Dear Marion,

Now it's my turn to thank you for a wonderful letter, and
not only figuratively but literally also, telling as it did
about various wonders which your generosity permits me to
experience vicariously. As I may or may not have told you,
I installed television sets both in Konnarock and in Belmont
for Margrit's convenience. She rarely used them. Margaret
and I never look at television. Take that not as a boast but
as a confession.

The spectacle in Westminster Abbey seems to me of social and
cultural importance, worth thinking about, even if perhaps not
worth watching all day. Worth remembering when we fret about
the maldistribution of wealth. Royalty and nobility are the
concave mirrors in which unimaginative "ordinary" people see
themselves magnified, because without magnification, they are
unable to see themselves at all. One of my patients sardonically
remarked on the farce that the bride and groom had been cohabiting -
sleeping together was his euphemism - for a number of years, a
circumstance which covers the ceremony, if one takes it at all
seriously, with an icing of fraud. If you want to know how I feel
about wedding ceremonies, look at:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ernstmeyer/andere/K41.TXT

The pageantry in Westminster Abbey is, if one finds the proper light
with which to view it, not all that remote from the inverse pageantry
of "Kruisdraging", which as you probably know is another name by which
Pieter Bruegel's "Procession to Calvary" is known. After all, Westminster
Abbey and Calvary have in common that they are the goals, termini ad quem,
of religious processions. "The Mill and the Cross" as the cinema
interpretation of Bruegel's painting I see as yet another overlay to
the infinite psychic and social complexity of Christ's Passion, an
epic myth in which I think I recognize the crux of our humanness, our
inhumanity and our humanity. More of that elsewhere, later.

Looking at the Bruegel painting, my attention was fixed on the contradiction
between the miniscule crosses already erected on Calvary within the black
ring of blood-thirsty - Sensations-lustige - spectators, and the 
monumentally incongruous windmill perched high on a rocky crag in an
anonymous landscape. According to your account:

_    "The painting features a wind-mill atop a high,
_    vertical rock, and the movie shows the miller's family
_    living in a cave at the base, where they grind grain
_    utilizing the powerful, rotating timbers connecting
_    to the windmill, and with a huge series of wooden ladders
_    ascending inside the hollowed-out rock to the enormous
_    windmill on top."

I'm sorry. The engineer in me is sceptical. Is there an historical
basis for this hugely impractical inefficient and expensive windmill
design? Off hand, I find it more plausible that the Mill perched high
on the rock is the painterly expression of the spiritual incongruity
of kruisdraging, of crucifixion, while substructure of:
_                                          the miller's family
_    living in a cave at the base, where they grind grain
_    utilizing the powerful, rotating timbers connecting
_    to the windmill, and with a huge series of wooden ladders
_    ascending inside the hollowed-out rock to the enormous
_    windmill on top.

is the crude improvisation of a (pseudo)marxist cinematographer who
is offended by and whose spirit has no access to the overwhelming
religious tradition that is the theme of the painting.

On another topic:
My allusion to the Merchant of Venice intended to show the similarity
between Shakespeare's case and my own, in that in both instances
the case might be won my the literal application of the law. In
the Merchant, a pound of flesh but not a drop of blood; in my case
forced removal of every plumbing fitting requires the explicit
condemnation of every fitting, a task far beyond certainly Mr.
Ciarmataro's wit. Incidentally, the removal of Judge Hopkins, and
the reinstallation of Judge "rip it all out" Macdonald may well be
a piece of Superior Court chicanery. I have no evidence in this instance.
However in the dismissal of my first case (after I had won), the
Superior Court made a special provision to lock the courthouse doors
against my attempt to re-enter, by stipulating that the case was not
to be re-opened without especial permission from the chief administrative
judge who was apparently much concerned to protect Nantucket from my
calumny. In the end, it was Mr. Ciarmataro himself who re-opened 
Nantucket's festering sores with his cease-and-desist order and who
keeps these wounds open with his stubborn insistence to have it all
ripped out.

Once one understands that the failure of adjudication is not a
consequence of judicial tort, but a reflection of inherent imperfection
and inadequacy of language, one sees the judges no longer as knaves,
but as victims of their own pretentions to justice. Again, Lessing's
immortal wisdom: So seid ihr alle, betrogene Betrueger. I agree that
the judges rule "in Equity", that the dictates of the law have been
universally set aside in favor of the judge's "conscience". Even more
fundamentally, I believe that the ultimate canon of justice is the 
preservation of the power of the Court. Initially, the courts are 
strongly biased in favor of the municipality as a cognate institution.
Nantucket, characteristically, does not reciprocate, does not respect
the judges, the courts, or the dignity of the judicial process.
All that I need to do to win the case is to demonstrate Nantucket's
underlying contempt for the court, more easily said than done.
In this regard, the old lawyers were very helpful. Just how the new
lawyers will shape up remains to be seen.

I've rewritten the last half of chapter 45 of Die Freunde. If you have
the humor and the time, tell me what you think of the lastest version.
I hope you will have, or have had, a nice weekend on the Farm.

Jochen