From The Danish Notebook

by Michael Palmer

Dear Iselin,

You ask me to connect the dots. You ask whether I remember the “old childhood drawings” where you connected the dots until a figure appeared. I remember connecting the dots; I remember the dragon that appeared, the angel that appeared. A winged horse once, a small wooden house. I remember sitting on the floor in a house, connecting the dots of a wooden house. Sitting on a coco rug on the tile floor of a house, my grandfather’s house. Connecting the dots of a wooden house, a dragon with an enormous tail, a horse with wings outspread. But I remember as well refusing once in a while to connect the dots in their numerical order, choosing instead to make a random pattern, with lines crossing other lines...

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I broke off the above some weeks ago, unable to continue, fearing that I would fall into novelistic language in telling what, after all, is a fairly simple story, but one that I had repressed from my memory for many years. Now, the heat today once again brings me back to it. I’ll start again.

I’ve been thinking about the dots. Two years ago, in the intense heat of August, I was wandering with a friend, the poet Norma Cole, through the streets of Paris. We crossed the Pont-Neuf to the Ile de La Cité and entered the Place Dauphine. As we traversed the Place in the direction of the Rue de Harlay I was overcome with the kind of obscure emotion which, for me at least, often precedes the recollection of a vanished thought or experience. I turned to look over my right shoulder and recognized the weathered exterior of the Hotel Henri IV. We continued walking to a nearby cafe as the pieces of this memory rapidly reassembled themselves. I felt, quite literally, as if I were being drawn downward into a dream state where fiction and fact, imagination and recollection, could no longer be separated.

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