Don, I missed your response somehow. I admire the scrupulous responsibility of the communicator, but I have trouble matching your description to what I know about the experiences of great communicators. Most can be, were, and still often are misunderstood. Everything can probably be misunderstood.

   I think of many great and highly moral books have been taken to be pornographic. I think of the painter De Kooning, who I consider great, and his comment that nobody noticed his women paintings were funny. Nobody had expected high art in the abstract expressionist vein to be funny. I believe that audiences form tenuous connective mindsets, rote expectations, which frequently misapprehend all sorts of things to an almost uncanny degree. When you go back and try to see how some of these things happened, it's hard to see what the problem was.

   If one can't risk being misunderstood I think one may risk falling into saying only those things that are ready-made to be expressed, a manner of illustration of those given meanings and intentions. It can be a kind of hidden censorship, at worst. It's not for me.

    I heard an opera singer yesterday telling how the sorts of things she routinely performed for German audiences got quite a different response from opera traditionalists in the U.S. One e-mail described her as a mole, a double-agent, on a mission to undermine western civilisation. All she could do was laugh (perhaps maniacally, while stroking a cat) and her company now calls her The Mole.