The burden of remembrance: Patti Smith’s dedication to lost legacies
The world should be thankful to have Patti Smith. As a musician, a writer and a vital pioneer, merging the worlds of punk and poetry into something fresh and exciting, the influence is immeasurable. But there’s also another role Smith takes on, somewhat accidentally but not unwillingly. She’s a historian, too, dedicating herself to the memory of her own scene and the stories of those who can’t be here to tell them.
“On March 8th, 1989, Robert and I had our last conversation. The last, that is, in the human form,” Smith writes as the epilogue to her beloved memoir Just Kids. But it’s in these final paragraphs that she reveals it was never her story at all. Instead, the book is a fulfilment of a promise. “I asked him what he wanted me to do for him,” she continues, recounting her final words shared with the artist and her creative soulmate, Robert Mapplethorpe, as he passed away from AIDS complications. “Will you write our story?” she remembers him asking, “Do you want me to? ‘You have to’, he said, ‘no one but you can write it.’ ‘I will do it,’ I promised.”
In the last moments with her closest friend, and the man that was so instrumental to her own artistry, Smith vowed to withhold what they’d been living in for decades prior. She writes, “I told him that I would continue our work, our collaboration, for as long as I lived.” Since then, the memory of Mapplethorpe and the rest of their friends has been a vital pillar in her life.
“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.” Those are the final words of the book as you close the back cover and feel her promise fulfilled.
But the covenant always extended far beyond Mapplethorpe. While Just Kids is anchored as the story of their life, the text stands as a wider eulogy to an entire generation of peers and idols. As Smith moved into the Chelsea Hotel and emerged herself in its bustling crowd, she was front row to the lives of legends and she knows well that those lives were all too often all too short. Just as Allen Ginsberg, one of her peers, wrote, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Smith saw those same best minds stolen from the world with so much still left to say.
Despite being one of the leading figures in punk, Smith never was much of one. By that, I mean her behaviour always aired on the side of sensibility and caution. She famously said, “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life, may you proceed with balance and stealth.” That was her mantra as she avoided the pits of drugs and alcohol that so many people around her tripped into. She has to acknowledge the luck of that as she got through what others didn’t.
As she recounts her moving out of the Chelsea Hotel, she pauses for a moment to remember. “Many would not make it,” she writes. “Candy Darling died of cancer. Tinkerbelle and Andrea Whips took their own lives. Others sacrificed themselves to drugs and misadventures. Taken down, the stardom they so desired just out of reach, tarnished stars falling from the sky.”
But there is no sense of victory to it. “I feel no vindication as one of the handfuls of survivors,” she continues. “I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring. As it turned out, it was I who got one of the best horses.”
Instead, there’s a feeling of survivor’s guilt that colours her older life and the realisation that as the others couldn’t tell their story, she’d have to try and do it for them.
On the simplest, smallest scale, that responsibility rules over her Instagram feed. Smith doesn’t let a date pass her by. She remembered birthdays, death days, publication days and more as she catalogues and celebrates the lives of her old friends through a grainy picture and a sweet caption, just to make sure her followers don’t forget.
On a grander scale, across the world’s biggest stages, her mission is continued through music. When she plays songs like her tender ballad for remembrance ‘Beneath The Southern Cross’, or the haunting ‘Ghost Dance’, she routinely dedicates it to the memory of a fallen friend whose home city she might be in or whose anniversary might be nearing. If not her own song, she’ll take on one of theirs, bringing their art along with her as she continues to journey through life while they can’t.
When Smith took to the stage of the CBGB for the final time in 2006, she was the perfect person to close it down. She resided over the room like a priest at its funeral. For her final song, she took that role seriously as she played ‘Elegie’, taking the chance to read a list of names of all the people who were no longer here to see the end of the venue they used to frequent.
As the crowd roared applause and her list rolled on, Smith did what she’s been doing since she first felt the honourable burden of legacy: she shared her stage with the ghosts. She did what she could to honour those who died too young to see the impact they left behind, to make sure their memory wasn’t left behind.
