The spiritual world is rife with powerful paradoxes, perhaps none more confounding than the fact that romantic love can be at once passionately physical and profoundly mystical, transcending time, space, and even bodily limitations. In its material manifestation, romantic love can encompass the best and worst of human drives, from fierce loyalty and self-sacrifice to physical and emotional abuse, lies, and betrayal. Yet the mystical realms to which love can open the human heart are boundless, extending beyond the physical body--as far as we now know the nonlocal mind can reach.
That all-in-one reality of human love gives the lie to the Manichaean split between body and soul that has formed the basis for countless strains of puritanical prejudice and bad religion over several thousand years. So it's all the more inspiring for a book that tells the love story of two people who emerged from the New York City art and music scene of the 1970s, and who were known for their celebrations of physical love, to be shot through with spiritual references. Even on the first page of the Foreword, the author mentions saying her prayers before going to bed, not as a child but as a grown woman of 43 who was a staple of the punk rock revolution. Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010), is emotionally involving and even sweet while detailing a subculture not noted for its compassion or spirituality.
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