46 pages • 1 hour read
M Train
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Themes
Solitude and Connection
Patti Smith depicts herself as a deeply solitary person. She is alone in many scenes from M Train, and she responds to that solitude in various ways. Sometimes, she seems genuinely lonely, especially when considering the people she has lost. However, being alone is an enriching experience more often than not because it affords Smith so much time for deep introspection. When she is alone, she can think carefully about her work as a writer, reflect on her past experiences, and connect deeply to her favorite books and television shows. Solitude initially seems like a kind of emptiness, but like all the forms of emptiness and nothingness that Smith describes, it is actually full and rich. Being alone helps Smith better understand herself on her own terms, accepting herself and her sometimes unconventional choices for what they are.
Because Smith spends so much time alone, she tends to form deep connections with inanimate objects, locations, fiction, and people who are no longer living. A cup of coffee can be a companion during a morning of writing. The well from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is so vividly real to Smith that she visits it in her imagination. The graves of Genet, Plath, Ozu, and Dazai help Smith feel real connections to those who are no longer alive. Even locations like her house in Rockaway and Café ’Ino become so vivid as to be characters in their own right. The world around Smith is alive with connections, even when she might appear to be entirely alone. She honors those connections with great sincerity, inviting readers to share her love for these seemingly small elements of her life.
In a few precious instances, Smith does connect deeply with other people. Her bond with Fred was deeply meaningful during his lifetime, and she still feels that bond decades after his death. Although she and Zak know each other only because he works at her favorite café, Smith genuinely appreciates him. Some of her connections with other people last for years, like her love for her friends in Japan. Other times, she meets someone only briefly but retains a powerful feeling of gratitude toward them for years after. The coffee trader she meets in Mexico and the maid who helps her when she is ill are among the most vivid examples. Smith extends compassion to others, caring about their perspectives and wanting to create a sense of poetry in their lives, like when she tries to bring the stones from the prison to Jean Genet. These connections with others, big and small, allow Smith’s everyday observances to bloom from “nothing” into meaningful memories.
Writing About Nothing
M Train is, at its heart, a memoir about nothing. Smith articulates the challenge of writing about nothing at the very start of the book and then goes on to explore the concept of nothingness in all its forms. Often, that means writing about moments in which nothing much is happening. Smith never describes performing in concerts, referencing her work only obliquely. When something very dramatic happens, like Hurricane Sandy, she discusses the leadup and the aftermath without going into detail about the event itself. By focusing on these in-between moments, Smith explores what it feels like when nothing is happening. Even in her descriptions of travel, she often puts a particular focus on the days when she simply stayed in her hotel or visited a café. What soon becomes clear is that these apparently empty days are full of small but meaningful moments.
Many scenes from M Train focus on Smith’s dreams or fragments of memories. Writing about dreams is a way to write about nothing, as dreams are wholly fabricated and separate from real life. Many of the memories Smith describes seem like non sequiturs that do not connect to the rest of the story, as though they are empty of meaning. Because Smith dislikes loose ends, she ends up revealing the significance of all these dreams and memories at the end of the book. She manages to generate meaning even when writing about nothing. Everything is connected, and everything is significant. Writing about nothing does not mean creating something meaningless; it means looking for meaning in places that might otherwise be easy to overlook, like dreams.
Smith finds many other ways to talk about nothingness. She discusses the emptiness left over when someone dies or something is lost. Fred’s death has left an emptiness in her life that is clear in the narrative. When she loses things that are dear to her, like the CDC, her coat, or The Killing, there is nothing to replace them. Living with the nothingness left over when there used to be something is a difficult and painful process. That something becomes significant because it no longer exists, leaving Smith to reckon with the nothingness that remains. This concept is most clearly expressed through Ozu’s gravestone, which features only the Japanese character for nothingness, mu. Writing about nothing is inseparable from writing about grief.
Grief and Loss
Smith has experienced profound grief in her life. Fred’s death is the primary, overpowering grief that haunts the narrative, though losing her brother was also a major blow. Smith also describes wide-scale, collective grief, including the losses after Hurricane Sandy and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Jean Genet’s death touches Smith, as he died before she could give him the prison stones. The disbanding of the CDC is unexpected, and though it is not a death, Smith still mourns the time she spent as a member of the club. Losing her coat hurts her, as does the cancellation of The Killing. She also loses Café ’Ino and Zak’s café on the boardwalk. All of these losses start to accumulate near the end of the book, making it seem as though everything is destined to fall apart with no way back. The result is disconcerting and painful.
Although there is no getting around the pain of grief and loss, Smith ultimately finds that everything she believes is lost has a way of unexpectedly coming back to her. Fred remains dead, but she sees a fictional character who reminds her of him. She also sees him in her dreams, and she realizes that the cowpoke is a manifestation of one of Fred’s childhood toys that he lost and then found again. She never gets her coat back, but she imagines that she absorbed it, keeping it with her forever. Café ’Ino closes, but she gets to keep her table and chair. Zak’s café is destroyed, but he is still making coffee on what remains of the boardwalk. Though Smith does mention these things in the book, there is a new CDC art collective, and The Killing was revived after being canceled. In the end, no loss is total.
The themes of writing about nothing and grief and loss are inextricable in this story. When Smith writes about nothing, it turns out that the empty spaces are full of meaning. When she writes about grief, it turns out that no loss is totally irrevocable. Smith reiterates this concept in the very last chapter of the memoir when she mentions the eternal recurrence test. She depicts the world as an ouroboros, an endless cycle in which everything that has happened will eventually happen again. According to this view, loss is only temporary. Nietzsche proposed the eternal recurrence test as a way to generate meaning over the course of a lifetime: If things are destined to repeat, is it possible to approach that repetition with joy? Despite all that she has lost, Smith ultimately answers that question in the affirmative.
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