Becoming artists of ourselves: Jim Morrison's poetry of emergent consciousness
The rock singer and poet used his art to break through the psychic barriers stopping us becoming fully human
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8dbfab4-67d2-400c-8f96-b4cba7c888f5_1526x1132.jpeg)
In her 2003 journal article, Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s, media and arts scholar Camille Paglia argues that the historical reception of that revolutionary decade tends to neglect the spiritual ideals of the time in favour of a purely political interpretation. The very real political reforms of civil rights, feminism and gay rights, Paglia says, cannot be separated from the ‘the new religious vision, which for a tantalizing moment in the American sixties brought East and West together in a progressive cultural synthesis.’ Whatever political changes were being aimed for, these were grounded in a deeper ideal of expanding human consciousness beyond the narrow obsessions of the materialistic and utilitarian ego. Paglia writes that:
‘Not since early nineteenth century Romanticism had there been such a strange mix of revolutionary politics with ecstatic nature worship and sex-charged self-transformation.’
It is within this ‘phantasmagoric religious vision’ and its power to alter the consciousness of humanity, that we have to place the poetry of rock singer Jim Morrison. Often dismissed as a ‘bozo Dionysus’ and a drunken wannabe voice of ‘pretentious rock’, Morrison’s critics fail to see just this moral background to his art. Morrison’s poetry can indeed be legitimately criticised for being sometimes too heavy-handed in symbolism and lax in poetic technique, but the governing vision of his work was coherent and ambitious. The failure to understand this fully-formed philosophic worldview in Morrison’s poems can be viewed as part of the historical blindspot that Paglia highlights in the prevailing interpretations of the 1960s counterculture.
In a poem called ‘The Crossroads’—transcribed from the 1970 recording called the ‘Village Recorder Tapes’—Morrison reveals the core pre-occupations of his poetic mission. That mission, drawing on a psychological and sociological understanding of the human instinct for ritual and worship, was to write a poetry of emergent consciousness. Morrison was less interested in Hindu or Buddhistic practices as championed by the Beats and The Beatles. His ideas were informed rather by Jungian psychology and his education in theatre arts and film aesthetics. Rather than yoga and meditation, or even LSD, Morrison’s work reflects more a desire to use performance and poetry to effect a shift in human consciousness. And he does this by deploying some very particular influences.
Forming the backdrop of Morrison’s poetry are the works of sociologist Marshall McLuhan, playwright Anton Artaud and Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann. McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media examines the way that technologies emerge as compensations for some infringement of our nervous system by previous social or technological changes, only to create their own changes. These changes alter the ‘ratios of our senses’ so that with the emergence of TV and cinema, the eyes start to dominate the body. Morrison was particularly anxious about this dominion of the eye and annihilation of the body. In The Theatre and its Double, Anton Artaud sought to return theatre as much as possible to its ritual power, creating a ‘theatre of cruelty’ that would use violent symbology to extricate audiences from their industrialised complacency and hypnotised modernity. Morrison’s use of violence and sex as weapons against credulity and conformity are a key part of his poetry as well as his performance style.
Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness sought to trace the common archetypes across time and cultures that reflected the way human beings become fully realised persons and through which civilisations flourish. Morrison’s obsession with symbols such as dying cities, war-stained fields, lonely killers, snakes, wild cats and processions of revellers, can all be understood as symbols of emerging consciousness. The violence and unsettling nature of these images performs a somewhat idealistic function, as a means to jolt us as readers or audience members into an awareness of ourselves and so help facilitate our individuation, to give us back the very agency that is threatened by mass society.
Right from the opening of ‘The Crossroads,’ we can trace the influence of Neumann’s psychological archetypes. Morrison writes:
‘Meeting you at your parent's gate We will tell you what you have to do What you have to do to survive…’
The ‘we’ of this opening stanza is deliberately mysterious and unsettling. The point is that the child leaving home is being welcomed into a new tribe, perhaps a gang of marauders in an apocalyptic state, perhaps a group of tribal elders in a pre-industrial setting. For Morrison, the two possibilities are often conflated. What matters is that the person addressed faces a change, a moment of crisis in which survival is at stake. This is emphasised further by the next stanza:
‘Leave the rotten towns Of your father Leave the poisoned wells & bloodstained streets Enter now the sweet forest…’
Now we can see the influence Artaud, who uses the coming of a plague as the metaphor for the effect theatre should strive for. That is, the purpose of theatre is not reassurance, but to deliberately and ritually evoke terror and fear and a sense of crisis. The blending of Neumann and Artaud here is pure Morrison, a synthesis of archetypal and aesthetic principles which defines the atmosphere of so much of his verse. Only at the point of crisis can we begin to become fully developed human beings, only then do we have the courage to face the ‘sweet forest’. That is, only then do we have the motivation to willingly enter the unknown and leave the ‘rotten’ and ‘bloodstained’ familiarity of our previous lives. Morrison’s point here is that the only way to survive is to face the unknown. The forest is a symbol both of maternal power and the unconscious, the dangers of the hidden forces of our deeper minds. To Neumann, the first stage out of the primordial and pre-creation formlessness of the ‘Ouroboros’ stage (the self-creating energy of pure life signified by the snake eating its own tail) is the ‘Great Mother’ stage. This is a stage of only partial individuation, where the ego is detecting its own identity, but is also still conscious of its submergence in the all-embracing life power. Much of Morrison’s poetry seems to be concerned with exactly this stage, and the sense of uncertainty about whether any future individuation can actually happen.
In the next stanza, there is a shift in imagery. Now we are in the territory of The Golden Bough, where the price of growth and fertility is the blood of the king or some emissary in his place. In this case, it is the warrior’s blood on the field of a finished battle. Only here ‘the soil/is rich & rice/will grow again/& gold…’ Again, battle evokes the crisis point and the cost of this crisis is exactly what is needed for a moment of renewal. That ‘& gold’ added as a tag to the stanza, however, extends the fertility symbolism into the realm of alchemy, and it also breaks the syntax. Morrison is talking about not just survival now, but purification, the full realisation of the human being, beyond mere hand-to-mouth sustenance, in the pure light of consciousness.
In the following stanza, the syntax becomes even more broken, the form collapses into fragmentation. In this, we can see both the strength and weakness of Morrison’s technique. He writes in an abbreviated, condensed imagery. His rhythm is that of his spoken voice, so there is not much control of meter actually on the page. Rather his words tumble in short, punchy stanzas that mirror the cascading fall of his own melodious voice as a performer. This means that he never writes in fully-structured sentences and he often writes in bursts of unfinished thought. Used as a crutch, this can easily be dismissed as adolescent scribbling, but much of the time there is some deliberation behind it, and it reflects the sporadic, unformed, reaching quality of the emergent consciousness he is trying to articulate.
With the images of ‘Cobra sun/Fever smile’ we are back in the Neumann-Artaud synthesis of primordial crisis, but here Morrison wants to emphasise the positive, creative principle that awakens naturally from a return to this state. Hence, the oxymoronic phrases of a smiling fever and snake that is also a sun. We cannot have form without a return to the formless state. This is a deathless state which is the cycle of death and rebirth itself, and from which emerges a voice of consciousness, the voice of prophecy and derangement. Morrison writes that crisis brings forth the voice of truth. The ‘raving witness’ that affords us a reorientation after the collapse of order. That re-orientation is symbolised by the ‘Asia’ that finishes off this stanza, a symbol of the East where the sun rises. Again, the symbolism and phrasing is attenuated and half-formed. Sometimes Morrison merely alludes to symbols rather than developing them. This is to the detriment of his poetic impact, but it does allow him to span great leaps in thought in short poetic movements.
The sense of disorientation and of speaking in tongues becomes more intense in the next stanza, in which the familiar and unfamiliar, the domestic and the wild, are blended in a dream-like, somnambulant haze and a complete collapse of logic and meaning. In fact, the dominant poetic effect here is what logicians call ‘selection violation’ in which the wrong kind of word is put in the wrong grammatical place. This is found in phrases such as ‘Stronger than farther’ and ‘It’s the brother not the past/That turns sunlight into glass.’ The search for some hidden, linear meaning would miss the point here. What seems to be going on is a sudden descent into the subconscious, the ‘panther’s living room’ of formless, Dionysian confusion. Out of this, again, comes the ‘strange witness’ of the primal, prophetic voice of truth. Morrison writes:
‘This is the sea of doubt which threads harps unwithered & unstrung…’
The next two stanzas pose a question as to how renewal and spiritual awakening could emerge out of the crisis Morrison has been describing. How could there be a ‘flowering/of god-like people/in the muted air’? However this ‘is all we have left’ says Morrison, ‘Now that He is gone’. This is obscure and elusive, but it may mean the death of God, in the Nietzschean sense. The collapse of traditional religion has created the necessary return to primordial consciousness, a return to the Ouroboric state, which now allows a new flourishing. When Morrison continues to the next stanza, he leaves out the pronoun that he had previously capitalised, giving the poetry here a deliberately fragmented and avant-garde momentum, and emphasising the anxiety about the loss of a father god, the loss of patriarchal consciousness, which Neumann equated with a defined sense of self and ego. From this primordial ‘insect dream’ we can only ‘hear the women/scream out wonderingly for solace/from the tense soldier.’ That is, there is a battle between the rational and subconscious, the ordered and the primordial, between self and immersive oneness in Great Mother consciousness. This dynamic between two states, the state of emergent consciousness as opposed to either fully conscious or fully unconscious, is the real subject of all of Morrison’s poetry. The ‘crossroads’ of self-awareness here is creative, the ignition point of growth and evolution.
To close off the poem, Morrison uses the recurrent motif of his memory of hearing rock ‘n’ roll for the first time on the radio as a child. He quotes in condensed form a poem that he used and re-used in songs and other poems: ‘Texas Radio & The Big Beat’. This new music, to Morrison’s child-self, seems to emerge from nothing, out of the swamps of Virginia:
‘Soft driven slow & mad like some new language Reaching your head w/the cold sudden fury of a divine messenger.’
It is the prophetic voice that has been alluded to before in this poem, the voice of self-creating orientation that emerges, evolutionarily, with the serpent slither of instinctual power, and which gives form to formlessness. Rock music, Morrison is proposing, might just be the ‘raving witness’ that springs forth from a moment of crisis, from a moment when old forms and traditions collapse and we re-enter the Great Mother phase of partial self-definition. But then again, Morrison is not quite sure. The outcome of the crisis is not clear. This is a time of ‘heartache & and the loss of God’ where we are ‘Wandering, wandering in hopeless night.’ In this liminal, in-between moment of consciousness, Morrison tells us ‘there are no stars’, there is as yet no new orientation, no hope of navigation, only a dead idol, ‘the maiden w/wrought iron soul.’
Morrison’s ambivalence here reflects something in his character as a poet. He is both idealistic and detached, humanistic but uncertain, and in this he mirrors the time in which he was writing. People still argue about whether the cultural revolution that occurred in the 1960s was a false renaissance or not, and Morrison was all too aware of the openness of this question. What he did seem certain of, however, was the full scale of the psychic crisis that civilisation had reached, and with it, the potential for creative renewal that it provided. Whether human beings would seize this moment for self-creation was not clear to Morrison, but he clearly saw his art as providing a violent and erotic shock of consciousness necessary to this process. In an interview with journalist Lizzie James, Morrison said he saw his art as a tool of expanded consciousness which uses ‘images of violence, which will bring shock and pain’ to break through ‘the phoney facades people live behind.’ In ‘The Crossroads,’ we can see this sense of creative mission at work. Though Morrison was an imperfect poet, who had not fully developed his technique, he had a precise and coherent worldview and a commitment to the pentecostal power that rock ‘n’ roll had to effect a shift in human consciousness.
This review was written in memory Jim Morrison and his work on the recent anniversary of his death, July 3. ‘The Crossroads’ can be found in The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts and Lyrics published by Harper Design and available on Amazon here.