I.  The rest of the story on:  Lake O’Hara

278.  how mj had longed to be at Lake O’Hara even before the Crack-Up

Mj first fell under the spell of Canada’s dramatically ice-carved alp-like Rockies in 1960 when Rev and Jo were so proud of their Florence valedictorian they took him west as a high school graduation present in Rev’s brand new 1960 blue Buick Electra.

Mj drove so that they could relax and enjoy the scenery together for once.  

The three shared motel rooms to economize and it embarrassed him, he said, to shave in front of them. It was his first summer shaving. He was seventeen.

They went straight to Glacier Park and over the Going-to-the-Sun Highway, then up to Banff and Lake Louise in Alberta. Only a minute was left for Lake O’Hara at the end. Mj squeezed in a fast walk up to Opabin Meadow while they reminisced and dreamed in the lodge, but it was more than enough, he said, to whet his appetite. And he swore he would return to Lake O’Hara above all places he had seen on earth.

Mj loved the area around Lake O’Hara for several reasons. He was fanatically fond of hiking and of climbing to the tops of mountains all his life, for one thing. He made it to the top of forty or more of the highest peaks in Colorado eventually, not by copter but on foot, each one a separate 1- or 2-day climb. He hiked all over Colorado, the U.S. and Canada, and even a little in Europe and Mexico eventually.

But Lake O’Hara offered more than challenging mountain hikes. It was the most gorgeous chunk of nature imaginable. Emerald green lakes in deep evergreen-forested valleys. Sheer alpine peaks piercing the sky everywhere, hung as they were with gleaming thick white glaciers. Raw nature in abundance; wildlife everywhere; camping; and a lovely lodge by the lake. And pepsi-slurping tourists could never drive their pepsi-slurping cars in to the lake in those days, like they could to tourist-ridden Lake Louise, Moraine Lake and Peyto Lake. To get to Lake O’Hara took commitment and nerve: eight long miles bouncing on a very hard seat on a rattle-y de-commissioned school bus that was infrequent and very deliberate and followed an unpaved and dusty, bumpy and winding mountain road. This kept run-of-the-mill tourists out and let adventure types know they were welcome. The cozy lodge and ranger station, though rustic-looking on the outside, lent the lake a classy civilized feel and assured one that there was help if needed.

That next school year, as an assignment for his freshman Creative Writing course at Wrigley, mj wrote the poem about Opabin Meadow which he mentioned ten years later while writing on Hungabee. The lady professor, as Dr. Lorenzo told Sammy later, chose to read no one’s poem to the class but his. She raved about the ‘open vowel sounds’, an aspect of writing young mj had never contemplated. He had responded to a deep feeling, was all; and thought about technique hardly at all. He would not see himself as a would-be writer until medical school.

Four years later, in 1964, after graduating again, but from Wrigley College this time, mj finally managed to get back to the spot he had dreamt of seeing again for all four of those years: Lake O’Hara.

He spent the first part of the summer of ’64 selling dictionaries in the D.C. area with a friend from Wrigley, Bob Ruegg. Rev lent him his ’60 blue Buick Electra, making do with Jo’s older maroon Pontiac so mj and Bob could get around in D.C. They sold reasonably priced one-volume encyclopedic dictionaries door-to-door to poor families of high school students in suburbs of D.C. where only Blacks lived. They were doing well, as he told Sammy years later, and making money. And one Friday evening in Alexandria or Arlington, a group of Black drinking teens menaced mj with a German shepherd and he got away unhurt except for scrapes and bruises.

It was late in the summer and he had just received his letter of acceptance to medical school. Something snapped and he wanted to get a break and go west. Bob was for it so they went to Bob’s parents’ big house in suburban Arlington and borrowed all the camping equipment they could need in a lifetime then headed west in Rev’s blue Buick without his knowledge. Rev thought his favorite, most gorgeous car of all time was still in D.C., poor guy, helping to sell dictionaries.

They went straight to Lake O’Hara and camped near the lake and lodge. They were in good shape from walking door to door all summer, but they did some shorter hikes for a few days to be certain of their endurance and then did their big hike, the one described in ‘Lake O’Hara’. And mj said it was one of the most beautiful days of his life, if not the most beautiful. The weather was perfect. Hours and hours of daylight, eighteen at least, from four in the morning until ten at night, allowed a nice long leisurely hike. High pressure made the air dry, spring-like in temperature and crystal clear. Scenery was otherworldly. Big and little. Mountains and wildflowers. All of his senses were sharpened and he thought he would pop out of his skin. He felt triumphant at the hike’s high point on the Divide. They descended by the east side for the same reason as in The Remaking, its shorter descent back to civilization as darkness approached.

Bob was excellent company. He was flexible, resourceful, together and quiet, but now and then would let off a voluminous unexpected hoot, just to get rid of some unspecified pent up neo-Calvinist tension.

But on the way back east, outside of Eureka, Montana, the Buick rolled on fresh tar while Bob was driving all night in the rain, which made fresh tar slippery. Mj was sleeping in the back.

Mj had been forced to call Rev and inform him that his beautiful car was wrecked. But the kicker was (and mj loved telling this part more than any other) that Rev should have scolded him but ‘never said one word of complaint’. No condemnation for hauling his car across country without asking to do so, or for wrecking it, either one. Never. Because, maybe, he really was a good and loving, caring father, his strict fundamentalism notwithstanding. And maybe too because mj had been an exemplary son up to that point, the summer he graduated from Wrigley, ’64, and Rev and Jo had no complaints. Not yet. Complaints would come later. In ‘64 they had just attended their son’s magna cum laude graduation at Wrigley and were very, very proud of him. They were relieved he was alive and unhurt, and Bob too. So, with the money Rev wired, mj and Bob took a bus to Chicago and flew to D.C. to deliver the dictionaries which customers had ordered, and to collect owed balances. And then he started medical school at Penn.

And with insurance money Rev bought a second – ‘barely used’ – 1960 blue Buick Electra identical to the first from a rich elderly widow in Moorestown or Haddonfield who had never driven it and was easily talked into lowering the price to match the insurance company offer, in order to help a poor Methodist preacher accomplish his mission for Christ here on earth.¹

On a separate occasion in 2007 Dr. Lorenzo explained that several years later, then, while driving toward Glacier in ’70, as described at the beginning of The Remaking, he, or ‘young mj’, as he liked to say, had thought about going up to Lake O’Hara one more time immediately after Glacier Park. But of course he had never made it because of ‘that crack-up’. THE ‘Crack-Up’, in other words.

That was why, he said; or: it was at least one very important part of the reason why O’Hara had become the final destination and climax of his year-long Remaking trip to the Arctic and back. There were many times, he explained, when – especially during the inhumanly cold, drawn out winter – just by being able to remind himself that Lake O’Hara awaited him as his end-of-year goal, he was able to keep going. O’Hara was a useful goal and payoff for that particular year or any year. For mj lorenzo anyway, if not necessarily for everyone else in the world.

279.  how a climb from the lake to Hungabee was the right ending for a healing Remaking trip and book

However, the Dr. added: when it came to rounding out his nature-based trip, book and healing, all three, and all with completeness and balance, the Lake O’Hara area offered far more than a spectacularly lovely, challenging and varied hike. It gave him, among other things, tons of divinely incredible natural beauty to get ecstatic over; juicy Indian nature lore to plumb the depths of; very human Native American vision quests to emulate; The Divide to conquer and stand on again, splitting nature’s time-space continuum once again thereby, as called for by mj’s unscientifically proven (and quite possibly paranormal) belief system, hopefully doing it ‘properly’ this time; two gorgeous mountains named for chief and squaw (or so mj imagined), the chief being knife-thin, the squaw looking plumper; and all happening close to Glacier Park, Montana, closer to the U.S. than at any time all year since just after the Crack-Up, close enough that mj could believably be catapulted from Hungabee directly back to his homeland people who were theoretically awaiting his tale with great anticipation; for, after all, as Loud Slap’s father, White Fur, had told their entire tribe: the important results of the trip would be brought back to the tribe.

280.  how such an ending was thought by high schoolers ‘not dazzling enough’ and by others ‘too dazzling to be true’ and how all felt the climax of the Remaking should have been designed better to please their taste

Dr. Lorenzo later mentioned to Sammy that many pundits and high school students had expressed bewilderment over the ‘Lake O’Hara’ section, maybe from having expected it would be more dramatic or more exciting or something. More ecstatic, maybe.

Rarely could they say just what they had expected. Many people had found it hard to express anything about it at all, in fact. Speechlessness was not an uncommon response, the Dr. said. Bewilderment. Amazement. Letdown.

American movies, said a reviewer, ended when the tension was resolved and the couple got married; and so, therefore, should American books. 

Some high-schoolers who could talk about it were especially flummoxed because they thought that since mj’s first race up the flank of the Rockies to the Divide had failed, this time he would win a harrowing, dangerous Pikes Peak Hill Climb in a racecar, or win a Vail-Mountain type of July-4^th run-to-the-top footrace, going full-speed straight up the nearly perpendicular side of Hungabee and right off the top into pure sky, his feet pedaling heavenward like a video game. Some of the high-schoolers laughed right out loud in front of him at mj’s idea of fun, the way he ran on the tops and sides of alpine peaks ‘freezing his balls off’ naked.

Dr. Lorenzo always enjoyed talking with high school students, he said, because they helped him ‘get humble’ like his parents did. He accepted invitations from high schools all over the world, therefore, and in later years made it a pastime to keep up with such invitations.

Unlike high schoolers, however, some more settled and experienced readers of books were surprised, instead, that The Remaking ended so soon after spring Break-Up. It was not believable, they objected, that things would go so well so suddenly after years of nothing but psychic tempest, especially after the last year, which had been tempest multiplied by tempest. It ‘lacked verisimilitude’, they charged. How in the world could everything be suddenly so light and clear and pure, so elated and optimistic? Was it realistic? No. It was too simple, that’s what. Or naïve. Mj lorenzo, whoever he was, had to be dreaming to think his life could get so darn lovely so fast.

And Dr. Lorenzo was perennially tickled and flabbergasted by all such ‘psycho-woggle’ notions that pundits, high schoolers and public came up with, year after year, when reacting to his book and him. They wanted him, he said, to fictionalize his life so it would seem ‘more real’. But that was okay, he said. Because part of his ‘job in this world’ was to deal with reactions to The Remaking, no matter how crazy they might seem or be. The Remaking, he said, ‘like the Bible’, had become a VEHICLE for discussion of ultimate truths, even during his lifetime. And nothing could have gratified him more.

281.  how the solstice ordeal was seen by mainstream pundits as an object lesson in Mortimer-Jack conflict dynamics

Basic pundit reaction, right from the early 70’s, to any and all bewilderment from other readers over ‘Lake O’Hara’, was always to pull out of their mental portfolios the tired cliché that: the section announced its subjects loudly on its very first page. No one knew where the cliché had sprung up originally, but all remembered it had been around and was available. So they used it time and time again, especially with greenhorn college students reading The Remaking for the first time.

‘Look at the very first few keywords on the page’, they said to perplexed parties year after year, generation after generation: ‘high’; ‘Harlequin’s saucy sweetheart’; ‘Dlune’; ‘Peace Rose’; ‘Hungabee’; ‘Thunder Man’; ‘wait here for me’; ‘I want to do it myself’. What more was needed in order to understand?

Mortimer’s Triptique had foreseen that the climax of The Remaking would have to deal with the matter of ‘ecstasy’, of ‘being high’. This was ‘inevitable’. Mj had to establish that he was ‘remade’ sturdily enough now that he could allow himself to feel truly happy day after day after day without having to constantly fear he might spin out of control and become ‘manic’ as had occurred the year before (due to speed; or to internal psychic imbalance; or both, most likely). For that ‘mania’ had caused a ‘Crack-Up’ so grave it had killed Delkrayle (or so he felt and said) and nearly killed him.

So: the trick of ‘Lake O’Hara’ was to re-create the conditions of Glacier Park a year before. To see if he could avoid falling into the same trap or traps. To re-create as many of the circumstances of the Crack-Up as possible – the solstice; the straddling of the divide; mental and physical debilitation; feeling high; etc. etc. – but no drugs – WITHOUT CRACKING UP.

Mortimer had written several times over the winter on the subject of what made the difference between mania or ‘sick joy’, and ecstasy or true, ‘healthy joy’. Mania or ‘sick’ joy resulted when the various strengths in Jack and Mortimer were not properly power-managed, balanced and integrated.

Mania resulted from the combination of (1) a long-suppressed and suddenly released burst-out of unchecked Freudian id, i.e., primitive animal energy; and (2) a decaying, cracking mask of dry, rigid intellect and bland acceptable quasi-religious comeliness, through the cracks of which the id’s primitive animal energy could/had burst, shattering the mask and leaving essentially no lid or control on id; i.e. on ‘libido’, as Jung more accurately and comprehensively named that energy burst.

The newly burst-out and unfettered id or libido might team up with a few of the crazy airy wisps of intellect that were still floating in air after the explosive burst-out of id/libido, and/or with some more deeply rooted animal intuition, to produce a manic patient able to say non-stop and loudly the most crazily brilliant apparent-nonsense one could imagine. That was ‘mania’: Jack in the Arctic.

Mania was depression’s opposite, it was true, but its sick opposite. And mj, approaching Hungabee and the solstice, was trying to design an opposite to depression that would be not sick but healthy; real unfettered happiness; real joy. His term for this kind of real, genuine emotional high was ‘ecstasy’.

And mj considered Dlune to be the key to finding this new kind of elevated mood, not because he was in love only, but because she made practical sense. She knew how to help him stay balanced so he could enjoy happiness or ‘ecstasy’ with less risk. ‘Dlune’, ‘Peace Rose’, and ‘Hungabee’ had all been code-words for ecstasy since the Triptique. That was why he put equals signs between them at the opening of ‘Lake O’Hara’.

Dlune’s job from the beginning had been to encourage up-mood manic-tending earthy Jack; and to keep down-mood depressive-tending Mortimer enchanted and occupied with her everyday earthiness. So that mj would not fly away into a remote, dehumanized world of intellect, into that state of mind which had defined and constituted mj lorenzo’s grave imbalance for years prior to his Remaking year.

This constant monitoring by Dlune always did elevate mj’s mood eventually. And at this point in the trip and year, just as planned and hoped, mj was succeeding in getting about as ‘high’ as he was capable of getting, mood-wise. And this combination of circumstances put him at risk for exploding into mania once again, i.e., for exploding into a state of too much unfettered boiling id and libido, combined with insufficient lid to control it.

So theoretically, mj should have, or might have wanted Dlune at his side more than ever as Lid-in-Reserve, to keep tabs on things and intervene, if called for, to help modulate his mood and energy level while up on airy, intoxicating Hungabee. But Dlune had quickly gained an awful lot of power in mj’s life, as ‘Peyto Lake’ had shown. And now that he had gotten a little stronger, he felt he must ask her to give up a little power. Mj wanted to do his Native-American-style vision quest on the Divide by himself. Granted, since historically he had been inept at maintaining a proper balance between his two sides, he was suspect, in her mind and his, both. So they both were worried about the solstice. Yet he was going to do it alone, as he said.

So: whatever plot tension existed in ‘Lake O’Hara’ came from this worry, as almost all pundits agreed, wishing the high-schoolers could understand too. The hike to and the climb up Hungabee, and the vision quest while there for as many days as it took, would be a test of the almost completely remade mj’s ability to keep a level head when ecstatic.

The longer he stayed on the mountain, inspired by the high-altitude heavenly beauty of nature, indulging his head-swelling dreams and visions, feeling above everything and everybody down on the plains far below, exposing and debilitating himself physically, and thus mentally and emotionally too: the greater this final Remaking challenge would be for him, and the greater the accomplishment, therefore.

But: climbing a high mountain produced a feeling of elation and heightened power in almost anyone who did it, and could flip a fragile mj over the edge. Dlune was a psych nurse and understood that danger. She knew very well how far a discombobulated mj lorenzo could go, how ‘very out there’ he could get, having seen him in Fort Smith. So when he did not come down at the end of the first day, as he had promised he would, she sat all day the second day in Wiwaxy Gap, worried and looking for his return, yet remembering his words, “Dlune, I want you to wait here for me. According to your people’s legend, as you tell it, I should have made this trip alone to start with. Maybe that sounds patronizing. I don’t mean it to. I just want to do it myself this time.” ‘This trip’ and ‘this time’ referred indirectly to his last little special healing jaunt, Peace River, which he had done with her because it had been a trip for two from the start. While ‘this trip’, like Loud Slap’s, was a trip for one.

And so: when mj did not come back at the end of the second day, still, she decided to go the third day, looking for him, as was her custom and job, and as had been prescribed by him: ‘In case you have to come for me…’

Some readers were confused by mj’s second version of their plan, which he had written in his notebook while on Hungabee, and had left for Dlune to read. In that version he agreed she could bring him a sandwich on the third day; which was exactly what she had done at that point; and yet, said most pundits, that had not been their plan as the chapter had opened. The best pundit explanation for this apparent discrepancy between the two versions was that it was not a discrepancy. The going theory became that mj had known from the beginning he would stay on the mountain three days. It very well may have been the original plan they had agreed to. But to calm her down he had changed it and said he would be back in a day. For when they had gotten to Lake O’Hara she had cried about it all.

And so he was testing Dlune now, just as the mountain was testing him. He apparently felt ready for the challenge of the quest. He trusted himself. And in turn he wanted to see if he could trust her. Did she believe in him enough to wait until the third day, as they had originally agreed? She did wait, and passed the test.

Many high-schoolers, however, having once heard all this ridiculous explanation, still felt it was just a tempest in a teapot. They had lost patience long ago with mj’s careful enterprise, apparently, mj’s ‘this-trip-for-one’, and ‘that-trip-for-two’. They were frazzled and worn out by the calm of balance. Lake O’Hara was ‘an old person’s concept of drama’ and they wanted real excitement like race cars flying off mountaintops. They preferred fantasy adventure games to word-mandalas.

At the same time, though, there was something about mj lorenzo’s The Remaking which high school students could not dismiss or forget. And no one was sure what it was, even though many pundits tried to figure it out. They wrote treatises on how H.S. students all over the world would invariably end up referring to The Remaking during school lunch break almost daily, quipping, “As mj lorenzo says,… …peanut butter is good for you;” or, “As mj lorenzo says,… Mr. Butler’s history assignment sucks the big one,” etc. etc.

II.  The remainder of the story on:  the culture hero pundits

282.  how Lake O’Hara was seen by culture hero pundits on the other hand as a call from their hero mj to help him with his mission

Meanwhile, the culture hero pundits had their own take on ‘Lake O’Hara’. Their approach to interpreting anything in mj lorenzo’s life always explained more elements than any other approach, possibly because they always considered elements no one else addressed. Their take felt more comprehensive, in other words. And that felt good to other pundits – assuming, that is, that those culture hero nuts were ‘correct’, a question mainstream pundits held in reserve for years.

It was easy to see how these hero-worshippers, so-called by some (facetiously), had grown inordinately successful interpreting The Remaking. The culture hero pundits, unlike mainstream pundits, saw mj as a kind of Ghandi or Christ writing an inspirational guidebook for future followers bent on carrying out his ‘mission’. This was why they inevitably looked at things no one else did. And since ‘Lake O’Hara’ was the climax of mj’s big year of spiritual discovery, to their mind, and contained the finishing touches of his holy mandala, then naturally they found world-shaking importance in it.

For instance they said that mj had focused on Dlune more than on himself at the end of his Remaking in order to ‘pass the torch’, as it were, to his ‘disciples’. She was ‘his first disciple’, the first devotee to help him with his mission. And there would be more ‘disciples’ (if they had anything to say about it). Her role was as personal and intimate as a devotee’s could be, and that made her critical to his future work in the world. But she was critical in a second way too, as a first follower whose example would shine to the guiding aid of those coming along behind her. And so, mj had felt it necessary to represent her ‘carefully and with purpose’, as they put it.

And, emphasized the culture hero pundits as well, mj and Dlune were seeking ‘a new place to live’, that is, somewhere to start their new work and life, the Remaking mission. This explained the newly married pair’s seemingly overdone and sophomoric interest in ‘Loud Slap’. A lot of pundits thought it ‘inappropriate’ at first, so much affection for such a simple-messaged, or simple-minded, childish or early-adolescent Boy Scout tale as ‘Loud Slap’, which looked to have been designed for young Blackfoot braves-in-training.

But – said the ‘culture hero’ pundits – as naïve in tone as it may have been, and uncomplicated in content, ‘Loud Slap’ addressed the critical, survival-related subject of finding one’s place in the world, a place with enough food and water and protection and comfort to support a long, pleasant and productive life. That was a hugely important subject, especially in a world ever more crowded with people competing for resources every day. And once mj and Dlune had found their new place to live, said the culture hero pundits, mj could then proceed with his life’s work. His ‘mission’, as they forever referred to it.

283.  how their interpretation of Lake O’Hara made  the culture hero people ‘dig up’ their hero and tell him in effect ‘you are our culture hero and we have come to help’

These extremist hero pundits could guess what mj must have needed right after Hungabee, they told the world during the seventies, after having studied him and his work for so many years. The young couple would have needed a place where: 1. mj could work as a psychiatrist, for that was his vocation and source of income; 2. their children could be raised with access to all they deserved; 3. Dlune could feel at home, since she had come from an extremely northern zone and was Native American; and 4. mj could find peace and quiet and write. And also, as these hero-pundits added: mj lorenzo would almost certainly have needed a place where he could keep in touch with his inevitable admirers and supporters and ‘especially with his most important helpers on his mission’.

This last point got them thinking about themselves again, actually. And it became the thing that pushed the hero worshippers over the edge in 79 finally and made them demand that Sammy contact mj for them. And that failing, as the world would hear eventually, they tracked him down themselves and found him in Denver, Colorado, in early 1980, just before his divorce.

A conversation ensued between mj lorenzo and the culture hero adherents at that time, right off the bat, first by mail, and then in person. In the very first live meeting, culture hero zealots began to pressure their hero to ‘take a stand’.

By way of reply he asked them, “If Thomas Mann and James Joyce were felt by their respective peoples, the Germans or Irish, to have hit several nails on the head at once tapping into the soul of the German and Irish people, respectively, would that make Mann and Joyce ‘culture heroes’?

“Or wouldn’t it mean they were just doing their job as writers?” he asked.

A volunteer spokesman for the hero group tried to answer this. He allowed there could be a distinct difference between a very good writer who spoke for his people, on the one hand, and a culture hero as defined by Joseph Campbell, on the other. But, he added, Mann and Joyce had not offered as many suggestions for improving the culture as mj had. For The Remaking had actually prescribed a very clear and detailed treatment plan and then carried it out. The Remaking had left behind a useful outline of how the process of ‘healing’ might be applied TO ANY ENTITY in conflict with itself. Not just to individuals, but to groups too. To countries; to whole races; and even to huge geopolitical power blocs. And maybe even to nature itself.

284.  how mj said “If I’m a culture hero it’s news to me” and how the culture hero pundits then tried to see mj lorenzo as an antihero and failed

Dr. Lorenzo appeared taken aback. He admitted he had tried to do just that, to come up with a conceptual framework that might succeed in elucidating not just his own craziness, but humanity’s craziness as well, and one that could ‘treat’ both.

But Carl Jung had done something ‘far better’, he said, after thinking a few seconds. And while Jung had won many adherents, many of them terrifically brilliant and exemplary in every way, he doubted Jung had ever been called a culture hero. Maybe he should have been, he conceded. And Jung may have seen himself as one privately, because he structured his work like a man with a mission. But his system was highly intellectual. And most of his books were tough work for even the brightest, most educated readers.

And Jung’s followers were middle and upper class professionals, all very comfy in their little world of psychoanalysis, and each so brilliant and artistically and emotionally sensitive that they all spent half of their mental and emotional energy lifelong just trying to stay sane living typical everyday lives in the materialistic, super-compartmentalized, forever increasingly dehumanized and dehumanizing Western world. And those who did teach and write, trying to pass on the experience of growth that Jung had helped them have, wrote almost as intellectually as he had written. Not one brilliant follower ever succeeded in popularizing Jung’s teaching except Clarissa Pinkola-Estes to a small extent. So, popularizing Jung was something that someone else still might try, said Dr. Lorenzo, maybe even someone in the auditorium that day. Because Jung’s system was potentially curative for the world. But to his knowledge, again, since Jung had reached only a small group of people, no one had ever called Jung a ‘culture hero’. 

The Dr. had come pretty close to saying that himself, one pundit pointed out, standing to speak, when Mortimer, in the 'second attempt' of The Remaking, had called Jung ‘the shaman for the global village’, the ‘global shaman’. And furthermore, said this pundit, quite politely, of course: though Jung had addressed political and international problems in terms of his psychotherapeutic conceptual system at times, he and his followers had stressed individual healing far more. Whereas Dr. Lorenzo in The Remaking appeared to have stressed a global approach to a far greater extent than had Jung. And in addition, the role of Dlune in The Remaking was meant to symbolize his future devotees and helpers in the world, so that he could fulfill his mission to the whole world, the mission he had always felt was his, to ‘save the human race from annihilating itself’. Wasn’t that true?

Dr. Lorenzo again appeared taken aback. He was right in the middle of a very uncomfortable divorce with Dlune and had just lost contact with his kids, so he was sad and shaken up. For years he had barely thought about The Remaking. He had merely struggled to survive emotionally and economically in the world, and had not expected probing questions aimed at the core of his super-sensitive psyche when he had accepted the invitation to meet with readers. So he said those things to them, every detail, and more. He said he had simply been living a quiet life. He described that life, and he wrapped up by saying that if he were a ‘culture hero’, it was ‘news to him’.

And anyway, he added, “The Western world already has too many heroes, and always has had.”

Well. News of this ball-buster spread like greased lightning. The culture hero people were devastated. They felt abandoned by their hero and immediately within the pundit circle a new school of thought crashed into being for the sole purpose of counter-butting the culture hero school. It was known as the ‘culture antihero’ school of thought, or the ‘antihero’ school.² And other new schools of thought popped up, some in reaction to this one, others for crazier reasons. The political structure of the pundit world transformed overnight.

Dr. Lorenzo was invited back after a few months of pundit reconnoitering. And he accepted the invitation, again without realizing where it might lead.

In the fall of 1980 they flew him to Philadelphia from Denver and met with him in Irvine Auditorium at Penn, probably several hundred or more in the seats, with the Dr. and a few lead pundits sitting on stage. And again, after an hour and a half of enlightening but innocuous back and forth, as if everyone had been avoiding something big, a spokesman stood and addressed the Dr. directly, sort of in summary. Only this time it was a representative of the new ‘antihero’ group.

Mj lorenzo, he said, as he looked at the Dr. and at the audience too, from time to time, had in effect declared himself an antihero when he had said that there always had been too many conquering hero-types in the Western world, and that this always had been one of the Western world’s chief problems vis-à-vis the world outside, and that he, mj lorenzo, did not want to be one of those conquering heroes, or be in any way like any of them. But the fact remained, said this spokesman for the ‘antihero’ group, that mj lorenzo still wanted to ‘save humanity from destroying itself’, as his Remaking had proclaimed. His approach was simply opposite that of all the heroic figures and groups that had hitherto characterized the Western world. Instead of proclaiming a mission to better the world, then going and trying to ram that ‘better’ down everyone’s throats, as various factions in the Western world had done for centuries in so many forms, even Jung himself, maybe; instead of that, mj lorenzo was proclaiming a mission, then proceeding to quietly demonstrate his mission by pure example, and little else, not even looking over his shoulder to see if anyone might notice. He was not seeking followers. Yet followers were seeking him. He had quietly and painfully studied himself and remade himself to correct errors set in motion back when the Western world had come into being. He had written down the formula for accomplishing this remaking so that other individuals and even whole nations and nation blocs might try remaking themselves. He had married an Indian woman, producing children of mixed race. He had worked helping people emotionally damaged by the off-kilter way in which the Western world had lived for two thousand years. And then, the book he had written – containing the formula for remaking – he had left in a box in a closet with dirty socks on top of it, never knowing for ten years his father had published the book. And now he was willing to go out of his way to answer questions from readers.

And who in the world could guess what Dr. Lorenzo might do next, or not do, said the ‘antihero’ pundit. Mj lorenzo might act like an antihero at the moment, and talk like one and even feel to himself like an antihero maybe. But to them, he would always be a real hero because of his overall admirable example.

The pundits applauded with uproar and Dr. Lorenzo seized the noise as a good moment to rise and disappear into the wings. And afterward he was not a little bowled over for several whole months. 

And so: the attempt by ‘culture hero’ pundits’ to see mj lorenzo as ‘antihero’ failed in no time. Miserably. They were ‘culture hero’ pundits again, each and all. And they remained so, to the point that an awkward tension between them and the Dr. continued for years. His ‘Laugh and a Half’ conferences of ’95-’97 were aimed chiefly at them and the Sunday Schoolers, in fact.³

285.  how freshman pundits tried to get to the bottom of the tension between mj lorenzo and the culture hero pundits

And newcomers to punditry wanted to get to the bottom of all this discomfort. Mainstreamers had thrown up their hands after a year of trying to do that in the early seventies. But newcomers after 1980 took the whole world of punditry on, saying that if the culture hero people thought mj to be an ‘avatar’, they should just call him on the phone and ask, “Are you an avatar?”

But the culture hero people could not bring themselves to do this. Maybe because a Today Show host had asked the Dr. the question once right on early morning live TV, and he had said, grinning, “Ask the pundits!”

But the pundits did not know for certain. Because they could not bring themselves to ask. ‘Something about the man made it impossible’, they said. Nobody could explain the strange catatonia of will on the part of the same people who once had been so hyperactive as to dig mj lorenzo out of bed with Dlune. Not even their joke-master critics, the mainstreamers, could explain this strange phenomenon.

But it comforted the latter tremendously to see their ‘culture hero’ associates humbled for once, to see that the ultimate super-saintly do-gooders could be found helpless after all, in at least one tiny corner of their ‘crazy devotional souls’. Hero worshippers could allow ‘room for mystery’ in their ‘hallowed universe’ after all, howled mainstreamers at wine and cheese parties to which they were certain no spies had gained entry who would divulge to culture hero nuts or the prying press this dark side of mainstream pundit politics.

Yet; and but: even mainstreamers had to admit the following morning all hung over that even perfect they felt helpless when it came to asking Dr. Lorenzo that ballsy question. Maybe because he had never brought it up himself. Who knew why? Maybe they were afraid he would say, “No, I am not an avatar. I am not a savior. I am not Jesus Christ returned. I am not a reincarnation of Vishnu. I am just a regular guy like you and you and you.”

For that was something that comforted many: he had never said he was ‘NOT any of those things’. He had said, precisely, “If I’m a culture hero, then it’s news to me.” But few pundits had taken this to mean absolutely, ‘No, I am not a culture hero’. Many thought he was playing hide-and-seek, just as Krishna had hidden from his followers behind trees, playing with their heads and hearts. Some thought he was trying to discredit Joseph Campbell’s notion of ‘hero to one’s culture’, but they saw in time that he had no beef with Campbell.

So most pundits, eventually, came to understand he had said it as part of a campaign to re-shape their nervous systems in a way that would help them stop thinking like typical Western-world-ers; i.e., stop thinking that their own group was the only one that could ever discern how life should be lived on the planet or ever produce great wisdom, sages, avatars and saviors. Stop them, in other words, from thinking so heroically, so naively and obsessively, like a pack of blindly, impulsively and violently idealistic teenage samurai turtles.

But – fortunately – the newcomers – probably sensing the self-muzzled dark side of the mainstreamers – could never let it rest. Had mj lorenzo not said in his Remaking that he thought he knew better than others did how life should be lived, and that he had come into the world to save it?

YES, they all answered the newcomers loudly: ‘from blowing itself up!’ That was what he had said. To save their bodily lives, the physical life of the human race, not to ‘save’ their ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ like Jesus. Not to ‘enlighten’ them like Buddha. Just to preserve them physically from self-destruction, so they could still have a ‘spirit’ to ‘enlighten’, whatever that might mean to a given person.

286.  how the Remaking pundit old-timers laid out for newcomer pundits exactly in what way their lives had been remade

BUT, said the newcomers again and again, meaning the constantly arriving newcomers who comprised one brand new generation of punditry after another: “You ‘old-timer’ Remaking experts keep saying that mj lorenzo ‘changed your life immeasurably for the better’. The Remaking ‘remade you’, as you grew to understand and apply its principles.”

And this, the ‘old-timers’ could never deny, fortunately. They were left briefly speechless by each such challenge because each time it came up they were reminded of the thing which kept arguing for the shockingly un-swallowable possibility that mj lorenzo might be an ‘avatar’ or ‘culture hero’ or ‘savior’ on the level of Buddha, Christ or Krishna after all. A ‘savior’ not just of the human race in body, but of the ‘soul’ of the race, if one meant the word ‘soul’, at the very least, in the way Afro-Americans meant it when they talked about having ‘soul’. For it was true: he had indeed ‘saved their heart of hearts’. He had ‘made them human again’.

That was the word: ‘human’, as ‘early Remaking pundits’ explained to freshman newcomers. It was not human enough to block D.C. intersections, as they had done, until suppressed groups got a piece of the pie; or until our boys were brought home from war; or until politicians who were put in office by organized blocs of extremist neo-Calvinists stopped treating gays and ‘les-/bi-/trannies’ as abominable anathema condemned by God. To be human you had to know people on both sides of a struggle intimately. To not lose your humanity you had to know the insides of the people you were fighting for, meaning the insides of the ‘Blacks’; and the fighting ‘boys’; the ‘gays’; women, poor, or whoever. Everybody.

And trickier yet, you had to know your enemy intimately, those who were doing the suppressing, the ones who were sending the suppressed to perdition.

And vice versa, if you were an extremist on the ‘right’, the ‘Mortimer’ side of a conflict, the same applied in reverse. You had to get to know the people you called anathema intimately. Fall in love with a leftist, if necessary. Share their bodies and homes with them. ON THEIR TURF; not your turf. And you had to let that knowledge of humanity change you. Then you started to become ‘human’.

And if and when you were human to that extent – (and if and when enough others had done as much, and assuming they had not destroyed your planet and you with it yet, before you could ask the next question) – then and only then could you ask -- if you still did not know -- what the purpose of your life on the planet, after that, might be.

First things first. Get and be human as you were born to be. That was purpose number one on the planet. Then ask the very biggest questions, if you wanted to ‘think like God’ as Mortimer had wanted to think. For: a dog’s first job on the planet was to be a dog, not a Homo sapiens. And a man’s first job was to be a man, not God, or a god. Because: if you asked grave questions before you were fully human, ‘fully a man’ or ‘a mature woman’, then the upshot of asking was likely to turn aberrant, as aberrant as the upshot of asking the very rational, scientific questions that had produced the very rational and scientific and seemingly benign Theory of Relativity. The results of asking such rational and scientific questions, unfortunately, were just as likely to be aberrant and anti-human, unfortunately, as had been E=mc² and the very rational and scientific atom bomb. Needles to say.

Just imagine, said experienced pundits when explaining this to newcomers, what might have happened if mj lorenzo ‘as Mortimer’ had tried during Freeze-Up to come up with a theology as comprehensive, coherent and consistent as that of Thomas Aquinas. (Mortimer was capable of it, they reminded.) So he could understand to the nth rational degree ‘how the Holy Spirit had gotten the virgin Mary pregnant with Godsperm’. ‘Mortimer’ had not been ‘human enough’ yet to have produced anything but ‘more damage’ to the world, had he pried into ‘that corner of God’s mind’, the pundits said. Whereas, when the question had enticed mj in later life; now; recently; ‘fully human as he was now’: he’d had the good sense to guzzle three beers and get a good night’s snooze and forget about it.

287.  how freshman pundits felt silenced

Well, darn. The newcomers heard in these comments an invitation to shut up. They were ‘trying too hard to theologize’, apparently. They were ‘wet behind the ears’, according to old-timers. They were trigger-happy and should hold their fire. And even more insulting, they were ‘not human enough yet’ to ask such ‘dangerous’ questions without ‘rocking the boat’ of the pundit world. And they were filled with chagrin, generation after generation of newcomers. Yet, for some fortunate reason, they cow-towed; amazingly; and let their super-provocative question lie, about who and what exactly mj lorenzo might be, culture hero or what. Maybe out of respect for mj and his chief spokesmen; or maybe because they saw the wisdom in mj lorenzo’s identifying this problem: of asking graver questions than one was capable of answering or understanding. Even though they were perfect rabble-rousers in their own right, just as their predecessors had been, and could have raised a big stink in the press or anywhere about this muzzling of their admirable intelligence.  

They had merely wanted to get to the bottom of all the tension they had uncovered in a world of punditry which, if truly in possession of ‘the truth’, as that world claimed to be, should have been at peace with itself by now, as they felt. That was all. Nothing so earthshaking as to have to be shut up for asking. But they had been asked to ‘wait’, and so they would wait. Maybe things would work out without their impatient help.

288.  how culture hero pundits formed an organization named El Wammy because they worried that not enough was being done to help their hero’s mission

And the culture hero pundits, meanwhile, supported such answers to newcomers from mainstreamers. They did not want to be badgered either. Culture hero people had always understood the very core of their hero’s message, even if they had gone too far with hero-worshipping at times. They were simply worried about mj’s mission, they explained. That was all. Everybody should be as worried about his mission as they were, they thought.

And so, by 2005 they had formed an organization named ‘El Wammy’, derived from the words ‘live with a Mexican in her/his home:’ ‘LWAMIHHH’.

During the late nineties they had supported Dr. Lorenzo’s proposal that U.S. high schools not grant diplomas to students who had never lived for one high school summer month in the home of a Mexican in Mexico. He had proposed such a graduation requirement but ‘done nothing about it’, as they complained to the press. When ‘he had all the power’, not they. And so they decided to implement a program without him.

But elected school board members across the U.S. resisted their program aimed at changing graduation requirements because they feared they might be the next ones required to live with Mexicans in their homes. With no running water. And with broken bed springs and mattresses beaten to a hard, one-inch thickness by generations of endless lovemaking. And with nothing but crappy outhouses and no toilet paper and scorpions and cacti up your butt, and refried brown pinto beans oozing out your ears from being fucked in the head by Mexican culture shock.

And so when Dr. Lorenzo moved to Mexico in the year 2001 his culture hero pundits gave up wrangling with U.S. school boards and moved right behind him. For years they had felt he had under-valued their devoted input. And they still wanted his attention, finally, after all these years.

And it worked.

All he asked of them was that they keep a distance in Mexico and find their own niches separate from his, so that ‘each could know Mexico at its rawest’, undiluted by the presence of other gringos. And then, as he said, ‘after a year or two or more’, they would ‘compare notes’.

And they followed his recommendation and wrote books about their years in Mexico, some of them.

And this, then, was when Dr. Lorenzo ‘finally’ began to give the ‘culture hero’ people some ‘long overdue and much deserved’ attention, as they told New York Times editors. He complimented them on their work in person and in the papers. And he supported it. In fact, he announced that what ‘deserved special attention’ in their schema was the decision to stop trying to change school boards and the rest of the world, and to start trying to change themselves instead.

For he could see that many of them, when they came home from Mexico after 2002 or so, seemed humbler and more ‘natural’ and ‘human’, as others had seen too and marveled upon in the press.

And by 2003 this first core group of Mexican adventurers had come up with an even more exciting definition and mission for ‘El Wammy’. The ‘M’ in LWAMIHHH now stood for ‘Muslim’, they said. The way to get along with Muslims in the world was not to have them come live in the U.S.A.. That might be a start, maybe. But it might just as likely backfire, since history had shown that Christians and Muslims had rarely parked their horses on the same sand dune successfully for more than a single burping meal together.

But: even if they did come to the states and no civil-war Balkan- or Spanish-type struggle ensued, it would never be enough. White Americans had already tried that with Black Africans. Blacks had lived in white homes as slaves and servants. And later, Mexicans had replaced them. All of which was a start, again, granted. But it could never be ‘enough’ to make both sides human again. It could never ‘save humanity from self-annihilation’, as mj lorenzo said was possible and essential.

What had saved Mortimer, according to culture hero people, was when, on Dlune’s recommendation, he had asked Chipewyan – ‘without fear because he was desperate’ – if the old man would help him find a place for the winter. And what had ‘saved his skin far more’ was accepting Chipewyan’s invitation to live with him.

Americans then, similarly, would have to go to the countries of Muslims and live right in their little homes and tents, because humanity was desperate for solutions now.

And the mainstreamers, for once, supported these crazy ‘culture hero’ fanatics. It was not enough any more, they agreed, to block traffic or stage protests or preach to school boards. With the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11 in 2001, the only thing left, they said (when everyone else was ‘decked out in war regalia’), was to ‘set a different kind of tone and example’ and live with people you thought were anathema ON THEIR TURF and in their decrepit home-hovels, trying to see things through their eyes a little, and publicizing the results for the edification of all.

The rest of punditry for once supported ‘one of the craziest harebrained notions the hero worshippers had ever dreamt up’, as they told The Observer. They admitted the plan’s wisdom. Which was that in order to be fully human in the way mj was challenging them to be, it was not enough to have ‘your enemy’ or ‘potential nemesis’ ‘in YOUR house’, as they put it, your own American home. Black slave nannies had lived in white southerners’ homes with them, nursing and raising their children, forming liaisons with the white daddies and making mixed-race children. And none of it had stopped whites from suppressing Blacks. Because that experience had occurred ‘on suppresser turf’.

When hero pundits went to Mexico, on the other hand, they lived ‘with the other side’ ‘on their turf’, sharing their germs, falling in love with them, enjoying sexual relationships with them ON THEIR TURF, getting to know them intimately on their terms and territory, and suffering culture shock in Mexico just as everyone else in the world did when they came to the states.

And it was one of the very few things in a period of many decades that had actually rendered those cocky, weirdo-extremist culture hero pundits a little bit humble and tractable. Even reading and knowing The Remaking inside and out had never given them that humility or true wisdom, they confessed, shocking everyone with the confession. Not even being shot down mercilessly by the New School for Social Research. Only knowing the ‘bodies and homes’ of Mexicans intimately IN MEXICO, and letting Mexicans fall in love with them, shelter them and care for them, IN MEXICO, had made them human enough to stop thinking of the bodies and homes of Mexicans as ‘trash’. They had finally stopped thinking of people who thought and lived unlike themselves – any humans anywhere, in other words – as ‘trash’ or ‘anathema’.

And they were shocked. They could not understand what had happened and they asked Dr. Lorenzo for an explanation. Why did they feel, as they put it during a 2004 Naropa writers’ workshop in Boulder, ‘so damn good for the first time in our lives, as if somebody had saved our souls or something’.

And the Dr. answered them, “Once the Jack part of you feels truly embraced, the rest of you goes along for the ride.”      

So: as the ‘culture hero’ pundits said, the time had come to ‘change the M word to Muslim’.

289.  how Dr. Lorenzo recognized the accomplishments of the culture hero crew

And for the culture hero pundits’ brilliant work toward peace and human understanding Dr. Lorenzo raised punditry awards to a new level. At the 2004 awards banquet in New York with great fanfare he granted them as a group his special surprise ‘Triple Crown of Punditry’ award. A very kitsch plastic goldish statue of a split banana for their pun, as he said, on Sammy’s name: ‘Wammy’. A mock papier-mâché MOISTR of his own design and handicraft for their brilliant interpretation of Mortimer’s humble, unwitting acceptance of Chipewyan’s love and help. And finally, a serious new prize of his own invented category which he called, creatively, a ‘Remaking prize’, for ‘The Best Group Remaking of the Year’, part of the new prize being a challenge in perpetuity to the ‘remade group’ who had won the prize to live up to that description in every single year to come.

III.  The remainder of the story on:  mj lorenzo (as of the present writing)

290.  how pundits saw mj lorenzo’s impact on the human enterprise as of 2007

In short, by 2007 it had become a cliché among mainstream pundits to sum up the argument in a few more sentences. Whatever you might call mj lorenzo, whether crazy or culture hero, avatar or con or Coyote trickster (as many thought), the fact remained that: the trick had worked. By 2007 his writing and life, i.e., his 1971 The Remaking and the way he had lived since then, including his very quiet year-in-year-out effort to make the world a better place, had helped many people around the globe grow more healthily and naturally human, people on all sides of every equation.

In other words, as the ‘git-along’ pundits had said for years: you could argue about everything else, including whether mj lorenzo’s The Remaking were Holy Holy or wholly holey, but no one could deny that it had made the world more happily human. He had given people hope. And not just pie-in-the-sky hope, but a way, a practical formula based on the ‘crazy Remaking year of M and J’.

Despite his apparent craziness at times mj lorenzo had, as almost all pundits agreed, provided the world with a concrete blueprint for healing the pain caused by extreme differences of belief, for correcting imbalances of power, and gently, step-by-step, for depolarizing some of the many frighteningly hyperpolarized situations to be found around the globe. And in fact, the world had already applied those principles in a variety of situations and benefited.

Evidence even existed that ‘God’s nature itself’, to use Dr. Lorenzo’s term, had benefited from mj lorenzo and his crazy ‘experimental sacred handbook for psychotics’, since even the earth’s solar system had shown better electromagnetic tune and balance starting around May or June of 1971, as certain Remaking unified theory pundits claimed who had carefully monitored and measured such matters.

Human civilization had not nuked itself to obliteration yet, they said. So who could prove them wrong?