Devotion

by Patti Smith

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.

Drawn to yet an older headstone, I note the word DEVOUEMENT carved diagonally on the border. I ask Alain what it means. —Devotion, he answers, smiling.

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

I remember seeing Voltaire’s cap in a glass case in a museum somewhere. A very humble flesh-colored lace cap. I harbored an intense desire for it, a strange fascination that lingered coupled with a superstitious notion that the wearer might access the residue of Voltaire’s dreams. All in French of course, all of his period, and at that moment it occurred to me that dreamers through time dreamed of those in their own epoch. 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.

As I knelt to place the small bundle beneath her name, words formed, tumbling like a nursery song. I felt helplessly at peace. The rain dissipated. My shoes were muddied. There was an absence of light, but not of love.

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.

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.

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

Some things melt before they become memories.

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

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.