My favorite poetry of Jim Morrison, accidental Gnostic. There are many, many more of his writings not here, and I reordered them in a way that just seems clearer to me, starting with his positive and uplifting poems, down into his critiques of modern society. These are from “The Lords and the New Creatures,” “Wilderness,” and “The American Night.”
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A series of notes, prose-poems, stories, bits of play & dialogue, aphorisms, epigrams, essays…
Poems? Sure
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The Voice of the Serpent
Dry hiss of age & steam
& leaves of gold
Old books in ruined Temples
The pages break like ash
I will not disturb
I will not go
Come, he says softly
An old man appears &
Moves in tired dance
Amid the scattered dead
Gently they stir
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No one thought up Being.
He who thinks he has
Step forward
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Urge to come to terms with the “Outside,” by absorbing, interiorizing it. I won’t come out, you must come in to me. Into my womb-garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe within the skull, to rival the real.
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Between childhood, boyhood, adolescence, & manhood there should be sharp lines drawn w/tests, deaths, feats, rites, stories, songs, & judgements.
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Moment of inner freedom
When the mind is opened & the
Infinite universe revealed
& the soul is left to wander
Dazed & confused searching
Here & there for teachers & friends
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“Have you ever seen God?”
A mandala, a symmetrical angel.
“Felt?”
Yes. Fucking. The Sun.
“Heard?”
Music. Voices.
“Touched?”
An animal. Your hand.
“Tasted?”
Rare meat, corn, water & wine.
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Where’d you learn about Satan –
Out of a book
Love? –
Out of a box
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An appearance of the devil
On a Venice canal.
Running, I saw a Satan
Or Satyr, moving beside me,
A fleshy shadow of my secret mind.
Running.
Knowing.
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The Wolf,
Who lives under the rock,
Has invited me to drink of his cool water.
Not to splash or bathe,
But leave the sun & know the dead desert night
& the cold men who play there.
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Accomplishments:
To make works in the face of the void
To gain form, identity
To rise from the herd-crowd
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The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the “Lords” is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have secret entrances, and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much of a glint in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance.
The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas. Especially the cinemas. Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent.
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There are no longer “dancers,” the possessed. The cleavage of men into actor and spectators is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed with heroes who live for us and whom we punish. If all the radios and televisions were deprived of their sources of power, all the books and paintings burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed, all the arts of vicarious existence…
We are content with the “given” in sensation’s quest. We have been metamorphosized from a mad body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes staring in the dark.
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More or less, we’re all afflicted with the psychology of the voyeur. Not in a strictly clinical or criminal sense, but in our whole physical and emotional stance before the world. Whenever we seek to break this spell of passivity, our actions are cruel and awkward and generally obscene, like an invalid who has forgotten how to walk.
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Films are collections of dead pictures which are given artificial insemination.
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Film spectators are quiet vampires.
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Cinema is the most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation is sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood. Caligula wished a single neck for all his subjects that he could behead a kingdom with one blow. Cinema is this transforming agent. The body exists for the sake of the eyes: it becomes a dry stalk to support these two soft insatiable jewels.
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Film confers a kind of spurious eternity.
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Each film depends upon all the others and drives you on to others. Cinema was a novelty, a scientific toy, until a sufficient body of works had been amassed, enough to create an intermittent other world, a powerful, infinite mythology to be dipped into at will.
Films have an illusion of timelessness fostered by their regular, indomitable appearance.
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The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.
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It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It ensures his existence.
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Phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows, spectacles without substance. They achieve complete sensory experiences through noise, incense, lightning, water. There may be a time when we’ll attend Weather Theaters to recall the sensation of rain.
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