Dear Alex,

The trash is collected on Wednesday morning. Even now I should be in the
basement filling 4 mil. contractors' trash bags with "boxes of string to
short to use", "tools to be sharpened or discarded" and uncounted empty
tins that once contained home-baked cakes... But the older I get, and
the more porous my memory, the more my writing needs to be a real-time project,
in which the thought and its expression are fused. Writing is non-intrusive.
Its great advantage is that it need not be read, it may be ignored, thrown
in the waste-basket or electronically erased without having been admitted to
consciousness. I'm not offended that very little of my writing is read, 
that even less of it is "understood". That's the price I pay for the freedom 
to think and feel. Warning: Parental guidance required. This letter is not 
for children or adolescents.

Margaret was very literate. She considered everything that she wrote as
documentation of her spiritual existence. Because she wanted to preserve
that documentation, she made carbon copies of all her letters as she
wrote them. (She never learned to use the computer.) The earliest compact
between Margaret and myself was that not everything "need be said" but 
that there should be nothing between us "which could not be said." She
(and Janet) had no compunction about reading their maternal ancestors'
most intimate letters. In her declining years, much of Margaret's fantasy
was preoccupied with the (sexual) exploits of one of her polygamous ancestors.
She would surely forgive you for eavesdropping two years after her death
on the dinner conversations about theology in Pocono in September 1949, 
68 years ago, at which you yourself were present and presumably dutifully 
ate your spinach.

I selected her letter of September 6, 1949, as documentation of the person
Margaret had been before she came under my spell. It was written less than
four months after Friday, May 20, 1949, the day of our threshold St. Matthew 
Passion encounter in Bethlehem; it was written four weeks before the evening
of October 4, 1949, when she spent three hours on a date with Leo Hameson
who was in competition with me for her affection. That was when Margaret
chose me over Leo. I consider the candor (and innocence)  with which she 
reported all this to me, an index of the quality of our relationship. Please 
don't deem it invidious when I write that the hypothetical issue of
voyeurism which you raise does not necessarily reflect exhibitionism on 
my part.

A very tenacious childhood memory compels confessions: I remember as a
very young child, I can't have been more than one or two years old, when
my sister, two years older than I, and I were bathed in the same tub, I
made sexual advances on her. The adults must have noticed, because the
joint bathing was curtailed. Before I became sexually mature, I fantasized
marrying my sister, not because of any physical attraction, but because 
she was familiar to me, I was not afraid of her, and - I suppose - I was
intimidated by my mother's hostility and aggressiveness. My adolescence,
so far as I perceive, was characterized, if anything, by specific allergy
to any incestuous inclinations regarding my sister.

The ineradicable subliminal role which the role of incest (in which the
Gods of the Greeks were eminently accomplished) plays in my subconscious
is documented in my lengthy novel "Döhring" which is the story of a 
sixty year old widowed academic who befriends as an "adoptive daughter"
"Dorothea", a thirty year-old spiritually shipwrecked womens' liberation 
crusader, who first seduces, then abandons, then betrays him, and at
whose wedding party to another man in Döhrings ancestral mansion,  
that house is destroyed by fire. If Margaret had been my sister, my
life would languished in a passion impossible of consummation, no
different from my fate if she had chosen Leo Hameson over me.

The question: Do I understand or do I misunderstand?

Love, Jochen