Just Kids

by Patti Smith

We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.

No one expected me. Everything awaited me.

I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.

“Nothing is finished until you see it.”

In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos—the Modern, the Met, the Louvre? I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.

I didn’t feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

“Patti, nobody sees as we do,”

Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world.

knew one day I would stop and he would keep on going, but until then nothing could tear us apart.

For me it punctuated the duality of the summer of 1969, Woodstock and the Manson cult, our masked ball of confusion.

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys.

And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in.

“Christ died for somebody’s sins / But not mine,”

He saw in me more than I could see in myself.

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.

When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.

When I walked on the stages of the world without him I would close my eyes and picture him taking off his leather jacket, entering with me the infinite land of a thousand dances.

“Patti,” he drawled, “you got famous before me.”

Paths that cross will cross again.

that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.