Patti Smith: The Grace of Starting Again

Last week, performer Bob Dylan was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. For reasons known only to Dylan, he declined to appear in Stockholm to accept the award, and Patti Smith—songwriter, diarist, and punk rock poet laureate—was there to accept it in his stead.

She performed his phantasmagorical ode to the Pandora’s box of the early 1960s, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” to the assembled audience of international dignitaries and before the king and queen of Sweden. It’s worth watching her performance before reading further: https://bit.ly/2huBmsc. About midway through the lyrically complex song, being performed with an orchestra, Smith staggered and missed her lines, the nightmare of every performer and public speaker. But what happened next was what inspired me to write today.

She smiled humbly and said to the maestro, like a high-school kid at an audition, “I’m sorry, can we start that section again? I apologize…I’m so nervous.” What could have been a moment of awkward silence was transformed into the grace of a fellow human being stumbling, acknowledging the mistake, and getting back up. The audience rewarded her sincerity with a long applause before she attempted the verse again then completed the song gloriously to a standing ovation.

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I watched this clip a few times, trying to understand what was so compellingly human about it. When we watch musicians perform, we expect perfection. That’s why we pay to see them—we expect a better version of anything we could ever hope to create, a performance, not a rehearsal, even from a queen of punk rock, a genre that celebrates the unpolished rawness of an emotional performance.

It was not that Smith was perfect in her rendition of Dylan’s song. That’s not the point. It was her capacity for grace in a moment of imperfection that made it so compelling; the courage to be compassionate towards herself and to see this stumble not as a failure, but as the opportunity to connect with her audience, as all performers do, not as an example of perfection, but as a fellow human, a beautifully flawed person.

Smith, in this week’s New Yorker, wrote about the moment: “When my husband, Fred, died, my father told me that time does not heal all wounds but gives us the tools to endure them. I have found this to be true in the greatest and smallest of matters.”¹

As therapists, we have the opportunity to offer this same gift to our patients. When our patients stumble and berate themselves for their failures, could we give them the space not to be perfect, but rather, to endure their stumbles as opportunities for grace and humility, and in the safe container of the therapeutic relationship, to allow them to say, “I’m sorry, can we do that again?”

References

1. Patti Smith. How does it feel. The New Yorker. December 14, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/patti-smith-on-singing-at-bob-dylans-nobel-prize-ceremony. Accessed December 14, 2016.