The Iron Gate of Perception

Hardly any of the few and not overly interested visitors to the London Fog club on the legendary Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in January 1966 could have guessed the symbolism hidden in the address of the place where The Doors performed their first performances that evening. Dusk Boulevard, namely, was the right place for the beginning of a Faustian uncompromising artistic and life adventure - a short, too short journey into the night of the poet who announced in verse that he wanted to reach its end by highway. He said nothing about the return; he probably knew from the beginning that he wouldn't be there. And on that boulevard, from somewhere in the ancient London fog, through the smoke - not only tobacco - of the club to which that fog gave its name, the face of William Blake, the poet, visionary and prophet who will remain the greatest spiritual and poetic teacher of James Douglas Morrison, watched him in to the pantheon of American culture of the twentieth century remembered under the name of Jim.

TO THE SECOND ABROAD: Lightly placed in the context of Californian acid rock scene in the late sixties, The Doors were something else from the start. And something more. Groups like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, or on the other side the Velvet Underground, convincingly proved with their actions that rock culture is not just "shubby-do-up" swag, but a unique and complete view of the world, but with them - with all due respect according to the lyrics of the songs, with which they not only broke taboos, but also entered the realm of poetry that does not require musical accompaniment - after all, everything began and ended with music. The alchemy that existed in the first and only line-up of The Doors (Ray Manzarek, keyboards; Robbie Krieger, guitar; John Densmore, drums; Morrison, vocals) led its members down paths that they certainly could not have predicted from the beginning, at least not entirely. . Already with the release of their first album, at the beginning of 1967, The Doors became a group that tried to combine music, poetry, and a special kind of ritual theatrics at live performances. Over time, the latter two elements became more pronounced, which was also reflected in the gradual simplification of the musical expression: from the psychedelic disorder of the first three albums (The Doors, Strange Days, Waiting for the Sun), close to the then-dominant West Coast sound, via a strong but stylistically incoherent fourth album (The Soft Drinks Parade), The Doors appeared on their last two studio releases (Morrison Hotel i L. A. Woman) quite close to the rudimentary blues idiom. At the same time, Morrison's poetry became more mature and complex (and less and less suitable for a wild marriage with music), while concerts increasingly turned into performances whose course no one could predict, least of all the participants themselves: the exciting testimony of this was recorded on the double album Absolutely Live.

The performance of the remaining three musicians in the group should neither be underestimated nor overestimated: The Doors were not only Jim Morrison's backing group, but Jim Morrison was first among equals. Not only as the author of the greatest number of songs and as one who was always one step ahead of others on and off the stage, but also as a complex artistic personality in which was embodied what was the essence of The Doors, but also much more - too much for one body and one mind.

TRAVEL NA COUNTRY NIGHT: Especially for a mind whose credo was "conscious disordering of the senses", with the aim of opening the usually inaccessible inner spaces as the only paths that lead to the true realization of the essence of the world. Morrison's cry of "Wake up!", repeated countless times at his concert performances, was addressed as much to each of those watching him from the darkness as to himself. It wasn't a "let's-raise-all-hands-now" party call; Morrison called for a ritualistic rite of purification. Guided by Antonin Artaud's idea that theater should frighten the audience in order to wake them up, film editing student James Morrison already in his first performances as the frontman of The Doors tried to be much more than a singer: he wanted to be a shaman, a healer who would not only to wake the dead, but also to lead them on a joint adventure of traveling to spaces beyond consciousness and reason. Baedeker of that journey was written by two poets whose works are largely based not only on Morrison's poetry but also on his entire life, and finally his death: we are talking about Arthur Rimbaud and William Blake.

Rimbaud's principle of "conscious disorder of the senses" is actually a recipe for implementing Blake's most famous and influential slogan, the one after which Morrison named his group: "If the doors of perception are cleared, everything will appear before man as it is: infinite." The door of perception, of course, is within the human mind; passing through them is an exciting journey through the regions of one's own consciousness, like the one that Rimbaud talks about in many of his songs, through a nostalgic-bitter recapitulation of a life in which spiritual death occurred much earlier than physical death. Nostalgia for what has never been experienced, and resentment and disappointment due to the impossibility of complete self-realization, are motifs that dominate Jim Morrison's poetry as well. In the song Stay u hell, Rimbaud says: "Once upon a time, my life was a feast... / on which various wines flowed"; in his poem American night, Morrison asks: "Where are the feasts that were promised / Where is the wine, that young wine...". It was necessary, therefore, to boldly look for a way to fulfill the broken promises - even if it was "tottering through the neon forest", as Morrison does in the song Soul Kitchen from The Doors' first album. In that kitchen of the soul, actually, the search for a new world does not take place, but the creation of that world - immaterial, and therefore indestructible. Rimbaud (in the work Illuminations) and Morrison in American night ("the world is being built anew, in spasm, in darkness") - both under the protective shadow of William Blake, the first poet who pointed out the true nature of the poisonous gifts of civilizational progress and raised his voice against the terror of rationalism and materialism.

FLOWERS NA BORDER: Salvation is in wildness and nature, Blake pointed out in his early years Songs innocence i experiences in which, among other things, he talks about the possibility of re-establishing the long-lost harmony in the common existence of all living and non-living things on earth. Morrison's desperate attempt to escape from the claustrophobic consumer paradise of Western civilization can perhaps be experienced as an echo of the influence of the then somewhat tired beat-generation: Kerouac, Ginzberg, and Gary Snyder also escaped, in various ways. All of them, however, if they did not accept, then at least recognized the megalopolis as their "natural" environment, from which one can escape - usually into oneself - for a short or long time, but the return is inevitable. Morrison did not recognize such temporality; if there is no final and permanent refuge, then one should run to the very end: "Not touching the ground, not seeing the sun, there is nothing left for us but to run, run, run..." This is the trace of romanticism, sublime in its heroic naivety, which from the poetry of Jim Morrison, through Baudelaire, Poe, Byron and many other "storm riders" it leads back to Blake. The similarity of their poetic goals is also striking: Blake talked about clearing the door of perception, Morrison claimed that with his poetry he wanted to "liberate people from limited ways of seeing and feeling." Finally, the most deeply personal reason for artistic creation is similar to them: Blake realized very early on that he had to "create his own system, so as not to be enslaved by someone else's", and Jim Morrison strove for the same goal. Unruly and unrestrained, he created his own mythical world, the world of the "Lizard King". The power of that world, but also the curse of its creator, rested on the fact that the distressed and angry Lizard King found the most complete embodiment of his personal mythology in the spaces of his own consciousness. And in mythical landscapes, only death is certain: no one gets out of there alive.

HEART TAME: Morrison predicted his ultimate fate in the very first song of the Doors' first album. In it, in the title verse, he reveals what he intends to do with Blake's door of perception. Break on attraverso, to the Other side, one should break through to the other side - calls one of Blake's best and most consistent students in that poem. Morrison is one of the many who broke through the doors of perception, or blew them up, but at the same time he is one of the few who turned such self-destruction into an artistic act. At the same time, he did not perceive the limited resources at his disposal as an obstacle.

Not overly original, but therefore completely honest, Morrison saw drugs primarily as a means of expanding consciousness. At least in the beginning, like many before and after him. The enjoyment of altered states of consciousness soon turned into an insatiable need for anything that could lead to such states - often lethal combinations of different opiates. Indulging in drink, he used to say, "is somewhat like gambling; you go out for a drunken night, and you don't know where you'll end up the next morning. Sometimes everything turns out well, sometimes disaster strikes - it's a roll of the dice. That's the difference between suicide and slow surrender."

A roll of the dice, however, will never end a case; that's why the difference between suicide and slow surrender is much smaller than it seemed to Jim Morrison. Precisely because of this, his death probably surprised him more than most of the witnesses of his spectacular death. Chance, therefore, wanted Morrison's last throw of the dice to take place in Paris, the city where he, disgusted by the aggressive misunderstanding and the increasingly frequent mockery presented to him by America, went to with the desire to continue his life exclusively as a poet. He did not continue it as a poet, or in any other way: he died of a heart attack, in a bathtub, in a hotel room, on the third of July 1971. If the roll of the dice that night had had a different outcome, Morrison would have turned sixty this December eighth. This ending, however, hastened the beginning of the realization of his last wish - the wish to be taken seriously as a poet.

Today, it is quite clear, despite sporadic disputes, that James Douglas Morrison is a poet who has his place in the history of American poetry. Raised on the foundations of a tradition that shaped the expression of several important poets of his time, Morrison enriched that tradition with his own poetic legacy. It was also created from the legacy of European poetic movements - romanticism, symbolism, surrealism - but, passing through these influences, Morrison became a poet of American prayer and American night. Like Ginzberg, Ferlinghetti or Corso, he became a guide through the nightmare of the neon world, a blasphemous priest of spirituality in the world of materialism, a poet who in the middle of shallow-minded joyful consumerist glorification of life invoked death - in order not to somehow outsmart and deceive it.

It may be that he succeeded. If for no other reason, then at least because he experienced death the way William Blake did. Blake said that death does not exist, since human life is "an endless pilgrimage through time, towards eternity"; Morrison asked the question "do you know about the warm journey under the stars, do you know that we exist?". With his shameless courtship of darkness and death, he invited people to realize that they are alive. That is why he was able, defiantly and blasphemously, to inform those concerned: "I am canceling my subscription to the resurrection." He knew, or at least he had an inkling, that something would remain behind him even when the music stopped, when the lights went out. Therefore, it is to be believed that the darkness that now shelters him is not too different from the one in which he spent his life.