by Patti Smith
Nothing is solved, but I’m off anyway, I say, packing my small suitcase. The same drill: six Electric Lady T-shirts, six pair of underwear, six of bee socks, two notebooks, herbal cough remedies, my camera, the last packs of slightly expired Polaroid film and one book, Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg, a nod to his coming birthday. His poetry will accompany me on a short lecture tour, one that will take me to the cities of Warsaw, Lucerne and Zurich, free by day to disappear down side streets, some familiar and some strange, leading me to unexpected discoveries. A bit of passive wandering, a small respite from the clamoring, the cries of the world. The streets where Robert Walser walked. The grave of James Joyce just up a hill. The gray felt suit of Joseph Beuys hanging unattended in an empty gallery in Oslo.
* * *
—
IN MY TRAVELS, I disconnect from the news, reread Allen’s poems, an expansive hydrogen jukebox, containing all the nuances of his voice. He would not have disengaged from the current political atmosphere but would have jumped right in, using his voice in its full capacity, encouraging all to be vigilant, to mobilize, to vote, and if need be, hauled into a paddy wagon, peacefully disobedient.
As I pass from border to border the atmosphere of motion takes on the quality of otherworldliness. Children seem animated, paper dolls in little jackets pulling along their own suitcases adorned with the badges of their own travels. I long to follow them but continue on my way winding down my predestined journey to Lisbon, the city of cobbled night.
It is here I meet with the archivists of the Casa Fernando Pessoa, where I am invited to spend time in the beloved poet’s personal library. I am given white gloves, enabling me to examine some of his favorite books. There is detective fiction, collected poems of William Blake and Walt Whitman, and his precious copies of Flowers of Evil, Illuminations and the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde. His books seem a more intimate window into Pessoa than his own writing, for he had many personas who wrote under their given names, but it was Pessoa himself who acquired and loved these books. This small realization intrigued me. The writer develops independent characters who live their own life and write under their own names, no less than seventy-five of them, each with a separate hat and coat. So how can we know the true Pessoa? The answer lies in front of us, his own books, an idiosyncratic library perfectly preserved.
Recording the poem Salutation to Whitman for the oral archive, written by one such creation—Álvaro de Campos—lifts my spirits. Coincidently I had read Allen’s poem for Whitman the night before, and the librarians who shepherd his books are delighted to hear of the connection. Time swiftly passes and I forget to ask if they have any of Pessoa’s wide-brimmed hats, which I assume to be in their original hatboxes, perhaps within a concealed closet along with an array of overcoats once used for his clandestine night walks. Returning to my hotel I pass his likeness, forged in bronze, that nevertheless seems set in motion.
It is in the city of Pessoa that I linger, though I could hardly say what exactly I am doing. Lisbon is a good city to get lost in. Mornings in cafés scribbling in yet another notebook, each blank page offering escape, the pen serving, fluid and constant. I sleep well, dream little, simply exist within an uninterrupted interlude. On a twilight walk a strain of music drifts through the old city, evoking the low, sonorous voice of my father. Yes, Lisbon Antigua, a favorite of his. I recall as a child asking him what the title meant. He smiled and said it was a secret.
Brothers and sisters, the evening bells are tolling. Lanterns illuminate the patterned streets. Within an Edward Hopper–like silence, I follow the path that Pessoa once walked, at all hours. A writer of multiple minds, so many ways of seeing and so many journals, labeled with so many names. Treading the tiled walkways, touching the ivy-covered walls, I pass a window and notice a gentleman standing at the bar, slightly bent, scrawling in a notebook. He wears a brown overcoat and a felt hat. I try to enter but there is no door. I watch him through the glass and the face I see is familiar yet unfamiliar.
Café A Brasileira, Lisbon
—He’s just like you and me.
It was the sign back again, my clairvoyant nemesis, but in the center of my enforced solitude, I could not help but be gladdened.
—Do you really think so? I ask.
—I am absolutely sure, it answers, somewhat affectionately.
—You know, I whisper, you were right, I really am going to Ayers Rock.
—The soles of your shoes are already red.
I did not ask the sign how my husband fared in whatever space was allotted to him in the universe. I did not ask the fate of Sandy. Or Sam. Those things are forbidden, as entreating the angels with prayer. I know that very well, one cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.
The cobbled streets lead me to my provisional home. My room is an enchanting mix of simplicity and uncommon detail. There is a carved wooden bed with a linen coverlet and a small desk with a white lattice paperweight and a stained ivory letter opener. The meagre supply of stationery, enough for a sole missive, is nonetheless of a finely burnished parchment. The bathroom floor is a gleaming mosaic pieced with tiny blue and white tiles like the base of a Roman bath.
I sit at the desk and remove my old Polaroid Land camera from my sack to inspect the bellows. The book of Allen’s poems is opened to A Supermarket in California. I picture him cross-legged on the floor next to his record player singing along with Ma Rainey. Expounding on Milton and Blake and the lyrics of Eleanor Rigby. Bathing the forehead of my young son, suffering a migraine. Allen chanting, dancing, howling. Allen in his death sleep with a portrait of Walt Whitman hanging above and his life companion, Peter Orlofsky, kneeling by his side, covering him in a swathe of white petals.
I am tired but content, believing I have somewhat unraveled the city’s secret. In the drawer of the nightstand is an illustrated pocket map, a little guide to the town of Sabrosa, the birthplace of Magellan. I have a vague memory of drawing a ship circling the world at the kitchen table. My father making a pot of coffee, whistling Lisbon Antigua. I can almost hear the notes melding with the sound of the percolator. Sabrosa, I whisper. Someone is fastening my seat belt. The wooden bed in the corner of the room seems so far away, and all is but an intermission, of small and tender consequence.
HOME IS THE SAILOR
The sheet I had tacked to my wall was still there, hanging like a limp sail. I had completely forgotten about it. The state of mind that induced the intricate markings had shifted. What’s more, heavy rains had caused the skylight to leak and the sheet was now stained with rust-colored streaks that seemed to contain a language of their own that drifted in and out of my sporadic sleep.
No moon, black sky above. Get a grip, it’s only 4 a.m., I tell myself as I plod into the bathroom, strangely spacious, as if two small rooms had been gutted to produce one unnecessary anomaly. There is an old farm sink, a small tiled shower, an obsolete claw-foot tub overflowing with linens and enough room to throw down a mat and stretch out on hot summer nights. Perched against the wall is a slightly mottled mirror with a faded postcard of Victoria, the second smallest of Magellan’s ships, manned by the explorer himself.
Sensing no sleep on the horizon, I roll out the mat and resort to an old game, originally designed to trick myself to sleep. I imagine myself a sailor in the time of the great whaling ships on a lengthy voyage. We are in the center of a violent storm and the captain’s inexperienced son catches his foot in a length of rope and is pulled overboard. Unflinching, the sailor leaps into the storm-tossed seas after him. The men throw down massive lengths of rope and the lad is brought to the deck in the arms of the sailor and carried below.
The sailor is summoned to the quarterdeck and led to the captain’s inner sanctum. Wet and shivering, he eyes his surroundings with wonder. The captain, in a rare show of emotion, embraces him. You saved my so
n’s life, he says. Tell me how I can best serve you. The sailor, embarrassed, asks for a full measure of rum for each of the men. Done, says the captain, but what of you? After some hesitation the sailor answers, I have slept on galley floors, bunks and hammocks since a lad, it has been a long time since I have slept in a proper bed.
The captain, moved by the sailor’s humility, offers his own bed, then retires to the room of his son. The sailor stands before the captain’s empty bed. It has down pillows and a light coverlet. There is a massive leather trunk at its foot. He crosses himself, blows out the candles and succumbs to a rare and wholly enveloping sleep.
He eyes his surroundings with wonder
This is the game I sometimes play when sleep is elusive, one that evolved from reading Melville, that takes me from the mat on the bathroom floor to my own bed, affording grateful slumber. But it was not to be on this markedly humid night. The mischievous monkey, toying with the climate, toying with the coming election, toying with the mind, producing sour sleep or no sleep at all. Punctuating my tangled musings, the rain suddenly beats down on the skylight. I watch the red streaks break apart and realign, an indecipherable Sumerian text. There is a bucket in the closet, which I place beneath the leak, anticipating intermittent dripping, a bucoloic rhythm of its own.
I turn on my small television, careful to avoid the news. On the screen, a blond Aurore Clément is whispering in French as she packs the bowl of an opium pipe.
—There are two of you, she says, drawing closer to Martin Sheen, one who kills and one who doesn’t.
—There are two of you, she repeats, slipping out of the frame. One walks in the world, one walks in dream.
She rises, drops her robe and slowly unties the panels of mosquito netting framing their bed. He draws from the pipe, watching the outlines of her body moving behind the pale netting. She unhurriedly unties each panel as he reaches for her, through the fog of cinematic war.
At last I feel sleep closing in, saying good night to the sailor and Captain Willard and the French girl with the opium pipe. I can hear my mother reciting a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. Home is the sailor, home from the sea. And the hunter home from the hill. I can see her hand pushing a roller, repainting a bedroom or smoothing out new wallpaper. The credits are rolling, it says Apocalypse Now Redux. The net closes around me, the rubber band is cut and blood rushes in a vial, drawing one unfinished thought.
IMITATION OF A DREAM
For Sandy
Sandy open your eyes. I traced these words on the window with my left hand, over and over, as if producing a spell. An ardent Artaud type of spell, one that would actually work. But no mystical effort could realign the directive of the Reaper. It was July 26. The prelude ended, Parsifal knelt before the mortally wounded swan and Sandy Pearlman left the earth.
On that same day, there was news of wildfires in Southern California, the dense smoke reaching all the way to Nevada. The Democratic Convention was blazing with its own fiery mix of hope and desperation. Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered aircraft, made its last leg around the world. The gods Sandy had celebrated buried their marble heads in sand-colored towels. He would never enter the Matrix with his beloved Keanu Reeves, or circulate in the mad world of Donnie Darko or listen to Angel of the Morning or eat devil’s food cake. Sandy, with the thinking heart, composing a vast reinterpretation of history through an ongoing dream, was now seeking his kingdom of Imaginos, captain of his own charmed ship.
The days of summer stretched. Sunflowers bloomed in every field. In my solitude, I imagined wolves crying. I followed them, trudging the icy perimeter, passing a gingerbread house, an entire village trapped on an ice sheet as big as the smallest of the thirteen colonies. A colony adrift. I looked up at the sun, as if drawn by a child’s hand, with each ray distinct.
On the fifth of August, his birthday, the birthday of my son, I opened the top of my desk and found the last package Sandy had sent me, one that had arrived during my travels and was tucked away unopened. He would often surprise me, for no particular reason, with gifts of Aztec chocolate, tins of sockeye salmon from Seattle, Solti’s traversal of the four operas of The Ring of the Nibelung. I packed it with some things, got a half pound of chestnut pasta and some green onions and took the long subway ride to my little bungalow in Rockaway Beach. I struggled with the combination lock on the battered cyclone gate, as dried salt had jammed the numbers. The yard was a battleground of towering ribwort and trampled Queen Anne’s lace.
Once inside, I flung open the windows. I hadn’t come to Rockaway in several weeks and the house needed a bit of airing. I shook sand out of my Chinese rug and vacuumed and mopped the red-tiled floor with oolong tea. I wanted coffee, but dampness had crystalized what was left in my jar of Nescafé.
Opening the small package, I pictured Sandy hastily addressing it, securing it with an excessive amount of scotch tape. It was a CD of Grayfolded, an experimental Grateful Dead recording, difficult to find and much coveted. He had promised me that he would find it and he did. Happy Birthday, Sandy, I said aloud, thank you for the present. I felt extremely calm, even lighthearted. I rinsed off the dishes, prepared myself some spaghetti and sat on my porch with my plate in my lap, staring at my yard where persistent finger grasses had overrun the herbs and wildflowers, like settlers on the Indian plain.
I sat motionless, did not rise, or gather my tools, or hack or weed. I suddenly felt dead—no, not dead, more otherworldly, a grateful kind of dead. I could feel life scurrying about, a plane overhead, the sea just beyond and the unfolding notes of Dark Star drifting through the grid of my screen door. I could not bring myself to move, and let myself be transported elsewhere, long before I knew Sandy, long before I listened to Wagner, to another summer at the Electric Circus, where a young girl slow-danced with an equally young boy, awkwardly in love.
BLACK BUTTERFLIES
Last days of August with Sam in Kentucky. We had been working for most of the afternoon. I went out back around twilight for a short break and was drawn to strange movements on the stone ledge surrounding the garden. It was covered with black butterflies, scores of them, one on top of another, in a fluttering frenzy in the half-light. There was a faint whistling sound, their mortal song perhaps, dark wings their mourning coats. A photograph I had taken of my grown children at their grandfather Dewey’s funeral came to mind. My son in a black Stetson hat and my daughter in a black dress.
Sam looks up and grins when I reenter; we immediately return to work. An early revision of a recent manuscript. There are several changes and new passages which he verbalizes to avoid the struggle of writing by hand. Some time ago he told me that one must write in absolute solitude, but necessity has shifted his process. Sam adjusts and seems invigorated by the prospect of focusing on something new.
His sister Roxanne makes me tea. You’re coughing, she says. Sam smiles. She’s had that darn cough for forty-five years. Sam sits stoically in his wheelchair, his hands resting on the table. His old Gibson rests in a corner, a guitar he can no longer play. And the reality of the present hits hard, no banging on the typewriter keys, no roping cattle, no more struggling with his cowboy boots. Still I say nothing of these things and neither does Sam. He fills in the silences with the written word, seeking a perfection he alone can dictate.
We continue, me reading and transcribing, Sam writing out loud in real time. The deeper task is to rescue aloneness. The aloneness required to write, the absolute necessity to claim those hours as though hurled through space, like the astronaut in 2001, never dying, just continuing on and on in the realm of film that never ceases, into the infinitesimal, where the Incredible Shrinking Man is still shrinking, and in that universe, is its perpetual lord.
—We’ve become a Beckett play, Sam says good-naturedly.
I imagine us rooted in our place at the kitchen table, each of us dwelling in a barrel with a tin lid, we wake up and poke out our hea
ds and sit before our coffee and peanut-butter toast waiting until the sun rises, plotting as if we are alone, not alone together but each alone, not disturbing the aura of the other’s aloneness.
—Yep, a Beckett play, he repeats.
As night falls, his sister prepares his needs. I settle into my makeshift bed, situated where I can see him.
—Are you all right? he says.
—Yes, I’m good, I answer.
—Good night, Patti Lee.
—Good night, Sam.
I lie there listening to the sound of his breathing. There are no curtains and I can see the silhouettes of the trees. Moonlight illuminates the fragile webs in the corners of the room and the edge of his bed and the low coffee table between us laden with books and my feet poking out from the quilt that covers me. The portrait of night I see through the window beckons. Unable to sleep I get up and go outside to breathe the air, looking up at the stars and listening to the crickets and the bullfrogs in full throttle. I use the flashlight on my phone and return to the garden of the house. The black butterflies are still there, motionless, covering a portion of the ledge of the garden wall, but I can’t really tell if they are dead or just sleeping.