By Stuart Mitchner

I wanted to know about everything: the layers of heaven, possible other worlds, the inside of rocks, what lay between the pages of unattainable books, what people really thought but didn’t say, what invisible force kept us in line, what held us back and what propelled us forward.

—Patti Smith

Although these thoughts from poet/singer songwriter Patti Smith’s memoir Bread of Angels (Random House 2025) could apply to curious human beings of any age or profession or gender, the person she’s writing about is a tall, skinny fourth grader who “reasoned” that now that she was “no longer the fastest runner” at her school, she would have to discover something to make her “special.”

Capricorn: Dec. 22-Jan. 19

For all my weekly reliance on dates of the month, I usually think of them apart from birth signs, but not while reading the new memoir by Patti Smith, who was born on December 30, 1946. When I scanned the Wikipedia entry for the day we publish, I found January 14 overflowing with possibilities, beginning with Marc Antony (83 BC) and Queen Joan I of Navarre (1273). But open the door to the legions of Capricorn birthdays and in marches Joan of Arc, even though the exact date in 1412 is unknown. After Joan comes “the whole sick crew” (apologies to Thomas Pynchon), including Robert E. Lee and Ben Franklin, Dick Nixon and Isaac Newton, Edward Teller and Edgar Allan Poe.

A neat Capricorn/January 14 connection turns up with the Wikipedia Event for that date in 1973 when Elvis Presley’s concert “Aloha from Hawaii” was broadcast live via satellite, setting a record as “the most watched program by an individual entertainer in history.” It’s worth noting that Capricorner Elvis (Jan. 8, 1935) suddenly, dramatically surfaces in Smith’s memoir when the news of his August 16, 1977 death interrupts a song on the radio: “I can’t say why but I felt an irrational rage at the core of my sorrow. He was only forty-two and despite his great fame was much maligned and misunderstood.” While it’s unlikely that being a fellow Capricorn incited her rage, the news filled her with “an all-consuming urgency to break out and get back into action” after being grounded during a long recovery from a devastating fall. Her first act upon hearing the news was to take off her neck brace, throw it to the floor, and set it on fire.

Elvis and the Queen

Between 1901 and the present, the only two artists granted the status of Wikipedia events are Elvis Presley and Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, who ascended to the throne on that date in 1972 and reigned for 52 years, abdicating on January 14, 2024. Given the prominence of Denmark and Greenland in the recent news, I had a look at Queen Margrethe’s biography, where I found that Elvis came into her life, and she into his, on her 1960 visit to the United States as Princess Margrethe, during which time she met the King himself at Paramount studios in LA. On royalcentral.co.uk, you can see a photo of Margrethe and Elvis (in uniform for GI Blues) with Princesses Astrid of Norway and Margaretha of Sweden.

I also found abundant evidence of her artistry. During her reign the Queen has designed and embroidered vestments and textiles for churches in Denmark, Greenland, Germany, and England; worked as a screenwriter and designer for two Hans Christian Andersen adaptations (The Snow Queen and The Wild Swan); won awards for set design for numerous ballets with Tivoli Dance Theatre including Thumbelina, The Nutcracker, the Steadfast Tin Soldier, and Cinderella; and she illustrated an edition of The Lord of the Rings for which she received fellow Capricorn J.R.R. Tolkien’s admiring approval.

Wondering if Queen Margrethe ever spoke out about Trump 2’s designs on Greenland, I found reports of “a spectacular example of diplomatic dressing” at the 2025 Danish New Year’s Banquet, where she wore a custom floral tiara made of Greenlandic gold — which she did not offer to the president for his collection.

“Running Up That Hill”

I thought about Patti Smith’s childhood wish when I listened again (and again and again) to Kate Bush’s magnificent “Running Up That Hill,” the song reborn as a worldwide hit when it saved a life in the fourth season of Stranger Things. You don’t have to be an admirer of Kate’s music to know that she shared the wish, at whatever age, to “know about everything,” whether the layers of heaven or unattainable books or what people really thought but didn’t say, and especially “what held us back and what propelled us forward,” the force she expresses so powerfully and joyously in the song whose full title was “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God).”

Bush explained the genesis of the song in an interview on BBC Radio 1: “I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman can’t understand each other,” but “if we could actually swap each other’s roles, if we could actually be in each other’s place for a while, I think it would lead to a greater understanding.” At first she thought the only way the swap could be managed was “a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, ‘well, no, why not a deal with God!’ … because in a way it’s so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you.” The problem was “we were told that if we kept this title that it would not be played in any of the religious countries, Italy wouldn’t play it, France wouldn’t play it, and Australia wouldn’t play it! Ireland wouldn’t play it, and that generally we might get it blocked purely because it had God in the title.”

The Second Verse

The “deal with God” part never seemed essential to the power of the song, except that at some point in the act of creation ambitious songwriters or poets or artists conceive of something comparable to a dea1 with a muse or a higher authority like the one Patti Smith was already seeking at the age of 8. John Lennon must have been there as he composed “Instant Karma (We All Shine On),” where he tells his listeners, “You better get yourself together, pretty soon you’re gonna be dead.” The single was released on February 6, 1970, 10 years before his self-fulfilling prophecy was enacted on December 8, 1980.

Relistening to Kate Bush’s song, I kept coming back to the second verse, a high point of an all-high-points song but with words that seemed unusually out of synch with the rest: “You dont wanna hurt me, but see how deep the bullet lies, unaware, / I’m tearing you asunder, oh there is thunder in our hearts, / is there so much hate for the ones we love, / oh tell me we both matter dont we?”

After the shooting of a poet in Minneapolis, the words of the second verse took on a grim, potent resonance that had never been there before. In the late Renée Nicole Good’s award-winning poem, she writes, “now i can’t believe — that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths make room for wonder.”

The Poet at One

In the first chapter of Bread of Angels (“The Age of Reason”), Patti Smith describes how her mother “warned me of the cost of a thousand actions, but I had to see for myself and was thus bitten, stung, and exposed to all manner of insults and injuries. With little sense of the struggles surrounding me or the havoc I caused, I’d reach for the forbidden, a lit cigarette, a silver tablelighter, flicking it to produce a pretty flame, sliding a tight rubber band on my wrist. A burned finger, a blue hand.”