199.  how the ‘sixth attempt’ remained unnoticed for years

Many Remaking pundits ‘felt bad’ for ‘poor old put-upon Dr. Lorenzo’, they said in later years during talk shows and NPR interviews. It must have felt ‘awful’, ‘having your dirty drawers hung in the street by the media’, every six months in a way more gross than the last intriguing angle. And the ‘culture hero’ pundits felt ‘worse than anybody’, they moaned. They were ‘ranked out’ when ‘psychos with no heart' said mj lorenzo brought it on himself.

Because they had created Dr. Lorenzo’s problem with the media, not mj. ‘WE, the culture hero pundits did it to him’, they said, ‘when we dug up his address, got him on TV, and lost him his privacy forever’.

The sweet-looking ‘sixth attempt’ would come to be blamed as well, though, in the end. By everyone. And correctly; even though in the early years no one had imagined The Remaking’s ‘sixth attempt’ capable of arousing any interest of any kind, let alone a scandal.

Pundits had dismissed the ‘sixth attempt’ and ignored it, underestimating its importance for years.

Even unearthing the author had helped people understand this part of The Remaking very little at first. Mj lorenzo had shed light on his great book in other respects over time, but when it came to the ‘sixth attempt’, ‘we should have left him in the Poconos screwing Dlune’, as the psychos were overheard to have felt, and knowing perfectly well they had tracked him down in Denver, Colorado, not in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

‘Every time he said anything about it’, claimed these ‘psycho’ pundits, ‘he just obscured things more’. And most pundits agreed with the psychos for once. (But not with their irreligious reference to Dlune and the Poconos, of course. For most of mj’s fanatical following felt it was ‘disrespectful to refer to a hero like mj lorenzo, or to his wife and family in any way other than ‘the Dr. and his wife and family’.)

200.  how the world’s foremost Remaking pundit Sammy Martinez first met the author

The ‘early Remaking pundits’ had visited mj’s parents in the 70s and learned that mj had come home for Christmas in 71, finally, and had kept in touch with family after that. But they had not asked for a way to reach their hero at the time. He would ‘come for them’, they believed.

“When the time is right,” as they said to each other.

But he never came.

And so, in ’79, an especially ardent handful ’could not stand on decorum a second longer’, as they explained to Newsweek later, and demanded Sammy Martinez contact mj on their behalf at once. Because they felt like ‘loose iron filings without a magnet’, as they would tell CNN in 2000, and wanted to be ‘aligned finally’. Yet Sammy had refused to help. And he had felt it was the right decision at the time, as he would explain later.

Sammy had idolized mj too, starting from the unforgettable day when they had met in ’71, at young Sammy’s impressionable age of 14. He had been quite grown up for 14, though, and had realized right away that he could not ignore the ‘superabundance of' – as he would call it one day – ‘serendipitous, too-magical synchronicity’ found in their chance meeting.

Sammy’s shaman grandfather had been training Sammy in ‘tribal healing’ ever since the boy had begged him to do so at age eight. And in ’71 to help his child prodigy grandson ‘round out his healer’s education’, the old man had taken the kid along in his old clanky Chevy pickup all the way from San Juan Pueblo in northern New Mexico straight up the plains to Calgary, Alberta, for a powwow of North American tribes from everywhere, from Tegucigalpa and from Tuktoyaktuk and from everywhere in between, coming to Calgary at the summer solstice. ‘Just’, as the old man kidded, ‘to celebrate the fourteenth birthday of Samuel Oké Martinez’. For Sammy’s birthday ‘just happened to be’ on San Juan day, the name day and fiesta day, i.e., the patron saint’s day of his own ‘San Juan’ tribe and pueblo. All of which ‘just happened to coincide’ with one of mj lorenzo's favorite events, the summer solstice.

After a ‘humdinger’ of an after-solstice powwow and parade on the 22^nd of June in Calgary, the two headed in the old man’s pickup straight for the Divide, still all decked out in tribal paint and feathers and the whole sacrosanct San Juan Day razzmatazz gitup. They rattled in the pickup straight through Banff to the Valley of the Ten Peaks and decided in late afternoon to park and walk up the right side of Moraine Lake, since so many hours of light were left in the day still. And after passing the lake they took the fork that climbed toward Wenkchemna Pass.

They cut off just below tree line into a meadow and wandered bathed in the slanted orange light of early evening quite deeply into a thinly forested meadow, far from the trail, looking for a brook or peaceful place to rest ‘where nobody would make a silly fuss over the feathers and corn husks’ which they still revered as they hung from their bodies. They were resting by a brook in a glade dappled with sun when a beautiful ‘glowing’ man could be seen approaching them unaware of their presence, picking berries gracefully and shamelessly in nothing but a backpack. The young man noticed them finally and they offered water and food, every bit of supply they had, in fact. And the three talked and talked.

He wanted to stay on the Divide a third night once fed, but was dehydrated and weak still. So they walked him down through the glades, far enough from the trail to help him feel less ‘torn away from the mountain’, talking with him nonstop and getting to know him and even making him dress.

Sammy and mj did most of the talking, of course. And the next day they met again so that mj could give the kid a letter to send to the Lorenzos, granting them permission to mail a copy of the complete Remaking to Sammy’s family’s ancient adobe hovel in San Juan Pueblo. Sammy sent the letter off and received the package several months after his trip home to New Mexico. And it went to his heart and stayed there forever.

Sammy kept in touch with mj and Dlune and in ’74 looked up mj’s parents too, while college-hunting in the east. In ’75 he graduated from Española High and started at Penn, eventually double-majoring in English and Anthropology. He made frequent trips to Florence during his four years on the east coast, almost every weekend during the first year. The Lorenzos were crazy about him. They trusted him more than they did their own son, ‘even though Sammy was an Indian’, as Jo admitted: a statement meant at first as brutally as it sounded, inexcusably, but later meant jokingly, once they had been ‘re-educated’, as Sammy and Dlune called the ‘ordeal’ of ‘re-training the Lorenzos away from impolitic and insulting over-honesty’.

 Sammy let the Lorenzos know that U.S. campuses were humming with underground Remaking study. And they made Sammy agree not to reveal that scary fact to ‘his priestly eminence’, as Rev said, until all three could agree together it was ‘the right time’ to tell ‘fragile’ mj. For Rev and Jo had not recovered – nor would they ever – from the fear that they themselves might inadvertently flip mj into another ‘banana split’ year ‘like that year’ just by doing ‘one lousy and unsuspecting, little dad-blasted thing’, meaning a tiny little thing like finally revealing they had published his book without his express permission (even though he’d said in the book they should do just that).

201.  how the pundits managed to unearth their hero despite every obstacle

Sammy revealed to the Remaking pundits he met at Penn, upon first discovering them in late ’75, that mj was alive and well, living a quiet life with Dlune, enjoying fatherhood since ’74, and pursuing his career in psychiatry.

By the following morning the pundit world knew from Paris to San Francisco. And the event became a benchmark by which early pundits forever after compared notes on their lives, asking each other, ‘Where were you the day that Sammy said he knew where mj was?’

But they were waiting for him to contact them. So it was four more unbelievable years before they turned their venom on Sammy, venting frustration as mentioned. Sammy was the one who ‘blocked mj lorenzo’s mission’, said the ‘culture hero’ crowd in ’79, and the world would remember him for it. But Sammy felt it was not the ‘right time’ and he used these words ‘to save the Lorenzos and mj a likely ordeal’, as he explained to TIME later. He needed more time to think about what might be the right time.

And so, the extremist blocs, the ‘culture hero’ folks, the ‘Sunday Schoolers’ and a few others, having gone so far now as to actually threaten one of their own pundit comrades, Sammy, decided it was time to stop beating up on themselves and others and actually solve the problem. They put to use all known people-tracking catalogues such as the New York Public Library possessed, came upon a Colorado Board of Medical Licensure list of M.D.’s who practiced in that state, including work addresses and phone numbers, and found their hero in early 1980.

Mj was floored, of course. He knew where the blame lay too. Sammy had not released his papers, he knew. His parents must have released his Remaking without telling him.

In letters from his trip he had told them to publish it, but he had enjoyed years of a peaceful quiet life and hated to see them disrupted.

Once he recovered and could feel anything at all, anger took over and he called his parents one night after two glasses of wine. They hid nothing, of course. They were open and honest and forthcoming. They were, in fact, as patent as two old bottomless wooden buckets, just as they always had been whenever nothing intimate was required.

And so, with this historic unearthing of mj lorenzo, the importance of mj’s parents to understanding every aspect of The Remaking suddenly struck the pundit world. Sammy, now a very mature 22 and an anthropology grad student (in New Mexico), realized that an assignment awaited him. He begged mj’s permission to interview his parents formally. And by summer and fall of 1980, when work on the ‘first revision’ for the pundits was well underway, the two projects became one. For Sammy’s interviews had produced so much of value that he and mj soon wanted to include virtually all of the interview material in the 1980 ‘first revision’.

202.  how the original version of mj lorenzo’s The Remaking got itself ‘published’ the very first time

During Sammy’s interviews the Lorenzos in 1980 were clear about how the ’71 ‘publication’ of The Remaking had come about, and seemed desperate to justify it, partly because their son’s recent unpleasant anger over what they had done eight years before was still fresh on their minds.

At Christmas of ’71, they explained, when their long lost (and ‘only’!) son had turned up unannounced finally, seemingly intact once again finally, and with his new beautiful black-haired ‘Indian wife’ in tow; and when Rev and Jo had seen how ‘wonderfully’ things were going with the visit, much better than expected ‘after all that’; Rev sincerely regretted having gone to Philly one month before and gotten The Remaking, i.e., the contents of ‘those crazy envelopes’, printed up and distributed without mj’s permission.

Rev had thought at the time, though, that his reasons for doing so were good reasons, for nothing had been heard of their son in four long months, from June 30 to the end of October, ’71. They had no idea what was going on. Mj had suffered a terrible year. He had even ’Married an Indian!’ as Jo put it. Maybe he could not work yet. Maybe he was paralyzed. They ‘Just did not know what to think’. And furthermore, winter was coming around again now. And Jo agreed with Rev that mj might be ‘still suffering’, feeling he ‘couldn’t ask for anything’. Maybe he had gotten ‘all proud’ because he had ‘married that Indian woman’. This was how Jo would phrase the issue addressing Rev, not only in ’71 but still in ’80 during interviews in front of Sammy himself, who was one of ‘those Indians’.

So Rev wanted to find his son and tell him they would help despite anything and everything that might have happened. They were tired of ‘the stand-off or whatever it was’, and wanted to see mj ‘like forty’, ‘like anything’, in other words. They wanted to see him ‘bad’. They were ‘literally heartsick’, as both explained to Sammy.

And so: at Rev’s post-retirement age of 66, he had driven his new Buick, the replacement from the insurance company, down super-busy U.S. Route 130 and over the Ben Franklin Bridge every single weekday during Philadelphia morning rush hour traffic, and had spent the entire month of November, several free freshly Xeroxed copies of the newly published ‘The Remaking’ always in a brief case he carried, and a copy always in hand to give personally to each and every friend of his in the great city of Philadelphia. Each and every single lifelong Ridge Ave. Roxborough pediatrician friend who had gone to Central High with Jo’s father. Each and every University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine dean of admissions Rev had phoned in ’64 and met in person to cajole into accepting his son into medical school because two friends of his and Jo’s had been Penn valedictorians and had sent additional letters of recommendation which Rev had felt compelled to deliver to the deans personally. Each and every med student and young person of whatever description he ran into on Hamilton Walk the same day he talked with the med school deans. Each and every embarrassed and disgruntled internship chief of his son’s at Presbyterian Hospital ten blocks from the medical school. Each and every young man or woman in hospital garb in the parking lot and corridors that day, including the Quaker teen pacifists doing Alternative Service as stock boys in lieu of submitting to U.S. military draft for Vietnam. Each and every waitress and busboy at Pagano’s Italian Restaurant on Chestnut St. where Rev always ordered lasagna, as well as each and every server at each and every Philadelphia restaurant where he ate lunch that month. Each and every U. of P. student or faculty member he could collar at the feet of Penn’s Ben Franklin statue and along its many crisscrossing campus walks before and after his daily W. Philly lunches on- and off-campus. Each and every one of his Temple University and Temple Divinity professors still traceable forty years after Rev’s graduating in Divinity as well as two very accommodating divine ‘secretaries’. Each and every born-again-Christian Sunoco Oil Company magnate from Jo’s Collingswood High School graduating class now living on the Main Line, chairing the Pew Foundation and CEO-ing in a 65^th floor Center City penthouse office. Each and every preacher-discount dentist the family had ever known in working class Tacony; each and every piano and voice teacher who had ever voice-coached Jo in a row-house somewhere in a vast Northeast Philly flatland full of nothing but miles and miles of red brick row-houses. Each and every Jewish warehouseman near gritty ancient red-brick Front and Spring Garden who had sold Rev perfect factory rejects out of flimsy open grey boxes at an additional bulk discount just because Rev was a poor Methodist preacher from a poor farming town in South Jersey and his poor preacher’s wife and kids couldn’t go naked! Each and every old-style, stand-in-front-of-your-store, sidewalk-hawking and passerby-haranguing Jew dress shoe broker on South St. who had ever talked Rev into a closet-full of spiffy triple A wingtip preacher shoes at quantity discount. Each and every Jewish jeweler, assessor or pawnbroker working in an iron-reinforced glass cage near 8^th and Sansom who had ever sold Rev a watch, a ring or a locket starting from the day in 1931 he had bought Jo’s diamond engagement ring. Each and every far-South-Philly trumpet-playing Alsatian cousin in Jo’s forgotten Philadelphia-German family. Each and every hospital administrator at Methodist Hospital on South Broad St. where Rev’s poor lost son had been born twenty-eight years before. Each and every young person in scrubs Rev met in the halls of Methodist Hospital that same day. Each and every last short and beefy owner of every ancient dark and magical three-storied Bible-selling ‘Christian book store’ in ancient Center City Philadelphia that Rev had taken his teenage son to and that always gave ten percent clergy discount. Each and every bank manager near Billy Penn where the Lorenzos had saved for mj’s unquestionably necessary college education. Each and every Provident Life Insurance man Rev had ever bought policies from in Center City in case something unspeakable happened to Rev or to mj. And each and every Poconos Bible camp evangelist and Christian male quartet tenor Rev had ever known personally who still lived in southeastern Pennsylvania anywhere in or near the great City of Brotherly Love.

And with that winsome, handsome, well-dressed, gentlemanly and jovial manner that made him so well-liked everywhere, Rev. Lorenzo had handed each and every friend, old and new, a fresh copy of the just Xeroxed ‘book’, not apologizing even once for the monstrosity, just asking for help in copying it further and getting it out on the street so people could ‘look for clues’ that might bring his lost son to light.

And then, said Rev and Jo, after all of that, AFTER ALL THAT, as they should have just guessed: mj up and walks in the door out of nowhere two full weeks before Christmas. And Rev kicked himself again and again. He just should have waited a little bit longer to hand out that ‘lousy lemon of a word-mandarin pickle’ or whatever that crazy book was.

What if the poor boy should object to his private pickled bananas getting publicized all up and down the Delaware Valley? Jo did not want a scene at Christmas, however, not her Jack’s first time home after ‘such a bad year’, as she put it pathetically. What if he got upset and did something crazier than ‘that crazy trip’?

And after Christmas every few months Rev would ask himself again and again and always decide against bringing it up. Because Jo, especially, was so gratified they were all getting along ‘so nicely’. And so, nothing had been mentioned the whole ten years until suddenly in 1980 ‘that same dang hippie group’, judging from a very recent picture on the Arts page of the Sunday Inquirer, the same weird group that had visited Florence several years back and asked such interesting probing questions about the author of ‘The Remaking’, had finally ‘unearthed’ their long-lost mj lorenzo.

Meanwhile copies had been made of copies of the original Remaking. And now Remaking pundits were complaining to mj in person about his wonderful book’s illegibility, ten years after Rev had distributed it. Rev had given him back the original envelopes long before, in ’71, of course. And mj had considered ‘re-writing the crazy thing’ ‘some day, maybe’, to make it more readable and understandable, ‘if only he could read and understand it himself’. But he had enjoyed a nice quiet family life in the Poconos and Colorado instead.

And suddenly one day he had ‘come home from work at the Fort Logan Mental Health Center in Denver and opened his mail like any other day’, as he told the story later. And ‘that stupid pile of papers in the box in the closet’ had ‘somehow gotten loose on the street’ and blown around in the wind ‘like some wing-ed canine’ and managed to adopt a ‘huge freaking following all over creation who were complaining to the press from (freaking) Frankfurt to Frisco that the monster’s Dr. Frankenstein creator had let his monster loose for everyone else in the world to love and care for except the mad owner of the monster himself’, as the Dr. put it in a conference once, with a smile.

203.  how the 1980 ‘first revision’ then came about

It took young Dr. mj a while to adjust to the shock, he admitted. He never hid this fact from the pundits, either. And once he had settled down from the shock and anger of having his life turned upside down and inside out by unsought notoriety, he granted that the thing, the ‘book’, was indeed hard to read.

NATURALLY. That was why he never had read it again himself all those years. It was why he had left it in a box and never published it, he would add quietly.

Even for the most ardent fanatics, that ‘pundit’ or ‘original’ version of The Remaking was a mess because it was copied from the very same wretched original mj had air-mailed home, all spotted and stained, some of it looking plucked from the muddy side of the Mackenzie and dried on the gritty canoe bottom, several pages even ‘mucked up with fish blood’, others stained with gasoline. It had been reproduced cheaply, likewise, from the very same Remaking pages Rev and Jo had pored over a thousand times, mussing and wrinkling and smearing them with holy sweat and juicy liverwurst, mustard and onion from Jo’s favorite German rye sandwiches.

And so, after a few months of feeling ‘ass-shock-edly half-aware’ that somebody was kind of interested in his wretched artistic offspring; and then having been informed it was merely a ‘weird, heady and intellectual bunch’ that seemed interested, meaning mostly leftist outcasts, as it seemed to mj before he got better information, not the ‘average’ person or USA cross-section which one might have wished had fallen in love with one’s book, when one reflected on all of this calmly; and having thought about this whole perturbation for a while: he finally decided in the spring of 1980, with the help of Sammy’s coaxing, of course, that he would concede to the publication of a new and ‘revised version’ aimed at a more general audience.

And so the suddenly famous author made several valiant and famous stabs at ‘fixing’ his original, but each attempt came out badly for its own reason. He complained to Sammy, chief intimate supporter of his writing by now. And Sammy, who had been thinking about little else BUT a re-write for years, immediately came up with a version that edited out some of the original and patched the rest with transitions, commentary, interviews and other improvements. Mj liked the flow of it. And the darn ‘first revision’, when published, even sold a little in campus and offbeat-hippy, New-Age, guru-follower, and occult-type bookstores here and there in the U.S.A., Canada and Europe, starting in late 1980.

204.  first impressions of the ‘sixth attempt’ as recalled by ‘early’ pundits

The ‘sixth attempt’ in the ‘first revision’, as in the original, remained one of the simplest parts of The Remaking to read because Sammy had altered it barely at all. It still consisted of one long Indian tale and a medley of mj lorenzo vignettes of varied type and origin. And the mood was relatively light, so the reading was easy. But no one knew what it was about, even still, other than what seemed obvious. The new 1980 version helped no one understand the ‘sixth attempt’ any more profoundly than before, in other words.

Mortimer never would have settled for any too-obvious meaning, as everyone knew. And yet he had never explicated this part of his Remaking anywhere else in his crazy patchwork of a mandalic book. Thus it seemed at first, at any rate. And it remained stubbornly ‘undiscovered’, therefore, even after publication of the ‘first revision’.

When the early Remaking pundits had first tackled the overall Remaking puzzle in late ’71 and early ‘72, they had approached it only because they were searching for clues to mj’s whereabouts, trying to help poor ol’ Rev Lorenzo. For, as they would tell the story for years: Rev had seemed ‘so deserving and dedicated’ to finding his son, mj. And so the clue-seekers had not bothered digging into the quiet ‘sixth attempt’, because they had been drawn to louder sections more intriguing to interpret. The ‘sixth attempt’ did not look ‘cluttered or complex enough to harbor hidden clues’, as they explained later. In fact, it struck them as ‘just a teenage-y-romantic shout of post-virginity triumph’. And already by 1971, after a mere three years of ‘free love’ among that population, loss of virginity (‘are you kidding?’) was a yawningly passé subject in pundit circles.

So the ‘sixth attempt’ was ignored for years by almost everybody. Like a wallflower; like the so-called ‘lost child’ of an alcoholic; like ‘the quiet patient’ on a psych ward who is so quiet that the nurses hardly remember he or she is there. Until one day, after weeks of hospitalization, since nurses have been too overwhelmed with super-wacky Jack-type problem-makers the whole time, they have a screaming heart attack discovering a quiet Mortimer sitting right next to the nurses’ station: “He has been sitting right here beside us a whole month and we don’t know a flippin’ thing about him!”

And even when the ‘sixth attempt’ was ‘discovered’ finally by a few advance scouts, additional years would pass before any Remaking pundit would be able to dig around and find even enough differing interpretations finally to list all of the commonest ones on a web page.

And more striking yet, when Sammy did his 1980 revision, the only part of the book that caused anything close to argument with the author was the ‘sixth attempt’. Mj was hard as steel about it. He stood unmovable, defending his right to ‘no comment’ when Sammy asked for a little bit of enlightenment. Authors ‘had that right’, he said. And anyway he had never thought Rev would take his writing seriously and ‘have the damn thing published’.

So the ‘sixth attempt’ stood right in the middle of everything just like an untitled nude sculpture covered with packed frozen snow in the middle of a vast city park, unexplained by its sculptor, left to be chiseled by winter winds, abandoned to be interpreted without the least little bit of guidance even after spring finally bared it.

205.  Dr. Lorenzo chats about the ‘sixth attempt’ years after writing it

But finally, of course, years later Dr. Lorenzo did mention the ‘sixth attempt’ on occasion. One day he was relaxing with Sammy and said that in late March at Chipewyan’s cabin, one early-darkening afternoon after a hundred too many dark days already, he was resting ‘in the way young Mortimer often did’ and had pulled out of his knapsack his old Calvinist Pilgrim Bible, the ‘dispensationalist’, ‘Law-versus-Love’, ‘Covenant-teaching’ student Bible aimed at young Bible-lovers.

He was looking for the passage in Judges about Micah and the Danites so he could tear Petitot to shreds. But instead he absentmindedly looked at the editorial page and was reminded it was a ‘reference’ Bible designed for ‘Young Christians’. His parents had given it to him during high school. He had loved that thick tome very much at the time, just as he always had loved all things complex, intricate, absorbing, erudite and too grand to be seen as anything but miraculous or near-miraculous, even down to raw nature itself and his own existence in it. And he had felt tears in his eyes at Chipewyan’s cabin, he said, reading that stupid editorial page, before he even got to where he was going in the Book of Judges, to ‘crazy Micah and the Danites’. He was far from home and was homesick, actually. And terribly sick of winter, a hateful winter that was much longer, colder and darker than anything in the states, a ‘barely human’ winter, one that could kill you in five minutes if you just walked the wrong way off a trap line and tripped in the snow, fell, and made the mistake of shutting your eyes exhausted ‘for a few minutes of rest’. He had ‘kind of lost it’, he said, reading the names and credentials of all thirty-six, mostly Philadelphia-area ‘Contributing and Consulting Editors’ in detail, because they sounded so homey and wholesome and familiar and sincere and well-intentioned and warm. He could see them in his mind’s eye like family, even ones he had never met. Yet they were just as far away as if they were part of a dream from which he had just barely awakened, part of another existence, mere memories of a world so different it seemed impossible ever to have known such real-sounding people.

There was ‘Homer Hammontree, D.D., Evangelist’, for example, a preacher famous in the Philly area whom the Lorenzos had considered a friend. And ‘Mary V. Eberwein, Sunday School Dept. Superintendant’, whom he had not known but could ‘easily picture’ from having known so many of her type, probably an ardent Sunday School teacher in some big moneyed Baptist church in one of the heavily populated Pennsylvania counties outside Philly, a woman whose love of the Word and of children, and whose leadership and American-woman get-up-and-go had earned her a promotion at about age 50 to ‘Superintendant’ of her good-sized church’s big Sunday School and finally a place on this prestigious board which had created the educational footnotes and the elaborate system of margin references for the Pilgrim Bible that he and other thinking, church-going, Bible-toting teens had loved so much. And ‘William Allan Dean, B.S., D.D., Pastor of Aldan Union Church’, ‘also associated with Philadelphia School of the Bible’. ‘Bill Dean’ as mj’s family had known him, a man who had preached so well at his uncle’s Bible camp in the Poconos that a cousin was named for him.

And when he had finally flipped through looking for Judges and Micah and the Danites, he had come across an old September 1966 newspaper article stuck in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 6, as Dr. Lorenzo told Sammy. And he had thrown that article into his Remaking at the beginning of the ‘sixth attempt’, taking out some of its lines and adding a few of his own.  

206.  the newspaper article about the Peace Corps training camp in the Poconos and the ‘hodge-podge’ or ‘collage’ section of The Remaking which the article helped inspire

The Hindu Temple in Shawnee Pa.

Peace Corps Trainees in the Poconos Buy Toothpaste with Rupees

(clipped newspaper photo with the following caption:)

Moment for meditation:…

MORTIMER JACK LORENZO

a…

VISITOR FROM PHILADELPHIA,

and…

DELKRAYLE RAJNAPUTH

…of New Delhi, an instructor, take a few moments from the busy training program for meditation at the camp’s tiny temple.

(text of article:)

There are two places that sell…

MATCHES, INSECT REPELLENT, STAMPS,

…food and whatnot in the…

UPPER DELAWARE VALLEY

…town of Shawnee,…

NAMED FOR AN EXTINCT TRIBE OF NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.

…One is ‘Fred Waring’s Shawnee Village Store’, which is just like any crossroads store in America. Trade there is naturally conducted in dollars and cents.

But the other establishment is not quite so ordinary. It is the Faith in Lord Ram Hotel Bazaar, where commerce is conducted in rupees and annas.

Not far from the bazaar is a temple of Ganesh, the Hindu god of auspicious beginnings. It is a tiny building….

I AM AFFECTIONATELY REMINDED OF OUR LITTLE FORT CHIPEWYAN OUTHOUSE HERE, WHICH IS WHERE I AM READING THIS.

…Four rough logs support the roof. Red dragons with gold eyes are painted on the pediment. Above the altar are brightly colored drawings of swarthy gods and goddesses wearing silk robes with gold-embroidered hems….

WHO LEFT THIS 1950 CALENDAR OF NUDES ON OUR OUTHOUSE WALL?

…Down the hill from the temple, near…

THE

…lake, is a…

MAS PATCH.

…The Hotel Bazaar, temple, and…

MAS PATCH

…are parts of a Peace Corps training program run at Shawnee by the University of Pennsylvania. They stand, along with a number of conventional Pennsylvania-style buildings, on what was once a summer camp for…

NORTH AMERICAN SHAWNEE AND LENNI-LENAPE INDIANS.

…Fifty-five volunteers are now pursuing a…

WINTER

…training program there. They are preparing for service in Gujurat, a state in northwest India.

Most of them are young people fresh out of college who want to see some of the world and perhaps improve it a bit.

Others are older.

“These kids,”…

SAID AN OLDER MIDWESTERN TRAINEE,

…“they have lots of energy, enthusiasm, idealism. And that’s good. But we’re going over there to help farmers.”…

HE POINTED TO THE MAS PATCH AND THE TEMPLE-OUTHOUSE.

…“And I know about dirt.”

To help get the volunteers ready for India, fourteen Indians live with them. They eat with them and sleep in their cabins. Whenever curiosity or doubt strike, which is often, there is a real live Indian around to answer questions.

“What is the word for ‘smoke’?” a young man asked as he lit up after lunch.

“Say ‘pio’,”…

THE INSTRUCTOR FROM NEW DELHI, DELKRAYLE RAJNAPUTH

…told him.

“Doesn’t that mean ‘drink’?”

“Ah, yes. In Gujurati…

THEY

…drink…

THEIR

…cigarettes, so to speak. At least ‘pio’ is the word for both ‘smoke’ and ‘drink’,”…

SHE SAID.

………………………………

Indian Summer

I couldn’t wait to serve, so I offered my duties to a public health instructress in the India Peace Corps Program, which led me into contact with her Delhi-born roommate, a princess of Rajna Puth. How else could I aid ‘the movement’ when I was locked up in medical school? What better way to get involved? I provided spiritual succor to two lonely secular missionaries preaching secular love. By practicing it with me, they might become the better preachers. And who was I to deny them?

Rev, you can forget the sacrifice of your blue Buick Electra in Montana and remember its earlier consecration as a vessel for unseen unrestrained passion. On pitch-black nights at the dead ends of dirt roads in upper Delaware mountain valleys (“Poke your nose in the Poconos”), I saw the world through a blue Buick. Do I remember my toes flipping playfully the electric window buttons, the tingling air on my backside, the CBC French songs on your radio, your back seat pillows that were so handy, once intended for the comfort of Nana on her trips to the Home? Can I forget our experimentations, our method of trial and error, our determination however against all odds to experience what I would not wait to be married for? Can I forget the red-orange autumn afternoons on sprawled out cotton sleeping bags laid in overripe wheat fields on the sides of upper Delaware mountain valleys, where we studied the Kama Sutra on tired knees and elbows?

You were there, O Lord, showing me the way. With your autumnal passion for the Law, you taught me the rules the hard way. You showed me where spirituality also lies, in or out of Buicks. And somewhere today in northwest India thirty-three peasants are happier and closer to Thee following the dissemination of Thy love in those days.

………………………………………..

Dlune has visited me again, not waiting for me to tear myself from this unholy sepulcher, don my snowshoes again and care for my lines as I should.

And she has brought me the peace pipe that was her father’s long before her birth, the same one that he once passed religiously to the man at his left and two hours later received from the right hand of him on his right in a fire-warmed cabin somewhere on the dark frozen plains of a wintering Canada, while women and children of the tribe slept in a circle of shelters around the cabin and the European men mentally violated in advance all their treaties regarding land, hunting, trapping, and the making of war and peace.

By this ‘final agreement’ signed in 1921, the Indians of the Northwest Territories were granted their ancestral rights supposedly, ‘for as long as the sun shall shine and the rivers shall flow’.

The peace pipe is drunk as one sips through a straw. The force needed to raise the taste of smoke to the tongue’s receptors is so great that one is forced to remember the inevitable price of peace, which will always be the loss of something. Unfortunately for the Slaves, it was the loss of themselves, by degrees, to become something other than what they had been, to become the vestiges of Indians, strange men who play cards beside the Mackenzie and are unfit for factory jobs but at the same time are unable to hunt when there are no herds.

Before Dlune’s father had received the pipe from his right again, he had forgotten passing it to his left. He had forgotten the women outside, the French-Canadians arguing across from him, or the content and price of the bargain, and had become absorbed in remembering only Mink Woman, whose trying experience had once in the long ago brought to his people through the Blackfoot tribe to the south a knowledge of the sweet-smelling substance he was smoking.

Through peace meetings with their neighbors in those days the Slaves had learned of the Blackfoot medicine grass and of how it had been found, and they had been shown how to use it to their good. It had come from the gods. It had been a gift of love. It had come through thunder and lightning and disaster. And it had come through an Indian princess who had sold her soul to the god of thunder, who had carried her off and away from her home and the one who had loved her most, Crow Man.

Dlune’s father pondered the off-chance that this might happen one day to a daughter of his. But because he was very old when Dlune was born more than twenty years later and died of consumption right after her birth, this last chief of the Slave tribe never heard of the truth.

………………………………………..

THE THUNDER MEDICINE

A Blackfoot Tale¹

(about ‘Mink Woman’)

One day, while most of the men were hunting, three young, unmarried women went out to gather wood, and while they were collecting it in little piles here and there, a thunderstorm came up. Then said one of them, a beautiful girl, tall, slender, long-haired, big-eyed: “O Thunder! I am pure! I am a virgin! If you will not strike us I promise to marry you whenever you want me!”

Thunder passed on, not harming them, and the young women gathered up their firewood and went home.

On another day these three young women went out again for firewood, one ahead of another along the trail in the deep woods, and Mink Woman, she who had promised herself to Thunder Man, was last of the three. She was some distance behind the others and singing happily as she stepped along, when out from the brush in front of her stepped a very fine-looking, beautifully dressed man, and said: “Well, here I am. I have come for you!”

‘No. Not for me! You are mistaken. I am not that kind; I am a pure woman,” she answered.

“But you can’t go back on your word. You promised yourself to me if I would not strike you, and I did not harm you. Don’t you know me? I am Thunder Man.”

Mink Woman looked closely at him, and her heart beat fast from fear. But he was good to look at, he had the appearance of a kind and gentle man, and – although thoughtlessly – she had made a promise to him, a god, and she could not break it. So she answered: “I said that I would marry you. Well, here I am, take me!”

Her two companions had passed on; they saw nothing of this meeting. Thunder Man stepped forward, and kissed her, then took her in his arms, and, springing from the ground, carried her up into the sky to the land of the Above People.

…………………………………………….

When mj returned to Philly and medical school he found himself thinking not of the one he had really been visiting, but of Delkrayle. He wished he could have spent those two weekend nights with Delkrayle and not with her roommate. He might have caught a glimpse of the golden hem of her sari at least, or had a minute to stare at her Princess-self, better still.

Her hair was dark, as was her skin. Her soul was dark, or so mj fancied. He wanted to vanish right into it pale from the narcotizing smogged world of books, disease and death and resurrect an ardent olive-brown. He wanted to show her his country, reveal to her the beautiful in the ugly and teach her to fear what she had admired, then love what she had feared. He wanted to take her away, to New York or the West, and then forget all of his plans for them once they found their room and spent the weekend there, quite to his amazement, to his swelled head and aching back. And he wanted to LEAP from there into the canvas-board daylight of a concrete Manhattan Monday oblivious to anything but Delkrayle and his – their – Indian paintbrush sunlit earth.

What ancient promises might she have violated during such a weekend? What new private pacts might she have made with herself? Which one of her costly silk saris had been blemished beyond use? Had the red telak on her forehead suffered damage by some part of him as their bodies passed to reach each other? How many New York hot dogs had been guzzled down? How many peanuts?! What might mj have been asked to fetch at the drug store? Would she have been content with what he brought her in the room? Would they have slept alright and held hands in bed or on the street? Were they the object of remarks by passers-by in Times Square as they hurried up 42^nd Street to catch a bus back to Philly, or even, if she said so, to board one that was headed straight west toward the Rockies?

From his room in Philadelphia mj had a weekend like this one mapped in too much detail. He wanted it in just this way, with just these questions to be answered, and he wanted it from miles away, down-river, in a smoke-shrouded city where he tried to keep himself alive; while she waited for him back there in the clean mountain air, wondering about promises.

………………………………………….

Dear Delkrayle,

Today we learned about… but how can I remember, because as usual I was dreaming of you. What are you wearing today? How do you have your hair? Are you in green? or pink? or brown and white? Did you know that you and I were in the Sunday paper, “Of Delhi, an instructor”? What does ‘pio’ mean in the language of northwest India? I am very depressed by your absence and by my trying to be a doctor, and here is what I am thinking about it today.

Princess, if you were here or I were there… I would not have to consider it at all, so I am coming to get you Friday. Don’t forget me. Don’t think too much about your homeland. Delkrayle, I love you! Oh, I remember. The lecture was called “Faith and Works,” only because that, beside you, was what was on my mind today during Pathology lecture.

……………………………………………

‘Faith’ and ‘Works’

If the ‘rich young ruler’ had come to Jesus and asked, ‘Master, what must I do to have eternal life’? And Jesus had answered, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’; the fellow might have said, ‘That’s tremendous. Wait here while I get Bathsheba’. He would have run home, stumbling over his sandals, and blubbered the story to his rich and lovely woman, and if she had believed it too and they both had been zealous believers for five days, and if he had then followed Jesus happily on his whirlwind march through Galilee: in several days he might have felt a tug to return to his home and call his scribes for dictation – it was time to get back to work, he might have decided. And he missed sleeping in until noon with soft warm Bathsheba. Soon he would find that the thought that Jesus was ‘The Way, the Truth, and the Life’, did not evoke in him the enthusiasm it once had. ‘In fact’, he asked himself aloud as he lay in bed ensconced in his everyday posture, his scribes recording solicitously, ‘Do I really believe in what that Jesus guy said at all? I can’t tell. I don’t feel like telling anyone about it, and I’m not overjoyed thinking about it… Write that down’!

Whether his faith will ever receive expression again is an important matter for heaven to consider. But as for our understanding -- : Jesus, instead of talking about ‘believing’, or ‘faith’, might have done better had he told the ‘rich young ruler’: ‘Obey the commandments; then give up your writing and your bed and follow me’. For in the last analysis, and not just in the first brief rush of emotion, that is what faith, or believing, must really amount to. Because the enthusiasm with which any young hothead trips over himself and his woman, will soon come under scrutiny, and the poor fellow will see what his burst of enthusiasm is costing him. Poof! Enthusiasm: no more; for:

faith

without the right action

is

as empty as

lines

without clear meaning

as illusory as

good form

without the right content

as lonely as

a church

without people

and

as flat as

this bed

is

when I am in it

this long

But what does all of this have to do with Mink Woman? If I were to give up my pencil and bed to follow someone, whom would it be? Delkrayle? Dlune? But I already said I would not do that. Then would it be: myself? myself in her company? or myself in company with some mystical notion of what Jesus meant and what he would like me to do?

The entire predicament dates back to the Protestant ‘heresy’ permitting priests to marry. For how can a man be both a shaman and a lover, a savior and a saint, a priest and father, Thunder Man AND Crow Man, rich man and poor man, Word and Flesh? Rev, you are to blame. And Dlune and Delkrayle are in the same boat with me, MAKING THEIR WAY UP THE SAME CRAZY RIVERS.

207.  a few pundits try a little harder to comprehend the ‘sixth attempt’

Now, it should have been obvious to most readers by this point in the ‘sixth attempt’, if not before, that something was bothering Mortimer’s mind and heart during the month of April in the north. But what the heck was it? And why had he not gotten specific? What was he ‘hiding’? asked some.

In that last emotional paragraph Mortimer was obviously complaining that he could not bring the opposites together. But which opposites? It was too wide an array of opposites to interpret, was it not? Did he mean himself and Jack? himself and Dlune?

One of the recurring themes of Mortimer’s long winter’s writing – as certain pundits came to understand things during the 70s – was that he was spending what he thought might be too much time in bed writing, just as he had done in medical school writing in his notebooks; and that he should probably give this up if he ever wanted to have any kind of regular human life in the world. But his mission in the world was to write, as he had come to understand it. And so he was in conflict about writing. For: one part of mj, ‘Mortimer’, wanted to ‘write’ all the time in bed, while the other part, ‘Jack’, wanted to ‘live’ all the time but was not around at the moment to hound Mortimer about the fact.

Yet pundits were not convinced that this had been the whole ‘possibly veiled’ ‘thing’ ‘bothering’ Mortimer in the ‘sixth attempt’. Maybe it was. Maybe not. Since the ‘sixth attempt’ was Mortimer’s sixth shot at getting the polar opposites, Jack and Mortimer, to meet and talk and live together amicably in the same body, then it might have been ‘the thing’. But something more seemed to have been bothering him too, said many pundits, once they got interested in the ‘sixth attempt’ after about 1980 finally. And with that the fun began.

Most of the section was about women, said some. Okay, then: did this dilemma regarding ‘writing versus living’ have something to do with women? Probably. Because, every time Mortimer stayed in bed writing, it kept him from people, such as Dlune. But writing was part of his self-imposed mission, so the dilemma and its tension remained. This was why Mortimer cited the ‘Protestant heresy to marry’, said some. Not because he agreed it was a heresy, or believed the contrary either. He cared not a whit about ‘heresy’. That was so much church nonsense. He cited the heresy, rather, because that historical controversy between the Roman church and the rebellious 'Protestant' defectors from the Roman church represented in a nutshell what he was trying to express: that, in his life, it had always been pretty damn hard to get a balance: between the demands of the body and the demands of the mind; between the demands of the church and the demands of the world; etc.; it had been hard for him to balance demands of every kind, every single line item on every sing list of opposites found in the books of his favorite authors, Jung, Sartre and others, not to mention his own lists of conflicts between opposing energies. In fact, throughout most of mj lorenzo’s life up to this point, Mortimer had solved the problem of ‘conflicting demands’ by keeping intellectual pursuits paramount and telling Jack to shut up and get lost. Mortimer had lorded it over mj lorenzo’s other half, Jack, and still did not know how to let go of power, a tragic affair which had stripped Mortimer of almost all humanity throughout college and medical school.

There was another theme, too, said ‘sixth attempt’ experts, which came and went throughout the section: homesickness; and the conflict between opposite worlds that occurred when two people of opposite worlds became friends; or lovers; or became a married couple. ‘Homesickness’ meant missing your own world, after you had been in the other person’s world a little too much. The longest story in the 'sixth attempt', by far, the Mink Woman tale, was about this: homesickness. It was about the tension created inside Mink Woman by missing her own world while being in Thunder Man’s world. And that was why Mortimer had proceeded to address the very issue at this point. For he now wrote:

Faith without Action is as empty as the Land of the Above People was for Mink Woman when she grew tired of Thunder Man’s frequent absence and went out one day to dig mas tubers all alone in the fields.

‘You may dig up the tubers’, Thunder Man’s people warned her, ‘but if you find the largest tuber of them all, do not unearth it, for it is the mother of the rest’.

To shorten the story, this is precisely what Mink Woman did. And her rebellious, disobedient act made her a typical heroine of the world of myth, of course, where a figure who broke a taboo always returned to his or her people with greater understanding but suffered meanwhile for the rest.

Is that not so, Delkrayle? Did you not break a taboo too? And if so, where and what are you suffering now? And whom are you blaming? Me?

Mink Woman’s father was worried and promised to her former Blackfoot suitor, Crow Man, plain and simple though he were, that if he could find out where Mink Woman had gone, he could gain her for his wife. And given such an offer, Crow Man needed all of five minutes to find out, with the help of a magpie’s tail, in which direction to look for absent Mink Woman: straight up; high in the sky; where he could not reach her; and where to his repeated frustration the sun blinded him every time he turned to look. And he kicked the dusty ground a few times, swore under his breath and waited for her to come thunderation back. How he envied and hated this Thunder Man! How he would like to meet him on the trail and wrestle such a rich and powerful demigod into his grave. What could such a character know of down-to-earth day-to-day living with a woman like Mink Woman, if he was constantly off on the heavenly hunt or whatnot? What did he know of hunting on the northern plains, with herds thinner every year? And did it snow up there like it did down here? He doubted it. Did it blow freaking freezing cold? He knew it did not. That was not the place for Mink Woman. Thunder Man was not the right one for her.

Come back, O Mink woman. Come back!

Meanwhile, Mink woman was on her way home. This is how it happened, as the Blackfoot told it.

……………………………………………

Well, Mink Woman wandered about on the warm grass and flower-covered plain, digging a mas here, one there, singing to herself, and thinking how much she loved her Thunder Man, and wishing that he would be more often at home. He was away the greater part of the time. Thus wandering, in a low place in the plain she came upon a mas of enormous size; actually, it was larger around than her body! “Ha! This is the mother mas; the one they told me not to dig up,” she cried, and walked around and around it admiring its hugeness.

“I would like to dig it, but I must not,” she at last said to herself, and went on, seeking more mas of small size. But she could not forget the big one; she kept imagining how it would look out of the ground; on her back; in her lodge, all nicely cleaned and washed, a present for Thunder Man when he should return home. She went back to it, walked around it many times, went away from it, trying to do as she had been told. But when halfway home she could no longer resist the temptation: with a little cry she turned and never stopped running until she was beside it, and then she used the digging stick with all her strength, thrusting it into the ground around and around and around the huge growth and prying up, and at last it became loose, and seizing it by its big top leaves, she pulled hard and tore it from the ground, and rolled it to one side of the hole.

What a big hole it was! And light seemed to come up through it. She stepped to the edge and looked down: upon pulling up the huge mas she had torn a hole clear through the sky earth! She stooped and looked through it, and there, far, far below, saw –

Why, everything came back to her when she looked through it: There it was, her own earth land! There was the Two Medicine river, and there, just below the foot of its lower lake, was the camp of her people! She threw away her digging stick, and her sack of mas, and ran crying to camp and into Thunder Man’s lodge. He was away at the time, but some of his relatives were in the lodge, and she cried out to them: “I have seen my own country; the camp of my people. I want to go back to them!”

Thunder Man came home in the evening, and upon learning what had happened, his distress was as great as that of Mink Woman, whom he loved. When he came into the lodge she threw herself upon him, and with tears streaming from her eyes, begged him to take her back to her people.

“But don’t you love me?” he asked. “Haven’t you been happy here? Isn’t this a beautiful – a rich country?”

“Of course I love you! I have been happy here! This is a good country! But oh, I want to see my father and mother!”

“Well, sleep now. In the morning you will likely feel that you are glad to be here, instead of down on the people’s earth,” Thunder Man told her. But she would not sleep; she cried all night; would not eat in the morning, and kept on crying for her people.

Then said Thunder Man: “I cannot bear to see – to hear such distress. Because I love her, she shall have her way. Go, you hunters, kill buffalo, kill many of them, and bring in the hides. And you, all you women, take the hides and cut them into long, strong strips and tie them together.”

This the hunters and the women did, and Thunder Man himself made a long, high-sided basket of a buffalo bull’s hide and willow sticks. This and the long, long one-strand rope of buffalo hide were taken to the hole that Mink Woman had torn in the sky earth, and then Thunder Man brought her to the place and laid her carefully in the basket, which he had lined with soft robes: “Because I love you so dearly, I am going to let you down to your people,” he told her. “But we do not part forever. Tell your father that I shall soon visit him, and give him presents. I know that I did wrong, taking you from him without his consent. Say to him that I will make amends for that.”

“Oh, you are good, and I love you more than ever. But I must, I must see my people; I cannot rest until I do,” Mink Woman told him, and kissed him.

The people then swung the woman in the basket down into the hole she had torn in the earth, and began to pay out the long rope, and slowly, little by little, the woman, looking up, saw that she was leaving the land of the sky gods.

Below, the people, looking up, saw what they thought was a strange bird slowly floating down toward them from the sky. But after a long time they knew that it was not a bird. Nothing like it had ever been seen. It was coming down straight toward the center of the big camp. Men, women, children, they all fled to the edge of the timber, the dogs close at their heels, and from the shelter of thick brush watched this strange, descending object. It was a long, long time coming down, twirling this way, that way, and swaying in the wind, but finally it touched the ground in the very center of the camp circle, and they saw a woman rise up and step out of it. They recognized her: Mink Woman! And as they rushed out from the timber to greet her, the basket which had held her began to ascend and soon disappeared in the far blue of the sky….

Not long after Mink Woman’s return to the earth and her people, Thunder Man came to the camp. He came quietly. One evening the door curtain of Lame Bull’s lodge was thrust aside, and some one entered. Mink Woman, looking up from where she sat, saw that it was her sky god husband. He was plainly dressed, and bore a bundle in his arms: “Father!” she cried; “here he is, my thunder Man!” And Lame Bull, moving to one side of the couch, made him welcome.

Said Thunder Man: “I wronged you by taking your daughter without your permission. I come now to make amends for that. I have here in this bundle a sacred pipe; my thunder pipe. I give it to you, and will teach you how to use it, and how to say the prayers and sing the songs that go with it.”

Said Lame Bull to this man, his sky god son-in-law: “I was very angry at you, but as the snow melts when the black winds blow, so has my anger gone from my heart. I take your present. I shall be glad to learn the sacred songs and prayers.”

Thunder Man remained for some time, nearly a moon, there in Lame Bull’s lodge, and taught the chief the ceremony of the medicine pipe until he knew it thoroughly in its every part. “It is powerful medicine,” Thunder Man told him. “It will make the sick well, bring you and your people long life and happiness and plenty, and success to your parties who go to war.”

And as he said it was, so it proved to be, a most powerful medicine for the good of the people.

Thunder Man’s departure from the camp was sudden and unexpected. One evening he was sitting beside Mink Woman in Lame Bull’s lodge, and all at once straightened up, looked skyward through the smoke hole, and appeared to be listening to something. The people there in the lodge held their breath and listened also, and could hear nothing but the chirping of the crickets in the grass outside. But Thunder Man soon cried out: “They are calling me! I have to go! I shall return to you as soon as I can finish my work!” And with that he ran from the lodge and was gone. And Mink Woman wept.

Who can know the ways of the gods? Surely not us of the earth.

…………………………..

The peace pipe from his right startled Dlune’s young father. He remembered the teepees outside and Dlune’s mother, still childless. He wondered if it would happen to a future daughter of his as it had to the Blackfoot chief’s. But if Mink Woman had suffered that particular pain once on behalf of all susceptible girls, then no girl properly taught this story should have to go through the pain again.²

Yet the Slave chief was very old by the time his daughter Dlune was born years later. And he died right after her birth so never could have known the answer. And so, Chipewyan and I must answer it for him now.

208.  pundits try to guess Mortimer's reason for featuring the Blackfoot tale 'Mink Woman' in his Remaking; and guess 1 is: to express fear of Dlune's 'homesickness'

The pundits wanted to know, of course, once they got interested in the ‘sixth attempt’ after 1980: what exactly was this ‘question’ that Mortimer ‘and Chipewyan’ had to ‘answer’ NOW  ‘to the satisfaction of Dlune’s dead father’?

And they thought they knew: was it not the question of whether Mortimer might cause Dlune to suffer, as Thunder Man had caused Mink Woman to suffer? And the first ones interested in the ‘sixth attempt’ took ‘suffer’ to mean ‘feel homesick’. For Mortimer, they said, had made it ‘rather clear’ he did not want to take her away, even with Chipewyan’s approval, only to have her become homesick.

And this amount of interpretation of the ‘sixth attempt’ satisfied many a pundit for a while. And they let the chapter go.

But one or two remained unsatisfied, and that was all it took.

How could it have been anything as simple as that, they asked, when mj lorenzo was so notoriously multi-faceted, and when he purposely included as many meanings as possible in as many sentences about ‘Mortimer’ and ‘Jack’ as possible, all throughout The Remaking? No amount of worry about the critically important duo of Mortimer-and-Dlune, therefore, especially a worry as heated as the one above, could be understood so one-dimensionally, i.e., as if homesickness had been the only thing on Mortimer’s mind at this point in the year.

209.  Dr. Lorenzo agrees with ‘homesickness’ and adds guess 2: ‘to promote in the Western world via literature well worth reading an intimate detailed knowledge of non-Western literature and culture’

New theories circulated in the pundit world therefore; inevitably. And Dr. Lorenzo, despite reticence, dropped a few hints himself over the years about his ‘sixth attempt’.

As spring approached, from the ‘fourth attempt’ on – the Dr. told Sammy Martinez in later years – he had kept reviewing his relationship with Delkrayle because a suspicion nagged at him that something was missing from his memory of her. So he tried to wrap up her story in the ‘sixth attempt’ as well as he could remember it, because the end of his twelve-month year of healing was approaching fast. And he tried to console himself that if something important about Delkrayle did come to mind in the few weeks left before his year ended, that thing might be included, hopefully smoothly, in Part III.

He also said in a 1985 UNESCO symposium on world peace that John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps was a ‘perfect subject’ to turn up for a second, seemingly incidentally, in The Remaking; because the book, like all of his subsequent books, addressed itself to the grave ongoing fracture in global politics. Most people in ‘70 and ‘71 had been worried about the split within the Western world between totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism, he said. But he had been preoccupied his ‘entire adult life’ with a split which he felt was far more profound and dangerous, the divide between the Western world and the non-Western, and he had been looking for ways the fracture could be repaired. The Peace Corps was one exceptionally useful way, he said. And so it was fitting that mj lorenzo, whose ‘Jack’ side throughout medical school had been subtly pushing his ‘Mortimer’ side to get to know better and to live more comfortably with ‘Jack’ and ‘Jack-types’ all over the world, would find himself in association with the Peace Corps, beginning to learn how to do just that.

Delkrayle was from a ‘Jack’-type culture, one the ‘Mortimer-ized’ Western world was obligated to get to know better if mankind were to avoid obliterating itself, said Dr. Lorenzo. Dlune was from a Jackian culture too. And so, ’Mortimer’ had played with the word ‘Indian’ at times in The Remaking, using it as a term that meant the ‘Jack’ part of the world that the ‘Mortimer’ part, i.e. the Western world, had to get to know more intimately. The Western world and all of its Mortimers had to look for ways to help the two ‘hyperpolarized’ sides, ‘Western world’ and ‘non-Western world’, to avoid blowing each other up, lest all of humanity and civilization be destroyed in the process, a likely outcome if weapons of mass destruction were used. And for decades all major players had continued to threaten to use such weapons, as was a known fact.

Mortimer had been playing with the double meaning of the English word ‘Indian’ when he had thrown as many references to American Indians as possible into the newspaper article on Indians from the subcontinent. And for a similar reason he had thrown mas plants into Pennsylvania, where they most likely did not grow. Because he had been trying to remind himself, he said, that homesickness such as Mink Woman experienced had been an issue for Delkrayle too, just as it might become for Dlune and as it was for him already right there at Chipewyan’s cabin. Any time two utterly different world views clashed, such as when two people from ‘two different worlds’, as they said, fell in love: then homesickness and disenchantment were huge possible pitfalls that had to be prepared for in advance.  

210.  a Freudian psychiatry resident at The Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital offers guess 3: ‘to express Mortimer’s fear of sex’ and he analyzes mj lorenzo’s sexuality as revealed (or so he claims) in the ‘sixth attempt’

Dr. Lorenzo’s comments would have been more than enough interpretation for the average pundit interpreter. But the post-1980 pundits had ten years of punditing under their belts and were therefore far from finished. They had not tracked down and found their hero, mj lorenzo, ‘for nothing’, as they said. They had dug him out of his hole in the ground just like the wolf in Chipewyan’s tale had dug up the younger brother, the rebellious ‘Jack’ side of the two-brothers duo. And now: a real flesh-and-blood mj lorenzo made a better target than some will-o-the-wisp they could not know or find. He was out in the open finally. And he might as well brace himself, they told themselves and each other. He had hidden behind ‘world peace’ explanations and could hide no more. Because: there was sex in the ‘sixth attempt’ and this explained mj’s perennial reticence about it probably, especially given the fact that the half of him writing at the time had been the perennially sex-spooked Mortimer.

Of course most readers had already caught the clear references to sex throughout the ‘sixth attempt’, Rev and Jo included. But in the mid 90s a Penn medical school grad, a psychiatry resident at the Institute of the Pennsylvania Hospital (which had been Freudian-analytic for years, not Jungian, not ‘eclectic’, ‘behavioral’ or any other school), maintained that behind the obvious references to sex, and feeding them energy, were truckloads of inferential allusions to sex. And on his website he listed in detail those many ‘inferences’ from beginning to end, creating therewith a huge website and an extremely popular one. Naturally. And not just because the subject had to do with sex, or because it had to do with the sexuality of a very particular person; but because it had to do with the sex life of a very famous and controversial person, mj lorenzo.

Sex had been on Mortimer’s mind, as the resident insisted, right from the moment when he began altering the newspaper article which he ‘found in his Pilgrim Bible’. This was ‘proven’, he said, by the otherwise seemingly gratuitous mention of a nude outhouse calendar. The unnervingly frequent and capitalized ‘MAS PATCH’ insertions shouted sex as well, as the Institute psych resident promised to show on a future page. And the two-paragraph ‘Indian Summer’ piece, he said, mj had written for no other reason than to celebrate sex, or more specifically, to celebrate his late-blooming sexual emancipation, after a painful, lifelong (until then) suppression of mammalian instinct, like ‘some kind of St. Bonaventure of Padua and his Friggin’ Holy Entourage or something’, as this young resident put it so poetically on his website. The relationship with Dlune was only the second stage of mj lorenzo’s very slow, hesitant, drawn-out sexual emancipation, Delkrayle and her roommate having been the first, said he.

Many pundits disagreed vehemently with this last, however, arguing there was no choice but to believe Mortimer’s overt claims that ‘Western doctor mj’ had never gone beyond fantasizing sex in his relationship with Delkrayle.

In any case, as the psych resident responded on his site: Mortimer, by April of ’71, was still far from sexually experienced or confident, and his late-winter relationship with Dlune and especially his thoughts of formalizing their relationship into a long-term commitment, were unleashing a preoccupation with sexual issues.

The first lines in the ‘sixth attempt’ which mentioned Dlune made clear just exactly what the preoccupation was, said the resident: “Dlune has visited me again, not waiting for me to tear myself from this unholy sepulcher, don my snowshoes again, and care for my traplines as I should.” The main thing her presence made him think about, was that when she was around, he had to stop his usual activity, writing; and it was difficult to ‘come down off his bed’, that high and ‘spiritual’ place where he wrote, so as to attend to the very physical, earthy and sexual reality of her presence. Some pundits had noticed this before, but they had not gone far enough, said the resident. Mortimer was not just worried he could not leave the ‘spiritual world of writing’ and attend to Dlune’s general physical and emotional needs. More than anything he was worried he would not be able to satisfy her sexually. She would not wait for him. She would interrupt his peaceful dreamland cabin reverie and insert herself physically into his world, as those lines about her showed, “not waiting for me to tear myself from this unholy sepulcher.” The fact that the ‘sixth attempt’ was dripping with sexual references necessitated such an understanding of lines like this, the psych resident maintained.   

This eye-opener caused a storm of controversy which calmed down quickly, however, because the psychiatry resident’s argument was so extensive and detailed, so well thought out and comprehensive. His next supporting argument, which appeared on his website and turned up in Remaking chat rooms within a month, was Dlune’s father’s remembering the tale of Mink Woman.

Why should Dlune’s father have worried about something happening to her ‘like what happened to Mink Woman?’ the resident asked his website visitors. What had happened to Mink Woman? By making a careless promise, she had been torn away from her earthy tribal existence, up into the world of a high-flying god-guy who then took off and neglected her. She was homesick largely because her new husband was never around. She wanted his love and loving sex, but he was always off on the ‘heavenly hunt’. When he left her the very last time, at the end of the tale, he said:

They are calling me! I have to go! I shall return to you as soon as I can finish my work!

And who knew how long that would be? Years, most likely. Voices from the sky could call him any second to a very important mission, voices that no one else heard, voices he could not make wait, not even for a minute, as the tale showed.

This point was one of the original messages of the tale of Mink Woman, said the resident. The tale deliberately and consciously, but also tastefully, reminded the women of the Blackfoot tribe that: for good lifelong day-to-day sexual and other kinds of simple homespun satisfaction, they would be better off with one of their own homely, homey, earthy, unwashed Crow-Man types, than with some well-dressed and handsome high-falutin sky-god Thunder-Man type.

The mas tuber itself had sexual, phallic, overtones, said the resident; for while her husband was away, Mink Woman craved to have it, and imagined herself with it in her cabin, “on her back;” and when she finally gave in to her desire and pulled it out, it left a big hole. Mj had included the mas tuber in the newspaper article gratuitously again and again, not just to put Indians of one kind with Indians of another, as Dr. Lorenzo had said, but also, and more importantly, because of its phallic meaning, said the resident. Mortimer’s preoccupation in general was itself phallic in the ‘sixth attempt’. He feared there would not be ‘enough dick to satisfy’.

These were the exact words the psych resident used on his website, explaining that he used the four-letter word to ‘stay modern and also compensate for Mortimer’s pathological reticence’. He said that Mortimer’s preoccupation throughout the winter was that his boring existence of Western-world-type analytic and scientific and philosophical thought was ‘a dickless world’; it was a world that lacked a Jack-type with real down-home ‘everyday dick’. ‘Jack represented dick’. And Mortimer doubted whether enough of ‘Jack’ was around to ‘meet everyone’s needs for dick’.

Mortimer had already written in preceding sections about impotence, though subtly and discreetly. That too had been a reference to ‘insufficient dick’, of course.

The resident stayed with the ‘vulgar-seeming’ ‘dick’ term on his website, he explained, belaboring its use in order to emphasize and remind that one of Mortimer’s principal lacks, by definition, was animal human earthiness. This was the proper interpretation of mj lorenzo’s The Remaking. No one could dispute it. The proofs were legion: the world was out of balance, split in half and alarmingly hyperpolarized, mj lorenzo was saying, because the Western world was uptight with, among other things, its fundamental animal humanness. And the earthy word ‘dick’ was a better word than ‘penis’ or ‘phallus’ to re-inject the earthiness missing.

The fact that he had to explain his use of the word and virtually apologize for it on his website, proposed the psych resident, was yet more proof of the existence of such discomfort throughout Western civilization. Discomfort with earthy sex talk could be found even within the pundit audience, shockingly.

But not in Mexico, he added, agreeing with Dr. Lorenzo.

211.  ‘fear of sexual inadequacy’ is the theme of the ‘sixth attempt’ insists this very outspoken pundit who shocks the world with his outrageous ideas and language

During the trip to Manhattan, said the resident, at least in ‘Western doctor mj’s’ med-school fantasy, Delkrayle gave him her virginity, as shown by the subtle use of such words as ‘violated’, ‘blemished’ and ‘damaged’, all of which had been used in English traditionally to allude discreetly to loss of virginity.

But the biggest giveaway was the question which remained in Mortimer’s mind afterwards: “Was she content with what he brought her in the room?” This too revealed preoccupation with his sexual adequacy.

And then in the “Faith and Works” section he belabored the point further.

What was ‘faith without works’? What did such a strange expression mean? It had been a frequent discussion point of mj’s Protestant upbringing, proposed the resident. Mj had heard literally thousands of Bible-pounding Bible-quoting sermons in his lifetime, by the very best educated and most eloquent preachers in America. He came from a family of preachers and teachers. Every single one of mj’s seven uncles, whether by blood or by marriage, and on both sides of the family, amazingly, claimed the resident, was an ordained Protestant zealot minister. And this was actually true, as Sammy Martinez and certain other pundits immediately would verify right on the resident’s website. So, sermonizing was in mj lorenzo’s blood.

Except that all of the sermons and sermon-like passages in the Remaking were ‘absolutely revolutionary’.

No Protestant minister, not even the most liberal, ever would have said or written things like mj lorenzo did, such as the provocative lines at the end of ‘Indian Summer’: “You were there, O Lord, showing me the way. With your autumnal passion for the Law, you taught me the rules the hard way. You showed me where spirituality also lies, in or out of Buicks. And somewhere today in northwest India thirty-three peasants are happier and closer to Thee following the dissemination of Thy love in those days.” For here he was saying that the sexual love he had given the Peace corps instructress, Delkrayle’s roommate, if not Delkrayle herself, was actually God’s love: first passing through him and then ‘disseminated’ to her. (“Note the root Latin word for semen or seed in ‘disseminated’,” said the resident.) And vice versa too, probably, from them to him.

And no traditional Protestant minister would ever have said or written publicly, as mj did, that ‘spirituality also lies’ in sex, least of all that it was passing through the preacher himself! The congregation would have fainted and vomited, in that order, and Sunday would have been over. For months.

So, no one could ever expect that Mortimer’s brief written homily on the ancient Christian sermon topic of ‘Faith and Works’ would sound anything like a traditional Christian sermon. There would be a few formal resemblances, but Mortimer Lorenzo was bound to shock with some revolutionary twist, some non-traditional interpretation of Christian scripture.

And more often than not, said the resident, mj lorenzo’s ‘sermons’, Jack’s and Mortimer’s both, stressed and reminded that the church had debased sex and had contributed in a major way thereby to Western man’s belittling his own human-animal condition. This psychic aberration of belittling, denying and hiding from one’s own essential animal nature occurred nearly culture-wide, as part and parcel of nearly every aspect and corner of Western civilization; and that aberration had caused untold problems in the world. It was one of mj’s chief complaints in The Remaking, said the resident, if not the chief complaint.

And so, accordingly: mj lorenzo’s discussion of ‘Faith and Works’ was about sex plain and simple, said the resident, not about ‘faith’ or ‘works’ in the usual Protestant sense. The point of the message was, ‘What good is faith without works?’ In other words, what value lay in saying you were one of God’s ‘elect’ or ‘saved’, if you didn’t live like it? The outward proof that you were good enough to go to heaven, as Calvin had repeated perennially, lay not in some ceremony such as baptism, but in the way you did your daily work in the community, including the way you treated other people. Similarly, Mortimer was saying, with intentional subtlety because it was so intimately self-revealing: the ultimate proof that you were a true hard-working husband lay not in any marriage contract or ceremony, i.e., not in some spiritually symbolic act in a church, but in the daily flesh-and-blood animal ‘grunt’ ‘work’ of bringing love to your wife. And everyone in the world knew, said the resident, that for a hot, young, just-married woman, especially for Dlune, ‘this meant dick’: it meant ‘dick-dick-and-more-dick’. There was no sense pretending. Mortimer was not pretending. He was just being discreet by not saying it outright. After all, his reading audience would be his father and mother. And as he wrote these very lines Dlune was at his side practically looking over his shoulder. So he had to discuss sexual potency discreetly.

Who could deny, the resident asked his enthralled website visitors worldwide, that since the minute Dlune had hit the scene in Fort Smith, on the sidewalk under the streetlamp, six floors below the psych ward, it had been perfectly clear via hint after hint after hint, that she was as thoroughly at home with her body and sexuality as any female mammal could be, whether lioness, gazelle, northern Alberta Wood Buffalo, or Homo sapiens; and at home with everybody else’s body and sex too, just as well.

Mortimer, the resident claimed, summed up all these points when he said a little farther along: “Faith without Action is as empty as the Land of the Above People was for Mink Woman, when she grew tired of Thunder Man’s frequent absence, and went out one day to dig mas tubers, all alone in the fields.” Or, in other words, translated according to the resident’s interpretation: “Marriage without down-and-out loving sex of a ferocity, frequency and sincerity that satisfies and fulfills both sides, is as empty as the United States felt to brownish rosy-golden Delkrayle and/or Dlune, when they grew weary of their uptight, rational-scientific, extremist-Christian-bred U.S. American man’s pale-skinned Mortimer inadequacy, and went out one day all alone in the countryside looking for some real earthly animal-man Jack dick.”

212.  earthly fallout from the psych resident’s nuclear website

Naturally the storm of controversy over this knockout website -- one of the first in the history of the world wide web to discuss sex intellectually and openly -- never subsided, since it discussed mj lorenzo’s sex life openly and graphically, but worse – or better, depending how it struck you – implied that a parallel existed between mj lorenzo and his culture, and that his people too were sexually underdeveloped or immature, including, presumably, all pundits and even the resident himself! It seemed to imply that the entire Western world was more uptight with human sexuality than the rest of the world and humanity were. But U.S. Americans of northwestern European and Protestant extraction especially so; and of them, the right-wing extremist Christians even more, for that was the group from which mj lorenzo had come. 

Could it be true? Every Remaking pundit who was hooked up in any way to the web in those early days of the world wide web wanted the answer immediately. Were the Republicans, they asked each other in cyberspace: ‘freaked out by their own dicks and balls, by their own labia and vaginas’? For months after the site caught on, whenever pundits ran into each other they asked the next implied question too, with adolescent uproar at first; and seriously after time: were the Republicans ‘freaked out’ by the sexual instincts and organs of darker-skinned peoples at home and around the globe? This was a gravely serious question, of course. It seemed exceedingly important to the future of humanity, which now hovered on the brink of self-extinction just as mj lorenzo himself had hovered during his year in Canada at times. And so they meant the question with utter gravity when all was said and done, for they knew how close humanity had come, again and again recently, to pulling the trigger on its own self.

213.  Dr. Lorenzo responds to the bombshell suggestion that The Remaking properly interpreted reveals an unspoken conviction of his that the Western world and especially a certain identifiable part of that world is (and/or fears itself to be) sexually inadequate

Dr. Lorenzo was offered a number of opportunities to shed light on such issues over the years, in public and in private, and always said the same thing. During his remaking year, he would explain, especially during the winter, he had tried constantly to get to the bottom of the difficulty Mortimer and Jack were having whenever they tried to interact. One of the most unbearable events of his year, he said, had been the virtual omnipresence of a constantly masturbating and naked Jack during that several-week period in Fort Smith. He felt he had created the monster himself somehow, and it had then refused to leave him in peace. He could not get rid of it or even understand why this was so.

But eventually, as Dr. Lorenzo explained, it had dawned on him that a huge amount of the tension between his two warring sides for years must have been this very thing: that his Jack side spooked his Mortimer side, and – more importantly – that the part of Jack which haunted Mortimer most of all was Jack’s SEXUALITY: obviously.

He had not been able to see the point before. The first few times the hypothesis had come flying at him like a wild pitch, he said, he had ducked and run because he had thought it implied something ‘homo’, just as Rev had thought. But then, as his comprehension had grown during the Remaking year that his entire civilization, the Western world entire, was haunted by human sexuality, its own and everyone else’s, while the rest of the globe was comparatively comfortable with its sexuality and everyone else’s, then he could start to calm down and accept the hypothesis as likely truth. But naturally, too, once he did figure out in this way why the image of Jack at Fort Smith had obsessed him so, said Dr. Lorenzo, he knew he would have to find a solution, for his own mental and physical health’s sake, and for the rest of the world’s, too, therefore.

 And so, he had studied the matter for years. He had never done a Kinsey-style survey;³ he had just observed the world around him, he said. His psychiatric practice had exposed him intimately to every kind of sexual behavior one could imagine. The more comfortable he became with clinical discussion of sex, the more relaxed he became discussing with his friends from all over the world everything and anything they knew about sex. And in the end he had found plenty of evidence that the Western world suffered the same malady he, Mortimer Jack Lorenzo, did, speaking in broad generalities, i.e. percentages. U.S. Americans suffered this aberrancy of 'feeling haunted by sex' more (at a higher percentage rate) than Europeans did. Protestants more than Catholics. Conservative Catholics more than liberal. Whites more than non-whites. Republicans more than Democrats. Right-wing Republicans more than moderate Republicans. Extremist Protestants like neo-Calvinists more than moderate Protestants like traditional Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians. But every part of the Western world suffered the malady to one degree or another, and did so far more than the rest of the world.

Mj wanted to publish a book describing the many examples he had found, but ‘for now’, he said, addressing the Colorado Psychiatric Society in 2000, he could easily offer one blatant example with which nearly everyone living in the world when it occurred must have become very familiar. When Democratic President Clinton was caught playing around with someone other than his wife, and the U.S. Republicans attacked him with righteous-to-high-heaven indignation, and the goopy details of Clinton’s sexual relations with the woman got into every paper and TV news report in the world and stayed there for weeks, every man, woman and even little child in Mexico, said Dr. Lorenzo, thought the attackers to be horse’s asses, ‘pendejos’, meaning ‘stupid pubic-hair terds’. Not because the attackers were Republicans, for Mexicans did not react to this kind of U.S. American politics politically. They reacted instinctually, as street-hip sexual humans in confident and relaxed possession of thousands of years of a shared group history that included certain kinds of fundamental and universal, tried-and-tested Mesoamerican attitudes toward sex.

Dr. Lorenzo said that he knew, from having lived with Mexicans in their homes for a number of years, and from having studied Mexican people and their history and culture assiduously, that Mexicans respected, honored, encouraged and even celebrated the sexuality of all men and women, lofty president and lowly peon, as long as that sexuality was mostly hetero and not exceedingly abusive. It almost never occurred in Mexico that one Mexican man or woman would attack another Mexican man in the way U.S. American Republicans were attacking Clinton. And 99.999% of those rare cases in Mexico, when they did occur, had been spurred by blind crazy sexual jealousy, obviously not the primary motivation in the Republican attack on Clinton, though it might have been a secondary motivator for some Republican attackers.

No one in Mexico would have held it against Hillary if she had attacked her man in private or even in the press, Dr. Lorenzo’s many Mexican friends had told him. That was her right. But no one else should do so. Because in Mexico to condemn via gossip (in private) a man’s macho heterosexual animal instinct and behavior was thought churlish and immature. While to condemn it loudly in public was juvenile, stupid, taboo and worse yet, likely to get you killed.

Dr. Lorenzo’s theory was that such rules had resulted from thousands of years of experience gained living a thoroughly civilized life in highly regulated indigenous Mesoamerican societies. He suspected the rules had been adopted when the Mesoamerican civilization’s members saw that such rules helped produce social and emotional stability. It was obvious to him, he said, from his intimate knowledge of Mexican sexual mores, and of Mexican life and mental health too, that having such rules, while it required overlooking widespread sexual ‘peccadilloes’, as the Western world would want to call them, helped lead to better mental health overall, both individual and societal. Mexico suffered very little mental illness, he said, compared with the severely emotionally imbalanced U.S.A. And, he said, the fact that the U.S.A. lacked such healthy, worldly-wise, practical taboos against such behavior as ‘shaming’ a man for his natural human heterosexual behavior, was one more sad result of the Western world’s ‘sick and wearisome 2000-year-long compulsion to denigrate normal, natural daily earthy human behavior (including sexual behavior) at the expense of overall mental health’.     

Dr. Lorenzo made it clear over the years that he felt that within his civilization and nation, the malady of being spooked by sexuality and human animal-ness was suffered most of all by his own people, by the kind of neo-Calvinist Protestant people he had grown up with, most of whom were, in fact, Republicans. He knew them. He had been born and raised among them. But in a slightly different way it also applied, he said, to millions of American Catholics as well, and even to some Democrats, for he had known plenty of them quite intimately over many years too, and there were even a few in his family.

Even a few contemporary Mexicans were still trapped in the ‘sick early-church obsession with purity and virginity’, he said once in Spanish during a talk show on Telemundo, Hispanic TV. But ‘99.9999% of all Mexicans’, he said, were far more at home with their bodies and their sexuality than were the conservative USA Protestants he had grown up with. He knew this to be the case, because he had lived intimately for years with ordinary people of all kinds, on both sides of the border, as mentioned.

214.  but the Dr.’s final word on the ‘sixth attempt’ is silence

BUT, complained certain pundits: even after all this impressively relaxed, exemplary openness about sexuality, including his own, Dr. Lorenzo stuck to his (hidden) guns and never addressed whether any part of this discussion had been the point of the ‘sixth attempt’. Even though many of his readers ‘knew’ that it was.

Mortimer first, they said, and now Dr. Lorenzo, had been covering up for Delkrayle, Dlune and even young mj lorenzo himself. Pundits ‘messaged’ this conviction to each other via internet chat rooms and cell phones: otherwise, they said, Dr. Lorenzo would have discussed all aspects of the sexual issue in the ‘sixth attempt’ openly, like he did everything else.

Thus the psych resident’s huge claim was not easily surpassed or controverted, either one. And it remained one of the chief ways of understanding, for a while, what must have been mj lorenzo’s point in the ‘sixth attempt’: that he feared he had ‘insufficient dick’ for marriage to Dlune.

215.  one group of pundits attempts to force the issue to a ‘logical’ conclusion despite years of interference from their hero

One group of exceedingly rational analysts argued that it ‘had to be true’ because of the ‘inexorable logic’ in the following argument. Mj lorenzo had always maintained that the Western world suffered ‘animal and sexual dwarfism and rational-scientific gigantism’, as they paraphrased it, using medical terms. His people were underdeveloped as animals and overdeveloped as intellectual brains. He had never equivocated on this. And in analyzing the Western world he had always presented his very own self, as he, mj, had functioned up to the time of The Remaking year, as a typical representative of that world, an example of that world par excellence. More specifically, in The Remaking he had used the concept and character of that aspect of himself he called ‘Mortimer’ to represent that aspect of the Western world which he called ‘sexually immature while rationally over-developed’.

Thus it had to be true, ‘by logical deduction’, said they, that just like the Western world, mj himself, meaning the Mortimer that had suppressed Jack up until his remaking and had suppressed him again at Fort Chipewyan, had suffered ‘some form of sexual dwarfism or disability’ at least at some point in those 27 years, if not for most of those years, meaning ‘some kind of sexual handicap, crippling, shortening, shortcoming, or at the very least, immaturity, and/or sexual diffidence greater than normal for people of his age around the world’.

Needles to say, these pundits, shockingly, were dubbed the ‘dickless’ pundits. And, more shockingly, they were not even shut up by being called the name but seemed encouraged by it, if anything, and they talked on and on.

Had ‘impotency or sexual inadequacy’ been too terribly far from the truth, as many of mj lorenzo’s devotees propounded over the years, he probably would have ‘rebutted such an accusation’ ‘by now’. For in a way, as they said, it made him look bad, or less manly, if it were true. Most men in the world would have refuted such an accusation. But, maybe because he was dedicated to the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they said, Dr. Lorenzo had been ‘left no ethical choice’ but to let the ‘accusation’ stand ‘without much meaningful comment’.

216.  another group defends their hero’s sexuality as unquestionably manly

A group of mj lorenzo’s most stalwart die-hard defenders, including many women pundits, objected to labeling him as ‘less manly’, however. After all, he had canoed to the Arctic and back, struggling physically and mentally over thousands of miles. He had ‘loved and made love to women’. He had climbed mountains, trained to become a doctor, practiced medicine, specialized in psychiatry, ‘made a lot of money’, ‘sired offspring’ (and given babies to Dlune, as the women preferred to put it), written many famous books and exposed his intimate life to the whole world in minute detail. What could have been more manly than all of that? Perhaps if he had suffered a problem with potency or intimacy at some point in his life, that made him ‘a little’ less ‘macho’, but not less manly, said these analysts, because only a real man could have ‘had the balls’ to: look at his own personal ‘fear of turning out to be sexually inadequate’; let alone, make that fear a public issue. ‘Macho types’ could admit no weakness and were ‘a sick, silly caricature of manliness’. A real man, or hero, behaved like mj lorenzo, said these defenders of his manliness, mostly women, whom other pundits called, naturally, the ‘butch dickerers’.

217.  a sensible non-extremist assessment of mj lorenzo’s sexual health around the time of late April 1971

By April, however, 'the re-making of Mortimer Jack', as mj’s subtitle called his makeover, had not been accomplished yet fully. Perhaps – who could know exactly, but maybe – he was not fully a ‘real man’ just yet in April of ’71. Maybe he even knew this. And maybe this was why he worried about ‘adequacy’, if he did worry about such a thing around that time, as is likely. His book, The Remaking, certainly left the impression upon most people that in April of ’71 mj lorenzo still saw himself as more a Humpty Dumpty than a real whole human man. He knew perfectly well that his two famous and bizarre halves were still floating around in separate parts of the universe even after all these months. There had been six very insincere ‘attempts’ already to put Humpty back together again and a seventh was soon to start. And even if the seventh succeeded nobody in the world could say how many more times after that in his lifetime mj lorenzo might have to deal with the issue of poorly balanced energy, sexual or any other kind you could think of.