Jim Morrison, Poet

Jim Morrison was an accidental rock star, a man who walked backwards into the music business: His eye was always on the printed word (interview, eighth question from the end). The maelstrom of the sixties, before it swallowed him up, offered him a wave of turbulent confusion that he surfed with style and talent until alcohol—see the autobiographical poems further down in this post—turned him into an ‘asshole’. Before his return to the womb in that Paris bathtub, he left a body of work that, thanks to the genius of the Doors, is as vital and stimulating as it was half a century ago. Now, as the age becomes increasingly imbecilic—for so many, the marriage of invasive technology and hyperconsumerism has sealed off the soul with a wall of permanent amusement—I have no doubt that Morrison’s lyrics and the Doors music (that ‘rose of mysterious union’) will continue to cast their luminous darkness, their joyful seriousness, there wherever the vigilance of angels safeguards silence.

Upon graduating from high school, Jim asked his parents not for the traditional car, but for the collected works of Nietzsche (interview). From the time he could talk, he had a feeling for the heightened language we call poetry. He was a voracious reader, kept notebooks with words and quotations from his readings. By his late teens, thanks no doubt to Rimbaud and Nietzsche—Nietzsche for the marriage of philosophy and poetry, Rimbaud for the example of the seer—esoteric knowledge was flowing in his veins. How did he acquire it? After all, as Adam Phillips says in The Beast in the Nursery, ‘only hunger turns food into a meal, it is appetite that makes things edible’. So what made Jim hungry when the vast majority were satisfied, what was the crack that let in the light? Jim gives the answer in ‘Dawn’s Highway’ and ‘Newborn Awakening’ on An American Prayer: ‘Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind’. He was marked, then, like all who are not ‘at home’ in the world, by a foundational trauma. (What confuses many is the fact that he was so at home—like a fish in water, like a drunk in wine—in the topless bars of Venice, in the decenteredness of L.A.) This trauma—this vision of dead Indians bleeding exceeding discursive knowledge and so unassimilable—was the necessary condition for his acquisition of esoteric knowledge.

All Jim’s poetry, then, is informed by the knowledge available only to the initiated, the knowledge ‘the ghosts of the dead Indians that leapt into [his] soul’ impelled him to acquire. But where exactly did that knowledge come from? From whatever conductor of the numinous Jim came across: the via negativa that opens the doors of perception or the mansions of the mind that open up to the wayfarer’s gaze, the awe and mystery of the black side of the holy or the living-in-depth that journeying along the axis mundi entails. And in what does that knowledge consist? In a nutshell: The insight that truth is hidden, the visible world illusion, and only a quest to attain the transcendent can procure wisdom. As every Doors fan knows, the images of this in Jim’s poetry are numerous: ‘break on through to the other side’, ‘take a journey to the bright midnight’, ‘I want to hear the scream of the butterfly’.

‘All intensified knowledge sooner or later turns metaphorical, and literature is the inescapable guide to higher journeys of consciousness’*. Paradoxes, unusual verbal juxtapositions, are but one means the poet has at his/her disposal to ‘break on through to the other side’. Again, these abound in Jim’s poetry. A few examples: ‘Insanity’s horse adorns the sky / Can’t seem to find the right lie’, ‘Carnival dogs consume the lines / Can’t see your face in my mind’; ‘The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night’; ‘We need golden copulations / The fathers are cackling in trees of the forest’; ‘The streets are fields that never die’; ‘My eyes have seen you / Let them photograph your soul / Memorize your alleys / On an endless roll’; ‘Shadows of the evening / Crawl across the years’. As he pursues the initiate’s journey, then, Jim’s poetry paints us ‘inscapes’ of his consciousness.

* Northrope Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990] p.28

Giorgio Agamben: ‘Poetry lives only in the tension and difference between sound and sense’. (Paul Valéry: ‘The poem: a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense’.)

Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1999) p. 109 | Paul Valéry, Tel Quel, Gallimard Folio Classiques, 1996) in the section entitled ‘Rhumbs’

Giorgio Agamben: ‘In our culture, knowledge is divided between inspired-ecstatic and rational-conscious poles. Insofar as philosophy and poetry have passively accepted this division, philosophy has failed to elaborate a proper language, as if there could be a royal road to truth that would avoid the problem of its representation, and poetry has developed neither a method nor self-consciousness. What is thus overlooked is the fact that every authentic poetic project is directed toward knowledge, just as every authentic act of philosophy is always directed toward joy.’

Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, tr. R.L. Martinez (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) p. xvii

Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Words began not by being abstract, but rather by being concrete. Let us consider a word such as “dreary”: the word “dreary” meant “bloodstained”. Similarly, the word “glad” meant “polished”, and the word “threat” meant “a threatening crowd”. Those words that now are abstract once had a strong meaning. Therefore, when speaking of poetry we may say that poetry is not trying to take a set of logical coins and work them into magic. Rather, it is bringing language back to its original source.’

Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1967-1968 (Harvard University Press, 2000) pp. 79-80

Trance is another means Jim uses to attain the transcendent: ‘To speak to the heart / And give the great gift / Words Power Trance’. Jim has often said that in lieu of finished songs, in lieu of closure, he prefers the openness of improvisation: ‘I like singing the blues – these free, long blues trips where there’s no specific beginning or end. It just gets into a groove, and I can just keep making up things … I like that kind of song rather than just a song … just seeing where it takes us (interview). In other interviews, Jim also spoke often of performance-as-ritual. Most of the time, however, his drunkenness and the juvenility of the audience impeded his attempts at trance. Nevertheless, his performance ideal was to use words/music to generate music/words and this in turn to generate trance, and then in a spiral up the axis mundi, trance to generate more words and music, and so on until transcendence is attained. Much of his poetry, then, employs language in the service of this ideal.

Jim’s poetry has a strong cinematic dimension. Andrzej Zulawski (a Polish filmmaker whose first film, The Third Part of the Night, was released in the year of Jim’s death), was a filmmaker whose films, especially Chamanka (She-Shaman) and Possession, are perfect expressions of Jim’s ethics and aesthetics (for the true artist, the two are always intimately entwined). Zulawski’s films enact the trance Jim sought as a means to transcendence, they embody Jim’s conception of cinema: ‘Film is the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness, in both dream life and the actual perception of the world’ (interview). The most consistent cinematic equivalents of Jim’s poetry, then, are the films of Zulawski. Indeed, ‘The End’ and ‘When the Music’s Over’ can be seen as aesthetic precursors of Chamanka and Possession.

In Jim’s poetry a mythical dimension often attaches to words, giving them—like phosphorus exposed to oxygen—a particular glow. The butterfly in ‘the scream of the butterfly’ suffices unto itself, but attached to the insect—for listeners with attuned antennae—is its mythical dimension as ‘the soul freed from its covering of flesh’. In ‘The End’ the snake is clearly mythical: great god of darkness; symbol of both soul and libido; storehouse of potential underlying the palpable world. Night, as we have already seen, is an emblem of ‘the other side’; the word recurs in many songs. In ‘Moonlight Drive’, the moon is awash in mythical associations, giving access to the ‘strait gate’ which opens upon release and light, a short cut to the luminous centre of being and oneness. And what about in ‘Wild Child’? Who is that ‘ancient lunatic [who] reigns in the trees of the night’? A witch, a black moon, a decrepit madman?

A prophetic dimension is present in several of Jim’s poems (‘When the Music’s Over’, ‘Ship of Fools’, ‘Not to Touch the Earth’), but it is in ‘The End’ where we perceive this dimension most clearly. The prophetic in literature, write Northrope Frye, ‘indicates the quality of the poet’s authority’. He cites the example of Amos in the Old Testament, who ‘has the refusal to compromise with polite conventions, a reputation for being a fool and a madman, and an ability to derive the substance of what he says from unusual mental states, often allied to trance’. Frye points out that in modern times, ‘the writers we instinctively call prophetic—Blake, Dostoevsky, Rimbaud—show similar features. Such writers shock and disturb; they may be full of contradictions and ambiguities, yet they retain a curiously haunting authority’.

* Northrope Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature [Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990] p.53

What gives ‘The End’ its ‘haunting authority’? What—besides the brilliance of the music—makes it so powerful? It is, I would argue, the fact that it reaches deep down into a mythical, primitive psychology and then evokes cinematically what the poet found there. In a 1968 interview with the Los Angeles Free Press, Jim said: ‘I used to have this magic formula to break into the subconscious. I would lay there and say over and over “Fuck the mother, kill the father. Fuck the mother, kill the father”. You can really get into your head just repeating that slogan over and over. Just saying it can be the thing’. Now, ‘the connection with the psychologically primitive characterizes the prophetic writer’, says Frye (p. 54). Jim would agree, and would be quick to make it clear that, to the extent that he is working in a mythological dimension, the ‘prophetic’ is not about foretelling the future, but rather about highlighting the fact that history is a series of repetitions. Thus, just as in film where every image on the screen is in the present tense, not matter where it is situated in the narrative sequence, so in ‘The End’ the ‘stranger’s hand in a desperate land’, the ‘Roman wilderness of pain’, the ‘snake’ and the ‘blue bus’, the killer who ‘walked on down the hall’, are all immediately present to us, even as they resonate through past and future centuries. This is a particular quality of Jim’s poetic genius, and this is what I characterize as the prophetic dimension in his poetry.

If ‘The End’ is, as I believe, the finest poetic achievement in all of rock (matched only, perhaps, by ‘A Day in the Life’), we owe it to the ghosts who entered Jim’s soul when he was four years old. It is thanks to those dead Indians that Jim became the artist he became, and it is their recurring death that gives his poetry its prophetic dimension. An extravagant thesis, I admit, but wasn’t Jim one for extravagance?

‘Listen, real poetry doesn’t say anything, it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you. And that’s why poetry appeals to me so much—because it’s so eternal. As long as there are people, they can remember words and combinations of words. Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film, a piece of sculpture, a painting, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue. If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.’

Jim Morrison, Wilderness Vol. I (Vintage Books, 1989) p. 2

Words dissemble
Words be quick
Words resemble walking sticks
Plant them they will grow
Watch them waver so
I’ll always be a word man
Better then a bird man

From ‘Curses, Invocations’, An American Prayer

ROBERT SMITH, ROMANTIC SYMBOLIST: THE CURE & SYMBOLIST ART

LOVE IN FOURTEEN SONGS – I