233. first part of the
To Dlune
Out of the
dustbin into the trash
Away with the
relics of has-been hash
And here come
the days of would-be new
Encounters and
endeavors
Me and you,
I love you I
regret to say
I meant to say
it another day
Hoping the
feeling would pass and be
Over and
separate
You and me,
I hoped to say
it another way
Or not to have
to at all
I wanted to make
the figure last
And not fall off
the wall
I wanted the
thing to be past
I wanted us to
feel
That feeling is
the real repast
And not some
souring meal,
And in the end
of all the thinking and drawing
When thoughts
were confirmation and belief
I hoped that
love would find its thawing
In your and my
relief.
mj
..................................
Des Dene Peaux-de-Lievre1
(A Hare Tale)
The lamia, a kind of
beetle which gnaws the bark of the fir tree, cast, in the
beginning, a spell over the entire earth by saying: “Man shall
die.”
Fortunately, the frog
broke the spell by replying, “But he shall be resuscitated.”
(Petitot
note:) “The
frog buries himself in the swamp in autumn; he passes the
winter there, frozen with the surrounding earth and as hard
and as solid as a statue, only to resuscitate in spring with
the thawing of the earth and water.”
......................
You have to
picture this.
I meet my
doctor-friend as I have before, too many times, but for
the first time I’m detached. I am not even there. I’m
already, in my mind, on the way out the door, so I’m ready
to handle anything that might come my way, since I’ll be
catching it on the run.
I’m escaping the
vulnerability that comes from paralysis. I’m no longer
immobilized by immobility. The door is over there and I am
about to use it.
My friend, a
naturally decent guy, greets me as usual. “How are you,
mj?”
“Fine, how are
you?”
“I’m okay too,”
he twists his face. “Why do you ask?”
“Just to be
decent,” I say. “It’s a natural question.”
“Yes,” he stares
me down. “But it isn’t like you.”
He knows I’m up
to something so I get it over with.
“Why didn’t you
tell me I wasn’t sick?”
“Weren’t sick? I
never said you were sick.”
“You implied it
sitting there as my doctor asking questions twice a week.”
“But you implied
it first by asking for help.”
“No I didn’t. I
wanted to talk to somebody. I wanted to be reassured I
wasn’t sick, but you never told me. You implied I was by
maintaining appointments and treating me like a mental
patient.”
The poor guy
denies this vehemently, hardly like a psychiatrist. It’s
very healthy. I have him in the palm of my hand because I
know I’m right.
I don’t need him
any more.
It’s not our
disagreement he’s upset about losing, though. It’s me.
I’ve been interesting. A friend, more like it.
I explain: “I
was talking with a medical school classmate who was
reassuring me. He told me straight to my face that of all
the people he knew I didn’t seem so especially different.
I said, ‘Say that again’. And when he did I snapped. I had the
revelation: Why don’t I go about thinking of myself as not
sick instead of sick? Who says I’m sick? Christ! It’s just
a premise. What if it’s wrong? It’s so immobilizing, I’d
probably feel better without it. I want to live thinking
I’m well. So I’ve decided to feel well, as of yesterday.
And I’ve decided I don’t need to see you any more. I’m
sorry. I can give you a call in a month. Is that alright?”
That was his
idea, not mine, actually.
He wrote me a
letter. He missed me probably, worried about me.
Probably because
his psych residency chief said, “Send that crazy damn med
student a letter. Make sure he’s okay. The dean at the med
school sent him to us. We can’t fuck this Lorenzo case up.
Wasn’t it Lorenzo was so depressed he flunked the damn
second year and spent a makeup year doing Peace Corps
volunteers instead of autopsies?”
“That’s the
one,” sighed my doctor-friend.
And then his
outpatient therapy supervisor had to chew his ass royally
too, poor guy: “Never let a therapy case walk away! What
if it’s a ‘flight into
health’? He
thinks he’s better and he’s not. He’s scared of therapy
and he runs, goes downhill, kills himself and it’s your ball of wax now, your depression. His
parents take you to court and you
lose. You didn’t follow normal
‘standard of care’. No outpatient psychotherapy
ever ends without at least three weekly sessions in a row
discussing the coming end, reviewing the gains, and saying
goodbye and thank you.”
And my poor
psych residency therapist must have complained, “But he
refused to do all of that.”
“WELL DOCUMENT
IT THEN!” the supervisor would have retorted.
So that’s why
the poor guy sent me a letter, trying to ‘document it’.
Didn’t I want to come back for a one-month post-discharge
‘check-up’ ‘just to talk’?
No. I’d had
enough. I was fine.
If I ‘wasn’t sick’ how
could I need to be ‘checked’ and
‘documented’?
Some friend!
......................
In the north,
Rev, when winter is about to finally end and turn into
summer like magic, a harbinger of the imminent
transformation is the arrival of small shiny puddles of melt
water on frozen rivers and lakes, usually on a day of warm
Chinook wind blowing in from across the Rockies. Over a
number of days, as sunshine increases and days lengthen, the
river water below the ice rises imperceptibly, and the lake
water beneath its lake ice rises too, by degrees, until the
thick ice – attacked from above by sun, from below by the
mountains’ melted snow-become-pushing-water, and from within
its own thick icy self by rising temperature – somewhere
within itself develops a weak point that is weaker than any
other weak point, that matures into a line and finally into
an ice-weakening line with three-dimensional ramifications,
branches through and across itself, up and down; and the
imperceptible promising defect becomes a perceived and
astonishing break.
That single break is the
hope of spring because spring bursts forth through it
like a mud-green liquid tiger, transforming winter into
summer in a magic second. The ice snaps in a
single spot. It sounds from far away like a dull roar of
thunder. For with this snap the
green and muddy waters from below, above, and within meet and agree to erupt and
to bring about a rapid succession of snap-snap-snap
combined and multiplied as a virtual explosion of ice
into a mist of a million pieces of airborne ice-particles
that rise and re-settle and join the liberated turbulence
below.
The earliest
break occurs in a smaller river feeding a lake. And it
spreads like lightning with thunder inside it downstream and
across the lake.
In my case, Rev,
I heard Break-Up approaching like distant drumming; but I no
sooner thought ‘drumming’ than it was on top of me at the
island. The frozen lake I had just been walking on was now
splashing water with heaving blocks of ice floating in it,
the whole extravaganza flowing and crashing down the Slave
and Mackenzie to the
And I can’t help
reasoning with myself as follows, Rev.
I have assumed
that I am as impenetrable as ice. But the assumption itself
is a big part of what has made me seem so impenetrable. So,
if I leap now to believe that a certain event, any
random occurrence no matter how seemingly insignificant, is
in fact the harbinger of a new life, then this belief will
be for me, de facto,
willy-nilly, the single break which
will extend itself into a thunderous Break-Up and bring me
to my more fluid self. I will then crash about with a new
way of looking at myself, a way brimming with optimism and
self-trust, a way of vitality and of giving myself the
benefit of a doubt – a doubt that was previously
unassailable, even though rationally indefensible – and of
exchanging that old doubt for a new and different rationally
indefensible attitude, but an attitude simply worth the
trying, namely, faith.
.....................
Disturbing the
Peace
The powerful and
intelligent
Conservationists
claim, however, that it would turn the world upside
down to divert northward-flowing rivers southward.
And I say: maybe
this would be a nice thing, to turn the world upside down,
as long as those nature-resenting
Because what I
want to know is this: how can any truly-human man conceive of forcing
a beloved, revered-as-sacred, beautiful, living part of
nature to perform such a disgusting, boot-licking,
potentate-pleasing stunt, so far removed from its natural
river-ly nature? My answer: no truly-human man could.
Therefore: the creatures who would do such a thing are not
truly-human men, but something else. Inhuman men, maybe. Or
aberrations.
How does an
aberration live with itself? How can it find sleep at night?
How does it make love? By diversion. By subjugation. By
practicality. An eye for mechanics. It makes love while
calculating tomorrow’s checkbook balance. An aberration sees
a beautiful natural event as nothing but a useable,
corruptible object.
I want to talk to
the aberration’s wife in private.
I’d like to study
the aberration’s nightmares.
......................
Raping the Peace
(or: a fluvial
gang bang)
In the
Meanwhile along
this imaginary line, at a point in midstream which is a
bubble, a bubble of white froth that appears transiently in
the fast-moving Peace and then vanishes into the ozone blue,
only to be replaced by a never-ending succession of similar
but individually unique white bubbles, I see in my mind’s
eye a freshly carved fir stake interrupting the water’s
momentum. The stake has been driven deeply and securely into
the river bed by last summer’s hired hands, college students
from the eastern cities vacationing for pay with the
Department of Lakes and Rivers. Next summer they will be
replaced by equivalents of succeeding classes, who in turn
will drive in more fir stakes, similarly fresh-hewn, and
finally extend a
real line of wire across the river, the better
to imagine the river’s sad future ongoing abomination in
more lurid detail.
.....................
(Mj and Dlune are
on opposite sides of their big one-room efficiency apartment
at Peyto Lake Motel. He is lying on the bed reading old
notebooks from medical school, working on his Remaking.
While she sits in a chair, darning socks.)
Dlune.
What, mj?
We left the
olives with the elk and buffalo. The dirty jar. On the
grass.
Don’t start. We
can get more. The elk won’t mind.
They will. I
will.
Which? the elk or
you?
I don’t know the
difference.
Poor mj…
Bleeat-Mooo.
Bleaooo.
(It’s the sound
of a baby elk when sad.)
Mj!
Just a loss of
spirit. Let’s forget it.
Good.
(later:)
But I didn’t want
to disturb the Peace. Remember?
It was necessary;
important.
It trammeled on
the Peace.
It was for us, mj!
But against it.
You have to choose, mj, as your
Kierkegaard said.
I could have
chosen to be considerate.
And you will from now on,
mj.
I intend to.
Dlune?
Mmm?
C’m’ere.
#..!..%..”…”…..#XO!
.........................................
Frequently I
stumble over the question which forces itself up to me
from beneath the dark surface: what do I really want? For
example, why do I still write so avidly if I’m in medical
school, not writing school? One would think there would be
a clear goal in an occupation so time-filling as writing
like this, but if you knew, you would know about the
private despair that tightens my chest when I re-enter the
room to sit and pick up a pen – which topic this time? –
to occupy the next few hours. And the vague uneasiness
that is felt now, and again later during the writing, that
nothing is being gained from this, or that whatever is
possibly being gained will never be used or remembered.
Tonight I pick
up this notebook in an effort to gel my thoughts one final
time, only to discover the vague anxiety that scampers
about beneath my consciousness, the same one that lunges
at me when I awake in the morning or when I enter my open
door and think of the hours that lie ahead to be filled by
who knows what for who knows what purpose. I am not
excluding even pleasure as a possible purpose of writing,
but I do not think that this is what attracts me. I’ve
considered that it could be the desire to fill time, until
I have heard a definite calling to do something else or
have found something, anything that will fill my time for
me without leaving me just as empty as I have been up
until now.
In reality I
avoid thinking at all. I imagine that I fear it. I don’t
know. I simply do not know. I am afraid to think
about why I no longer think. I suspect that even as I say
this I am not thinking at all but merely assuming an
attitude, and that having once supposedly cleared my
conscience of the burden of guilt over possibly doing
myself or others an injustice by not thinking, I
will seem to think and then quickly resume my pastime of
writing in this notebook with the same amount of absent
passion and repressed brain cells. I am worried and I am
not worried. I am not sure which, or how, or how much. How
can I analyze myself so carefully and revealingly and
perhaps disastrously, without experiencing greater change?
How can I still be so bland, so immobile, unmovable,
unemotional; so sec? How can I feel that I
have been reading works of intelligent contemporaries and
learning nothing? Where did I add the idea that I had
learned everything, or that I had learned all the
categories of human experience and knowledge and that
although one might still be revealed to me that was new,
it could quickly be localized, perspectivized, and
intellectualized, drained of emotional overtone and good
thought, and would leave me just as much a bore and just
as bored as before? Why would I allow a habit like this to
become mine, knowing as I should that it would deprive me
of humanity and empathy, of any will to live, of any
active interest in anything, of any optimism, any care,
any love for life? I could find reasons, but I would only
be delaying the work I should prefer of ridding myself of
this burden, of getting the iron out of my soul.
It occurs to me
that I have for a long time given myself the following
hasty reaction to any felt anxiety or ill-feeling over
anything: “Do not give notice to this specter of your
‘past illness’ which will loom to confront you now and
then, which you discredited with finality when you
understood it as a bad habit you had expected of
yourself and never dreamt could be exorcised by a sudden
attitude of imperious indifference; just as if it had
occurred to one, after suffering for years from the pain
caused by a loved-one, to finally, one day, forgive the
loved-one, only to find that the pain suddenly
vanished…..”
Except that the
pain has not vanished.…
......................
Mj, will you stop
reading that and pay a little attention to me?
I left my blank
notebook in the knapsack by the window. Could you get it for
me?
Mj, we’ve been
here for three hours and you haven’t said hardly a word to
me.
I just did. I
asked you to get my notebook.
(She looks at the
knapsack and back at mj. She repeats the gesture. Heat is in
motion beneath it. He watches bewildered, his mind fastened
on a sentence that he is helpless to commit to paper without
a notebook. The sentence and the mood that engendered it are
slipping away, probably to be replaced by anger,
frustration, impatience with himself and her, despair...)
Dlune.
What?
Get me the
notebook and I’ll be through in a minute.
(Not moving.)
What are you writing about?
You and me.
I know. But what
specifically? If I’m going to get the notebook, I want to
know who or what I have to share your life with.
You’re sharing it
with a part of myself that always wanders off and gets lost
and requires pursuit to find it and bring it back to me and
you.
What?
With oriental
princesses, with friends I’ve had and haven’t had but can’t
tell which is which, with the air at the top of mountain
peaks, with strange people everywhere. With that glacier
over there. With whatever is on my mind.
What is not on your
mind, mj?
(Pause.) You?
There you go.
Well…
(She looks
frustrated.)
Well sometimes…
like right…
I MISS you, mj!
I miss you too.
Where’ve you been?
Right here next
to you. For a long time now.
I’m getting tired
of this...
Mj, I am a
princess.
I know, baby, I
don’t know what I’d do without you.
I’m a Slave
princess, since my father was a chief. If the Blackfoot
hadn’t taken me I would probably seem more like a princess
to you now.
Sometimes I can’t
believe that story. Why should I? Just because Chipewyan and
your mother tell it?
Don’t you want to
believe it?
(He thinks a long
time, crossing his legs one way and then the other and
finally smirks in her direction.)
If you’re a
princess, then I must be a prince. I’m the prince of the
Peace!
Fine with me.
(Mj rolls
laughing on the flowered bedspread and on top of her, since
she has joined him.)
Stop it, mj!
Let’s forget the
notebook.
Done. A long time
ago.
....................
Sometimes, Rev, I
can’t tell if I’ve been resting in a cabin in
I can’t think in
a straightforward rational way. I’ve exchanged a linear, for
a circular approach to the universe. I’ve replaced organized
analysis with paradox, parable, analogy, allegory and just
plain living. My trip diverts from a straight and sensible
line into a vaguely harmonious circular course, and in a
sense I’m going only where I’ve already been.
Maybe I needed
this kind of repetition and recall in order to remind myself
who I have been and who I will be, and who on earth I am.
But maybe I would
be better off with an explosive interruption, to see again
who I did not
want to be and who I would rather have been.
The
objectification of what I am before my very own
self-observation is what I don’t need. Such a
view cries out to be fractured like a stack of human
vertebrae on a bowling alley. The certainty that I am this
or that wants to be shattered until I cannot tell what to think
about myself, but merely what to wonder at and respect, or what to
worship, namely
not myself but something somewhere still in myself,
something lurking, something as yet only still suggested,
something more than I had guessed even after all my
guessing, something even now about to express itself…..
I need…… I may
need….:
.....................
Dlune, what am I
trying to say?
What is it, mj?
That’s what I
asked.
What’s what?
That.
.......................
Paper day-glo
kites and flowers, happy hours
With you
Surface waits and
partial hates
For you, girl
Wait for me a
while, I’ll be there
For the meeting
With you
Absorb yourself in
me, wholly
And then you’ll
see, baby
Where I am
Hold me in your
heart only
Not your arms
Your body harms my
soul
I can’t keep it
whole
Giving it in
particles to you
And then when the
time divines
My body will give
itself to you
But you have to
wait for the perfect moment
And don’t make issues
out of paper tissues
…………………………….
234. Dr. Lorenzo from a
maturer vantage point looks back on the healing aspect of
his unusual trip
Dr.
Lorenzo, in later years, during informal conversations with
friends, would struggle mightily to explain The Remaking
from time to time and would end up doing so in various ways.
One
‘way’ of explaining it, or conceptualizing it, he said a
number of times, began by comprehending what had really happened at
Going-to-the-Sun.
He
believed that by straddling
the Divide on the solstice, ‘splitting space and
time at once’, or in other words, standing at the
point where and when space and time were just then being
‘split’; and by being immediately, right there and then struck
by lightning, ‘nature’s shock therapy’, as he called it, right
at that rare and uniquely magical dividing point in
space-time; he had managed accidentally-on-purpose
to insert himself, or had been lucky or graced to be
inserted, he was not sure which, maybe both, into the warp and woof of
nature. And that was why, for the entire year
thereafter, his ‘own nature and the nature of nature itself
had been one’. His changing moods and mental states, i.e., his
switching from Mortimer to Jack and back, was as much causing
nature’s events, as nature’s events were causing the
switching.
Or, if
that sounded too ‘crazy’, he said, it might be proposed that
the year-long series of multiple natural events, intricately
linked as they were both outside and inside himself,
were caused simultaneously by a third force that could be
called nature’s
natural healing system or plan. The main point was
that by ‘becoming one with nature’, instead of ‘living a life
not in synch with nature’, or often in virtual opposition to
it, as he had done before, he could now be cured, or healed,
by nature.
Being
‘melded with nature’ in this way, however, put him through ‘an
awful lot’, the Dr. said, right up to the point of Break-Up.
But having gone through all that, and having remained ‘locked
into nature’ despite any discomfort the procedure might have
caused, then: when spring Break-Up finally
occurred, he was in a perfect position to benefit from
that Break-Up and have his two ‘asymmetrically’ ‘split’
‘halves’ put back together again in a much more smoothly human
and natural way.
In all
truth though, Dr. Lorenzo added, it was more accurate to say
that: the entire
series of events had healed him, not just Break-Up
alone.
235. buying in to the
treatment plan is critical, says the Dr.
And
furthermore, he said, if Jack and Mortimer had not both
bought into the idea
from the very beginning, by believing that the series
of events was and would be a healing process, it never
would have worked, no matter how ‘luckily’ linked to nature he
might have ‘accidentally’ become. His problem was too huge to
rely on unconscious ‘luck’ or ‘accident’. Conscious ‘buying in’ had been
a crucial part of the success of such a strange, new,
unheard-of healing approach as Jack (by instinct) and Mortimer
(by intellect, mostly) were coming up with that year.
Seeing
that thoughts like these could lead to vast realms of further
speculation, Dr. Lorenzo tried to ‘wrap it up’ ‘quickly’ and
tie it with a ‘little bow’ one evening in 2001 when visiting
Sammy in
This
was why he, Dr. Lorenzo, years later, had come to prefer
referring to young mj’s solstice-lightning ‘fortuitous
insertion into healing nature’, instead, as having taken place
‘accidentally-on-purpose’.
It had not resulted from just ‘luck’ or ‘fortuity’ or ‘grace’,
he said. That ‘insertion’ had been intended, at least
partly. For Jack had taken over control of ‘young mj’ already
in Philly, virtually completely. And young mj had then fled
west driven by Jack,
who had been responding to an instinctual, barely-conscious
now-or-never survival-impulse to do something drastic
in order to finally, please,
make mj’s life livable.
Overall,
Dr. Lorenzo often left the impression through the years that
thousands of angles on The Remaking remained to be explored
probably, or even to be thought of maybe; and would be
welcomed by him for consideration, given years sufficient to
do so.
And he
admitted this particular healed-by-nature ‘explanation’ of the
Remaking was a non-rational one, a ‘Jack-ian’ intuition, not a
rational, Mortimer-like ‘scientific’ explanation. He reveled in its being
such, and said that all the best soul-healing methods were at
least a little bit less than fully rational and
‘scientifically defendable’. And many – including many
religions – were a lot
less, yet continued to work successfully to some degree for
many individuals. (Even though, as he liked to add, it seemed
to him that many religions down through the ages had helped to
bring about what he called an 'occasional but unfortunately
all-too-frequent' ‘mass psychosis’.)
236. the Dr. repudiates
(or clarifies, as some say) an important part of his
All
these comments taken together, he said, amounted to a
repudiation or expanded clarification, perhaps, of his lines
about the Break-Up written at Peyto Lake: “…if I leap to
believe that a certain event, any random occurrence
no matter how seemingly insignificant, is in fact
the harbinger of a new life, then this belief will be for me,
de facto,
willy-nilly, the single break which will extend itself into a
thunderous Break-Up and bring me to my more fluid self.”
For,
on a later occasion, he proceeded to elaborate on the subject
of how big or small,
how significant or ‘insignificant’ a thing ought to be in
order to work as a healing aid. In his case, however, now, in
fact, looking back at it after so many years, he preferred ‘big’ and ‘significant’
over his former opinion quoted above from Peyto Lake: ‘no matter how
insignificant’.
Dr.
Lorenzo did not think it would have worked just as well, for
example, to have lived the rest of the year as he always had,
and to have just caught a plane up to Fort Chipewyan for
spring Break-Up and sat by the lake on a beach chair
meditating a few days, hoping he would be cured ‘that easily’
when the ice finally exploded and the hidden water leapt out
‘like a liquid tiger’. An ‘illness’ of such magnitude as his,
he said, required a ‘larger cure’ than any treatment plan so
‘simple-minded’ as that.
Nor
did he think it would have worked to have lived his life as
usual, and to have caught a plane up to
237. the Dr.’s comments
during a healing workshop at Ghost Ranch
Apparently
unable to leave this ‘whole realm of possible speculation’
unaddressed after all, the Dr. went on to explain to
participants in a Sammy Martinez healing workshop at Ghost
Ranch in 2001 that his ‘full cure’ ‘actually’ lay in: (1) his
having ‘meshed with
nature’ completely; and then, while trusting nature to do its
job of curing, or healing, (2) his having been able to accept Dlune when she
came along, as part of the treatment plan and cure.
Not
just Dlune, however, but all of the year’s events were to be
understood in a threefold way, he said, as: (1) having been ‘dictated by nature’
during a period when he, mj lorenzo, had ‘invited nature to
help him’; (2) having been recognized by him as
part of nature’s healing gift when they came along; and (3)
having been accepted
by him once he had recognized them.
The
Remaking therefore, he said, constituted a written report of
all the pieces and steps of a huge protracted treatment plan
that ‘God’s nature’ had prescribed, piece by piece and step by
step, over a year’s time from solstice to solstice, every
single crazy element of such a seemingly crazy treatment plan
or ‘remaking’: Mortimer’s depressed notebooks, so exasperating
for anyone in the world to read; Mackenzie’s journals written
by two men at once; Petitot’s book of beautiful Indian tales
preceded by Petitot’s exasperatingly arrogant introduction;
the great Carl Jung and all the other sages; the river; the
ice; the stolen canoes; and a million other healing factors.
That
was why he kept putting so many depressed notebook passages in
the envelopes to his parents, he said. Because: all year long,
throughout his trip of remaking, he kept returning to them
himself, again and again. Yet for years he was of course
dismayed – as everyone else was, too, whenever they did the
same – every time he opened The Remaking and read one of those
‘disgusting damn notebook entries’. Because it pained
him to remember how down, how isolated, de-personalized and
empty he had been, how de-humanized,
he said, apparently for little more reason than having tried
to live his life exactly
as family and society had expected him to live it while he was
in college and med school.
During
the year-long trip, reading the notebooks would goad him again
and again to stick
with the treatment. And for this reason, though he
hated them, he would read them purposely, when discouraged, to remind himself
how terribly bad he
had felt – other years and this year – and what a huge amount of help
he still needed. No outside party would ever understand why a
treatment as huge, convoluted and revolutionary as the
Remaking had been required, thought the Dr., unless they
had experienced a
convincing stomach-full of the cause themselves
(in the form of the notebooks).
No
outsider, said the Dr., could ever appreciate how lifeless his
existence had been, and how necessary his year of
restructuring, unless they had either been through it
themselves or read ‘a hundred of those
soul-murdering notebook entries at least’.
The
notebooks, said Dr. Lorenzo, were prima facie evidence of
the single extended crime Mortimer had committed against
Jack over many long years, and the damage it had caused
Jack’s life force and his own. The notebooks were ‘convicting evidence’
of Mortimer’s crime
against Jack and mj and himself, that crime having been ‘denial of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’.
And
that was why his book could not read like any other book.
Because, to his knowledge, no one had ever written a book
reporting in all its painful and disgusting detail such an
illness and such a cure, let alone a book on the subject of a
re-humanizing recovery from a life-threatening bout of
‘U.S.-American-type Mortimer-inflicted
dehumanization’.
238. insertion into
nature’s matrix meant sticking
with the treatment plan
Persisting
in using, for the moment, just this one ‘way’ (out of ‘many
possible ways, theoretically’) of looking at The Remaking, Dr.
Lorenzo offered the healing workshop participants at Ghost
Ranch an additional ‘thought’. Since the ‘insertion’ had begun
on the Divide at the solstice, he said, an ‘extraction’ from
the abnormal state of ‘over-entangled one-ness with nature’s
matrix’ likewise had to occur at the Divide on the solstice, a
year later to the split-second. So that he, mj, could be
‘discharged from nature’s psych hospital’ and sent back to a
normal everyday human existence.
The
healing trip had to last through the night of the ’71 summer
solstice because a cure could only be accomplished by adhering
to what nature had dictated, i.e., to what Jack (mostly) had intuited and Mortimer
(a little) had rationally
conceived at points during the year that nature
(including their own inner nature) was telling them to do. Via
the Triptique, for
instance, or via subtle hints or obvious punches in the face.
That detailed trip itinerary
(the meaning of the English word ‘triptique’, as the American
Automobile Association used it), for example, had called for
climbing Hungabee at the summer solstice. After spring
Break-Up at Fort Chipewyan, therefore, mj could not ‘walk off
the job’ or ‘walk out of nature’s hospital’ now that he felt
better, in the way he had walked out of his outpatient
psychotherapy with the psych resident back during medical
school. For as good as it had felt to walk out back then, it
had not worked. So this time the job, or the cure, would not
be over until he had climbed Hungabee at the summer solstice.
In
fact, Dr. Lorenzo said, his job would not be over even then.
Once down from Hungabee he still would
have to make an effort to make the cure ‘stick’. One ‘could
not be presumptuous about nature’s cures’, as he warned
Sammy’s workshop participants.
A serious, years-long
disorder like his, especially, as Dr. Lorenzo emphasized, one
that had failed to respond to other therapies, required a massive treatment
intervention and required that he ‘stick’ with that
massive treatment plan as
dictated. And fortunately he had done just that. He had
stayed with the Triptique,
with Dlune, and with all else that had been earmarked as
required. Had he not done so, he was certain, the cure would
not have been as ‘virtually complete’ as it had seemed to turn
out. But since he had done so and had not walked out, then
the cure, in fact, had proven amazingly efficacious.
239. more on the
subject of ‘respecting nature’
Dr.
Lorenzo added in a lighter manner that he had respected nature
before his Remaking year. He knew that his trips to Glacier
and Yoho when he was younger had lifted his spirits each time
for months afterward, and had given him inspiration often
while locked up in school. But the Remaking year multiplied
his respect a thousand times, especially from Break-Up on. For
it was only then, after Break-Up, that he finally saw exactly to what extent
nature had assisted in his healing. He had gotten results. That
explained why, just after Break-Up, he had written so much to
Rev on the subject of disrespecting nature and the proposed
‘rape’ of the Peace River.
On
more than one occasion Dr. Lorenzo said that the Peace and
Dlune had been equivalent in his mind in a number of ways
while writing The Remaking. That was why he had placed an equals sign between
them in some of his ‘poetic equations’. And now, years later,
even though he and Dlune were no longer married, he would
often marvel over how incredibly valuable she had been in
getting him ‘back down to earth’, back down to a place where nature, i.e., a more
natural, ordinary human life, could heal and keep him
healthy, mentally and physically.
It was
a favorite topic, one that continued to fill him with
amazement. Perhaps in part because he had thought of her
negatively all too often, and especially right after their
divorce in 1980. Dlune, in other words, because so finely
attuned to nature herself, living in synch with nature, living
naturally, had possessed the right credentials to be picked up
by ‘nature’s healing team’, as the Dr. called it, and to
become a major part of the treatment plan that nature dictated
for ‘young mj’.
240. young Dr. mj sticks with Dlune
as part of his Remaking cure therefore
All
through the 70’s, in fact, the decade after Dr. Lorenzo wrote
his Remaking, he continued to stick by the notion which he had
expressed at the very end of ‘Freeze-Up’ that from that point
on Dlune was paramount to his re-making. He had written:
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 of course by thunderous
ice-break. He came to the point by extrapolation; by making
a last-ditch absurd fling in the face of fate; by dancing a
Totentanz, as it were, a dance right before dying, a dance
that might or might not come up for reflection at some later
date, since death might strike him 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 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 until now.
Mj
lorenzo would be getting to know and experience the world through his ‘Jack side’,
in other words, Dr. Lorenzo explained to the healing workshop,
in case someone had missed that somewhat complicated point;
through the ‘Jack’ that Mortimer had kept penned up all those
years, dominating mj and suppressing Jack as Mortimer always
had.
‘Young
mj at Chipewyan’s cabin’, said Dr. Lorenzo, ‘functioning for
the moment as Mortimer’, had sensed, ‘thanks to Dlune’s help’,
that to correct the
dehumanizing imbalance created by ‘thinking too much’
(as Jack had been the first to call it, all the way back in
Powelton), and by doing so for too many years:
mj in the future would have to live in a drastically new
way, as far from grey-matter brain as possible.
For,
after Dlune had come along in November, already by February
Mortimer had seen how much she had helped him. He had
discovered her benefit as soon as he had noticed the upbeat
romantic mood of his ‘fourth attempt’. Toward the end of the
long winter, granted, misgivings about settling down had crept
in to worry him, as the ‘sixth attempt’ had shown. But by the
last page of the ‘seventh attempt’, as in the lines quoted
above, he had made up his mind that Dlune was a crucial part
of his cure and had to remain so for some time to come.
The
pundits too, knowing how obtusely mj lorenzo could express
himself at times in The Remaking, agreed that these paragraphs
from the ‘seventh attempt’ (just quoted) were words of
unequivocal commitment. The sentences were as clear as young
mj lorenzo’s writing ever got. Dlune was the next step in his
re-making, he knew.
And
so, as mentioned, during the 70’s Dr. Lorenzo had stayed with
the plan, for it had arisen out of The Remaking year,
and was on the list of ‘Instructions for After Discharge
from the Hospital’ such as any patient received when
leaving a hospital after a major, complicated treatment
intervention, often written down on a sheet of paper.
Mj and
Dlune, now married, had two children, a boy and a girl. He
finished his psych training and began working with patients.
Such a life kept him busy, and his original copy of The
Remaking sat in a box throughout the 70’s. Often he forgot he
had written it. Marriage and work helped him feel a ‘more
ordinary person’. He felt human again, more like he had when
quite little, hanging out with his mother, playing on the
floor, making designs with a child’s set of different-colored
toy stone tiles.
During
the 70s ‘young mj’ ‘also forgot’ – as Dr. Lorenzo told Sammy
Martinez once in private – that while writing The
Remaking he had sometimes understood that he was more than that, more
than simply a working, family-oriented, ‘ordinary person’, and
had felt, instead (at those special times, while writing The
Remaking), like a special
human being, one who had been assigned a special mission.
241. a coterie of early
70s pundits declares mj lorenzo a culture hero
Mj
lorenzo forgot during the 70s that his mission at one time
had been ‘to save
humanity from destroying itself physically’. Throughout the 70’s he did not
remember that he had written that in The Remaking.
Some
of the pundits who had discovered mj’s book during the 70s had
not
forgotten these all-important statements of his in The
Remaking, however. While he had been quietly constructing a
basic, natural human life as husband, father and doctor,
having just written The Remaking, and having put it out of his
mind, this special handful of ‘early Remaking pundits’, on the
other hand, had been
busy declaring him a ‘culture hero’.
Most
pundits objected at once, of course, that the culture hero
people had ‘gone too far’ and ‘gone overboard’. Or that they
were ‘jumping the gun’. It was far too soon to say that mj
lorenzo was a ‘culture hero’, since he had not lived much of
his life yet. No one could say what impact his life and work
might have one day. It certainly could not add up to much yet, judging from
what they saw in the mirror. The pundits were a very motley
crew in the early days, they admitted and even bragged, except
for the very few who sometimes
wore slightly newer Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. They all felt better,
granted, thanks to mj and his Remaking. But there were not ‘enough darn pundits
yet’, said the skeptics on the issue, finally, to warrant a
claim that mj had heroically impacted his culture at large, or
even should.
Discussion
on the point raged throughout the 70’s, however, as the
pundits kept adding to their understanding of The Remaking by
studying it exhaustively. And after they found mj in 1980
interest in the proposal raged even more. For, new information
on their hero and his life and work and impact kept pouring
in, month after month.
It was
safe to say, in short, that once having raised its fascinating
golden head this lion of an issue was not likely ever to go
away.
242. explanation of the
term culture hero
Now:
from the 1940s on Joseph Campbell2
had been perhaps the number one scholar3
inspiring intelligent discussion of the newly proposed notion
of ‘culture hero’, as Remaking pundits liked to refer to the
idea simply. And a few other scholars had added a point or two
here and there. Generally speaking, a ‘culture hero’ was one
who possessed the very special ability to see straight into
the heart of his culture and see it with perfect clarity; see
a problem in it; and heroically fix it. Or, at the very least,
leave behind, when he left this world again, a program for
fixing it, and a large enough following to implement the
program to a significant degree.
The
‘hero’ often achieved all of this by looking into his own
heart. But much more was needed to make a culture hero. Every
single one of a certain large set of extremely rare and
exemplary qualifications had to be present in a would-be hero
of this highly uncommon kind. He had to be so well tuned to
himself as to know exactly how to look inside his own heart
and understand all he saw. Then too, he had to be so perfectly
tuned to the people and the world around him, he could look at his people in their
world, and recognize what was going on in them. Third, he
had to possess the extremely rare quality of being an exact reflection of
his culture. This did not happen to everybody by any
means. Fourth, he had to have the perspicacity to see that connection
and realize that he
was a mirror of his
culture and that it was a mirror of him.
As
exacting as all this might be, plenty more was still required.
He had to have the wisdom to distinguish which elements of the
culture were causing pain, and which were not. Likely as not
he would understand this from his own pain. But he had to be
sure that his own pain would never keep him from fulfilling
any of the other prerequisites on the list. Next, he had to
possess the genius of
healing, so as to know the cure for his culture’s problem. Likely as
not, he would have to try
the cure on himself first, making sure it worked, and
convincing others it had. And then he had to have the talent
to speak up and communicate all of this knowledge of himself
and his people, explaining to them the problem and the cure,
and convincing them he was qualified to speak and help. This
was a huge assignment. He could not be a hero to his culture
if he kept his discoveries to himself, or if he spoke up in a
way that alienated everyone right off the bat, losing himself
any possible audience ever. And too, personal sacrifice of
some kind, somewhere along the way, was as good as inevitable,
and could even include an untimely and unnatural death.
All of
this constituted an enormous set of demands that very few in
the history of the human race had ever met.
All
told, though, there just had not been many such heroes in
human history, and despite excitement in pundit circles it was
not clear at all yet that mj lorenzo could be said to meet
such extremely exacting prerequisites.
243. mj lorenzo
certainly meets criteria for culture hero in at least one
way, claim culture hero pundits
But:
The Remaking readily revealed mj had at least some of
the qualities required, argued the culture hero pundits. For
instance, Parts I and II of The Remaking had shown that mj’s
makeup appeared to mirror that of his culture very, very
closely. Nearly every time he perceived a problem in himself
during his healing year he looked at his culture and saw the
same thing writ large. And similarly, when he discovered
faults in his culture he looked at himself and found them
inside himself as well.
Overall,
nothing less than an exhaustive study of The Remaking was
required in order to review what evidence it might have
offered as to whether mj possessed the other requirements or
not. And many pundits attempted such studies.
244. mainstream pundit
reaction to
But:
what about Part III, at least, i.e.
Dlune’s
role with the new mj lorenzo was ‘close to miraculous’, said
many Remaking scholars, due to her sixth sense for when mj was
getting too far out in the ether-y wispy nebulae – under
Mortimer’s influence – and had to be brought back down to the
nitty gritty bang bang of ordinary human life on earth.
245. culture hero
pundit reaction to
Those
caught up in the ‘culture hero’ frenzy, however, stressed a
particular set of points apart from these. In fact, in
general, the ‘culture hero’ pundits had a way of expressing
themselves unlike that of any other group. Once one grasped
that mj lorenzo was a ‘culture hero’, they said, all the weird
little lost-looking puzzle pieces flew into place like magic.
It was an experience every one of them reported having had at
some point in the course of their understanding, and never
again thereafter; because, from that point on, from the point
when they realized mj was a ‘culture hero’, the puzzle pieces
were ‘already in
place every time they went looking for them’.
They
all said, for example, that by Break-Up and
And
these pundits maintained that mj lorenzo wrote Part III,
choosing the particular contents for it that he chose, in
order to show (among other things) that these two aspects of
his ‘mission’ – i.e. (1) to live humbly as a caring family
man, breadwinner and physician, and (2) to communicate his
message – were still in conflict, often as not. Often when he
tried to continue his writing of The Remaking at
The
good news was that the fighting inside mj had lessened. It had been
brought to light during the last year and subjected to
tremendous scrutiny – by Jack and Mortimer both. Mj now
possessed a better understanding of what the fight between his
two sides was all about. And he made a better wrestling judge.
He did not lose his referee cool when the two sides struggled
for supremacy. One side did not knock the other out and pound
his opposite to death. Neither side ran through the audience
creating uproar. Nor did either one sit there staring at the
floor of the ring, or masturbating for the front rows. There
was no evidence of lingering sexual compulsion or drug
addiction at
This
was the answer from the ‘culture hero’ pundits to those
‘lame-brained’ pundits who considered the ‘
The
‘culture hero’ pundits knew what: mj, the owner of the house
that Jack built, the Jack that was finally living in the house
side-by-side with Mortimer; that same mj now appeared better
equipped to keep his house functioning peaceably despite
those two scrapping rascals, and in fact because of
them and their help, actually. And he was informing the world
of the fact by writing ‘
The
good news was that the fighting in general had not only gotten
fairer and less bizarre, it had actually diminished. Mj and
Dlune, for example, might have come close to scrapping in
these pages, but they did not do so. And he stayed with her.
And he did keep on writing. And he did finish his book.
‘
246. an aspect of mj’s
culture hero role perplexes and worries culture hero pundits
There
was one special twist in the knotty culture hero theory that
interested some pundits inordinately. Throughout the 70s they
could hardly stop talking about it, mainly because they could
not figure out what it meant or what to do about it.
Normally
it was expected that a culture would mirror its culture hero,
and vice versa. But no one expected the culture to reflect the
heroic quality of
its culture hero. In that one respect, at least, he was
normally expected to be different from them. That was why he
had come to save them: because they had not been heroic enough
to do it themselves.
But in
the case of mj lorenzo, said some pundits, the culture
mirrored even the ‘hero’ aspect of its hero.
There
had always been a conflict inside mj, they pointed out,
between the part of mj wanting to live a normal human life in
the world (Jack), and the heroic part trying to complete a
world-saving mission (Mortimer). And amazingly, that conflict
had already existed,
in a big way, within the culture from which he had come.
The
Western world had been bothered and bewitched by heroes and
hero-types and even heroic-style groups for centuries,
all of which continually distracted the civilization’s members
from their basic assignment of remaining whole humble humans.
Just as dogs were supposed to remain whole humble dogs, not
try to be saviors of the canine world or demi-dog-gods. That
was the Western world’s biggest problem in the world today,
said the culture hero pundits. And this Mortimer-savior aspect
of the Western world, they said, was something that tried the patience of the
rest of humanity severely. The ‘Jack’ part of
humanity-at-large was just as beset with consternation, for
example, over the USA’s constant Mortimer-like tendency to act
in accordance with its
perceived mission of saving the world (saving their own selves
included), as Dlune was beset at Peyto Lake and elsewhere,
with consternation over mj’s trying to fulfill his mission of
writing and saving the world.
This
observation, since it seemed valid, left the ‘culture hero’
pundits in a daze, interestingly. Even speechless, for once.
Here
was a culture, the Western world to some extent, but the
Yet
the Western world, and the
Some
of the culture hero pundits, inevitably therefore, began to
worry about mj lorenzo’s welfare, should he begin to make
waves in the culture around him. During the late 70s they
wondered if they should try to track him down and protect him
somehow. No one could yet stand to think about it beyond this
point though. And so the question remained unresolved a little
longer.
247. second part of the
Mj, what did you
ask me a while ago?
To fix my wool
socks. In case we hike.
Isn’t that why
we’re running a motel in this location, so we can hike?
Then fix my
socks, please… Dlun’. C’m’ere a sec.
We are in our
one-room apartment above the motel. The north wall is a
fifty-foot picture window with a view extending from a tip
of Peyto Glacier, on the left, to the falling-off of a
mountain range across the valley toward the east, on the
right. On the wall…
‘Dlune, you’re
blocking my view’.
She responds with
four suggestions over a minute’s time separated by three
time-chunks of silence:
‘View the other forty-nine
feet’, she comes back….. ‘Look at me’….. ‘Look at it
from a different angle’…..
‘Move’!
1) ‘View the other forty-nine
feet’: I conclude: women are practical, realistic creatures.
Men are the hopeless idealistic romantics. Even the way she
looks at a mountain is down-to-earth. It’s the same way she
looks at me. But can’t she see I am high in the sky?
2) ‘Look at me’: I look
straight at her. She is wearing a burlap and leathery kind
of sari-sarong, not at all sorry, standing there darning my
green and brown Continental Divide socks.
3) ‘Look at it
from a different angle’:
I move across the flowered bedspread to the other side of
the double bed and observe her figure from a new angle.
Something is missing still.
4) ‘Move’.
Dlune, c’m’ere a
sec, I have to ask you something.
She comes this
time.
She was feeling
my eyes consuming her, maybe. And you know, I forgive her
for standing there. She is an Indian. She has to stand somewhere.
.........................
Dlune, let me read
your book
Don’t give me that
downcast look, girl
Don’t worry about
my downcast look, girl
I wanted you to
feel me from across the room
Not insinuate
yourself into my lap
And bruise my
pages
I’m thinkin’ baby,
don’t have time to love
Today
I’m too vulnerable
for love today
But please don’t
go.
.......................
If you stand high up above
blue-green
To the right
unfolds a subsidiary range, likewise into the blue northern
infinity.
In between the
two, at the base of the Divide’s shoulder, so to speak, on
which you stand, and up against the glaciated backbone,
huddles sparkling blue-green
It must be
grasped that this world is unaltered by the sight of
anything designed by man. It is pristine
nature at its most frightening and glorious. It is cold,
though bathed by sunlight. Endless, although seemingly
framed at the edges. Primitive, yet timeless. And
frighteningly silent. It is motionless yet seething with
life. It is all that is unknown to the beholder threatening
to become known as abruptly as a soul laid bare at a glance.
One day, perhaps
before we have experienced it in the way we should have,
this potential tourist attraction may be advertised in neat
and attractive brochures and organized into sensible,
graspable, un-frightening schedules to comfort its visiting
Pepsi-slurping tourists, who will be offered the following
rationalization of its inner necessity and utter
irrationality –
‘Cabins at…’
‘Trail rides
to…’
– and be asked to
believe thereby that everything
they see is under control, only to be left wondering
slightly, though, for split seconds in mid-air as their nags
bounce them along shit-strewn trails beside lakes and rivers
and around grey heaps of mountains and back to a waiting
fireplace, pool table, martini, dinner, and bed, if maybe,
just maybe, these mountains are not what they have
been cracked up to be after all.
Maybe they do
hold surprise, after all.
Yet Park Rangers
will be taught to list
the habits of squirrels, wolverines and beaver, in order to
entertain at campfire on Wednesday night and reassure
tourists that all is predictable.
But such lists
will only have the effect of belittling the real surprise that every
lurking wolverine must be for every carefree beaver, and
that the Indian arrowhead once was for all.
……………………….
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The Pepsi-slurping tourist, by the
way, will want to be careful to avoid the chance occurrence
of a huge chunk of ice pivoting slowly and inexorably off
the front edge of Peyto Glacier and crash-ing into the
lake to create a tidal wave; which will most assuredly sweep
him coldly from his bed, and his shining blue car from the
neatly white-lined parking lot, sending Pepsi-slurping car
and bed and tourist back down the churning Athabasca and
Mackenzie into the always quietly waiting Arctic Ocean.6
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……………………………
Dlune, here’s
proof that ice moves of its own volition.
(Reads aloud as
they sit in a grassy meadow overflowing with wildflowers
during a hiking break:)
‘Movement of
Glaciers’.
(Reads silently,
then says:)
‘Ice moves of its
own volition’. Yes. Those are the exact words.
What do you mean?
If ice can move,
anything can happen.
Like what, mj?
Like our trip.
If ice can move,
there’s hope for you and my grandfather then.
I admit that’s
what I meant, Dlune, but you didn’t have to beat me to the
punch.
If I hadn’t
‘moved’ you, you’d still be in bed.
I know.
Let’s change the
subject.
Ice….. It says
here, that if stakes are placed in the face of a glacier on
a straight line, one day later the center stake will have
moved several inches, and the peripheral stakes less,
demonstrating the ice has moved, even though it is a bona fide solid.
That gives me hope.
Let’s think about
something besides you.
You.
That’s you, too.
How about
flowers, Dlun’?
Here’s a blue
violet.
How about this
white Indian Paintbrush?
This has to be
Saxiphrage.
You take the dark
ones, Dlune. I’ll get the light. The one I want to find is
‘Nancy-over-the-ground’, because according to our folder it
grows around
(Dlune lies in
the grass now too.)
This might be
Fleabane.
(Moving toward
her, helping her observe:) Is it ‘giant purple’ or ‘alpine’?
(Voice softer:)
Hmmm. It must be alpine, cause it’s not giant, and not
purple.
(Looks into her
eyes:) Hmmm: I think I agree.
(Their foreheads
touch, and the softness in their eyes is an adjunct to the
harmony of their Hmmm’s.)
......................
(Later:)
Mj, you know, in
Blackfoot language north means behind direction. We say,
Op-ut’-o-sohts. And for south, we say, Ahm-ska’-pohts.
That’s ahead direction.
Om-scopoats.
No! Ahmska’pohts.
That’s what I
said.
You spelled it
wrong.
How do you know?
I know you, mj.
And east is Pi-na’-pohts. That means down-river direction.
West is up-river: Ah-me’-tohts.
The Blackfoot
always lived on this side of the Great Divide, didn’t they?
So that kind of poetry was fine for them, but what happened
when they chased the Kootenai into the
They reversed it,
of course! Do you think we are dumb?
I guess not. When
it comes to poetry. But you’re more religious than
scientific.
We’re very
practical. Down-to-earth. Unlike your science and religion.
That’s why we don’t have religion or science. Everything is
just all one to
us.
Just all one….. XZ%#X!
......................
Just imagine,
Rev, if we lived in a world where geography, biology,
psychology, religion, philosophy, physics, myth and every
other knowledge could be studied and understood all at once
as a single discipline, one brilliantly simple paradigm that
explained all these things, everything in the world,
all at once.
That, then, might
be something close to how ‘Indians’ of all kinds, including
Indians of the subcontinent, always have tended to think and
live.
………………………………
Mountain
Survey Sidetracked to Improve
Only three-fourths of a
mile of this road, from the
Rough and Rugged
From the Lookout on until
the road passes through the forest onto alpine meadows at
still higher elevation, the road is a rough, rugged jeep road.
Motel Opens
Peyto Lake Motel opened
in late May for three months summer season. However, it will
still be necessary to provide jeep transport for those not
wishing to hike the seven miles from the base camp to the
motel above the timber line at 8500 feet.
Fishing may soon be
available in the alpine area, according to Dlune Lorenzo,
co-manager of the motel. The parks department is considering
stocking the lake with trout.
……………………………
Dlune, how could
we end with this place, and not go on to the denouement and
apotheosis we planned?
You planned.
Didn’t you want
it too?
That was when you wanted it, mj.
I think I want it
again.
You floor me.
Can’t I persuade
you?
Yes. If we can
come back here, maybe. Who will take care of the guests?
College students.
We’ll teach them to respect the peace of the place.
It was a
compromise to start with, mj. A motel at Peyto
Glacier! What respect did we have?
We didn’t build it, did we?
You gave lectures on Indian Tales… right?
....................
Editorial in ‘The
MOTEL CHANGES HANDS
For Remainder of Season
Dr. M. J. Lorenzo, young
American physician who two weeks ago opened the Peyto Lake
country to tourism with a luxury motel he and his new
Blackfoot-Dene Indian wife, Dlune-tta-naltay, were managing
themselves, has announced that the motel will be turned over
to sub-management this summer after all and that he and Dlune
will be heading south and across the mountains to seek new
quarters.
Dr. Lorenzo had planned
to serve the
‘First things first’,
were his words. ‘Dlune and I have a commitment to make this
trip. As you know, we had intended it even before we stopped
at
‘Once you get used to
waking up like this it becomes soothing and difficult to leave
behind. The rough edges are smoothed over by arising to the
universe in balanced proportion. You become hypnotized.
‘Then on a recent nature
hike Dlune and I were talking, and we realized the effect it
was having on us. We felt snagged. Drugged. On the other side
of these mountains all water flows to the Pacific. And we
think maybe a drastic change like that is what we need’.
Dr. Lorenzo stopped
briefly and looked thoughtful. He was asked to explain. He
lowered his voice and appeared more relaxed and natural.
’Well, frankly, the real
reason is, I’ve put off for a whole year a long, careful,
special trip into the mountains that I must take for reasons
too personal, too catastrophic and poetic – maybe even
ineffable – to explain in a newspaper. But recently Dlune
discovered the route we should take in one of her Blackfoot
people’s legends, the one telling about the brave young
beaver, ‘Loud Slap’, who goes with obedience, cleverness and
self-discipline in search of a new home for his tribe’.
Dr. Lorenzo spoke again
as he had initially, with more tension in his voice. ‘Do you
want me to say more, or is that enough for the article’?
The Lorenzos have been
conducting an interesting lecture series on Indian legends and
will be missed for that reason as well.
We hope they will find
their way without difficulty.
The
The Editor
…………………………
BANFF-JASPER AND
(Illustration:
Pepsi-slurping tourists twisting Pepsi-slurping necks and
throats out of Pepsi-slurping windows in order to photograph
SNAP not experience a pinnacled
Pepsi-slurping mountain range.)
………………………….
Here’s my idea,
baby. Let’s take the Nature Trail south from here. We can
follow the Bow and look for a place to cross the Divide that
won’t be too much for you. Then we’ll take the jeep road
into
Are you
forgetting Loud Slap’s route?
I thought that was Loud
Slap’s route.
248. culture hero
pundits rebut the popular sexual interpretation of ‘sixth
attempt’, in light of events at
The
ongoing, year-in-year-out argument over mj’s debatable
‘culture hero’ qualifications which had started as early as
1972 and ‘73 sparked a different kind of discussion among some
pundits many years later. A new school of thought arose in the
late 90’s regarding The Remaking’s ‘lost child’, its ‘sixth
attempt’. Some of the diehard ‘culture hero’ pundits offered a
very intriguing alternative to the famous sexual
interpretation of the ‘sixth attempt’ by suggesting that
Mortimer, during April, had been worried about keeping Dlune
happy if they married, not just sexually, as the
infamous psychiatry resident had insisted on his website, but
humanly,
i.e., in all ways human; simply because of the possible
demands of his ‘mission’.
For
instance, one year his mission might require that he settle
down with Dlune. But a few years later it might require
something quite different. How could he even know what might
be required, so far in advance? And it might be unfair to ask
her to go through a lot of possibly very demanding
Thunder-Man-type mission-related changes.
These
culture hero interpreters of The Remaking said that Mortimer’s
asking Dlune to marry him was like Jesus asking Mary, as they
put it: “Mom, won’t you please come to my crucifixion?”
Mortimer had no idea, at that point, what he might be getting
poor Dlune into, other than his obvious tendency to drift off
from her into thought-and-writing-land. However, said they, he
must have come to terms with the question somehow, eventually,
or he would not have asked her to marry.
But
for a while at least, especially in the ‘sixth attempt’, he
had felt sorry for her, not knowing what she might be caused
to suffer at his and his mission’s expense. That was why, they
said, he had written in that section, when discussing his then
worried feelings about Dlune:
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, both a savior and a saint, both a priest
and a father, Thunder Man and Crow Man, rich man and poor
man, Word and Flesh?..... And Dlune and Delkrayle
are in the same boat with me, MAKING THEIR WAY UP THE SAME
CRAZY RIVERS.
It was
the most complete yet succinct interpretation of that
paragraph anyone had offered up to that time. For, one could
see, suddenly, that the first of each pair of ‘opposites’ was
relatively more mission-inclined, while the latter was more
man-of-the-house-inclined, more tied to the hearth and
humanity’s animal needs. Hitherto that weird list had made
every pundit’s head spin. But suddenly everyone got it, thanks
to the culture hero nuts. And even some of the ‘psycho’
pundits confessed mj lorenzo might not have been as crazy,
necessarily, maybe, at times at least, as many had been
thinking.
Nor
the ‘culture pundits’ either, for that matter.
These
latter suggested too, that Mortimer had eventually resolved
the Dlune issue by asking himself: ‘Who would be following
whom?’ For in the paragraph immediately preceding the above he
had asked himself:
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 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 answer
had to lie, for him, somewhere among the last three options.
For, he was clear in this paragraph that he would not ‘follow
Dlune’, simply because she
would have to follow him
any time their wishes conflicted. But whom would he
follow then?
Most
culture hero pundits felt Mortimer must have chosen the middle
of the three options, “Myself in her company,” the other two
being not quite the right phraseology at that moment for a
theologian like Mortimer. It was accurate enough to say he
would be following “myself.” But more accurate was, “Myself in
her company.” Since any would-be culture hero had to follow
himself, not another.
And
so, he would follow in this way: he would follow himself. But
she would accompany him. ‘Just as Mary Magdalene had
accompanied Christ’, as the culture hero pundits added, for
they were forever comparing their hero with Christ.
And
that, they said, explained why when he invited her to move on
from
249. several pundit
groups compare and contrast their hero with Christ
Accordingly
therefore, a very small school of pundits held that the third
answer was a possibility. They claimed that mj lorenzo
referred to Jesus so frequently, and with so much respect
(even many years after giving up going to church), it all
seemed to suggest he just might be following “myself in
company with some mystical notion of what Jesus meant and what
he would like me to do.”
On
their websites this group presented long lists of quotes from
The Remaking and eventually even other books of Dr. Lorenzo’s,
as well as magazine and TV interviews, newspaper articles,
taped lectures, mj’s own journal articles, his Mexican picture
stories, etc. etc., all of which they claimed supported their
argument. Even his revolutionary Bible-quoting ‘secular
sermons’ which preached ‘fleshly spirit’, they claimed, both
in The Remaking and out, were always ultimately respectful of
Jesus, even as irreligious as they might sound at first to the ear
of anyone living in the civilization founded on Christianity
and Christ, especially if they had ever taken church at all
seriously.
It was
just a small group of pundits who professed this belief,
however, and it included almost all of the ‘Sunday School
pundits’, as anyone by now should have guessed.
The
vast majority of pundits disagreed. The mainstream view was
that mj might have consulted
Christ at times, or studied or admired him. But that if mj
lorenzo had been following
Jesus Christ in any manner or to any degree, he would have
made the point clear in The Remaking, and they were more than
certain he had not.
Most
of mj lorenzo’s pundit following eventually adhered to the
understanding that mj was a believer, so to speak, in what
might be called ‘secular Christianity’, i.e., the practice outside the church of
some of the basics Christ had taught, especially brotherly
love and forgiveness and equality among all men, even ‘faith’.
But faith in oneself,
not in some weird, unearthly, anti-human, church-invented,
church-promulgated, ridiculous brainspun idea about Christ
or Christ's mother or father or anybody or anything else. The
church had complicated and diluted and hidden Christ’s simple
human gospel teaching so much, mj had said again and again:
that if anyone wanted to own a ‘church’ for Christ-followers
that bad, they should start their Christian religion over from
scratch and this time
stick to business, meaning Christ’s teaching alone.
“After
all,” as he often asked, “who was it who died on the cross,
Jesus or Paul? And yet Paul constantly had to remind everyone
in his letters how much he was suffering. Why? Was that not
stealing Christ’s thunder?”
But
Dr. Lorenzo doubted any church could or would stick to
Christ’s teaching, because of the Western world’s constant and
un-humble tendency to produce heroes who wanted to push their
newly discovered brilliant ideas and interpretations on
everybody else around them claiming they had come from God.
All these ‘holy do-good saints’ like St. Paul were so
overwhelmed with their own brilliance and self-sacrifice, they
just could not shut up about it and let Christ shine on his
own.
That
was why Dr. Lorenzo preferred a quiet, individual, non-Church,
non-‘Triumphant’, non-organized, non-threatening,
stay-at-home, natural, nature-based, down-to-earth approach to
rebirth and remaking, he said.
250. culture hero
pundits win most awards including one for their
Over
the years the ‘culture hero’ pundits, though they were
exasperating at times, gained respect nevertheless by scoring
the greatest number of ‘ace
interpretations’, meaning: the greatest quantity of
MOISTR awards collectively (Most Outasight Interpretation of
Something in The Remaking) of any pundit group. While their
occasional missionary zeal irritated many, no one could deny
that their way of looking at things produced the most
‘together’ understanding, more often than not.
Accordingly,
in the last analysis it was the ‘culture hero’ pundits who
seemed to end up with the most comprehensive, coherent and
compelling interpretation of the low-keyed, playful
After
a winter like Mortimer’s and a honeymoon ‘up the Peace’, they
said, he and Dlune deserved ‘down time’ and got it at
And it
was also a fitting rest after all the tension of the long
winter and excitement of spring Break-Up. It lacked
action-adventure, granted. Romance and excitement were limited
and there was little conflict. But that was precisely the
point.
Mj had
written
251. culture hero
pundits accused of sounding ‘a little puritanical’
The
‘culture hero’ pundits always insisted that from Break-Up on,
mj’s mission as heroic savior figure to his culture was the main theme of The
Remaking. And as a result they offered about the best
understanding to be found anywhere of very many things, big
and small. For example, no other pundit group ever explained
as well as they did the poem which opened the section: “Out of
the dustbin and into the trash.” It would have been nothing
but small-minded, they said, to have limited an understanding
of that poem, or anything in the book from spring Break-Up on,
to sex only.
Why
did mj ‘regret’ to have to say ‘I love you’? Not because he
feared he ‘lacked dick’, they chided, but because he regretted
what Dlune might be put through following him, in the same way
that Christ must have regretted what he would put his mother
or Mary Magdalene through. It was a ‘disgrace’ and a
‘sacrilege’, they said, sounding not a little
puritanically-&-righteously out-of-control, to limit any
interpretation of The Remaking from the Break-Up on, to ‘dick
only’. Now that Mortimer and Jack were both un-frozen like
twin frog brothers in an Indian tale, now that they were
resuscitated and fused back together in a new way, more alive
than ever, mj was on the move once more toward his mission in
the world. And that mission was more than sex, they chided, as
‘even the famous psych resident from the (Freudian) Institute
of the
They
sounded not only like southern TV evangelists at times in
their ardor, but a little like Carl Jung too when he had
broken with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, over Freud’s
interpreting everything under the sun sexually, and had said
to Freud, in effect, “There are more things in heaven and
earth, o Siggie, than are dreamt of in your (sex-obsessed)
philosophy.”
That
‘more’, said the ‘culture hero’ pundits, was mj’s 'Thunder
Medicine', the subject and object of his climb up Hungabee at
the end of The Remaking.
252. culture hero
pundits arouse even more ire
With
time, the ‘culture hero’ pundits gathered so much strength,
and made so much noise about the ‘Thunder Medicine’ mj had
‘brought down from the mountain’ that a bit of a backlash
against them came into being, surprising no one. A brand new
underground pundit rag argued that the ‘culture hero’ pundits
should study mj lorenzo ‘a little more closely’, for theirs
was precisely ‘the kind of pedantry mj detested’. Some
wondered if the famous psych resident had not set up this
‘backlash’ website assuming a fictitious cyberspace identity
in order to blindside his ‘culture hero’ critics with this
revenge cavalry charge right when they had thought they were
winning the fray.
There
were several websites and rags attacking ‘culture hero’
pundits with vicious cavalry thrusts, however, not just one.
And a good part of this ‘backlash school’, as it came to be
called, tended to think that The Remaking was ‘nothing more’
than a beautiful and elaborate and very-well-worked-out
representation of one person’s effort to achieve well-rounded
psychological wholeness.
253. culture hero
pundits lash back at the backlash school
The
‘culture hero’ pundits had a fit over this, for they feared
their all-important cause was losing ground, right at home,
among the pundits themselves, where it needed support the
most, if mj were ever to get his mission accomplished. They
were even more dismayed when an even larger ‘school’ of
interpretation came into being among Buddhists in Boulder,
Colorado, then spread around the country like wildfire,
insisting that the true beauty of The Remaking lay not in any
‘supposed mission’ but in its ‘mandala form’. Quiet sections
like ‘
Thus
the book had remained true to the traditional understanding of
a mandala to such a degree that it supported many different
interpretations, from many different individuals, as the
That
was very pretty,
said the ‘culture hero’ pundits curtly. It sounded nice, like
World Sunday in Sunday School, singing, “Red and yellow, black
and white, they are precious in His sight”; but sometimes the
world of humans got gravely out of balance; like
now; and that was why it needed a gutsy hero like mj lorenzo
to fix it.
254. New School conducts social
research on Remaking pundits with shocking outcome
And
then a whole new field of study opened up like a whole
However,
they added, this did not mean that the ‘culture hero’ pundits’
interpretations of The Remaking were necessarily wrong. It
just meant that their high level of ‘Puritan-like overly
theologized idealistic zeal’ had combined with a ‘rightwing-Christian kind
of American neo-Calvinist insensitivity toward simple
humanness’, and made them step on toes and sadly lose
much-needed support for their hero’s cause.
The
culture hero pundits, scandalized-to-mortification by none other but
them-very-own-selves, and more-than-duly rebuked and chastised,
behaved far more humbly after that for a while.
Or
less than a while, as all might have anticipated.
“Eleven
minutes,” answered they: “exactly:” For they
had conferred immediately.
Voted. And now would confess to anyone in the world who asked,
that, officially speaking, “We have been scandalized and
mortified by our very own selves for eleven minutes but now
are back on track to our purpose.”
And
the debate continued for ever and ever, presumably; as
While
the most side-splitting revelation of all, maybe, was that the
And
so, for this and for a thousand more understandable reasons,
seemingly nice and decent, God-fearing, otherwise
respectable-looking people everywhere wanted to cook up the
whole squawking gaggle of Remaking pundits but especially the
‘extremist Culture Hero fanatics’; while the latter sensed
they were disdained but hardly ‘gave a flying hockey puck’ any
more, they were so fed up and ‘traumatized’ from ‘flying straight into
invisible plate glass windows just trying to get a
little real and lasting PEACE in the world for a change’.
1 This
tale may be found in Petitot’s famous volume of northern tales
(see Bibliography). The various names of tribes and sub-tribes
mentioned in The Remaking could easily confuse anyone. A
general rule (whose validity would be hard to prove) might be
that around 70-71 (and also during the 1800s when Petitot
collected the tales) the Loucheux, Hare (or Hare-skin),
Beaver, Chipewyan and Slave were all sub-tribes of the overall
Dene group, all speaking closely related variations of an
Athabascan parent language, all of which are related to the
languages of the Zuni and Navajo in the U.S. Southwest. The
Hare lived along the middle stretches of the
2
Joseph Campbell, The
Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1949).
3 The
term ‘culture hero’ – and the idea of a hero who ‘saves’ or
gives new life or skills to his people, culture or
civilization in some way – was in the air throughout the 20th
century, especially in the fields of Jungian analytical
psychology, and anthropology, ethnology, religion, mythology
and the philosophy of history. By the 21st century
you could find the term used without any definition in
computerized encyclopedias such as Encarta (article on
African religion) and Britannica
(articles on ‘myth’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Native American arts’,
‘Coyote’, etc., etc.). The term had even gotten itself into
the dictionary. The computerized Merriam-Webster Unabridged
(2003, Version 3.0) defines the term as meaning: “(1) : a
legendary figure variously represented as a beast, bird, man,
or demigod to whom a people attributes the factors that appear
most essential to its existence and culture (as important
inventions, the overcoming of major obstacles, the exercise of
divine leadership, and the origin of itself, mankind, natural
phenomena, or the world); and (2) : one that symbolizes the
ideal of a people or group.” This dictionary usually provides
etymology or background history for each of its entries, but
since it does not do so in this case, it must be that nobody
quite knows where or when the term originated. Arnold Toynbee,
drawing on Bergson, made the idea of culture hero a pillar of
his philosophy of history without using the term exactly,
saying that either a core group (which he called a ‘creative
minority’) or an individual (which he called a ‘creative
personality’ or a ‘superhuman’ ‘man of genius’) could come to
the aid of a civilization in time of crisis and get it past an
obstacle on which it had been foundering. (A Study of History,
“The Growths of Civilizations,” section XI, “An Analysis of
Growth.” See Bibliography.) Marie Louise von Franz used the
term “cultural hero” in her lecture entitled “C.G. Jung and
the Problems of Our Time,” given at the Jung Institute in
4
5 These
sentences describe the view in the photo of Peyto Lake which
mj enclosed in his ‘Eureka envelope’ to his parents (all of
Part III), the same photo which opens the current chapter
called “Peyto Lake.” Peyto is about 25 miles north of the town
of Lake Louise, Alberta, and about 70 miles north of Banff
(which lies about 100 miles west of downtown Calgary, the
capital of the province of Alberta). The highest peaks of the
mountains on the left in the photo lie directly on the
Continental Divide. They are the Divide. (This
photo may also be found on the home page of
www.bruceduvall.com .)
6
Canadian friends of the Dr.’s from Athabasca, Alberta, a few
years after he retired from practicing psychiatry completely,
pointed out to him in an email in the most gentle way possible
that a ‘tidal wave’ in Peyto Lake would have ‘swept you down
the North Saskatchewan River into Lake Winnipeg not down the
Athabasca and into the Arctic’ as he had ‘written and
imagined’. The
