Devotion

by Patti Smith

Inspiration is the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour.

Why does the creative spirit turn on itself? Why does the maker twist all drama? The pen is lifted, guided by the shattered muse. Without discord, it marks, harmony passes unnoticed, without discord, it continues, Abel is rendered no more than a forgotten shepherd.

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.

And the face of love is nothing but the whiteness of winter blanketing limbs of trees fallen through holes colorless skies.

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

—Why are you crying? Asks a voice. —I don’t know, I answer. Maybe because I’m happy.

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

There is the odd familiarity that keeps tugging at me. A long-ago sense of things.

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.

a sophisticated, rational man and a precocious, intuitive young girl.

Mr salary vibes

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.

Can one, tracking and successfully collaring a criminal, truly comprehend the criminal mind? Can we truly separate the how and the why?

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

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

Yet of all the languages I have known, skating is the one I know best. A language without words, where the mind must bow to instinct.

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

Everything I am, she was thinking, has been given to me by nature.

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

The little witch, he was thinking, yet chided himself for attributing such power to an awkward schoolgirl.

—Don’t look for your mother in me, she would say. You must find her in yourself.

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

She had nothing save a recurring dream, like a moving still from a grainy film—her mother shading her eyes from the sun and sheets unfurling on a line.

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, and to skate. That was all she desired.

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.

He came to understand that tearing things apart was a powerful aspect of human nature.

No reason is required for the herding of people like sheep.

She was swimming in filth, utterly lost.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel. A story with the intrinsic power of myth. One that turned in on itself, leaving only a transparency, their bed an acrid cloud, on which they brutally coupled, then floated. 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?

Our possessions cause us much pain,

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

Am I worthy of living?

I feel new, and Frank is new and our baby will be new. You are also new. That was the gift your parents gave you by releasing you.

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.

There are no signs that tell us who we are. Not a star, not a cross, not a number on the wrist. We are ourselves. Your gift comes only from you.

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.

For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy then the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.

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.

And the face of love is nothing but the whiteness of winter blanketing the hill the fir and the pine the fawn and the horn

Everything is blown And yet we long Two dark eyes One head bowed One fallen crown

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others.

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 and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

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.

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.