay protected by building ice houses in a
certain way, how to cover huge distances rapidly (by
using sleds and sled dogs and by smoothing the runners
in a certain way). And once Amundsen finally possessed
this vast, specific and absolutely essential knowledge,
HANDED HIM CARINGLY AND LOVINGLY FREE OF CHARGE from
none other than ‘barely-human’ ‘Eskimos’, he could (1)
finally find the 'Northwest Passage' to the Pacific
Ocean that Mackenzie and all others had failed to find,
and (2) even reach the South
Pole too, before anyone else, (3) and accomplish both of these
without loss of life, whereas more traditional
attempts often had cost many valuable lives. And by
March of ’71, thanks to the ‘barely-human’ helpers with
whom he had lived, Mortimer, likewise, seemed well on
his way to surviving the deadly sub-Arctic winter both physically
AND emotionally.
4.
The ‘fifth attempt’ was a comic romp,
intended to show that Jack was hanging out in the
rooster coop named ‘mj’ more now, even, than during the
‘fourth attempt’; and that Mortimer’s mood was still
getting better, not worse. He was not
delusional. He was showing off
by acting
crazy. It was a satiric romp. That
was why, in the end, he threw ‘poltroon’ into the list
of credentials he had amassed. Maybe he had not won the
title of ‘poltroon’ by interpreting scripture. Or maybe
he had, on second thought. Anyway, somebody had
forgotten to give him the actual honorarium. So he could
not prove he had won the title. He just knew he
deserved the title of 'poltroon' for less than heroic
behaviors somewhere along the line, and was showing off
his willingness to laugh at himself about the fact.
5.
Having a girlfriend helped Mortimer feel part of the
human race finally. It gave him some confidence as a
male animal, a mammal, albeit human, enough that he
could risk looking foolish, clowning around and having
fun. He could kick up his padded paws with his Dad, Rev,
even, and see him as an equal and even a buddy, believe it or not.
6.
Mj lorenzo had to do his own translating of Petitot’s
tales from French into English, before he could use them
in The Remaking. And the translation was surprisingly
‘not bad’, said a number of bilingual
French-and-English-speaking pundits eventually.
7.
Living and hanging out with and loving some of the
earth’s simplest and loveliest earthy people had taught
Mortimer more than a hundred libraries might ever have
taught him, just as Carl Jung had said it would; and as
it had Amundsen too, when he had stayed with Arctic
Eskimos a whole unplanned year or two, right in the
middle of seeking the Northwest Passage. Amundsen, by
the way, was so mesmerized by the Eskimo people and
their life that at one point he was ready to give up his
wackily obsessive life-long polar quest and just stay
and hang out with Eskimos forever.
(He lived with an Eskimo woman, by the way.) The fact
that Mortimer recognized how much he had gained from
living with Chipewyan and Dlune was captured succinctly
in his statement in the ‘fifth attempt’: “I am
trafficking with my own soul!” This point was different,
it should be noted, from the point in #3 above, namely
that so-called ‘barely humans’ actually knew more
than rational scientific-minded Westerners about life.
Point #7, this present point, referred to the much more
important discovery that living with those so-called ‘barely-humans’
CHANGED ONE as a person immeasurably for the better.
8.
It was not Mortimer’s intention to knock Judaism, least
of all the Mercy Seat or Altar of Burnt Offering, or any
aspect of Jewish worship, but to mock extremist
Christians, Petitot for one, and most of all the
Bible-belt people of his own background, for the
extremely ardent way in which they interpreted and misinterpreted
the Bible – which happened to include all of Jewish
scripture too – in order to draw conclusions that were
sometimes uproariously unconvincing, if not horrendously
harmful. And: to retaliate for so much scandalous abuse
of Jewish and Christian scripture that had afflicted the
world, he twisted it equally and more,
only – unlike them – announced the fact
beforehand; and showed that he, Dlune and
Chipewyan – all three – were legitimate 'priests', i.e.,
fully qualified intermediaries between God and man;
meaning ‘between God and their own selves’; meaning,
that is, intermediaries between the God in them, and the
human in them; meaning, as well, intermediaries between
the divine and the people. HEALERS, in short.
Self-healers. MAGICIANS. Coyote figures. Prophets.
9.
Mortimer and Jack both, during their Remaking year,
unearthed and used a host of tricks for arriving at an
overall Remaking self-healing schema, far too many
tricks to list here. But a common one was illustrated in
the ‘fifth attempt’ graphically, a ‘trick’ that could be
called: ‘milking the parallel’. Two tricks leading up to
it made ‘milking the parallel’ possible. First, during
the summer, Jack had discovered the rough outlines of
‘Mortimer’ and ‘Jack’ and how they interacted in
general. Once he had defined mj’s two sides, the next
step, or trick, was now: to develop a sixth sense
for detecting possible fitting parallels in the
world around, to those ‘two sides’, Jack and Mortimer,
such as parallels in Mackenzie’s journals; or in the
Utilidor at Inuvik; or in tribal Indian legends; or in
the Bible. These were just a few of the thousands of
places that parallels might be found under the sun, and
the ‘fifth attempt’ made use of the last, the Bible.
Once a reasonable parallel to the duo was found – for
example, as here, in the Judges story of old man Micah,
the young priest and the wandering Danites – then the
last step was to ‘milk the parallel’ for all it was
worth, in an effort to understand and improve mj
lorenzo. This was why, when Petitot’s introduction
‘sent’ Mortimer, in effect, to this story in the book of
Judges, in the Bible, he felt it his job while there to
not simply interpret the verse in traditional
hermeneutical and preacherly style, but to also
‘interpret’ it in the manner that Jung’s disciple, Marie
Louise von Franz would have interpreted a fairy tale, or
that any Jungian analyst might have interpreted a
patient’s own dream or work of art: by digging down into
it deeply, looking for possible appropriate parallels
to the individual, and by ‘milking those parallels’ for
all they were worth.
10.
When Mortimer said that Christ was ‘the central issue
after all’, he said it with a sense of humor, not
meaning it in the way most Christians would have, but
meaning rather that he had learned at least one
essential thing from Christ, that he, Mortimer, would
have to leave the bed where he always wrote, and get
back with his people, in the same way that Christ had
had to leave the cross, to return to his people. At
first this might have sounded disrespectful and offhand,
but it honored, regardless, the central point of
Christ’s teaching to his followers, which was that he
would suffer and die, be brought down from the cross and
be buried, then would rise from the dead for their sake,
so he could live with them again, to their benefit.
Mortimer had merely found a refreshing way of referring
to this while tossing it like so much raw beef into the
stock pot of the Remaking. He loved to refer to central
Christian beliefs in an unholy way, so as to cut a
wearyingly self-satisfied Rev and his ilk down to much
needed human size. But the whole time he remained
fundamentally respectful of Christ’s teaching.
11.
It was never mj lorenzo’s intention to equate himself
with Jesus Christ, as some critics accused, but rather
to draw a parallel
between the two of them. The parallel he saw between
himself and Christ was this: that like Christ, he, mj,
had a special mission to complete in the world, and it
involved some inconvenience and maybe even suffering.
Like Christ’s mission, his own was to save the world,
but in a different way. Christ’s ‘salvation’ was aimed
at individuals, and at their ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’, whereas
Mortimer’s mission was to shed light on certain issues
in such a way as to possibly, hopefully save the human
race IN BODY, AS A WHOLE, to save it, that is, from
annihilating itself physically and
materially.
12.
One of the issues that Dr. Lorenzo stressed through the
years, as he traveled the lecture circuit trying to keep
humanity from blowing itself to bits, was that various
cultures and religions only worsened tensions in the
world when they denigrated and dehumanized other
cultures and religions the way Petitot did. It amounted
to provocative and dangerous behavior at a time when the
viability of human life on the planet was not a given by
any means, not even for the richest and most powerful
nations and individuals. A number of serious widespread
problems made it hard enough already to share the planet
peaceably, like weapons of mass destruction; population
explosion; overpopulation; insufficient resources;
global warming; wasting of resources; trashing of the
environment; faulty economic planning; greed; the
gambling away of private family nest-eggs by huge
impersonal financial entities; infectious disease; and
many more, including geopolitical arrogance in general.
While solutions were being sought for these widespread
problems, individuals could help by not adding prejudice
and name-calling, etc. All the peoples of the earth had
to learn quickly to see each other as co-equal in their
intrinsic humanity and co-equal in their right to
inhabit the planet, and had to find ways to do so
peaceably, treating one another the whole time with
utmost respect, starting as soon as possible, if not
sooner. Otherwise they were likely to blow each other
off the face of the planet tomorrow,
or sooner.
And
when certain cheeky pundits asked Dr. Lorenzo why, then,
he was so critical of other people, he responded that it
was essential to criticize one’s own
people when they were increasing, not
decreasing, tension in the world. The trick, he said,
was to attempt to do so in a way that was ‘outrageous’
enough to get their attention, but not so ‘out-there’
aberrant as to strip them of humanity altogether.
13.
Dr. Lorenzo complained repeatedly in later years how
upset it made him every time he rediscovered how much
negative prejudice against simpler, non-Western peoples
on the planet had been built into him somehow by his own
twisted Western-world culture. He assumed that if it had
been built into him, it must have been built into nearly
everyone else in the Western world too. And so he
studied his Western world and easily found it
everywhere. And he felt, after a lifetime of
experimenting and searching for a solution, that the
best method he had ever found for lessening the negative
prejudice, was to actually live for at least a month
with a simple family in their home, in one of those
cultures which his own culture had routinely devalued,
just as he had lived for a part of a year with Dlune and
Chipewyan, who were of a culture his people had always
devalued, the Native American culture. He felt that
Mexico, being so shockingly different from – and
devalued by – the U.S., though ‘theoretically’ part of
‘Western civilization’ ‘in a way’, was as good a place
as any for the U.S.A. to start this self-reforming
get-acquainted project. And to get the project going in
a real way, he recommended that no U.S. American be
allowed to receive a high school diploma of any kind,
without having lived first with a typical (poor) Mexican
family in their home in
Of
a country like the U.S.A. that presumed it had the right
to exert its might and will around the world in so many
ways that affected so many human beings in so many
countries, the people of the world had the right to
expect this kind of sincere effort at a
pride-and-prejudice-tempering education, this much
effort at the very minimum. By 2005 Dr. Lorenzo had
enjoyed long friendships with a number of ordinary
Mexican families in Mexico, and was convinced that there
were millions of families like them who would welcome a
young USA high school student in their home – most
likely for the price of a very few pesos, if any pesos
at all.
14.
The ‘fifth attempt’ amounted to an engagement and
wedding announcement, all in one. Mortimer was informing
Rev and Jo he wanted to settle down with Dlune, and was
asking for their blessing in the form of their
participating with him from afar, in a party, in this
here-and-now epistolary romp of amassing credentials to
win Dlune’s hand. The ‘fifth attempt’ also informed them
– politely; almost in a whisper – that he and Dlune were
already married, in a sense, since they had been
sleeping together in the same room, a liberality of
which the Lorenzos would never have approved, one that
could have, in fact, startled them straight into the
next week scandalized, tremorous and weeping, if they
had chosen to let it do so. Thus the ‘fifth attempt’
demonstrated too, that Mortimer was grown up and crafty
enough to break his parents’ sacred rules right in their
faces, while tricking them caringly into partying-hardy
to celebrate the fact. He knew they would love the romp
and cherish it. It was the only section of The Remaking
he had designed thinking
almost entirely of them, outhouse Bible jokes and all.
And they did love it, amazingly. And they cherished it
forever, both of them. Partly because its scriptural
lesson was a nitty-gritty Calvinst-Protestant one, in a
style they had grown up on and cherished all their
lives, joke or no: that every believer was his own
priest. And Dr. Lorenzo was elated when he learned from
Sammy in 1980, that his parents, Rev and Jo, had not
condemned his outrageous approach to remembering such a
point, and better yet, had laughed about it for years.
15.
The ‘fifth attempt’ had a wound-up, over-energized,
nearly-out-of-control, elated, irritable,
flight-of-ideas hypomanic feel to it, which suggested
again that sometime-manic Jack was influencing Mortimer.
Most pundits agreed that the likeliest moment of manic
psychotic delusion, if a reader felt there had to be
one, as a few tiresome ‘psycho’-pundits tiresomely did,
inevitably, was Mortimer’s wacky suggestion that he was
living with Ho Chi Minh, not Chipewyan, and that ‘they’
were coming to kidnap him and force him to provide
medical care to injured fighters whose war objectives he
might not necessarily support.
16.
Experts on The Remaking who usually defended mj
lorenzo’s sanity, however, argued at one point
over the years that any normal, sane
young man about to marry a princess and go on a
fabulous honeymoon after months paralyzed in a
total body cast, and after years of suppressed sex,
would have sounded exactly like Mortimer, if not worse:
like a lit and
crackling box of fireworks about to explode and light
up creation. And the rest of the pundits applauded
and stamped their feet at this observation; even the
'psycho' pundits. Nobody could disagree. And so they
voted the ‘sanity pundits’, unanimously, that particular
year’s top MOISTR prize for: ‘the very Most incredibly
Outasight Interpretation of Something in The Remaking’.
196. the four
major schools of Remaking pundit-wizardry
And
in sum, then: when it came to the ‘vast empty spaces’
of the Remaking and the differences of interpretation
they sometimes caused, the ‘fifth attempt’ provided a
classic case of such a thing and came to be revered by
pundits as the very symbol of pundit disagreement. For:
by 2005 there had come to be four major schools of
Remaking pundit-wizardry, roughly speaking, and after 34
years of punditry, the ‘fifth attempt’ provoked heated
disagreement among the four, more cleanly and clearly,
and more classically, than any other section of The
Remaking, it seemed. And those four major schools of
interpretation were as follows.
1)
As of 2005
roughly five percent of the tens of thousands of
Remaking pundits worldwide still considered the ‘fifth
attempt’ and a good bit of The Remaking as purely
‘psycho’, sheer Mortimer-wacko brainspun idiocy and
‘bullshit’ and therefore of little or no meaning or value to
the contemporary world, other than to provide
illustration of far-fetched thinking, whether you called
it ‘manic’ or ‘psychotic’ or whatever. The exact word
employed to describe it did not matter, they said.
‘Value’ was the issue. And these pundits were still
called, in 2005, the ‘psycho’ pundits.
2) The great
majority of pundits belonged to the calmer,
middle-of-the-road group already described throughout
this chapter. They were those who claimed the ‘fifth
attempt’ made the sixteen points listed above. And they
were the ones who had always attempted to appeal to
reason in opposition to the ‘psycho-pundits’. Since they
were the mainstream they still had no name for
themselves in 2005.
3) By the
early-to-mid 70s a distinct though motley crew of
super-devoted pundits had already created a small but
powerful organization within the overall organization of
pundits, one officially recognized by the rest only
because it had become too vociferous to ignore. This
group took very, very seriously (worth dying for,
possibly), these words of Mortimer’s in the ‘fifth
attempt’: “…prophet; priest; and king; to my very own
self. AND TO MY PEOPLE: FOR THE NEW COVENANT
RENDERS CHIPEWYAN’S CABIN A TABERNACLE…” These devoted
followers of mj lorenzo were called by everyone
including themselves the ‘culture hero’ pundits, and
they constituted about ten per cent of the whole.
4) A fourth
group, perhaps five per cent of all pundits registered
on official Remaking membership websites, refused to get
caught up in the discussion. Their argument was that all
the heated, endless discussion on this particular
subject was ‘a tempest in a teapot’. For what really
mattered was what had already happened, and what was
happening right now, and what would be happening in the
future. The one and only important thing was, namely,
that: mj
lorenzo’s Remaking was re-fashioning the world.
And these folks were called the ‘git-along’ pundits.
197. the
priesthood of all believers
And
due to the heated debate over the ‘fifth attempt’ down
through the years, Dr. Lorenzo did finally accept in
2004 an invitation from the history department at Penn
to give a third lecture there, this time on the subject
of “The Priesthood of All Believers.” He said that “the
priesthood of all believers” had been one of the three
primary revolutionary tenets of the movement to reform
Roman Christianity in the 1500’s, a movement which had
come to be called the 'Protestant' 'Reformation’. The
groups – later ‘churches’ or ‘denominations’ – that
protested and broke away from the Roman church, he said,
all without exception reduced the authority of church
clerics and handed back to individuals the right and the
power to connect with God directly in a number of ways,
a power which had been theirs all along, in truth, but
had been denied them by church fathers for well over
1000 years. This power to serve as priest for oneself,
he said, was often a large part of what made Protestant
Christians such zany (and even sometimes inspiring)
zealots and was the basis of Mortimer’s argument in the
‘fifth attempt’ that: the top of the bed in Chipewyan’s
cabin where he spent the winter of 70-71 thinking out
his theology and sending sermons to his parents was,
rightly speaking, according to the theology of Martin
Luther, John Calvin and every other Protestant
theologian in history, in effect, therefore: the Mercy
Seat of the Lord, tantamount to the mercy seat of the
ancient Jewish tabernacle, the place where God met ‘his
priestly representative’ most intimately and directly.
198. and finally:
the explanation for Jo Lorenzo’s irrepressible
laughter
The
mercy seat, in effect, was anywhere Mortimer chose to
rest his poor white ass, including the outhouse. And it
was this understanding, creeping up on poor Josephine
Lorenzo, which had undone her in church, poor thing. And
undone her for the rest of her life too. Because she
knew no Protestant in his right mind, not even Rev,
could dispute the point. She and Rev both knew scripture
and Evangelical tenet too well to disagree that God met
man in the toilet as well as anywhere else. She just had
not expected her son to remind her of it in a sermon he was
delivering in his first crazy ‘modernistic novel’,
or do it so hilariously (to her, at least), or in a way
which would creep up on her so unexpectedly again and
again for the rest of her life.
Jo
did not feel bad about her son’s ‘breakdown’ ever again
after this ‘sermon’ of his, she told Sammy in 1980 (when
she was 70), because he had made her laugh for the rest
of her life ‘more than enough to make up for his
craziness’.
In
fact, Rev Lorenzo up and died and left her alone in the
world in ‘86, and she confessed to her son and daughter
one day about five years after that, once she had
finally calmed down from the loss, that there was an
unmentionable fact which heightened her incurable,
day-in-and-day-out susceptibility to feeling tickled
whenever she heard or thought: ‘mercy seat’. The ‘fifth
attempt’ had helped
her understand something she had thought she would
never comprehend during her lifetime, she said,
probably until she got to heaven, mainly because she
could never have asked Rev to explain it until she saw
him in heaven. And that thing was this: why, every
Sunday morning before preaching in church, he would read
and study the Bible passage he was about to use in his
sermon sitting
on the toilet.
And
as for all of those other seemingly nice and decent
people all over the world who usually longed for mj
lorenzo’s silence?... This time, after reading something
of his, ‘the fifth attempt’, they were the
ones speechless.
