258.  the Lorenzos sighed with relief and with good reason this time

All three sections of ‘Break-Up’, meaning ‘Part III’ of mj’s Remaking, ‘the first draft of the first modernistic novel’ of their writing-challenged son, as Jo Lorenzo thought of the whole welter, landed in the mailbox in an inch-thick manila envelope just before noon on June 30, 1971, postmarked Eureka, Montana, its date of mailing smeared.

Jo hustled next door to the church and found Rev in a meeting with Summer Bible School teachers which ended at once when they saw her apron and face. And the two ran home and read the thing in no time, forgetting lunch and admitting right out loud a certain satisfaction: Jo first when Rev read aloud the boy’s description of high peaks around Lake O’Hara; and Rev at the end when Jo read mj’s final visions from Hungabee. A satisfaction that their son was looking just about sane enough, finally, they hoped, that they could sit back and heave a sigh.

“Spring isn’t nutty like winter,” as Rev put it. It was not as crazily intellectual either. He could digest it, he said, without chewing an antacid pill. And Thank the Lord, was he ever blessed by the words: ‘The End’.

259.  but Rev Lorenzo called his son’s writing banana split sophistry and Jo thought it silly shenanigans; and not even pundits ever conceded to the author’s claim that The Remaking’s literary style and matter was that of 'sacred text'

Writing-challenged the boy remained, however, in their opinion. The 'truck' of ‘Lake O’Hara’ annoyed the Lorenzos with the same 'unprofessional', un-Hemingwayesque, 'un-novel-like' style, characterized by the same ‘tiresome’ mix of the many and various format faux pas that had irritated them all year long, including, as they revealed to Sammy in 1980: (1) jolting tractor trailer gear shifts from one genre to another; (2) truckloads of multi-page quotes and lengthy stories ripped wholesale from unheard-of sources without shame, and usually without explanation even; (3) gaping holes in story-structure and suspense plot-line that required ‘wheelbarrow-loads’ of replacement parts, major filling-in work by the reader or better yet, ‘by some expert interpreter mechanic’, as Rev wished they might have been offered along the way; although his number one wish had always been that the ‘truck’ simply had ceased to exist; and (4) abstruse formulas, radio code-words and densely concentrated several-word Greek-chorus shouts that were used to hint at meaningful mile-markers that were being directed at the reader, the new driver of this ‘truckload of crap’ (as Rev whispered to Sammy), when such points could have been made ‘as in other books or driver’s manuals’, e.g., fleshed out and portrayed in action you could visualize ‘like a potato’. And there were many more defects, of course, too many to even warrant further serious buyer’s review, according to Rev. And Jo did not disagree with Rev, at least not during this interview conducted by Sammy.

“Why doesn’t he at least write like Ernest Hemingway,” was the rhetorical question Rev asked his wife, the ‘at least’ meaning: “At least we could read it maybe, though who would want a son like Ernest Hemingway?”

And Jo admitted that this envelope upset her like the others by ‘borrowing its taste from the gutter’ at times, and ‘waxing untraditional’, and ‘indulging silly shenanigans’, as she liked to put it, not wanting to be too awfully hard on her Jack since he was healing and fragile and could snap or break. She would never want him to hear her thoughts somehow.

Neither of mj’s parents ever bothered to research why their son had called his book a ‘word-mandala’. Rev dismissed ‘the priestly one’s’ use of the term ‘word-mandala’ as ‘banana split sophistry’, and won another pun prize for this gem, this time from the Remaking pundits known as the 'pun ditzies' when they read it in Sammy’s ‘first revision’.

But those very same exemplars of erudition, the pun ditzies, ripped off Rev’s pun and changed it to ‘bananasplitzo-FIST-ry’ because, as these original ditzies explained, The Remaking was not just ‘wise craziness’ or ‘crazy wisdom’, but 'a fist in the schizophrenic gut'.

Whereupon their spiritual superiors, the SACRED-PUN-ditzies, showing reverence for such a tour de force, bestowed upon ‘the regular non-sacred-punnies’ a truly deserved prize at the 1981 annual Remaking awards held at the Hilton in New York, this time for (as the gold-ish award statue of a handsome banana standing straight and tall and split in half said): ‘The Best Remaking Pun Adaptation Ripped Off by one Group of Pundits from Another Group of Pundits During the Year 1981’, an award that became sacred Remaking tradition thereafter.

Needles to say. 

But sadly, meanwhile, the Lorenzos had missed a last chance to appreciate their son profoundly. Never would they ever get to enjoy the enlightening realization that their own offspring had meant the totality of his mailed envelopes not as a weird, messed-up ‘novel’ or story, or as a stab at a story that constantly missed its mark and cut sophomorically huge bleeding swaths of un-novelistic analysis ‘or other tripe’ straight through the tender and fragile story line; but rather, as: a collection, or (more correctly) collage, of written pieces of purposely many and greatly varied type, hopefully placed correctly, i.e., in a geometrically, emotionally, logically and artistically balanced way, in order to sum up accurately, as Dr. Lorenzo called it once, ‘the whole freaking universe of poor ol’ Mortimer John Lorenzo’s experience to date on planet earth’, so as to provide him, hopefully, a better handle by which, in the future, to perceive, understand, remember, and maybe even – to some extent, perhaps, hopefully – anticipate, and even ‘micromanage healthily’ his very important natural human emotional life on planet earth in the future.

The Lorenzos would never get to grasp that The Remaking was a highly organized collage of written pieces, you might say, all the more pregnant with suggestion, like any collage, because of what was not said, for example, about why a particular piece might have been placed before or after another; or at the beginning and not at the end.

But even if the Lorenzos had understood any or all of this, they would have complained anyway, probably; just as everyone did, including all pundits eventually. Everywhere in the world, practically, every single reader or student of The Remaking complained about these things.

Even though, as Dr. Lorenzo later pointed out, no one had ever complained ‘in that uncomprehending tone’ ‘about the Bible’ and its stylistic leaps; gaps in meaning; un-fleshed details; cryptic shouts; allegorical ‘types’; multiple authors; ‘un-novelistic repetition’; ‘insufficient physical description’ of characters; and so on ad infinitum. And, as he was known to have said to Sammy privately in an upset tone once: “What about the way the gospel story was told four whole times by four different authors, one right after the other, three of them almost identical word for word because all three copied somebody else’s words verbatim? Did that ever drive Bible students ‘crazy’?”

Or, as he complained later the very same night to Sammy, after an uncharacteristic three glasses of Merlot and four Drambuies at Charlie Brown’s in Denver, and out-shouting the drunken lungful singing and live piano man: “Did students of the Bible ever spurn that sacred text for not describing Jesus’ face and body?” Of course not. They looked at Michelangelo’s sculptures and were content.

And so, unfortunately, for many years the Remaking’s claim to any status as ‘sacred text’ and ‘word-mandala’ was not comprehended or embraced by pundits, even by some of the most super-ardent ‘culture hero’ pundits. Not even as of 2005. Although all such aficionados claimed to be ‘world experts’ on the thing for twenty or thirty years, as the Dr. put it to Sammy in private.

260.  why pundits could not see The Remaking as sacred text in the Dr.’s respectful opinion

The whole problem was this, said the Dr. a little more seriously during a Duke Divinity seminar in 1992. It was easier to think of a book by someone you knew as being political; or psychological in purpose; or scientifically sound maybe. Or maybe even religious in its implications. But to perceive a book by someone you knew as ‘sacred’, or as religious outright, was a stretch that snafu-ed the Western mind, apparently.

IF young mj had been writing his Remaking in India, he said, or had mailed it over to be mailed back with an India postmark: maybe then ‘somebody’ might have accepted it as ‘sacred’.

So he had quipped at Duke – a bit sourly it seemed to some students who claimed to be quoting him, in a letter to the Duke campus paper later: and IF this; and IF that. But who saw Canada as sacred? Or who saw Dene or Eskimo as sacred, or naked Jack least of all?

And of course: the Lorenzos, and other exceedingly critical types on the street who got to sink their saber-tooth incisors into The Remaking too, eventually, via the ‘revisions’, were all even less capable, maybe, than the pundits, of swallowing or digesting this claim which was made right on the title page: that the thick book to follow was ‘sacred’ or ‘sacred experiment’. Some of them thought this ‘sacred thing’ a coyote-type prank or trick. While others opined cynically that The Remaking was ‘just’ an ‘experiment’ in the sense that it ‘merely pretended to be sacred’, claiming the format of the Bible for convenience, since mj lorenzo ‘wrote suspense-based prose like a second grader’.

Only a few besides the author himself, as of 2005, were prepared to accept that The Remaking, in addition to documenting in detailed outline the re-shaping and re-furbishing of mj lorenzo, also offered precisely thereby a blueprint for the remaking of everyone in the world. Of humanity in perpetuity. And of nature itself. Or, were prepared to accept the notion that The Remaking’s already demonstrated ability to have accomplished such wonders ALREADY! might amount to proof of its sacredness.

261.  Dr. Lorenzo reflects on the sacredness of nature

The Remaking’s nature, i.e., its essence, was sacred, claimed its author. Because it had been drawn straight from nature. And raw un-prostituted nature was sacred, if you asked him. Even prostituted or raped nature was sacred, although it might have been marred or maimed so that it now shone a little less gloriously.

Yes, he said: nature was sacred. At least it had been the last time he checked, the last time he heard a bird sing. Even conservative Christians had to admit nature was sacred, said Dr. Lorenzo, though they were bound to feel obligated to shudder upon thinking the thought, obligated as they were by wacky tradition to think such a thought ‘pagan’ or ‘pantheistic’. But if nature were not sacred, said the Dr., a Christian God could never have manifested in a human body. Christ’s body and blood were not sacred merely because Jesus, on the very first ‘Holy Thursday’, had rendered them so. They were sacred ‘from the get-go’, just as was all of Christ’s animal-human body, because his human body like everyone else’s human body was an intimate part of created sacred nature. That was why Christ could offer his body and blood in a sacred way.

Christ, said Dr. Lorenzo, could have set up worship around ‘fingernails and toenails’, or dancing; or sex; all of which were equally natural and sacred; but chose ‘flesh and blood’ because of Judaism’s Passover tradition and the ‘bread-and-wine think-set of the ancient world’. All of Christ’s body was sacred, not just the blood and flesh, i.e., red cells and muscles. The whole kit and caboodle, the whole physical animal body existence of Christ was sacred, said Dr. Lorenzo, because it was part of God’s sacred nature, just like the Dr’s own body and the body of each one of his friends and foes was sacred.

And the body of every Iraqi killed by USA bombs. And the body of every Syrian or Libyan child and woman killed by government mortar attacks on Homs or Bengazi. And the body of every New Yorker killed by plane-bombing of the Twin Towers

One day when he was thinking through this matter of ‘sacred body’, however, Dr. Lorenzo ‘tripped’ over the Virgin Birth and ‘fell on his head’ like Mortimer of yore, he said, meaning he found himself anguishing with himself in his head over the thought that: “Mary must have been impregnated by a kind of sperm that might be called Godsperm.”

And he ended up struggling with whether Adam might or even MUST MAYBE have come from Godsperm too and in no time felt so much ‘like Augustine inventing the crazy doctrine of Original Sin’, he downed three Sierra Nevada pale ales watching The Simpsons in order to forget; and went to bed.  

But: if nature had not been sacred, Dr. Lorenzo liked to say, and if he and his animal-human body had not been sacred too, right along with it, then nature never would have healed him. It never would have known that he was part of it and needed healing; and done the job. Maybe he, mj lorenzo, could not figure out Godsperm ‘today’, he said, as blithely as Mortimer might have figured it out once upon a time; but he could figure out ‘that much’: that sacred nature had recognized him as part of itself and healed him.

And so, what all of it meant was that at last check, in 2005, very few Remaking pundits, even of the group ‘most stellar in overall Remaking comprehension’, though they might have fervently supported mj lorenzo’s ‘mission’, had yet learned to think of mj’s mission and message as being ‘sacred’. And, unlike Christ, mj did not very often dazzle his people to make a point. In fact, if certain pundits had not dragged him out of bed, as they liked to say, he would still have been poking his nose in the Poconos.

But, as the pundits liked to say too, down through the years, people who did not know mj just did not know what they were missing. And so, proving themselves right, as always, the pundits did not know what they were missing either, even now that they had dug him up and enjoyed him at their side for so many years.

262.  the Dr. defines his term sacred nature within a brief multi-point sacred philosophy for sacred humanity

It was for these reasons, then, that the Dr. agreed to compose a very curtailed ‘sacred philosophy for sacred humanity’ and allowed Sammy Martinez to publish it as part of this third revision:

1. The human race is in need of a system of shared convictions upon which it can build a common future for all humanity.

2. That system of convictions should be simple and reasonable enough that all human beings can easily embrace it.

3. Although it is thoroughly human to invent paranormal explanations for things, there is no scientific ‘proof’ that such an entity as a ‘God’ as imagined in the Bible exists. All ‘God’-based religions are a product of dreams; visions; paranormal experiences; interpretations; intellect-based theologies; intuitive interpolations; cruel military conquest; tradition; political manipulation; hocus-pocus; and/or guess-work and other things. Combined with sincere faith and knowledge too, of course. Faith in and knowledge of The Unknown and Unknowable. This is why there is so much intense disagreement about ‘God’ and ‘The Unknown and Unknowable’. And where there is so much intense disagreement it will be virtually impossible to find unity of purpose.

4. However: all of us as human beings do know that nature exists and that we exist.

5. And it is a human universal that we are awed by both.

6. It makes sense then that we treat both with respect and reverence.

7. And to treat nature and people with respect, awe and reverence, is to treat them as sacred.

8. Cultures which have treated all of creation as sacred, such as the Native American, the ancient Greek, and the subcontinental Indian, just to name two of many hundreds, have produced enviable healthy-mindedness and well-roundedness in their members, while cultures which have treated nature and people as merely things to be used and manipulated selfishly toward material and other kinds of ends (such as the U.S. American culture has done, and ever more so since about 1950), have produced devastating amounts of mental illness and pain and death.

9. Thus to see all nature including human nature and humanity as sacred, i.e., worthy of respect and reverence, is not only reasonable but useful and healthy. And it is a conviction which any human can easily embrace.

10. Once we see ourselves and our bodies as an intimate part of sacred nature, then we see almost everything about ourselves as sacred, including bodily functions, religious and paranormal experiences, having fun, being creative, etc., etc. However, those sacred bodily functions, religious and paranormal experiences, fun moments and creative times should not be forced upon others but only shared with those who are willing.   

11. It is utterly human and is therefore a wonderful, creative, fun and sacred event when one party in a sexual relationship invites another to lovemaking AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and it is all the more wonderful when described creatively in a sacred (nature-based) artistic book (as long as the book is being read voluntarily).

12. Any questions?

263.  the Lorenzos understand their son’s new twist on the term Thunder Medicine a little too well

Nevertheless, ‘in spite of all that tripe’, as Rev said, meaning all his millions of criticisms of his son’s writing, he chose to argue on his son’s behalf this time. ‘Lake O’Hara was’, he said: ‘the easiest dang section to read’ of all the book’s difficult sections. And the pundits agreed.

Rev’s only other gripe was: he just ‘did not think you should talk about your own personal accidental penis activity in a book’. ‘Or a letter to your parents’. Either one. Whatever his son’s crazy darn writing was.

The poor Lorenzos never could figure that one out. Book or letter. Fiction or real.

And as for ‘mandala’, as they said later, if he had meant the word as anything but silly literary shenanigans, he would have defined it, right? They had looked it up and not found it in their 1939 Merriam-Webster collegiate dictionary, so it must have been silly nonsense.

Needles to say.

They had managed, though, to get an important percentage of what ‘Thunder Medicine’ alluded to so cleverly and discreetly, its hidden second meaning. Both of them got it. And that was an improvement for Jo especially.

Except that it was just a lucky thing for Dlune’s sake, in a sense, that she had been Indian. Had she been white; or Protestant, even worse; or both, worse yet; or ‘born again’ white Protestant neo-Calvinist, the worst triple-witching combo (unless you added ‘blonde’); her parents-in-law would have thought much less of her for telling their son she wanted sex right away that night. In writing, in a note. Or even in person, for that matter. Probably not even by secret code like a wink, or a certain dropped word. But least of all right on the page of a book that people might read!

Because: John Calvin, for one example, as the Lorenzos explained to Sammy once in 1985, though the father of America's way of looking at the world had been ‘a little stricter’ than many of his U.S. followers today, had gotten it ‘about right’. He had always required strict morality in his Geneva back in the early-to-mid 1500’s, as the Encyclopedia Britannica (1985: 15^th Edition, hardback) made clear. He had preached ‘dress without display’. And he had said ‘shun frivolity’. He had forbidden dancing just as they still did at Wrigley, where, by the way, they also still forbade smoking tobacco; drinking alcohol; watching movies; and playing cards; as much as 450 years after Calvin.

264.  the Dr. gets carried away while discussing neo-Calvinists’ discomfort with their own and other people’s so-called vices

In fact, as Dr. Lorenzo said once to a few friends over wine and a game of liar’s dice, very neo-Calvinist Wrigley College, logically speaking, should have included ‘sex in any form’ in its infamous ‘pledge’ of no-no’s. This was the list of potential ‘vices’ that each student at Wrigley in the early 60s had to ‘pledge’ or promise to ‘shun’, as Calvin would have put it, by signing again and again, at the start of every single semester. It was a very carefully worded paper form, i.e., document that would hold up in court. The ‘pledge’ included NOT going to the movies; dancing; drinking; smoking; or playing cards, as mentioned.

But it should have included not indulging in ‘sex’, above all, obviously, as anyone with any sense could have seen, if you sincerely wanted to keep single college students out of trouble, as the Dr. loved to point out. The Wrigley administration must have wished again and again that ‘the pledge’ had included ‘no sex in any shape or form’, he said. They must have wished that ‘the pledge’ could have gone down a detailed list. No masturbation. No cunnilingus. Etc. etc. And every item should have been signed with a separate signature, in fact, so that there could be no Bill Clinton type quibbling by clever students over whether ‘sex’ included fellatio in the back seat of a Buick.

But ‘sex’ had been AN UNSPEAKABLE WORD at Wrigley in the early 60s, an unmentionable subject. So, the school administrators were PREVENTED from adding it to the list, said Dr. Lorenzo; who thought this the funniest thing since Frankie the farting coyote. Even less could they have added cunnilingus. God forbid.

For Calvin had 'raised his followers to sainthood without showing them a way back down to earth’, as the Dr. said.

And so, the Wrigley college administrators were ‘jimmy-strung’ or ‘wedgied’ by their own spook reflex, hilariously so, as the rest of the world saw it and especially the Dr. Trepidation at the very thought of discussing sex hung them by their own balls, poor guys.

They were ‘hung’ because: if college students or young people anywhere in the world were denied normal everyday diversions and pleasures common in their culture and upbringing, like going to the movies, drinking, smoking, dancing and playing cards, etc.: guess what?

Sexual pandemonium.

But maybe that was what Wrigley wanted, quipped the Dr. after two red wine glasses of Merlot on the particularly crazy night when he said all this to Sammy in San Juan Pueblo. Maybe it was what the whole aberrant Christian church wanted, he said. Which, like St. Paul, St. Augustine and John Calvin, while considering sex dirty and sinful, nevertheless in the same breath wanted more and more of it, so as to have more Christians in the world, as many and as rapidly as possible.

And all of these so-called Christians, as the Dr. liked to add, were just as wackily distracted from Christ’s message of good news for the heart (LOVE, FORGIVENESS, PEACE AND UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD) as everybody else in the world was. Who knew WHAT these people were thinking sometimes, he wondered, they were so ‘backbreakingly snarled up in all their twisted, self-encumbering light-and-dark steed-straps’.

265.  Dr. Lorenzo execrates the reforming hero Calvin but praises the man for his mercy shown during fiery executions

In any case, to return to the Lorenzos’ praise of Calvin.

In Geneva, where under Calvin’s personal guidance the plague of radical-Reformation, extremist-Christian, poop-of-braying-burro, anti-natural and anti-human thinking took such a famous and terrible turn for the worse back in the mid-1500’s, even JOKING AROUND annoyed and offended Calvin at times, especially joking about supposedly sacred things. And this, said the Dr., was a good totalitarian trick for quelling first-amendment freedom of speech if ever there was one.

John Calvin could banish you from your own city for JOKING AROUND, and from your own house, land and people forever, permanently, JUST FOR KIDDING AROUND. As he had done one man, said the same Encyclopedia, a man who had heard a donkey bray and had quipped, ‘That ass chants a fine psalm’.

Calvin could banish you, as Dr. Lorenzo explained to friends who knew little about Calvin, if he did not torture you or holy H. gosh separate you forever and permanently from your living bones, execute you, man, dead as a doornail, man, right out of Geneva altogether; as he did some who did not take his elaborately belabored and brilliant theology and tome of rules for Christian living seriously enough.

He could make an exception of the bones, actually, if that helped you feel better. If it softened the blow for you and your loved ones, the Calvinists who ran the Calvinist government of Geneva would offer you this loving Christian concession in your dungeon cell, where you awaited your burning at the stake. Calvin himself might come to your cell and offer it to you as a ‘last civilized and holy wish’, if you wanted it. Proposing this in Christian love, magnanimously.

For Calvin worried about being seen as totally mean and heartless and un-Christ-like, explained Dr. Lorenzo. Anyone would have worried so in his position. It was only human. And so, Calvin and his people would commute your sentence ‘from frying to roasting’ if you only asked. You had to ask for the favor. They would stay by your side during your public roasting of an execution, basting you with olive oil or with your own fatty juices now and then so your muscles and organs would not fry to a crisp but would roast and come off cleanly from shin bones and ribs, without even your two tiny pinky bones charring hopefully, of course, and would then carefully collect ‘you’, by which ‘you’ they meant your neat and clean white leg and back and finger bones once ‘you’ had ceased to steam. And would hand ‘you’ over to family for safekeeping.

Why? Because: with so many Catholics everywhere threatening Protestants right in their newly reformed European towns and neighborhoods, Protestant lands had become such special, holy places in those days, that who with any decency would have wanted to lie until the rapture in some ‘less holy soil’?

And so, with all of such extremist Calvinist Protestant history, theology and sociology taken thoroughly in mind then: of an Indian woman, as Jo Lorenzo reasoned, you could ‘expect such talk’ that was not morally strict, i.e., that did not shun frivolity and/or avoid display. And Rev must have agreed for he flinched not a tiny rib muscle when she said these words to Sammy.

And they might well have been right, said Dr. Lorenzo. That you could expect such behavior as Dlune’s (when she asked mj to bring her his ‘Thunder Medicine’ that very night back in the tent) less of the average extremist-Protestant neo-Calvinist woman of the Western world and more of the average ‘Indian’ woman. To want sex from her husband and to say it openly yet still pretty tastefully, even right on the page of a book maybe. Probably they were right about that, Dr. Lorenzo conceded. Lord only knew.

Except for the fact that they meant the observation IN A WAY DISPARAGING OF DLUNE, NOT ADORING OF HER, as they should have meant it HAD THEY EVER WANTED THEIR SON AND DAUGHTER-IN-LAW AND WORLD TO BE WHOLE AND WHOLESOME for once.

Oh well. What could one do?

Ni modo, as they said in Latin America when only so much could be done to change a thing, and when you felt forced, therefore, to live with it. At least for now. NI MODO.¹

Needles to say.

¹ See Appendix B for a translation of Spanish terms and (sometimes filthy but) colorful Spanish street lingo. 'Ni modo' is usually said in an indifferent or surrendered tone, as here, and means: 'oh well, what can one do?'