Sitting With It
On March 31, singer, poet and grand dame of punk, Patti Smith launched a subscription-based series of writings on substack. Being a head-over-heels Smith devotee, I jumped on board posthaste, signing up for the paid version with access to even more of her musings and poetry.
Between then and now, I have also attended four memorial services for family members and friends. Smith’s words and photos have been a balm in the most surprising manner, and accompanied me along some dark paths.
Smith has an incredible eloquence in fixing an emotion or time in her life to a physical object — a table, a watch cap, a coffee cup. She photographs things as if they’re sacred talismans, from objects on her desk to the chessboard where Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky in 1972 (she traveled all the way to Iceland for that one).
For a reader in emotional freefall, it is profoundly grounding. It’s a sign of interconnectedness in a time when we feel increasingly disconnected.
The way she writes about Mark Rothko’s tweed overcoat, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s hands, provides both perspective and a calming reminder that the outside world is interconnected with the inner in a complicated yet life-affirming way. We can let it work gentle magic on us.
Grief is an unpredictable thing.
Every loss comes with its particular sorrows. In the past month, I’ve found that each one has additionally re-engaged the mourning for my mother, who died in 2018.
Grief is a feral cat.
It’s unpredictable and keeps its own opaque schedule. It comes and goes when it wants, and it wrecks anything it sees fit — yowling all night as you try to sleep, flashing surprise claws when you reach to soothe it, mangling any fragile thing it finds.
This has also been a busy month. Those seem to go hand-in-hand, don’t they? For me to maintain a living as a freelance writer, I write somewhere around 7,000 words a week, in addition to other work that keeps me afloat.
There hasn’t been a lot of time or emotional space to make art.
I’ve spent more hours staring at blinking cursors and silent instruments in the past month than I have actually making art. When I have worked, I’ve spent hours recording music that I’ve almost immediately deleted. The little non-work writing I’ve managed has been relegated to a “sketches/attempts” folder that I will probably never touch again. Stories and poems have languished in that folder for more than a decade.
When grief and overwhelming pressure come, when the anvil of burnout drops on us, we experience a kind of spiritual “fight-flight-freeze” crisis.
We can choose to push through all of it, shouldering room for our work and hammering out whatever we can as a distraction or because we have to feel productive.
We can run from it. My go-to spiritual flight mechanism is burying myself in snacks, ice cream, Harry Potter movies and international detective shows (the last an obsession I share with Patti Smith — more proof that we’re soulmates). When anyone checks in, I snap something about self-care and go back to stuffing my face.
Finally, we can freeze. Fatal in a physical fight-flight-freeze moment — deer in the headlights, hunter before the tiger — but actually pretty handy in a moment like the one I’m in right now.
That’s what I found myself doing this month: freezing. Or, more specifically, stopping. Stopping and holding space for whatever floods in.
I stop. I settle in, and I wait and listen. I make note.
I’m really tired of words. I make a living in words. And, writing seventy-gazillion words a week, I crave space and simplicity. And silence.
I feel like I’ve used up all my subjects. Poems about ritual, stones, time, loss… I can’t go on indefinitely just circling these same themes. I don’t know where to turn for something new.
Patti Smith has a Proustian gift (with the clear language of Elizabeth Bishop) for intertwining emotion and object, and she is a decidedly physical writer in a world that is increasingly virtual. She loves both the physical and inner worlds, where many of today’s writers see only conflict.
I hate pretty much everything I’ve created in the past month. I sit down anyway. I try. I get up and walk away. But I come back.
Sometimes I don’t want to be resilient.
No matter how much I deny it, I feel incredible pressure to be productive. The older I get, the more I feel it.
Sitting with these realizations gives me the opportunity to interrogate them, to try to understand where they sit in my body, how much of them is rooted in reality and how much in perception.
I turn to artists I admire for the reminder that I’m not the first person to be here or feel this.
John Cage was devotee of silence, and yet he wrote, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
On not knowing what’s next, the poet WS Merwin, in an interview with Bill Moyers, said, “I think that poetry and the most valuable things in our lives … come out of what we don't know. They don't come out of what we do know. They come out of what we do know, but what we do know doesn't make them. The real source of them is beyond that. It's something we don't know. They arise by themselves. And that's a process that we never understand.”
Patti Smith has written a lot about grief and creativity. Last month, she wrote, “When my husband died in 1994, I found it impossible to do anything creative, to write a single word. One afternoon when the children were at school, I noticed how lovely the light was and how it fell upon the mosquito netting over the window. Fred’s old Polaroid Land camera was on the shelf. I took two pictures that afternoon, both diffused in light. The first was Nureyev’s practice slippers and a second of the net falling on a Tibetan singing bowl. Just two photographs. But to me, proof of creative energy, some evidence that I yet existed as an artist.”
And that crap art I’ve been making? In 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to Alfred Stieglitz, “The painting of this morning is no good … But I was much excited over it—and know that something will come.”
Interconnectedness is a key that unlocks grief. Every one of us experiences grief. And loss. And overwhelming pressure. We are connected by grief as much as we are joy, or oxygen, or water, or the carbon in our cells that came from stars.
Unlocking grief is not the same thing as eliminating it. I don’t know if you ever eliminate it. But, by unlocking it, we open it. And by opening it, we can see all of it.
Grief is the itch of the healing wound.
Patti Smith lost her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith in November of 1994, less than one year before I met Erica, the woman who would later become my wife. For the 26 years that Erica has been in my life, Patti’s husband has been gone from hers.
This is perspective.
26 years is a long time. And it isn’t.
Life is long. Life passes quickly. That’s the paradox.
John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Life is the grief. It is the busy week. It’s not waiting to happen on the weekend, or when we feel better. If we stop and sit with this moment, this task, this feeling, and live fully with it without holding onto it and without regret, then we’re living our lives fully.
Art comes from grief as much as it comes from joy, from love, lust, faith or rage. That’s because art is life made tangible, distilled into a frozen moment or a sound or even the memory of a feeling.
We make art because we are overwhelmed and paralyzed and overcome. Not in spite of it.
Be gentle with yourself when things are too much. There’s no need to rush to create. It will come when it’s ready and in the form it requires. All you have to do is let it.
