James Douglas Morrison.
James wanted to separate himself between the writer and the LEGENDARY rock performer he became. Sometimes when Jim tried to involve his audience and evolve a feeling onstage, the person in charge halted the show, and abruptly terminated the performance. Jim was arrested a couple of times, and in New Haven, CT, the police marched him offstage in handcuffs. Jim's writings reminded and evoked that of recent histories of the time of the 1960s. Jim once said more than once: Life is a trip. I intend to enjoy it while I can. - James Douglas Morrison.
While some may only see him as the lead vocalist of The Doors, what people may not know was that at heart, Jim was a poet and a writer. He filled journal after journal (dozens of them) with copious expressions of a literal mind. Music happening by happenstance. Jim composed poems/writings and took notes about the alchemists and Frederick Nietzche. Energizing each and every page is a lost, but determined explorer who goes out his way to pluck the strongest fruit, only to polish them with a cotton cloth of innocence. The myriad, often disconnected verses of Jim Morrison are more dense than fiery sparks, a mythological rapture or both of the human consciousness.
At the height of his music career, Jim took steps to clear a space in the public view for the poet and the writer. Jim submitted his work to pop and teen magazines. He began to organize his writings so he could self-publish them...James Douglas Morrison.
It was around 5TH or 6TH grade when Jim wrote his first poem called The Pony Express to which he can remember. Unless he let his hands do the work without his thinking about it; the writing itself would've been no good on May 21, 1954. Jim kept a lot of notebooks through high school and college - for some dumbfuck reason - maybe it was wise - but Jim threw them away. Living with regret with those actions. He thought of being hyponotized or taking sodium pentothal (truth serum) to try to remember, due to the work he put in those notebooks night after night. But, if they weren't thrown away, Jim never would've written anything original. They were mainly accumulations of things James had not originated. If he never got rid of them; Jim would never have been free.
The lizard and the snake are identified with the unconscious and the forces of evil. The piece "Celebration Of The Lizard" was kind of an invitation to the dark forces. It's done with tongue-in-cheek. People don't realize that. It wasn't serious. It was meant for irony. Writing of his life and of the times that were alive-and-well in the eyes of Jim Morrison.
Windows work two ways, mirrors one way. You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows. Jim would write beautifully even of the most taboo subjects. Hinting the matter but never direct. Jim did most The Lords when was at film school UCLA. It truly was a thesis of film aesthestics. Jim wasn't able to make a film then, so all he could do was ponder and write about them. Alot of Jim's passages became prophetic several years later due to Jim unknowingly writing what has yet to happen. Jim writes in The Lords about the feeling of powerlessness and helplessness that people have in the face of reality. No real control over what controls them. The closest is a TV set. The Lords is a way to reclaim your own life.
The day that Jim was finally forced to realize that no one in the world knows any more about what's going on than any other person. Jim kind of lost interest in philosophy as a study of ideas, but philosophy appreciated from the standpoint of how men of the past have used words, used language. That is why poetry is the Ultimate form, it defies us as human beings in language. The way we talk, and the way we think is the way we act, and the way we act is the way we are. Soon our voices must unite us as one, or one must leave.
If Jim's poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which we see & feel. Jim would write of events throughout HISTORY and find a way to make people THINK! The irony of human nature is your basic human being. Studying the psychology of others. We used to have Barnum & Bailey's; Believe It Or Not. We used to have TV news. Now we have news transcended from what's no longer news; but just viable entertainment for which overrides REAL news.
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| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
"Optical illusion is optical truth. It's sacrilege to say that there is such a thing as optical fraud." - Goethe
Jim's words, although written in his time, speak LOUDLY to resonate TODAY!
Proving time-and-time again how much Jim's words speak that he is indeed a MOSIAC.
Jim literally took his words and what he wrote in-studio sessions and completed them with photo stills with a detail match.
Jim's interest in film was due to it being the closest approximation in art that we have to the actual flow of consciousness, in both fantasy and in the everyday perception of the world. Jim liked to write. Some were for music. Some weren't fit for it until he finished it in post. Songs are special. Music liberates the imagination. When Jim sang his songs in public, it was a dramatic act, but not just acting in a theater, but as a social act with real action.
Jim had a habit, much like other writers, wrote on whatever miscellaneous he could write on... envelopes, napkins...etc. Jim wrote of what he knew. He also wrote with a voice of the times that would become and still is TIMELESS & LEGENDARY!
(1943-1971)
