The wonderful Lindsay Potts has sent me books and letters throughout my service. Thank you a thousand times, Lindsay. It is amazing how similarly her taste and mine parallel. The book “Just Kids” published in 2010 by the famous Patti Smith was placed on my fruit crate bookshelf only for Gray to find when going through my collection of “to-be-read”. I immediately went to my itunes, and yes, someone, once upon a time, passed me some of the songs from her Horses album. I sat on the bed with Gray and we listened to her sound as if for the first time.
It took another week, and for Gray to go on another adventure into the mountains while I stayed back to work at the after school program, for me to actually crack the black book open. I had avoided this, her love story with Richard Mapplethorpe, for obvious reasons. The epitome of loneliness probably shouldn’t be participating in someone else’s love life, even if it is through script only. But now that I am experiencing the world with another young adventurer, it seemed a good moment.
My relationship with Patti has rocketed only 100 pages in. While this confused young woman she writes about doesn’t have quite the mission to save the world I have so naively possessed, her need to live through art yokes me to her. Her writing and rhythm feels so similar to mine that if it weren’t for her prodigious vocabulary you could probably confuse my own oeuvre for parts of hers. The young woman yearns to leave her hometown and know the world. She risks security and her health to not only meet people and earth, but to make art.
“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.”
This is the only quote in the book I have actually dug out a pencil to underline. It echoes the Rilka quote when speaking to a young poet,
“…live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday… … you will live your way into the answer.”
But, what I love about Patti’s quote is that it speaks to the communal nature to humanity (though it may be a little mocking of young relationships). Our personal, young confusion only finds its answers through knowing others and living our confusion. It is only through simultaneously living our questions and the answers we have stumbled upon, do we begin to find ourselves and loved ones.
I love thinking of life this way. I love how this thought promotes world travel, curiosity, reading, questioning, conversing, listening, and loving. There is no irony in the fact that both of these writers are divulging information of and to the young. I like to think that that is all of us. So long as we are living our questions through knowing each other, will we be forever young?
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