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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, from 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, from 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
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Drury, Nevill. (1996). Shamanism. Great Britain: Element.
Erikson, Erik. (1968). Identity: Youth in Crisis. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Fowlie, Wallace. (1994). Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The
Rebel as a Poet. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gates, Richard and Hammond, Robin. When the Music's
Over: My Journey Into Schizophrenia. New York: Plume.
Jones, Dylan. (1990). Jim Morrison: Dark Star. New York,
London, Toronto: Viking Studio Books.
Kennealy-Morrison, Patricia. (1992). Strange days: My life
with and without Jim Morrison. London: HarperCollins.
Kerouac, Jack. (1961). Book of Dreams. San Francisco:
City Lights Books.
Morrison, Jim. (1970). The Lords and the New Creatures.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Morrison, Jim. (1990). The American Night. New York:
Villard Books.
Morrison, Jim. (1990). Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim
Morrison. New York: Villard Books.
Neumann, Erich. (1994). The fear of the feminine and other
essays on feminine psychology. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Neumann, Erich. (1972). The Great Mother: An Analysis of
the Archetype. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Neumann, Erich. (1995) The Origins and History of
Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peellaert, Guy and Cohn, Nik. (1973). Rock Dreams.
Reynolds, S. and Press, J. (1995). The Sex Revolts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rimbaud, Arthur. (1966). Complete Works, Selected
Letters. Chicago and London; The University of Chicago
Press.
Riordan, James and Prochnicky, Jerry. (1991). Break on
Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison. New York:
Quill.
Sugerman, Danny. (1991). The Doors: The Complete
Illustrated Lyrics. New York: Hyperion.
For other works and fiction by the author, try
renaissancetoday.com - go to "books section" - go to
"general fiction and experimental cinema".
Special thanks to Jana Grünert for allowing
me to use her psychedelic drawing.
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