Dear Marion,

It's a disgrace that I don't even wait for your letters to
illuminate my computer screen before I start the next composition.
My compulsion to write is out of control, and as I have intimated
before, your address is a pretext: I write always to myself.
There's no denying that my mind has gone wild and escaped all
fetters of civility and reason; it's too late for any vaccine,
and without any thought-control officer in sight, the poor brain
will just have to wear itself out.

Before I try to address your very helpful questions, only one
thought, which has just occurred to me, although it has probably
long been obvious to you, namely that it's an incongruous mistake
to describe consciousness as a phenomenon defined by and limited
to the individual, - shades of the bugaboo of the Platonized,
Christianized "soul", where obviously in many dimensions, e.g.
language and politics, consciousness is a social continuum that
involves many, in fact involves uncounted individuals. The circumstance
that the boundaries of such a social continuum, that the elements of
social consciousness cannot be identified, should not stand in the way; 
the elements of individual consciousness are similarly unsusceptible
to definition. The concept a consciousness which transcends the
individual mind seems to me a very fertile one, although I can imagine
that to you it is obvious, and you might ask why it took me so long
to reach this conclusion. The (literary) challenge now is to avoid
being swept into irresponsible Hegel-like generalizations.

As for your question concerning the quotation from Faust:

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Und freilich ist nicht viel damit getan.
Was sich dem Nichts entgegenstellt,
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt
So viel als ich schon unternommen
Ich wußte nicht ihr beizukommen
Mit Wellen, Stürmen, Schütteln, Brand-
Geruhig bleibt am Ende Meer und Land!
Und dem verdammten Zeug, der Tier- und Menschenbrut,
Dem ist nun gar nichts anzuhaben:
Wie viele hab ich schon begraben!
Und immer zirkuliert ein neues, frisches Blut.
So geht es fort, man möchte rasend werden!
Der Luft, dem Wasser wie der Erden
Entwinden tausend Keime sich,
Im Trocknen, Feuchten, Warmen, Kalten!
Hätt ich mir nicht die Flamme vorbehalten,
Ich hätte nichts Aparts für mich.

FAUST:
So setzest du der ewig regen,
Der heilsam schaffenden Gewalt
Die kalte Teufelsfaust entgegen,
Die sich vergebens tückisch ballt!
Was anders suche zu beginnen
Des Chaos wunderlicher Sohn!

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Wir wollen wirklich uns besinnen,
Die nächsten Male mehr davon!
Dürft ich wohl diesmal mich entfernen?

FAUST:
Ich sehe nicht, warum du fragst.
Ich habe jetzt dich kennen lernen
Besuche nun mich, wie du magst.
Hier ist das Fenster, hier die Türe,
Ein Rauchfang ist dir auch gewiß.

Mephistopheles entered Faust's study as a black poodle
who had trailed him on his walk through the vernal countryside
with his teaching fellow, Wagner. Now, in his study, despairing
of reason, Faust resorts to magic to discover the secrets of
nature and conjures up various spirits, ultimately forcing the
metamorphosis of the poodle (ihr habt mich weidlich schwitzen
machen, - you surely made me sweat) into an itinerant (graduate)
student, - Ein fahrender Skolast, Der Kasus macht mich lachen -
makes me laugh. Mephisto describes his metier as destruction,
and laments that none of his tools is really effective, except
(perhaps) fire, as proprietary to him. Faust then summarizes
the ultimate futility of Mephisto's efforts by noting that
Mephisto counters the creative healing power (of nature) with
the devil's icy fist maliciously clenched, in vain:

So setzest du der ewig regen,
Der heilsam schaffenden Gewalt
Die kalte Teufelsfaust entgegen,
Die sich vergebens tückisch ballt!

and adds with dismissive irony

Was anders suche zu beginnen
Des Chaos wunderlicher Sohn!

(Since your efforts at destruction fail)
Why don't you try something else,
you curious son of chaos.

This challenge to Mephisto, try something else, entails also
the irony that Mephisto accepts it and does try something else,
albeit ultimately unsuccessfully, namely to destroy Faust by seducing
him to a life of lechery and pleasure. I'm mildly fascinated by
the implications of Goethe's denying Mephisto's proprietary claim
to fire, allowing Mephisto nothing more than:

Die kalte Teufelsfaust ....,
Die sich vergebens tückisch ballt!

Mephisto's claim to fire is an allusion to hell,
and Goethe does not believe in hell fire.
In a later scene, when contemplating suicide,
Faust declines to tremble at the notion of hell
as a dark cavern (dunklen Hoehle)
in which the mind invents its own damnation:

Vor jener dunkeln Höhle nicht zu beben,
In der sich Phantasie zu eigner Qual verdammt,

Here's the entire monologue:

Ja, kehre nur der holden Erdensonne
Entschlossen deinen Rücken zu!
Vermesse dich, die Pforten aufzureißen,
Vor denen jeder gern vorüberschleicht!
Hier ist es Zeit, durch Taten zu beweisen,
Das Manneswürde nicht der Götterhöhe weicht,
Vor jener dunkeln Höhle nicht zu beben,
In der sich Phantasie zu eigner Qual verdammt,
Nach jenem Durchgang hinzustreben,
Um dessen engen Mund die ganze Hölle flammt;
In diesem Schritt sich heiter zu entschließen,
Und wär es mit Gefahr, ins Nichts dahin zu fließen.

These comments invite the further consideration
that my letters would be less inane if a larger portion
of them were devoted to (classical) literature at the
expense of my own ruminations. That's a preference you
would have to express.

_                   * * * * *

Race relations in Konnarock have been governed by the KKK
from the time (circa 1898) that the lumbering town was
carved out of virgin forest by Luther (sic) Hassinger
a Pennsylvania entrepreneur who invaded the region with
a troop of Scandinavian and German craftsmen to rape
the mountainsides of lumber as far as the eye could see.
My father sometimes commented that various of his patients
were Ku Klux Klanners, and I myself frequented the shack of
one of them, - name I've forgotten, - an elderly couple 
to whose house across the creek in Laurel Valley I (then aged
12-14) would drive regularly to replenish our supply of eggs.
The only reason there's no history of lynching in Konnarock 
is that there haven't been any niggers to lynch.

I remember driving across Iron Mountain with Mrs. Thelma Shumate,
nee Magnuson whose father came with Luther Hassinger from Pennsylvania
when Konnarock was founded. Thelma was a nurse of sorts, who helped
my parents when they were very busy. Her husband, whose first name
I can't remember, was a farmer-carpenter of sorts, who helped build both
the "Medical Center" and the palatial house where I am writing now.
As I negotiated the sharp curves in the road, - I can remember exactly
where, - Thelma explained that she wasn't particularly prejudiced against
niggers, but knew that they had a special smell. I didn't say anything.
Should I, and if so what?

In seventy years, I've never seen a black person in Konnarock
except for convict-slaves patching the dirt roads under the
muzzles of shot-guns wielded by stony faced guards. To this
day, no black person has ever dared settle in this valley or
on its mountain-sides.

Ironically, the only black person who makes an appearance in the
village nowadays is the current doctor, whom the medical corporation
that bought the local medical facilities has imported from the Caribbean.
She doesn't live here, however, but commutes the 50 miles from Bristol
on the days that she makes herself available. I've never seen her;
it's said that she's friendly and soft-spoken, and that the local
populace accept her, I suppose holding their noses, just as they did
when that German Jew doctor came here seventy years ago. If they could
get used to him, I suppose they can get used to anything.

It must have been toward the end of the war, 1944 or 1945, that the
Commonwealth wanted to set up a slave-labor camp for black convicts,
and to my horror, the Rev. Able Kenneth Hewitt, D.D., who was then the
mission superintendent and a missionary colleague of my father's, at
that time well disposed to us, sold them the half-acre tract of land 
that separated the newly built St. Matthew Lutheran Church (in which I,
aged 14, more or less, had installed the wiring of the ceiling chandeliers)
from its parsonage, sold it to them for their gulag. I remember now
thinking then of the thirty pieces of silver. It was an incongruous
situation; I was offended by the church's complicity in what I considered
cruelty, and I was frightened. I approached Pastor Hewitt, nimby,(not
in my backyard) I said, and expressed my concern that the proposed Camp
right across the road, providing us plain sight of all that went on,
might be too reminiscent of Buchenwald to permit my father to sleep. 
Whether without or with my father's consent, the camp was installed,
and his sleep seemed undisturbed. He was asked to serve as prison
physician. I remember a discussion with him, in which he expressed his
conviction that his involvement might be of benefit to the black prisoners.
I don't think anything ever came of his willingness to help. The prisoners
whom I subsequently observed working on the road, not too strenuously,
seemed reconciled to their lot. After a few years, the camp was dismantled,
to be replaced by a storage facility for the Highway Department.

In Damascus, where I practiced general medicine from 1956 to 1962,
there was one black family, whose name I've forgotten. During the years
I was in Damascus, their children had to take the bus to the nigger
school in Abingdon, 15 miles away.  They had a very bright, attractive
daughter in her late twenties who was looking for work. When I negotiated
with Herbert Wright, the local undertaker who boasted that he covered
up the doctors' mistakes, what he thought of my hiring this pleasant
young woman as a secretary, he said it wouldn't work because the local
men considered her potentially useful only for prostitution.

So far as I was concerned, having a separate waiting room for blacks,
as had been suggested, was out of the question.  There was Effie
Meadows, a short squat white woman in her sixties with yellow hair,
arthritis and heart failure, who was a regular patient of mine. One day,
when she came, the waiting room was crowded, and the only vacant chair 
was next to the black girl I wasn't permitted to hire. Mrs. Meadows said:
"What d'you mean making me sit next to that nigger woman?" I raised my
voice so that all my patients would get the message: "Mrs. Meadows,"
I said, "You should be honored and grateful that that lady is willing
to sit next to someone like you." Mrs. Meadows didn't walk out; she had
nowhere else to go, and she also came back for the next visit.

That's it for today. My prescriptions for Health Care reform require
a whole book, on which I'll start tomorrow. Meanhwile, I'll append below
what was on my mind yesterday.
 
Dear Marion,

One key to the conundrum which I defined in my "We
ought to vote in Green Cove" letter is the presumption 
that every thing that I do is my action as an individual,
is the result of my "decision" and of my "free will."
Isn't that the very essence of democracy, that each
of us is free to exercise her/his will to vote for
whom she pleases? It is a crime to lobby or to campaign
or to try to exercise any influence on the free will of
the voter within 100 feet of the polling booth. You or
I have the right to express our own "free will", free
to vote for whomever we choose. It's an individual 
decision for each one of us.  That's correct, isn't it?

But the most miniscule of introspections suggests to me
that at least what _I_ do is not a matter of my "free will".
Granted that I anticipate much of what I do, and that I am
concurrently aware of my action. But my awareness and my
anticipation are not themselves objects of awareness and
anticipation.  In other words, I "will" what I do, but I
cannot "will" what I "will", and even less can I will what
I will what I will. (I'm plagiarizing Schopenhauer.) In
other words, with respect to my supposed "free will" I can
discern no chain of causation. The action appears, it's just
there, and the thought that somehow I "willed" or "caused"
what is done by me, is merely that: a thought, an illusion,
a figment of my imagination. It's not just the vote that I
cast, it's also the words that come to mind, that I type into
the computer file, the images of my surroundings, of my houses,
of the towns and counties and cities in which I live, all 
these words and images are latent in my mind, "encoded"
somewhere, somehow in the tissues of my brain, and find their
expression when I speak, when I write, when I walk or drive
around the neighborhood, none of them selected or appointed
by me, none of them expressions or reflections of anything
that might reasonably be called free will.

I love Jello. When I've been real nice and done exactly what I'm
supposed to do, Margaret will reward me with a bowl of Jello. She
likes to put little pieces of fruit, strawberry, blueberry, apple
or peach into the Jello, because the fruit makes the Jello healthier
and it also makes it more interesting. My mind, as I understand it, 
is like the tiniest of blueberries, and a bit shrivelled at that,
buried in a huge bowl of Jello along with thousands, nay millions
of other tiny more or less shrivelled blueberries. It doesn't happen
in our house, but on Olympus in Oerlinghausen, when my grandmother
Elfriede made Jello and my grandfather Joel was meyered in a sour mood,
he would bang his fist on the table; the mass of Jello would shake and
quiver and tremble and each embedded monadic blueberry would tremble
with it, and not only tremble but would tell itself and its fellow
blueberries that it was trembling of its own free will. Now with whom
do you agree: with the blueberry that claims it trembled of its own
free will or with the Court jester Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who said
all the trembling was the expression of a preestablished harmony,
(praestabilierte Harmonie), pre-ordained by the Goddess Elfriede
when she poured the Jello and precipitated by the God Joel when he
banged with his fist. Neither Ernst nor Fritz nor Heinz were permitted
to bang their fists on the table, because as Joel, identifying himself,
liked to quote at dinner: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.  In any event,
speaking now as a blueberry, I'm reluctant to claim that the shaking
and trembling to which I feel myself subject is consequence of my decision,
of my doing, of my free will.

Unless we can clean up this mess, and extricate the millions of shrivelled
blueberries from the sticky Jello matrix in which Elfriede and Joel have
trapped them, dry them off and turn them into free-thinking, upstanding
responsible citizens, we'll have to rethink "democracy." Maybe we should
study zoology and learn from the geese that I can see flying in formation
overhead and from the minnows that I can see swimming geometrically aligned
in a school in the pools of White Top Creek. Is it plausible that each of
them should make an autonomous conscious decision to position itself in the
exact location where it flies or swims with its fellows. And even if there
existed, invisible and inscrutable to us, some official procedure manual or
some authorized guidelines by which fish and geese positioned themselves,
is it plausible to argue that each goose, that each silvery minnow makes
a deliberate conscious decision of its own free will to adhere to such a
manual or to abide by such guidelines, each goose and each minnow being
"free" to decide whether or not to comply?

I'm not persuaded. Occam's razor mandates the assumption that geese and
minnows move in concert by virtue not of private, but of common intention.
They move in concert. "Concert" is the Schluesselwort, when one considers
the effort we make, having totally separated, isolated and individualized
from ourselves and each other, then to join once more "in concert" to achieve
reintegration into an esthetic community.

6 Go to the ant, thou sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise:
7 which having no guide,
overseer, or ruler,
8 provideth her meat in the summer,
and gathereth her food in the harvest.
_                  Proverbs 6

Assuming it's true that the ant "provideth her meat in the summer,
and gathereth her food in the harvest," does she do so pursuant
to an individual act of free will, or from obedience to some formica
statute or regulation that God laid down for the ants, or that the
ants in formicratic assembly voted to impose on themselves, or does
she do it because she is compelled by some amino acid sequence
in her genes?  Just a question.

Acting or playing in concert relieves one of personal, individual
responsibility for everything except following the conductors baton.
Once communal action has been mentioned, one sees myriad examples:
in language, in politics, in science.  In each instance individual
consciousness merges with that of the community, and subsequently in
turn distinguishes itself from community consciousness. There is
continuing to and fro, hin und her between community and individuality.

On occasion, the tension between community consciousness and individual
consciousness becomes unbearable. That's where the prophet steps in.
Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus of old. Luther, Kierkegaard more recently,
all concerned with redeeming the individual blueberry from the mass of
the Jello. The modern code word is subjectivity, inwardness. When Luther
referred to "Glaube", faith, and identified "Glaube" as the key to 
"salvation", and intended the unconditional relationship to God, he
achieved also the unconditional separation of the individual from society,
a step that would have been fatal, had it not been promptly reversed in a
myriad of ways, most obviously the unconditional subjection of the newly
"liberated" (cf. Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen) "Lutheran"
Christian to the authority of the local princely tyrant, - or tyrannical
prince, if you prefer. It's worthwhile to note, that Jesus also was not
consistent. He said first, My kingdom is not of this world. The Kingdom
of God is within you. Then he contradicted himself and said in effect,
establish that kingdom which is within you and make it outward: Go into
all the world and teach every nation. And you know where that led: to
Konnarock.

So both you and I are right. As usual, there's no disagreement. We have an
affirmative obligation to be involved, to vote for the best candidate, to
donate to the most patriotic of causes, to become a member of the party,
and of course to wear on ones lapel, the miniature American flag, that
latter-day Parteiabzeichen without which one cannot win the confidence of
the public, to join the army, the police, and even the secret police to
maintain law and order and to keep the country safe, and above all, to
have faith in the manifest destiny of the community from which we are
infact unable to escape, even if that were our wish, to shout and sing:
God Bless America, We are his Chosen People. Aren't we? You believe that,
don't you?  Inevitably and unavoidably there will come a revulsion
against such involvement, a revulsion which sends some as hermits into
the wilderness, and causes others in desperation to try to find their
identity in the works of art that they create. Happy New Year.

Jochen