Patti Smith, M Train (a memoir)
"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love."--William Wordsworth, from "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
I finished M Train late last night, and while I should have slept in, I awoke at sunrise, my mind full of images from the book--Patti searching out the grave of Sylvia Plath, Patti photographing Bolano's writing chair in Blades, Patti at Mishima's grave, Patti and her late, lamented husband Fred Sonic Smith traveling to Suriname to fulfill a promise Patti had made to the ghost of Genet...and then the lines I have reproduced above from Wordsworth's Tintern Abby, imperfectly remembered, arrived as the sun rose in a bank of clouds over the Sandia mountains. I next remembered an interview I had seen with Patti (I couldn't call her "Smith" if I tried) shot in 1975 when, clearly under the influence of something or other, she stole the show from five or six men, band members and a male interviewer, describing her own sense of freedom and of "breaking through to the other side." Somehow all of these disparate images coalesced into, of all things, a theory of history.
Morning mind, like beginner's mind, is the best place to find new ideas.
Figuring out the arrival of William Wordsworth was easy enough. His great poem of memory precisely describes Patti's working model: in "lonely rooms" (though by her own admission Patti is never lonely) and at her corner table at the Cafe Ino, she drinks her coffee and writes in her notebooks, remembering what has been a tumultuous life, full of joy, fame, and heartbreak. Her beloved husband, Fred Smith, died young, as did her companion and lover of the late 1960's and early 1970's Robert Mapplethorpe. She has been celebrated as one of the founders of punk rock, and she was by far the finest lyricist to perform to in this style; she is a successful visual artist, an activist, and, above all (for me) a compelling writer. Her memoir Just Kids won the National Book Award in 2010; she has written half-a-dozen other books of which M Train is perhaps the finest. There is much for her to remember.
But the reason I thought of Wordsworth and of "Tintern Abbey" in particular goes deeper than the centrality of memory in Patti's work; rather it was because, as was the case for the great romantic poets of the 19th century, Patti is inspired by a deep sense of place--by graveyards in particular, but also by landscapes and seascapes, by city streets and remote villages. Her descriptions of specific locales as a source of self-identity mirrors the Romantics' certainty that the spiritual and therefore the enduring is best discovered by traversing pastoral districts, visiting ruins, gazing on hills and oceans and then, reposing (pen in hand) in tranquility, recalling and reproducing the sensations evoked, not by the places themselves, but by their recollection.
I can't pretend to know Patti's working methods--I'm guessing from what she has written, which may or may not be construed as a guide to her thinking--but her collections of objects and her offerings to the dead are aptly tied to her interests and obsessions: a few stones for Genet's grave, a cotton sock with an embroidered bee for Sylvia Plath, and always the Polaroid photographs of what feel like melancholy objects (Bolano's writing chair, Frieda Khalo's bed, Tolstoy's bear)--all of these images and objects possess the precise weight of memory one finds in the Romantics, or, closer to us, in the haunting books of W.G. Sebald. (Sebald isn't mentioned in M Train, but his spirit hovers alongside Patti as she writes).
Since the end of World War II (Patti was born in 1946), the central passion of American history has been the consolidation of economic and political power--enjoying the accidental fruits of uncontested material superiority that came after the War and the construction of a fragile consensus that would allow traditional elites to maintain social control while at the same time reluctantly doling out just enough wealth and just enough freedom to keep the majority of Americans, if not contented, then at least docile. I know this is facile and probably untrue, but then, of course, it is true.
The 1950's (e.g. 1945-1963) were an experiment in social control through the narcotizing effects of consumerism on the one hand, and the enforcement of conformity through ideology and violence on the other. Women were locked in the domestic sphere; African-Americans were excluded from the mainstream through legal segregation and quasi-legal lynching; gays were forced into hiding, and non-elite men were pushed into economic and social roles that were, at best, constricting, and at worse, debilitating (see Richard Yates). All power flowed to the elites of business, government, and the academies. In other words, the aristocracy first conceived by the Founders had, at long last, been fully achieved within the comfortable borders of prosperity and global hegemony.
However:
There was bound to be an explosion, and the overthrowing of this repressive order was the work of the now much maligned "radicals" of the 1960's. Actually not radicals so much as persons who hadn't forgotten that ideals like democracy and liberty were a reward due even the lowliest assembly-line worker, hotel maid, and stay-at-home mom. Yes, it's true, in the Sixties there was folly galore, and self-indulgence, and the stupidity induced by drugs and narcissism, but the social impact of the age, which lasted until 1974, was indelible and salutary.
All of this is well known and it took me only fifteen seconds to think all of the above in that slipshod way I have of thinking in grand narratives.
But what I was actually considering was the weirdly exhilarating image of Patti Smith, age 29, a slender slip of a young woman, explaining to an interviewer that her life was about freedom, and that this (I thought when I heard her say it) was precisely the romantic view of human existence, and that saying this, and living as though it were true--living as though human freedom, especially creative freedom, was the point of living at all--wasn't a reason to shake one's head and worry about narcissism or the fall of American civilization but quite the opposite.
What Patti was saying was the simple truth. And that, stripping away all of the bullshit about what it means to be a responsible citizen and a loyal American, leads one back to Wordsworth: our duty is to ourselves, to our understanding of our finite earthly existence, and that once we have managed to make some sense of what we are doing, we need to work hard to create something beautiful, however it is that we choose to do so. All understanding is self-understanding. And the minute this not-at-all original idea came to me it also seemed clear that this was why I have been reading books all these years, precisely to discover for myself the truth and the freedom of thinking.
Here, I finally said to myself (the sun fully risen at last), was a way to find "the best portion of a good man's life"--how to live both well and fully.
Thanks Patti.
George Ovitt (12/7-8/2019)
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