Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life — to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive — a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity.

One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood — a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies.

Just as The Fairy Tale Tree awakened the young Nick Cave to art, this was Patti Smith’s precocious awakening as an artist. The opening sentence enchanted her:

You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.

It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: “entrance into the mystical world.” In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: “the heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.”

She couldn’t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn’t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them — for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist.

In her moving memoir Bread of Angels (public library), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds — the odds of bodily survival, with a “Proustian childhood” punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard to imagine living with, from the death of her childhood best friend at twelve to a season of being marked by an incomprehensible cascade of losses: her artistic soul mate is taken by AIDS, her husband falls ill and dies at the hospital where their children were born, and in the wake of all that grief her beloved brother is slain by a stroke while wrapping a Christmas present for his daughter.

What saves her again and again is her reverence for the magic and mystery of life. She recounts her early sense of it when, between eviction notices and temporary dwellings in urban buildings marked for demolition, her family moves into a modest house in a rural marshland area:

There was mystery here, not so much in the people, but in the land itself, in the barns, the outhouse, surrounding wetlands, the red earth containing the clay of being. I felt it calling to me, inviting me to experience a frequency I had not yet known. I was consumed with a sense that each of us knows everything, possessing our own lock and the key to turn it. I wondered what I would find, what my contribution might be, and what I might add to the infinite pool above.

Not long after that, she discovers the door to which her heart is the key:

Our sole family visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a revelation… We had never been to a museum or a gallery, we had never been to the movies or a restaurant together. There was no money to do anything save to picnic in the summer together.

When she encounters Dalí and Picasso for the first time in those alien marble halls, she is overcome by the sense of being among allies who would lead her “to a whole new world.” It is through that “invisible transformation” that she manages to break away from her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing and begins charting her own map of meaning, discovering what there is to believe in that holds — “the woolgatherers” and “soul-catchers,” “the many tongues of nature, the moral lessons of fairy tales, the language of trees, and the clay of the Earth.”

Looking back on her sense that the artist is “the material mouthpiece” of the divine and on her longing to discover “an equation that would include all things,” she writes:

I cast off my religion, not without escaping a bitter sorrow, yet also accompanied by a feeling of liberation. I had chosen my own path, gave my evolving self to art, and decided to prepare myself for the life of an artist pledging to be steadfast no matter the consequences… The braid of the mind seemed to have many strands winding around each other, containing everything. All of history, all of knowledge, waiting to reveal itself, if only one could crack the code… We are born with a mind, open to everything, no fear, no known boundaries, but with each new rule, restriction the mind divides. We learn to live as in the age of reason, in relation to the world, to social order, balancing a compliance between imagination and the respirable kingdom.

Once the imagination is set free, the revelations can only keep coming. When she chances upon Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, she is entranced by it, so unlike anything she had ever read, yet so full of the same “shock of aesthetic recognition” she had found in the paintings of Picasso, the poems of Yeats, and the photographs in Vogue.

She pulls at the mysterious golden thread binding these disparate enchantments and suddenly the entire tapestry of the creative spirit is revealed:

Then it struck me: Everything was a potential poem. The stoic prayers of the mantis, the knowing eyes of my dog, the pen scratching. The white snake stirred, and the invisible lines of the rebel hump flickered then shimmered like the coat of many colors.

Every poem, whatever its form, is marked by “a sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment,” and it is to that brightness that she decides to devote her life, leaving home to become an artist, sharing the path with heroes and friends and heroes who became friends by that centripetal force that draws those true to themselves to one another: Rimbaud and Bob Dylan (“both poets seemed trapped in a static present while perceiving future dimensions folding and unfolding into one another”), Alice in Wonderland and Allen Ginsberg, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. She reflects:

I felt chiefly a worker and believed our struggle a privilege. There were walls everywhere, the cracks were formed by others. All we had to do was kick with all our power, topple them, clear the rubble and create space.

Through the struggle — the seasons of subsisting on eggs and oranges, the accident that landed her in a neck brace for months, the mothering of small children — she stays true to her vision, wielding her nos like machetes to make her path through the bramble of the givens: no to the gender norms of dress and demeanor, no to the photographers insisting on airbrushing her peculiarities, no to the posh producer promising to make her a star if she let him take “full command,” no to changing the raw lyric line for polished politeness.

Life responds with its slow-burning yes, radiant and redemptive: Her first record is pressed at the selfsame New Jersey plant where she had once been turned away in applying for a factory.

Buoyed by the knowledge that those given a gift have a responsibility to serve it well, she comes to see the struggle as the holy price of the real work: “to open the wounds of poetry.” In a sentiment that calls to mind Kafka’s reckoning with what keeps the gifted from living up to their gifts, she writes:

Eventually we must act, set in motion a process that will push us closer to the open wound.

Out of her particular life arises the larger sense that art is the alchemy of transmuting the wound into wonder, the sense that to be an artist is to remain ever “enthralled by small things” — the wild roses climbing up the ramshackle house, the “impossible blue” of the morning glories, the same doves returning to the balcony each spring — and ever animated by the “incandescent restlessness” of striving “to materialize the indissoluble filament connecting us all,” giving form to those “unpremeditated gestures of kindness” that are “the bread of angels.”

Pulsating beneath it all is “love, the ineffable miracle” — that delicate art of holding on and letting go, our training ground for trusting time. She writes:

All must fall away… Shedding is one of life’s most difficult tasks… We evolve, we falter, we learn from our transgressions, and then repeat them. We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel. And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.

What emerges from the pages is the sense that art, like love, is that mysterious alchemical reaction between time, truth, and trust — trust in the truth of one’s vision, trust in the kairos of creativity across the lineage of artists, trust in the tenacity of the creative spirit. With such trust, time becomes not a river but a fountain, pouring in every direction into a pool of itself at the center of the sunlit plaza of the possible, and we, corpuscles of mist gilded for a moment before we drop to wash the silver pennies of the dead, and then begin again.