The Indissoluble Filament Connecting Us All: Patti Smith on What It Means to Be an Artist
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Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Patti Smith
16 min read
The article is a deep meditation on Smith's artistic philosophy and life trajectory. Wikipedia provides comprehensive biographical context about her punk rock origins, poetry, and visual art that enriches understanding of how she became the 'Godmother of Punk' while maintaining her artistic authenticity.
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Arthur Rimbaud
17 min read
The article mentions Rimbaud alongside Bob Dylan as poets who shaped Smith's vision of 'perceiving future dimensions.' Rimbaud's revolutionary approach to poetry and his abandonment of writing at 21 directly parallel themes of artistic rebellion in Smith's philosophy.
Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity.
One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood — a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies.
Just as The Fairy Tale Tree awakened the young Nick Cave to art, this was Patti Smith’s precocious awakening as an artist. The opening sentence enchanted her:
You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.
It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: “entrance into the mystical world.” In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: “the heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.”
She couldn’t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn’t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them — for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist.
In her moving memoir Bread of Angels (public library), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with ...
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