When Patti Smith accepted her medal last Thursday night she talked about two personal moments in which Katharine Hepburn touched her life. The first was when she, as a young girl, first read Little Women and was introduced to Joe March; Smith described feeling so connected to that character, a boyish and headstrong young woman, a writer. She then described waiting on Katharine Hepburn in New York working in a book store; it was after Spencer Tracy had passed, but Katharine Hepburn would touch some of the books and say, “Spencer would have liked that.” Later, when Smith’s husband died, she remembered that moment and felt better about her own desire to still shop for her husband.

Those descriptions of how Katharine Hepburn helped Patti Smith through two major parts of her life—her difficult adolescence and a large loss—made me think about those people or figures who, just by being themselves, allow us to be ourselves as well. And Robert Mapplethorpe is also a person, as we’ve seen throughout the memoir, who allowed her to become the person she wanted to be, to become her most authentic self.

And, in turn, Patti Smith has become that person for musicians, artists, writers, and even Mawrters. Before accepting this blogging position, Patti Smith felt vague and far way. I was a fan, obviously, but as I read through Just Kids and then processed that reading through various blog posts, her image became sharper and more defined in my head. Then I got to meet her, like really meet her, and she not only lived up to that image, but felt even stronger and even more genuine.

In a very important time in my life, only a few months before I graduate from college, I met a person who told me to go after and work for what I wanted; I met a person who validated my desire to write and create, to perform even if I only know four chords on the guitar; I met a person who reminded me to love the people in my life fully and that there are teachers, collaborators and supporters in surprising and unique places. And, in that way, Patti Smith has pushed me to become my most authentic self as well.

These are obviously very sad pages. It’s not as if Robert’s death is a surprise. Not only are the historical facts well-established, but his impending death hangs heavily over the book from the very beginning. Nevertheless, it’s heart-wrenching to read, despite Patti’s beautiful, lovingly poetic tributes that surround all the details.

One of those details was Robert’s curious question: “Patti, did art get us?” It’s a complicated question, and Patti rightly shrugs it off, with no regrets. But the devotion of both Patti and Robert to art, and how it played out over their lives, reminded me of some of Robert and Patti’s interactions from earlier in the book. I was especially reminded of Patti’s early description of herself as the bad girl trying to be good and Robert as the good boy trying to be bad. This dynamic lasted to the very end, with Robert trying “everything but prayer” to heal himself, and Patti praying ceaselessly to make his suffering sufferable, convinced that Robert is still holding hands with God on his way toward death.

In an earlier section of the book, Patti talked about Robert describing himself as pure evil. “You don’t have to be evil to be different,” she’d told him then. “You are different. Artists are their own breed.” She goes on to tell us her readers that she “believed he would once again embrace the knowledge that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity.” When I read that the first time, I wondered what it meant exactly. “Only purity.” Pure what, really?

The sacred and the profane loom large across the artistic bodies of work of both Patti and Robert. Given the horrendously immoral response to the AIDS crisis that came from the conservative, often Christian, establishment in the early 1980’s, it’s no surprise that Robert would embrace the profane in an attempt to undermine the sacred attacks on him and his fellow travelers (the horrible bullying of the beautiful human being of Marlon Riggs comes to mind). It’s a path that other artists have followed in his wake, embracing a posture of pure evil to challenge and expose the real evils of disease and intolerance and narrow-minded hatred and injustice. Diamanda Galas, for one, has made quite a notable career doing such things.

Yet it’s a posture nonetheless. During Patti’s (excellent, charming) afternoon performance for the students last week, she jokingly mocked her own cool artistic poses from the 1970’s. “There are no pictures of me smiling in the 70’s,” she laughed. “I was too cool,” she said, launching into a set of mock caricatures of her iconic photographs, most of which were taken by Robert. “Nowadays all my pictures are of me grinning like a big dork,” she went on to say, and ended her talk with an inspirational set of comments about not being afraid to be embarrassed in public, capped off with a brave a cappella performance of “Because the Night.” On the face of it, this admission of her former posturing seems to be at odds with “Only purity.” Is art a pose, or is it pure?

So I got to thinking about art that’s seen as pure evil, and art that’s seen as pure good, sticking with the traditional understandings of sacred and profane as defined by traditional Christian symbols. I’m no art historian, but I do know pop music, so that’s where my mind went.

On the pure evil side of the spectrum, I recalled the end of the (excellent) documentary Until the Light Takes Us, an examination of the Norwegian black metal scene known for its explicitly anti-Christian symbols, corpse-painted band members, real-life arson of historic churches, and ghastly murders and suicides. But even here, Darkthrone multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and black metal legend Fenriz looks sadly at the camera and says “A big part of me wishes that this whole thing didn’t turn into a trend. That’s what f&!#ing sucked, and sucks still. Then again, you know, people like to dress up.” The pose seems quite present here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EhasabiQGs

On the pure good side of the spectrum, I recalled conversations with friends of mine who play worship music in praise bands at Evangelical churches. One such drummer told me he had to quit the band because he felt guilty when congregants told him they’d felt the Holy Spirit move during a moment in one of his songs, knowing full well that it was his manipulative cymbal flourish that had produced such a feeling. The possibilities for posturing in such music is quite well known and frequently discussed among such musicians, as this video demonstrates:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJp98hoqy5I

So it appears Patti was right.  There is no pure evil and no pure good.  But where’s the “only purity”?

Again, my discipline of Sociology is happy to explode notions of purity and authenticity in art, personality, and elsewhere. Everything is fabricated, socially constructed, imagined, idealized, and performed. But this explosion is not meant to diminish what remains. The performances we try out in front of each other are the only reality that we’ll ever have. They may be posed, but they’re not fake.

Ruth Finnegan studied music making subcultures in the English town of Milton Keynes. As a good social scientist, she tried to map the obvious social categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality onto these musical taste communities. But nothing fit. She then realized she needed to reverse the causality. The social circumstances were not producing the musical tastes and practices. Rather, the activities and performances and musical expressions within these enclaves were in fact producing profoundly important social communities, identities, and moral pathways through life.

Simon Frith argues that engagement with music and art allows us not to discover who we “really are” (since such a thing doesn’t exist), but rather allows us to try on different identities and personalities to become who we wish to be. I think this is what Patti had in mind with her notion of purity. And I think this is what Robert and Patti succeeded at so admirably.

Kurt Vonnegut said that Mother Night was the only novel of his that he knew what the moral was: “We are who we pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be.”

“I did alright, didn’t I?” Robert asked Patti as he was dying. “Yes, you did well,” she replied.

“Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express.”

In the Magificat, the earliest known Marian canticle (and Latin for “my soul magnifies”), Mary discovers that she is pregnant and wonders aloud that God “hath regarded the humility of his handmaid”: “For He that is mighty hath magnified me.” Although I am not Catholic, I came to understand why followers love Mary so dearly when I had my children. To feel blessed because you have been miraculously gifted with this child, but to also know that this perfect little biscuit must also some day die, as we all must, is the most glorious—and piteous—magnification of joy and mortality one’s soul can endure.

Perhaps it is especially since Patti and Robert both shared both devotion to, and abnegation of, Catholic iconography and the faith itself that I can’t help but draw a constellation connecting Mary and Patti. They share the joys and pains of mothers whose beloved offspring belonged to them and yet were somehow born wanting to belong to everyone—and, more, to a higher purpose.

Patti is mother to her own actual children, but she had long been so to Robert: through his early, difficult years when he was straining to hear his true calling; when, via his trademark sacred profanity, he became the object of desire to legions of followers; and in the last years of his life, when he was publicly persecuted for his work. The parallels aren’t neat, and Robert Mapplethorpe was no Jesus, but still. They’re there.

What illustrates the comparison most painfully, for me, is that Patti discovered she was pregnant at the same time that she learned that Robert had been diagnosed with AIDS. Patti, having been busy with family life in Michigan for years, hadn’t spoken with Robert in some time, and when she picked up the phone to call him, and heard that he was hospitalized with AIDS-related pneumonia, she cried, instinctively covering her belly. “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life.”

Mary and Patti: our ladies of sorrows. As Mary hears Simeon’s prophesy about her son’s rise and demise, Patti—knowing that Robert was now living on borrowed time—recalled her early sense of foreboding about Robert: “Every fear I had once harbored seemed to materialize with the suddenness of a bright sail bursting into flames. My youthful premonition of Robert crumbling into dust returned with piteous clarity.”

Yet, there they are, both with their perfect babies. There is Mary, pictured, as she most often is, as Madonna and child—her predestined Savior. There is Patti with her newborn daughter and dying soul mate. When the two reunited in LA after Patti’s daughter, Jesse, was born, Robert asked to take a picture of mother and child: “I held Jesse in my arms, and she reached out to him, smiling,” she writes. “‘Patti,’ he said, pressing the shutter. ‘She’s perfect.’ It was our last photograph.”

And Patti, as mother to her brilliant, wayward, and courageous son of sorts, writes of Robert’s corporeal and spiritual beauty: “…it occurred to me looking around at all your things and your work and going through years of work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still the most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

On a personal note, I am amazed to report that I now have my own Patti/mother story. By way of background, I have always given each of my three children royal monikers, for our mutual amusement (and my abiding hope that some amazing painter will one day fancy making a regal portrait of them). My eldest, 12, is Zuzu the Just, for her ferocious sense of ethics and fairness; my youngest, almost 4, is Will the Undaunted, for his intrepid cast of mind and body. My middle child, 9, is Frances the Blessed, because she is a sort of changeling, who does not believe that any lines exist between magic, science, and spirituality. Her career goal, she told me a few months ago, is to be “a quantum physicist who discovers the dimension where souls are located.” Awesome.

Naturally, I took Frances (or, as we more often call her, “Frankie”), as my date for Bryn Mawr’s Hepburn Award ceremony in Patti Smith’s honor. We had brought her a present, a talismanic piece of jewelry, a necklace made by our friend J. Rudy Lewis: a bronze wishbone on a leather cord, with one of our favorite things that we’ve heard Patti say before and after her concerts.

Patti noticed Frankie right away, and leaned down to accept our gift, for which she thanked us graciously, but also with alarm: “But what am I going to give you as a present?” she asked Frankie. She searched her jacket and pockets and smiled, drawing out her gift, a simple silk black ribbon of the sort she is famous for wearing. “I have had this in my pocket for five years, all during the time I was in Japan, and it is my good luck charm,” she said, pressing it into Frankie’s palm. “And this is my present to you.” Frankie whispered, “Thank you,” amazed and mute with honor.

After the ceremony, some faculty, including me, were to have our photos taken with Patti. When it was my turn, Frankie shyly told Patti the words that were inscribed on the necklace we had brought her: “It says, ‘I’d like to thank God I’m alive.’” Patti leaned down, hugged and kissed her, looked at Frankie in the eye and said: “And I am, honey. I am.” Patti then politely shooed the adults away and told Frankie that she would like to have her photograph taken with her.

And there they were, the most beautiful works of all: my blessed baby, Frankie, and the magical survivor and genius, Patti Smith. My soul was magnified.

Patti singing J. Carroll's "People Who Died" (But we're alive!)

Frankie, the Blessed

Little emerald bird
Wants to fly away
If I cup my hand
Could I make him stay …

To say goodbye, Patti writes a poem.

Departing from Robert and her life in New York to move to Detroit with her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, she composes a work for Robert’s portfolio and he assumes a place as “the blue star in the constellation of my personal cosmology.” The two don’t reconnect until several years later, when Fred Smith suggests Robert photograph Patti for the cover of their album, Dream of Life. Then, Patti’s personal cosmology is shaken by news of Robert’s AIDS diagnosis. Their reunion and the work they create – their artistic and personal connection still strong – becomes a fitting and fulfilling final act.

Dream of Life becomes more than just an album title, but a phrase that encapsulates everything about Patti and Robert’s final months together. Pregnant, Patti’s creative process is both biological and artistic, while Robert must fight the biological destruction imposing a certain end to his powers to exist as both an artist and a man. Both are acutely aware of this: “He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life,” Patti writes. Once again they strive to stay together as circumstances attempt to tear them apart.

Their original connection remains despite the years of separation. In the midst of a beautiful apartment surrounded by expensive furnishings, Robert delights in showing Patti the pieces of fabric, paper, string, and other small treasures he has collected. In response, she tells Robert “he had always been with me, part of who I am, just as he is at the moment.”

Despite her happiness at welcoming Robert’s physical presence back into her life, Patti is acutely aware of that physicality slipping away. Robert experiences the life and love of Patti’s visibly expanding family in the wake of the loss of his lover Sam Wagstaff and his own rapidly declining health. Facing the pain of death, he asks: “Patti, did art get us?” Patti, agonized, refuses to answer in the moment, but in hindsight, rightfully rejects the idea. It is through art that Patti and Robert’s relationship remains alive. Together they created – and inspired each other to create – poems, drawings, songs, photographs, a true legacy. When Robert regrets not having children with Patti, she correctly asserts “our work was our children.”

When Robert’s artistic strength finally is stolen by disease, Patti can no longer take comfort in the power of Robert-as-artist and instead must face his ever-apparent mortality: “I had nothing left to give him but love,” she realizes, lying in the dying artist’s arms. Their last conversation takes place in a hospital, where they pledge their love to each other before Robert is wheeled away for tests. Two months later, she attends his memorial service.

To say goodbye, Patti writes a poem.

… Little emerald soul
Little emerald eye
Little emerald bird
We must say good-bye