Devotion

by Patti Smith

Inspiration is the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour. The arrows fly and one is unaware of being struck, and that a host of unrelated catalysts have joined clandestinely to form a system of its own, rendering one with the vibrations of an incurable disease—a burning imagination—at once unholy and divine.

Why does the creative spirit turn on itself? Why does the maker twist all drama?

we pillage, we embrace, we know not.

The prospect of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

There is a solemn delight in the air and I feel a familiar desire to receive the body of Christ but do not join them.

My sister took a picture and in it I see myself, forever frozen in air full of joy. It seems a small miracle to reconnect with all that adrenaline, all that will.

The ancient Greeks dreamed of their gods. Emily Brontë of the moors. And Christ? Perhaps he did not dream, yet knew all there was to dream, every combination, until the end of time.

There was an absence of light, but not of love.

Fate has a hand but is not the hand. I was looking for something and found something else,

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

I can examine how, but not why, I wrote what I did, or why I had so perversely deviated from my original path. Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

I wondered, since I had birthed my characters, if I was mourning them.

Silence. Passing cars. The rumble of the subway. Birds calling for dawn. I want to go home, I whimpered. But I already was.

you were all snow white and I the seventh dwarf prepared to serve you

Her rapture excited him; God had given breath to a work of art. She arched her body, spinning in descending and ascending spirals, shaking a bit of glittering dust from the star she was undeniably becoming.

She had little sense of time and lived by the approach and diminishing of light.

Twirling about giddily, she experienced the melancholy luxury of solitary joy.

The unexpected gift suggested small hopes, a vague but promising human connection. She felt a delight but also a fear of it,

I was only a child and feared nothing.

I saw it all before me, in an instant that instantly disappeared, yet made its mark.

I was gifted in science, but this gift gave me no tools to express the inexpressible.

—I was born beautiful, she blurted, why should I have an ugly life?

Each star plays its part; each has its own place.

He had done well, but the thrill of attainment had become hollow; he found himself uncharacteristically restless and short-tempered.

—Languages are like chess. —And words are like moves?

Winter would melt into spring, into summer, and she would have no recourse but to wait for falling leaves to signal winters return.

—Don’t look back, Eugenia, she would counsel, slipping on her fox stole. Everything is before us.

She never asked for love, nor longed for affection, had no experience with boys, not even adolescent kisses. She only wished to know who she was,

His name was Alexander but to her he would always be Him.

That is how I became Philadelphia, she wrote later in her journal. Like the city of freedom. Yet I was not free. Hunger is its own warden.

internally restless, consumed by the desire to tear things apart and rearrange according to his own design.

—Some things melt before they become memories.

The world outside was rebuilding, but we lived in a bubble and I was too young to know of such things.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel. A story with the intrinsic power of myth.

When does it cease to be something beautiful, a faithful aspect of the heart, to become off-center, slightly off the axis, and then hurled into an obsessional void?

—Every thought transforms as feeling.

—Our possessions cause us much pain, he replied. —How can that be when they give you such pleasure? —Someone else will have them when I am dead. This causes me pain.

There are rules. There is an entire system to embrace, then conquer. —There are many ways to conquer.

She was at that moment the legendary firebird rising from the ashes of a delicate nocturne, a blessing and a curse to her captors.

The impossible reigned in the poem of her mind. To do what no other had done, to reinvent space, to produce tears.

A heart is stunned by another.

It was her penance, to deny herself the one thing she could not live without.

A kernel of remorse slowly opened and spread through her system; it was another kind of blood.

Is life worth living? He had written in the margin that perhaps there existed a deeper question—Am I worthy of living?

Why should a child suffer the burden of politics, of blood?

You are also new. That was the gift your parents gave you by releasing you.

I felt as if we were floating in space, and I felt frightened. But now I realize it was also a miracle. Having no past we have only present and future.

We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.