Styles change, rockstars come and
go. Values parade down the runway of society, flattering the puppetmasters as
the people stare transfixed at shadows on the wall of some dim cave, flickering
televised images which burn their propaganda into weary eyes. American Idolatry
has replaced the once mighty cult of personality that inspired a rebel
generation and turned the world on for three decades. Right in the middle of it
all, James Douglas Morrison appeared and stood out briefly, a piece of cosmic
fire burning through our thinning atmosphere in the darkening twilight, casting
shadows of silence upon the echoing green. No longer were sung the songs of
innocence.
“You
see, the birth of rock and roll coincided with my adolescence, my coming into
awareness.”
Young people all over the
English-speaking world were becoming intoxicated by the wild panpipes of this
Black American music, as the Bacchants in ancient Greece were carried away by
the Dionysian frenzy spreading out of Asia Minor. Film stars like James Dean and Marlon Brando
offered a new aesthetic of cool, no longer the stoic professionalism of
Humphrey Bogart but instead a hot-headed and righteous martyrdom of the
individual for whatever pathos or political stance presented itself in the
swirling milieu of a society whose tide, for a moment at least, seemed to be turning.
It was the medium of cinema that brought the late Jim Morrison and Ray
Manczarek together in the mid-60’s, while studying film at UCLA.
This past Monday would have been
Jim’s 71st birthday, yet the singer has been gone for over 43 years,
leaving a yawning chasm in his wake for all of us. What might have been is not
a subject we philosophers take seriously, as reality gives us every cause to be
filled with a sense of wonder. What he left us, at the price of his own sanity
and blood, is a legacy whose surface has merely been scratched. The higher
man’s very existence justifies itself, but still there is much we can learn
from him, which may prove to be of benefit, and pave the way for the future of
culture. Jim wanted for us, above all, to be free. Freedom is not a bourgeois
luxury but a terrible burden. And yet, as the teleological arrogance of Man
would have it, freedom is the goal to which all of evolution has been driving,
ever since some singularity in the fabric of space exhaled the Heraclitean fire
of which we all are composed.
As the father of three sons myself,
I know how difficult it is to deal with this raw masculine energy, the impulse
to freedom which has not learned measure or restraint and knows of no bounds
save the direction of its own superabundance. Being the son of a Navy Admiral
during a time when American values were seemingly etched in tablets of stone, the
tension pulled Morrison taut as a bowstring ready to release its arrow at the
mark. Luckily, his keen eye had taken aim, guided and reassured by his
incessant consumption of literature, poetry and philosophy. The model of Arthur
Rimbaud resonated in the young poet’s fragile, eggshell mind, as it was still
incubating and waiting to hatch. As he came of age, Jim would take up Rimbaud’s
challenge to undergo “a prolonged derangement of the senses to achieve the
unknown.” This was becoming more commonplace, as young people were imbibing
marijuana and ingesting lysergic acids like the latest spring fashion. Jim went
further, also smoking jimson weed and, according to myth, searching the desert
for peyote, only to get beat up by a Mexican gang.
After graduation, Jim’s use of LSD
picked up, inspiring the poet to compose his first rock songs, some of which
would be on The Doors’ early records. The band was formed shortly thereafter
when Jim ran into his fellow graduate Ray Manczarek on the sands of Venice
Beach. After an early incarnation that included Manczarek’s brothers, the
band’s lineup solidified with the addition of flamenco guitarist Robby Krieger
and jazz drummer John Densmore. These two shared an interest in transcendental
meditation with Ray, attending classes by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Jim,
meanwhile, maintained his interest in transcendental medication as his acid use continued, not having much use for the
Eastern esoterism that was sweeping the counterculture, although he did attend
one class and composed the song ‘Take it as it Comes’ for Maharishi. This was
all before The Beatles first took acid or studied under Maharishi.
The group put in two years of hard
work, practicing daily at the beachfront house Ray shared with his wife Dorothy
(and, for a time, Jim,) building their repertoire on the club scene in LA and
promoting their demos to record executives until finally, due not only to
Morrison’s poetry but also Krieger’s incredible songwriting (which Jim
encouraged,) they all of a sudden found themselves on top of the world during
the Summer of Love. Already along the way Jim had broken virtually every rule a
popular singer was supposed to follow, culminating in an extended performance
of ‘The End’ during which the singer, high on the equivalent of 100 modern-day
doses of acid, gave visceral expression to the Freudian ‘Oedipal Complex’ and
lost the band a job, thereby gaining a career.
Well then! What more to say on the
band’s legacy; let us instead explore the deeper implications of what Jim was
trying to say, and what he was saying to try. We have said that freedom is the
highest goal of the philosopher, for wisdom is freedom not merely from material
constraints (a prerequisite nonetheless for extended intellectual pursuit) but
also from all fetters of the mind, all societal conventions which seem put in
place to simplify and unify man’s existence, yet serve actually to squander our
spiritual reserve on a thousand petty concerns which are of no true relevance
to our inner selves. The Apollonian illusions of white society through the
50’s, transcribed in the popular songs of the time, were ill-prepared against
the sudden onslaught of maenadic revelry and political protest; how much more
dangerous was the wisdom of wild Silenus to the avaricious monarchs of our age?
For at worst, early rock and roll had questioned the solidity of sexual mores
and race relations, and the first half of the sixties only offered a protest
against militarism and oppression, voicing the agenda of a political party. The
true philosopher, rather, is party to none, and when it becomes evident that he
holds as great disdain for bleeding-heart liberalism as he does for
tight-fisted conservatism, he surely has no value to the Corporate States of
America, for he has no use to which to be put. If all the young people had
burned their draft cards, if all had joined in some such march, or voted for a
certain bill, it would have only proved how easily they could be led, and the
rulers, if wise, would have found a way to co-opt and subvert such dissidence
into a new conformity; which in fact has occurred, a plain fact to the
open-eyed. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Arthur Schopenhauer as Educator” the true
philosopher is painted as being antagonistic to the interests of the state; for
this purpose, the state has elected false philosophers to instruct the youth
with false wisdom, programming their eager minds with doctrine beneficial to
her interests. It will take another piece of writing to examine, at length, how
the powers-that-be have indeed reduced the fearsome powers of rock music, and
all popular music, to a feeble, anorexic seductress of mass consciousness in
order to curtail the possibility of true intellectual freedom, and above all,
to “Sell, sell, sell!” For two decades, however, Jim’s model was an example to
punk, hard rock, heavy metal, and perhaps even hip-hop, as dangerous minds were
able to gain wide popularity and use their voice to utter forbidden truths and
question established values. All this, of course, has its downside, and the
corporate state has learned to profit from what threatened to do it harm,
throwing out the baby while retaining the tepid bathwater.
But no one did it like Jim. In “The
Pre-Platonic Philosophers,” originally a lecture series by
then-university-professor Friedrich Nietzsche, the great philosophers of
ancient Greece through Socrates are painted as ‘pure’ philosophical types,
whereas Plato and all who follow him are ‘mixed types,’ meaning that they
present nothing essentially new in their thought or character but merely build
upon and synthesize the ideas of the older, pure philosophers. Nietzsche would
remain ambiguous throughout his literary career as to his own philosophical
‘type’’; certainly he boasts of many advancements that he proudly claims to be
of himself and no-one else, above all a panoramic perspective of morality as
something not fixed but constantly shifting in mankind’s ceaseless exercise of
its will to power, with words and values pasted over each other as rulers and
thinkers see fit. At the same time, many of Nietzsche’s ideas can be traced
back to these same pre-Platonic philosophers, whom he admired so greatly,
especially Heraclitus, while Nietzsche’s own philosophical attitude of questioning
can be compared to the skeptical Socrates, whom the philosopher frequently
derided. We are left with the same uncertainty in defining Jim Morrison, and
certainly nothing is more difficult than giving definition to a man whose brief
life was so sharply kinetic and transformative, despite (or rather because of)
his deeply contemplative nature. Now that we have set out, however, let us not
stray from our task.
Examining the record: Jim Morrison
left us various writings, in the form of poems, notebooks, brief
screenplay-sketches and philosophical musings. From his writings and interviews
we have a rich catalogue of quotes, many of them self-contained aphorisms in
the tradition of Proverbs, Heraclitus, Lao-Tzu and Jim’s own favorite aphorist,
William Blake. (There are also several quotes attributed falsely to Jim,
concocted by Oliver Stone for his cinematic version of Morrison, portrayed by
Val Kilmer in the film. As with virtually all of Stone’s work, these reflect
the filmmaker’s own philosophy more than the film’s subject, although this is
not necessarily to the director’s discredit.)
Of course, what Jim is known best
for are his songs (as well as Robbie’s songs, which he sang himself and
therefore is probably assumed by most listeners to have written.) ‘Break on
Through (to the Other Side)’ is a tour-de-force of Heraclitean fragments set
against a bossa-nova/Ray Charles fusion groove. This world is, for us as mortal
beings, a seeming contradiction of opposites: day and night, pleasure and
sorrow, accumulation and dissipation; yet these seeming opposites spring from
the same source, and we have no recourse but to pass constantly from one state
to another, as water from the sea turns to vapor and clouds, which then become
water again and causes plants to grow, eaten by animals who will die and return
to the Earth.
This song opens The Doors’ first,
eponymous album; the record concludes with ‘The End.’ We have already touched
on the introduction of the Oedipal theme in performance of this song, which
developed from an embryonic break-up, an ode and lament, perhaps to a
high-school girlfriend of Jim’s who broke his heart, questioned his manhood for
expressing his pain in tears and led to his destruction of all his written
poetry up to that point (as Plato had destroyed his own poems in order to
become the philosopher that Socrates wanted him to be. Perhaps this is why
Plato was not himself a pure type, as he allowed his mentor to dictate his
early beliefs to a too-great extent; perhaps this is also what led a highly
impressionable Nietzsche astray in the form of Schopenhauer and Wagner.) (A
great many perhapses.) By the time of these recordings, ‘The End’ had become a
forum for Jim’s poetic improvisation, and on the album version focused on the
overall confusion and violence of our times, reflecting the eternal human
condition, whose loftiest and most noble ideas and institutions have evolved
from a substratum of cruelty and vigorous suppression. The climax comes when
Jim confronts Man’s archetypal parents, threatening parricide and incest, and
chants the word ‘fuck’ as a percussive instrument while Robbie performs the
most impassioned use of Indian raga within the context of rock music up to that
point. (In the originally issued recording, Jim’s profanity is turned way down
in the mix, but Francis Ford Coppola, in his own Heraclitean/Nietzschean epic
exploration of ethics and philosophy in the context of the Vietnam conflict,
‘Apocalypse Now,’ brings the word back up to audibility and reclaims the
powerful statement Jim was making, that this world of suffering and futility of
which the Ecclesiast despaired is ultimately redeemed by sex and death.) After
recording this masterpiece of a song, perhaps the most chilling performance in
a recording studio ever made, Jim continued to repeat, “Kill the father, fuck
the mother,” obsessively, offering the explanation that ‘the father’
represented those repressive institutions of society which must be successively
overturned by the new generation, and ‘the mother’ represented our own nature
as children of the Earth, and the necessity of our commitment to passionately
pursue our own biological and emotional selves, rather than follow the strict
patriarchal authority that his own father embodied as a military officer, at a
time when global conflict and militarization were deeply disconcerting to many
young people in the counterculture, as well as a growing tide within the
mainstream liberal community itself. To Jim, there was no separation between
the internal and the external aside from the thin veil of consciousness and our
own epidermis; there was no performance, only reality. He would often sit in
despondent contemplation long after the music was over, lamenting the fact that
probably no one really got what he was trying to say, what same pessimism I try
to suppress as I develop this exposition.
“I
like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to
think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to
actually wake up and think, you’re doing something.”
Afterword Jim, high on acid,
typically, returned to the empty recording studio, which he believed to be on
fire, and ‘rescued’ the facilities from the blazing inferno which surrounded
him. The fire turned out to be a small red light from a recording console or
perhaps an ‘EXIT’ sign, and rather than prevent, he actually caused irreparable
damage to the instruments and recording equipment, although the masters were
safe and have since found their way into our hearts and livingrooms. Jim’s responsibility
for the incident could perhaps have been denied had the singer’s shoe not
gotten stuck while scaling a fence to flee the scene of his heroic deed.
Just as Jim reminds us that we
cannot have day without night, it is wrong to attempt to separate the man and
his work from his supposed ‘shortcomings’ in order to redeem his image in our
own eyes, as if modern man has the right
to judge something so alien to itself as genius. Jim Morrison is probably known
best of all for his drug use and erratic behavior. While experimentation with
psychoactive substances and rebellion against authority were both commonplace
during the 1960’s, we cannot write off Jim’s enthusiastic prodigality as a mere
sign-o’-the-times. A psychologist
would point to his childhood, and, following Freud and Jim’s own extrapolation,
trace all this ‘misbehavior’ to a resentment against parental authority. Oliver
Stone certainly attempted to do so (which should only give signs as to his own
childhood.)
“When
you make peace with authority, you become an authority.”
Clearly Jim was fascinated by ideas
of control and revolt. He provoked the police, he provoked his audience,
experimenting with calculated incitement to riot. He provoked his band; he
provoked his lovers. Before the band had broken big, drummer John Densmore came
to pick Jim up from a girl’s house one day…and found him standing in front of
the young woman, with a knife to her throat. “That’s when,” John recounted years later in his memoir, ‘Riders on
the Storm’, “I realized our lead singer
was psychotic.” We might now say ‘manic-depressive’ in place of
‘psychotic’, but this too is a misunderstanding of a certain psychological
predisposition to extreme heights and depths of emotion which seep into daily
life, sharpening and altering behavior in a way that is not safe and
predictable to a civilized society, which must above all tame and domesticate
the human animal as a puppy is housebroken. ‘Mania’ is a false term for power, misdirected by societal
restrictions against the individual
and his own interest, rather than allowing its fruit to blossom as it sometimes
does, to produce among the most profound artistic accomplishments of human
history, as well as advancing the individual or his cause with seemingly
boundless energy in the military, political sphere, or even just his day-to-day
activities such as work and feeding his family, doing the dishes, and writing
long paragraphs with the desperate desire that they find readers who may be
excited to an equivalent level of vibrational energy in order to grasp the
rushing waters of his thought.
Jim’s drug use was an extension of
the same impulse that stirred him to create. There has been much speculation as
to whether creativity necessitates ‘mental illness’ and ‘substance abuse’ (as they
are known to the vulgar) or vice versa, but the truth is that they both flow
from an overabundance of energy,
something which is condemned in our society unless it can be put to some highly
specialized (and therefore innocuous) use. Now, there is great variation in the
species of drug used, the methodology, dosing, and all other particulars
involved, especially when we are discussing an inspired genius. For drugs
themselves do inspire, as has been
the case since before recorded history, and according to a few 20th
century scholars, is responsible for the development of much of our religious
institutions (and, by the late Terrence McKenna, human consciousness itself.)
They can both expand and collapse our sense of ego, which is of prime
significance to the poet and dramatist, as has been sketched out by Nietzsche
in ‘The Birth of Tragedy’. Jim’s downfall, however, came in large part from his
growing reliance on alcohol, which mitigated his anxiety over excessive fame,
being misunderstood by the world, and the looming charges for obscenity at the
infamous Miami concert. Ultimately, however, by its toxic nature alcohol only
contributed to anxiety and, in the end, his death.
What have we, in the final
analysis, to learn from all this? That freedom is a two-edged sword; that we
don’t really want freedom, but a shiny new prison. The liberties we embrace are
in fact arbitrary and extravagant, and Jim himself was not immune to these
indulgences. The paradox is one that must confront us, at the deepest level of
our being. The freedom in sexual politics, for example, proved to be misgiven,
as it led to an increase in sexually transmitted infection, including later the
HIV virus, which has devastated the lives of countless individuals and families
across the country and indeed the world; it has led, furthermore, to a
self-indulgent zeitgeist where pornography is proliferated and women are bound
to a social restraint unprecedented in the history of the so-called patriarchy
over which the same liberal forces have won so much ground for women’s supposed
liberation. In fact, we are all quite less free, to think and be our true
selves, correspondingly as we see an increase in our right to arbitrary acts
prescribed by a spectral elite of mind-control doctors, all of whom are well
aware of the implications that have been raised by such freedom fighters as Jim
Morrison and have done a commendable job at co-opting and subverting the truths
unearthed to more dubious ends than could previously have been imagined.
“The most important kind of freedom is to be
what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your
sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a
mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal
revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can
take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take
away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be
granted. Nobody can win it for you.”
Suggested reading:
Friedrich Nietzsche-
The Birth
of Tragedy
The
Pre-Platonic Philosophers
The
Untimely Meditations (specifically, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’)
Ray Manzarek- (I have retained the original spelling of his
name in the body of this essay; Ray dropped the ‘c’ when he became an entertainer
to distance himself from his Polish heritage, as many celebrities of various
background have been forced to do by our Anglophiliac society, and kept this
spelling for this autobiographical publication)
Light My
Fire
Heraclitus-
Fragments
Jim Morrison-
The Lords
Wilderness
and by the author (dGabe Evau)-
No comments:
Post a Comment