Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I was unfamiliar with the
Ivy Strategy Asset Fund Class C. A very quick, superficial
review has led me to the perhaps incorrect conclusion that
this Ivy fund is significantly less volatile than the
benchmark S&P average, having dropped in the collapse 
2 years ago, only 36% as opposed to 50% for the S&P, and
having since then appreciated only 30% as opposed to the
S&P's 60%. Before relying on these figures, you should
check them; they may be wrong.

For all that, I'm probably the wrong person for investment
advice. Some years ago I gave up short term trading in
common stocks, because I found that the cumulative sum of
small gains was sooner or later wiped out by a larger loss.
I found unacceptable the risk of a really big loss in a
sizeable market downturn. More recently I've invested only
in 3 month Treasury bills, which as you know, return zero
interest, because I'm very pessimistic about the nation's
economic future, no matter which party "governs". Although I
consider myself "liberal", even radical, I'm not persuaded
by the Keynesian denial of the future. ("In the long term
we are all dead.") Paradoxically, even though at 80 1/2 years,
I will be dead in the short term, for me, intuitively, the
future is the present, and the present is the future, with
respect to the preservation of the environment, and much
less important, with respect to maintaining the value of
the currency which cannot sustain indefinitely the fabrication
of money from thin air. I interpret the current unchecked 
expansion of the money supply as yet another financial bubble,
the biggest of them all, bound to burst sooner or later. Who
knows when?  I consider insane the political-economic policy
of preventing social upheaval by continued unlimited growth
of population and of economic activity.

Finally, and perhaps decisive for me, is the recognition that
any risks I take with capital in order to increase it, will
be rewarded at my death with 60% confiscation by combined
Federal and state estate taxes. For me the risk and the effort
don't seem worth it; at least not this morning.  You'd better
find yourself a financial adviser more attuned to the
contemporary scene.

I puzzled you when I wrote: 

_   Isn't, moreover, the very process of purporting
_   to affirm the horror, denial of its reality;
_   while the inability to contemplate the horror,
_   i.e. "denying" the horror, would be compellingly
_   to transpose it into the immediate present,
_   and thus the ultimate validation of its reality?
_   In other words: the concepts of denial and reality
_   are mutually incompatible.

Underlying these assertions is the concept that language is a screen
which both reveals and conceals what I feel, what I think, what I
experience, - was ich erlebe. When my thoughts and feelings are
indistinct and tenuous, language serves to amplify and to articulate
them, to make clear and distinct and unambiguous what might otherwise
remain nebulous fantasy. But the capacity of language to express
experience (Erleben) is severely limited. There is much in my life
which is "unsagbar", unspeakable. When I am badly hurt, I can only
scream in pain; when I am terribly angry, my language degenerates
into profanity and curses. When language purports to do justice to
severe and violent emotions, rather than a screen on which these
emotions are displayed, it becomes a mask by which these emotions
are hidden, in other words, an untruth, a lie. Consider the inescapable
falsehood of the statement: I feel your pain. Remember that Cordelia
was unable to put into words her love for her father, while Goneril
and Regan flattered the senile King Lear with what proved to be
empty rhetoric.

I contend that the horrors of the Holocaust, the horrors of the
Cambodian genocide, the ongoing horrors of genocidal massacres which
continue in one place or another month after month and year upon year,
are unspeakable in their reality; and that one deceives oneself when
one purports to do justice to that reality by speaking about it.
To purport to speak about the unspeakable is to deny its essence
as being unspeakable, i.e. by purporting to describe horror, one
is in fact concealing (denying) its essence of being "beyond words."
That is what I meant when I wrote: "the concepts of denial and reality
are mutually incompatible." Reality, by definition, cannot be denied.
Paradoxically, when one purports to "deny" horror, one is in effect
declining to trivialize horror with words, and therefore one is in
fact affirming the reality of horror as being unspeakable.

I note that the Khmer Rouge movement itself, from its origins to
its end, may be understood as an Hegelian misconception of the meaning
of language, of words. You reported:

_    When Sambath asked about all the innocents who had been killed,
_    Chea said he knew nothing about this.......that wasn't supposed
_    to happen.  He said: "I sympathize with individuals and with society. 
_    If I have to make a choice between the two, I choose society."
_     
The statement: "If I have to make a choice between the individual
and society, I choose society," lays bare the roots of the Khmer Rouge
tragedy. "Society" is a theoretical construct of language. "Individual"
is the projection onto the person next to me, - auf meinen Naechsten,
in Luther's German, onto "my neighbor" in the English of the Jacobeans,
of my own consciousness, of my awareness of my "self", of my "soul".
Chea's ideological bias in favor of "society" made him blind to the
existential (spiritual) reality of the policies he was promoting.
It was the Hegelian reification of language which desensitized Chea
to the consequences of his actions. The same argument, it seems to me
sheds light on the roots of the Nazi atrocities. They too subordinated
the individual to the society. They saw - and treated - Jews and Communists,
homosexuals and gypsies, and for that matter their own constituents,
das deutsche Volk, not as individual human beings but as "societies"
whose fantasized virtues or vices justified the destruction which the
Nazis inflicted on the world.

Or have I, once more, gone off the deep end?

Jochen