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 P?re 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”.
P?re 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.