December 23, 2011

Dear Cyndy,

It turns out that the e-mail that I sent last night was incomplete, because this morning, in the course of the matitudinal day-dreaming that I find so productive, I conceptualized a continuation of the novel. Independent of what goes on "at home", or largely so, the melodrama on the Island continues.  While Katenus, as is his custom sits in a beach chair contemplating the breakers under the setting sun and making notes for an essay on Justice, Police President Leopold Brandes, - whom I've rechristened Leopold to avoid all possibility of confusion with a flesh- and-blood Martin Brandes who practices forensic psychiatry in Maryland - Leopold Brandes obsessed with Katenus' housekeeper Elly, ambushes and kills Katenus. Then, in true Island judicial tradition, Brandes as police president investigates his own crime and determines Katenus' death to be a suicide. Furthermore, on search of Katenus' mansion for the suicide note there is discovered a letter from Mengs approvingly quoting Rilkes maxim about the desirability, about the existential need for ones own, individual death (seinen eigenen Tod).  Relying on the literary authority of none less than Nancy Drew, Brandes further determines that dying ones own death (seinen eigenen Tod sterben) means committing suicide, that in fact Katenus' death was an assisted suicide, illegal in this state, a death for which Brandes ultimately holds Rilke responsible; but since Rilke is no longer subject to the courts' jurisdiction, Brandes issues a warrant for the arrest of Rilke's accomplice, Jonathan Mengs. - I know all this sounds loony, and it almost surely is,  but so is the Massachusetts judiciary.  Wait until language, poetry, until rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, irony and subtle sarcasm catch up, then maybe the loonyness won't seem quite so objectionable.

Jochen

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