310.  New York literary agent ‘can’t find a publisher’ for the present work

A New York literary agent in July of 07 had given up on finding a publisher for this heavily illustrated in-depth study of Dr. Lorenzo’s first underground book, The Remaking. The agent’s contacts in the publishing world were ‘not interested’ because, as an email (soon to be famous among Remaking pundits) explained: ‘...economic competition among publishers has become so intense of late, they are rarely willing any more to invest in a work of nothing but literary and/or artistic value such as The Remaking’.

311.  Sammy’s written reply to the agent

The Dr. was provoked to a rare degree, ‘too furious to express himself clearly’, so Sammy fired off the following:

1. We are delighted that the New York publishing world thinks The Remaking has ‘literary and/or artistic value’! Frankly, Dr. Lorenzo was worried it had neither. I always knew otherwise, though. Not just one, maybe. Or maybe the other. But both. And the erudite world of wise Remaking punditry always thought so too, if you recall, since the famous day in 1971 when they stumbled upon mj’s manuscript in Philadelphia.

But, as for the book’s possessing ‘nothing but’, or ‘only’ or ‘merely’ artistic or literary value: we find the judgment as distasteful as if the mayor of New York City declared the Statue of Liberty ‘of nothing but architectural and/or scenic value’ and bombed it to bits. Or as if a freshman English student after reviewing the Declaration of Independence for a homework assignment reported it to be ‘nothing but a brilliantly written English composition.”

For: a ‘brilliant’ work of writing MUST possess value more than just artistic and/or literary if it lays out in detail a desperately needed formula for helping humanity to live in peace and harmony with humanity.

2. At the very least: if people can learn from reading, studying and understanding a single well-written, lively and even humorous book how to peacefully live with themselves and with other people, clearly that book must have value that is political too (as anyone not suffocated by the stilted, stunting air of New York City’s high art world should be able to see, we hope).

3. And again, if a formula lays out a step-by-step method for helping an individual to live in peace with his-or-her own hyperpolarized, divided and warring self, as young mj’s Remaking year and trip and formula definitely did do, then the formula has value that is psychotherapeutic, i.e., potentially self-healing for every person on the planet (and will be needed all the more if the stifling air of New York City fine arts has spread anywhere else on the planet).

4. If a book, furthermore, clearly lays out a formula for the Western world that is culture-healing, then that book’s value is more than literary or artistic, and not just political and/or psychotherapeutic either, but downright, out-and-out culture-transforming and culture-saving, as The Remaking verily is.

5. And when a book lays out a clear step-by-step outline that can be used by earthy, non-Western cultures for dealing with, living with and getting along on the planet relatively peacefully with arrogant and aggressively controlling and overly ideologized Western Civilization, as The Remaking definitely does, then that book (or any excellent study of that book) is clearly of GEO-political importance not only now but in perpetuity, or at least for as long as ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures and the problematic difference and tension between those two vastly different worlds all continue to exist.

In fact, as follows logically, such a book is humanity-healing and world-healing. Why? And how? As a result of the fact that such a book can decrease the polarity between opposite worlds. It depolarizes – or can, if properly used, potentially depolarize – tension everywhere in the world. When read, studied and understood and applied, The Remaking shows the way to bridging the chasm between hugely different worlds. It is humanity-saving, therefore, just as young mj said in The Remaking that he himself was, and as this study of The Remaking stresses again and again: mj lorenzo was born into the world of earth’s humanity to save it PHYSICALLY from doing itself in PHYSICALLY.

6. And as a result, therefore, any book that might be of such interest potentially to every single human being on the planet, now and in the future, should be of interest likewise to any clever publisher struggling to ‘survive’ intense competition from other publishers. Such a book could help lengthen the life of the human race, rather than jeopardize its survival as 99% of the books currently published do, since they fail to address head-on the dire pressing problems threatening the future of humanity. Owners of publishing companies who care about the survival of their own progeny will want to publish this classic STUDY of The Remaking, therefore, because it will increase understanding of The Remaking. And as understanding grows worldwide and as Remaking principles are applied increasingly, peace will prevail on the planet gradually more and more, creating more potential buyers, generation after generation, long after the original publishers are dead and gone (if the human race makes it that far despite the shortsightedness of nearly everyone, including current-day publishers). The clever and far-sighted publisher who invests in The Remaking or a thorough detailed study of The Remaking, as this book certainly is, will leave a legacy to earth’s people, in other words. Whereas a publisher who leaves The Remaking out in the cold will weaken the human species and help it move a step further along a short path toward self-destruction, including, of course, destruction of publishing companies and their owners and progeny.

7. For all of these reasons a highly excellent AND literary, AND artistically magnificent study of The Remaking such as the present one, when published, can and will prove to be nothing but hugely popular in every country and therefore hugely money-making and MORE THAN WORTH THE FINANCIAL RISK, not only in the immediate future but for ages to come, in the very same way that the Bible has been until now the biggest selling book of all time. ‘Popular’ is an understatement, in fact. The Remaking will be essential reading for every high school and college student where earthly humans populate the universe, or at least from now until the great day when the tense distinction between Western culture and non-Western culture has ceased to exist. And it will be essential reading beyond that, as well, as a matter of fact, to help people remember how peace was established on earth finally, just as Homer and the Bible are still read by millions worldwide to this day, ever less as sacred text (as they were intended to be read originally, of course), and ever more as quintessential literature that helps reveal how the world came to be the way it is today, split excruciatingly between two kinds of culture, Western and non-Western, one lording it over the other while the other acts politely as serf.

Dr. Lorenzo approved this official letter, including the unusual line asserting that ‘mj lorenzo was born into the world of earth’s humanity to save it PHYSICALLY from doing itself in PHYSICALLY’. He signed it, in fact; and Sammy signed it and sent it off.

312.  response of New York literary agent

And the literary agent wrote back:

Dear Dr. Lorenzo and Dr. Martinez:

I am afraid the publishers and I do not find your ‘clear steps to Remaking humanity’ etc etc. [sic] very ‘clear’. Where in the world are these famous ‘steps that constitute remaking’ to which you refer with conviction, as if they had been laid out in your book so baldly that a third grade child could locate them and write them down? Expert and educated readers, including my Yale English major student interns and their Masters and PhD superiors, have tried once more to read your book, The Remaking (meaning this detailed study of it, which is the same thing practically), and remain unconvinced that any ‘clear message’ of any kind can be found in it.

Where, in other words, within the front and back covers of your illustrated word-mandala of a pity-sake manuscript, exactly, for pity’s sake, are these alleged ‘clear steps to reforming humanity’ ‘LAID OUT’? You understand your book and all points which it contains, I realize, Dr. Lorenzo; and Sammy; and it IS a beautiful, ENJOYABLE work: but I CAN’T FIND THEM!!!!!

313.  Dr. Lorenzo’s written response to the New York literary agent including his soon-to-be-famous ‘desperate appeal’

The Dr. himself wrote this time:

For those New York publishing world and literary agent moguls who by no one’s fault but my own have not grasped the latent – or should I say, a little politically incorrectly, ‘allegorical’? – or ‘inferential’? – meanings and implications of the original Remaking or even of this more explicit and excellent exposition of it, by which I mean the ‘clear humanity-saving steps’ of young Dr. mj’s ‘remaking’ year and trip as laid out in both books: I will here and now, once and for all, make those steps perfectly Dick-and-Jane first-grade-primer clear, with no more waltzing around Robin Hood’s crazy literary and/or artistic word barn as in the past.

Any human entity that is suffering because polarized by duality, as most human entities are these days (as explained in the study we are trying to get published, with your help), will benefit from studying and applying the steps of mj lorenzo’s own personal remaking trip and following the same steps toward his/her/their/and/or/its own remaking.

A ‘human entity’ means an individual; a couple; a family; a circle of friends; a common-interest group (for example ethnic, religious, political or other); a neighborhood; a community; a town; a city; a tribe; a nation; and/or a bloc or collection of any one or all of these.

And the term ‘polarized by duality’ means split tensely in half and divided down the middle between opposing or contrary self-defeating factions, as exemplified by mj lorenzo’s own split between his ‘Mortimer’ side and his ‘Jack’ side.

The steps which young mj followed in 70-71 in order to remake and re-balance his own out-of-whack (because so extremely hyperpolarized) mj self follow below in rough outline. These fundamentally human and natural self-healing ‘steps’ which mj discovered intuitively and outlined at times unwittingly in his first book, The Remaking, can be applied toward balancing a bit more evenly ANY ‘human entity’ that is out of balance.

My outline of the ‘steps’ here is only a ‘rough’ one because it includes just a quickly digestible number of salient points that constituted young mj’s (meaning my own) 70-71 ‘remaking’. It does not include every single sequential focal point in detail.

1. College student mj decreased his summer work load, thereby granting himself more time to do other things.

2. In his free time he studied Carl Jung, especially those passages treating the subjects of self-forgiveness and self-healing.

3. The increase in time to relax and explore his own psyche allowed him to begin to expand his understanding of self and world and to develop new and healthier goals and dreams.

4. And as a result of these changes in the way he did things the strict surrounding shell of rules and intellect (the ‘Mortimer’ half of ‘mj’) which had always over-governed him and squelched his creativity and true human nature began to crack, to lose strength, and to gradually fall away.

5. ‘Jack’, the earthy childlike half of mj’s total person, emerged from inside that superficial shell of a facade, breaking the ‘Mortimer’ shell further, as when a chick hatching from an egg breaks its shell to pieces, rendering it practically valueless and useless.

6. ‘Jack’ was now liberated and could – and did – wander about without all of the confining strictures of social rules and intellectual formulations which until then had told mj lorenzo exactly how to think and what to do and when to do so. And wandering about the planet now by the seat of his figurative pants, meaning his bare ass, just like most other young animals in creation, mj lorenzo in the form of ‘Jack’ immediately developed a more healthy and balanced approach to life for mj lorenzo. The principal novelty of the new approach derived from the fact that mj lorenzo’s natural mammalian-animal-human instincts could express themselves with absolute freedom. And in retrospect it is hardly surprising that immediately those instincts sought natural healing solutions straight from the heart of nature, in the same way that the instincts of a wounded dog, lion or other mammal not confined in a cage always guide it to look for healing solutions from nature.   

7. In short order Jack – intuitively – came upon a new and more balanced design for the future of mj lorenzo, a new mj in which Mortimer would give up some power over mj, and let Jack have more power than in the past. Henceforth they were to govern mj as a carefully balanced team. And a key part of the plan was that mj would counterbalance Mortimer’s relentless effort to dominate him (via too much hair-brained intellect and too many cockeyed rules) by spending the rest of his days in very intimate relationship with people and cultures dominated by ‘Jack’ energy, not by ‘Mortimer’ energy. The Remaking in its written entirety served mj lorenzo as an explication of what these two opposites consisted of, and the ‘third attempt’ in particular offered him and the world several long lists of traits pertaining to the two opposite sides of himself and his world, Mortimer on the one hand and Jack on the other, so that any future reader could learn to distinguish between the two polarities in real life. Dr. Lorenzo for his own part in later years found that Mexican culture and his close Mexican friends who had grown up ‘in the street’ in Mexico were sufficiently earthy and Jack-like to serve him as ballast and to counterweight his perpetual tendency to let bizarrely divorced-from-life Mortimer energy float him higher and higher into the wispy ether of crazy intellect and crazy rules.    

8. Another way to understand why and how planet earth’s humanity is at war with itself right at this moment, a way that is a little clearer and simpler maybe, is to drop the ‘Western’ versus ‘non-Western’ paradigm altogether and understand the split in humanity to lie more accurately between groups of people on the one hand who are dominated by their love of thought systems and groups of people on the other hand who are dominated by love of bodily existence in the physical world. The first type of person can become so possessed by a thought system that bodily comforts and pleasures are made secondary, even to the extreme that such people may give up gladly any physical existence in the world at all, simply because they are convinced that the imagined rewards offered by their thought system actually exist. While the second group would give up whole sets of thoughts or beliefs altogether and readily, rather than miss for a second their present rare chance to enjoy physical life in the wonderful world. Such a paradigm for understanding humanity lets us see that in a world where the entire human race can be eliminated in thirty minutes by some fanatic’s mere button touch, the first kind of people are the source of the threat to humanity. Extremist, belligerent, rigid thought system adherents are far more likely to be the present bane of humanity, whereas people who love physical life in the world are far more likely to be humanity’s salvation. And somehow the first group must let the second group HELP it to become mentally healthy again, become sane, in fact, lest weirdo thinkers in the first group destroy the human species altogether as a result of extremist attachment to certain beliefs. And the original model of this kind of helping was offered in my book, The Remaking, when Mortimer Lorenzo while spending the winter writing – and writing –  and writing – at Fort Chipewyan came to the realization, finally, that he would need the ballast of ‘Jack-type people’ around him constantly for the rest of his life if he were ever to live at all sanely, and when he proceeded therefore to spend the rest of his life purposely and consciously letting Jack-type people and cultures save him from his crazily peace-sacrificing and life-sacrificing ‘mind’.

9. And this is where the New York literary agents and publishers get their chance to help save humanity from physical self-destruction therefore. Mortimer Lorenzo busted his rear end of a brain producing his humanity-saving formula out of his own life-endangering mountaintop experience and wrote it in a book; and now a worthy scholar has explicated the text brilliantly, producing the study we are discussing, this ‘look’ at The Remaking that we would like to see published, all of us, honestly speaking, if only it were possible to get the book to people in a presentable, sellable, marketable form.

And the literary agents and publishers are the ones most critically needed at the moment, the friends in possession of earthy day-to-day knowledge of how to get Mortimer’s, i.e. mj lorenzo’s, thought system printed, published and mass-marketed around the world. Literary agents and publishers are the ‘Jack-type’ feet-on-the-ground know-how-possessing friends who are so in love with the pleasures of earthly life that they have been unwilling till now to risk losing their chance to go on enjoying those pleasures. They are afraid that if they finally publish mj lorenzo’s most important book, his ‘financially risky’ book and thought system, The Remaking, in any form, their life of earthly pleasure will come to an end. But now that we have shown that The Remaking is a financial goldmine FOR GENERATIONS TO COME, and not a financial risk, we are waiting for them to respond to the call for help.

Poor mj is still hanging from the south face of Hungabee, so to speak. He doesn’t know how to get down from the craggy mountain he has climbed. Friends have put out a call for help from the Rocky Mountain Rescue Squad (the agents and publishers) down on the ground far below and they have come up to look at his hairy predicament and declared him beyond help!

He is exactly like the Indian brave in ‘Eltchelekwie Onnie’ (Lake O’Hara) who in the last scene of the tale gets stuck on a very high eagle’s eyrie and needs help to get back down to the tribe on the ground, so that he can tell them his vision and story of how he got his vision, and how after he had suffered his vision he didn’t know how to get back down to the ground again to tell them about it, so that they could share his vision and have the powerful vision they needed to live by, a vision that would save them from self-destruction too.

No vision quest is complete, according to Native American tradition, until the vision has been brought back to the visionary’s people.

Or, as Loud Slap’s father said to Loud Slap right before he sent him off on his quest: ‘After your trip to look for a new life for the tribe come back and tell us what you have found’! Don’t get snagged, in other words.

But young mj lorenzo IS snagged. He is snagged at the very last step of his quest and he refuses to give up and drop out when he is this close to graduation. He is still calling for help. We can hear his cries for help and somebody has to go way up there and help him in the same way that the little eaglet helped the tribal brave in ‘Eltchelekwie Onnie’ get down from his terrible height, in the tale mj passed on to us in the very last chapter of The Remaking, the ‘Lake O’Hara’ chapter.

Where, then, is the ‘eaglet’ who can help, the eaglet who is willing to risk his neck, the one who will befriend the stranded brave and spend enough time with him so as to figure out the exact magic formula that will help the poor boy down from his miserably snagged tribe-saving vision quest?    

314.  response from all quarters to Dr. Lorenzo’s ‘desperate appeal’

Dr. Lorenzo sent off this reasoned and impassioned ‘desperate appeal’ to all parties concerned early in the year 2011 and ‘within an almost acceptable period of time’, as he said to Sammy Martinez, and ‘by some miracle’, as he added, the present publisher appeared and was ‘committed enough to find a way to provide the help needed’ so that this classic definitive study of mj lorenzo’s The Remaking, ‘the most thorough and magnificent study of The Remaking ever conceived’, as he said, could be published ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB.

And mj lorenzo’s famous ‘Remaking pundits’ were flabbergasted with the interchange. It was the first time in 40 years: 2011, the first time since 1970-71 (when the author of The Remaking had first ‘dreamt up his whole crazy trip and book’, as they said) that he had signed his name publicly in no uncertain terms to the assertion that he had come into this world to save it from destroying itself physically, and that The Remaking was the ‘sacred text’ outlining the steps of that physical salvation of the world’s race of humans.

In fact, as they said, this interchange between mj lorenzo and the New York literary agent attempting to find a publisher for the present study of The Remaking ‘constituted one of the three most tellingly defining moments in the great and unbelievable life of mj lorenzo’. They were so dumbfounded, indeed (as USA Today would soon report in its ‘Life’ section) that they called a reunion conference for world-wide Remaking punditry to celebrate the moment of their leader’s defining himself once and for all, in such a public, unabashed and ‘heroic’ way.

The culture-hero pundits spearheaded the reunion and after it was over declared it a success despite the fact that on such very short notice no convention center in the world had been available that was large enough for all who wanted to attend, except the one in deathly hot Tucson, Arizona. Hardly anyone had ever booked that hall in summer, of course, due to the withering oven-like heat awaiting conventioneers outside the hall’s civilized air conditioning. And these culture-hero pundits continued to declare the gathering a success even after the final death count from the Tucson street heat exposure had been determined a month later; for, as the culture-hero pundits said in their final interview with USA Today regarding this tragedy, ‘forty dead was only one tenth of one percent of the forty thousand Remaking pundits who had attended from around the world, and that was a far smaller percentage of devotees than the incomprehensibly heavy death toll suffered during many a Muslim or Hindu or Christian Crusader or other mass devotee pilgrimage down through the centuries around the world’.

And furthermore, they added, every pundit in the world now understood better ‘why so many dirt-poor Mexicans had died trying to cross illegally into the United States to find work’. None of the pundits, as smart as they were, had ever fully grasped the degree of duress until forty of their own had died in dark piles right in the gutters of Tucson from hiking in dark jeans, sneakers and T-shirts with small dark backpacks and no water for the twenty-block trek from the convention center to the hotel in the very same Sonoran Desert heat. And they noted as well during the interview that they – exactly like those poor determined Mexicans – ‘simply had been trying to get to our own particular dream’, which in their case, of course, was to make mj lorenzo’s message known to the world. And they also admitted that the forty deceased had ‘unfortunately helped’ get news of this soon-to-be-published ‘Remaking study’ spread around the globe ‘a little further and faster’. And that was another reason the extremist ‘culture-hero’ group of pundits considered the convention to have been ‘a success, unfortunately’.

And critics of these extremist ‘remaking’ pundits cried in the press that it was indeed ‘regrettable’, as always, that any Remaking pundits at all had ever enjoyed any ‘success, unfortunately’ reaching any goal in life at all. Better yet ALL of them should have ‘withered away’ in the heat, ‘one and all’, every single one of the forty thousand, in the very same oven-like heat that had killed thousands of the ‘four hundred million dream-obsessed Mexicans’ who had crossed the same Sonoran Desert over the decades of that (equally) illegal and immoral mass pilgrimage: so that the crazy pundits’ crazy dream and mj lorenzo’s crazy philosophy and every memory of that ‘psychotic’ belief system and ‘unholy polemic’ finally could have been declared ‘kaput’ and over and done with forever and ever; and so that all those who still found the Remaking pundits’ dream wretchedly revolting could have breathed a sigh of relief. Finally!

And they immediately held huge prayer breakfasts worldwide begging and begging and begging God for such, in every fundamentalist religion jargon or language imaginable, all on the same day and at the same hour, all interconnected rousingly to each other by cameras, huge movie screens and satellite video (funded by oil moguls in the Middle East and Texas).

And the culture-hero pundits retorted in a letter that made the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer: ‘THANKS TO LOCAL BOY MJ LORENZO’ (the headline), the ‘fundamentalist religious factions’ of the world had finally found an 'excuse' to collaborate and begin getting to know each other intimately at the very deepest level, even Muslim fundamentalists and even American neo-Calvinist Christian fundamentalists, 'two of the most childishly bellicose and irreconcilable groups in the history of the planet’. And this ‘excuse’, this ‘very first tiny step toward reconciliation’, as the culture-hero pundits repeated so as to twist the knife and drive the point home all the more excruciatingly, had come about “only thanks to the very clear humanity-healing message of mj lorenzo in his great book of ‘literary AND artistic’ ‘experimental sacred text’,”

The Remaking

or

The Remaking of Mortimer Jack

An Illustrated Word-Mandala in Three Parts

Originally Created for Private Use by the Author

mj lorenzo

the cherished ’monster bird-puppy’ his pundits called:   mj’s handbook for psychotics

.