Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your concern. Margaret was in fact ill
for a few days at the beginning of the month; she seems
to have recovered completely. As for myself, I believe
I have been well in every respect, and I ask myself
whether I might not be fatuously indifferent to turbulences,
both public and private, that deserve lamentation. 

To come back to the issue we most recently discussed,
the political pendulum that swings between anarchy and
fascism, I conclude that the constitutional republic
that presents itself as an alternative is an idealization,
always at risk of degenerating into one or the other
component; and proves to be an illusion that satisfies
only a certain level of moral and intellectual mediocrity.
It's not the idealized world, it's the real world in which
we live and with which we must come to terms.

My litigation seems to have some difficulty in getting off
the ground, inasmuch as I have not received from the
Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters
the signed return receipt for the service of process
by certified mail, which Rule 4 of the Massachusetts
Rules of Civil Procedure requires. In an attempt to cure
this defect, I obtained another Summons document from
the Clerk of the Court, and walked with it in a heavy 
drizzle of snow mixed with rain to the offices of the
Sheriff of Suffolk County a few blocks away, where I paid
fifty dollars to have the Summons together with a copy of
the Complaint delivered a few hundred yards
down the street. Somewhat to my surprise I was told by
the secretary that proof of service would not be filed
by the deputy sheriff, but would be mailed to me, and
it would be my obligation to make certain the proof was
properly docketed. Maybe I'm too impatient, but as of
this morning's mail, I haven't received it; and I have
started to ask myself how many days I must wait, before
the suspicion of collusion between the Sheriff's Department
and the Board of State Examiners etc., traverses the
boundary between paranoia and prudence. If and when
that time comes, I will repeat the exercise, this time
obtaining suitable receipts from the Sheriff's office to
be able to show the judge that I did the best I could.

In the interval, specifically on January 5, I finally
received from the Plumbing Board the decision and order
flowing from the hearing of December 17. Their lawyer(s)
went to some trouble to come up with a legal justification;
a six page document, riddled on the face of it, - as read
by the appellant, - with explicit contradictions; claiming
the support of "court decisions", but able to cite only one
case, "Herrick v. Athur E. Butler et al." (sic). This case is
thirty-six years old; it's an unpublished one, "unreported",
as the lawyers say, and I can't look it up in the library.
I've asked both the Plumbers' Board and the Nantucket
Superior Court clerk to mail me a copy.
The plumbers' lawyers themselves note the irony that Herrick
v. Butler is also a Nantucket controversy. A recent newspaper
article in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror relates that
Nantucket's suicide rate is 4 times that of mainland
Massachusetts. It figures.

Meanwhile I've been working on the computerized surveillance
system for the orphaned building project; and even while I'm
writing this, Margaret appears in the door with the small
package containing the "video-capture" card that I ordered
from Amazon.com and that I will fit into the computer later
this evening to complete the installation. To this point at
least, the project seems to be going very well, albeit punctuated
with episodes of frustration while I try this and try that
to work around a technical problem. As of now, I have succeeded
in programming the machine so that it will turn itself on (boot)
as soon at it receives electric power. This I will switch on
and off with an X-10 telephone transponder, which I am about
to order for seventy dollars. Once the computer starts running,1
it activates the modem to the telephone line and uploads via
the file transfer protocol (FTP) to my web site a file containing
its latest Internet address. The service provider gives me merely
a "dynamic" (as opposed to a static) Internet address. Only the
Nantucket computer knows its own current address, which changes
each time the computer logs on to the Internet. That's why the
Nantucket computer must take the initiative in establishing the
communications link. A few minutes after I have turned it on by
remote control, I retrieve its latest address from my web-site.
I log in from Belmont and have control of programs which should
make it possible to turn on the four video cameras, and to retrieve
from them images of the same quality as we have from time to time
exchanged over the Internet. Now that I have received the
video-capture card, I can start with the next phase of the programming.

Computing is emotionally and intellectually very satisfying;
devoid, like the electric toy trains of childhood, of all existential
agony. It occurred to me this morning that I shouldn't wait
for my next incarnation to become a computer engineer.
Given the manna-like trillions that our government is about
to shower on us to provide sustenance in the economic (and moral)
desert into which we have strayed, I may begin right now to explore
the computerized medical records projects with which they propose
to save us from the banal futility (or futile banality) of
contemporary medicine. Conceivably there might even be some
manna in it for me, although I mustn't measure my manna before
I've gathered it up. As I may have mentioned, I wrote the computer
programs for my own medical practice in 1981, and I have been
maintaining computerized medical records from May 13, 1982 to
the present.  So maybe in some respects, I have a head start.

On the literature front, so to speak, I've been spending some time
editing a few of the 593 odd pages to which my present novel has
bloated, always ready to add to it when the spirit so moves me.
More reflections also on the Porter scene in Macbeth. I wondered
what the porter meant when he said that he should have old turning
the key. I was curious how the Germans translated the phrase.
They didn't. They substituted ersatz. I found four German translations
of Shakespeare, three on the Internet, and one from my parents' library, -
which they never read. "Das hat mit uns nichts zu tun." My parents' volumes:
a translation by Friedrich Gundolf, (1880-1931), a wonderfully insightful
and eloquent literary critic (Jewish - what else) of the first third
of the last century, whom I have always greatly admired. I was much
interested by the versions on the Internet. How does one say "equivocator"
in German? One doesn't really. When I first saw that Wieland
(of Oberon fame) translates "equivocator" with J*s**t, I supposed 
it was just an expression of Protestant bigotry. But then I remembered
that Gundolf makes much of Shakespeare's religious agnosticism; and
just possibly the equivocator who couldn't equivocate himself to
heaven should be interpreted as parody of a Scholastic. What do you
think? Schiller couldn't cope with the scene at all. In monumental
bowdlerization he replaced it with a hymn - in Paul Gerhardt style -
to the dawn by one who had survived the gloom of night. I was reminded
that of all the poets with whose works I am familiar, Schiller has the
least sense of humor; in fact he has no humor at all. The fourth
translation I looked at was by Dorothea Tieck, the daughter of the
prolific Ludwig Tieck, who had Dorothea ghost-translate, -without
giving her credit, - for a German Shakespeare edition that he had
contracted to produce. Dorothea came up with nothing better
than "Doppelzuengler", an ugly word, meaning a double-tongued person,
sometimes applied to characters like myself who speak two languages;
while I, as I mentioned, consider myself an equivocator also in the
true Shakespearean sense. I've always been puzzled by theories of
"comic relief". Probably again, because there's something wrong with
me, I don't consider the Porter's Scene funny, but in some perspective,
the most tragic of all. Likewise the fool in Lear, and the folly in
Hamlet.

That should be enough to reassure you that I am alive and kicking.
Please stay well, give my regards to Ned, and tell me more about
your vasculitis if and when you feel like it.

Jochen