Jim Morisson Essay, Research Paper
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 fianc?e, 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, Moli?re, 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.