Dear Alex,

Thank you for your e-mail. The fact that as I walk through
this large cold empty house I must restrain my tears, corroborates
my surmise that at this time I wouldn't be up to a public memorial
service. The private one proceeds unabated.

You almost certainly were not a party to that psychiatry teaching session
in what was then called more or less truthfully the Boston Psychopathic
Hospital, its name long since euphemized into something less threatening.
The instructor was seducing his students to discuss personal experiences
with intra-family conflict. My response was unsatisfactory. I told him
I would never be angry with any member of my family. He replied: "They
will consider you emotionally empty. They will call you a monster."
That explains why I couldn't, can't and won't get angry with you. My
perplexities find literary expression, maybe a sonnet or two, but in
German, so it couldn't hurt, even if, against my principles, I wanted to.

Last night I resumed at about 10 p.m. writing sonnets, the first,
"Bild von Aphrodite" (Picture of Aphrodite) alludes to the Bartlett Head 
in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts a photo of which, - unless memory and/or 
fantasy deceive me, served as my "pin-up" girl already in Lowell R-31. 
The sonnet describes the transmutation of that classical ideal of beauty 
into contemporary flesh and blood.

The second sonnet, "Palindrome" recounts how subsequent to my first
glimpse of Margaret in front of the Packer Chapel in May 1946, my
prototypical Tamino experience, the memory of what I had seen sustained
me in the three difficult but highly productive years in Matthews 3
and Lowell R-31. Palindrome refers to the mirror phenomenon that the
image of her from an enchanted 63 year marriage seems similarly to 
sustain me now. But for how long? Who knows?

As for the legal brief in my appeal, it's fifty pages of prose, albeit
in at least 12 point double spaced print with 1" horizontal and 1.5"
vertical margins, prose which will most likely at least be glanced at
by three appellate judges and their six law clerks, all of them presumably
skimmed off the top of their profession. It's be a cold day in hell before
my nonlegal prose has nine readers. Besides, it's a stylistic challenge to
convey the news that formal justice is out of reach of us humans, or at
minimum of us humans with plumbing licenses, to convey that news to three
judges whose profession is a charade to demonstrate that we are an
affectionate, peaceloving and truthful people, awash in 1. Corinthians 13
love, and that our C.I.A. is the apotheosis of Pauline Christian charity.

That's an upbeat note on which to end. Is it time to resume telephone
contact? Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to all of you!

Jochen