Post by darkstar on Jun 12, 2005 23:52:04 GMT
An American Poet - Jim Morrison
By: Nelson Gray
Heroin Times - December 2000
Jim Morrison was much closer to the living embodiment of Dionysus than he was to a heroin addict. However, by most accounts, he probably tried heroin-maybe in Paris before his death and probably at The Factory with former lover Nico of the Velvet Underground, who were, at the time, the darkest band in the United States other than The Doors.
In other words,
Jim Morrison's lyrics and the band's music that fit the words like the flora and fauna of a great spirit's ecosystem were honest and august in reflecting their times: war, violent protests, assassinations, drug experimentation and love-ins, but there is a great deal more to that when taking the artistry of The Doors into critical consideration, which I shall do only briefly.
The Beatles offered an antidote to the troubles of the sixties, but The Doors, The Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones diagnosed the disease, and Bob Dylan did both (although all these bands did some of both to a lesser extent).
Where Bob Dylan localized and depicted the etiology of the sixties in a bardic, then mercurial and symbolic poetry, Jim Morrison took the events that characterized the time and endowed them with archetypal significance and universal resonance.
This charged immediacy and timelessness was so overwhelming at times that it could be elusive, and it wasn't limited to the recordings, but also inherent in the live shows, perhaps even accentuated by them: for instance, in Miami, when a bearded Jim Morrison carried a lamb on stage to roar with the lungs of a lion in "a Roman wilderness of pain."
The Doors, as a live act, were more than a rock band. What The Doors did incorporated elements of poetry/spoken word and performance art.
As a lead singer, in the sixties, the only front man with as much charisma was Mick Jagger. By all counts, Mick Jagger was a more polished performer. Onstage, Mick Jagger played the devil and played him well, but Jim Morrison actually took you to hell during a live show.
Even without having seen The Doors play live, this radiates from the fire and brimstone of any Quasar screen with a VCR playing footage from one of their shows. As an ancient archetype, Dionysus, "taking a mask from the ancient gallery,"
Jim Morrison succeeded in traveling the continuum of his historical moment to achieve the binary stature of an icon, a human symbol, left by the Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Times), in defining an era by polarizing its signs.
categories.
Jim Morrison epitomizes the contradictions of the times in terms of the visionary and revolutionary juxtaposed in counterbalance with the violent and the self-destructive: these are not necessarily two entirely opposite.
For Jim Morrison, they were two sides of the same door, as they were for a good many people of his generation who subscribed to a sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll lifestyle. (Danger as much as comfort and rebellion is part of the seduction of taking drugs.)
Unfortunately for Jim Morrison, who is the icon that best represents all attributed to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and many others of lesser renown and those of none at all, this door became firmly planted in the ground as a headstone, and ever since, for future generations, it has had the magnetism of Stonehenge, as is evidenced by how many people continue to pilgrimage to the grave of the lead singer of The Doors.
On a universal level and on a ceremonial, performance level, what Jim Morrison (and The Doors) enacted was The Birth of Tragedy as described by Friedrich Nietzsche as a relationship between the Apollonian (the poetic, the medicinal) and the Dionysian (the frenzied, the drunken). This can also be seen as a parable of the nature of drug-taking in general, and, in this particular sixties drama, Jim Morrison was the tragic star.
Jim Morrison's career as a poet, a singer, and performer and his life represented the mythology of the two brothers, Apollo and Dionysus, made marketable to be consumed through the usual channels of popular culture. This is an amazing feat in and of itself, but, ultimately, the latter aspect is a sizable portion of what contributed to his drug-related death in Paris of a heart attack.
However, Morrison's directory to an untimely demise was mapped out long before his marketable looks were seized upon to be exploited to the diminishment of attention directed and paid to his poetic gift, and what ensued was not all that different, in contrast and comparison, to the Maenads, in a frenzy, ripping Dionysus to shreds, which he tried to escape by radically changing his appearance.
In the classic song, "The End," when Jim Morrison sang about being "lost in a Roman wilderness of pain," he was, as a poet and nihilistic mystic, marking the terrain of his odyssey into the depths of consciousness, "a dark night of the soul" (St. John of the Cross); Morrison had a mystical mission or agenda as is clear on the first track of the first album: "Break on Through" alludes to St. John of the Cross's "Break the Mind's Barrier."
Pain often precedes death and we universally relate the two. Morrison calls it a "Roman wilderness" in reference not only to a fallen empire that mirrored the United States then and does now, but also to Mania, the Roman goddess of death and poetry.
As a poet and a seer, Morrison chose his road and his method of travel from the very beginning, and it is one of a very specific and ancient nature, speaking from personal experience, that is as treacherous as it is exhilarating, offering mind expansion at the risk of death.
The band took its name from a quote by mystic, seer, prophet, and poet William Blake: "The doors of perception must be cleansed." Morrison operated from a Rimbaudian maxim which states "The poet must first make himself a seer by a systematic disordering of the senses" ("A Season in Hell").
www.herointimes.com/dec00/flashback.html
By: Nelson Gray
Heroin Times - December 2000
Jim Morrison was much closer to the living embodiment of Dionysus than he was to a heroin addict. However, by most accounts, he probably tried heroin-maybe in Paris before his death and probably at The Factory with former lover Nico of the Velvet Underground, who were, at the time, the darkest band in the United States other than The Doors.
In other words,
Jim Morrison's lyrics and the band's music that fit the words like the flora and fauna of a great spirit's ecosystem were honest and august in reflecting their times: war, violent protests, assassinations, drug experimentation and love-ins, but there is a great deal more to that when taking the artistry of The Doors into critical consideration, which I shall do only briefly.
The Beatles offered an antidote to the troubles of the sixties, but The Doors, The Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones diagnosed the disease, and Bob Dylan did both (although all these bands did some of both to a lesser extent).
Where Bob Dylan localized and depicted the etiology of the sixties in a bardic, then mercurial and symbolic poetry, Jim Morrison took the events that characterized the time and endowed them with archetypal significance and universal resonance.
This charged immediacy and timelessness was so overwhelming at times that it could be elusive, and it wasn't limited to the recordings, but also inherent in the live shows, perhaps even accentuated by them: for instance, in Miami, when a bearded Jim Morrison carried a lamb on stage to roar with the lungs of a lion in "a Roman wilderness of pain."
The Doors, as a live act, were more than a rock band. What The Doors did incorporated elements of poetry/spoken word and performance art.
As a lead singer, in the sixties, the only front man with as much charisma was Mick Jagger. By all counts, Mick Jagger was a more polished performer. Onstage, Mick Jagger played the devil and played him well, but Jim Morrison actually took you to hell during a live show.
Even without having seen The Doors play live, this radiates from the fire and brimstone of any Quasar screen with a VCR playing footage from one of their shows. As an ancient archetype, Dionysus, "taking a mask from the ancient gallery,"
Jim Morrison succeeded in traveling the continuum of his historical moment to achieve the binary stature of an icon, a human symbol, left by the Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Times), in defining an era by polarizing its signs.
categories.
Jim Morrison epitomizes the contradictions of the times in terms of the visionary and revolutionary juxtaposed in counterbalance with the violent and the self-destructive: these are not necessarily two entirely opposite.
For Jim Morrison, they were two sides of the same door, as they were for a good many people of his generation who subscribed to a sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll lifestyle. (Danger as much as comfort and rebellion is part of the seduction of taking drugs.)
Unfortunately for Jim Morrison, who is the icon that best represents all attributed to sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, and many others of lesser renown and those of none at all, this door became firmly planted in the ground as a headstone, and ever since, for future generations, it has had the magnetism of Stonehenge, as is evidenced by how many people continue to pilgrimage to the grave of the lead singer of The Doors.
On a universal level and on a ceremonial, performance level, what Jim Morrison (and The Doors) enacted was The Birth of Tragedy as described by Friedrich Nietzsche as a relationship between the Apollonian (the poetic, the medicinal) and the Dionysian (the frenzied, the drunken). This can also be seen as a parable of the nature of drug-taking in general, and, in this particular sixties drama, Jim Morrison was the tragic star.
Jim Morrison's career as a poet, a singer, and performer and his life represented the mythology of the two brothers, Apollo and Dionysus, made marketable to be consumed through the usual channels of popular culture. This is an amazing feat in and of itself, but, ultimately, the latter aspect is a sizable portion of what contributed to his drug-related death in Paris of a heart attack.
However, Morrison's directory to an untimely demise was mapped out long before his marketable looks were seized upon to be exploited to the diminishment of attention directed and paid to his poetic gift, and what ensued was not all that different, in contrast and comparison, to the Maenads, in a frenzy, ripping Dionysus to shreds, which he tried to escape by radically changing his appearance.
In the classic song, "The End," when Jim Morrison sang about being "lost in a Roman wilderness of pain," he was, as a poet and nihilistic mystic, marking the terrain of his odyssey into the depths of consciousness, "a dark night of the soul" (St. John of the Cross); Morrison had a mystical mission or agenda as is clear on the first track of the first album: "Break on Through" alludes to St. John of the Cross's "Break the Mind's Barrier."
Pain often precedes death and we universally relate the two. Morrison calls it a "Roman wilderness" in reference not only to a fallen empire that mirrored the United States then and does now, but also to Mania, the Roman goddess of death and poetry.
As a poet and a seer, Morrison chose his road and his method of travel from the very beginning, and it is one of a very specific and ancient nature, speaking from personal experience, that is as treacherous as it is exhilarating, offering mind expansion at the risk of death.
The band took its name from a quote by mystic, seer, prophet, and poet William Blake: "The doors of perception must be cleansed." Morrison operated from a Rimbaudian maxim which states "The poet must first make himself a seer by a systematic disordering of the senses" ("A Season in Hell").
www.herointimes.com/dec00/flashback.html