Patti Smith wrote a book about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe called Just Kids, and made the scene at the New York Public Library the other night to talk about it. She read from the text, listened to arias, and sparred with her interlocutor in her down-to-earth girl from South Jersey earth mom kinda way. But she was really there to talk about love and loss and the path through life - and she referred several times to human "passages" and the presence of the dead in our living lives. Facing a passage in my own circle these long months, I found the experience moving, especially Patti's muscular insistence on the evidence of joy within the dark valley of human fear and mourning. Then she picked up the guitar, apologized for her lack of skill on the instrument, and proceeded to blow the room away - and shake the every leaf in the NYPL stacks below - with a rendition of In My Blakean Year from her brilliant 2004 record Trampin'. My crude handheld video appears above, shaky as its maker these days. But the sound is good, and the words are still true:
In my Blakean year
I was so disposed
Toward a mission yet unclear
Advancing pole by pole
Fortune breathed into my ear
Mouthed a simple ode
One road is paved in gold
One road is just a road
from Amazon.
