(Images provided by The Drifter. Mighty Boo is considering you)
I first heard of the English poet, visual artist and freedom fighter, William Blake, friend of Thomas Paine, through James Douglas Morrison, but then again, there were many persons and things I first heard of through Jim Morrison that have had a lifelong influence on me, including the untamed German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the vanishing French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
The first full-length biography of Jim was No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. I devoured this book a year after it came out in 1980 when I was 14 years old and living with my family near the Mississippi River in Quincy, Illinois, which is both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln country for anyone who’s awake enough, which is not most of us, but is a few of us.
I was 14 in 1981 so the book had been out for around a year when I first read it. It shows how young I was to think that I believed the book had been out for a long time back then, even though now a year seems like a day to me. And it also seemed, back then, as if Morrison had been dead forever, even though at that point it was only around a decade. A decade seems almost like nothing now in the face of so many additional years later.
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” By this point, this must surely be one of the most famous quotations from English Literature of all time, a quotation that many and many more are familiar with in various guises and ways even though they have no idea what the original source of the quotation is.
A huge part of the fame of this quote has to do with Morrison’s band’s name, The Doors, but it also has to do with Aldous Huxley’s famous book The Doors of Perception, which is a long essay about hallucinogenic drug experiences (experiences which Huxley was to continue right up until the end, even taking the extraordinary step of consuming LSD on his deathbed). Morrison originally heard the Blake phrase doors of perception from Huxley’s popular book, but Jim later became intensely familiar with many of William Blake’s other works as well, as he was with that of Nietzsche, and Rimbaud, those two eternal rebels and voices of human freedom who originally inspired Jim Morrison more than any musicians ever did.
Because Jim was a poet from the start, and at the end of his life he’d grown so disgusted with the outward trappings of his manufactured musical fame that it literally sickened him, even though he also knew he’d won a kind of immortal glory through his writings and his work with The Doors who’d brought his writings to life.
William Blake’s 16-line poem “London,” first published by Blake himself with his own illustration in 1794, says that the streets and the river of the great city are “charter’d,” which means for sale and locked down in a place where everything is for sale, including the loyalties and sympathies of the human heart.
Blake talks about how there are “marks of weakness, marks of woe” in every London face he meets, and he talks about chimney-sweepers (little boys) crying and soldiers (little more than boys) sighing as their blood runs down the palace walls; and he throws out a sympathetic shout for the female prostitutes (many of them girls) who are everywhere in the city while also calling the institution of marriage, not a happily-ever-after, but a “hearse.” In short, this poem was and is about as radical as it’s possible to be, then and now.
This poem also contains another William Blake quotation almost as famous as “the doors of perception.”
In line 8 of the poem called “London,” Blake says: “The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.”
In five words, William Blake manages to capture and encapsulate the mental slavery Jim Morrison was waging holy (spiritual-only) war against in the 1960s, as well as the mental slavery that is coming to dominate our own day more and more with the rise of (or the return to) authoritarianism and corporate conformity all over the world.
“Mind-forg’d manacles” is a two-word phrase written in the 1790s by an Englishman who supported the American Revolution while also being a passionate abolitionist.
Blake also supported the rights of women. He taught his own wife how to read and write and worked with her as his artistic partner in an age when such things were exceedingly rare.
And he abhorred and spoke out about the destruction of nature by the industrial revolution in an age when almost no one understood what was really going on – except the poets, rebels and drifters.
A century and a half and more later, Jim Morrison became a receptor, and then a conduit, for the imaginative and rebellious worldview of William Blake as he did with Nietzsche and Rimbaud and the spirit of the Native Americans.
One thing the yin and yang means (in my interpretation of it) is that two completely opposite and seemingly antithetical things are always true at once in this world we inhabit.
In this case it means that everything has changed – and nothing has.
Signed, The Drifter…
Saragun Springs 
Welcome to fall, Drifter
I happened to read No One Here Gets Out Alive the year after you did! In 1982 (still have the book, somewhere in my many book boxes). I was twenty-three and my friends and I were very much into the trappings, if not yet the actual philosophy of the deeper life, that is always around us.
I cannot imagine the fire it must have cause in a person nearly ten years younger than I. I was so immature that I thought the drugs were the thing and yet to consider why. There was not a lot of Blake, Huxley or Rimbaud or Nietzsche in this gray little military town, even though it reflected their observations–but there was Morrison, whose brief life flashed by, but left a memory.
You can see the same fire in Cobain, who was born, not coincidentally, about when you were, in another gray little burg not far from here. Mainly the system of forced and foraged manacles is so old that it has become an evolutionary given for most people. Except the well read poor, who know it keenly–thus are at peril of an early death if they do not find a way to survive their own reactions.
I actually met Courtney Love once at a party. Shortly before she married Kurt. Heroin made her eyes as knowing as those of a dead Tuna. We didn’t speak. She was just another one of those human horror shows along the edges. But the vile response she attracted after his death placed me on her side, although I’m just fine not knowing her personally. “The life” requires many choices to be made, not all of them are good because they are not well thought out. Still, throwing shotgun shells on stage is low behavior that I will never support. He didn’t have to marry her.
‘Tis the way it goes. The torch passes on, like one falling star to another. People miss the larger point and focus more on “how much acid did he take that night?” There’s a social evolution going on and just because the ignorant greatly outnumber the opposite, it does not mean they will be around at the end.
Ha! It’s raining–something natural about that. The northwest is a fraud in sunlight.
Thanks again for another great column!
Leila
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Leila!
It both does, and does not, surprise me that you read the Jim bio right around the same time I did. What I do know for sure is that such occurrences are not just random happenstances in the life of an artist. On the contrary, these kinds of events are the very things that make up the important moments of memory and future time (and all the present ever does is balance between the two, like a high wire walker without a net). One wonders what the Universe was thinking when it orchestrated such an important (as the two of us reading the book at the same time) event. And these kinds of uncanny things are important in everyone’s life (even those who don’t read); it’s up to the artists and the artist-friendly peoples to show the way in this, if they can. One does what one can and the rest of it be damned, at least on this level.
That’s wild that you met Courtney, but again, maybe also not such a surprise on second thought.
She must’ve either figured out how to moderate the heroin usage, or given it up. Or she probably wouldn’t be with us any more.
Kurt said on more than one occasion that his three favorite writers were William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Samuel Beckett, and that choice of 3 was in fact a great act of literary criticism all in itself. Those three writers are not 3 who everyone puts together, but they are three who “belong” to each other in every way. In his own way, Cobain was as much literary genius as musical genius, very very much like Mr. Mojo Risin’ himself. I remember reading a story about Cobain when he was on tour. He told someone he had to go back to get his luggage. His luggage was a crumpled-up grocery bag containing several of William S. Burrough’s books – no more, and no less.
Thanks so much for your great responses to The Drifter’s column today, as always it rises to the level of a reason for being that will last forever now!
D
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Drifter
Before microsoft and grunge got huge there was a “large small town” aspect to the Puget Sound region, which died not long before Cobain’s suicide. This was especially true about the music scene. I was involved with it for years but I was always a bit more inclined to write.
Anyway, it was commonplace to see members of various well known bands anywhere that played live new music. Even in Bremerton. The grunge word showed late, a media invention–mainly the bands saw themselves as new wave punk. They loathed Bon Jovi, Poison, etc, the 80’s hair boys who wrote R rated bubblegum.
A very good friend of mine got into a very loud argument with Dave Grohl at what is now called The Manette Saloon (I wasn’t present) around the time Nirvana went national. No punches, but people kept telling me about it. It couldn’t happen anymore. Money and personal assistants and the tiresome, calculated nature of fame ruins everything from pro wrestling to the Nobel prize.
And to Geraint: Jesus, you are smart too! All you guys!
Leila
LikeLike
Leila
Based on the way Dave Grohl can scream (which I’ve seen on you tube) I would not want to get into a shouting match with him although I can yell pretty loud too (shockingly so)! Their song “Best of You” (and the video) carry on the Cobain tradition with true honor and glory.
Given my own fascination with that time and place (and having been in the area back then, too, on an extended visit from Bellingham to the ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula including wherever Carver was from, Seattle, and other points in between, and I’m pretty sure we took the ferry to Bremerton or maybe another ferry), it’s so wild and cool that you are from there!
You’re an all-around artist (even studying the skies) but a born writer which is utterly clear based on the profusion and the quality of the work. For anyone reading this who missed it check out the recent Leila poem on Galileo. The power of mind expressed in it gives one goose bumps if you’re awake…
Dale
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Dale
Ha! From what I was told it was a loud exchange of ideas!
My friend Tim is a singer and has been in that life for 40 years. He has never “made it” but has remained a working muscian for years and has hosted radio work from time to time. He is a big guy and can do the Tarzan yell. He is very cool and never backs down when he believes in what he says. (Also, interestingly, he is from Greenfield Indiana).
I was told they argued about the sincerity of heavy metal lyrics (Tim is big on metal).
Then again, as long as there is no violence, bars are good forums for debate!
Leila
LikeLike
An essay that might have pleased Morrison himself in that it highlights what mattered to him most, the one consistent theme in his life: his writing. Your twinning him with Blake is wonderful (wonder-filled) & is done in such a way as to whet the appetite for a longer study, perhaps as lengthy as Fowlie’s ‘Rimbaud & Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet’. And you get at the heart of Blake, no “poor Blake” about it. Oddly enough, or not oddly at all, Morrison it was too proved my gateway drug to those other cultural intoxicants – Rimbaud, Artaud, Blake, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, RD Laing . . . There was savour in that very title: No One Here Gets Out Alive.
On a slightly different tack, it’s long struck me that JM was also a fine practitioner of what would these days be called Microfiction; those untitled prose pieces that make up much of his self-published slim vol ‘The Lords’ have a taut authenticity to them. Seems to me his influence can be detected in some surprising places. Crime writer James Ellroy is on record somewhere as saying that JM is the only rock lyricist he has any time for. Here’s a passage picked at random from Ellroy’s 2001 novel, The Cold Six Thousand: ‘Lyle walked. Lyle staggered. Lyle navigated. Lyle tried handholds. Lyle grabbed slot-machine racks.’ Here’s a passage from JM’s The Lords, published in 1969 : ‘Oswald (?) kills President. Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house. Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippet. Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured’. Quintessentially ‘Ellroyan’ – & written at a time when Ellroy himself would’ve been too whacked out of his skull to write a line.
In my teens I translated some of JM’s poems into Welsh. Horse Latitudes, Dry Water, etc. I recall being particularly stumped by the line ‘True sailing is dead’. Come to think of it I also remember trying to translate such fabulously discordant images as ‘Before I sink into the Big Sleep/ I want to hear . . . The scream of the butterfly’.
Looking forward, as ever, to reading more.
Geraint
LikeLike
Geraint
Your analysis of Jim as microfictionist before the term itself existed truly rises to Wallace Fowlie or Harold Bloom levels of brilliant literary criticism. The pieces from Jim’s self-published volumes are perfect examples, and when one thinks upon it again, too, many of his songs are also very much like microfictions if one reads them on the page, filled with fragmented narratives and complex characters who appear in flashes. Maybe especially “The End.” This song is more like a poem or a drama than a microfiction on some levels, but then again on another level it does so much in so few words in a narrative and character way that it operates on microfiction levels very effectively.
I want to look deeper into Morrison’s self-published volumes again, based on your ideas about Jim as a writer and this notion of him as a pre-microfictionist. Thanks for the inspiration for this as well as helping to inspire the subject for today’s column originally, along with David Henson from Literally.
Thanks, too, for sharing some examples of your translation experiments with Jim. Somehow he seems like an oddly perfect writer to bring into Welsh. Your experiments in trying to bring Jim’s English into Welsh also shine a great light straight back on Jim’s original words themselves. Almost like scientific or alchemical experiments with language, vessels for illuminating the truth/s of his words. That a teenager was engaged in such pursuits is amazing!
Thanks, too, for mentioning Artaud and Kierkegaard. I definitely heard about these two through Jim first as well. (RD Laing is a name I know but need to do more research on.) It’s really quite amazing what a channeling of the great Western tradition in both literature and philosophy Morrison was. He is known for these things, but nowhere near as widely known for these things on a literal level as he should be. Indeed, very few can compete with him on this level. And in certain ways, no one can compete with him on this level. Not even Dylan…(Sorry Bob.)
Thanks again, Geraint! Your skills as both artist and critic of the word are (literally) uniquely inspirational and one-of-a-kind original.
Dale
LikeLike
Dear Dale,
Me too, I was an early William-Blake-adopter in my teens. Even to the extent of spending whole days in the Uni library reading the strange writings (visits to Heaven, to the Moon, etc) of the Swedish mystic, Emmanuel Swedenborg, than Blake was so interested in.
I reckon Blake has a particular appeal to the young, not least because he doesn’t just hate our ‘charter’d’ civilisation, he’s also an optimist about changing it.
Another fine essay, Dale, thank you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Drifter
Great topic! “The Lizard King” and William Blake.
I know more about Jim than W.Blake.
So this is great! I will be reading some of Blake’s poetry maybe Jim’s too.
I came to the party late on “The Doors.” had a girlfriend show me the way in my mid 20s with “Break on Through to the Other-Side. ”
Loved the movie with Val Kilmer, RIP. At the time I thought he really was Jim Morrison.
Blake sounds like an early environmentalist, responding to the woes of the industrial revolution. He would walk around here all day with his head down and his fist clenched.
I like what you quoted Blake on “charter’d,” Everything for sale–very counter and awful to the native Americans, the perfect people ( if anyone could ever be called such a thing). When the rivers themselves have a price tag.
Christopher
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Christopher
Check out some of Blake’s poems from SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE whenever you get a chance. This work originally included “London.” The whole thing was done by Blake himself with his wife’s assistance; he wrote the poems, and illustrated them, and published them.
Each separate poem is short, like Emily Dickinson, but the language is clear, more like William Wordsworth. Except Blake takes the simplicity and brevity of language even further than Wordsworth, making him a kind of precursor to Denis Johnson, big time.
All of Blake’s creative works were self-published by him. He made his living as an engraver and illustrator of other people’s works.
He was centuries ahead of his time on multiple levels, including as an environmentalist. He decried the ills of the industrial revolution in an era when people labeled him MAD for doing so, literally (because they called it “progress”).
The closest artist I can think of to Blake is Van Gogh. With Blake, it’s impossible to decide whether he was more effective as a visual artist or as a poet. He’s that good in both fields. And he also invented his own brand of Christianity that took the religion back to its roots, i.e. its reality. An amazing artist and poet at all levels who was able to, and did, reach through to the other side while he was still on this side. He heard the “tiny whisper” that is the voice of God in this world. More later!
Dale
LikeLike
Hi Dale
I’m definitely going to check out W. Blake. Thanks for all of the priceless insights into these great poets, and artists!
WB sounds like my kind of guy. I hate the word “Progress.” related to the environment. When it’s anything but. Like “Beautification.” These lying words are on par with the Nazis’ “The Final Solution” and “Euthanasia.” They make it sound
almost reasonable.
PS
I got a story “The Edge of Gas Stations,” accepted on LS today. A while back I read one of your essays and there was a gas station scene that was utterly brilliant.
I had about an 800 word piece that I had given up on for a year or so about homelessness and a gas station… Long story short… Your gas station scene inspired me to finish it. This has happened to me a lot in writing. I read someone else’s work that I admire and it gets the motor/muse kicking. I think SK mentioned the same thing. Reading as a means to writing. Thanks!
Christopher
LikeLike
Christopher
Great news on all levels, thanks for sharing!
First off, congrats on another Literally acceptance. You are building up a truly impressive table of contents for yourself there. And like Johnson and Carver you never write a bad sentence and every new story shows it again in a different way, like an on-going, in-progress novel-in-stories, which is, along with the novella, one of the finest fictional forms (or the finest fictional form if we think about the Arabian Nights, the Decameron by Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, among others).
Secondly, I’m so glad my gas station incident piece led to you returning to an abandoned rough draft and bringing it to completion. That is a truly creative and experimental use of the word on your part and from my side of things inspiring another writer of your quality in that mode is what it’s all about!
Thanks again for sharing, this is truly great news in two special ways, and it reminds one that not everything going on is horrible these days, there is some truly great art being created from and in the margins of the USA as the world burns (like before WW 1 in Austria perhaps)…
Dale
LikeLike
Hi Dale
Thanks!
I mostly work on older stories I started awhile back. I still try to write new material, but it’s hard. Or easier to pick up on the old stuff.
Yes It is inspiring to read and have it click those creative gears into gear. And your gas station incident and the writing did this well!
This is what I look for in reading. I never knew this until I started writing in a constant way. SK said in “On Writing.” “Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.”
I wrote so many uncompleted stories that in flash I’m back onto something I gave up on. It’s a success to get these done even if they fail to get published. It’s almost like an earwig that must be completed to go away.
Sometimes I think about how life was before. Before an Army invaded or took those loved ones away to war. Ukraine is the current disaster. They had their houses, bowls of cereal in their chairs, watching TV, and then the rounds of artillery shells started booming. That would be terrifying! And the poor animals that never get a voice!
Somehow the Russian Army always seems the most brutal–besides the Nazis–then again their really is no “Kinder gentler machine gun hand,” Neil Young, “Rockin in the Free World.”
And many times, (maybe every time), it’s one man at the top of the devil’s hierarchy that decides it.
Austria before WW1 had all kinds of artist (people drawing, writing, and singing) and the growth of psychology–unbeknownst to many– the terrible tensions leading to the assassinations of Arch Duke Ferdinand and Sophie. Then the marching feet stormed into 1914. It never ends the violence. Reminds me of the Cranberries’ “Zombie.”
Christopher
LikeLike
Christopher
In many ways I think an artist of the word like yourself with a lot of unfinished rough draft material is in the very best position of all. It means you have many things to work with, and picking up where you left off and let the trail go cold can often be, I have found, the very, very best way to create a good piece of writing. I would even go so far as to recommend this as a piece of advice for short story writers or poets. Write many, many different stories or poems, and DO NOT finish any of them. Write literally dozens of pieces if you can, without finishing. Then let them all cool off for days, months, or years, depending. Then go back and pick them up one at a time and finish them. Writing fearlessly in that way, you won’t be censored by yourself, and later you will have lots of material to work on.
Someone once said “Writing is Rewriting.” Since rewriting generally involves adding, taking away, or rearranging, these are rational decisions that are better made when the material has cooled off. Yet, for writing to feel spontaneous and alive, it should be created in an open free way, yet needn’t be taken all the way yet. On the contrary, it’s better not to, oftentimes!
Yes yes yes! about reading and writing, as well. What goes in is what comes out in almost every case. A good and advanced writer will have an individual voice that won’t be overly influenced by what is read. But there are NO good writers who are not great readers as well. I know Mr. King agrees with me on that. There are no good writers who aren’t great readers. Zero. Every single writer who ever achieved something decent spent years reading, and continued to read until the end. The two go hand in hand and can’t be separated, not at all.
Gotta run for now, more later, great to hear that you have all that unfinished material you can bring to completion, since “Writing is Rewriting” you’re still writing even when not drafting new material, even though I know the feeling of drafting new material can also be unbeatable!
Dale
LikeLike
Hey Dale
Yes it does seem to clarify a story when they are left alone, either by choice or a dead end. In my case it is usually a dead end. Otherwise I would keep at it, but it doesn’t often go that way.
Still it’s a good practice to step away before you are taken by the guiles and sirens of your own words. That might be lousy. lol.
I read where SK tries to write 6 pages of clean copy a day. He sometimes gets a novel done in 3 months or so. Crazy genius.
I find writing to be a lot harder than that.
Thanks for your comments on this rather important topic. At least in the writer’s life, while the bombs are still dropping and the lies are being mass produced.
Christopher
LikeLike
A fascinating essay, Dale. I had no idea about Blake influencing him. Morrison was his own Tyger, Tyger, burning bright. I saw an old Frank Zappa interview about the time of Lizard King. Frank didn’t seem too impressed with Jim’s poetry. But there is no denying his vocal and performance skills.
LikeLiked by 1 person
David
Thanks again for suggesting the topic of this essay, and for reading and commenting upon it, as well!
I can agree with Zappa that not every poem Morrison wrote was a masterpiece. On the other hand, he’s one of the very few songwriters whose lyrics often (not always by any stretch) can be read on the page and almost touch the heights of poetry.
He’s also the creator of so many great individual lines, names, titles and phrases that he truly earned the term “poet” like few songwriters ever have. And he had the heart of a poet. And the spirit! The brains, too.
Leila and I would love to have one or more of your stories appear on Saragun Springs, this is Leila’s site but I’m a Co-Editor now! If you have something laying around, send it on in, it will make the cut hands down and we’d love to have you appear here!
Dale
LikeLike
Hi, Dale and Leila, I have some stories published by journals which are now defunct and have discontinued their website. I’d love to have them “out there” again. Would you be interested in taking a look at a couple of those?
David
LikeLike
David
Absolutely we want to “reprint” the pieces you mentioned, just send to the website asap (but also no hurry), I think there’s still room in October.
I’m excited about bringing these stories back online! Thanks for getting back to me.
Dale
LikeLike
Good! I’ll send a coup
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi, Dale & Leila, I’m not sure how to get the stories to you. I tried replying with an email, but it wouldn’t go through. I don’t see where I can attach files here on this website.
David
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi David
Thank you! Either of these addresses will work
saragunsprings@gmail.com
or ireneallison12@gmail.com
Thank you!
Leila
LikeLike