Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot: One Powerful Song

Image via WikipediaI have been listening to this song multiple times today. It is so very powerful. I just googled up the lyrics to the song for the first time. Wow. This is really something.

Patti Smith: Dancing Barefoot

This song might be to love songs what The English Patient is to movies in that genre. My favorite part has got to be the mention of gravity. That is one powerful metaphor. The mention of the word barefoot attains the same height as the mention of gravity. The mention of "the mystery of childbirth" takes me to my favorite book: Tagore's Gitanjali.

she is benediction Image via Wikipedia she is addicted to thee
she is the root connection
she is connecting with he

here I go and I don't know why
I fell so ceaselessly
could it be he's taking over me...

I'm dancing barefoot
heading for a spin
some strange music draws me in
makes me come on like some heroin/e

she is sublimation
she is the essence of thee
she is concentrating on
he, who is chosen by she

here I go and I don't know why
I spin so ceaselessly,
could it be he's taking over me...

[chorus]
she is re-creation
she, intoxicated by thee
she has the slow sensation that
he is levitating with she ...

here I go and I don't know why,
I spin so ceaselessly,
'til I lose my sense of gravity...

[chorus]

(oh god I fell for you ...)

the plot of our life sweats in the dark like a face
the mystery of childbirth, of childhood itself
grave visitations
what is it that calls to us?
why must we pray screaming? Cover via Amazon why must not death be redefined?
we shut our eyes we stretch out our arms
and whirl on a pane of glass
an afixiation a fix on anything the line of life the limb of a tree
the hands of he and the promise that s/he is blessed among women.

(oh god I fell for you ...)



When I turned Zemanta on for this blog post, I realized Patti Smith is still alive. She would sure be someone to meet in person, to say I have met her. Is she is New York?

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Patti Smith: Dancing Barefoot

(Via Soraya Darabi)

Patti Smith: And this entire time I thought Dancing Barefoot was a U2 song.

Bohemian Soul Mates in Obscurity

In “Just Kids” Ms. Smith writes of becoming pregnant at 19 (“I was humbled by nature”) in New Jersey, giving up her baby and heading to New York for a fresh start. Describing herself as “I, the country mouse,” she writes of heading to Brooklyn to visit friends and discovering that those friends had moved away.

In a back bedroom of their former apartment she encountered Mapplethorpe for the first time: “a sleeping youth cloaked in light,” a beautiful young man who resembled a hippie shepherd at a time when Ms. Smith had been contemptuously described as looking like “Dracula’s daughter.”

Thus fate introduced Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe, who would become roommates, soul mates, friends, lovers and muses. Strictly speaking they were never starving artists in a garret, but the romanticism and mythmaking of “Just Kids,” and their tenancy in the tiniest room at the Chelsea Hotel, brings them pretty close to that ideal.

They went to museums able to afford only one ticket. (The one who saw the exhibition would describe it to the one who waited outside.) They went to Coney Island, able to afford only one hot dog. (Ms. Smith got the sauerkraut.) They loved the same totems and ornaments and flourishes; they valued the same things, though in different ways. “We were both praying for Robert’s soul,” Ms. Smith writes of Mapplethorpe’s frank ambition — especially when he fell under the influence of Warhol, someone she deeply mistrusted — “he to sell it and I to save it.” She goes on to suggest caustically that it was his prayers that were answered.