It's been said that poetry is a young man's sport. It was
for me and it was for Jim Morrison. His myth and legacy superseded his wild ride of a life when he died in a bathtub in Paris 40 years ago today. Morrison became forever young at the age of 27 after he fled the United States and rock stardom to revisit his writing.
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| Inks on Bristol / 2011 |
When I was 15, Jim Morrison pried open my third eye. His words served as scalpel and their journey the funneling void- which twisted open a vortex straight through me to the channel of the great creative spirit. I carried around
The American Night
as my own vade mecum (one of two posthumous collections of his writing) months before I ever heard an album of The Doors in length. Much of Jim's early writing emerged in epic material for the band, recording masterpieces at 10 and 12 minutes with the singer providing a mixture of lyric and spoken word. The Universe gave Morrison his ultimate instruments of translation with
The Doors- I don't think any other three musicians alive could have kept up with him.
Morrison devoured much of the same writing I was interested in at the time of my discovery of his poetry. The Doors' name came from my own favorite author, Aldous Huxley's work-
The Doors of Perception
. The book was an essay inspired when Huxley (an already world-renowned author) ingested a powerful hallucinogen, mescaline to see what it was all about. [Click
HERE for my portrait of the author.] In turn, Huxley had taken his title from William Blake's
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell...
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru' narrow chinks of his cavern."
This quotation is indeed a fine source of verbal comparison for a hallucinogenic experience, especially dealing with with substances such as mescaline, peyote, or psilocybin mushrooms. These sacred substances lift the veil on reality. So much so, that one can't feel the effects of alcohol or even marijuana while on them. Such drugs provide a mystical experience, which Jim indulged in excessively. A hit of blotter LSD is incorporated into my memorial portrait of him you see today.
I went on to find other wonderful coincidences in Jim's writing and his inspiration from other works such as
The Yage Letters
from
William S. Burroughs and
Allen Ginsberg. This is another drug-inspired tale woven through a series of letters between the two authors. The first portion of the collection begins with Burroughs during his visit to the Amazon Rainforest in 1953 in search of yage, one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man. The latter series of correspondence occurred when Ginsberg went on the same conquest in 1960. Burroughs wrote back to Ginsberg after his mystical journey...
"WHAT SCARED YOU ALL INTO TIME? WHAT SCARED YOU ALL INTO YOUR BODIES?"
Not a decade later, Morrison wrote...
"Who scared you? Why were you born, my babe?
In two-time's arms with all of your charms, my love.
Why were you born? just to play with me?
To freak out or to be beautiful, my dear?
Load your head, blow it up, feeling good, baby"
-The Doors, Who Scared You
All artists, writers and musicians draw from the collective creative spirit- the universal energy which seizes you and picks you and gives you the compulsion to create... but it takes guidance. Someone has to lift the curtain and someone has to urge you along. Jim had Huxley and Burroughs and then his Doors.
One of the main elements of my illustration of The Lizard King is the Shaman funneling out of
The Third Eye at the top of the page. One of the duties of the Shaman in Native cultures is to guide individuals through sacred ceremonies involving the ingestion of drugs which have inspired countless creators over the past hundred years. Jim looked at his role as an entertainer and musician in the same respect- he would guide his audience through a journey and if you listened just right, you may never think the same way again. As a child, Morrison witnessed a highway accident and as his father drove past, the young boy saw an Indian dying on the side of the road. Jim was convinced he was possessed with the spirit of this man and that he was a Shaman...
"Indians scattered on
Dawn's highway bleeding,
Ghosts crowd the young child's
Fragile egg-shell mind."
-The Doors, The Ghost Song
Click
HERE for a stream of my portraits from Rock Star Martyr!
