Words from the New World Part 3: The Transience of Adventure

Patti Smith turns formative events into evocative objects.

This is the last of three posts about Patti Smith’s later work. Part 1, which provides an overview of the 2012 album Banga, is here. Part 2, which considers the ongoing legacy of 1975’s Horses, is here.

Johannes Stradanus, Amerigo Vespucci awakens the sleeping America, late 16th century.

Patti Smith’s 2012 album Banga, though steeped in loss, elegy and mourning, does not merely present retellings of the tales told in other late chronicles by or about the artist. Rather, it suggests that Smith is finding new ways to look forward.

If critics in the late 1990s wondered, as Victor Bockris noted, when Smith’s ‘professional mourning’ would end, Banga shows the wealth of other interests the artist has for her writing. That said, I’d argue that Smith’s earlier life writing projects still pervade Banga when the album is heard through the filter of the late chronicles I discussed previously. Smith’s ‘real’ lateness is an intensification or thickening of her life story, a combination of the anticipated lateness of her early work and the arrived-at maturity and proven ability to be singer, rock star and icon.

We can read some of Banga’s key moments similarly, hearing ‘Amerigo’ perhaps as a rock and roll narrative, or ‘Maria’ as an elegy for Robert Mapplethorpe. The latter figure certainly saturates much of Smith’s work, past and present. In the ‘deluxe’ edition of Banga—designed as a book containing text, photography and sound, with the CD almost an extra at the back—references to Mapplethorpe appear not only in Smith’s liner notes, but also via the addition of a bonus track entitled ‘Just Kids’, based on material from Smith’s memoir. There are also less explicit references, such as how the description of the boat voyage undertaken by Smith and Lenny Kaye while preparing the album calls to mind that undertaken by the character M (Mapplethorpe) in The Coral Sea.

The memory project of Banga can be broadened further, however, to include references Smith may not have had in mind; such is the nature of the intertextuality she herself invites. ‘Amerigo’, about the discovery of the New World, communicates its debt to adventure by the slowing and quickening of pace, altering the dynamics of the string accompaniment at key points to move from full sail acceleration to complete lull, a becalming after a storm.

The lull brings near silence, broken only by the thin keening of a violin, then Smith’s urgently whispered imperative: ‘Hey, wake up, wake up’. Rising in wonder, the song gears up again, gathering wind behind its sails once more. On arrival at his unexpected destination, Smith has Amerigo Vespucci express his awe at the people he witnesses: ‘such a delight to watch them dance, free of sacrifice and romance […] free of all the things that we hold dear’.

The narrative is not free of romance, however, for it carries the romantic overtones of many observers of the New World who saw only innocence or noble savagery. In this aspect, Smith has crafted a lyric that is reminiscent of the tone of voice found in many of the narratives of the voyages left by sailors, priests and others involved in the navigation and subsequent conquest of the Americas.

Amerigo Vespucci, Letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, from The Mundus Novus Translation, trans. George Tyler Northup, 1916.

This is also a tone that used by writers of fiction attempting to recall the wonder of that time, such as Alejo Carpentier and Juan José Saer. Both authors explored what Smith calls ‘words that have not been written / words from the New World’, albeit with rather more playful and less romantic visions of the colonial encounter.

In The Harp and the Shadow, a fictionalised account of Columbus’s voyages of discovery. Carpentier’s Columbus is asked to describe the world he has discovered but can find no words to do so because of the total difference between all he sees here and all he previously knew. He feels equally that ‘things that have no names cannot be imagined’ and that ‘words would not reveal the thing, if the thing were not already known’.

Saer’s novel The Witness, meanwhile, plays with classic accounts of the colonisation of the New World by having a sixteenth-century Spaniard caught and kept prisoner by a South American tribe solely so that he can be released and act as witness to the tribe’s existence and destruction:

They wanted me to reflect like water the image they gave of themselves, to repeat their gestures and words, to represent them in their absence, and, when they returned me to my fellow creatures, they wanted me to be like the spy or scout who witnesses something that the rest of the tribe has not yet seen and retraces his steps and recounts it, meticulously. Threatened by everything that controls us from the dark and keeps us outside in the open until the day we are plunged by one sudden capricious gesture back into the indistinct, the Indians wanted there to be a witness to and a survivor of their passage through this material mirage; they wanted someone to tell their story to the world.

Saer challenges those romantic notions of the New World that saw it as a lost Eden and its inhabitants as innocent or naïve beings with no desire for fame or permanence.

There’s also a connection, in my mind, to the work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Through the medium which allows the (re)discovery of the past—in this case, the text—we come to know the past and its meaning for us in the present. The text becomes both the witness and the medium that allows for time travel. As Barthes writes:

Death, real death, is when the witness himself dies. Chateaubriand says of his grandmother and his great-aunt: ‘I may be the only man in the world who knows that such persons have existed’: yes, but since he has written this, and written it well, we know it too, insofar, at least, as we still read Chateaubriand.

With the importance of the witness as medium noted, we could return to ‘Amerigo’ by considering the role that Smith’s voice plays in the narrative. While it may be possible, for much of the song, to follow the ‘film voiceover’ illusion of conflating voice with character rather than actor (allowing here for the additional forgetting of gender difference), the illusion collapses when the track moves from Vespucci’s address to the king to ‘I gotta send you just a few more lines … from the / new / world.’

Here, Smith’s Americanisms shine through, from the anachronistic ‘gotta’ to the way she drawls the lines in her best Dylanesque. Suddenly, ‘new world’ takes on a different meaning as we shift back to the familiar tones of Patti Smith, a voice from the new world of twentieth century rock music.

My points about memory and witnessing can apply to other aspects of Banga. As Barthes notes, the act of writing is crucial to memory, and words can act as keepsakes of the departed. At the conclusion of Just Kids, Smith recalls the hard decisions around which of Robert Mapplethorpe’s possessions to hold on to and which to auction. She breaks into this recollection with a startling observation about writing:

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine.

Remembrances of those who have died serve as reminders that they once lived and that the world in which they lived once existed. This is partly the point of Just Kids and partly the point, it seems, of Smith’s many elegiac songs. We might hear ‘Maria’ as an elegy for a world that no longer exists and for those who peopled it; it may therefore be as much about Robert Mapplethorpe as it is about Maria Schneider. Once the connection is made, the line ‘white shirt black tie’ can be heard as a reference to Mapplethorpe’s famous picture of Smith on the cover of Horses.

Because my response to Banga has been so focussed on ideas of adventure, exploration and a strand of New World imagery that focuses on lost innocence, I also can’t help hearing lines from ‘Maria’ as evoking similar themes: ‘at the edge of the world’; ‘I knew you when we were young’; ‘we saw ourselves: raw, excitable’; ‘we didn’t know the precariousness of our young powers’.

The song could equally work as a companion piece to the foreword Smith wrote for her collection Early Work in 1994:

Youth untested, unbridled. Our hustling smiles.
Our lively limbs. We were as innocent and
dangerous as children racing across a mine field.
Some never made it.

For me, these lines echo those found in the opening section of Hart Crane’s poem ‘Voyages’:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

The sea is too loud and the children too far away for the narrator to deliver this message (‘could they hear me I would tell them’); all the poet-narrator can do is recall the seduction of the ocean with its promises of ‘caresses’. That seduction proved deadly to Crane himself; his own sea voyage culminated in a suicidal leap from the deck of a ship into the Gulf of Mexico on 27 April 1932.

In following such anarcheological traces, I’m reflecting a practice of association that Smith herself frequently uses, the experience of art mixing sometimes uneasily with the experience of life. Immediately after reporting Mapplethorpe’s death in Just Kids, Smith writes of listening ‘to the aria from Tosca with an open book on my knees’, which can be read as a way of aestheticising a key moment (something that Smith’s critics accuse her of doing too readily) or of looking to art for comfort.

Or both. Increasingly, I feel that it may be near impossible to mourn a person, thing or event in an artistic text without turning those things into beautiful objects of one kind or another, or at least evoking the artistic tropes that can do that transformative work. Art, like adventure, is a way of turning formative and transformative things into evocative objects.

Soon after the Tosca passage, Smith describes a trip to the coast to work through her mourning:

Up and down the deserted beach I walked in my black wind coat. I felt within its asymmetrical roomy folds like a princess or a monk. I know Robert would have appreciated this picture: a white sky, a gray sea, and this singular black coat […] I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael.

This recalls a passage in The Coral Sea, in which Smith describes the sea as being like a Rothko painting. Here, art comes before nature, a theme echoed elsewhere in the book and presented by Smith as an attitude adopted by M himself: ‘Art, not nature, moved him’. This and other passages connect, for me, to an oft-quoted observation by André Malraux:

An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, in the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting; but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue. What makes the artist is that in his youth he was more deeply moved by his visual experience of works of art than by that of the things they represent.

Malraux also refers to musicians tracing their inspiration back to a concert they witnessed when young and writers to poems, books or plays they encountered at an impressionable age. Smith narrates many such experiences in Just Kids, including a visit to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the sight of the Rolling Stones on television, and the discovery of Rimbaud’s poetry.

We should be wary of attributing to Smith an over-reliance on art over ‘reality’, for there is plenty of real life to feed into her story. As she told Thurston Moore in a 1998 interview, in response to a question about realistic depictions of life, ‘I’ve lived reality, so why go see it on the movie screen?’ Yet she seems drawn to recognising an aestheticisation of life in others and to highlighting ways in which art is itself an adventure. M’s voyage on the Coral Sea, learning about light and space and the magic of objects, also concerns the desire to fix transience (a favourite theme of Malraux’s), to capture the beauty and fragility of an autumn leaf or a blooming flower in, and for, art.

When, in ‘Constantine’s Dream’, we reach the plea ‘Let me die on the back of adventure’, it is tempting to hear it as Smith talking to us, her listeners. The rendering invisible of the author via the narrator does not work the same way in song as it tends to in film and literature. It may frequently and convincingly do so in folk music, but not in the medium in which Smith works, for rock and roll has always exaggerated the conflation of the ‘I’ of the narrative and the performer. Lines about dying on the back of adventure and bringing words from a new world thus become Smith’s visions, pleas and wishes as much as they do Piero’s, Vespucci’s, or Columbus’s.

Metaphors of adventure, even when applied to conquistadors and fifteenth century artists, may ultimately be about the adventure of rock and roll. Or, if that’s too grand, rock and roll may be the late twentieth century artistic vehicle par excellence for Smith and her fellow navigators to pursue the adventure of creation and discovery. Certainly, for Smith, rock and roll was the next logical step for poetry in the twentieth century. Poetry had long been a leap of faith for many. In the hands of modernists such as Hart Crane and Vicente Huidobro, it became an exercise in free-fall. For Patti Smith, it was a stage dive.

Malraux’s observation on the relationship between life and art transforms into one about adventure and chronicle. Perhaps what thrills is not only the sense of adventure in its immediacy, but the siren-like pull of the chronicle of adventure, the lure of the elegiac tone we find in the best told tales. When we read, at the start of Saer’s The Witness, the line ‘What I remember most about those empty shores is the vastness of the sky’, whose voice are we hearing? Is it the unnamed witness, hardened by years and softened by nostalgia? Or is it Saer, the storyteller, offering a lure to his readers to enter the sweet sea of his prose?

Piero della Francesca, in the words of André Malraux, ‘might be symbol of our modern sensibility, our desire to see the expression of the painter, not that of the model, in his art’. Artistic expression comes to the fore often in Smith’s work, as in a passage from the closing sections of Just Kids, where innocence is filtered through experience and an elegiac, almost pathetic tone overwhelms any neutral account of lives led:

We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world. There were temptations and witches and demons we never dreamed of and there was splendour we only partly imagined. No one could speak for those two young people nor tell with any truth of their days and nights together. Only Robert and I could tell it. Our story, as he called it. And, having gone, he left the task to me to tell it to you.

We can read into this a critique of the many biographies that have told and retold the story of the years leading up to Horses. We can discern the testimonial imperative. I was there, Smith tells us, and the story will resound through my voice. Mapplethorpe had asked Smith to tell their tale to the world, and she waited to find the voice with which to do so. Witnessing, Smith reminds us, is not only the taking-in of experience; it is also carrying, bearing witness, and finally, when the time comes, unburdening.

We can also hear the voice of the seducer, the voice that, in its most beguiling tone, invites us to adventure, to set sail upon a sea of possibilities and, like April fools, to ‘ride like writers ride’.

Back to life again.