It’s not so easy writing about nothing. Patti Smith begins, threads, and ends her book, M Train, with the solemn observation of a cow poke who shows up in her dreams. Though M Train is hardly about nothing, it may have felt that way to Patti Smith as she constructed her ”wagon wheel of words scrawling ”in notebooks and on paper napkins, punctuated by quantities of black coffee.” Moving forward through a dream is nothing like moving backward through it upon waking. In that way, the hindsight vision of her pages the picture comes together like ink gathering on a polaroid, many of which are sprinkled throughout the volume. The cow poke waxes poetical. M Train is not about nothing. It rings through with the vibrations of what it is to experience loss.
Patti lives alone with her cats in the Greenwich Village. She writes at an old cafe and possesses an uncharacteristic territorial-ism over her table and chair. If she finds it occupied she waits in the bathroom until it is free. Once seated she orders coffee, brown toast, and olive oil. The waiter tells her that it is his last day on the job, that he’s leaving to open a cafe of his own by the beach. This exchange brings about the memory of when she almost opened her own cafe once, and instead moved to Detroit, for love, for Fred Sonic Smith, who asked her for a child. She agreed, but only on the condition that they could first visit the prison in French New Guinea where Genet served time. She wanted to gather stones from the prison and deliver them to his grave. Fred agreed and the narrative sweeps us from the doldrum of an average day in Manhattan cafe to the trip she and Fred took which bonded them for life.
M Train works like this throughout, rocking like a cradle back and forth through her solitary life in Manhattan to the jet setting adventures she takes to speak for a crowd, to photograph a chess table, or to deliver talismans to the graves of her heroes and heroines who were often her friends. One day she finds her Cafe Ino is closed and so instead goes to another restaurant. A splash of tea falls on the table in the shape of an island. She takes this as a sign to immediately book herself a trip to Japan and to find Murakami’s special alleys and magical corners. She leaves the restaurant at once and whisks us away on her memory. It is as easy to turn the page to find one’s self in Iceland as it is to find one’s self in Venice Beach or at a hotel in London only to watch detective shows. But the transportation feels genuine and never contrived. We are traveling as much through her process of memory as we are through space.
Smith writes as clearly about her journies to the graves of Genet, Plath, and Rimbaud as she does about her affection for AMC’s The Killing, which she watches as often as she can. She describes detectives as modern day poets. It is hard to ignore that even a romantic Renaissance woman like Patti Smith might be dealing with acute grief or loneliness. Detective Sarah Linden searches for the missing, episode after episode, trying to solve the case of a dead girl.
The loneliest thing is not to be found.
But here in the pages of M Train, Smith is never lost. She may be trying, however, like Linden, to solve her own mysterious case of the missing. Her grief is felt most strongly from the loss of her love, Fred Sonic Smith. His is the thread which needles through the passages of foreign travel and through dreams. The waiter buys the cafe on Rockaway with partial help from Smith’s investment. He guarantees her coffee for life. On her first trip to the cafe she finds a weather beaten shack by the boardwalk for sale. She calls it the Alamo and makes an offer on the house, promising to pay the funds after a slew of speaking engagements throughout the summer. Hurricane Sandy has other plans. The new cafe is destroyed, and while the Alamo remains mostly intact, she has to begin significant renovation. The metaphor is not heavy handed, it is treated, as lightly as a the cow poke dream.
The losses surmount and with varying degrees of severity. The Killing is cancelled mid-plot. Her Cafe shutters business. She loses her favorite coat. A camera. Lou Reed passes away, and with him, so does the New York she cannot imagine without him. She recalls when Fred lost his favorite toy, a plastic cow boy named Reddy, perhaps the dream-like specter who appears in her dreams. ”That is death. A disappearing act.”
But for a tale of grief, this is not a sad or depressing book. Rather than the emotion of grief, M Train wants to thunder along the process of grief. And that process can whirl, spin, pirouette a free fall of memory. It endures hum drum of feeding cats and falling asleep to television shows and waking with awkward visions from dreams. It takes coffee black and summons holy invocation from the commonplace. It insists that the lost will be found. And that ”Perhaps it’s not where we are going but just that we go.”