Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jul 12, 2006 8:40:23 GMT
This is an interesting piece from William Cook which has been on the net for years now ...featured in Scorpywag a few years back it should be of interest to anyone who wants to explore Jim the Poet a bit....I have pasted it here in case the site goes down.
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (§ 146)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Introduction
James Douglas Morrison’s poetry was born out of a period of tumultuous social and political change in American and world history. Besides Morrison’s social and political perspective, his verse also speaks with an understanding of the world of literature, especially of the traditions that shaped the poetry of his age. His poetry also expresses his own experiences, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet — from his musings on film at UCLA in The Lords and The New Creatures, to his final poems in Wilderness and The American Night.1 It is my intention in this essay to show Morrison as a serious American poet, whose work is worthy of serious consideration in relation to its place in the American literary tradition. By discussing the poetry in terms of Morrison’s influences and own ideas, I will be able to show what distinguishes him as a significant American poet. In order to reveal him as having a clearly defined ability as a poet, my focus will be on Morrison’s own words and poetry. I will concentrate on his earlier work to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrison’s poetry and style.
Morrison’s poetic style is characterised by contrived ambiguity of meaning which serves to express subconscious thought and feeling—a tendency now generally associated with the ‘post-modern’ or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poetry quite profound in its effect upon the reader, by using vividly evocative words and images in his poems. While it is obvious that Morrison has read writers that influence his work, and their influence remains strong in subject and tone, he still manages to make it his own in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas. We would expect to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a lesser writer, but Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism and blatant ‘borrowing,’ in order to achieve originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, “Bad poets borrow, good poets steal.”
Morrison’s poetry is very surreal at times, as well as highly symbolic — there is a pervading sense of the irrational, chaotic, and the violent; an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrison’s poetry reveals a strange world — a place peopled by characters straight out of Morrison’s circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrison’s speech is a native tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet. He belongs to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg calls the “American Prophecy . . . present in all that speaks to our sense of ‘identity’ and our need for renewal.” Rothenberg sees this prophetic tradition as:
affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary consciousness by means of more precise and highly charged uses of language and to provide new tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life . . . A special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman saw the poet’s function in part as revealing the visionary meaning of our lives in relation to the time and place in which we live . . . we have taken this American emphasis on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the central meaning of a ‘prophetic’ native tradition.2
The lasting impression of Morrison’s poems is that they attempt to render the dream or nightmare of modern existence in terms of words and imagery, quite bizarre and obscure, yet compelling at the same time. An important aspect about the body of his work and his commitment to his particular style, one closely aligned to Rothenberg’s ‘prophetic’ tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what other poets of his time were writing.
I. Critiquing the Myth of Morrison
In 1994, Professor of French Literature at Duke University, Wallace Fowlie, published the first ‘scholarly’ study of the poetry of the charismatic lead singer of the sixties rock band The Doors. The book was titled Rimbaud & Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet,3 and as suggested by the title, it is a comparative study of the lives and work of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The fact that Morrison had written to Fowlie, thanking him for his 1966 translation, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters,4 proved the starting point for Fowlie’s comparison between the two poets. Despite Fowlie’s apparent good intentions, his knowledge of Rimbaud’s work and his understanding of French symbolism far outweigh any of the observations he makes about Morrison’s poetry. Perhaps the most insightful point he makes is when he labels Morrison “Kouros,” the Greek word for “a youth attractive to men and women . . . At times in praise of his beauty. At other times it is hurled almost as a curse at those youths who insolently torment older people.”5
After inadvertently making his own contribution to the Morrison ‘myth’ by stereotyping him as Kouros, Fowlie goes on to disclaim his own observation by stating that “[t]his name I suggest as representative of the non-hypocritical innocence of Jim when he was not aware of the power of his appearance and his personality.” When was Morrison ever not aware of his appearance and his personality? Pre-teens? This is a typical example of Fowlie’s misunderstanding of Morrison’s character and is what informs most of his discussion of Morrison’s poetry. Consequently, Fowlie only ever illumines the obvious in the poems, although he does make solid connections between some of Morrison’s poems and their allusion to and the influence of Rimbaud.
Fowlie has written a perceptive analysis of Rimbaud’s poetry and the poet’s role as rebel, yet the same observations are in his 1946 study: Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood.6 Again, by concentrating on the myth of Morrison, as he does successfully with Rimbaud, Fowlie ignores the literary qualities of the poetry. Like most people that encountered Morrison, either through books or in person, Fowlie never seems to get past the myth. In view of this unfortunate aspect of his discussion of Morrison’s poetry, his approach is neither scholarly nor enlightening. However, what Fowlie does provide is a superficial guide to those wanting to pursue certain points, such as the influence of Nietzsche, Artaud, Rimbaud and the ‘Beat’ writers on Morrison’s own writing.
Most literature on Morrison is predominantly biographical, preferring to regurgitate the myth and scandal surrounding his life and times, rather than give his art any serious consideration. Despite interest, both negative and positive, his writing has not been comprehensively analysed in the context of his life and culture. Nor has it been discussed in terms of its merits (and failings), or its place in the ranks of American literature. The reasons why are twofold. First, Morrison’s verse is obscure, highly subjective and at times obscene or grotesque in imagery and speech, as in ‘An American Prayer’ from The American Night:7
Cling to cunts & cocks
of despair
We got our final vision
by clap
Columbus’ groin got
filled w/ green death
(I touched her thigh
& death smiled)
(AN, p.5)
Secondly, the ‘myth’ tends to impede any progress past itself — the romantic idea of Morrison as ‘poet-performer’ is preferable to the critics than any serious attempt to actually understand or analyse the poetry itself. For example, Fowlie’s judgement of Morrison’s life pigeonholes him in terms of the poetry; he cannot separate Morrison’s poetry from the “persona [which] had everything to do with the principle of Dionysus.”8
To this point, Morrison’s reputation precedes any serious literary analysis of the work. Despite his failings as a human and as a poet, he has left behind some valuable and important examples of his poetic talent that deserve serious analysis. This discussion will focus primarily on Morrison’s earliest work and the display of ideas, influences, and style that evolved into his own poetic voice. It is my belief in the strengths and significance of Morrison’s poetry, which has led me to situate him as a poet in the American literary tradition.
II. Motivation & Motif
Morrison’s early experiments with poetry and prose, written between 1964-69, depict — in the language of an intellectually ambitious film student — the strong influence of people such as Nietzsche and Artaud, and his ideas on aesthetics, philosophy, life, and film in particular. His early writings are the foundation on which he develops his poetical style. All the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his first collection of poems recur continuously throughout his later works. The Lords and The New Creatures9 was conceived as two separate books; however, it was published as one book containing Morrison’s ideas and poetry. Essentially, it is a forum for the fleshing out of style. The first half of the book The Lords: Notes on Vision, is a collection of notes and prose poems; while the second half, The New Creatures, is an assortment of poetry.
The Lords is a motley work of ideas and prose, loosely held together with motifs of death, cinema, and the reinterpretation of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality seems to be in short supply, and naïve idealism in abundance, it is interesting for the allusion to, and presentation of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, central to Morrison’s poetry. Stylistically, The Lords reflects his propensity for ‘dark’ imagery and self-mythology, which would later be a fundamental characteristic of his poetry and performance. The motifs that pervade all of his poetry abound; the ‘city’, ‘sex’, ‘death’, ‘assassins’, ‘voyeurs’, ‘wanderers’, ‘deserts’, ‘shamanism’, and so on. The autobiographical and historical references in the poems reflect the myth making process of turning fact into fiction: the inner world of the psyche and its perceptions of surroundings, a mythological landscape of Morrison’s mind.
His own life sets the tone and scenarios of the poems. His itinerant childhood constantly spent shifting around the country, combined with his career choice of international rock star, made Morrison identify himself with the image of the vagabond or wanderer. It was a literary figure that he would use in his poems, obviously having symbolic and poetic appeal, as well as personal significance. As he has suggested of himself and others: “We’re like actors, turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a half-formed shadow of our lost reality.”10
His poetry, however, has a strong sense of place; the strong observational power of the astute outsider, works well in the invocations of strange border towns and locations. His vision of Los Angeles, or ‘Lamerica’, is profound in its focus and impressions. It is even stranger because of the ambivalent nostalgia Morrison seems to hold for the place, where he had lived and performed with the Doors: “Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments.”11
At first, for Morrison, it was musical theatre that would attempt to provide the ‘ritual’ for the city, using his shaman principles to try to ‘join its fragments’, and bring his audience together. When that failed, and the ‘summer of love’ and the notion of hippie solidarity had dissipated, he turned to his poetry as the ritual that would piece together the fragments of his own experience. Like Eliot’s ‘fragments’ shored against his ruins in The Waste Land, Morrison’s words and poetry are the means by which he can make sense of his world and guard against his aesthetic mortality. However, as always in his poems, there is a sense of cynicism, directed toward himself as well as the reader. Almost as if, his suffering and sacrifices, made in the name of art and cultural freedom, were not for his own benefit but for the benefit of “you,” the reader:
Words are healing.
Words got me the wound
& will get me well 12
If you believe it.
(AN, p. 61)
This segment from his absurdly titled poem, ‘Lament for the Death of my Cock,’ reflects Morrison’s pessimism and poetic idealism. The sense of suffering expressed in this later poem is also found in his earlier work The Lords, in relation to the idea of sacrifice for the good of all: “What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?”
Morrison’s early awareness of society’s ills, and his benevolent sense of social responsibility, meant that he had a personally doomed and intense experience of America and its ideals. In particular, the ‘Western Dream,’ as expressed in his apocalyptic invocation of a ‘brave new world’ of dreamlike existence and ritual: “We are from the West. The world we suggest should be a new Wild West, a sensuous, evil world, strange, and haunting.”13
With his own experience informing his work, Morrison begins The Lords by addressing the reader rhetorically, as if revealing some truth about modern existence. He introduces his analogy of a society’s relation to place, in terms of a ‘game’. His vision of the city is one of a dystopian environment—it is an interpretation of the American condition and all modern civilisations. Morrison sees the city in modernist and symbolist terms: the metropolis as a metaphorical reflection of society:
We all live in the city.
The city forms - often physically, but inevitably
psychically - a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center. Drive toward outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prostitution.
But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding
the daylight business district exists the only
real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night cinemas.
(L, p.3)
Like Eliot’s invocation of the “unreal city” in The Waste Land, inherited from Baudelaire’s line about the “warming city, city full of dreams, where ghost’s in broad daylight catch the walker’s sleeve,”14 there is a relation of person to place. Rimbaud’s perception of a city is more in line with Morrison’s, when he cries: “O sorrowful city! O city now struck dumb, / Head and heart stretched out in paleness / In endless doorways thrown wide by time; / City the Dismal Past can only bless: / Body galvanised for sufferings yet to come.”15
Morrison’s motif of the city is as surrealistic as it is symbolic in the strange juxtapositions of vivid imagery, symbol, and metaphors of human consciousness. Throughout Morrison’s poetry, the city appears paradoxically as a place of despair, yet a place where experiences of sensuality and euphoric indulgence abound. It is a place of malaise and tensions, yet it offers art and life as well as an ominous source of disease and death. Nevertheless, this place of binaries and complexity is his primary source for an assortment of bizarre characters and experiences from the ‘dark’ side. It is a place where the ‘lords’ and the ‘new [suggesting modern] creatures’ cohabit.
Morrison’s notion of American society and its effect upon culture and people, is one of the main concepts behind The Lords. He defines it as
the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that people have in the face of reality. They have no real control over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set. In creating this idea of the lords, it also came to reverse itself. Now to me, the lords mean something entirely different. I couldn’t really explain. It’s like the opposite. Somehow the lords are a romantic race of people who have found a way to control their environment and their own lives. They’re somehow different from other people.16
The notion of the ‘lords’ is a philosophical construct and a poetical device used to distinguish society as hierarchical. Morrison’s idea of the lords can be related to Nietzsche’s view in The Will to Power (1967), of “the Lords of the Earth — that higher species which would climb aloft to new and impossible things, to a broader vision, and to its task on earth.” The lords are the poets and artists — the people who are revolutionaries, who seek to change the conformist culture in which they exist and lead society forward:
The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge
or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only
try to enslave others. But gradually, special
perceptions are being developed. The idea of the
“Lords” is beginning to form in some minds. We
should enlist them into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal
appearances. The Lords have secret entrances,
and they know disguises. But they give themselves
away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in
the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a
glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us
books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas.
Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse
us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns
our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted
and indifferent.
Door of passage to the other side,
the soul frees itself in stride.
(L, p. 32-33)
“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” (§ 146)
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Introduction
James Douglas Morrison’s poetry was born out of a period of tumultuous social and political change in American and world history. Besides Morrison’s social and political perspective, his verse also speaks with an understanding of the world of literature, especially of the traditions that shaped the poetry of his age. His poetry also expresses his own experiences, thoughts, development, and maturation as a poet — from his musings on film at UCLA in The Lords and The New Creatures, to his final poems in Wilderness and The American Night.1 It is my intention in this essay to show Morrison as a serious American poet, whose work is worthy of serious consideration in relation to its place in the American literary tradition. By discussing the poetry in terms of Morrison’s influences and own ideas, I will be able to show what distinguishes him as a significant American poet. In order to reveal him as having a clearly defined ability as a poet, my focus will be on Morrison’s own words and poetry. I will concentrate on his earlier work to show the influence of Nietzsche and French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud and the effect they had on Morrison’s poetry and style.
Morrison’s poetic style is characterised by contrived ambiguity of meaning which serves to express subconscious thought and feeling—a tendency now generally associated with the ‘post-modern’ or avant garde. His poetic strength is that he creates poetry quite profound in its effect upon the reader, by using vividly evocative words and images in his poems. While it is obvious that Morrison has read writers that influence his work, and their influence remains strong in subject and tone, he still manages to make it his own in the way he adapts these influences to his style, experiences, and ideas. We would expect to find remnants of quotes, stolen lines and ideas, in a lesser writer, but Morrison shows his strength as a poet by resisting plagiarism and blatant ‘borrowing,’ in order to achieve originality in his own verse. As T. S. Eliot has said, “Bad poets borrow, good poets steal.”
Morrison’s poetry is very surreal at times, as well as highly symbolic — there is a pervading sense of the irrational, chaotic, and the violent; an effect produced by startling juxtapositions of images and words. Morrison’s poetry reveals a strange world — a place peopled by characters straight out of Morrison’s circus of the mind, from the strange streets of Los Angeles boulevards and back alleys. Morrison’s speech is a native tongue, and his eye is that of a visionary American poet. He belongs to what poet and critic Jerome Rothenberg calls the “American Prophecy . . . present in all that speaks to our sense of ‘identity’ and our need for renewal.” Rothenberg sees this prophetic tradition as:
affirming the oldest function of poetry, which is to interrupt the habits of ordinary consciousness by means of more precise and highly charged uses of language and to provide new tools for discovering the underlying relatedness of all life . . . A special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature. Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman saw the poet’s function in part as revealing the visionary meaning of our lives in relation to the time and place in which we live . . . we have taken this American emphasis on the relationship of myth and history, of poetry and life, as the central meaning of a ‘prophetic’ native tradition.2
The lasting impression of Morrison’s poems is that they attempt to render the dream or nightmare of modern existence in terms of words and imagery, quite bizarre and obscure, yet compelling at the same time. An important aspect about the body of his work and his commitment to his particular style, one closely aligned to Rothenberg’s ‘prophetic’ tradition, is that it is in the tradition of what other poets of his time were writing.
I. Critiquing the Myth of Morrison
In 1994, Professor of French Literature at Duke University, Wallace Fowlie, published the first ‘scholarly’ study of the poetry of the charismatic lead singer of the sixties rock band The Doors. The book was titled Rimbaud & Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet,3 and as suggested by the title, it is a comparative study of the lives and work of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The fact that Morrison had written to Fowlie, thanking him for his 1966 translation, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters,4 proved the starting point for Fowlie’s comparison between the two poets. Despite Fowlie’s apparent good intentions, his knowledge of Rimbaud’s work and his understanding of French symbolism far outweigh any of the observations he makes about Morrison’s poetry. Perhaps the most insightful point he makes is when he labels Morrison “Kouros,” the Greek word for “a youth attractive to men and women . . . At times in praise of his beauty. At other times it is hurled almost as a curse at those youths who insolently torment older people.”5
After inadvertently making his own contribution to the Morrison ‘myth’ by stereotyping him as Kouros, Fowlie goes on to disclaim his own observation by stating that “[t]his name I suggest as representative of the non-hypocritical innocence of Jim when he was not aware of the power of his appearance and his personality.” When was Morrison ever not aware of his appearance and his personality? Pre-teens? This is a typical example of Fowlie’s misunderstanding of Morrison’s character and is what informs most of his discussion of Morrison’s poetry. Consequently, Fowlie only ever illumines the obvious in the poems, although he does make solid connections between some of Morrison’s poems and their allusion to and the influence of Rimbaud.
Fowlie has written a perceptive analysis of Rimbaud’s poetry and the poet’s role as rebel, yet the same observations are in his 1946 study: Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood.6 Again, by concentrating on the myth of Morrison, as he does successfully with Rimbaud, Fowlie ignores the literary qualities of the poetry. Like most people that encountered Morrison, either through books or in person, Fowlie never seems to get past the myth. In view of this unfortunate aspect of his discussion of Morrison’s poetry, his approach is neither scholarly nor enlightening. However, what Fowlie does provide is a superficial guide to those wanting to pursue certain points, such as the influence of Nietzsche, Artaud, Rimbaud and the ‘Beat’ writers on Morrison’s own writing.
Most literature on Morrison is predominantly biographical, preferring to regurgitate the myth and scandal surrounding his life and times, rather than give his art any serious consideration. Despite interest, both negative and positive, his writing has not been comprehensively analysed in the context of his life and culture. Nor has it been discussed in terms of its merits (and failings), or its place in the ranks of American literature. The reasons why are twofold. First, Morrison’s verse is obscure, highly subjective and at times obscene or grotesque in imagery and speech, as in ‘An American Prayer’ from The American Night:7
Cling to cunts & cocks
of despair
We got our final vision
by clap
Columbus’ groin got
filled w/ green death
(I touched her thigh
& death smiled)
(AN, p.5)
Secondly, the ‘myth’ tends to impede any progress past itself — the romantic idea of Morrison as ‘poet-performer’ is preferable to the critics than any serious attempt to actually understand or analyse the poetry itself. For example, Fowlie’s judgement of Morrison’s life pigeonholes him in terms of the poetry; he cannot separate Morrison’s poetry from the “persona [which] had everything to do with the principle of Dionysus.”8
To this point, Morrison’s reputation precedes any serious literary analysis of the work. Despite his failings as a human and as a poet, he has left behind some valuable and important examples of his poetic talent that deserve serious analysis. This discussion will focus primarily on Morrison’s earliest work and the display of ideas, influences, and style that evolved into his own poetic voice. It is my belief in the strengths and significance of Morrison’s poetry, which has led me to situate him as a poet in the American literary tradition.
II. Motivation & Motif
Morrison’s early experiments with poetry and prose, written between 1964-69, depict — in the language of an intellectually ambitious film student — the strong influence of people such as Nietzsche and Artaud, and his ideas on aesthetics, philosophy, life, and film in particular. His early writings are the foundation on which he develops his poetical style. All the motifs, symbols, and imagery introduced in his first collection of poems recur continuously throughout his later works. The Lords and The New Creatures9 was conceived as two separate books; however, it was published as one book containing Morrison’s ideas and poetry. Essentially, it is a forum for the fleshing out of style. The first half of the book The Lords: Notes on Vision, is a collection of notes and prose poems; while the second half, The New Creatures, is an assortment of poetry.
The Lords is a motley work of ideas and prose, loosely held together with motifs of death, cinema, and the reinterpretation of mythical and theatrical theory. While originality seems to be in short supply, and naïve idealism in abundance, it is interesting for the allusion to, and presentation of philosophical and aesthetic ideas, central to Morrison’s poetry. Stylistically, The Lords reflects his propensity for ‘dark’ imagery and self-mythology, which would later be a fundamental characteristic of his poetry and performance. The motifs that pervade all of his poetry abound; the ‘city’, ‘sex’, ‘death’, ‘assassins’, ‘voyeurs’, ‘wanderers’, ‘deserts’, ‘shamanism’, and so on. The autobiographical and historical references in the poems reflect the myth making process of turning fact into fiction: the inner world of the psyche and its perceptions of surroundings, a mythological landscape of Morrison’s mind.
His own life sets the tone and scenarios of the poems. His itinerant childhood constantly spent shifting around the country, combined with his career choice of international rock star, made Morrison identify himself with the image of the vagabond or wanderer. It was a literary figure that he would use in his poems, obviously having symbolic and poetic appeal, as well as personal significance. As he has suggested of himself and others: “We’re like actors, turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom, endlessly searching for a half-formed shadow of our lost reality.”10
His poetry, however, has a strong sense of place; the strong observational power of the astute outsider, works well in the invocations of strange border towns and locations. His vision of Los Angeles, or ‘Lamerica’, is profound in its focus and impressions. It is even stranger because of the ambivalent nostalgia Morrison seems to hold for the place, where he had lived and performed with the Doors: “Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments.”11
At first, for Morrison, it was musical theatre that would attempt to provide the ‘ritual’ for the city, using his shaman principles to try to ‘join its fragments’, and bring his audience together. When that failed, and the ‘summer of love’ and the notion of hippie solidarity had dissipated, he turned to his poetry as the ritual that would piece together the fragments of his own experience. Like Eliot’s ‘fragments’ shored against his ruins in The Waste Land, Morrison’s words and poetry are the means by which he can make sense of his world and guard against his aesthetic mortality. However, as always in his poems, there is a sense of cynicism, directed toward himself as well as the reader. Almost as if, his suffering and sacrifices, made in the name of art and cultural freedom, were not for his own benefit but for the benefit of “you,” the reader:
Words are healing.
Words got me the wound
& will get me well 12
If you believe it.
(AN, p. 61)
This segment from his absurdly titled poem, ‘Lament for the Death of my Cock,’ reflects Morrison’s pessimism and poetic idealism. The sense of suffering expressed in this later poem is also found in his earlier work The Lords, in relation to the idea of sacrifice for the good of all: “What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?”
Morrison’s early awareness of society’s ills, and his benevolent sense of social responsibility, meant that he had a personally doomed and intense experience of America and its ideals. In particular, the ‘Western Dream,’ as expressed in his apocalyptic invocation of a ‘brave new world’ of dreamlike existence and ritual: “We are from the West. The world we suggest should be a new Wild West, a sensuous, evil world, strange, and haunting.”13
With his own experience informing his work, Morrison begins The Lords by addressing the reader rhetorically, as if revealing some truth about modern existence. He introduces his analogy of a society’s relation to place, in terms of a ‘game’. His vision of the city is one of a dystopian environment—it is an interpretation of the American condition and all modern civilisations. Morrison sees the city in modernist and symbolist terms: the metropolis as a metaphorical reflection of society:
We all live in the city.
The city forms - often physically, but inevitably
psychically - a circle. A Game. A ring of death
with sex at its center. Drive toward outskirts
of city suburbs. At the edge discover zones of
sophisticated vice and boredom, child prostitution.
But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding
the daylight business district exists the only
real crowd life of our mound, the only street
life, night life. Diseased specimens in dollar
hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night cinemas.
(L, p.3)
Like Eliot’s invocation of the “unreal city” in The Waste Land, inherited from Baudelaire’s line about the “
Morrison’s motif of the city is as surrealistic as it is symbolic in the strange juxtapositions of vivid imagery, symbol, and metaphors of human consciousness. Throughout Morrison’s poetry, the city appears paradoxically as a place of despair, yet a place where experiences of sensuality and euphoric indulgence abound. It is a place of malaise and tensions, yet it offers art and life as well as an ominous source of disease and death. Nevertheless, this place of binaries and complexity is his primary source for an assortment of bizarre characters and experiences from the ‘dark’ side. It is a place where the ‘lords’ and the ‘new [suggesting modern] creatures’ cohabit.
Morrison’s notion of American society and its effect upon culture and people, is one of the main concepts behind The Lords. He defines it as
the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that people have in the face of reality. They have no real control over events or their own lives. Something is controlling them. The closest they ever get is the television set. In creating this idea of the lords, it also came to reverse itself. Now to me, the lords mean something entirely different. I couldn’t really explain. It’s like the opposite. Somehow the lords are a romantic race of people who have found a way to control their environment and their own lives. They’re somehow different from other people.16
The notion of the ‘lords’ is a philosophical construct and a poetical device used to distinguish society as hierarchical. Morrison’s idea of the lords can be related to Nietzsche’s view in The Will to Power (1967), of “the Lords of the Earth — that higher species which would climb aloft to new and impossible things, to a broader vision, and to its task on earth.” The lords are the poets and artists — the people who are revolutionaries, who seek to change the conformist culture in which they exist and lead society forward:
The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge
or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only
try to enslave others. But gradually, special
perceptions are being developed. The idea of the
“Lords” is beginning to form in some minds. We
should enlist them into bands of perceivers to
tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal
appearances. The Lords have secret entrances,
and they know disguises. But they give themselves
away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in
the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a
glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us
books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas.
Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse
us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns
our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted
and indifferent.
Door of passage to the other side,
the soul frees itself in stride.
(L, p. 32-33)