An artist wears his work in place of wounds. Here then is a glimpse of the sores of my generation.
That’s the introduction to Patti Smith’s 1994 collection of poetry and prose.
A lot has happened in the past week and a half. Lou Reed passed away, and we wondered anxiously about the future of music, and art. Separately, on a personal level, I struggled with the sharp realization that life can—and will, in the most jarring, burning way possible—change in an instant.
I let my roommate chop my hair off and did some other impulsive, life’s-tough-and-I’m-20 things. Mostly, I turned to Patti Smith. I turned to her words and voice: live performances, albums, interviews; her commencement speech for Pratt Institute’s class of 2010; her eulogies for Robert Mapplethorpe, Lou Reed, Virginia Woolf; her “advice to the young, or how to be a human being.” I’m working on a tell-all letter to her now.
A couple of years ago, I was listening almost exclusively to Patti Smith’s staggering, unstoppable, punk-poetry piece “Babelogue.” I was 17, impressionable and stunned by her fierce rawness and openness. A few months later, I started carrying a signed copy of “Just Kids” with me everywhere. I dreamed of the Chelsea Hotel and the life of an established artist, consisting only of a mattress, an enormous window, an easel and the love of my life.
Smith is a force. She’s an artist to the bone. Yet her purity of intent, her life-affirming vulnerability and her faith in the people—in the young—are what keep us inspired.
We think apprehensively about the future of art. Smith disagrees. It has never been easier to reach such a broad audience. We decide what we think is good in accordance with our tastes, and as we grow, we cultivate our own aesthetic. We self-publish novels, distribute virtual chapbooks and record our own songs. We respond to things, and if we’re lucky, we respond with a moment of creative impulse.
It has never been easier to feel something so strongly, and so surely, that you have no choice but to express it and to share in that intention.
It has also never been easier to feel so discouraged and lost by your work: that it isn’t a real work of art, you aren’t a real artist and besides, everyone recycles the same material and technique, everyone shares in the same trite influences and wisdoms. The world doesn’t need another mediocre poet, painter, dancer. It’s too exhausting to bring artistry to everything we do. We’ll never be good enough to afford to navigate today’s world as an artist, let alone do what Patti Smith did in the ‘70s. She herself said that New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. So we make the safe decision to focus ourselves toward something else, when really, we’ve only abandoned our creative impulses.
Smith understands the frantic need to create, and she also understands those long periods of anxious futility. But again (and thank goodness, too), she disagreed.
We’re all still figuring it out, and what power we actually have, but the people still do have the power more than ever. And I think right now, we’re going through this painful sort of adolescence. What do we do with…our world? Who are we? But it also makes it exciting. All the young people right now, the new generations, they’re pioneers in a new time. So, I say, stay strong.
We think apprehensively about our own futures. We have a vision, or a dream of a vision, and we have good intentions. But there are distractions. There’s heartbreak. There’s change, and there will be times when we fade away or halt to an abrupt stop altogether. Yet we continue to create, for ourselves or for others, and we remain devoted to our work because we want to—because we need to. Through all aspects of our selves, and the most wrenching moments of our lives, our artistry beats with the same desperate, unyielding conviction.
That's heartening. That’s thrilling.
And do you know what I found after several decades of life?...We achieve our goal. We become a level of ourselves. And then we want to go further, and we make new mistakes, and we have new hardships. But we prevail. We are human. We are alive. We have blood.
Thank you for everything, Patti Smith. (Expect a letter, and maybe a drawing or two, soon.)
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