"Until Their Sleep Turned to Water" by David Newkirk

Until THeir Sleep Turned to Water

David Newkirk Woolgathering, by Patti Smith, New Directions, 2021.

I know the exact second my artistic infatuation with Patti Smith began.

At the stroke of midnight, April 18, 1976, the static on my tiny black-and-white television cleared long enough for me to watch Smith take the stage on Saturday Night Live. Easter Sunday began with Smith, simple piano chords in the background, declaring that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

As the piano chords faded, she sang a petulant, rapturous version of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” that somehow never stopped accelerating in tempo and intensity. Her “Gloria” was no longer a pop love ditty. It was a weapon. A weapon that she aimed squarely at a society whose rules and regulations could not contain her.

The next day, I found her 45 RPM version of “Hey Joe” at a record store. In Smith’s version, it was no longer a gun in Joe’s hand, as her friend Jimi Hendrix had imagined. Instead, fortynine seconds of spoken free verse turned the gun into a machine gun, held by Patty Hearst in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army flag. Her words framed the song with a dark, accusatory psychoanalysis of suppressed sexual desire and twisted privilege as a motive for violent rebellion.

I was hooked. I wanted more. And over the years, Smith would provide it.

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Like many infatuations, my earliest understanding of Smith initially lacked depth. I wouldn’t learn that she wrote poetry until I stumbled upon her 1978 collection Babel. It would take me nearly four more decades to discover Smith’s 2010 National Book Award winning memoir Just Kids, the beautifully crafted story of her early artistic journey and life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It would take still another year after that to find Woolgathering.

Woolgathering draws its name from a story—or perhaps a fable—from Smith’s childhood. Looking out a window after bedtime, Smith had a vision or dream of spectral figures “bathed in a pale clairvoyance, less like people than rows of quaking aspen with leaves quivering at the slightest breath.”

Needing to give the figures a name, she mustered the courage to ask an old man what they were. “Without opening his eyes, without so much as moving his lips,” he answers her. “They be woolgatherers.” She comes, over time, to understand that the woolgatherers are charged with “[g]athering what needs to be gathered. The discarded. The adored. Bits of human spirit that somehow got away.”

Just as Smith does in Woolgathering.

While many of its vignettes tell early parts of Smith’s life, Woolgathering is not a prequel to Just Kids. In fourteen sections— some prose, some poetry, some both, all interspersed with photography—Smith takes the reader on an expedition into “the scarcely charted landscape of memory governed by clouds.” Her storytelling is animated by the child in her who lives still, a child that resurrects moments, and renders them eternal with words.

Words that are ripples in the pond of time. Words that are made from the dreams of children who slept “until their sleep turned to water.”

In the section “Two Worlds,” Smith’s ethereal prose describes her transformation from child to woolgatherer. She tells us how

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she has become “[a] solitary shepherdess gathering bits of wool plucked by the hand of the wind from the belly of a lamb. A noun. A nun. A red. O blue. Twittering threads caught in the thorns of an icy branch.”

Over time, Woolgathering itself has grown as Smith has added to its cloudscape. First published in 1992 by Hanuman Books, a specialty avant-garde publisher operating from New York’s famous Chelsea Hotel, Woolgathering was originally issued as 3x4-hand-sewn volume. The size was designed to fit in a pocket, or, perhaps, the literal and metaphorical knapsack that makes multiple appearances in the book. The New Directions 2011 edition—the volume’s first wide release—was a slim folio that added photographs by Smith and additional material.

In the newest edition, Smith’s wanderlust is sidelined by the pandemic. She finds that she can travel only through sorting her boxes of Polaroids. Her “mental dart” lands on a candlelight procession celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin Mary that she once joined in Spain. We are given a new vignette, written as she contemplates the fate of burning rainforests and children pulled from their paths by the pandemic.

Another bit of time, a moment plucked and woven into a tapestry of words and images. More wool gathered.

Woolgathering proves one point beyond any dispute. For some artists, it is an error to draw lines as though there are boundaries in a map. We cannot say “music, only here and only this; poetry, here, but not elsewhere; photos and drawings, there; and prose, only to the left.”

Clouds, gathered by hand, cannot be mapped. For Smith, there is only her life, unbounded as it seeks the divine, and her art, relating the world’s beauty, sadness, and joy.

And, of course, the gathering of wool.