1.
3 of Dr. Lorenzo’s
Jack-type friends-and-helpers after his retiring to
central
2.
“after a
few days Mrs Lorenzo had calmed herself... through
prayer” (based on Caravaggio’s 1590 ‘Medusa’;
3.
“after the
Crack-Up Jack (not Mortimer) began arranging his and
Mortimer’s scratchings, recent and old, in puzzling piles
and mailing them one bizarre pile a month, home to his
folks” (photo of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories,
Canada)
4.
Jack’s
self-calming mantra (invented and even copyrighted by
Mortimer so no one else, least of all Jack, could claim
it), ‘a MANdala is an ANtidote to a chaOTic STATE of
MIND’, arranged ‘musically’ on the page so as to
rhythmically emphasize certain syllables in a
self-hypnotic way
5.
one of
Mortimer’s ‘hated’ (by some) Remaking lists
of dualisms or opposing polarities between ‘Jack’-traits
and ‘Mortimer’-traits, this particular one derived from
studying Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy
6.
a
‘typical’ (as Vogue
magazine pointed out) mj lorenzo ‘story-picture’,
this one started with a photo of the smashed Buick on top
of which were superimposed three separate lines from the
chapter it introduced: (1) “’Fort Simpson’ was ‘THE
fireworks chapter’; (2) “Jack’s ‘Fort Simpson’ notes to
his parents, as the ‘early Remaking pundits’ explained to
newcomers, could be divided into three crazy-quilt
sections:...”; and (3) “Who but Jack could have intuited
THAT monkey wrench? asked Rev. Who else was that loony
tunes?” – one trick to a successful ‘story-picture’ was to
add story-telling words to an image in a way that the
image thereby was ‘enriched’, not ‘impoverished’ – this
one first appeared in the 1994 ‘second revision’ and, as
is apparent, required close collaboration between mj (and
his two parts) and Sammy
7.
collage
of: colored cubes; the blue Buick on its roof; da
Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian man’ (rotated sideways); and the words:
‘what can it mean to say someone cracks in half is it even
possible??’
8.
color photo
of a meadowful of wild daisies and other wildflowers
near
9.
da
Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ (ca 1509;
10. photo: Dlune smoking
a cigarette with urbane panache
11. dreamlike collage:
photo of Dlune in a flower garden, her face hidden
by her hair (except for a smiling eye); upon all of which
is superimposed a seeming plate of glass seemingly
reflecting da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, who is now rotated
upside down and seen double, and on which are engraved the
words: ‘exactly what happened to ---- dr. mortimer john
lorenzo in the crack-up’
12. a photo of
terrain near Inuvik, NWT, on which are superimposed:
(1) an eagle in flight, (2) a youth hugging the earth and
peering at the viewer, (3) two similarly peering wolves,
and (4) the opening words of his ‘bird-puppy chapter’, as
Dr. Lorenzo called it in later years, ‘Fort Resolution’:
“An undying complaint of Dr. Lorenzo’s was that the weird
little bundle of stuff he’d prepared for his folks from
Fort Resolution... was
too sad...” – the fall colors of the North have been
marbled, i.e., body-painted onto the youth’s skin using
the layering tool of the computer program, Paint Shop Pro
13. photo of the famous
‘garden wall’ in Glacier National Park, Montana,
which is so pretty it might seem (to some) to argue for
the existence of an imaginative, even artistic,
mankind-loving divinity: a sloping alpine meadow of a
dense multicolor mix of white daisies, yellow composites,
red Indian paintbrush and many other wild midsummer blooms
of varied and vivid color, all flung prolifically among
dark rock outcroppings, small dark evergreen stands and a
dark rustic lodge; and with a backdrop of blue sky and
dark, majestic glacier-carved knife-edge peaks spotted
with white snow patches; all of this seeming to shout:
amidst the darkness let there be light and life
14. three of mj lorenzo’s
experimental guesswork formulas relating split
clowns (like Harlequin), split geographic worlds and their
split rivers (like the Mackenzie which is muddy on one
side and green on the other) and his own split self (‘I’);
and relating the poles of a single bar magnet to the poles
of the two halves of that very same bar magnet after the
bar is cut in half, and also to himself as Jack and
Mortimer: the top and bottom lines using ordinary math
language (‘=’) and the middle, the language of
mathematical ratios (‘:’
; ‘::’)
– in plain English this could be expressed something like:
Harlequin is split down the middle exactly as the
Mackenzie is and exactly as I am; North is related to
South as Jack is related to Mortimer; North is to South in
a bar magnet exactly as North is to South in one half of
the same bar magnet after it is cut in half, or ‘Jack’;
and exactly as North is to South in the other half of the
original bar magnet after it is cut in half, or ‘Mortimer’
– all of which means that mj lorenzo was a little like the
4th century BC Greek music theory philosopher,
Aristoxenus, who used the language of mathematical ratios
to theorize that ‘the soul is related to the body as
harmony is to the parts of a musical instrument’
15. gaudy collage of
some items mj/Jack ‘loaded’ into his father’s
borrowed-cum-stolen blue Buick, including French horn,
pots and pans, backpack and so on, some practical and
others quite impractical
16. more ‘stuff’ mj/Jack
loaded into the stolen Buick, a calmer collage than
#15, maybe because sprinkled with cannabis leaves
17. a Buddhist mandala
on which have been superimposed the words Jack used to
persuade Mortimer to drop out of his psychiatry
internship: ‘you might never have this chance again’, and
above and below which are listed the arguments Dr. Lorenzo
resorted to in later life when frustratedly attempting to
defend his ‘wacko pastiche’ (as a Florida tabloid put it)
of a ‘first modernistic autobiographical novel’ (as his
mother astutely and not too incorrectly benomered The Remaking)
18. a Hindu mandala
(balancing geometrically all of the variegated and even at
times opposite or oppositional gods and other forces),
above and below which are the words: ‘that’s why The
Remaking can be and has been told and understood in so
many different ways’
19. a map of the world
emphasizing a multi-colored Canadian province of Alberta,
which sits dead center between the two poles of mj’s trip,
New Jersey and the Arctic (and where, therefore, both Jack
and Mortimer sensed most of mj’s problems would be
solved); on which are superimposed a glimpse of Frederic
Remington’s ‘Canoe in a Stiff Current’; the cover of
Mackenzie’s journals including his portrait; an abstract
geometric mandalic design; and the words, ‘if Mackenzie
could do it’ (‘so could I’, as Jack thought; but this last
is left unstated and merely implied)
20. the Lake O’Hara
scenery mj (standing in the foreground) described for
his parents as if describing an ancient traditional
(Shinto) Japanese flower arrangement or ‘ikebana’, a piece
of writing which stirred Jo Lorenzo so unspeakably that
her attempt to hand it out to everyone after church caused
a stampede during which the choir director was trampled
and ended in a total body cast for a year
21. a map of
22. collage which opens the
Inuvik envelope and shows – superimposed upon a
photo of dead trees, wooden houses and ‘Utilidor’ (the
above-ground heating, water and sewage system Canadians
invented so they could stomach living there) – a musk-ox;
a caribou; and a youth; all naked as nature on day one
23. image which
introduces ‘the sixth attempt’, whose hidden subject
most pundits thought to be sex: a digitally altered
Masaccio fresco (1422-26), ‘Expulsion from the Garden of
Eden’, depicting an ashamed Adam and Eve hurrying from
Paradise naked but for two and a half fig leaves over each
set of genitalia (Florence, Italy: frescoed directly onto
the wall of the Brancacci Chapel): on either side of which
are the words: ‘it was the start of a long ordeal’
24. Rev and Jo, ages 32
and 27 in 1937, just married two years, on their
‘second honeymoon’, this time to Lake Louise, Alberta,
Canada (‘second’ because, as they explained in 1980 to
Sammy: when they got married in ’35, in the depths of the
Great Depression, they could afford to drive the old
Pontiac only to Washington, D.C. and Winchester, Virginia;
they had to save up for two more years to realize their
real dream honeymoon to the Canadian Rockies) – and then,
once they got home and developed the original black and
white print, they paid extra to have it ‘tinted’; after
which it spent a half century and more on their bedroom
wall, fading inside a tarnishing frame of tin
25. several British
Columbia ‘Rockies’ are mirrored more than perfectly
in an early-morning Lake O’Hara as smoke rises from a
rustic but comfortable Lodge; and an inscription says, ‘A
mandala is an antidote to a chaotic state of mind’
26. the very last of the
exasperating ‘lists’ of polar-opposite ‘Jack’ and
‘Mortimer’ character ‘traits’, a list by which
Mortimer drove many of his readers stark raving mad,
jamming it into the ‘seventh attempt’ when everyone was
more than ready for spring break-up and when he had
promised ‘no more lists’
27. little mj with a real live
‘Indian’ and a less-than-savage big sister on top of
Lookout Mtn. outside Denver on the family’s 1949 summer
drive ‘out west’ to Colorado – the original black and
white has been ‘tinted’ using Paint Shop Pro – possibly
this was mj lorenzo’s very first tiny contact with a
‘Jack-type’ or non-Western culture, the world which
eventually would help him balance and thereby transform
himself, keeping him from self-destruction
