Love & Devotion

Thoughts on reading Patti Smith and writing

At Bookshelf Hanoi, Lili lifts Devotion off the shelf, “Let me get this for you. It looks like something you’d love.”

“What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts.

Because we cannot simply live.”

— A Dream is not a Dream; p. 93 Devotion by Patti Smith

Reading Patti Smith’s Devotion, my struggles for a writing voice surface in plain sight. Her sentences float like clouds, sometimes with piercing silver lining, sometimes rain and snow, but always capriciously consistent and all-encompassing, each sentence a microcosm of the whole work. This must be what writing from the heart reads like. To dare is to be ruthlessly honest. To question is to believe most assuredly in the unknown.

I feel indebted to the generosity of writers for sharing their work with the world. Reading feels like being guided by hidden paths of word cobblestones, a saunter in the most intimate workings of one’s existence.

A morning read

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From a poem written in 2021 about the eternal desire to leave behind something good:

...the kind of comfort in
squirrel-watching / as they cache their cheeks plump with nuts
and honey-crisp apples, we realize / it is all so simple / this
happiness, to feel full / biting down the pulp then casting the
cores out of the window of a car moving uphill, we wish to
leave behind something crunchy and good / something as good
as what we’ve been bestowed upon in this world...

I think we live to love this world and to feel its pronounced way of response. I sense it in almost everything I do. Talking to strangers, I find myself falling in love because of one small thing they’ve said. Numbers and names mean very little. No matter what we do, if we do it out of love, it is lovable by default. Love breathes more and more life into everything — isn’t that so deeply moving?

And poetry is the art of holding one’s breath — in awe of this world and of things we may never be able to explain: of a painting, of little ants and their hill, of inseparability, of theories and patterns, of thoughts, of actions, of people, of what we can’t live without...

The heart of design is to amplify love and our capacity to feel.

Because love is the only thing that makes the sad confinement of the human condition free and boundless. With infinity comes creation.

And how does love begin?

As if asking,

How does the beginning of everything begin?

Waiting for a friend