Morrison, 'An American Poet', and 'English Blake' are popularly espoused as voices of their nations. Both saw themselves as prophets, claiming at least to comment on and at most to influence the political and cultural events surrounding them. As part of their prophetic personae, they both invented new lineages for themselves, mystically adopting chosen ancestors that would tie them tightly to the kind of historical and creative inheritance they wanted for themselves and their countries.
Morrison tells a powerful memory of childhood trauma in 'Dawn's Highway', one of the poems he recorded on his last birthday (it was put to music by the surviving Doors on An American Prayer):
Morrison's personal mythology here is an attempt to attach himself to the shamanic traditions of native Americans, and also to opt for a more 'authentic' American identity than the one of oppressive white power that his biological lineage dictates (considering his father was an admiral in the US Navy, and very much involved in Vietnam).
In Milton, Blake describes becoming one with John Milton, Britain's most imposing national poet:
Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift;
And on my left foot falling on the tarsus enterd there;
But from my left foot a black cloud redounding spread over Europe
Milton had used his writing talents to support the English Revolution (including defending the regicide), and suffered for holding to his beliefs in the Restoration. Blake is asserting radical political authority as well as literary prowess by identifying with Milton.
Blake's possession by Milton apparently has wide repercussions ('spread over Europe' – like Morrison, Blake is writing in wartime). The most conspicuous appearance of Morrison's recurring lines, 'Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind', is in 'Peace Frog' on Morrison Hotel, a prophetic, apocalyptic song with its own specific geography: 'Blood on the streets / in the town of New Haven', where Morrison had become the first rock star to be arrested on stage (as Fong-Torres notes, p. 112). Like Blake, he takes elements from his own biography and mythologizes them on a global and cosmic scale. And like Blake he creates catalogues of places to illustrate the national reach of his prophecy: 'Blood in the streets / of the town of Chicago', 'Blood stains the roofs / and the palm trees of Venice', 'The Bloody red sun / of phantastic L.A.'. In such a visionary city, he combines literal and figurative geography: 'blood on the streets / runs a river of sadness', and most remarkably, 'The river runs red down / the legs of the city', recalling Blake's imagery of birth trauma and miscarriage (in Morrison's notebook these verses were titled 'Abortion Stories', according to Jerry Hopkins in The Lizard King, p. 129). Compare also the 'unborn living living dead' of 'The Unknown Soldier', and
Nursery bones
Winter women
growing stones
Carrying babies
to the river
in 'The Soft Parade'. However, the lines could also suggest loss of virginity (which has revolutionary force in the case of Orc and the Nameless Shadowy Female in the Preludium to America); or menstruation as the simultaneous potential of fertility and infertility, life and death; or indeed human sacrifice as practiced by women in Jerusalem. 'Blood hath staind her fair side beneath her bosom' (Jerusalem 67:43) in the extended narrative of the Daughters of Albion 'drunk with blood' (Jerusalem 68:12), while for Morrison the blood is also the woman's as victim:
Blood! screams her brain as they chop off her fingers Blood will be born in the birth of a Nation
These lyrics are juxtaposed with a parallel set dominated by the repeated line 'She came': female orgasm is apocalyptic and violent for Morrison as it is for Blake at the end of The Song of Los, where
Her hollow womb, & clasps the solid stem:
Her bosom swells with wild desire:
And milk & blood & glandous wine
In rivers rush & shout & dance,
On mountain, dale and plain
In 'Peace Frog', and more clearly in 'L. A. Woman', Morrison also creates 'a City yet a Woman' (Four Zoas, Night IX:223) as Blake does in the figure of Jerusalem, with a kind personification which perceives both simultaneously – 'I see your hair is burning / Hills are filled with fire' – and mixes both, blurring external and internal – 'Drive through your suburbs / Into your blues'. (Note how personification is used toward social commentary: the suburbs are a direct route to depression.) They draw on a collective origin in Biblical prophecy, and partake of its depiction of Israel as a combination of innocent wife and abandoned harlot: 'Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light? / Or just another lost angel'. Like Blake's persecuted Jerusalem, 'Never saw a woman so alone'. (Oothoon also, as rejected but righteous harlot / wife, and as 'the soft soul of America' (Visions of the Daughters of Albion 1:3), is a precursor of 'L. A. Woman'.)
Both Blake and Morrison proceed from this kind of imagery to imagery of male power: as in Blake the call, 'Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time' (Jerusalem 97:1) leads to the predominantly phallic imagery of Albion's awakening and reuniting with the Zoas, Morrison also moves from the L. A. Woman to the combination of resurrection and erection in his anagram, 'Mr. Mojo Risin / Got to keep on risin' / Risin', risin''. Morrison sings, 'L. A. Woman, you're my woman', while for Blake Albion's rising also is catalyzed by union with the feminine personification of nation: 'England who is Brittannia', who is also Jerusalem, 'enterd Albions bosom rejoicing' (Jerusalem 95:22, 32:28). Morrison once said, 'Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and the Doors are looking for a ritual also. A kind of electric wedding' (quoted by Federica Pudva, p. 133), like the ones evoked by Blake at the end of Jerusalem, and in the title of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In her essay on Morrison and Blake, Federica Pudva points out that 'London was for Blake a real city and at the same time a spiritual and symbolic reality, part of a broad divine vision' while in Morrison's vision, Los Angeles was 'the umbilicus of the world' and a microcosm of fragmented modern society (p. 132-3, my translation). Morrison called Los Angeles a '"genetic blue-print" for the United States' (Lizard King p. 301). In a poem, 'The Guided Tour', he writes,
city is inside of body made manifest
meat organs & electrical
power plants
reminiscent, in reverse, of Los searching 'the interiors of Albions / Bosom', which involves coming 'down from Highgate thro Hackney & Holloway towards London' (Jerusalem 45[31]:3-4,14). Though the alienated modern city in Morrison owes much to Baudelaire and, as William Cook examines in detail, T. S. Eliot, Pudva finds that Morrison's flâneur-like observation of prostitution in the city in his poem The Lords– 'a ring of death with sex at its centre' – is rooted in Blake's 'midnight streets' and 'Harlot's curse' in 'London' (p. 127-8).
We might see Morrison grasping more than content in the Songs if we take 'People are Strange' as commenting on the contingent voice of Songs of Experience and playing with the use of persona it offers.
When you're a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you're alone
emphasizes the kind of interior realities which may contribute to the compulsion of the speaker in 'London' to 'mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe'. 'Women seem wicked / When you're unwanted' distils the combination of blame and pity in the 'Harlot's curse' seen as infecting the city and blighting both birth and marriage with death. 'Faces come out of the rain / When you're strange' is like the fragmentation of faces and voices without bodies in 'London', and 'Streets are uneven / When you're down' is a direct statement on psychogeography. If the song was inspired by an enlightening Laurel Canyon sunrise, as Robby Krieger narrates (in Fong-Torres 95-6), then it is located (or projected) on Morrison's home territory as 'London' is on Blake's.
Cook, William. 'Jim Morrison: A "Serious Poet"?' Literary Kicks: Opinions, Observations and Research. 12 July 2003. http://www.litkicks.com/JamesDouglasMorrison
Fong-Torres, Ben, and the Doors. The Doors. New York: Hyperion, 2006.
Hopkins, Jerry. The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison. Revised and Updated. London: Plexus, 2006.
Pudva, Federica. 'The Devil's Party: Jim Morrison e William Blake' Anglistica Pisana 2:1 (2005) 119-37.
This article was originally posted on Zoamorphosis.com.