E V I D E N C E | POMPIDOU
Stephen Crasneanscki: Where should we start from? I guess one of them is the three French poets we decided to focus on, Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud, and René Daumal, who left France for a journey that changed their lives forever. We read and studied their text, went back on their trace, recorded on-location, composed music inspired by those places, and tried to understand them.
Patti Smith: Yes, it’s two ideas, one is that we love them, and we love them as beings. The other is that we love their work and look at their work not as being dead or even completed because we think of them as living and organic and that their cells are energy cells that are still multiplying, still sending vibrations, still conveying. The force of Artaud, you couldn’t kill him!
P: You know that movie from Peter Brook, Meetings With Remarkable Men? In the beginning of the movie, the father takes his son to the mountain, and all the men are there with their sons and they have a competition on who can make the mountains speak. They all have to use the voice and the one who can make the mountain almost shake and reverberate and create the echo (which is the mountain speaking) wins the sheep. In a certain way, that’s what I feel it is like: we’re presented with the mountain a the material, it’s Artaud’s poems or Rimbaud’s or Daumal’s texts. In performing, it’s the same type of thing. I can simply read the poems quietly, or have someone do it in French, and we have the poem and fine, it’s perfect. It might not reverberate anything. But in staying open and being free to assault, or be assaulted, that way there is a reverberation in each case. Not necessarily in every case, but in at least one Rimbaud, Artaud, Daumal, and maybe more, the mountain actually speaks.
S: Yes, the mountain speaks, but only for the one who can hear. Along the journey, I am collecting stones, sand, pieces of wood that come my way. When all those objects and instruments come back into the studio and are played with the right intention, they also reveal their own stories.
P: When I’m in the studio, I’m listening to a soundtrack of elements, of sticks, rocks, rain, air, and wind. They take me places because of their purity and the purity of their intent. They were recorded in dangerous places with absolute love. Unconditional love and that comes through and just takes me on another journey. Because I am not making the physical journey – you made the physical journeys – I can only make the journeys through performance and language. But they are big journeys. We help each other journey, right?
S: Yes, every time you are traveling with me in spirit. Your presence, as well as our poet, is always part of my adventure. You are there with me, and sometimes I think there is no decision-making involved when it comes to capturing the sound, as though it was already there, waiting for me. My sole responsibility is to be present in order to listen and do what I am required to do.
P: To me, it’s one of the most beautiful things about being alive, having this consciousness that can reach out and go there, that’s where we channel from. It’s all energy. Those poets are all dead of course. I go to visit their tombs and I know they are dead, but their energy – radio waves and brain waves, all of those things go there, that’s what the pool is: it’s the liquid energy of everything. If you thought of it as a great set of encyclopedias, you can go to the pool and find the R’s and you can find Rimbaud. To me, the pool is also pre-Babel. In the Tower of Babel story, everyone speaks the same language. They had the miracle of telepathy. They could do anything. They are building the tower of Babel and they have this tower, they can raise stone, the unification of their minds is so powerful. In Genesis, God looks at them and he can that they want to see what he’s up to. He’s looking down and he thinks, “What the fuck?! My people all speak of one mind so they can do anything and they are coming up to my house. Because of this, I’m going to confound their language.” And they were trying to talk to each other, but one person is speaking Greek, one Somalian, and they couldn’t communicate to build this tower. To me, the pool is pre-Babel, when man knew everything and they were only this far away from God. It still exists, he didn’t destroy the pool, he just made it hard to get to.
S: All true languages are incomprehensible. In the act of collecting and recording, we are trying to restore what came before language. Like an intuitive sense of truth.
P: Well, I think our work is important, on the most banal level, new interpretations of these three great minds. On other levels, we are preserving and encoding these notebooks with chicken scratches and encoding the process of channeling, of accessing the pool and taking from it and then giving process to the pouring and receiving, like a figure of eight. As an anthropologist preserving what otherwise would be gone all of a sudden, like all the Indians are killed, or no more access to the mountain, or no one cares anymore, On so many levels, art, anthropology, spirituality, entertainment, all kinds of things in obscure works that aren’t even obscure anymore because we opened them up with a can opener.
P: What does it say in Mount Analog, “And you, what do you seek?” Don’t you love that? I remember reading that and going “(gasp) wow.” What do you seek? Everything?
S: Unlimited vision.
P: Well, you know, if you’re going to have unlimited vision you’re going to see a lot of difficult things. You are gonna see death, loss, hunger, and exquisiteness, all of the same weight. The price Artaud paid; look at him with no teeth, with raw skin. You have to be raw at least some point. You have to wail like an animal, at least once.
S: There is always a duality in all of us. An apocalyptic as well as wise mind and both states exist in different moments of our lives. This instability followed our three poets wherever they went.
P: Yes all of them, but that is why Daumal has such beauty. He seems to me the one with the most clear mind when he died, and no rage – the most accepting. The beauty of his soul was like washed crystal, it was clean.
S: When I went to the holy city of Varanasi in India to record for our album of René Daumal, hundreds of bodies were burning along the Ganges river. the Aghori, an ascetic Shiva sadhu, told me that you can see one’s life through the way the body is burning. A good life is a body that burns fast. A conflicted life is one where the body is resistant to the fire, and you can see legs and arms getting stiff and requiring constant assistance for them to burn.
P: [sighs]
S: It’s like trying to find a breath that has fossilled on a rock, which we are trying to resurrect, and record its exhalation. The breath of a universal consciousness “aware of itself in the flow of time, still it only in the present, that is, an immediate simple act outside the flow of time”, as Daumal said. It’s about creating a space, being present, and bringing it to life.
P: Yes, it’s like awakening the space, how beautiful. It always exists. In Daumal’s space, he created it, that’s what artists do, they create space. If you’re creating space for others, it’s up to them to enter it and use it, whether it’s Blake that created space or the space that DaVinci created in the eyes of his Christ. I remember in early Punk Rock, people would ask me, “What are you trying to do with your music? What is Horses?” I said, “I am creating space, so other generations can ask: what does doing an album mean?” It doesn’t necessarily mean some singles or that you have to write eight songs. This is an album that created space for you to expand on and create more space out of. Jimi Hendrix was a great space creator. It takes the artist out of the realm of the egocentric to create their work. But in creating space, there’s where benevolence takes hold, because artists will die. They will be dead, but the space they created lives. It’s a living space, as you said.
S: I think I learned that while walking at the foot of the Nanda Devi in the Himalayas. Being so out of breath and exhausted, I literally couldn’t see myself moving up another meter. Dhan Singh Rana, our Sherpa who was in his 70′s, repeated to me with his soft voice and infinite patience: “Don’t stop, just keep walking, just a little bit more.” And meter after meter, hour after hour, slowly but surely I got there. I recorded him back in his village for the opening track, singing an ancient song honoring the mountain – it turns out he was the last Sherpa that climbed its summit. The mountain teaches us the slowness and calmness that Daumal wrote of in his climbing diaries. When you finally arrive and look up at the magistral Nanda Devi summit, Daumal’s words resonate: “The Mountain is the connection between Earth and Sky. Its highest summit touches the sphere of eternity, and its base branches out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the path by which humanity can raise itself to the divine and the divine reveal itself to humanity.”
P: Well you see, you’re my Sherpa, I feel like I’m dying and you keep pushing, “Just a little bit more.”
S: Well, we are all Sherpa’s for each other, because sometimes pushing a little bit more allows us to see the sacred valley behind.
P: Those spaces are what we set out to find and explore physically by going to Antonin Artaud’s cave in the Sierra Tarahumara in Mexico, Arthur Rimbaud’s Sufi shrine in Harar, and René Daumal’s narrow and difficult trail of the Mount Analogue. Meanwhile, we attempted to metaphysically access the way they perceived the world to unlock the chain to their consciousness and see through their eyes, hear through their ears.
P: Sometimes you are so close – it’s almost as if there’s this wavering transparent veil, and all you have to do is put your hand through it and you’re on the other side. That last moment seems like the hardest movement of your whole life: to thrust your hand through it.
