Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 29, 2011 12:46:08 GMT
Pursued….a tale of Jim Morrison’s last night on Earth
by Chicago writer Jim Cherry
"There's something about me that explains everything
Robert Mitchum in Pursued 1947
Jim sat in the movie, not watching it so much as killing time.
Maybe he shouldn't have come to Paris because his literary heroes had.
Every path has a way, and what they found here doesn't exist anymore, at least not for him. The days were fine, he and Pam visiting the museums and cafes, but it was the night that still got out of hand.
There's plenty of time for meditation and recollection before a movie starts. Jim forgot that observation when he published his book, but poetry is such an on going process, at least for him. Maybe he could rework it.
He was alone in the theatre, well not alone, there are one or two others, a couple of islands of people, he can see their silhouettes in the silvered movie light, but they're far off and separate from him.
Since the movie had started, the feeling of dread had eased, the dread of thinking, feeling like he wasn't going to live through the movie, like he was going to jump out of his skin.
He knew it was just the edge of his hangover, still you never knew...he knew, the feeling would go away if he could just relax and enjoy the movie.
How long had he enjoyed movies? Since he was a kid and saw movies as a series of disjointed images. He used to sit, letting the images flow over him and he watched his mind put them together.
Film is proof of the inherent chaos of the world, you can take images out of context, splice them together and the mind accepts them and provides its own context.
Pursued is the story of Robert Mitchum playing a character being chased through the desert by everybody around him without his really knowing why. Jim knew how that felt, everybody was after him, expecting things, wanting things, the groupies wanting his body, fans wanting spectacle, the record company wanting another hit, the other Doors not wanting him to drink, his family wanting him to conform to their idea of what he should be, the media wanting basically the same thing plus a good quote, everybody wanting everything he had, except what he wanted to give, his words; he was a wanted man.
Why had he chosen rock & roll as a career? A chance to work out some adolescent male phantasies. He smirked at his conceit. But now he was never satisfied with anything anymore. I've lost myself, part of myself, the part at the beginning where you know who you are, and where you're going; he'd gorged at the feast, the hunger is gone, the taste he didn't savour anything anymore, he just consumed, when in reality he was just consuming himself. The realization depressed him further.
"There's something about me that explains everything." As true for Robert Mitchum's character in the movie as it was for him.
And when he tried to define his motives, at the insistence of the press, he was accused of basing his whole life on one idea from a book, as ridiculous as it seems that the definition of anybody's life can be based on one idea from one book. And then they tried to turn my words against me.
There's something inside all of us that we can't explain, so we call it soul.
At least he had a philosophy. Better than nothing.
He thought back, life is recollection even when you're young, back to when it all started. 'Six years! It feels a lot longer than that.'
He thought, disgusted. He didn't feel the same as then, 'I don't look the same either, the last time I passed a mirror, it looked as if my body had been blasted by the logic of fame, burst forth from the leathers, a snake shedding its skin.
Do you remember when/you were young and beautiful?' Maybe a lyric for the future, he would have to remember it. 'I've changed, how can that be! I'm still young, sure I remember things from twenty years ago, but I was only seven, and my memory is only now starting to lengthen, it's not like when old people talk about twenty years ago when they were my age now. How did I get so down so fast? Where did my life go? How did I come to feel this way?
Where did the drunkenness start?
The un-inhibition? When he was younger it was a conscious decision, to feel, to accumulate experience to give him something to write about, but now is it to cover up something I don't want to feel?
It's all so confused now, he didn't remember anymore, he was tired, tired of running naked on the Paris rooftops, trying to break through the boredom of existence.
It felt like he was running, "run with me", he smiled a little at the lyric running through his mind, running because he was afraid of stopping, afraid to confront...what? What monster had started him running?
He thought back to six years ago in the UCLA botanical garden, closing his eyes he could see it in his mind, he could almost feel it, if he just tried hard enough he could be there again, the cool night air, the wet grass, his body lithe, his black jeans sandy, his unwashed hair starting to curl at the bottom of his collar, the stone path that led to a bench surrounded by the cool green hedges, his friends trying to talk him out of being in the band.
"There's too much competition, they'll never make it."
"Your film career is going great." Said another.
"You don't want to be in a band with those guys, Jim, they're not going anywhere." That was ironic, that's what most people would've, did tell Ray, Robby and John about him. If I make a film about it, I'll have to make it a Garden of Gethsemane scene, maybe call it Irony in the Garden.
Or was it earlier than that, walking along the beach stoned, the sun warming his skin, watching the swirl of people and colour, listening to the poems in his head, and looking for Ray.
The beach, it's what drew us all to L.A. in the first place, the pull of the ocean, it attracts us for whatever reasons we have.
I knew sooner or later I'd bump into him.
Or did it start on that morning we came across those dead Indians scattered over the highway and my mother told "it's just a dream, Jimmy, that's all it is." The voices echoing again in his head. 'How Indian a thought'.
Or was it the night he discovered death when he was eight years old and he wanted to go to his mother, but he realized she was going to die too, so how could she comfort him?
He comforted himself by realizing that even though he was going to die and could die at any time he had eighty years or so before he was going to die.
He wondered if his mother knew, or understood.
Or maybe the answer was something deeper, in the darker recesses of his mind that he was trying to forget. The screen was empty.
The movie, like the memory, you try to grasp it and it's gone.
He got up, walking up the sloping aisle of the theatre, he turned, looking back one last time; the screen was now blank, white, as if the movie had never existed, but he experienced it, remembered it as if he could project it upon his eyes, and that was what mattered, the experience, everything he'd experienced unrolled in his movie mind, he smiled at the memories.
He knew that you can choose to live your life one day at a time, and he had, and he wondered what tomorrow would bring?
I'm still waiting for morning, was it still on the other side of dawn?
"Maybe they all want something simple, like my death?" He mumbled to himself.
But death isn't as easily pursued as life. How close to death had he actually been? He'd scared himself a couple of times, he'd heard deaths far off voice, sure he'd have a heart attack or just not wake up, but how can you be sure unless you actually die?
He wondered if Pam would have any heroin at home, and he knew it was truly the end. J.C.
by Chicago writer Jim Cherry
"There's something about me that explains everything
Robert Mitchum in Pursued 1947
Jim sat in the movie, not watching it so much as killing time.
Maybe he shouldn't have come to Paris because his literary heroes had.
Every path has a way, and what they found here doesn't exist anymore, at least not for him. The days were fine, he and Pam visiting the museums and cafes, but it was the night that still got out of hand.
There's plenty of time for meditation and recollection before a movie starts. Jim forgot that observation when he published his book, but poetry is such an on going process, at least for him. Maybe he could rework it.
He was alone in the theatre, well not alone, there are one or two others, a couple of islands of people, he can see their silhouettes in the silvered movie light, but they're far off and separate from him.
Since the movie had started, the feeling of dread had eased, the dread of thinking, feeling like he wasn't going to live through the movie, like he was going to jump out of his skin.
He knew it was just the edge of his hangover, still you never knew...he knew, the feeling would go away if he could just relax and enjoy the movie.
How long had he enjoyed movies? Since he was a kid and saw movies as a series of disjointed images. He used to sit, letting the images flow over him and he watched his mind put them together.
Film is proof of the inherent chaos of the world, you can take images out of context, splice them together and the mind accepts them and provides its own context.
Pursued is the story of Robert Mitchum playing a character being chased through the desert by everybody around him without his really knowing why. Jim knew how that felt, everybody was after him, expecting things, wanting things, the groupies wanting his body, fans wanting spectacle, the record company wanting another hit, the other Doors not wanting him to drink, his family wanting him to conform to their idea of what he should be, the media wanting basically the same thing plus a good quote, everybody wanting everything he had, except what he wanted to give, his words; he was a wanted man.
Why had he chosen rock & roll as a career? A chance to work out some adolescent male phantasies. He smirked at his conceit. But now he was never satisfied with anything anymore. I've lost myself, part of myself, the part at the beginning where you know who you are, and where you're going; he'd gorged at the feast, the hunger is gone, the taste he didn't savour anything anymore, he just consumed, when in reality he was just consuming himself. The realization depressed him further.
"There's something about me that explains everything." As true for Robert Mitchum's character in the movie as it was for him.
And when he tried to define his motives, at the insistence of the press, he was accused of basing his whole life on one idea from a book, as ridiculous as it seems that the definition of anybody's life can be based on one idea from one book. And then they tried to turn my words against me.
There's something inside all of us that we can't explain, so we call it soul.
At least he had a philosophy. Better than nothing.
He thought back, life is recollection even when you're young, back to when it all started. 'Six years! It feels a lot longer than that.'
He thought, disgusted. He didn't feel the same as then, 'I don't look the same either, the last time I passed a mirror, it looked as if my body had been blasted by the logic of fame, burst forth from the leathers, a snake shedding its skin.
Do you remember when/you were young and beautiful?' Maybe a lyric for the future, he would have to remember it. 'I've changed, how can that be! I'm still young, sure I remember things from twenty years ago, but I was only seven, and my memory is only now starting to lengthen, it's not like when old people talk about twenty years ago when they were my age now. How did I get so down so fast? Where did my life go? How did I come to feel this way?
Where did the drunkenness start?
The un-inhibition? When he was younger it was a conscious decision, to feel, to accumulate experience to give him something to write about, but now is it to cover up something I don't want to feel?
It's all so confused now, he didn't remember anymore, he was tired, tired of running naked on the Paris rooftops, trying to break through the boredom of existence.
It felt like he was running, "run with me", he smiled a little at the lyric running through his mind, running because he was afraid of stopping, afraid to confront...what? What monster had started him running?
He thought back to six years ago in the UCLA botanical garden, closing his eyes he could see it in his mind, he could almost feel it, if he just tried hard enough he could be there again, the cool night air, the wet grass, his body lithe, his black jeans sandy, his unwashed hair starting to curl at the bottom of his collar, the stone path that led to a bench surrounded by the cool green hedges, his friends trying to talk him out of being in the band.
"There's too much competition, they'll never make it."
"Your film career is going great." Said another.
"You don't want to be in a band with those guys, Jim, they're not going anywhere." That was ironic, that's what most people would've, did tell Ray, Robby and John about him. If I make a film about it, I'll have to make it a Garden of Gethsemane scene, maybe call it Irony in the Garden.
Or was it earlier than that, walking along the beach stoned, the sun warming his skin, watching the swirl of people and colour, listening to the poems in his head, and looking for Ray.
The beach, it's what drew us all to L.A. in the first place, the pull of the ocean, it attracts us for whatever reasons we have.
I knew sooner or later I'd bump into him.
Or did it start on that morning we came across those dead Indians scattered over the highway and my mother told "it's just a dream, Jimmy, that's all it is." The voices echoing again in his head. 'How Indian a thought'.
Or was it the night he discovered death when he was eight years old and he wanted to go to his mother, but he realized she was going to die too, so how could she comfort him?
He comforted himself by realizing that even though he was going to die and could die at any time he had eighty years or so before he was going to die.
He wondered if his mother knew, or understood.
Or maybe the answer was something deeper, in the darker recesses of his mind that he was trying to forget. The screen was empty.
The movie, like the memory, you try to grasp it and it's gone.
He got up, walking up the sloping aisle of the theatre, he turned, looking back one last time; the screen was now blank, white, as if the movie had never existed, but he experienced it, remembered it as if he could project it upon his eyes, and that was what mattered, the experience, everything he'd experienced unrolled in his movie mind, he smiled at the memories.
He knew that you can choose to live your life one day at a time, and he had, and he wondered what tomorrow would bring?
I'm still waiting for morning, was it still on the other side of dawn?
"Maybe they all want something simple, like my death?" He mumbled to himself.
But death isn't as easily pursued as life. How close to death had he actually been? He'd scared himself a couple of times, he'd heard deaths far off voice, sure he'd have a heart attack or just not wake up, but how can you be sure unless you actually die?
He wondered if Pam would have any heroin at home, and he knew it was truly the end. J.C.