In short bursts, this sort-of-memoir provides some background to the story of how its author, musician Patti Smith, was drawn into the arts. It speaks of the magic world – unburdened by rationality and heavy demands – that we inhabit as children.
In ‘The Two Worlds’ Smith writes: “I bounded from temple to junkyard in pursuit of the world.” This makes evident the breath of the search to which she has committed her life, and in this book we learn that it started when she was very young.
Earlier last year we were treated to a straightforward autobiography of Smith’s friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, but if you’re expecting more of the same here, think again.
What we have here is more a cross between memoir and poetry. The name of the book, we learn, refers to Smith’s farming and shepherding heritage, as well as being a nod to the small people that were thought to inhabit the world through which she moved as a child. The woolgatherers lived in the dusky lands that Smith watched outside her bedroom window. On occasion she joined them and felt the kinship very deeply. In sleepy fields she “wandered among them, through thistle and thorn, with no task more exceptional than to rescue a fleeting thought, as a tuft of wool, from the arms of the wind.” She returned fully loaded with pictures, stories and experiences that she then bestowed upon her newly roused eagerly awaiting siblings.
This slim volume is very much about loosening oneself from the family fabric, about Smith happening upon, becoming, creating her own being. She seems to have done this very much with the blessing of her family and still aware of the inevitable unbreakable strings of attachment to one’s past.
It makes us glimpse some sense of our brief lives and losses, and that which gives us love and meaning.
Smith gives us the gift of encouraging creativity, as well as fuelling hope in life and possibilities. You can easily re-read the book for further encouragement without having exhausted its importance.
It is a lovely little tome, sprinkled with charming photographs, that does not yield all its gifts immediately, but saves a little for each read.
