seventh attempt

(third and last encounter of M & J)

(early May)

there were a few items of GOOD news like mj wasn't DEAD yet


go ahead to subsection:  [218]; [219]; [220]; [221]; [222]; [223]; [224]; [225]; [226]; [227]; [228]; [229]; [230]; [231]; [232]

218.  Mortimer suffers a persistent premonition of imminent death

 

Early May came and spring Break-Up was due any day. Chinook winds blew warmer stateside air up to the 60th parallel leaving little glassy areas on Lake Athabasca’s ice near Chipewyan’s cabin. This was a sign of imminent melt-down, according to the old man, and it reminded Mortimer of premonitions of death he had suffered occasionally since November. Other things had reminded him too during the long and terribly dark winter months and he had found ways to forget. Throughout those months, Dlune had often helped him forget all his fears in the world. But now, in May, even though she was beside him every minute, thoughts of death returned, chewed at his grey matter and would not quit.

In late November it had registered for the first time in Mortimer’s thinking outer grey-matter cortex that his days were numbered. In retrospect it looked like someone’s calculated trick. First, in early November, the revelation of the inevitable outline of his mandalic trip, the Triptique, had hit him in a visionary trance, more or less. It had seemed a needed answer to that sad, ineradicable picture he carried with him in his mind, of Jack in a seclusion room, a Jack of catastrophe and near-death. Jack’s overwhelming animal presence had helped the vision grab hold of him not in the conscious cortex but somewhere nearer the core of mj lorenzo’s nervous system, in an area that ‘thought’ or ‘saw’ or operated in a way foreign to Mortimer’s usual style so reasonable and calculated. That Triptique vision had snuck up on him via an area of nervous system where circuitry was circular and instinctual, not linear and binary. And that was why he had endorsed it from the core of his thinking be-ness and sworn to it with his mind’s heart. The amazing Triptique had popped up in front of his mind’s eye fully bloomed, like a magic rose balanced intuitively with all of its thorns, a beautiful and prophetic rose as necessary and given as any animal’s instinctual drive, right down to its finest claw nails.

And then, after all that, once he had reflected more calmly and analytically, more Socratically, scientifically, consciously, and questioningly in his usual way of ‘thinking’, in other words, it had hit the poor boy that by endorsing this vision he had accepted its outline of mj’s ‘cure’, including -- alarmingly -- the dooming prophecy that: spring Break-Up would mean Jack’s revival, the full-fledged resurrection of Mortimer’s nemesis and solution, Jack.

 

As the depression of Freeze-Up fades

energy will collect for the shooting

and sunburst of Spring Break-Up.

 

The suicide-murder is a self-amputation

and a rebirth of the poorly controlled passionate brother-self, Jack

(that wanted to kill the non-passionate part, Mortimer).

 

With time Mortimer had seen the light, too, that when Jack revived with spring, things could not be as they had been before the Crack-Up. Winter had brought the point home. More and more pieces of the mandala had jockeyed themselves into position over the winter; and he had thought and thought and thought about it, and contemplated and dreamt about it all, that: if he and Jack went back to the old way, warring with each other to possess and dominate mj exclusively, each trying to shut the other out of the mandala, it would do the mandala in, and mj lorenzo with it. It would be the end of mj’s human life and theirs. And also, too – and it was a GREAT BIG ‘and also, too’ – since mj’s problems were apparently a microcosmic reflection, or anticipation, of the political problems of the Western world and the planet, a return to the past would end human life period. For everybody.

And once Mortimer had put this jigsaw puzzle of a mandala together he had felt forced to draw the conclusion that to save mj and the world both: he, Mortimer, would have to die. He had ‘seen the handwriting on the wall’, as pundits put it later. Jack could not die. Jack was 99% of the life force in mj. It had to be Mortimer, as the Triptique said:

 

The suicide-murder is a self-amputation

and a rebirth of the poorly controlled passionate brother-self, Jack

(that wanted to kill the non-passionate part, Mortimer).

 

Boiled down, it said, unavoidably: 'The suicide-murder is a self-amputation… to kill… Mortimer'.1

He had forgotten this November discovery of his at times during the long, dark winter that followed, though. Mostly when he was feeling better, and especially from the ‘fourth attempt’ on, he had forgotten it completely. He had operated and written as if he were taking off with Dlune in the spring as one half of mj. She had made his winter so pleasant, at times, his inevitable death had slipped his mind.

But suddenly again now he feared Jack’s revival as if it were his own death. Everything he had been holding onto for years with all his might was about to bite the dust. His time was finished. The Triptique said so. The lake puddles said so. The only thing he did not know was in which way he was going to have to bite the dust and that made him even more nervous. Would it be slow and grueling? Humiliating? Would it hurt? Would it damage his reputation? Would people laugh at him? And while he waited to find out, it all depressed him very much, naturally, for that was Mortimer’s ‘M.O.’, his favorite and only modus operandi: depression.

 

219.  awaiting annihilation Mortimer theorizes about imminent annihilation

 

While Mortimer awaited destruction, feeling down and miserable, he did the other thing that was most natural for him to do, too, of course: he theorized endlessly about his coming death and wrote it down for suffering humanity at large, in a brilliant final spree of analytic thought-bursts. It seemed as if his cerebral cortex grey matter had seen its future end and slipped into automatic overdrive, so as to knock off what should have been a whole lifetime’s oeuvre of intellect in just one day of constant high velocity literary production. It was his swan song-cycle, you might say. Or better yet, his swan song encyclical.

Fortunately for mankind. For had Mortimer not, in Fort Smith, felt so badly for his poor little suffering buddy, Jack, that he let Jack’s pathetic psycho-silence talk him into accepting that flowery, romantic Triptique notion, the notion that Break-Up should mean the end of his own Mortimer self in some form, just so that poor sorry-looking Jack could live again as his beautiful, unhampered natural-human sexy self in the world, just like he had all summer; and had Mortimer not remained committed to that notion, now, even after six months of unchallenged power: THEN MORTIMER WOULD STILL BE WRITING AND THEORIZING AND MAYBE EVEN SINGING ENDLESSLY, ENCYCLICAL AFTER ENCYCLICAL AFTER ENCYCLICAL, TODAY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND FOREVER AFTER, EXACTLY AS HE DID THE WHOLE WINTER OF 70-71 and all his existence up until the Crack-Up. And the world would still be subjected to his hymnody of lifeless prating even now, because the re-making of Mortimer Jack would never have been brought to fruition.

 

220.  Mortimer compares himself with Harlequin hoping to find a hint as to the exact likely nature of his own impending death

 

Mortimer’s very sad and desperate last-minute theorizing was not entirely useless though. He studied Harlequin, among other things, for some clue as to what might happen to him, Mortimer. Harlequin was a standard character from traditional Italian Renaissance street comedy, the pantomime street theater for the Italian working class. Jack, too, had been interested in Harlequin, for the dunce often wore a tight clownish zoot suit which made him appear split down the middle, one color on one side and another on the other. And he was a clown, of course. A pathetic clown. A working-class clown who suffered in a way to make educated buffoons like Mortimer laugh until their sides ached. If the rich and powerful suffered, of course, everyone treated it as ‘tragedy’ and expected you to weep. But when Harlequin suffered you laughed, because he was so inane and unfittingly pedantic.

He wore a black mask, however, which concealed facial expression and all feeling which a real face would normally give away, since the mask remained fixed and unaltered regardless of whether Harlequin laughed or cried beneath it, day or night, just like the ‘masked facies’ or ‘face’ of a schizophrenic with ‘flat affect’. This was Harlequin’s most Mortimer-like aspect. It meant that if you wanted to know what he was truly feeling, since he spoke exceedingly stupidly and pedantically, and often only ‘pantomimed’ or ‘mimed’, you were forced to study his body language.

And Mortimer remembered having discovered in a book on Italian comedy once that the very, very most genius actor doing Harlequin, left with hardly an avenue for expressing feeling, not even an honest face or honest speech, sometimes resorted to the extreme of turning his back to the audience and USING HIS BACK to express real honest emotion.2

Thus Mortimer anticipated that when Jack returned to finish him off, since Jack never hid feeling and yet remained mute, their meeting would almost inevitably have to involve Jack’s back. That meant it would be a physical meeting. And an emotional one. Both.

And, since Mortimer often felt like his own back had been broken in the Crack-Up, so much so that he actually convinced himself at times it had been literally broken and he was paralyzed inside a total body cast in Montana, he took all this about Harlequin’s back to mean that when Jack returned, then his back, Mortimer’s, and Jack’s too, i.e. mj’s, would be healed. Otherwise it could not be a physical meeting. And he had just ‘proven rationally and logically’ with that scientific brain of his that it would be a physical encounter.

And since the Continental Divide was ‘the backbone of the world’, as the northern natives called it, then Jack’s return, Mortimer’s death and mj’s cure, would, all three together, have a great deal to do with the peaks of the Rockies along the Continental Divide.

And Mortimer told himself that by knowing all of this he had come to feel a little more prepared for whatever kind of death would be meted out.

Exactly this far into his thinking Mortimer woke up to the fact, finally, that Jack had gotten control of him. The little sneak possessed and inhabited Mortimer’s every thought. Mortimer had been estimating, up to this point, that Jack influenced him from a distance at times. Somehow. But now he saw that control was total. And constant. Jack had snuck in through Mortimer’s back door, the back side of his brain. He had pulled off the first stage of the coup d’etat through surprise, that is by using Mortimer’s anticipation and fear of his downfall’s imminent surprise return.

Mortimer, poor man, was like a Latin American dictator who had been convincingly forewarned by the other half of his own two-man junta that he was about to be assassinated within his own palace any second; any day. The only part of Jack that had not yet returned to the presidential palace to do the job, to the mj lorenzo body and mind that Mortimer had been trying to inhabit and rule all winter, was the physical part of the surprise: the real physical meeting that would hand Mortimer his death, the exact form of which would constitute the surprise. And in the meantime the question of death’s form, to be chosen by Jack, preoccupied Mortimer totally.

 

221.  Mortimer theorizes about what might have been had he been nicer to Jack

 

Mortimer then theorized, heavily, as to the role he could have played in this new theoretical remaking, had he not made a mess of things. And he did this despite the fact that he knew he was going to die. He theorized that his role could have been to provide the ‘system’, i.e. the theology, philosophy and rules of living, i.e., the politics for the new mj. And Jack’s role would have been to be the charismatic hero ‘symbol’, the way of life that was full of symbolic meaning, the actual living of that life. The role of Mortimer, as he wrote Rev, should have been to ‘surround and support Jack’, as a system always surrounded and supported an inspiring, meaning-packed symbol, as Christian theology surrounded and supported the church and its members and the symbolic way in which they supposedly lived their lives, i.e., by reflecting the symbol of Christ, i.e., Christ’s life, living the heavily symbolic Christ-like life of a Christian, including the symbol of Christ on the cross.

But mj lorenzo could not live ‘the Christian life’ as radical neo-Reformation Protestants of the United States of America had handed it to him. He had tried that crazy animal-body-demeaning formula once already. It had to be some other kind of life. The details needed working out. But a few of them seemed in place already and Mortimer could have provided the theology for the whole freaking deal.

Mj and Dlune were to take a trip up the Peace River after Break-Up and then head south. And mj was to climb Hungabee on the solstice, if Mortimer remembered and understood the Triptique correctly. Possessing this amount of understanding of mj’s future, i.e., of his actual future, and also, of his sadly might-have-been future, helped Mortimer face the unknown better, too.

But he did not understand how Mortimer Jack Lorenzo could have a future if he, Mortimer, was going to die.

It was at this point that Mortimer realized he understood it all better than he had thought. If animal-intuitive Jack was going to be mj’s hero and inspiring symbol, his symbolic way of life, like Christ was, or the Christ-like life was for a Christian; as Mortimer had just poetically declared and decided should be the case; then: mj should live the way Jack did: with feeling, with his body, intuitively, close to the earth and the people of the earth. Mj should live surrounded by simple, earthy human relationships. Mj should live – come to think of it – the way he, Mortimer, had lived at Fort Chipewyan, with Dlune and Chipewyan all winter. For, until that day was reached when the whole human race was back in balance with nature and itself; and until he was too: all of mj lorenzo’s most important friends and loves would have to be Jack-types, not Mortimer-types, whether women or men.

They could not yet be the kind of people mj had grown up with, therefore: probably not ‘born-again’ Christians yet, who feared their body jeopardized their spirit; nor the ‘elect’, ‘God’s new Chosen People’, as they claimed with hubris, the American extremist neo-Calvinist Protestants who were not humble enough yet; nor American preachers and teachers, who were not teachable and preachable enough yet; nor colleague doctors and psychiatrists who were not healthy and well enough yet; nor other writers and thinkers, unless they already knew the book of life; and probably not any U.S. Americans or any natives of countries of the ‘highly developed’ ‘Western world’, not yet anyway, because they were, almost all, still as lopsided and unnatural, as unaligned with earth’s magnetic lines of force, i.e., as out of tune with God’s nature as was the damaged (‘Western’) world that kept producing them.

Earthy, heart-and-soulful, instinctually intuitive ‘Jack-types’, rather, would help define and teach the way mj should live, and in ways which were not yet clear. And while that was going on, he, Mortimer, would have been willing, if only Jack had seen fit, to continue for the rest of his life, however long a life he might have been granted, working out the whole elaborate theology for this new system aborning. Because that had been his job always: to provide the ‘systematization’. Which meant that: in the world of the new mj, Mortimer could have kept writing still, if only Jack had agreed. For a theology was of less use if not written down.

And these thoughts left him a little satisfied. For he understood better where he had gone wrong, and what he might have done to make it right, even though it was too late now.

But it still made no rational sense to Mortimer that he was going to die.

In fact, the more he thought he saw and understood the future that would have, and should have been possible, the less sense dying made. But he plodded along with his thinking and writing anyway, hoping he might understand everything eventually. And he jammed each and every one of these gorgeously executed cogitative forays into the huge May envelope for his parents. So that: they formed, taken together, a sober farewell oration just prior to proudly drinking the hemlock, as it were.

 

222.  Mortimer compares himself with his own revolutionary ‘sixties generation’ looking for further hint as to the exact likely nature of his upcoming death

 

Now he wrote to his parents about his contemporaries, his generation in the states, the ones who had taken over the streets during the last decade, the volatile 60’s. The leftists of all degree, from quiet, sit-down-&-block-your-intersection pacifists to violent, gas-bomb-throwing radicals, all of them trying to solve the same problem Jack had been working on, but all of them going about it in a more active, vocal and immediate, even dangerous, way than he had chosen. They wanted to shift the power balance toward the left immediately, toward the darker, more neglected, even suppressed, peoples of the earth.

African Americans in the U.S., for example, as Mortimer’s generation said, should have been given the same rights, privileges and opportunities as whites. And they peacefully marched in the streets until everyone was sick to death of it, most of all themselves. But: they had a point. And Mortimer knew that African Americans had gained already a great deal of political ground because of all the marching and demonstrating. And he trusted that nothing horrible would result, nothing like what had been feared. He expected the world would feel a safer and friendlier place, in fact, when he found himself as a white doctor working one day, for the first time in history, with a black or brown nurse.

And his rebellious sixties generation said the U.S. should get out of Vietnam and let that country fight its own civil war and determine its own future. And to bring attention to their cause the leftists of his young generation took to the streets peacefully again in even greater numbers, shutting down whole universities and all of Washington, D.C., including even the routine operations of the lordly U.S. government, alarming the world and themselves too. And again they had a point. And Mortimer hoped that what they wanted would happen soon. For once again it was the right thing and fair. And he trusted that nothing terrible would result, but rather, that the world would feel a better place when a powerful nation showed restraint and allowed a smaller one to live its own life and learn from its own mistakes.

And a criticism leveled at these ‘activists’, Mortimer wrote, was that they joined together and went out into the streets protesting ‘more for the momentary pleasure of camaraderie’ than for any ‘future outcome of their actions’. And Mortimer was not going to belabor the obvious: that they had done it because they sincerely wanted things to change in the world. He knew Jack had been sincere when marching. What struck him in this criticism was the way that camaraderie had been belittled. The feeling of brotherhood and togetherness which inevitably resulted when people got together and tried to do the right thing together, was mocked.

Had it ever occurred to these same critics to criticize the congregations, the schools, the governments, or the workplaces, all of which likewise created a ‘feeling of camaraderie’, and say that their constituents were more interested in the fellowship than in the results? No, because the togetherness of those institutions did little to threaten those critics. While the togetherness of people who wanted to shift the entire earth’s power balance to the left, did threaten those critics, even though sharing power with previously suppressed peoples was the right and only thing to do, as anyone could see.

And Mortimer suddenly understood those critics of camaraderie. They feared the same thing he feared. For he feared that if the power balance were shifted inside mj at Break-Up so as to permit Jack more ongoing say, he, Mortimer, would die. And yet, when he thought about those other two major shifts of power balance between the controlling Western world and the controlled and darker non-Western world, he had never expected the Mortimer side of the equation to die. Nor had it. When American Blacks got more power, for example, the Whites did not die. Far from it. The two worlds had gone on living side by side and more compatibly and healthily than before, in fact. Because the Mortimer side was not lording it over the Jack side as before.

So why should he, Mortimer, have to fear dying? Why could mj’s two sides not go on living side by side just as well as Blacks and Whites had done after Blacks had won some freedom? Why could Jack and Mortimer not be healthier and happier than before, both of them, while he, Mortimer, gave Jack more say? Why would Jack not consider that as an option?    

Jack was silent, of course, as he had been all winter. Yet Mortimer remembered that Jack was almost certainly listening. And he thought that maybe he, Mortimer, should complain less from now on and propose more, therefore.

 

223.  Mortimer turns to Nietzsche seeking more comprehension still of why his country and world and self had to become so suicidally hyperpolarized

 

So Mortimer looked at Nietzsche, which Dlune had finally found and brought him from Fort Smith. And he made one more of those infamous ‘boring’ lists that high schoolers carried on about so bitterly in later years. But it was ‘the very last list of opposites extracted from the treatise of a famous Western mind’, as he said, which he would ever paste together for The Remaking. And it would prove valuable to the world, he promised. And so it did. And it was hardly boring, in all truth, as pundits and high schoolers admitted later. But instead the Nietzsche list became the list for discussion and remained so for years.

Mortimer had been forced to come up with the list, of course, because he was still trying to clarify as neatly and completely as possible HOW the world had gotten so sick and out of balance, so hyperpolarized. And similarly, for that matter, how mj lorenzo had. For each was the other’s paradigm, as Mortimer analyzed it. And he knew from his four years of medical school that once you ferreted out the cause of a symptom (such as hyperpolarization) you almost always had an easier time finding a treatment that worked.

In other words, if he ‘had to die’, as Mortimer wrote his parents in the ‘seventh attempt’, then ‘the least he could do’ was to ‘think out and leave behind a treatment plan for the world at large’. For global politics was ‘as schizophrenic as mj lorenzo’. And maybe, with the help of his ‘treatment plan’, the half of humanity like himself, the Mortimer part of humanity (the Western world, and especially certain very sick elements within it, more than others), would not have to be annihilated due to their own stupidity, as he was about to be annihilated due to his own stupidity, his stubbornness and fear of sharing power. Such reactionary tendencies inside him had come from a stupid lifelong fear of raw, unbridled, animal-human life itself: his own and others’. Such a fear of animal humanness was ‘treatable and avoidable’, he wrote Rev.

And Nietzsche was about to show him how the illness, mj’s and the Western world’s, had come about.
Mortimer's 'list' for Nietzsche's 'The Birth of Tragedy'

Nietzsche had found it necessary to go back through history thousands of years, all the way back to the founding of ancient Greek civilization, in order to come up with an explanation for what had gone wrong with the Western world. The ancient Greeks for eons had worshipped many different kinds of gods and goddesses in many different ways. Nietzsche, however, identified two principal kinds of religious expression among them, each with its own set of associated artistic expressions: the worship of Apollo, and the worship of Dionysus; and he named these two chief focal points of Greek thought and life the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian’.

The two ways of approaching divinity were diametrically opposite yet were, each one, a major part of the overall religious and day-to-day life experience of any given Greek in the world. With the result that: each approach was honored by all Greeks.

Obviously then, these opposite religious experiences could not have been practiced by two opposing groups who were fiercely competing for power, as such opposite politico-religious groups competed for power in the world today. But rather, the two opposite kinds of religious experience must have complemented each other within the life experience of each individual. And Nietzsche said this was the case. And Mortimer observed that ancient Greek religious life, in other words, had been inclusive, not exclusivist. Meaning: more than one religious perspective was welcomed by all of society and by each individual, both.

All this suggested to Mortimer that the emotional life of the average Greek during ancient times must have been less split and conflicted than mj’s emotional life now. And in fact, this was Nietzsche’s point exactly. That: the Dionysian-Apollonian approach to life had offered a ‘workable distribution of human instincts and an agreeably low threshold for depolarization’. In other words, the two opposite, or counter-balancing, ways of living and seeing things, had flowed freely into each other year-round. One group had not climbed up on a high horse and stayed there, unflinchingly and provocatively. But rather, each group, for example, had shared non-condemningly and wholeheartedly in the opposite group’s worship and holidays at times, in their stately Olympic games and wild spring sexual merriment, and this balancing of opposite energies had produced a ‘workable and agreeable’ life experience for individual and society both.

Then Socrates had come along and – condemningly – had pushed everything Apollonian AND Dionysian aside, BOTH, telling his students that they should contemplate ‘Platonic ideas’ instead.

Plato was the one who portrayed in his famous ‘Dialogues’ the philosophy of ‘Ideas’ which Socrates had taught him. And these so-called ‘Platonic Ideas’, which were really Socrates’ ‘ideas’ first, eventually became the starting point of all Western philosophy and religion. Practically every Greek student of higher education after the time of Plato (ca. 350 B.C.E.) was drilled in how to think ideas in the same way Socrates had thought them. Gradually the Platonic way of thinking, or ‘philosophy’, took over the ancient Greco-Roman world. It affected the way the Gospel of John was written, for example: John’s use of the term ‘Logos’ in a Platonic way within what was soon to become sacred scripture and church dogma, would impact all of Christian theology from that day forward. Platonic philosophy, therefore, greatly affected the way the early church fathers thought and made decisions that determined the future of the church. And the church dictated moral values for the Western world starting from about the time of the Emperor Constantine, i.e., from about A.D. 325.

And then too, St. Augustine, just to cite one more of hundreds of possible examples, was heavily influenced by Socratic and neo-Platonic thinking. And the number of books in the world by May of 1971, the number of articles and treatises, etc., describing Augustine’s boundless impact including all of his Platonic and neo-Platonic thinking, an impact not just on the church itself, but on all of Western world literature, thought, and actual day-to-day history right up to the moment in time when Mortimer was thinking this problem through, could have filled thousands and thousands of huge libraries. Because: the number of those documents about Augustine was literally countless. Boundless.

And then, when the ‘Middle Ages’ had ended; when roughly ten centuries (500-1500 C.E.) of chaos and darkness, i.e., knowledge loss, had finally come to an end: the ‘Renaissance’ had begun. And what we now call the ‘Western world’ had really come into its own. And now the thinking of Socrates and Plato was unearthed and celebrated once more, by Lorenzo de Medici and his crew. With the result that from the Florentine Renaissance on, Plato’s Dialogues were once again the beginning of philosophy in every center of higher learning in the Western world. Even Mortimer’s year-long Introduction to Philosophy at ‘Evangelical’ Christian Wrigley College in 1961 had started with Socrates and Plato, he recalled, and had stayed on the subject for quite a while before moving on.

In fact, somewhere along the way some clever thinker had suggested that all of philosophy was ‘a mere footnote to Plato’. Most people who first heard the phrase assumed it was a wise-guy exaggeration, a quip, not possibly true. But decades would pass, and more decades, and no one would ever succeed in discrediting this maxim. So the extreme-sounding claim would stick, and stick, and keep sticking. Everyone and his uncle would use it because it seemed so true, until even Merriam’s 1971 Webster’s Third New International unabridged dictionary would use Lionel Trilling’s reference to the maxim as a good example of how the word ‘footnote’ might be used in a sentence.

So what was wrong with all that? Several hugely important things, possibly. But the most glaring thing was the way Socrates denigrated (1) the physical human body; (2) all of its natural instincts, including sexuality; and (3) everything in both columns, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, belittling ALL of ancient Greek religion as ‘meaningless illusion’. According to Socrates, the only thing an authentic philosophy student, or real lover of truth and wisdom, should ever bother his head about any more was this new thing he was talking about: ‘Ideas’.

And Socrates himself admitted the inevitable result of such a way of thinking and behaving, when he said: “Then you may also agree that it is no wonder if those who have reached this height are reluctant to manage the affairs of men.” Yet he persisted in teaching the youth of ancient Athens to exercise their minds in a way that would make them ‘reluctant to manage the affairs of men’, i.e., would make them disdain normal everyday human life so much that they would inevitably come to disparage their own and everyone else’s natural physical animal human struggle in the world.

The polarity in Greek life which had been ‘so agreeable’ BEFORE Socrates was now suddenly replaced with a new and burdensome polarity AFTER Socrates, and thanks to Socrates. Because: he had left such an enormous impression on the Greeks and yet his idea of a ‘good’ life was so narrowly, weirdly, unnaturally, and anti-humanly defined. The two columns were from now on lopsided severely for Greek civilization, and for anyone who adopted the Greeks’ conceptual system eventually, such as the Roman world, and later too, our own Christian Western world.

The ‘Jack’ side of human personality in the Western world now had to bear the weight of everything Dionysian AND Apollonian both. While a person’s ‘Mortimer’ side was supposed to be spared all of that ‘mere illusion’ of his inferior brother Jack’s, so that he, Mortimer, the superior brother, could sit on a bed-like furnishing and relax and calmly contemplate ‘the Good’. Mortimer was not even pushed much to implement, or practice, ‘the Good’ necessarily. He was admonished primarily to contemplate it !!!

And then Plato, in his Dialogue, “Phaedrus,” had Socrates describe what it felt like to be one of these new, high-flying, high-thinking Greeks, a young Greek of Socrates’ new and extreme design, a new Athenian youth who had rejected the Dionysian and Apollonian both as tripe, and now wished only to contemplate Platonic Ideas, or ‘the Good’. The experience, he said, was like that of a charioteer crossing heaven in a chariot pulled by two winged steeds strapped and yoked together, one dark steed and one light. “One of them is noble and good,” he said, “while the other has the opposite character, and his stock is opposite.” The light steed, the ‘good and noble one’, was the one which ‘contemplated the Good’. The dark steed, ‘the opposite’, or bad, was the one which spent its life doing things Dionysian and Apollonian. The charioteer (meaning every new Socratic-thinking youth, from Plato himself on down through history) had to make his own two steeds work together somehow, of course, since every single chariot was equipped with such a pair; BUT: the two always wanted to go in polar-opposite directions. The ‘light and good’ one wanted to go up, higher in the sky; and the ‘dark and bad’ one wanted to go down, back to earth. And the poor, suffering, idea-worshiping, Socratic new young man, in other words, was STUCK WITH having to put up with the confining and ornery human body with all of its wacky desires and emotions, all its imperfect crackpot religions, all its illusory arts, and all of its less than perfect perceptions, all irritatingly strapped in place to the part of him which, like Mortimer, poor guy, constantly wanted to do nothing but float upwards like a saint in blowing white lace, contemplating the ‘Good’ in heavenly peace and quiet without any noisome Jack-energy around. “Hence,” said Socrates, “the task of our young Charioteer is difficult and tiresome.”

Mortimer remembered that when he had first studied the “Phaedrus” as a sophomore at Wrigley, he had misunderstood the light and dark steeds to represent the good and bad sides of the average person, such as himself: ‘good’ including, for example, ‘caring about others’ and ‘bad’ including ‘selfish’. Such an understanding might have been an innocent enough interpretation, and might have caused mj lorenzo little damage, had Mortimer stayed with it, and had mj lorenzo been a healthy, well-balanced human being to start with. But he had not been, as all the world knew by now. And then with time, as Mortimer had understood Plato’s philosophical points more correctly, he had thought it a good and wonderful thing to try to exercise his mind as much as possible the way Socrates had exercised his own mind and those of his students, in the way realistically portrayed in the unforgettable ‘Dialogues’ of Plato. So he had spent as much time as possible each day or week contemplating Ideas, manipulating them in his mind, arguing both sides of every argument rationally, and writing it all down in his tiresome notebooks.

On Mortimer’s part this was a less naïve interpretation than his earliest understanding, apparently, of what Socrates had been all about. It was closer to accurate, unfortunately. And so, this time, with this new and more accurate interpretation, he must have finally done himself significant damage. For, all of that escapist, un-earthy, unnatural thinking must have been at least a part of what caused his dehumanization and depression during college and medical school. In fact.

But never had poor Mortimer realized until reading Nietzsche now, in May of 1971, just how dangerous Socrates’ thinking had really been. Even at Wrigley his philosophy prof had never pointed it out. In fact, Mortimer had thought it an eternal discredit to the glory of ancient Athens that its government had sentenced Socrates to death for ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’. He had misunderstood the legal charge against Socrates of ‘corrupting’ to have referred to some sexual act; and had suspected the Athenian government had used such an accusation to get rid of Socrates because he was teaching the youth to use their heads and think liberally. How shameful that a society would want to stop higher thought, he had reacted, or censor new ideas with death. And this was exactly the reaction Socrates would have wanted.

But now Mortimer realized everything was exactly the opposite. The Athenians understandably had hated Socrates for bashing and destroying basic ancient tradition, and especially their traditional religion. This was what they had meant by ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’. The ancient Greeks had learned from their religion and forebears to love their sexuality and yet Socrates denigrated their sexuality. They loved their sometimes brutally physical life in the world and celebrated it perennially, year-round, and yet Socrates belittled everything about their ordinary day-to-day hard-knock physical human presence in the world. And somehow he was succeeding in seducing every last one of their vulnerable young sons, using his deceptive, manipulative, brilliantly crafted arguments, tricking them into believing that his own new style of ‘thinking’ and living was superior to his young students’ ‘out of date’ thinking and living. And the poor little boys were buying the crap. Socrates endorsed nothing about the nicely balanced, emotionally healthy life the boys’ Athenian parents and countless ancestors had spent centuries perfecting and believing in. He only endorsed use of the mind to manipulatively argue a point in search of the loftiest mental IDEA imaginable!

It seemed impossible to Mortimer that an entire intelligent and well-educated civilization could have been mowed over by such flying steedshit. He was pissed. Stunned. Nietzsche had hit the nail on its flying steedshit head. No wonder the Western world was all hopelessly twisted and backbreakingly divided against itself in its flying-up harness, and poor mj with it.

In fact, Dr. Lorenzo, even as much as thirty-four years later, still found it hard to comprehend why, or how, it could have happened that no one ‘ever had ever’ considered the ‘light steed’ to be the problem, instead of the ‘dark’. Someone must have tried, he guessed. After 34 years of hearing and thinking about Socrates’ two flying steeds, he still could only begin to barely imagine how, or why, an entire super-intelligent civilization had ‘bought such a crock’. Why had no one ever discredited it? And Dr. Lorenzo said that he wished, if only he could live long enough, that he might discover some day, himself, who in history if anybody might have ever tried to discredit Socrates and Plato, and why they had not succeeded any better than they had in getting a big long hook around and pulling back to earth that huge weird Platonic hot air balloon which Western civilization had floated away in so stupidly, so high in the sky that there was not even enough oxygen to sustain real down-to-earth, sexy-lovely animal-human life.

But he guessed it must have been because every such potential somebody rescuer or savior was still up there floating in that crazy balloon too.

 

224.  understanding Nietzsche removes a last burden of guilt from Mortimer’s mental shoulders minutes before death

 

Anyway: this whole huge discovery and awakening helped Mortimer feel all the more sympathetic toward Jack and himself. They had been handed a ‘virtually unworkable system’ by which to have lived what might and should have been the beautiful physical life of mj lorenzo in the world. Poor Jack had had to do everything human for mj lorenzo. He had been assigned all of the body’s activities, all of the emotion, all of the dreaming, all of the dealing with illusion, even the practice of religion more often than not, to whatever extent it may have been sincere and heartfelt anyway, not mere form, and all the suffering and pain, the terror and ecstasy, disease, contradiction, dance, music, poetry, all of the everyday world, and a thousand other enriching, growth-enhancing and humanizing things, all of which, taken together, had the power to leave Jack in possession of tremendously valuable, confidence-building, man-making, knowledge of real life and real life wisdom whenever he was finally and briefly let free by Mortimer to accept the vast assignment. Which was hardly ever. For Mortimer thought it essential to take up as much of mj lorenzo’s energy and time as possible lying around and contemplating high and lofty ideas, so as to try and persuade others to his lofty point of view.

Worse than that, yet, Jack had to suffer the humiliation of being de-valued whenever he succeeded in doing any of the very human things he did, and worse still, squelched and suppressed and prevented, every time he tried to do them, even though he was JUST BEING HUMAN. Mortimer was the only one of the two who was ‘noble and good’ and got any recognition or praise.

It made absolutely no sense to try to live like this, and yet the ‘best minds’ of the Western world had been flirting with achieving such airy, empty, fleshless, lifeless ‘spirituality’ for the last 2000 years. Why had all of Christian theology fallen into the absurd nit-picking quagmire known as ‘scholasticism’ in the Middle Ages? Why had Origen, third century theologian, writer and teacher, cut off his own balls? Why had Augustine made his monks give up marrying women they loved? Why had the Christian church always acted as if virginity in a woman was more fabulous than her sensuous sex appeal, right through her whole entire life, up to the grave? Why had the Western world gotten so carried away with reason and science that it had learned the fabulous secret of how to destroy the earth and every living thing on it? Why had the Western world thought its religious, philosophical, political, scientific and other ‘great ideas’ high and mighty, and the knowledge of a Mexican campesino about how to enjoy a simple lifetime on the planet not even worth a plugged nickel? Apparently, according to Nietzsche, it went back to Socrates, and to the unquestioned veneration he had been given ever since 350 B.C. And from what Mortimer knew of the history of Western thought, he could not disagree. Nietzsche made perfect horse sense.

But what was Mortimer to do about it? It was too late. It was a useless discovery; because he was about to die.

And then it hit him that Jack would never have whined about his prospective death, as he, Mortimer, was doing about his own. And once more he felt ashamed to be Mortimer, a type who did not know how to live or die, either one; did not know how to enjoy his body and its earthly existence, or another person’s, or party with others or get intoxicated and celebrate life with them as Dionysian Jack did. All he knew was how to study, read, write, think and manipulate ideas, rules and other minds. He was a disgrace to the human race and deserved to die, as he knew. And he wrote the following poem:

 

Spring Song

 

Winter of solitude

Spring of peace

Cabin of loneliness

Absence of love

There is no release from this hovel of emptiness

Spring of plenitude

Spring of vicissitude

Spring, resuscitate your captive

 

Breathe breath of lushness

Into this house

Because there is no hushness

Because there is no deciding

Because there is this colorless thoughtless quiet

Quiet not of peace but of rustling warm wind

Spring of fresh breath

Breathe into my sin

 

Spring, strong spring,

Strengthen meinen Sinn5

Howl up the Hereford hurricane

Splinter the filthy windowpanes of my soul

Rouse up the growling tiger and let roll

The gramophone of grating air and gravel

And grind them, drive them, erupt them into this hole 

Spring, violent spring

Violate me whole.

 

225.  encouraged by Nietzsche and with seconds to live Mortimer (quick!) tries to reunite mj’s mind and body via poetry

 

Mortimer was still waiting for spring and Jack to show up and settle things finally. And while he waited, since he saw his own Mortimer-mind as something that had been sadly and brutally whacked off and away from Jack’s body, by a historical figure no less distinguished than Socrates, he took up the mental gauntlet: he applied that mind of his to the subject of re-uniting Mind and Body, and came up with the following – almost sing-able – mini-encyclical:

 

and in the meantime

everybody ought to know

that the uniting of mind and body

occurs

not in the height of the brain

but in the whole fulgurating nervous system

from the highest interplay of axons of the cortex

down the middle of the back’s spinal cord

to the most peripheral shuttling of inorganic ions

through the water of the ultra-microstructure of muscles

feasting on the oxygen in air

and on the energy from cyclic breakdown

operating from the world to man and back again to the world

in cyclic fury

and in fact

as McLuhan said

not only projected but extended into the world

so that this mind-body (or nervous system)

does not stop at the skin

and when the mind-body unit cracks up

(and it is more vulnerable the more it is extended into the world)

a person is bound to feel that the universe has cracked with him

 

every mitochondrion of the human flesh demonstrates

that

life is circular

that

patterns, like spring lightning storms, are endlessly repeated

that

energy depends on not an assembly line but a cycle

and

that

at given points in the cycle the air becomes rarified

and beauty happens

and

that

only dying is linear

as linear as a multi-thousand-mile supply train

a slow progressive disintegration of the circle and breakdown of interplay

or else is the invention of false divisions

such as sickness-health

and East-West

mind-body

which by their constant hateful warring belittle the life experience

and denigrate the pathos of the human dream

and

that

dying is an attitude of the mind

which glorifies these binary misconceptions

alienating their parts from within the whole

and undermining the actual unity of life

and

that

Mortimer himself is therefore slowly dying

as he writes these paragraphs in and for a divided world

 

226.  Mortimer mind-ballets for Jack hoping to impress him with his talents and convince him to save his life; but he knows nothing of what he mind-ballets: life

 

This and every such exercise of Mortimer’s mind in the ‘seventh attempt’ was actually aimed straight at Jack, whom he now sensed to be close by and ‘listening’, even ‘watching’. He wanted to manipulate Jack into taking pity and cutting his poor pathetic reformed brilliant repentant other half, Mortimer, a break.

Mortimer was even upping the thought-art persuasion-ante from encyclical, to mind-dance. Now he was auditioning his mind-ballet skills, the mental agility and grace he could offer in a new mj. And Jack was the silent, invisible audience for Mortimer’s mind-ballet audition.

Every such mind-exercise was brilliant, granted. But it was also hollow, lacking in life, a sham and charade because the great mind-ballet choreographer, Socrates, had said you should mind-ballet your mind-ballet his way; and Mortimer’s world had bought the notion. So by definition Mortimer was lifeless and his agile pleas to have his death sentence commuted by Jack were lifeless. And where a little passion did seem to squeak and peak through in an occasionally excited tone, it was no more than acted; for he knew not of what he mind-ballet-ed. He could not convincingly beg for life, not knowing what life was. Thus these little brilliant mental gymnastic exercises, while they sometimes left pundit students of The Remaking cold, must be defended today as having been the very best mind-ballet of which Mortimer was capable. Since he lacked knowledge of real life, he could not fully appreciate that thing which he thought he was about to lose, ‘life’. Thus he could not dance real passion in begging to have his ‘life’ preserved. He could only mind-ballet Socratic pirouettes manipulating mind, and manipulating audience with mind.

 

227.  his depression tells Mortimer (incorrectly) that Dlune does not love him

 

And furthermore, Mortimer was depressed. He had been depressed all winter, the brief exceptions being when Dlune came around, or when something in his writing excited him. Depressive people always obsessed about death, their own death and everyone else’s, as Mortimer was doing. And depressives always thought they were no good for anybody. One month before, depression had been sapping his faith that he could pull off living with a woman, as the ‘sixth attempt’ had revealed. And he still could not believe that Dlune honestly wanted him.

Dlune did want him, as his writing showed. But not because he was in stellar shape emotionally. She knew he was depressed. But she wanted him because she saw his potential and knew how to help him attain it. When a psych nurse found a depressed man on his ass every day all day long, sparks flew. She knew how to get him out of bed. She knew how to get him back in bed and give him a different kind of bed experience. She saw potential in him, if once helped by her. She had seen little glimpses of Jack in Mortimer, like when they made love. She believed in him. She knew that when he called himself ‘Mortimer’ he was only half a man. She knew the whole man was split into two pieces. She had known well his other half in Fort Smith and liked him a lot; had met him in the street when he was calling himself ‘Jack’; then had seen this man again on the unit where she was working, this time as a doctor named ‘Mortimer’.

Dlune had never questioned all of this. Her grandfather was a shaman. Her father had smoked ritual pot. He had hallucinated women of legend abducted by sky-gods, women sent back to earth in buffalo hide baskets. She did not think scientifically, in other words. She did not keep one eye on the doctor at the end of the hall, while opening the seclusion room door sneakily to see if the two halves of this magical man could inhabit two bodies at once.

Dlune did not worry about ‘illusion’ or ‘psychosis’ because such concepts were irrelevant to love, which was presently the subject, not science. She expected unexplainable magic when it came to love. She lived in Fort Smith, the doorway to an incredible numinous world that was grand, exceedingly important and very different, the world of Mortimer Jack Lorenzo and her own Dlune self. And she thought this man wonderful in all of his many bizarre aspects.

But his depression told Mortimer otherwise. And the depression was likewise stealing his faith that he could go on living, or had the right to. His depression was enjoying its last mighty destructive fling before the expected changes of Break-Up. It was having one last giant whiney temper tantrum, a Reign of Terror to show off The Power of Depression, given its last great chance to do so, as it assumed.

And in between these immobilizing fits of furious depression, Mortimer now wrote another brilliant set of notes to his parents, still waiting for Jack to show up.

 

228.  whiling away his last few seconds before annihilation Mortimer admires Nietzsche’s observations on folk music

 

Mortimer was interested in what Nietzsche had said about folk music, because folk music had enjoyed a huge revival in the states during the 60’s, having been much less popular before. And this had puzzled him many times.

Nietzsche had said that folk song was always “the musical mirror of the world… the original melody… the perpetuum vestigium [undying vestige, the leftover trace which never quite goes away] of that wonderful ancient union of Apollonian and Dionysian…” And he added: “Every period rich in folk songs has been most violently stirred by Dionysian currents… [which are] the substratum and prerequisite of the folk song.”

Nietzsche had written these observations 80 years before Mortimer witnessed the fact when it occurred during his youth. The nineteen sixties had indeed been a period “most violently stirred by Dionysian currents,” and by folk music, both. Somebody or something in the 60’s had been desperately and heroically trying to correct the imbalance in the Western world’s soul, that imbalance created by Socrates and perpetuated by the Christian church.

Nietzsche was a genius. He saw the soul of Western culture. And his correct explanation of its unhappy split had to be heeded, before it was too late.

Nietzsche added that with the arrival of Socrates and the new thinking that swept Greece, such a huge number of Greek educated male leaders all at the same time abandoned the old way of living that one of the greatest arts ever given the world, Greek tragic theatre, ceased to exist. Boom. Over. All of ancient Greek civilization ended, basically, thanks to Socrates. Greek theater had been born out of Dionysian religious festivals. That had been the ‘Birth of Tragedy’, as Nietzsche called it, the title of his treatise. But then when Socrates came, that had been the ‘Death of Tragedy’, said Nietzsche. And Mortimer wrote:

 

The Death of Tragedy  =  The Birth of Broken Spinal Cords

 

The Charioteer : Burdensome Duality  ::  Harlequin : Tragicomic Duality

 

Who can come forth to fuse the opposites?

Harlequin colors the inescapable requirements of his tragic role with comic improvisation, and when he runs out of words he resorts to his drumstick. Harlequin wears a black mask. And what is it he conceals in the pack on his back? Is he or is he not a vulgar descendant, black-and-white, or brown-and-green, of classy ancient Greek established theatre? Or is he, like the Dionysian satyr-chorus, born straight out of, and speaking for – with intermittent good judgment – the blood and angry passion of the people?

Harlequin wears a black mask over his real white one. He plays at will first jester then king and uses both for his personal self-realization.

 

Willingness to Be Known  =  Harlequin Removes his Bi-chrome Mask

 

229.  Mortimer creates one last LIST! (pundits moan) so as not to leave his poor pitiful world with nothing of his learning after he is annihilated

 

And as a final surprise bonus-stunt encore to persuade Jack to save Mortimer’s life, he suddenly played the part of a self-revealing Harlequin. He faced his audience and, removing his Harlequin mask as an act of self-revelation, made a grand list of the multitude of mj lorenzo’s polar-opposite energy fields mentioned in The Remaking, just as he had made lists of polar-opposite traits he had found in others’ treatises. He listed many of the energy-force-opposites that he and Jack had been plugging in to the terms ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’ throughout The Remaking.

And this list threw into a tizzy every reader coming across it for the first time. No one expected another ‘list’ in the ‘seventh attempt’ because Mortimer had just gotten finished promising ‘no more lists’! Hadn’t he?

And besides all of his lists, had Mortimer not traumatized everybody in the world with mj’s two bodies, and his being in Montana and Alberta at once, not to mention a raft of other utter impossibilities? He could not be trusted! And they thought one more list would drive them off the edge of the world into abyss. They were exhausted. They wanted winter over. They hated depression. They were finished with cogitation. All of the world’s pundits would have put the book down when Mortimer seemed healed in the ‘fourth attempt’, yet had kept going out of respect for their hero mj. And so he really tried their patience now. It was time for Jack to show up and get this thing over with! They wanted spring! a breath of real air! real all out love. With some-body. Anybody would do at this point.

 

Jack  +  Mortimer   =   mj lorenzo   =   Unified Duality

 

Slave  +  Princess   =   Dlune   =   Unified Duality

 

Unified Duality   =   Dlune  +  mj lorenzo   =   Unified Duality



Mortimer's very last list

Rev, if you do not use my lists and diagrams as sources of POLAR PARADIGMATIC PLUG-IN SUBSTITUTE TERMS for the terms ‘Jack’ and ‘Mortimer’ wherever those names occur in The Remaking, you are wasting your time with what I write!

 

(Illustration: Andy Warhol: “White Car Crash,” 1963)

 

schizophrenia

is

a car crash in the Rockies

a universe gone awry

a philosophic dualism seeking a monism

a schism without a meeting ground

a cold war in quest of a conference table

 

not only is it indecision in the face of a choice

it is indecision as to whether to make a choice

or to try combining the choices

it is therefore

for all its apparent activity

a grandiloquent inaction

a commotion in non-motion

a do-nothing nothingness

an inertia

and an impotence

 

all claims to the contrary notwithstanding

temporarily at least

it is headed nowhere

unless

by a sheer act of faith

one chooses to consider that this schizophrenia

is

a necessary circumstance from which will emerge a better way

but

POW!

such a belief

is bound to convert the home field of consideration

into

an

CRASH!!

outright battleground

between

black (left)

and

white (right)

 

Screams my confessor-friend at me one day near the end of our connection: “Don’t you see your parents are trying to live your life for you?”

“What?” I try to gather what he means.

“They’re trying to live your life for you!” He rises out of his psychiatrist’s chair.

I don’t know.

I have to laugh, because this poor fellow is having to take over where I left off long ago. Since I have never been openly angered by my own past and future, he has had to be that for me. I can even laugh in his face as if it were his problem, not mine. How silly he looks with his face flushed and hot with blood over my life, not his. I’ve never really desired to laugh at him before now, but this time I have to.

But what I have not grasped yet is that I must laugh at my own self. When that occurs to me I can suffer a revelation, because I will have discovered that I, I am the laughable and therefore forgivable BUFFOON that I have always been from the very beginning.

After this historic session I become more direct with my professional friend.

 

230.  Mortimer remembers that he has forgotten that he, Mortimer, has always been an ass

 

Where was Jack?

Why did he never turn up?

Why did the ice never break, if Chipewyan said it was ‘overdue’?

Mortimer looked at the Triptique to see if he had missed something and he had. The plan for after Break-Up included him: “Mortimer, who revives with Spring Break-Up…” He had written it himself.

 

BREAK-UP (III) – Mortimer Jack: must write about himself (sometimes briefly missing a part of himself).

 

Energy collected in Freeze-Up = Winning of Dlune as companion for the Spring trip = Overconfidence and a coming explosion (a budding rose) = Dies again the controlling conscientious Mortimer, who revives with Spring Break-Up and rises in III to reach a new equilibrium with (incorporated in) a more passionate self.

 

In short:  Mortimer:  “revives with… break-up… and rises… to reach a new equilibrium with/in… a more passionate self.”

So much fuss about dying.

What an ass Mortimer could be.

What a winged-steed’s ass.

 

231.  mj lorenzo’s two pathetic split-off halves tangle intimately at last

 

Third and Last Encounter

 

Chipewyan told me earlier tonight about the ancient custom of the Hare or ‘Quarreler’ tribe or sub-tribe, his childhood people, to annually stage a community wrestling match. In one controlled annual event considered sacred, men and boys of his people ritually established who was tougher than whom, so that there needed to be no boyish disputation, day in and day out, all year long, disrupting the tribe’s peace. The event lay bare the entire tribal hierarchy; not a man or boy escaped a fight. The standing champion was favored by being allowed to fight last. The first bout was staged between the tribe’s two smallest boys: the declared winner was pounced upon by the next largest member, and so on… There was scarcely a man, thus, who did not win his first fight and lose his second, since when any man got up to do his two fights he was fresh for the first one, and too exhausted to fight well in his second. Last year’s champion invariably retained the title, therefore, being the last one to fight and having to fight only once; and so, usually, the ritual’s chief benefaction to the tribe, was its reaffirmation and celebration of the current power status quo, very top to very bottom; except, of course, in those rare years when someone in the tribe, during a year’s time, gained unusual strength.

I HAVE BEEN DISPOSSESSED OF MY BED! Live Indians are in the cabin, which smells like a gym with no windows. In front of the fire my mattress has been made into a ring mat, Indians surrounding it on three sides.

My athletic and younger brother is aching to take me on for once and for all, and the Indians see there is more than gaming in his taunts, when he pounces on me and the round develops not between us but between his opposite urges to kill and preserve. The council shows reluctance to call a decision, ashamed to admit an actual scare, maybe, while I have to suffer, back to the mat, beneath my spastic Cain of a flesh-and-blood alter-ego. And when it is finally clear that he has won and yet he stays triumphantly on top considering some further act, no one, not even Chipewyan, is breaking it up.

My muscles and joints are used up. My reserves are depleted. My legs and arms are defending me like jelly. I am reduced to a clotted lump of amoebic protoplasm, hoping to flow around its danger slowly, to engulf and assimilate it un-aesthetically, or else to be ingested and have to live inside it. Pinned on my back, unable to run to my bed, since I am on it, my younger brother’s dark face burrowing into my slippery sternum seeking my barely thumping heart maybe, either to squeeze, pump and release it, pump and release and revive me, or to clamp it for good with a protean vice-like grip to end me, my arms encircle his body and meet unpersuasively behind his warm wet back, down the middle of which streaks a broken mountain ridge of skin-clothed bone, arching and writhing and convulsing in volcanic fury or affection, whichever, bone housing safely the split-second electric messages shuttled beneath the ground and through the lightening sky from my sick flesh to his animal brain and back to his grip on me.

Groping for freedom my fingers splash in a lake of sweat by his shoulder-blade and spread a river down his back and off the side of his ass, a river which drains and drips on grounded me and tickles and tortures right at the peak of enervation. In such a position we hover grotesquely as one, to the tribe’s transfixed gaze, and I see in my mind’s eye a vision:

 

A Hare (‘Quarreler’) Legend6

 

Legendes et Traditions

Des Dindjie ou Loucheux

 

I

 

ETROE – TCHOKREN

(Le Navigateur)

 

At the beginning of the world, two brothers lived alone on the earth. The younger of them loved to live in the nude. He came and went, indoors and out, stripped of all clothing. His usual occupation was the making of arrows.

The elder, who loved tenderly his younger brother, said to him one night when they had gone to bed,

“My little brother, pierce my side with your arrow.”

Since it was night, the elder brother was also naked. He had taken off his clothes to sleep.

The younger replied:

“I do not want to do that, my older brother.”

“Ah, my young brother,” said the elder, “your arrows have no force; that is why you do not wish to shoot me, for if you did, you know well that they would not pierce me.”

Piqued by this lack of faith, the younger brother took his bow, held it against his brother, and pierced his breast with an arrow, killing him.

Then their parents wept, and the younger brother – the one who was in the habit of going nude – wept also; he despaired, he left the tent, and finally he departed never to return.

 

One of the council touches my jelly shoulder as I scrape past the circle of Indians toward a corner of the cabin. I am left unnoticed, free to consider what is left of my self.

I wake up in dark silence, hearing a few faint echoes of my dying body’s commotion, its breathing and its tachycardia, feeling its cold sweat soaking the mattress under me.

My eyes meet the wrinkled eyes of Chipewyan, who has come to comfort me for outlasting my dream, his hand on my bare shoulder having just waked me up and saved me. He withdraws without a word.

I record it all slavishly in my journal and fall asleep on the warm wood cabin floor beneath my bed.

 

232.  Mortimer looks to Break-Up with renewed hope and tries to describe in a few exciting poetic lines the huge difference between a Break-up and a Crack-Up

 

Mortimer felt free after this dream, finally, to think about ‘spring Break-Up’ in a more upbeat way, as something he would be participating in wholeheartedly, and wrote:

 

When the world around is one of excessive physical expansion (as when east-coast U.S. Americans expanded across the continent toward the Pacific during the 1800s and 1900s, or when Germany and Japan tried to conquer the whole world), the mind contracts and withdraws in reaction, and personal craziness is the exception. Craziness, rather, is externalized as a way of life for all. The world outside is fragmented and the world is split for all to bear.

But when the pendulum of expansion can go no further and the world scene implodes as it did in the late 60’s and again for Mortimer and Jack during the winter of ’70-‘71, bringing the fragments together again, each separate mind can now expand to incorporate and know and feel its brother, something in the way that a grandiose psychotic, blurring his boundaries and ending the definition of persons and parts, (1) expands to incorporate, internalize, and equate himself with the whole fragmented world now re-fusing, and thereby, like the prophet, priest, and king he claims to be, (2) either saves that world or destroys it.

Mortimer, for his part, has been until now the ultimate in external physical fragmentation (last summer) and internal mental contraction (this winter); both. In that order: first a backbone blown into the air in a zillion pieces by the Crack-Up; and after that the embodied winter solstice of the rational, ego-operated, mechanical world conquest, painfully protracted for months at Fort Chipewyan, all of his air-borne molecules still too constantly aligned and motionless in mid-air, poised at the turning back, waiting for the action potential which might deliver his nervous pendulum down, the other way, all the way back down and in from whence it had come out and up.7

Or to mix the metaphor further: Mortimer has spent months just like a movie left on pause a little after the peak of atomic blast. And now, finally, the movie’s mushroom cloud is about to implode back down and into the dusty earth from which it came.

The first step on Mortimer’s way back down (which for him is truly now the way ahead) will follow the sacrifice of his notes regarding his fancied projected trip up the Peace with Dlune. In the acute moment of his greatest despair he will use them as toilet paper in the outhouse and offer what remains of them to the stinking hole, just before Break-Up hits the island like a thunderclap.

Mortimer shouts in the outhouse with every one of the two or three guts he can muster, “I am going to take this trip without considering it,” his last three words drowned out by a thunder of ice-break.

He came to this point by extrapolation; by making a last-ditch absurd fling in the face of fate; by dancing a Totentanz, as it were, a dance just before death, a dance that might or might not come up for reflection at some later date, since death might strike in the middle of it.

And in this projected trip with Dlune, Mortimer will slowly discover, by allowing his very own Jack to feel, the single symbolic ACT by which the two can pull themselves back together, whether too late or not. With nothing left to lose, Mortimer will give himself up to the trip as he has never given himself up to anything. And it will be only the beginning of his giving, the rosy glow of which he will want to keep experiencing forever.

Rather than going out to conquer, Mortimer will be coming in to meet and to know and to discover: not the objective world, but the world-through-himself.

Or, to put it more clearly: the world through Jack, which is then through Dlune, which is all truly, simply, the world through the vaster side of himself that he has never known very well at all before now.

 

Rose Window = Peace Rose = Peace River = Hungabee = Explosion = Ecstasy

 

Where Ecstasy is equal to a Brief Beneficial Soul Explosion out of the heart of implosion, and where the imploding mass (m) is convertible in terms of (E=mc²) to exploding energy (E).

 

schizophrenia

will be psychosis

no longer

but

transformation of imploding mass into exploding ecstasy

not

the ecstasy of a manic-depressive in manic phase

but

the high of a steady guiding of energy into useful circuits

not

merely de-repression

not

powder-keg bombast

not

automatic electric de-fusing into nothingness

mechanical uncontrollable firing of the system

in a state of exploding in-itself

mere matter reacting

abreacting

unaware of itself

like a chimpanzee on LSD

like Jack Lorenzo cannon-balled to the Arctic

but

responsible self-willed electro-molecular energy

expressed as a confessedly binary being on a planned pleasure trip

into his solitary unknown

moving

going

where he wants to because he feels he has to

and believes he will know how to

and working

working

i.e., playing

like the second scherzo in an un-composed folk symphony

in tune with the universe

in tune with himself

like mj lorenzo on Hungabee

 

and that will be the difference between a Break-Up and a Crack-Up

 

1 This language reminded Remaking pundits of the first chapters of Jung’s Psychological Types, where he studied the early church fathers and their tendency to resolve inner imbalance and conflict between opposite inner personality poles by ‘amputating’ whichever pole, whichever part of their personality seemed to be interfering most in their living out the ideal life of a Christ-follower in the way they understood their faith to be telling them to live that kind of life. The church father, Origen, amputated his testicles, literally, while Tertullian amputated his mind, his intellect: “It is entirely characteristic,” Jung wrote in that early blockbuster of his, “that Tertullian should perform the sacrificium intellectus [sacrifice of one’s intellect], whereas Origen was led to the sacrificium phalli [sacrifice of one’s sexuality], because the Christian process demands a complete abolition of the sensual tie to the object; in other words, it demands the sacrifice of the hitherto most valued function, the dearest possession, the strongest instinct. Considered biologically, the sacrifice serves the interests of domestication, but psychologically it opens a door for new possibilities of spiritual development through the dissolution of old ties.” (Page 16.)

 

In the same early pages of Psychological Types (first published in 1921) Jung even used, said the pundits, the analogy of a magnet’s pull in describing his ‘extraverted’ and ‘introverted’ personality types (‘Introduction’, paragraph 4). And when the pundits discovered this they accused their hero, mj, of having ‘borrowed’ from Jung more than they had realized, because more than mj had confessed in his Remaking book.


The Dr., however, was as shocked as they were that Jung had ever analogized living persons to magnets. He suspected he must have ‘skipped the Introduction’ when he had read Psychological Types. And, since his mother had taught him not to lie, as he said, they would just have to believe him that any ‘borrowing’, if indeed he did owe the idea to Jung, ‘had not been conscious’. Throughout 1970 and 1971, he explained, he had been ‘floating in a cloud of scientific theory’, everything from magnetism and relativity to why the two mad mind scientists Freud and Jung had been unable to agree on so many basic things. Jung himself, he pointed out, at about the same age (25-30) as mj was in 70-71, had been ‘floating in an atmosphere of Einstein and Freud’. Einstein, during the same years that Jung in Zürich was doing a psychiatric apprenticeship (similar to ‘internship’ and ‘residency’ in the USA) under a living luminary of psychiatric history, Eugen Bleuler (who was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Zürich), Einstein, -- (four years Jung’s junior), -- whose interest in theoretical physics had been first stimulated by coming upon a compass at the age of 5, was pursuing his doctorate on the dimensions of molecules in the same town, Zürich, at the same university. Jung had been floating in the same intellectual atmosphere as Einstein in 1921, just as mj lorenzo had been floating in a similar atmosphere in 1971, 50 years later: and so it was inevitable that any one of these people might occasionally 'borrow' an idea from another without doing so consciously.


In sum, said the Dr., the issue of the ‘seventh attempt’ was whether to amputate one pole or the other, as early ‘church fathers’ had taught, or to align one pole with the other, as modern science, including the science of psychology, especially Jungian psychology, seemed to be recommending; and the ‘seventh attempt’, meaning Mortimer, was under the duress of his mandala, meaning the demands of time and space both, to resolve this dilemma before Spring Break-Up, which by early May was just around the corner (the ‘Time’ or timeline issue); and resolve the dilemma in a way that was spatially pleasing, geometric, and balanced in a mandalic sense. The conundrum had to be solved at the ‘right’ moment in Time, i.e., before the North’s ice broke; and it had to be solved in Space in the ‘right’ way, i.e., on the island, and in a way that produced the most beautiful kind of spatial balance between the hyperpolarized parts of himself; between himself and others; and among any and all other factors in his universe that needed balancing with their polar opposites.


All of punditry said their hero deserved ‘SOMETHING FAR MORE SPECIAL THAN A MOISTR AWARD ’for this ‘mind-blowing insight into the seventh attempt’; but by the second decade of the 21st century, when he came up with it, he had by then given them ‘so much’ that they had long since run out of any way to ‘thank him for anything’, as they put it in a mock ‘workshop encyclical’ that they sent him by email.

 

2 “One day the celebrated [English actor] Garrick was watching Carlin Bertinazzi as Harlequin play a scene in which he stood with his back to the public, rubbing his thigh and shaking his fist at some one who had struck him. Garrick was so impressed by the naturalness and finish of Harlequin’s acting that he exclaimed, ‘Look how the very back of Carlin has expression'!" Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 48f.

 

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, translated with Commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) was the ‘Nietzsche’ Dlune brought Mortimer from ‘the library in Fort Smith’. And as the Dr. liked to point out in later life (when his ‘mad and crack-pot’ – according to teasing pundits – urge to ‘connect’ previously un-thought-of connections reached its most bizarre extreme), Nietzsche published this world-changing work while a professor at the University of Basel in 1872 and remained in Basel until 1879, just a stone’s throw from the Basel neighborhood where the little boy Jung would grow up starting at the age of 4 in 1879. Jung’s grandfather, in fact, had been rector of the University of Basel just a few years before Nietzsche got there. And, the Dr. added, Jung himself would study medicine at the University of Basel starting in 1895. But the ‘later Remaking pundits’ called him on the carpet for this ‘nonsense’ of ‘relating things unrelated’, as they called the habit of the older Dr.’s. And he came back, very patiently, with the argument that it was important to understand that Jung had grown up ‘in the shadow of Nietzsche’, who, like Jung and like mj lorenzo, was ‘a Protestant preacher’s kid’.

 

It was his hunch, said the Dr., that one of the primary factors motivating Jung’s writing Psychological Types must have been his familiarity with Nietzsche’s fundamental pair of opposites, the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian’, and his feelings about them and about Nietzsche’s life and person. For one thing, Nietzsche’s “Birth of Tragedy” had been published just a few blocks from Jung’s house just a few years before his birth. Another hint that Nietzsche was a prime motivator for Jung’s Psychological Types was the fact that Nietzsche ate up so much of the book’s page space, as proven, he said, by the index, which showed more page references to Nietzsche than to the Bible or Freud or Kant or Plato or Schopenhauer. The only stars of erudition mentioned more than Nietzsche in Psychological Types had been Goethe, Schiller and himself, C.G. Jung.

 

A number of still-surviving ‘early Remaking pundit’ preacher’s-kids and their younger pundit friends got drunk on February 7, 2012, the Dr.’s 69th birthday, when they saw that with this comeback mj lorenzo had ‘outshone’ them ‘one more XXXXing time’.

 

Not having heard about any of this, however, the Dr. wrote them even more potentially reputation-damaging carryings-on, ‘an absolutely indefensible non sequitur’, as it seemed to them. He had always wondered, he wrote the core group still active on the East Coast, the group with whom he had been carrying on this weird conversation over weeks and months, how Jung could have written with such immense stylistic and academic-intellectual confidence even as a young man, as he himself could never have done. How could Jung have felt so at ease his whole life, hobnobbing with the greatest minds and souls of his time and of all time; both; as in a sentence like: “Yet we cannot pass over Schopenhauer without paying tribute to the way in which he gave reality to those dawning rays of Oriental wisdom which appear in Schiller only as insubstantial wraiths” (Psychological Types, p. 136), which showed an intimate, profound and confident knowledge of modern Western world philosophers as if they were live personages at a salon party where he had to sip some champagne with one, Schiller, before heading across the drawing room to hash out an argument with another, Nietzsche; plus a familiarity with the philosophy and religion of India and China such as pitifully few Westerners had ever been able to claim up until that day; and even showed a thorough knowledge of the slow maturation of the West’s knowledge of the Orient, from Schiller through Schopenhauer to Nietzsche; plus several other realms of profound knowledge to boot, most likely, all in one short sentence? How could he refer to all of these and other saints and sages of universal wisdom as if they were just a bunch of his peers at a Basel cognac party, associates with whom he needed to schmooze a little, or a lot, depending on that week’s to-do list? After all, he was only a medical doctor, an M.D., not a saint or philosopher. He had simply gone to college and medical school like any other doctor in the world. And he, mj lorenzo, had been really puzzled about that for years, he wrote the now elderly pundits in Philly, until one day in an exceptionally relaxed mood he had lingered longer over a book he had owned for years and read several times, C. G Jung: Word and Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), and paid closer attention to the pictures and descriptions of Jung’s ancestors on pages 9-12.   

 

As mentioned above, Jung’s grandfather, his father’s father also named Carl Gustav Jung, had been the ‘Rector’, the Chief Highest-Up Academic-and-Church Wazzamasumma of the University of Basel, an immensely prestigious position in one of the world’s greatest centers of learning ever, so storied it had given Erasmus space to reflect on the proper future of Christendom, given haven to Calvin to write his Institutes of the Christian Religion, his very first version of that erudite Renaissance guidebook to Christian living that changed European and world history forever, given Zwingli a place to find inspiration for his upcoming Reformation revolution, and so on and so on. Meanwhile our Jung’s father was a pastor in the Swiss state church, a ‘Reform’ Protestant church right in that same great old city in the very heart of old Europe. And Jung’s mother’s father had been not just a clergyman but the chief of all of Basel’s Reform (Protestant) Swiss state church pastors and clergymen of every level. But Jung’s genealogic schmoozing and hobnobbing credentials were even more stellar than all of this for qualifying him to write in the sage and informed, worldly and self-confident way he wrote. C.G. Jung the First (as the old Basel establishment would come to call Jung’s father's father after our Jung became famous worldwide) had had powerful contacts everywhere in European academia. In Paris after thirteen months in prison for acting like a young revolutionary, he had met one of history’s greatest geographers and explorers, Alexander von Humboldt, who had helped him get on the medical faculty of the university of Basel. The first C.G. enlarged the University faculty and the Basel city hospital, created a psychiatric clinic and a home for retarded children and was Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons, which gave him even more incredible connections. Imagine the reception our Jung must have gotten his first day at the University when his classmates heard that his grandfather had been the university president! In other words, Jung grew up in a community of stellar European figures on all sides, churchly, academic, scientific and political, and they all were people, moreover, who were not reactionary but instead felt at home with the latest ideological movements of their day. Jung's father, when young, was going to become a pastor and yet his doctorate dissertation was about an Arabic version of a book of the Bible, the 'Song of Songs'. His mother’s father had taught Hebrew in Geneva and once a week talked intimately with his ex-wife’s ghost. Also, he was an early Zionist and edited a monthly journal called ‘The Orient’. And Jung’s cousin held séances, which were ‘quite the rage’ in those days. That our C.G. Jung came from ‘liberal Protestants’, as Jung said late in his life, could hardly be denied. And all of this helped the Dr. understand better, he said, how one of mj lorenzo’s greatest heroes, Carl Gustav Jung, could have felt so at home with such vast realms of knowledge of so many unusual kinds.

 

But then he thought of another reason which, when combined with these, clinched his understanding. Jung, being an introvert who started getting to know himself quite well from a very early age, could not have helped but recognize that, compared with all of these brains and every other brain he had ever heard of or known personally, his own brain was very close to the top of the pile. He HAD to know that. That was the clincher. And that was the thing, as much as any of these other credentials, which allowed him to hobnob with the greats so comfortably. That and his stellar character, which wrapped it all up in a package of a kindly caring man.   

 

To this mj’s core pundit group responded by buying a full page ad in the Sunday Times which said

 

medicine was a sideline for: _____________

 

whose true and primary profession

 

was writer-sage

 

and instructed the reader to fill in the blank with either C.G. Jung or mj lorenzo. And this was when the Dr. was still practicing medicine!!

 

Incapable of seeing ill-will in his people, though, mj sent them an email thanking them for the compliment.

 

To which they responded in the year 2043, the night after he died, demanding to be informed why he had allowed his ‘revision people’ to get so out of hand in a look at mj lorenzo’s The Remaking as to load the ‘seventh attempt’ with excellent and delightful footnotes on Jung’s Psychological Types when that had been the subject of the ‘sixth attempt’, not the ‘seventh’, and the subject of the latter had been Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music.

 

To which they found an answer eventually in one of the footnotes of that very text itself: We take no responsibility for the actions of mj lorenzo or of any of his representatives or personality parts: past, present or future.

 

4 Ibid., p. 40.


5 Mortimer is using the German word Sinn here to mean a number of things at once: sense; sensitivity; sensibility; liveliness of sensation; good sense; common sense; live sense; all the many senses, physical and mental; and, meinen is German for 'mine'. Thus he is saying: strengthen my sense; strengthen my sensitivity; strengthen my sensibility; strengthen my liveliness of sensation; etc., etc. In other words: 'prepare me in every possible way', 'HELP ME THINK RIGHT, FOR ONCE!'

 

6 This story of a younger brother killing his elder may be found in Petitot’s tales of the northern tribes, as cited elsewhere and listed in the Bibliography. The title, translated, means: Legends and Traditions of the Hare (Rabbit) Sub-tribe [of the Dene]: 'The Navigator', or, 'The One Who Finds The Way'.

 

7 Two sub-groups of early Remaking pundits, one called (by other pundits) the ‘GMAs’ (grey matter amputees) and the other, the ‘EGBs’ (electric Gluten burgers), held that Mortimer, in the first three paragraphs of this piece ‘looking forward to Break-Up’, owed his conceptual framework and language ‘at least in part’ to Marshall McLuhan; and accordingly they issued a joint paper in Fair Science magazine in the late 70s. To Mortimer’s opening sentence, “When the world around is one of excessive physical expansion... the mind contracts and withdraws in reaction...,” they postulated as source McLuhan’s thinking in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Chapter 3, “Reversal of the Overheated Medium” (p. 47): “The stepping-up of speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion into implosion. In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of organization;” and Chapter 4, “The Gadget Lover” (p. 52): “...the autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation.... In the physical stress of superstimulation of various kinds, the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function.”  At the very vomitous thought of bloody Vietnam and Cambodia on TV and the front page of the paper, postulated they, a super-bloody foreign policy error which was the result of too many Mortimer-types thinking too much in a too-linear, hyper-rational mode (for example, the rationale of the USA’s war-promoting, Capitalist ‘hawks’, that ‘if we don’t stop the expansion of atheistic Communism and Socialism now in Vietnam and elsewhere, it will spread all over the globe and overtake us here in the USA’), mj lorenzo ‘reacted’ (as Mortimer said in this piece) by ‘withdrawing’; he amputated the offending organ, the grey matter of his brain; he, mj lorenzo, ‘withdrew’ from the horror scene by amputating his thinking function (Mortimer and people like him) and giving free rein to Jack to solve the problem of Vietnam and other problems related to it in a new and different way: a way that was not rational as Mortimer was rational, meaning not derived from the old kind of traditional Western rational, linear thought which had dominated the Western world from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle forward (then died a bit in the Middle Ages only to revive with the Renaissance and be multiplied with Gutenberg’s printing press and multiplied again with the mechanization of the industrial age and rational science); but rather a way that was ‘total-field’ like Jack, like the current ‘electric age’ in which we live, when the human race has become ‘retribalized’ into a single ‘global village’, all of us electrically connected day and night by TV, radio, telephone, computer technology, etc., or as McLuhan put it (p. 47), in an age like the present one when “...everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another’s lives.” Other early Remaking pundits who were Jungian wrote letters to Fair Science reminding that Mortimer was fully aware that Jung too, in Psychological Types (see footnote 1 above), had discussed at length the mechanism of ‘amputating’ the ‘offending’ bodily ‘function’. And Fair Science received a two-sentence response from the GMAs and EGBs: “That’s why we said, ‘at least in part’! Read the article again, bozos!” but printed only the first sentence. See: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill/New American Library/Signet (New York, 1964).

 

Some critics felt Remaking punditry ‘wasted their human potential’ forever trying to ‘track down’ the sources of mj lorenzo’s thinking. Sammy Martinez recommended at one point they ‘might do less snooping and more trooping’, just promoting their hero’s stepwise program for averting imminent humanity self-annihilation; but the Dr. corrected him in private, clarifying that he preferred people comprehend he owed his discoveries to the hard work: ‘of many wise women and men’; far more than of just himself. And furthermore he ‘enjoyed’ the back and forth of various disagreeing groups, each with its peculiar emphasis of perspective. The pundits made him laugh, he said; and Sammy replied, “But me they make cry. They embarrass me.”


“A monolilthic civilization,” the Dr. answered Sammy, “is a dead civilization. Lively and peaceful debate in public is a sign of a healthy social organism;” and he reminded that, in the end, at Ft. Chipewyan’s Break-Up, that was the only reason mj lorenzo had survived his trip to the Arctic: lively back-and-forth during which neither of mj’s two hyperpolarized sides had given in to the temptation to resolve their argument by resorting to the sword or any other discussion-squelching trick.

29

the blue Buick click here to go home go ahead go back


go back to subsection:  [218]; [219]; [220]; [221]; [222]; [223]; [224]; [225]; [226]; [227]; [228]; [229]; [230]; [231]; [232]

general table of contents        detailed table of contents for:       Part I   Part II   Part III etc.
catalogue of illustrations    -    1    2    3                   brief chronology of important events
    
 ( in the life of mj lorenzo's first book The Remaking )
    
all titles of:  'a look at the life and creative artifacts of mj lorenzo'
       
glossary of Spanish terms           bibliography