A Book of Days Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Patti Smith

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photograph credits appear on this page.

  Hardback ISBN 9780593448540

  Ebook ISBN 9780593448557

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Kochman

  Cover photograph: Steven Sebring

  ep_prh_6.0_141716075_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Hello Everybody

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Photograph Credits

  Suggested Reading

  Also by Patti Smith

  About the Author

  A hundred thousand birds salute the day.

  Christina Georgina Rossetti

  HELLO EVERYBODY

  On March 20, 2018, the Spring Equinox, I posted my first Instagram entry. My daughter, Jesse, had suggested that I open an Instagram account to distinguish mine from fraudulent ones soliciting in my name. Jesse also felt the platform would suit me, as I write and take pictures every day. She and I created the site together. I wondered how I might signal to the people that it was truly me reaching out to them. I decided upon a straightforward approach: thisispattismith.

  I used my own hand as the image for my first venture into the virtual world. The hand is one of the oldest of icons, a direct correspondence between imagination and execution. Healing energy is channeled through our hands. We extend a hand in greeting and service; we raise a hand as a pledge. Ocher handprints, thousands of years old, found stenciled in the Chauvet–Pont d’Arc Cave in southeastern France, were formed by spitting red pigment over a hand pressed against the stone wall to merge with an element of strength or perhaps to signal a prehistoric declaration of self.

  Instagram has served as a way to share old and new discoveries, celebrate birthdays, remember the departed, and salute our youth. I write my captions in a notebook or directly on the phone. I would have liked to have had a Polaroid-based site, but as the film has been discontinued, my camera is now a retired witness of former travels. The images in this book are drawn from existing Polaroids, my archive, and the cellphone. A process unique to the twenty-first century.

  Although I miss my camera and the specific atmosphere of the Polaroid image, I appreciate the flexibility of the cellphone. My first inkling of a cellphone’s possible artistic usefulness was through Annie Leibovitz. In 2004 she took an interior shot with her cell, and then printed it out as a small, low-resolution image. She said offhandedly that she thought it would one day be possible to take worthy pictures with a phone. I didn’t consider having a cellphone back then, but we evolve with the times. Mine, acquired in 2010, has enabled me to unite with the exploding collage of our culture.

  A Book of Days is a glimpse of how I navigate this culture in my own way. It was inspired by my Instagram but is uniquely its own. Much of it I created during the pandemic, in my room alone, projecting into the future and reflecting the past, family, and a consistent personal aesthetic.

  Entries and images are keys to unlocking one’s own thoughts. Each is surrounded with the reverberation of other possibilities. Birthdays acknowledged are prompts for others, including your own. A Paris café is all cafés, just as a gravesite may echo others mourned and remembered. Having experienced much loss, I’ve found solace in frequenting the cemeteries of people I love, and I have visited many, offering my prayers, respect, and gratitude. I am at home with history and tracing the steps of those whose work has inspired me; many entries are that of remembrance.

  I have been encouraged in watching my site grow, from the first follower, my daughter, to over one million. This book, a year and a day (for those born on leap day), is offered in gratitude, as a place to be heartened, even in the basest of times. Each day is precious, for we are yet breathing, moved by the way light falls on a high branch, or a morning worktable, or the sculpted headstone of a beloved poet.

  Social media, in its twisting of democracy, sometimes courts cruelty, reactionary commentary, misinformation, and nationalism, but it can also serve us. It’s in our hands. The hand that composes a message, smooths a child’s hair, pulls back the arrow and lets it fly. Here are my arrows aiming for the common heart of things. Each attached with a few words, scrappy oracles.

  Three hundred and sixty-six ways of saying hello.

  01 JANUARY

  A new year is unfolding, the unknown before us, brimming with possibilities.

  02 JANUARY

  After a day of rest, we take a moment to ask ourselves what we hope to accomplish. Small vows, urgent promises to be useful, to be better, to shed what is not needed.

  03 JANUARY

  Greta Thunberg pledged her childhood to Activism. Nature knows and smiles upon her on her birthday.

  04 JANUARY

  This humble headstone marks the resting place of writer Albert Camus, a proud and singular man.

  05 JANUARY

  My armor.

  06 JANUARY

  Divinely commissioned to liberate France from England’s clutches, Joan of Arc left her country home in search of horse, sword, and a suit of armor. At nineteen, guided by saints, she accomplished her mission, then was betrayed and burned at the stake. On her birthday, we are reminded of the principled and ardent fervor of youth.

  07 JANUARY

  As the bells of Ghent toll, a long stroll beyond the bridge of St. Michael. Then spending a while in the church of St. Nicholas, as the pipe organ bellows songs of obscure prophets with golden saws and saints with swords and the keys to heaven.

  08 JANUARY

  As a young girl, I admired the skater’s attire, adopting the look as my own. Black coat, black tights, white collar. The plate belonged to my mother, who preferred me in bright colors, but the skater prevailed. He dwells beside my copy of Ariel, another significant influence, given to me by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1968.

  09 JANUARY

  She has given the lion’s share of her eighty years toward the elevation of the human condition. She never let us down, by action or example. Her fearless voice a bell tolling for equality, opposing war, empowering the downtrodden. Happy birthday, Joan Baez, our dark butterfly.

  10 JANUARY

  This was a favorite book from my childhood: Around the World in 1,000 Pictures. In 1954, I began keeping a list of all the places I wished to go. Providence has been kind, and with camera in hand, I’ve been to many of them. I retrace my steps through yellowed pages, much thumbed by a dreamy twelve-year-old girl.

  11 JANUARY

  My first view of a palm was in the book of 1,000 pictures. In my travels I have seen many, such as this curved palm in San Juan.

  12 JANUARY

  A Polaroid of Haruki Murakami in Tokyo. He has said that there is no such thing as perfect writing, just as there is no such thing as perfect despair. Exquisitely
imperfect Murakami! On his birthday, I imagine him waking in a great silver capsule, descending the stairs, and looking up at a brilliant yellow sky.

  13 JANUARY

  This is one of the waterwheels built by the great Akira Kurosawa for his final film, Dreams. He did not dismantle them, as the people had grown to love them. They turn in the water in the Japanese Alps, where wasabi grows. I went there to see for myself the wheels that manifested from Kurosawa’s dreams. An arduous search for simplicity that was well rewarded.

  14 JANUARY

  Ocean Grove, Winter.

  15 JANUARY

  The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

  —Martin Luther King Jr., January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968

  16 JANUARY

  The desk of the great writer Jorge Luis Borges lives in the National Library in Buenos Aires. It was designed to encompass him, perhaps to assist in reining in his infinitely expansive universe.

  17 JANUARY

  In a preserved corner of the Café Tortoni, surrounded by Belle Epoch décor, a tableau immortalizes the great Borges, joined by tango singer Carlos Gardel and the poet Alfonsina Storni. A wax-museum diorama, coffee in perpetuity.

  18 JANUARY

  London. Florence. Hiroshima.

  19 JANUARY

  This is my Polaroid Land 250 with a Zeiss range finder. My idiosyncratic working companion for two decades of travel. With film discontinued it is now obsolete, yet holds a place of prominence among my work tools. Nothing really matches the atmosphere of the old Polaroid film. Except perhaps a poem, a musical phrase, or a forest hung with mist.

  20 JANUARY

  The hand, the stroke of the pen, words funneling.

  21 JANUARY

  A setlist is the spine of a performance, a guide for each night. It is part of our process; my bass player Tony Shanahan and I feel a sense of the night, its atmosphere and the energy of the people, and prepare the list, the concert’s inner narrative.

  22 JANUARY

  Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. My son Jackson, stoic and assured, playing in his favorite shirt.

  23 JANUARY

  This is Ravi Coltrane and Steve Jordan, setting up with their fellow musicians to soar in “Expression,” a composition by Ravi’s father, the great master John Coltrane. Music sings in the blood of our sons.

  24 JANUARY

  Monk’s House, Rodmell. In the garden where her ashes are buried, a bust of Virginia Woolf, cloaked in ivy, silently reigns.

  25 JANUARY

  Virginia Woolf, born January 25, 1882. This is her dreaming bed.

  26 JANUARY

  On the anniversary of the poet and wanderer Gérard de Nerval’s death, I offer the opening line of his Aurélia—Our dreams are a second life. A writer’s mantra.

  27 JANUARY

  Reading Nerval has always inspired me to write. This is the greatest gift that an artist bequeaths to future artists, igniting the desire to produce their own work.

  28 JANUARY

  Desk talismans: a postcard image of Mark Rothko. A St. Francis tau from a monk in Assisi. Sam Shepard’s pocketknife. A gold-flecked Murano bowl from Dimitri. Keep on going, no matter what, my talismans seem to whisper.

  29 JANUARY

  Thinking of nothing. I remember my mother sitting like this. And I would ask, What is it, Mommy? And she would say, Oh nothing. And now I know what nothing is.

  30 JANUARY

  Facing the chaos of mounting books, manuscripts, and just plain mess that always accrues when I’m deeply concentrating on something else. Today, I sorted, purged, and cleaned up. Not much fun but I managed to make a game of it, pretending my organizational skills were being observed by aliens.

  31 JANUARY

  Now, all done, and escaping abduction, I am ready to begin new work, primed to make a new mess.

  01 FEBRUARY

  Jesse with roses in the snow.

  02 FEBRUARY

  My desk in winter light.

  03 FEBRUARY

  Introducing Cairo, my Abyssinian. A sweet little thing the color of the pyramids, with a loyal and peaceful disposition.

  04 FEBRUARY

  Gem Spa, a corner newsstand that served us twenty-four hours a day for decades. The spot for underground newspapers, foreign cigarettes, and candy bars. Robert Mapplethorpe bought me my first chocolate egg cream there in August 1967. Everyone passed through its open door, now closed, the beats and hippies and us, just kids.

  05 FEBRUARY

  This is with William Burroughs at his Bunker on the Bowery, taken by Allen Ginsberg on September 20, 1975. I miss walking by his side, always pleased and proud to do so. Happy birthday, dear William, may your golden sails reach the port of saints.

  06 FEBRUARY

  Stacking end tables, dreaming of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column.

  07 FEBRUARY

  Beverly Pepper was an American sculptor who made her home in Todi, Umbria. Her work stands monumental, her spirit unfettered. With the future uncertain, she stated that she worked in the present as projected from the past, her own brand of futurism.

  08 FEBRUARY

  Independence Hall, Philadelphia. The Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation were ratified in the City of Brotherly Love, whose cobbled streets I tread upon as a young girl. The same streets that Thomas Paine walked while contemplating the rights of his fellow citizens.

  09 FEBRUARY

  Thomas Paine, writer, philosopher, and revolutionary, penned “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” He spoke out against slavery and the growing tyranny of religion. Shunned for being too outspoken, he died alone and penniless. On his birthday, we revisit this radiant thinker, standard-bearer for common sense.

  10 FEBRUARY

  The surreal reality of the relentlessly breathtaking Icelandic terrain.

  11 FEBRUARY

  A white Iceland pony appeared in the distance, as if the unicorn had broken through the metallic threads of the cloister’s storied tapestry.

  12 FEBRUARY

  Still life with Finnegans Wake, a bible of the incomprehensible, by the great Irish writer James Joyce. I obtained it some years ago in a London bookshop with money I earned performing poetry. Joyce labored on his masterwork for seventeen years, so one need not hurry to navigate it.

  13 FEBRUARY

  The key is equally incomprehensible.

  14 FEBRUARY

  Robert was my Valentine. February 14, 1968.

  15 FEBRUARY

  Robert gave me this Persian necklace, wrapped in black tissue.

  16 FEBRUARY

  Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1952. Sisters. True love.

  17 FEBRUARY

  Washington Square, New York City. This amiable fellow produced a nostalgic desire for mismatched mittens and welcoming mugs of steaming cocoa.

  18 FEBRUARY

  As a young girl she lived through bombings and starvation in war-torn Japan. Seeing the ravages of war, the terrible destruction and desperation, made a deep, lasting impression, impacting her unique voice as an artist and activist. On Yoko Ono’s birthday, may all give peace a chance.

  19 FEBRUARY

  This is the Peace Pagoda in Japantown, San Francisco. The strange weather gave everything the inner glow and aura of another time, the tower emerging from the mist like an old postcard faded in the sun.

  20 FEBRUARY

  In hi
s fleeting life all aspects of his work embodied the sacred and damned duality of being a rock and roll star. Kurt Cobain, February 20, 1967–April 5, 1994.

  21 FEBRUARY

  Rabbit news courtesy of Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. Remember the dodo. Feed your head.

  22 FEBRUARY

  This is the hat of the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. No other shall wear it.

  23 FEBRUARY

  Rockaway Beach. Restless gulls, restless hearts.