for/against patti smith

forgot to bring my journal to the beach

i am at the beach this week reading patti smith and inadvertently thinking about everyone in my life that reminds me of her. i know someone with the same patience as her, someone with the same idols as her, and maybe someone with the same hair as her. she has managed to endear herself to me in about 150 pages in a way no other voice has. so much so that i had to google “is patti smith going to die any time soon” and had to be comforted by the AI summary reassuring me that although she has suffered a few migraines recently, there aren’t any concrete signs of an imminent departure yet. i sighed with relief but with slightly less respect for her, even less than when she revealed that she was cucking. i found out from the same AI summary that she has of late been fairly active on her substack. i have very little regard for people with a substack, much less so for people with a paid substack, so i had to hush the dissonance within as i returned to my paperback copy of just kids. the feeling was, after all, familiar, precedented by that time in 2021 when news broke out that my childhood hero, drake from drake and josh, was being indicted and had pleaded guilty to two charges of child endangerment.

back when i used to pretend to like modern art, because everyone needs to like something, i read somewhere that instead of the art itself, it is your reaction to said art that is a far worthier subject of your meditations, and so i very quickly manufactured and internally categorized eloquent introspections on modern art, in case i ever had to stand at the altar of warhol and defend the soup cans. “i love this mondrian painting… it’s in perfect equilibrium,” i remember saying something of the sort in class once. reading patti smith however, i take note of the hotel chelsea, of the pursuit of art, or the sacrifices to that end, and i fall back to imagining everyone else’s reactions to these pages. her hand at mise-en-scéne evokes this longing that undulates between i want her and i want to be her, but her sensibilities are hard to mimic because she seems to speak so little of herself. she does make her own feelings towards modern art explicit, though, writing, “his [warhol] work reflected a culture i wanted to avoid. i hated the soup and felt little for the can. i preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.”

and maybe this is it; that what i call mise-en-scéne is really just the deliberate arrangement of her own life and days as she sought to transform them, and so it is less easily repurposed for my own self-discovery. and the charm in her writing is likely just her quiet but billowing sense of purpose, the same that she carries through from homelessness to the upper echelons of the cultural milieu of 70s new york. on the other hand, owing to some unexplored grounds, i sense a strange oneness, and not without disdain, with her partner that she broadly shares the memoir (and its cover) with, robert mapplethorpe. robert is painted to be the eccentric one, bare chested with three hand-made necklaces; the one who left the church to be an artist, still holding on to a child-like guilt that makes him flush his bounties from petty theft down the toilet; the one with the license to be caustic out of poetic torture. when he confesses to having been with another man, she asks him, “are you sure?” and robert, the one in tears, replies, “i’m not sure about anything. i want to do my work. i know I’m good. that’s all i know.” he doesn’t know what he wants, i thought.

on my birthday eve, i got myself a signed copy of m train. afterwards, i texted my friends asking if i should spend this much on a present while already spending so much on a vacation, even though i had already paid, because i wasn’t sure and wanted somebody else to re-affirm after the fact. they said yes. i think i know what i want, to some extent, but i just don’t know if my longings are in the same class as those of patti smith’s. robert is frequently the one who covets: chocolate milk, magazines with pretty pictures, a bigger studio. i wanted to and so i did go sit at the cafe at the beachside ramada, smoking a cigarette and sipping a latte, hot instead of iced in the mid-day heat and seaside humidity, because the hot latte made the scene in my head come together nicer. when a woman came and stood there asking for money, separated by a line of trimmed bushes and the glass balustrade, i sent her away saying i don’t have any, even though i did, because i was upset she was disturbing the scene in my head. later from my hotel room, i sent my friends a picture of the book i was reading, and one of them exclaimed why i was doing that even though there wasn’t anyone to see. to me this question carried more weight than he probably meant it to.

the week before i booked my flights, my feelings of uncertainty surrounding work had come to a head, which led me to fall into deep reflections on what i wanted, depending on which, i would pull this plug or the other. did i want my collection of antique books to keep growing or something else that i hadn’t yet discovered? i’d been here before, but i either couldn’t answer then or hadn’t made the time to think enough. i asked to talk to my manager and he told me a long story of adam and his sons, the killing of one by the other, and the precedence of sin. we talked for nearly an hour, and i felt that he was starting to diagnose me before i said i had to leave for another meeting. i told him that i really liked what he said and there was a lot to think about and i had actually been planning on going on a longer pilgrimage later this year and the lesson he had imparted would be something i’d add on to the tally of things to ponder. “you’re going to mecca?” i said no but promised that i would send him a postcard from my non-denominational pilgrimage when it was time. but for the time being, i still needed to go away for a bit, which he seemed to empathize with. at the end of the story of adam and his sons, he half-proclaimed and half-asked “we all believe in a god (?)” and i stayed quiet.

in my uber back from the airport, the driver asked me if i was going to go for the friday prayer too, and i stuttered before i said no, so he left me in the car with the windows cracked open to go pray at a mosque we found on our way. as it pulled up at home, that daniel johnston song, true love will find you in the end, came on shuffle. he says it will, but that it is a promise with a catch, and that only if you’re looking can it find you. i thought “true love” could really be replaced with just about anything you wanted, and the song would still make sense.