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Cooked
Over in a Woman's Kettle
The Myth and Drama of Jim
Morrison
written by Maryla
Madura
"Metamorphose.
An object is cut off from its name, habits,
associations. Detached, it becomes only the thing, in
and of itself. When this disintegration into pure
existence is at last achieved, the object is free to
become endlessly anything."
Jim Morrison, 'The Lords'
PART
I
The
Sex Revolts (Harvard University Press, 1995), Reynolds'
and Press' exciting book which looks at rock rebellion
from the perspective of gender revolution, characterizes
THE DOORS' creativity (1965-71) in terms of a
"phallic delirium" and a quintessential
"burning virility" while comparing Jim Morrison
himself to "an eternal nomad". Oliver Stone's
cartoon-comic movie THE DOORS (1991), on the other hand,
depicts Morrison as a sex-crazed, semi-literate jerk. I
think that both of these portrayals, intentionally or
not, vulgarized the image of Jim Morrison. To me, he was
always rather a "fair miller-girl of the song".
And I am saying this in the right meaning of the term,
since, in the Scottish tradition (and Morrison's
ancestors were Scots), mills were once connected with
brothels. Jim was the kind of Dionysus who became
magically "cooked Over" into a maiden in a
woman's kettle of female transformation. He wore his hair
down like a witch, a priestess of fertility and prophecy,
a goddess of the hunt, or a wild beast. In Rock Dreams,
1973, Morrison had Been depicted as a gay icon in a
string vest, perching on a stool in a crowded bar and
surrounded by rent boys, drag queens, and sailors. His
obsession with feminine symbolism and female
physiological debilitation (menstruation, birth,
defloration, etc.) can best be seen in a poem he wrote:
"The Spanish
girl begins to bleed:
She says her period.
It's Catholic heaven.
I have an ancient Indian crucifix around my neck,
My chest is hard and brown.
Lying on stained, wretched sheets with a bleeding
virgin,
We could plan a murder,
Or start a religion..."
Jim Morrison, 'Latino Chrome'
Choosing
to live his life on his own terms by rejecting the
security which could have easily been afforded him, he
became eccentric, uncompromising, and
rebellious(especially, considering the fact that he came
from a solid, military family - his father was an admiral
in the navy who had participated in the Gulf of Tonkin
incident off the coast of Vietnam and who commanded
squadrons of aircraft carriers in the Pacific while his
son was riding the youth cult show business). Jim, on the
other hand, was apparently encompassed by something
feminine; he was attracted to totemism and the mysteries
of the moon. His self-imposed suffering, sacrifice, and
eventual annihilation (brought on by an overdose of
heroin during his stay in Paris with long-time fiancée,
Pamela Courson) have ultimately contributed to his
immortality as one of the greatest rock stars in the
world. The whole process, however, followed from a
strictly feminine principle where the infliction of pain,
drinking of blood, consumption of intoxicants, opium
poisoning, overconsumption of tobacco and other vegetable
substances, etc. constituted what, according to a Jungian
psychoanalyst, Erich Neumann is "a journey over the
night sea" in pursuit of something both dangerous
and hard to attain. He was a man captured in a woman's
soul with a penchant for everything supernatural: a
shaman, a sibyl, a priestess, a wise woman, a seer.
On
Midsummer's Night 1970, Jim was married to Patricia
Kennealy, the then- editor of Jazz & Pop magazine, in
her Gothic East Village apartment in New York. But, as
Dylan Jones points out in his biography of the star (Jim
Morrison, Dark Star, Viking Studio Books, 1990),
"this was no ordinary service; it was a Wicca
wedding, a ceremony based on 'white' witchcraft".
The couple is said to have taken part in the ritual
handfasting, drawing each other's blood, and mixing a few
drops of their blood with a consecrated wine, which they
subsequently drank. Perhaps this was the way in which he
later described his experiences in another poem:
"Bourbon is
a wicked brew, recalling
courage milk, refined poison of cockroach &
tree-bark, leaves
& fly-wings scared from the
land, a thick film: menstrual
fluids no doubt add their splendor.
It is the eagle's drink."
From 'Wilderness,
The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison'
In Keruac's words, (starting out as a self-proclaimed
beatnik, Morrison had read Keruac since the age of
thirteen), he would have lived up to a special logo of
"a masquerader, a fraud, and a crooked pulp magazine
genius leader of some evil" (Jack Keruac, Book of
Dreams). However, I still prefer to think that Morrison's
psyche, just as female psyche, was in far greater degree
dependent on the productivity of the unconscious - the
matriarchal consciousness encompassing such areas as
sensual desire raised to frenzy of enthusiasm, a reeling
drunkenness, an orgiastic passion, and everything that
defies natural law and the handicap of sterile
preconceptions: "Let's just say I was testing the
bounds of reality" (J. Morrison, L.A., 1969). Down
to the witch and the herb woman of matriarchal decadence.
And such was the spirit which chanted in him
rhythmically: "What have they done to the earth?/
What have they done to our fair sister?/ Ravaged and
plundered and ripped her and bit her,/ Stuck her with
knives in the side of the dawn,/ And tied her with fences
and dragged her down..."("When the Music's
Over"). It is worth mentioning, perhaps, that next
to the Beat generation writers, French apologists (such
as Celine), and Russian avant-garde poets (Mayakovsky),
the adolescent Morrison had been immersing himself in
every book he could get his hands on about demonology,
esoteric studies, and occult sciences. Following
Morrison's death, poet Michael McClure formally
acknowledged the star's literary accomplishments and
artistry while a Duke University professor and literary
critic wrote a book titled Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The
Rebel as a Poet.
His life
manifested a universal relationship between seizure,
rage, passion, spirit, poetry, and oracle. Music, for
him, was only one of the mediums (anyway, it would always
be either Manzarek, Krieger, or Densmore who did most of
the composing while Morrison was writing the lyrics). He
did not hide from anyone that his real interests lied in
poetry and film. He methodically sought a transformation
and an awakening through rituals and stupor, through
intoxication alternated with sleep: "Why do I drink?
So that I can write poetry" (From Wilderness: The
Lost Writings of Jim Morrison). There is a curious kind
of doom spelled out from his songs, something which
suggests he knew he would die young (at 27): "Make a
grave for the unknown soldier/ nestled in your hollow
shoulder/ The unknown soldier..."(from his third
album, Waiting for the Sun). At times, he was both
sarcastic and pessimistic: "Riders on the storm,
Riders on the storm, Into this house we're born, Into
this world we're thrown. Like a dog without a bone and
actor out on loan, Riders on the storm"(from L.A.
Woman, his last album). He used to hide his vulnerable
poet's soul behind a mask of arrogance and ignorance. He
played a tough guy on the outside - everything permitted,
everything goes. A snake skin covered his body - his
self-description says: "He was a monster, black,
dressed in leather" (from Morrison Hotel). But he
also saw himself as a violated male: "Sore and
crucified..., I sacrifice my cock on the altar of
silence..." - (from The American Night). He was
invaded by something feminine and, therefore, alien, to
undergo a transformation into a lizard:
"Lizard
woman
w/ your insect eyes
w/ your wild surprise.
Warm daughter of silence
Venom.
Turn your back w/ a slither of moaning
wisdom..."
Jim Morrison, 'The
New Creatures'
Morrison,
who started out as an average UCLA's film student writing
scripts about lone hitchhikers and death in the desert
(although some controversial reports have it that he
would hire others to put his ideas on paper), saw himself
as living in a fatalistic world. He identified with a
feminine mana to offset the wind of destiny. How close
his ecstasy came to madness and his creativity to
psychosis can only be gathered from the sense of doom
which spilled out of the lyrics from his songs:
"Kill your father/ F... your mother..." (From
The End). A few of his poems from Dry Water suggest that
he was aware of the ancient Sumerian myth which spoke of
the male remaining inferior to, and at the mercy of,
Mother Nature, or the "Terrible Feminine" that
confronted him as a power and destiny. Biographer Dylan
Jones remarks that on that night in 1970, Morrison
fainted during his ritualistic wedding to Patricia
Kennealy because "he came into the presence of the
Goddess, one of the ancient forces of nature, and one of
the deities to whom he prayed...". Or maybe he
realized then that one had to be prepared to pay with his
own life for plucking a single leaf from the laurel tree
of art.
And yet
there was still another side to him, the bitter
self-mockery, the undignified public brawls, the
offensive street language, and self-destructive treatment
of himself as a useless misfit in a decadent society.
Perhaps he was aware (since many people were giving him
this impression) that he would never amount to anything
more than a darling of the poetry world crooning in a
gentle murmuring manner while adapting most of his sexy
poses from cheap Playboy nudes: the couches, the
sheepskin rugs, the wine bottles, and furs. Only through
premature death could his biggest wish (that of being
recognized a great poet) be realized. Although he strove
in his life for a liberation of the individual self, the
total freeing of the psyche from the mythical world which
has been imposed by civilization and materialistic
society ("Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of
the ages..."(from An American Prayer), for many he
remained just another depressed postadolescent who
somehow managed to make out of the very contradictions of
his protracted youth the essence of his charisma. In
fact, as an individual with an uncommon depth of conflict
and uncommon gifts (voice, looks, intelligence, artistic
talent), and with his uncanny luck, he was in the perfect
position to offer his tribulations to the crisis of a
whole generation of the late 1960's. Yet he held an
almost arrogant belief that what shook him as a youth
was, to quote Erikson (Identity: Youth in Crisis, 1968):
"a curse, a fall, an earthquake, a thunderbolt - in
short a revelation to be shared with his generation and
with many to come" and that "his one life must
be made to count in the lives of all" (Ibid.).
He must
have posed himself the philosophical question whether
Truth is objective and thereby immutable, or whether it
is only a construct of the society or given culture which
had been passed down in Europe for two thousand years. He
was beating against the wall in a desire to free himself
from the oppressive abstraction of values collected and
classified throughout the centuries, to "break on
through" into this fourth dimension, to acquire a
substance of something extraordinary which was supposed
to offer universal wisdom. Or maybe he just invented the
fantasy of the fourth dimension, the other side of the
wall, accessible through the Doors of perception. His
awareness of being chosen against his will did not
prevent him from expressing (often implicitly, in his
self-referential poetry) a latent wish for universal
power to be recognized as an artist and a seer, in fact,
a self-made prophet. The prison of his fame as a rock
star, nevertheless, greatly detracted from this image.
His tragedy, therefore, may be understood as
"searching for something that's already found
us"(from "An American Prayer"). Drugs gave
him a vision but deprived him of the ability to translate
this vision in a constructive way. Therefore, on the one
hand, there was this frantic search for truth and
universal wisdom. And on the other hand, the utter
inability to control one's destiny. Something common to
the fate of us all, perhaps.
Recently,
after having attained a status of artistic immortality,
he has been compared with the likes of the glamorized
Arthur Rimbaud (read: a long, gigantic and rational
derangement of all the senses) and with the Russian
revolutionary poet and futurist filmmaker, Vladimir
Mayakovsky (that's right - like the latter, he wanted to
be understood by great numbers - his poetry was concise,
telegraphic, parsimonious, popular, and simple). Before
his self-imposed exile in Paris preceding his death in
the summer of 1971 in the romantic manner of the
expatriate American writers of the 1920's and other
poets' maudits, Jim Morrison gave a gift to America, a
gift which the society did not specify for him in
advance. After his arrest at the Dinner Key Auditorium in
Miami (where The Doors performed in March '69) with
charges of indecent exposure (inspired by the savage
performances of Antoine Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty) and
public drunkenness while on stage, he thought of himself
as artistically misunderstood by his fellow countrymen.
Yet, his identity was deeply rooted in this country. His
premature death at 27 can be seen nowadays as a
tremendous loss to the American modern poetry, American
music, American theatre (his rituals and antics on stage
can be justified here since he was drawing his
inspiration from the legendary and controversial The
Living Theatre under whose spell he remained until his
death), American film (it is as yet little known that his
short film etude entitled "The Hitchhiker"
which he managed to direct and produce in the breaks from
touring with The Doors won awards at the international
art film festivals in Toronto and Vancouver in 1969), and
the American culture in general. The truth is he was
working his way to broader horizons, very much ahead of
himself and of his time. He was not concerned with the
tribulations and drama of his individual life because
such concern, no matter who you are, always chains you
down to the insipid and mediocre. He wanted to shape
creativity and the collective consciousness on a grand
scale ("I have ploughed my seed thru' the heart of
the nation/ Injected a germ in the psychic blood
vein" - from Road Days.) Time has told us he
prevailed.
PART II
My Private Conversation about a Dead Poet
Jim
Morrison's art, like the art of all great immortals, is
universally present. I think that he is one of America's
greatest artists. His recorded performances, songs, and
poetry have all inspired me toward a deeper study of the
American culture, history, and English language which, of
course, are not my own.
His
poetry
It is no doubt that some
of the most powerful lyrics in rock music and some of the
most beautiful poetry of modern literature have been
produced by James Douglas Morrison, the leader of the
"Doors" who had been nurtured on Beat poetry
and literature since childhood. Considering all of this,
I decided to translate into my native Polish some of his
poetry including "The American Prayer" as well
as some selections from his song lyrics and poems from
"The American Night", a collection which
reflects Morrison's fondness of Kerouac's On the Road and
Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.
A French
literature professor from Duke University, Wallace
Fowlie, notes in his brilliant book Rimbaud and Jim
Morrison - The Rebel As a Poet: "Compared with the
poetry of Villon and Rimbaud, Morrison's work appears as
a reflection of great poetry. But the reflection is
obsessive and subtle. His place is among those men whose
numerous departures in life, whose instability and
restlessness, have immobilized them for us. Gratuitous
images spring up in Jim's verses like reflexes and
answers to the subconscious law of chance and free
association" (Fowlie, p. 123). Morrison's poetic
imagery, often dominated by violence, death, raw and
savage eroticism, dreams and magic was also partly
influenced by other writers such as Balzac, Molière,
Cocteau, Joyce, Blake, Genet, Huxley, and Nietzsche - all
of whom he read voraciously. However, his innovative use
of language was, to a great extent, inspired by the more
recent works of the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg, McClure,
and Ferlinghetti. His poetry is often layered with
metaphors and symbols which do not easily reveal their
meaning upon the first reading. His language is, at the
same time, elegant and savage.
It is
especially interesting to note how much Morrison as a
poet had in common with another literary rebel - Vladimir
Mayakovsky. In "A Cloud in Pants", Mayakovsky
is aware of both the destructive and creative elements of
the city. He speaks of "grease-paint",
"flags blowing in the fever of fire",
"dying sunsets" like those in Marseilles,
"the square pushing aside the church porch that was
stepping on its throat", "rain covering the
sidewalks with sobs", as well as of "the
teeming streetfolk: students, prostitutes,
salesmen". Nevertheless, the city's dynamic way of
life, its multiplicity of colors, its vitality were, in a
way, advantageous to an arrogant and caustic poet whose
"soul does not contain a single gray hair". He
also speaks metaphorically of "town towers of Babel
we raise again in our pride", of "Golgothas in
the halls of Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa, and Kiev",
of "Notre Dame de Paris". His cities are full
of blood, rebellion, and inquietude in the "foul
weather of betrayal" suggesting the political
upheaval brought about by the Russian Revolution. His
cities are also filled with beggars, pedestrians
suffering from tuberculosis, soldiers "mutilated in
war", "naked whores" hurling themselves
from "a burning brothel" and madmen. This
strange succession of monstrosities reflects the social
disintegration which took place following the Revolution
of 1917 and which may have inspired the poet to make his
own private rebellion by not wanting to "make gifts
to mares of vases cast painstakingly in Sevres".
Mayakovsky's revolutionary poem A Cloud in Pants is
almost synonymous with Morrison's "Peace Frog"
which is filled with similar images of flowing rivers of
blood in various American cities.
In Women,
Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), George Lakoff argues
that there are two distinct views of human thought and
language. First assumes that the human mind which makes
use of internal representation of external reality
mirrors nature (correct reason mirrors the logic of the
external world). It maintains that mind is an abstract
machine manipulating symbols. This is the objectivist
view. On the other hand, according to experimentalist
view, thought is embodied in the structures used to put
together our conceptual systems. These structures grow
out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it -
this is the core of our conceptual system. This core is
grounded in perception, body movement, and experience of
a physical and social character. Thought, according to
experimentalists is imaginative - some concepts are not
directly grounded in experience (metonymy, metaphor,
mental imagery). These concepts Go beyond the literary
mirroring or representation of external reality.
In Women,
Fire, and Dangerous Things (1987), Lakoff shows that an
emotion, anger, has a conceptual structure and he
proceeds to investigate various aspects of it. He
examines some of the conceptual metaphors associated with
lust and rape and he concludes that lust is often
associated with hunger while the object of lust is food.
Morrison's poetry is full of such culture-specific
metaphors. In many of his poems as well as his song
lyrics, lust is heat, insanity, a functioning machine
(especially a car), a game, war, or a reaction to a
physical force. Lakoff notes that a particularly
important fact about the collection of metaphors used to
understand lust in our culture is that their source
domains overlap considerably with the source domains of
metaphors for anger. "The domains we use for
comprehending lust are hunger, animals, heat, insanity,
machines, games, war, and physical forces" (Lakoff,
415). Here are some culture-specific examples from
Morrison's poetry:
"For seven
years I dwelt in the loose palace of exile,
Playing strange games with the girls of the
island"
(lust as game)
"The engine runs on glue and tar"
(a lustful person is a functioning machine)
"Come on, baby, light my fire"
(lust as heat)
"Oh, children of Night
Who among you will run with the hunt?"
(lustful person is an animal)
"Blood is the force of mysterious union"
"Wound in sheets.
And daughters, smug
With semen eyes in their nipples."
(lust as a reaction to a physical force)
"We have assembled inside this ancient & and
insane theatre
To propagate our lust for life..."
(lust as madness/insanity)
More than
anything perhaps, his poetry is exceptionally cinematic.
I mean all these images, these "scenes of rape in
the arroyo", those "searchlights at dusk",
these "sunlit deserts (and) galaxies of dust, cactus
spines, beads, bleach stones, bottles and rust cars,
stored for shaping", "old books in ruined
temples", and "stars in a shotgun night".
I am sure he was able to pick up some of them in the
course of your adolescent trans-American travels on the
road, or while reading Blake, Huxley, Celine, Plutarch,
the Beat poets as well as many other authors (James T.
Farrell, maybe), and later, of course, in the
cinematography department at UCLA. Reading his poems is
like taking drugs: they lead us into a trance of images,
walls of sacred visions, inducing altered states of
consciousness of a profoundly hallucinatory nature which
all culminate in a unique contemplation of the meaning of
this world with a new awareness. At 27 he wrote: "I
have ploughed my seed thru' the heart of the nation.
Injected a germ in the psychic blood vein." And
then, in the same poem, his prophecy with its somewhat
disquieting sound: "Spectators at the Tomb - riot
watchers". Whose tomb? His own? Was he really able
to predict the delinquent crowds gathering around his
grave at Père Lachaise in Paris some twenty years after
his death?
"I
Can Forgive My Injuries In the Name of Wisdom, Luxury,
Romance..."
This is a passage he wrote
in one of your longer poems, "Lament" which was
based on the idea of a wounded, victimized male. In
"Dance on Fire", a 1985 documentary videotape
about The Doors there is one sequence which corresponds
to what he has written and which I find especially
unique. It opens with all four of The Doors walking
together along a rocky beach to the background music of
"The Unknown Soldier". Jim Morrison is playing
the role of Hyacinthus, a beautiful youth who was slain
by Apollo, or Orpheus, the victim whose body was
ultimately torn apart by wild boars, or even, perhaps,
St. Sebastian - because he is being tied to a pole. A
shot is fired (or so we only hear) and blood spills out
from your mouth - right on the white hyacinths, the
flowers which figure prominently as symbols in the Greek
myth of Hyacinthus (they are known to have grown from the
bloodstained grass). And I am sure that, being so well
versed in classics, he must have deliberately thought it
over, - he read Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks, a
fact meticulously recorded in the history of rock 'n
roll. The 'firing squad-Hyacinthus' sequence is perhaps
the most striking image in the whole 'cinema verite'
documentary of 'The Doors'.
Morrison
and Arthur Rimbaud
I am not the first person
to notice the similarity between their poetry. Professor
Wallace Fowlie has written a whole brilliant and
scholarly book about it - The Rebel as a Poet. But he
never mentions these examples, these are the lines I
spotted in Rimbaud's 'Season in Hell" (which is
largely Dionysian in nature, as opposed to his 'Les
Illuminations' which are decidedly Apollonian) and which
reminded me of some of Jim's poetry and isolated lyrics:
Arthur
Rimbaud |
Jim
Morrison |
|
In
the towns the mud would suddenly seem |
Blood in the
streets of the town of |
to
me to be red and black. |
Chicago... |
|
Autumn
already!- But why look with longing |
Summer's almost
gone, almost gone |
at
an eternal sun, if we are pledged to the |
Morning found us
calmly unaware |
discovery
of the divine light- far from those |
Noon burned gold
into our hair |
who
die according to the seasons. |
At night we swam
the laughin' sea... |
Autumn.
Our ship towering in the motionless |
When summer's
gone, |
mists
turns toward the port of poverty... |
Where will we be? |
|
Still,
now is the eve. Let us receive all influxes |
Now night arrives
with her purple legion, |
of
strength and of real tenderness. And at dawn, |
Retire now to your
tents and to your dreams |
armed
with a burning patience, we shall enter |
Tomorrow we enter
the town of my birth |
into
the splendid cities. |
I want to be
ready... |
|
The
best thing of all is a good drunken sleep on |
And night was what
night should be: |
the
beach. |
a girl, a bottle,
and blessed sleep. |
I
could go on like this forever. I think that he really
must have identified with Arthur Rimbaud, he wanted to
model your life on Rimbaud's poetry. His language is
definitely reflected in your thoughts. And then, of
course, that famous line from Rimbaud's brilliant letter
to Paul Demedy, written on the 15th of May, 1871:
"The
poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and
rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of
love, suffering, and madness.He searches himself. He
exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their
quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his
faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes
among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the
one accursed - and the supreme Scholar!- Because he
reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich
already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and
when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of
his vision, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps
through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible
workers will come; they will begin from the horizons
where the other one collapsed!" And Jim's, quite
matching that of Rimbaud, from The Lords:
"Metamorphose. An object is cut off from its name,
habits, associations. Detached, it becomes only the
thing, in and of itself. When this disintegration into
pure existence is at last achieved, the object is free to
become endlessly anything."
Sacrificial
Horses
At least two lines from
his poetry indicate that this particular aspect of
shamanism has had a profound effect on his consciousness:
"Insanity's Horse Adorns the Sky" from "I
Can't See Your Face In My Mind" and "Awkward
instant/ and the first animal is jettisoned/ legs
furiously pumping/ the stiff green gallop (...)/ Consent/
in mute nostril agony..." - from "Horse
Latitudes", a poem he wrote while still in high
school. It was indeed not uncommon for Indo-European
shamans to sacrifice horses to a god of the sky or
storms. You were very much into shamanism, you must have
known that when the Altaian shaman sacrifices a horse, he
invokes a multitude of spirits and the birds of heaven.
Then, he beats the drum violently, indicating a
'mounting' into the sky, accompanied by the spirit of the
dead horse. After ascending through several heavens in
visionary consciousness, the shaman converses with the
creator god Yayutsi and also bows before the Moon and Sun
in turn. Finally, at the celestial abode of bai Ulgan,
the shaman learns details of future weather patterns and
the outcome of the harvest. The shaman then collapses in
a state of ecstatic release (from Shamanism by Nevil
Drury, p. 23). For those of you who had no idea what
"insanity's horse adorns the sky" meant in
Morrison's lyrics, this aspect of shamanism offers a
quick explanation, I believe.
Jim
and Jean Genet
For better or for worse,
the influence of Jean Genet's (the 'French Beatnik's')
work on Jim's creativity has been greatly underestimated.
However, if one reads Thief's Journal, full of homosexual
acts and crime, one is at once reminded about the trait
of his personality - transgressive. And it was Genet,
too, who wrote in his famous novel:
"It
is right for men to shun a profound work if it is the cry
of a man monstrously engulfed within himself... Creating
is not a frivolous game. The creator has committed
himself to the fearful adventure of taking upon himself,
to the very end, the perils risked by his
creatures..." Sounds like a good preface to Jim's
collections of poems which were entitled: The Lords and
The New Creatures, respectively.
Jim
and Juliusz Slowacki
Jim's oracle-filled,
ancient, masterly tone of "The American Prayer"
as well as his frequent references to shamans, angels,
and omens are all reminiscent of the work of Juliusz
Slowacki, the great national Polish romantic poet who,
before his premature death at 39 in 1849, penned
"Anhelli". This poetic masterpiece about a
group of Polish insurgents, sent to exile in the midst of
the Siberian winter, and of the Shaman, their leader,
tells of the Northern Empire where the spacious and
colorful skies reigned supreme over the boundless,
hallucinogenic, and frozen plains full of angels, ghosts,
strange heavenly apparitions, as well as ominous signs
lighted by stars shotgun in the night. It seems unlikely
that Morrison could have known about Slowacki since the
latter's major works have not been translated into
English at that time. But to me, the similarities were
striking.
The
Little Game Called Go Insane
Jim's own transformation
into a shaman on the desolate Venice roof in the summer
of 1965 after he finished college sounds like a
flirtation with madness. In the most comprehensive
biography to date, Riordan and Prochnicky tell us about
this time: "Jim Morrison knew that a change was
taking place inside him. After a while he rarely left the
roof, dropping acid almost continually, and spending his
time meditating and writing..." There was the lack
of regular meals, heavy drug use, and utter isolation.
But Jim did not go insane. Jim's transformation was quite
successful as it culminated in him changing from a
slightly overweight kid to a rock legend, a shaman, a
poet.
Yet,
according to Nietzsche, what may be nourishment and
delectation to the higher type of men may become poison
for the inferior type. Let us take as an example the case
of Ross David Burke, a paranoid schizophrenic with manic
depression who believed he had invented rock music and
whose journal "The Truth Effect" had recently
been published under the title: When the Music's Over
(1996). One of the people in the introduction described
him as "always making references to or quoting Jim
Morrison... a lot of really heavy Doors stuff". He
would self-medicate with alcohol and marihuana, sit in
his room for days playing loud rock music, read Huxley's
The Doors of Perception, write poetry (not bad), or
compose music and play it out with a band on weekends.
But at the age of 32 this intelligent,highly sensitive,
perceptive, talented, and at times even brilliant man,
who knew how to write as well as play drums, guitar, and
harmonica, has committed suicide by taking much more than
a lethal dose of drugs. Reading his book is a journey
into his mind, into his delusions, hallucinations, and
fantasies. The people who helped put this book together
(Dr. Gates and R. Hammond) found themselves listening to
the Doors and other bands of the 60's and 70's as well as
reading the poetry of Jim Morrison in order to piece
together his life story. The moral of the story? It is
very dangerous to find oneself obsessed with the Jim
Morrison myth.
And
another example, straight from Riordan and Prochnicky's
biography, Break On Through: "At a Denver, Colorado,
swap meet a thirty-three-year-old woman who pays $300 for
a publicity photo signed by Jim Morrison... She calls
herself a collector but sees a psychologist twice a week
about her obsession".
Père
Lachaise, Summer 1996
I wasn't an elegant woman
in Paris in August, 1996... In fact, I ran out of the 60
francs I had been saving to buy those seven roses I
intended for Jim's grave. Instead, I just wrote a
note-poem and attached it to the geranium standing in a
pot which someone had already deposited there. I was 22
at that time and have been reading and translating his
poems ever since...
The
Question of Innocence...
To be successful and to
make a career out of his good looks and sexy crooning, he
had to know the rules of this unfair world. He repeatedly
quoted Blake: "Some are born to sweet delight, some
are born to endless night". Furthermore, he had a
special predilection for visiting such perverse places as
the 'Butterfly' in New York (a porno theater)or the Rock
& Roll Circus in Paris (a heroin dive). He had a
great interest in human misery, perversion, and
degeneration. After all, he once wanted to be a
sociologist or a writer which only makes it seem logical
that he must have possessed the qualities of an observer.
Was his own innocence lost in the process? Or is
innocence as such only a mystification? In one of his
published interviews, I remember him having been quoted
that if he had to do it all over again, he would have
settled for a quiet and unknown artist undemonstratively
plodding away in his little garden. With the kind of
intelligence he was endowed with, he must have known the
price for playing with his own survival.
Masters
and Servants
From Aristotle he picked
out this quote: "equality for equals and inequality
for unequals". And from Nietzsche: "The Lords
of the Earth - that higher species which would climb
aloft to new andimpossible things, to a broader vision,
and to its task on earth"(from: The Will to Power).
During one of his infamous performances, Jim, the Lizard
King, addressed his audience as "a bunch of
idiots". But, in the end, I also think that he
wasn't really enjoying the fruits of his success. Because
he was well experienced in the indecent politics of fame.
The
Mystery of Africa
What about it? Was it the
virginity of a continent which, in the past, had
attracted some of his favorite authors - the young
Rimbaud, the young Celine? The phrase about African magic
repeatedly comes up in his early lyrics suggesting that
he, too, was quite enthralled by it. And some still argue
that this is where he is living today. The controversial
book The End by Bob Seymore questions the validity of the
French doctors' death certificates and insinuates that
the whole thing, including the almost secret and
surprisingly hasty burial in Paris attended by a closed
circle of the most intimate friends, had only been a part
of a deliberately prearranged 'exit' or rather an escape
from the prison and pressures of fame. And the whole
thing with singer Marianne Faithfull (who used to run
around with Mick Jagger) and the French count who,
apparently, have helped Jim out in his secret passage to
some remote place in Africa... Well, this is definitely
something to be inspected further. Let's hire a detective
or write a mystery novel.
'On
the Road'
I, too, had some 'on the
road' experience. During my first summer in the US, I
went from Sarasota, FL to Denver, CO by car - with my
parents and two dogs. That was in 1989...
On
Jim and Pamela...
One thing a man can teach
a dependent co-living female without a marriage license
is how to be a good whore. In ancient Greece, daughters
of aristocratic households would associate with men for
intellectual purposes and be treated as their equals.
They would think it a disgrace to allow themselves to
engage in sexual relations with these men. (Such services
were performed by the lower class: both women and men.
Nowadays, on the other hand, in a ploretarian society, we
all have come down to this level - we are all -except for
a handful workers and we are all prostitutes. Aristocracy
is dead). And so, after Jim's death, when he, in fact,
had left millions in the records, Pamela was forced to
sell her fragile beauty by the hour to keep her expensive
drug habit - all of this due to some legal
inconsistencies in their alleged 'marriage'. I personally
prefer Jim's relationship with Patricia Kennealy - his
real intellectual equal who in her autobiography Strange
Days righteously encourages us all impressionable fans to
"get some weight into our lives, read some books,
think some thoughts" and who basically implores us
all not to thoughtlessly imitate Jim Morrison but rather
to seek that very same light for ourselves which had
guided his creativity and which he so spontaneously
recognized in his own individual life.
On
the issue of materialism
One thing to admire is
that he was totally against any notion of it. He came (as
most such people) from a rich family. He was much better
off than his fellow university students, for example. And
then, in his art and in his lyrics, he has tried to
expose and fight against the American materialism. This
was a big break-through in Rock'n'Roll compared to what
is being advertised by most rock stars today: all they
project is a desire for money, after the dollar. Their
message reads: "money equals power and
control". And Jim Morrison happened to own a car at
some remote point of his short life - very briefly -
while refusing to own something like a house altogether,
for example.
How
it all began
One languid summer morning
in Concord, MA where I was renting a room in my cousin's
old wooden Queen Anne style house w/ a garden, I happened
to watch TV. They had something on the original rock
bands: 'The Animals', 'Cream', and 'The Doors'. I heard
"In the White Room" by 'Cream', "When I
Was Young" by 'The Animals', and "Alabama
Song" by The Doors. And the very next day I bought a
couple of tapes. I fell in love with "Summer's
Almost Gone" and "I Can't See Your Face in my
Mind" by The Doors. I took that tape to Poland with
me and I listened to it constantly. It gave me a great
deal of joy, a great deal of pleasure. I was able to get
Jim's The Lords & The New Creatures in Warsaw and I
read it both in English and in translation. Upon my
return to US in early fall of 1995, I found myself
looking for and buying more and more of the Doors' stuff.
I was 21 at the time.
Why
I fell in love
Because when he sang:
"She has a house and garden, I would like to see
what happens, she has wisdom and knows what to do",
I thought it was all about me. And when he sang:
"You're lost little girl, tell me who are
you?", I also thought it was about me. And when he
wrote: "Awake, shake dreams from your hair, my
pretty child, my sweet one, choose the day and the sign
of your day, the day's divinity - first thing you
see", I could only think it was addressed to me
alone and no one else. That was the magic and secret
behind his art.
My
Poem for the Last Poet
I wrote it on the night of
3rd of July, 1996, the 25th anniversary of Jim's death:
He was a poster
prophet
a favorite of gods
who had proclaimed that sex
made summers ripe
Girls would spread their legs
to embrace his timeless image
both beautiful and sad
a warrior dying on the battlefield
of golden fame
"the gardener found the body
rampant, floating",
he wrote in his ode to Brian Jones
two years before his own death
-nobody quite knew what for and why
On that night in July
when some faceless French dandies
unknowingly paced
the treeless and narrow
Rue Beautreillis
a jet shot to the sky
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Gates, Richard and Hammond, Robin.
When the Music's Over: My Journey Into Schizophrenia. New
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