M Train

by Patti Smith

Occasionally I write directly into my small laptop, sheepishly glancing over to the shelf where my typewriter with its antiquated ribbon sits next to an obsolete Brother word processor. A nagging allegiance prevents me from scrapping either of them. Then there are the scores of notebooks, their contents calling—confession, revelation, endless variations of the same paragraph—and piles of napkins scrawled with incomprehensible rants.

My Berlin hotel was in a renovated Bauhaus structure in the Mitte district of the former East Berlin. It had everything I needed and was in close proximity to the Pasternak café, which I discovered on a walk during a previous visit, at the height of an obsession with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

The faded blue walls were dressed in photographs of the beloved Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

I ordered the Happy Tsar—black sturgeon caviar served with a small shot of vodka and a glass of black coffee.

Could you give me a copy of your lecture so that I may at least attach it to the minutes? The opening remarks were lovely. —There actually isn’t anything written, I said. —But your words, where were they to come from? — I was sure to pluck them from the air.

Reading Ibsen? —Yes, The Master Builder. —Hmmm, lovely play but fraught with symbolism. —I hadn’t noticed, I said. He stood before the fire for a moment then shook his head and left. Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down “Desolation Row.” I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

As I unearth After Nature by W. G. Sebald it occurs to me that the image of the boy in white is on the cover of his Austerlitz. Uniquely haunting, it drew me to the book and thus introduced me to Sebald. Mystery solved, I abandon my search and eagerly open After Nature. At one time the three lengthy poems in this slim volume had such a profound effect on me that I could hardly bear to read them. Scarcely would I enter their world before I’d be transported to a myriad of other worlds.

There are two kinds of masterpieces. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. Devastating books. Like 2666 or The Master and Margarita. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is such a book.

reading Murakami in a Mexican hotel that specializes in sushi.

An old black dog approached me. He stopped and I petted his back, and as if it was the most natural thing in the world we stood and faced the sea, watching the waves approach and retreat.

Sylvia Plath took her life in the kitchen of her London flat on February 11, 1963. She was thirty years old. It was one of the coldest winters on record in England. It had been snowing since Boxing Day and the snow was piled high in the gutters. The River Thames was frozen and the sheep were starving on the fells.

My penance for barely being present in the world, not the world between the pages of books, or the layered atmosphere of my own mind, but the world that is real to others.

I bent down to look, as a photograph caught my eye above an entry for Paul Frederic Bowles. I had never heard of him but I noticed we shared the same birthday, the thirtieth of December. Believing it to be a sign, I tore out the page and later searched out his books, the first being The Sheltering Sky. I read everything he wrote as well as his translations, introducing me to the work of Mohammed Mrabet and Isabelle Eberhardt.

I am going to write, I told him. What will you do? He surveyed the area with his eyes, fixing on the sky. —I’m going to think, he said. —Well, thinking is a lot like writing. —Yes, he said, only in your head.

When Fred died, we held his memorial in the Detroit Mariners’ Church where we were married. Every November Father Ingalls, who wed us, held a service in memory of the twenty-nine crewmembers who went down in Lake Superior on the Edmund Fitzgerald, ending with ringing the heavy brotherhood bell twenty-nine times. Fred was deeply moved by this ritual, and as his memorial coincided with theirs, the father allowed the flowers and the model of the ship to be left on the stage. Father Ingalls presided over the service and wore an anchor around his neck in lieu of a cross.