In looking around for the fancy “-phobia” word signifying a fear of kites, I ran across three things that this entry is not about: an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” in which Dewey apparently puts to rest his dad’s fear of kites; the title of an episode of what appears to be an anime cartoon entitled “Marsupilami”; and a song by one Selma Booking entitled “A Cloud’s Fear of Kites.” I was unable to find the fancy word I wanted on the Web or in any of my books about strange words. Some “fear” words I did find that are of interest if not particular relevance include the following:

• sophophobia. the fear of learning, which I don’t have
• myrmecophobia. the fear of ants
• maledictaphobia. the fear of bad words
• phalacrophobia. the fear of going bald
• pogonophobia. the fear of beards, which I’m inclined to say I don’t have, as I have a beard, though it may simply be the case that I’m too frightened of it to shave it off
• taphephobia. the fear of being buried alive
• bromidrosiphobia. the fear of body odor, which I keep at bay by using lots and lots and lots of deodorant
• lepidophobia. the fear of butterflies
• nephophobia. the fear of clouds
• hypophobia. the fear of a lack of fear
• arachibutyrophobia. the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
• bathysiderodromophobia. the fear of subways or underground trains

When I mention a fear of kites, I don’t mean that I have a fear of any of the following things listed in the American Heritage Dictionary under the entry for kite:

• Any of the light sails of a ship used in a light wind.
• Any of various predatory birds of the hawk family Accipitridae, having a long, often forked tail and long pointed wings (ok, if I saw one of these up close with its talons going for my eyes, I’d probably be afraid of it, but I’m not generally speaking afraid of these birds).
• A piece of negotiable paper representing a fictitious financial transaction and used temporarily to sustain credit or raise money.
• A bank check drawn on insufficient funds to take advantage of the time interval required for collection
• A bank check altered to show a larger amount
• (Ok, these last three freak me out a bit too, but they’re still not what I’m ultimately talking about.)

It’s the standard definition I’m thinking of: The diamond of paper held rigid by two sticks and followed by a tail of bows; or the standard arrow-shaped kite you can get at your neighborhood drug store in April. Or, in my case, a big multi-colored parrot kite complete with fluttering tail feathers. It is this kite that I flew today, the first time I ever remember successfully flying a kite.

I do remember going out to the practice football field of the high school I lived near when I was a kid and flying kites with my family. On one such outing, I was stung by a bee and found myself treated to a poultice of saliva and tobacco. I was too young to manage a kite during these outings. And I don’t remember ever getting a kite very far up in the sky on later outings when I had my own kite (gray and black like a jet with discongruous eyespots on the wings that in retrospect I imagine would have made such a real jet a pretty easy target).

Today, we were entertaining the almost-four-year-old child of a couple friend who just had another baby. It had been windy last night, and we had the kite (an out-of-the-blue (figuratively speaking, though it could be taken literally) birthday present from a couple of years ago) in the car, so we decided to hit a park today and try to fly it. Mleeka flew it for a few minutes before landing it in a power line. Enter fear number one. I was sufficiently indoctrinated by the power company’s crudely-drawn cartoon commercials when I was a child to know that if you screw with power lines by doing such things as flying kites into them or attempting to get kites out of them, you’re looking for a cooking. This power line was thin and bent at the slightest provocation, so I wasn’t keen on tugging at it with the kite string lest it snap and fall down on me snakelike. So I cut the string. Luckily, the kite fluttered down a few minutes later thanks to a gust, and we retied the string and had another go, this time at a substantially greater distance from the power lines. It was my turn.

And I made a pretty good go of it. I got the kite pretty far up there, getting string burn on my hand as I paid out the line and guided the kite to prevent it from taking nose dives (of which it did several with what would surely have been catastrophic, beak-altering results for a real parrot). Now when I say I got it pretty far up there, I don’t mean that I got it way way up there. It was maybe 100 or 200 feet high, and I hear tell of people who get their kites so high that they’re unrecognizeable dots in the sky. The kite was high for me, but not high by a kite’s standards.

And the higher the kite went, the more apprehensive I became. I wasn’t afraid of kite as object. I wasn’t even afraid so much as increasingly uncomfortable about something I couldn’t and still can’t confidently put a label on.

I’m partially inclined to think my apprehension had to do with a perceived diminution of control: The higher the kite goes, the more influence smaller movements have on it; and the harder it becomes to steer; and the less attached it seems to the string, while at the same time it feels as if it must (or perish the world) stay on that string and in my sight and under my control. But I’m not sure that’s my issue. It may also have partially to do with my long-held notion that the reeling in of a kite is a Sisyphean task, that we tend to be reluctant to bring in the line when there’s a good wind, but as surely as we begin to bring it in, the wind picks up, the result being a kite in flux, never quite high enough and never home but always needing to be reeled in. Essentially, by flying a kite, you’re setting yourself up either to have to reel in a whole bunch of slack line once the string breaks at a point six miles from your spool or to keep up an Old-Man-And-The-Sea scale epic battle with the kite.

I suppose it’s uncertainty that gets my goat. That seems to be the unifying gotcha of both of my primary theories about this little neurosis. The closest thing to this in my phobia book is “kakorrhaphiophobia” — the fear of failure.

I first encountered the work of William Gaddis in his book J.R., which I selected randomly from the two or three of his books available at my local library. I heard about Gaddis as an influence on one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, who had also been compared to Pynchon and DeLillo, both of whom also were new names attached to works a few of which I later read. I kept forgetting about Gaddis until recently. J.R. is among the hardest books I’ve ever read. It’s one that you have to learn to read as you read it, and much of the text is cant and jargon with no immediate context. I was briefly inclined to suggest that it was a work of Impressionistic fiction, and maybe it does fit that description in some way, though Impressionistic fiction I’ve more recently learned tends to be work of a more personal nature. This distinction courtesy of the Holman and Harmon (formerly Thrall, Hibbard and Holman, I believe) A Handbook to Literature. After giving it some more thought, I’m inclined to label J.R. something closer to cubism. It’s a fragmented story for sure, done almost completely in unattributed dialogue (and it’s a long book, weighing in at 700 - 800 pages) with no transitions and precious few plot markers. As you learn to read it, you begin to see the larger story, and a vaguely unified whole emerges by the end of the book. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read.

But this entry is about The Recognitions, another book by Gaddis that I’ve just begun. I had read reviews of this book after finishing the other, and it’s reported to be an even harder read, longer and at least as complex. I’m only 40 pages into about 1000, but I’m so far not finding this to be the case. The Recognitions reads sort of like something out of Steinbeck so far.

Because my memory’s bad and I think this is a book I’ll want to remember, I’m recording here some notes and impressions from the first few pages.

The blurb on the back cover describes Wyatt Gwyon as someone who “forges not from larceny but from love… exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters.” Further, “In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and the fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon’s forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch.” So naturally I’m on the lookout for things that suggest falsehood or counterfeiting.

At the beginning of the book, young Wyatt’s mom dies overseas. She contracted appendicitis aboard a ship and was butchered by the ship surgeon, who it turned out was not a surgeon after all but a counterfeiter who had forged his papers. There’s falsehood number one. Within the first few dozen pages, there are several odd turns of phrase, descriptions of things in negative terms or in ways that suggest an uncertainty of appearance or validity, of which just a few follow:

• “Now he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in teh faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world… bent on seeing that he pay in this one.” (5)
• “Since it is not true…” (5, just a couple of sentences later)
• “for to tell the truth, none of these excellent fellows knew for certain what a woman looked like” (9)
• mention on page 10 of a monk dissembling tears by rubbing quicklime in his eyes so that he might be remembered as “Epiclantos” or “weeping so much”
• Wyatt Gwyon’s dad manages to get his dead wife carried in a funeral carriage reserved for virgins
• The elder Gwyon, a minister, is open-minded about other religions and is chastized for it, though he seems one of the more humane and sympathetic of the early characters.
• By contrast, Aunt May, who plays a central role in Wyatt’s rearing, is a Pope-hating fundamentalist who preaches a doctrine of hellfire and suffering rained down from an apparently benevolent god.

It’s important to watch for duplicity of character in this book, I suspect, as the last two bullets (and the theme as noted by the cover blurb) suggest.

Something else of note is Gaddis’s use of a word new to me, “fainaiguing” as in “though some fainaiguing had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country” (25). (Note yet more duplicity heaped on duplicity: a minister is having an original artwork certified fake so that he can get it illegally out of the country.) This must be the Italian word we bastardized to get “finagling.”

And finally (for this installment), Gaddis calls to mind an old story I had forgotten (which incidentally may not be irrelevant to the theme of counterfeiting/dissembling): “[Gwyon] was called back to the Seminary for a refresher course, and it was at that time that he developed a taste for schnapps, and started the course of mithridatism which was to serve him so well in his later years” (8). Again, we’ve got some duplicity here (along with a later mention of his forming a schnapps-sized hollow in a book in his study) — a difference between the behavior one might expect of a minister and what’s actually the case. But back to the story. I probably wouldn’t even have gotten the reference (glossing over it as a reference to mithraism) had I not recently been thinking of A.E. Housman’s poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” which was called to mind because I had begun rereading Paradise Lost. In “T,TiSS,” you find the line “Malt does more than Milton can/to justify God’s ways to man,” which is a reference to Milton’s suggestion that his goal in PL is “to justify the ways of God to man.” Housman also tells briefly in his poem the story of Mithridates, a king who, fearful that his henchmen would poison him, began taking small (and progressively larger) quantities of poison each day to build up a tolerance. (More duplicity here.) Of course this all coincidentally comes together very nicely. It’s also striking (to me) and a little weird that I had begun (and as quickly halted) a rereading of Milton’s Aereopagitica, in which he defends a free press and in which part of his argument is essentially that it’s how who’s reading something uses/interprets it that makes a book fit or unfit rather than the book itself. This meshes nicely with the idea of Gwyon as a minister who reads profane works but maintains a basic humanity that most would do well to emulate.