Year Of The Monkey - Patti Smith

YEAR OF THE MONKEY – PATTI SMITH

How strange it must be living Patti Smith's life. Just a thought that occurred whilst reading Year Of The Monkey. At the start of the book Patti mentions she's just finished the last of three nights in a row performing at the Filmore, in San Francisco. Can you imagine? Three nights of ecstatic, classic rock'n'roll that for some would probably be as near to a religious experience they will ever get, and that quite possibly includes Patti herself.

Patti, however, just casually mentions it almost as a 'by the way', as though it was no big deal. What is more significant to her is some guy with a greasy ponytail leaning over and puking on her boots on the last night and whether this is a good or a bad sign to end the year on? 'Well, considering the state of the world,' she surmises 'who could tell the difference?'

Patti wanders into a thrift store and buys an old Grateful Dead tie-dye T-shirt with Jerry Garcia's face on it. It's an impulsive buy, she says. She later hitches a ride to San Diego with a couple who ask for eighty-five dollars advance payment for gasoline. At a truck stop she gets out to go to the bathroom and on her return she sees the car speeding off into the distance, leaving her there stranded. Meanwhile, Patti's friend for over forty years, record producer extraordinaire Sandy Pearlman, is lying in a coma in a hospital.

All these things and more are fused together like fragments of a dream to create an encompassing dream-like experience but rather than the fragments it's the dream in totality that Patti is more interested in, and it's this that she writes about.

It's unlikely that Patti's a rich person at all but at the same time she's not going to be poverty-stricken, so if need be she's going to be able to afford new clothes if required. It's interesting then that she would instead buy an old, second-hand tie-dye T-shirt peeled from the body of some old Deadhead. It's interesting that rather than catching a coach or even a taxi, she would instead hitch a ride with a couple of potential psycho killers. Rather than staying at a Hilton hotel she chooses instead to stay at some rickety, old motel called the Dream Inn.

All things, however, are connected and nothing is coincidental so perhaps all things are meant to be? 'I was dreaming in my dreaming', as Patti sings on People Have The Power though that could easily be changed by dropping just one letter to 'I was dreaming in my dreamin' but in the book she fails to make that connection for some reason. Dreamin'? Dream Inn? Dreaming in my Dream Inn? It's like an exercise in Carl Gustav Jung's theory of synchronicity.

Throughout Year Of The Monkey there is a continuous sense of mortality as Patti marks the passing of time and the passing of life as she approaches her seventieth birthday. Her friends and those she admires fall and pass away continuously: Muhammad Ali, Sandy Pearlman, Fidel Castro, Carrie Fisher, Sam Shepherd. 'This is what I know.' she writes 'Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My husband is dead.'. It's like an echo of Jack Kerouac's lament at the end of The Dharma Bums where he asks: 'Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?'

All is dream. The dream of life. Dream for free because if nothing else we're free to dream. Is there, however, such a thing as the end of dream and if so where might that be? And if there is an end of dream would it not follow that there is also a birth of dream? Subsequently, might there be an afterbirth of dream? Come the end of Year Of The Monkey, Donald Trump is elected as the next President of the United States so yes, perhaps there is an afterbirth of dream and he's the full, dayglo embodiment of it?

'Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.' Patti writes 'Maybe tomorrow. A tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows.' She concludes, however, that 'The trouble with dreaming is that we eventually wake up'...

John Serpico