A prayer in deguise
Notes on Patti Smith and the Art of Remaining
The first book my boyfriend ever gave me was written by Patti Smith.
I remember opening it and feeling an immediate pull, as if she had found words for the kind of silence I had been living in. There was something in her voice, the way she turned ordinary moments into relics, that made me fall in love. Not only with her, but with the possibility that words could hold a world, fragile, imperfect, but alive.
When I first read Just Kids, I couldn’t help but feel the same way. My boyfriend and I were also two young kids with wild hearts trying to make sense of our lives through art, books, music and long nights.
A year and a half passed and we were still those young kids, spending our days searching for a voice and for a one of our own between borrowed stories and libraries, while searching for dreams that looked close but yet too far apart. I still remember that January, when Fher received his first salary working in art. We spent it all on books, our very own first books together. And somehow, that is how intermission started, not as a plan but as our own act in the search of something we hadn’t found yet. Our little space for relics and secrets, finally an intimate library of our own.
Our small shared library sat beside my bed, in an old building in Mexico City, where the sound of the street mixed with the smell of paper and dust. While the pages of our growing little collection slipped through my hands, I stumbled upon another book, a borrowed one, kept in someone’s private library. Inside, I found heart-speaking poems, handwritten lyrics, and photographs that documented a story I had never lived, yet somehow felt close to — another Patti´s book.
Somehow, it made me think about how Patti and Robert found their way back into our path. It had been more than a year since that first book, Just Kids, when we bought our first book together: an archive of Robert Mapplethorpe from 1987, with texts written by Patti. We didn’t know it then, but that book would become a symbol, a quiet thread tying their story to ours. And now, as I write this years apart, it feels almost circular, as if they had been there all along, quietly watching over the beginnings of what would one day become this.
Since then, Patti has remained a quiet compass. She writes the way people remember: slowly, reverently, with a tender precision that belongs to those who have learned how to lose. Her sentences do not demand attention; they breathe, they stay. Reading her, I understood that creation isn’t always about expression. It goes further. It’s about devotion, about keeping the light from disappearing.
Her story at the Chelsea Hotel feels almost mythical now. It keeps reminding me of my own life, even though they were so apart. What keeps me awake the most is its ordinariness. They were just two young artists, Patti and Robert, trying to make beauty out of scarcity. Between photography and poetry, hunger and prayer, they built a life out of fragments. Their work became a shared act of faith, a belief that art could sanctify what the world considered disposable.
In those early years, she carried Rimbaud in her pocket like a small flame. His defiance, his purity of vision, became part of her language, that refusal to separate art from life, dream from endurance. But what moves me most about her is the way she continues. Through decades, griefs and small miracles, she never stopped listening. Whether in a song, a Polaroid or a line scribbled in a notebook, there’s always the same quiet insistence: pay attention. The same impulse that led her to Mapplethorpe’s lens now leads her to archive the world: faces, books, stones, the ghosts of poets.
To wander through her archive, through the flickering videos, is to witness a life recorded in devotion. Each frame, each photograph, carries the same quiet reverence for what might otherwise vanish. These fragments don’t exist to immortalize her, but to preserve the pulse of a world she never stopped believing in.
Below, we’ve gathered a small archive of fragments of Patti’s voice:
Her videos, readings, performances, and some pieces from her visual work.
They echo the same devotion found in her writing, a way of keeping what would otherwise fade. Patti Smith teaches us that art is not about transcendence but about return—returning to what matters, to what hums beneath the noise, to the small traces that make us human.
And maybe that’s what her work offers: a way of staying awake. A reminder that, even in a vanishing world, words keep breathing, quietly holding what would otherwise fade. And somewhere, somehow, our stories meet, yours and mine, of those who are reading, wandering, searching for meaning that stays.
pd: we still treasure that first book from 1987.
-Isabel
Loved writing this
🤍