Andrea Comas/ReutersĪlthough that episode testifies to the trappings of commemoration, Smith still remains seduced by its spell. Smith poses in front of a picture of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.

This is the sort of slippery and murky territory the nostalgic is wont to inhabit. Smith eventually scandalises the group by delivering a speech that proffers a dramatic imagination of the geologist’s final moments, the precise details of which cannot be confirmed. She finds herself, for example, joining an obscure international society committed to honouring the memory of a scientific pioneer, Alfred Wegener. In fact, it ushers the author into plenty of comical, if not weird, scenarios. This romantic liaison with the past shouldn’t be mistaken for a condition of unrelenting grief. She dances incessantly on the precipice between the ephemeral stream of lived experience and its aesthetic framing, which is inherently reductive and fragmentary (and therefore tinged with absence). But the nostalgic sensibility she personifies is also intricately tethered to her identity as an artist. A great deal of these encounters manifest as phantom visions of her beloved late husband and brother. Smith’s narration of her own consciousness is saturated with fleeting images of loss. Certain objects and environments might appear to offer contact with a bygone era, but their intoxicating effect actually lies in the fact that they always deny us that contact. The past can only ever exist as a story we tell ourselves. Reading of Smith’s attraction to such tombs, I was reminded of Susan Stewart’s exquisite book On Longing (1992), in which she masterfully delineates the nostalgic impulse. One can only speculate on whether or not Plath would appreciate the gesture. At times, her susceptibility to their allure is breathtakingly intense.Īn eccentric example: while hovering over the grave of Sylvia Plath, she confesses an uncontrollable urge to urinate, so that the dead poet might feel some “proximate human warmth”. She explores and contemplates a vast array of relics, souvenirs and landscapes of ruin. Smith is more interested in the impossible promise of reminiscence than in any event it professes to bring to life. The meandering narrative structure and its portrait of transient endeavours conspire to deliver a profound meditation on the spectre of absence resting at the centre of all performances of remembrance (not least of which: the memoir itself). Perhaps to the surprise of some, Smith’s disavowal of plot makes for an utterly tantalising read.

Patti Smith performs on stage at Burgtheater in Vienna.

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