Bread of Angels and Holy the Firm
Patti Smith alternated readings from her book, Bread of Angels, with songs she sang alone on stage with her accompanist a few nights ago, September 15.
I had never heard her before; I, who had plenty of chances in the ‘70s to bop over to CBGB and listen to this rare woman in rock. But she was harsh, I thought then, just as fan camps were divided into those who followed folk singers, the Beatles, and others who liked the Rolling Stones or punk rock.
Now she was a woman without makeup and long gray hair, who forgot lyrics, laughed, and invited us into her humanity.
Annie Dillard died that day, September 15, 2026. Annie Dillard was my personal muse: the writer who pushed prose into poetry, wrote unabashedly about all the gods around us, and whom I most wanted to emulate.
She spoke at a nearby college campus on the East Coast, and I went to get my collection of her books signed, which she did. Those were the days before security, tables, and lines, when you just showed up, and people who were writers or musicians or artists talked to you.
Patti Smith was a mystic, too, and I was enthralled by her book Just Kids, about finding Robert Mapplethorpe when she and he arrived in New York City with only their dreams and no money. Like me, they were figuring out who they were, who they would become.
He became a great photographer, mostly known for his gay subjects and insights into that world in the ‘70s, before AIDS. Their pictures together when they were just kids look alike, I think. They are both androgynous, looking more like brother and sister than lovers.
She was known as a rocker, one of the few women to lead her own band, and a punk-rock innovator. Her current book, Bread for Angels, has her touring again now. In that memoir, she says she considers herself a writer first. Everything else follows.
That helps explain why Just Kids won the National Book Award. I read that book because of the award and my interest in Robert Mapplethorpe. Then I was struck by how Bread for Angels explained much of Smith’s artistic inspiration. She spent much time convalescing as a kid, which allowed her imagination to roam. She always thought she had a gift from God, even as a poor kid in New Jersey.
Maybe that is the difference: that I didn’t seek out the gifted and the innovators, the people who would push our generation forward. Or that I spent much of my 20s pulled between my own experimenting and the traditional paths available in New York City.
Two disparate heroines
I didn’t know if Annie Dillard and Patti Smith had anything in common, but they were on my mind this week. They both pondered the mystical from very different points of view, and yet maybe their greatest difference was in style.
Annie’s first husband was a college professor, a man she married when she was still an undergraduate. Patti Smith howled her way into the Chelsea Hotel and relationships with up-and-coming geniuses (and probably a couple others, but that I don’t know).
I do know I wanted to read about her life when she married Fred Smith, guitarist of MC5, and they lived a suburban Michigan life raising kids. She never learned to drive. I was also a suburban mom during this period, and I felt like I was masquerading. I can’t imagine life without a minivan.
The museum visit that blew me away
I know one of the most stunning museum visits of my life was when my companion and I arrived at an Italian art museum and saw Robert Mapplethorpe’s nude photos of models, particularly a black male model he favored, that were set up between Renaissance nudes and Roman marble statuary. The juxtaposition was arresting; the play of beauty, the finely defined musculature.
That find was like Patti, finding genius through serendipity and vision.
Annie Dillard wrote in Holy the Firm about Julie Norwich, a 7-year-old girl who is burned when a small plane crashes on the island where Annie is writing. Or does she call this girl Julie Norwich? Was she summoning the first known woman to write in English, Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century hermitess who survived the Black Death, a mystic who had herself sealed into a cell next to a church, where she lived for many years, writing of her visions?
So there are links between Patti Smith and Annie Dillard and the 20th century and Julian of Norwich, the woman of the 14th century. Whose words will survive? Whose visions will we understand?
I am taken by Annie Dillard’s description from Holy the Firm, often quoted, where she describes a moth drawn to a candle’s flame, who is then caught, and whose body becomes a second wick, like an unknown martyr burning.
Too many of our heroes and heroines were moths drawn to flames.
It is one of the images that wings across both lives: the bread of angels, the holiness, the martyrs, the immolations, the quest to be an artist.
It is the shaping of the story, the bending of words, the calling into being, the gift from God.
We were lucky to bear witness, we Boomers.
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