He was a man of many names: the Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Rising, Dionysus, The American Poet — and indeed he lived up to each of them. He was the down and dirty side of rock and roll, the cryptic scribe of the beaten path and the synergy between electric guitars and lamenting libretto.
Jim Morrison, born December 8th 1943 to a Navy family, was known from an early age for having a profound interest in the mythological, abstract and spiritual. This curiosity would breach through the sound waves of his prolific psych-rock band The Doors, with whom Jim reached his highest influence as an ostentatious front-man and lyricist. As the primary source of lyrics, Jim ripped The Doors away from any potential hope for family-friendly material and cast them into the spotlight as one of the biggest and baddest bands of the 1960s and 70s. What truly set them apart, aside from the musical genius of Jim and organist Ray Manzarek, was Jim’s sensitivity to the psychological and his keen attentiveness to the mechanics of the soul. Jim was a poet, if ever anybody could be called one.
Reading Jim Morrison’s poetry
The Flowering
The flowering
of god-like people
in the muted air
would seem
strange
to an intruder of
certain size
but this is all we have left
to guide us
Now that He is Gone.
Chilling, eerie, ominous — and yet somehow it makes perfect sense. Of course this is speculation and the meaning of poetry is subjective both to the reader and even to the fluid interpretation of the author, but it seems possible that Jim may have been addressing the more egotistical, conceited, and arrogant among us and almost justifying the behavior as acting in reminiscence — near reverence — of an absent God. Is he being sarcastic? It’s definitely possible. At the same time though, it is equally possible that Jim was trying to give a reason, without digging into individual psychology and experience, for such attitudes in people.
Jim is known in large part because of his overtly sexual lifestyle and antics both on and off stage. The front-man led an extreme life by any scale of measurement and yet seemed to know love far better than many ever will:
Time Works Like Acid
Time works like acid
Stained eyes
You seem to fly
The face changes as the heart beats
& breathes
We are not constant
We are an arrow in flight
The sum of the angles of change
Her face changed in the car
eyes & skin & hair remain
the same. But a hundred similar
girls succeed each other.
This particular poem may attract vastly differing interpretations, but when he says “We are not constant/We are an arrow in flight/The sum of the angles of change” the message appears preambular to the following verse declaring this woman as the result of trials and variations on purported love — at last finding a match. Taken by themselves, however, the poem could be easily seen as casual and disconnected in connection. If it weren’t for the middle two verses that would possibly be the only interpretation. In that way, this is almost a poem within a poem, both with two totally different views on the same matter. It is definitely food for the mind.
Jim’s mind often transgressed into the bigger themes of the world ignoring what things he imagined as trivial, such as common sense when it came to taking drugs like heroin and cocaine. He searched for subliminal meanings behind everything and romanticized everything he could see to the point where everything and everyone had their own soul and aura. With this mindset he often wrote and sang of morality, even when he wasn’t necessarily in favor of it. He found the collective soul of humanity intriguing:
The Original Temptation…
The original temptation was to destroy.
The Cliffs. The Road. The Walls.
Original heroism—to bluff the elements
of fire. To call creatures into the storm.
The original heroism was to fall. To ball.
The All. Natural man.
To participate in the creation.
To screw things up. To bring Things
Into being.
The Crossroads where the car hides.
Lies. Resides. A meeting-place
of Worlds. Where dreams are made.
Where anything is possible. Demons
lie.
The car is steel & chrome. The wood-pile.
Top of the pile. The heap. The graveyard.
Where metal is reduced to its common
mute element. To be reborn. A tale
of rebirth in the wilderness. To become
chaos & come back.
2 spade chicks, or a king & a queen,
comment from the balcony.
The types of society pass on the boards.
Microcosm in a thimble.
A car. This whole poem seems to be about a car. But not just a car for what it does, but for what it is; for what it represents. The car is a defiance against nature and the natural order of things. Mankind gave in to the “original temptation to destroy” to create something (capitalism, unnatural processes, conceit), which will ultimately fuel our demise, apparently overseen by our rulers. This is an apparent interpretation, others may see this microcosmic view of what was probably a ’69 Pontiac GTO as an indictment of the individual. An individual who supports the lifestyle of intervention will watch the world fall apart. Cryptic in either regard, but relevant to how we see the world when such things like the Trans Pacific Partnership, the Volkswagen emissions recall and the Beijing air quality red alert.
Jim Morrison spoke with a cynicism that rings eerily applicable to today’s world. As we look at conceited individuals (some of whom are currently preparing for the upcoming Iowa and New Hampshire caucuses), at love in the age of swiping right on digitized connection and “hook-up culture," and at the manipulation of those more powerful than us of the world and its resources, Jim Morrison’s luminous prose and verse may help us to mold our mindsets so that perhaps we can make sense of it all. The power of poetry is that no matter the poem, it always has two meanings: the meaning it intends to convey and the meaning it can never predict it will convey. Poetry opens the imagination in a way that allows the overloaded mind to think deeply about matters of life and living in a focused and soul-searching way. To correlate current events to one's own life is to walk along the razor's edge of sympathy, jump off into the air of civilization, and float on the wind to global dialogue. For this reason, Jim Morrison's poetry and lyrics remain a relevant and potential vehicle through which we might interpret life.
