Devotion

by Patti Smith

What would have happened had she continued her studies, stepped onto the rink of the world, if every move on the chessboard, every equation, even the dark fluidity of love had coalesced?

—I yearn to pray, Father, but cannot face our Lord. I cannot tell him what I have done. —My child, that is the mystery of confession, to unburden and leave it to him to carry the load. —The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible sea.

The qualities that will help you get through life you have received from me. The qualities that will make you welcomed in heaven from your mother.

she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy then the relics of saints.

She told of washing his blood from her ankles, burying him without a single tear. As she relived that moment she wept at last, not for the loss of him but of innocence.

she felt a wholeness that had been so long absent.

She did not slow down but whirled as if in the center of an infinity of infinities.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold. She bowed her head and lifted one arm toward the sky, surrendering, drawn by the gloved hand of her own conscience.

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards.

We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies ...

I seldom visit people’s homes, for despite the hospitality offered I often suffer a feeling of confinement or imagined pressure.

That is the decisive power of a singular work: a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.

The hours that pass devour us.

What is the task? To compose a work that communicates on several levels, as in a parable, devoid of the stain of cleverness. What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.