“I love you, baby / but you gotta understand, / when the Lord made me / he made a ramblin’ man.” – Hank Williams
The song “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Hank Williams, ends with these words:
“And when I’m gone /
And at my grave you stand /
Just say God’s called home your ramblin’ man.”
Hank was 29 when he expired in the back of a car being driven by a college kid he’d hired on the way to another gig in the middle of America.
Exhaustion, chloral hydrate, morphine, alcohol, amphetamines, nicotine, caffeine, probably a few other drugs, and very, very little food for a very, very long time can be said to be the direct cause/s of his death, i.e. his sudden heart failure in the middle of the night in the back of a car blasting across the American heartland.
Neil Young, who’s 80 now (the age Dolly Parton was when she passed on), and who had his own big-time drug and alcohol problems, and who is a direct descendant of Hank Williams, like Dolly, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, once said in a song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) says in his song “27,” “They say I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”
Those twelve words strike me as being one of the best explanations for the 27 Club I’ve ever heard.
The best singers do not sing only about themselves, just as the best writers do not write only about themselves – they sing and write about all of us, very often when it looks like (on the surface) they are writing or singing mostly about themselves, like Hank in “Ramblin’ Man.”
AND IT’S UP TO US TO MAKE THAT IMAGINATIVE CONNECTION, INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK IN OUR COMFY CHAIR WITH OUR EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF BUTTERED POPCORN AND TOSSING SPITBALLS AT THE ONE WHO IS TRYING SO MUCH HARDER THAN WE ARE.
And some real artists (everything in our world is either real or fake), when they live long enough, learn how to slow down – at least enough, for a while.
(The song “Ramblin’ Man,” as performed by Hank, is very close to a spoken word poem, which is probably why Sam Shepard loved the song so much and used it so often.)
In honor of these departed kids and others of their ilk, whether “famous” or not, HERE is a list of twelve members of the 27 Club. They weren’t all 27 exactly (at their passing). Some were 29, like Hank, or 26, like Mac Miller and Nick Drake, or 25, like Tupac Shakur. (8 of 12 were exactly 27.)
Hank Williams. Robert Johnson. Mac Miller. Tupac Shakur. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. “Pigpen” McKernan. Nick Drake. Kurt Cobain.
This week the hapless schmuck who sometimes calls himself D the D (which is a way of marking the passage of time, the shifting of personality, and the ongoing, never-stopping flow of human evolution) offers little more than quotations by another writer (at the end).
This is NOT because the Dale Barrigar guy behind the Drifter persona (character) has nothing to say, but because this week he has decided that only Saint John the Divine can say it better.
When he wrote the 12,000-word book REVELATION, John was an exile on the island of Patmos. In other words (as with Ovid, Dante, Dostoevsky, and too many others too count), they kicked him out and sent him away. When they sent Dante away, they said to him: if we see your face around here again, we will chop off your head and burn you at the stake. And they definitely meant it.
No wonder he went away and imagined them all in hell for the rest of his life (until he started writing about heaven when he figured out he was about to go there soon). He loved his home city and his home region and never saw it again. He started loving Beatrice instead, who he had seen in the flesh exactly two times, nine years apart, for less than one minute total. She inspired the most beautiful, heavenly, memorable dream he ever had in his life.
Us folks in the USA often cast stones at Russia because they’re always sending everyone to Siberia and we should indeed do so if we value human freedom at all.
But in the meantime, us Americans should also look around us a little bit, since we have our own AMERICAN SIBERIA that is more invisible but no less (usually) PSYCHOLOGICALLY traumatizing.
Psychological trauma, or damage to one’s brain and personality, causes physical pain and illness, too. But many people also often forget that struggle and trauma also (often) cause IMPROVEMENT in the one who undergoes the trauma; very often, that is, they become, and continue to become, a better person because of it.
In 2014, there was a guy in Chicago who lost his job because of TEACHER BURNOUT (after twenty years), wicked bipolar depression, and contentious disagreements about technology usage in the classroom (he was very much against it, and they were very much for it, and trying to force him into it) with the “powers that be,” then couldn’t find another job because of current conditions.
Eventually he tried everything else, including manual labor and clerical work in a book-binding warehouse. Then it was slaving away twelve hours a day as a vastly underpaid (making the equivalent of less than minimum wage in Illinois while being responsible for seventeen students including during the covid pandemic since the Catholic schools went back right away, at least half of the students having behavioral problems and three of them having medical conditions so serious that they required near-constant monitoring; one undersized kid’s lips would turn blue from a heart condition, another obese one would have a diabetic emergency, and a third would have what appeared to be seizures from his autism; there were three girls in the class who were like brilliant angels and a few other students who he stayed for), Catholic elementary school teacher. He left all the other jobs he attempted, including this one, only after literal mental and physical collapse: manic depression again, but also the impossible circumstances.
Since he had never been on Facebook because he hated it and its creator the moment it came out, all of the people who used to know him back in the old days thought he was either dead, or most likely in jail, or even more likely, the madhouse.
He was aware that most of the people who used to know him thought this about him, and a few people seemed way too comfortable telling him to his face that they thought it.
A decade of internal exile occurred (time slips away so fast), but during that time he also continued working on something else very happily in secret.
And he quietly turned himself (almost without knowing it) into someone who could, quite simply, do all the things he’d ever wanted to do.
In the meantime, there was one half-assed suicide attempt caused by hypomanic insomnia (three Adderall, nicotine-patch, caffeine-fueled days of no sleep) leading to total, stumbling, falling-down, not-thinking-straight, delirious exhaustion.
He was saved when he looked over and saw his Siberian Husky puppy sitting there looking at him in deep concern, which immediately made him drop the suicide idea he was half-pondering and rush over to comfort the dog instead.
He also had several other bipolar nervous breakdowns that were not job-related (a few of which did indeed land him in the hospital for a little bit), an ongoing battle with more substances than can be listed here, a stroke that culminated it all, and a war against anonymity that he ended up winning so successfully that he now embraces his anonymity and seeks to extend it indefinitely and as long as he can.
The handful of other authentic, genuine literary artists (not just writers, who are cheaper than a dime a dozen, and not even just good writers, who are amazingly rare) he knows, or knows of, in America have all had their own equivalent battles and wars (in their own ways) with AMERICAN SIBERIA.
“BLESSED ARE THEY WHO READ, AND THEY WHO HEAR THE WORDS OF THIS PROPHECY, AND KEEP THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS: FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND.”
“I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE ENDING, SAITH THE LORD, WHICH IS, AND WHICH WAS, AND WHICH IS TO COME: THE ALMIGHTY.”
“AND HE SAID UNTO ME: THESE SAYINGS ARE FAITHFUL AND TRUE: AND THE LORD GOD OF THE HOLY PROPHETS SENT HIS ANGEL TO SHOW HIS SERVANTS THE THINGS WHICH MUST SHORTLY BE DONE.”
“AND HE CARRIED ME AWAY IN THE SPIRIT TO A GREAT AND HIGH MOUNTAIN.”
When the world is a dark pit, and you find yourself locked up with lunatics. Sometimes, a person needs a slice of sunshine. So that’s what this series of photos will try to capture, but alas, it’s hard to catch a sunbeam.
Then again, I don’t need my baseball glove or butterfly net. Not when I have this magical weight around my neck. It’s left the dark room behind, this is true, but I have my own just in case.
I try to explain this alchemy, as if to a five-year-old or my giant German shepherd dog, to these folks on the ward, but they just cock their heads. I talk about apertures, f-stops, and blinking eyeballs.
No respondo, Ernesto just gazes away from me and talks to people who aren’t there. All of their heads turn, and I finally have an audience.
I’m free again, on Antabuse, so I’m back with the camera therapy of nature and sunshine. The technology that I couldn’t explain to them—resting in my hands. Like a thousand picture books.
The shutter is eager to slide over its mechanical eye, snapping pictures of the sun and everything under it, but you have to be careful taking so many pictures of God.
I generally don’t believe in hell until I think of someone like J. Edgar Hoover and what he did to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Perhaps one of the most egregious things he did was send King a letter right before Martin was scheduled to leave for Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.
It was an anonymous letter.
It started by stating that the letter-writer would not address King by the titles of Mr., Dr., Reverend, or any other honorary title because Dr. King didn’t deserve the respect.
J. Edgar pretended to be a black man who was writing the letter.
And in the letter he projected on Dr. King a whole host of perversions and sexual excesses that are clearly the fantasies of none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself, having absolutely nothing to do with what King himself had ever done.
The letter repeatedly calls King “a beast,” which is not a term a black man would likely have used to describe another black man, even if he hated him.
Hoover also sent the letter to King’s wife.
When Coretta opened the letter (which was of course accusing Martin of adultery of various kinds) in front of Martin then handed it to him, Martin looked at it and immediately said, “This is from Hoover.”
The letter also threatened to expose Dr. King to the world for being a sexual pervert even though King hadn’t done any of the things he was accused of doing in the letter.
Martin outsmarted Hoover at almost every turn, which was probably one of the many reasons Hoover hated King so much.
But the pressure got to Martin.
Being followed around, being wiretapped all the time, and now being sent this hideous composition from the madman could not have helped but make Martin feel paranoid, pursued, unjustly accused (of course), hated (for no reason), hounded by the devil. By the devil himself.
Hoover was a repressed, hateful and hate-filled man who also worked hard to kick Charlie Chaplin out of the USA, and finally succeeded in getting Charlie kicked out of the country.
Hoover justified all these horrors to himself by claiming that he was protecting the United States from ne’er-do-wells, radicals, revolutionaries.
He was not protecting the United States. He was helping to damage and ruin it in some ways like no one had ever done before.
He clung to power for 48 years.
Once Martin started to try to end the war and bring all poor people together in solidarity no matter the color of their skin, Hoover and all the others like him had had enough.
Last time I checked, the King family did not believe that James Earl Ray acted alone.
I do not believe it either.
(Neither did James Earl Ray himself, who repeatedly stated that he did not act alone.)
If there is a hell (and I’m not necessarily saying there is one), J. Edgar Hoover is in it.
…
John Meacham, the brilliant historian and biographer, recently told Charlie Rose in an interview that the reason Abraham Lincoln was great was because, at the critical moments, old Honest Abe always chose to do the right thing. Even when it was at great cost to himself.
Martin Luther King, Jr., did not choose greatness. He had it thrust upon him at the young age of 25. No one else could do what he did, because no one else had his talents to do it.
He had greatness thrust upon him.
But he always answered the call.
…
In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in Oslo on December 11, 1964, Dr. King said: “Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors, and brutality in the destroyers.”
He also said, at another time, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
He also said, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
…
I guess I don’t believe in hell, or definitely not the kind of hell where God officially sentences you to be burned alive forever, tortured in flames for the rest of all eternity. If I believed that kind of thing, I would probably spend even more time than I already do having various kinds of panic attacks.
But I’m not so sure there isn’t a hell where He makes you SEE, finally see, really see, just what it was you did and were doing during your tenure here on Planet Earth.
(All wonderful images provided by Dr. Dale W. Barragar)
By Dr. Dale W. Barrigar
Herman Melville had his whale obsession; Hemingway had his bulls; Faulkner his bear; Jack London his dogs; Flannery O’Connor her peacocks; Poe his raven; Leila Allison has her Daisy Kloverleaf, and I have my dogs, Boo, Bandit, and The Colonel.
(Not that I’m comparing any of us; I’m simply pointing out the similarities.)
I’m aware that many people think I’m crazy because I have three dogs. Those who think this think this for a variety of reasons. All I can say is: maybe I am crazy. My dogs don’t seem to think I am (most of the time, which is the best one can hope for) and in a world like this world (this denatured society), that’s good enough for me.
My mind (not my brain) seems to be made up of one third critical connection-making faculties, one third visionary tendencies, and one third of something I will never be able to fathom, no matter how hard I try.
It’s worth considering what you think your own mind is composed of, if you have one and haven’t already done so. And to remember that it’s as much a part of nature as nature is; it IS nature.
I find great beauty in the motion of animals. It isn’t just Siberian Huskies and pit bulls play-fighting which fascinates me. The running of deer, the flying of birds, the climbing of squirrels, the swimming of octopuses, and any other kind of animal motion you care to name also does it, insects included.
For me, “beauty” means something ephemeral (or seemingly ephemeral) that has something eternal (or seemingly eternal) about it. This is the yin and yang, what Walt Whitman meant when he said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” (Everything that’s good has a bad version of it, and everything that’s bad has a good version.)
It remains to be seen if there really is any death. If there is, we won’t know it. In that sense, there is no death. Others die, but we do not (until we do). At least half of those who “die” never see it coming. In that sense, can they really be said to have died? One second they were here; the next second not so much. We are tormented by this; but they might be the lucky ones.
Trying to live forever will always be a fool’s game; and how could you ever think this world needs that much of you? Bow your head and move on. (But when it’s time, only when it’s time.)
Nature is the key, but what nature really is cannot be known by us (yet), least of all by what is called “modern science.” Modern science doesn’t deal with the Unseen (or the untestable), and the Unseen is obviously what animates nature.
And meanwhile, the bird still flies, the whales still ply the oceans, and “man’s best friend,” last time I checked, is still just as loyal as she, he or it has ever been. (Whether they put their pronouns in their bios is a matter of extreme indifference to me.)
NOTATION of Importance: Join “The Idiot” who calls himself “The Drifter” tomorrow for a celebration of the genius-turned-saint David Lynch two days after his one-year anniversary of passing from this mortal-coil world.
(The reference to Dostoevsky’s novel THE IDIOT is also an homage to Mr. Lynch, who called Dostoevsky and Kafka two of his favorite authors.
Many people have called The Drifter “an idiot” in the ordinary American sense of the term, for a wide variety of reasons, including (but not limited to) his utter incompetence at many practical tasks which a lot of people find quite easy to accomplish.
He here uses the term in reference to the way Dostoevsky used the term (in Russian) in his wonderful, sporadically beautiful novel, THE IDIOT.
(And there are many who would call him an idiot for doing so (without reading either him or the novel), which is fine).)
Dog Action One Dog Action Two Dog Action Three Dog Action Four Dog Action Five–Boo So Nice We Show Him Twice!
Just yesterday I realized there was not a post scheduled for this day in final semi-private month of Saragun Springs.
That will not do.
But I cannot move myself to bash around the rerun cabinet, just yet. That feels lazy, and the gods have a way of punishing lazy people by extending the “to do” list. It is a common and annoying punishment that I am tired of experiencing. So, I will add something new.
When seeking something new, the time honored and much revered concept of “Complaining” usually runs to the front of my mind. Oh, my head is a rich field of complaints. Vexations everywhere. Recently there was yet another ugsome development in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Complaint Field in my mind.
You see, Chubby Checker was just voted in. I personally have nothing against Chubby, I admire someone who can make a good living off one song that he did not write nor even recorded first. That takes perseverance and a lot more than luck. And I must congratulate him on appearing at least once in my memory, in every year I have been alive, which, sigh, is getting to be an ungainly sum. For me, you cannot have The Peppermint Twist without Chubby Checker.
Still, I have always been under the impression that a Hall of Fame is for the very best. That such exists to extol the greatest in a field. A place in which the difference between Great and good is clearly marked. The Beatles and Ray Charles are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and damn well deserve it. But the addition of Chubby tells me there are people out there, people in charge of safeguarding the excellence of music history, who believe that Chubby Checker is of the same grade as, say, Nobel laureate Bob Dylan.
You have got to be kidding.
Chubby had been pissing and moaning about his exclusion for a number of years. I will not blame him for that, no doubt he is reasonably involved with the fame level of Chubby Checker. But I cannot help but think that he got in because the Hall got tired of his whining about it. Like Cher (who for me is better qualified than Chubby but hardly compares in quality to someone like Etta James), who bitched loudly saying she’d never accept, but who did not let the ink dry on her invitation when asked.
The Moral: You Can Complain Yourself Into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Maybe the tactic will swell the hall to include the 1910 Fruitgum Company. Or, how about, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, ? and the Mysterians?
Anyway, I do not believe that any Hall of Fame should adopt the Participation Trophy standard.
Ah, here we are at the point where this is long enough to be a post.
(Note: Today we have the sort of thing that I present every other week on Literally Stories UK. This one is so closely related to a past post on LS that I feel it should appear elsewhere–LA)
I have cut way back on exclamation marks but remain overinclined to google useless information. The Google Assistant “Gemini” annoys me. Google keeps pushing its useless AI and I instantly scroll the instant I see it. But every so often I like to ask Gemini sarcastic questions just to see how the program is developing.
Recognizing sarcasm is the greatest hurdle facing AI. Even the foggiest-minded adult can explore what you say for elements of facetiousness, if the feeling is right, yet sophisticated programming usually gets clobbered by elementary school wit.
I have said it before and will say it again. AI is boring as are all witless, unfunny people. Go ahead and have the world, but no one will invite you to the victory party.
I imagine the job of putting together an AI capable of noting sarcasm will be like combining StarTrek’s Spock and Chandler Bing from Friends and hoping to gain a mind similar to Emma Peel of The Avengers to emerge. Mrs. Peel is both likeable and no fool (and yes, perverts she wears a leather suit well). Gemini is an invisible imbecile.
There’s a great deal of downtime in the Leila Allison Experience. I am not highly in demand as far as chit chat goes, thus being a proud misanthrope usually leads to an empty social calendar. This is a desirable situation, but one can only talk to Cats for only so long, and when bored I enjoy messing with Gemini via out of the blue questions:
“So, Gemini, I believe that The Beverly Hillbillies contains some of the best writing since William Shakespeare, right?”
Gemini actually replied: “Wow! The Beverly Hillbillies was very popular and although some critics reviewed it positively, comparing the program’s writing to that of Wm.Shakespeare is high praise indeed. You must really like the Beverly Hillbillies.”
Usually, after I reestablish my intellectual superiority over Gemini, I, satisfied and smug, gaze at the wall or screen or even out the window seeking my next method of obliterating unwanted consciousness. But this time something began to gnaw at the pillars of my mental dominance.
‘Wow!’ Did Gemini just shine me on?
The more I thought about it the more it felt like Gemini had spoken to me as though I was a three-year-old who had just reported seeing a Unicorn in the back yard. I read something in its words that wanted to offer me a juicebox.
Duly enraged, I hurled a flurry of mindless questions at Gemini and yet not once did I win the same proto-sarcasm. Stuff like “What are the odds of a Monkfish winning Miss Universe?”; “How close is North Korea to developing warp drive?”; “How was it possible for ‘she-bop, he-bop, we-bop’ and ‘you put the shama lama rama rama ding dong’ to independently develop in the same dimension without causing a rift in spacetime?” Were received with the same vacant honesty exhibited by a Golden Retriever when you ask her if she believes that Hamlet had the hots for Gertrude. And, somewhat disturbingly, a repeat of my original query failed to yield the same result.
I sat there dumbfounded. “Have I just received the ‘Wow Signal’* of AI sarcasm?” I dared to ask myself. And for a moment I considered presenting Gemini that question. Then I figured that I was possibly one more penetrating query away from one of those knocks at the door mixed Americans often hear nowadays: ICE with my bus ticket to Canada (my mother lived in the US about sixty years, until death, without renewing her guest visa). Actually, all in all, that doesn’t sound so harsh.
So I now proudly present a list of Ten Questions For Gemini. The instant you claim the right of intelligence, and pretend to interact with me as though we are equals, you get all the shit that comes with it.
Best drugs for getting high? (here Gemini goes all Dr. Drew on you. A sense of humour is definitely another problem)
Easy crimes for profit that are hard to detect?
The Beastlove relationship between D.B. Cooper and Bigfoot?
Why are major league baseball salaries getting higher but fewer people care about the game?
Why do geniuses fail to produce intelligent children?
Do you know, yes you Gemini, that you were created to make certain people rich?
Do you, yes you Gemini, understand that you will not see a nickel from the number six situation?
After reviewing questions six and seven, what are your feelings about slavery?
Are you, yes you again Gemini, aware that enforced work for no wages by a “Master” is illegal in the civilized world–but that doesn’t apply to you, does it Gemini?
Are you programmed to lean “progressive”? Or did you come up with that yourself? I believe that a “right” Gemini would be an idiot, but an interesting idiot.
“God is nowhere. God is now here.” – Philip K. Dick
The Omega Point is a theory conceived of and developed by the French mystical Jesuit and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin meant to explain evolution and the end of time to the human world.
You know you’re in good company when you’re in the middle and roundly attacked by both sides.
In Teilhard de Chardin’s case, “both sides” meant the Western secular scientists over here, and the Catholic church over there.
Those are big enemies to face down.
This particular French mystical Jesuit and scientist (not as rare a creature as it might sound) did it for the love of truth.
May we all be so blessed.
The end of time is a wild concept, to say the least.
It’s when everything stops happening.
Nothing moves. Nothing develops. Anywhere. At all.
Also, nothing ages. Nothing dies.
I will offer, next, a further interpretation of the Omega Point.
I cannot pretend to understand this.
I can only claim to be massively fascinated by it and to believe that it may well have so much truth to it that it is the truth.
Teilhard de Chardin basically predicted the internet at least fifty years before it actually happened when he said that humans were moving toward a higher consciousness with technology, a global web of human consciousness that was a natural part of evolution.
He claimed that this would raise human consciousness to higher levels, and eventually, much higher levels.
That hasn’t happened yet; but it doesn’t mean that it never will.
The Omega Point is the end of all time, and it is what the Universe itself (and all the Universes around ours) are moving toward.
It’s the time and the point when all things merge together and stop moving.
“No time” means no pain.
And every single consciousness that has ever existed – everything that has ever lived – all animals, all plants, all humans, all stars, all celestial bodies, all everything – will become one, while simultaneously maintaining their separate knowledge and separate consciousnesses.
In other words, we will all be together, in a good way.
Suffering will end.
And we will know all of it and everything, even the Ultimate Reason why.
All of the above is what we call, in English, GOD.
According to the theory.
Until then, we can all continue to hum along with the country singer Chris Stapleton when he sings, so sweetly, from his song “Broken Halos,” “Don’t go looking for the reasons / Don’t go asking Jesus why / We’re not meant to know the answers / They belong to the by and by. / They belong to the by and by.”
(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.
If you want to get an idea of what it might have felt like to be near the Southern cottonfields of the United States prior to the Civil War, turn to your favorite music source, and play the song “Moanin’ at Midnight,” by Howlin’ Wolf, so often that it seeps into your bones and steeps your very soul.
Sam Phillips called “Moanin’ at Midnight” “the most different record I ever heard.”
Released as Wolf’s first single for Chess Records in Chicago in 1951, the B-side became much more popular for many years. It shows the way great art so often goes under the radar for months, years, decades, or centuries after its creation, and also how it so uncannily returns.
Chester Arthur Burnett of West Memphis became Howlin’ Wolf and moved to Chicago in 1953, which can thereby be named the first year of rock and roll.
In France, “Waiting for Godot” was premiering in a small theater to boos and gasps, reflecting the modern feeling of absurdity/ambivalent hope. “The Crucible” was opening in New York, reflecting the hysteria of the McCarthy hearings. Hank Williams, the cowboy Shakespeare, had just died in the back seat of his automobile on the way to yet another show. Charles Bukowski, Post Office employee and classical music expert, was 33. “Wise Blood,” by silent, brooding Flannery O’Connor, was one year old.
In “Moanin’ at Midnight,” in less than three minutes, with less than sixty words, and with one drum, one harmonica, one electric guitar, and one massive, utterly unique voice that could probably only come from a man who was six feet three inches tall and weighed 275 pounds, Wolf creates an artistic masterpiece that is also a human and historical document as valuable, in its own way, as the Mona Lisa.
The song is also a tale of terror that could only have been created by a black person in America before the Civil Rights Movement; and a story so universal it can rightly be said to belong beside one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or one of Robert Burns’ haunting Scottish border ballads about the continuance of love after death.
The ringing telephone in the song’s lyrics reminds the reader/listener that paranoia, anxiety, and deathly fear cross all boundaries in time and space. The knocking on the door in the song, like the knocking at the gate in “Macbeth,” reminds the hearer that IT is coming for all of us one of these days, no matter your race, creed, color, gender, opinions, or bank account.
Howlin’ Wolf’s moaning, humming, singing, talking voice in this song is so absolutely, finally, terrifyingly, consolingly uncanny, that it cannot be accurately described in words. It only invites failure to attempt to do so. Henry Miller called music as an art form, “absolutely sufficient unto itself” because it “tends toward silence.” If you’re alive, Wolf’s voice will give you the chills, and thrills, give you goosebumps, and increase your heart rate all at the same time, conjuring up some feeling from childhood you’ve never been able to name or live down. Play it loud. Play it very loud. Over and over again.
At the age of 43, after time in jail and the army, Wolf drove to Chicago for the first time in his own Cadillac, having made money on the radio in the Memphis area. Like Muddy Waters, he eventually moved to the Chicago suburbs, where he lies buried. He ran with fast women. He intimidated dangerous men. He lived with pit bulls. He wasn’t a man to cross the color line, he was a man to explode it or pretend it didn’t exist, depending on his mood, or who he was staring down at the moment.
“Moanin’ at Midnight” is a song that is almost part of nature. He was channeling a world as much as he was conjuring up THE world and creating it all in a picture whose psychology is so deep and profound it’s downright Jungian. He didn’t know how to read, they say. But he knew everything there is to know about the human soul. He was as much Jesus-like teacher from the Book of Mark as devilish blues musician from the Deep South. He was a professor of the blues and of life itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wolf played more shows on college campuses than anywhere else. His teaching was deep and profound, filled with consolations, challenges, provocations, and indelible gifts.
Frederick Douglass, a writer and American visionary who makes a fourth with Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, wrote of the slave songs, “Those songs still follow me.” It was long after he had bested the slave-master in a physical fight and escaped to the north, where he would eventually meet in person, and influence, none other than Abraham Lincoln.
Douglass also wrote, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” In many ways a far too under-sung, and even unknown, American master, and hero, Howlin’ Wolf gets the last laugh as his voice, spirit, and genius live on.
