because the night has all the right words

my thoughts on Just Kids in honour of my seeing Patti Smith in concert

I believe every sentence has an ideal form: the right words, in the right order. It’s what I am chasing every time I write. I’ve only achieved this once, maybe twice, in my entire life.

It’s what I am hoping to find every time I read a piece of fiction. Sometimes I come across a writer who has put so many right words in the right order that it adds up to a perfect whole, and then I get depressed.

Reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids — her reflections on the time she spent with Robert Mapplethorpe in early 70s New York City — made me really depressed before we even got to the inevitable drug overdoses and AIDS death sentences.

Speaking of which, I am surprised at how affected she was by Brian Jones’ death. And even though I knew they were coming, I was surprised at how affected I was by all the others. She did not dwell on them, textually. In fact, most of them received just one or two sentences. It is an attestation to her right-words-in-the-right-order skill that these few sentences were so impactful.

I have been fascinated by the culture surrounding Andy Warhol since seeing Sienna Miller play Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl, devouring documentaries and biographies about the scene and its individual players. Patti Smith’s story of finding the scene and her observation from its edges is such a fresh perspective.

I’ve been a fan of Smith’s music for a while now, but this was the first time I have seen her put the right words in the right order on the page. I thought I’d share some of my favourite lines with you so that you, too, can see the right words in the right order. This is just the short list, btw. I have something underlined nearly every three pages.

I will not tarnish the last quote with any of my nonsense words, so consider this my sign-off. I hope you enjoy:

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

All the Jean Genet I had read contained a sense of sainthood that did not include the clap.

You could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on the pearl of the gods.

Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?

The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic.

As the band played on, you could hear the whack of the pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki barking, bottles clinking, the sounds of a scene emerging.

I saw his impatience to receive recognition in another life, as if he had the predisposed lifeline of a young pharaoh.

It was snowing as I passed a churchyard closed with an iron gate. I noticed I was praying to the beat of my feet.

The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time.