If love were a purely cultural invention, it would stand to reason that love would simply not exist in some cultures. However, anthropological research suggests that love is a universal emotion. For instance, biological anthropologist, Helen Fisher, studied 166 societies and she found evidence of romantic love in an overwhelming 147 of the 166 societies, or nearly 90% of the time. Scientific research suggests that the brain activity of couples in mature relationships is very similar to the brain activity of those newly in love (sharing the "cuddle hormone"). In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin devoted almost twice as much space to bird songs as to human music. He saw these melodies, which play an important part in courtship and mating, as the prototype for more advanced types of music. Just as birds sing to attract the opposite sex, "primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences... This power would have been especially exerted during the courtship of the sexes,—would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph,—and would have served as a challenge to rivals." Put simply, all songs were originally love songs.
In its long history, music has brought people together in many ways—in work and worship, ritual and recreation, and other settings where social cohesion can benefit from its aural glue, its ability to transform isolated individuals into a larger whole. The love song brings people together on a more intimate level, encompassing the most stylized forms of modern-day romance. Darwin, for his part, aimed to trace all these manifestations back to the same biological origins; and once he found this key, he decided that it unlocked many doors. Early human songs of courtship and mating also served, he surmised, as the foundation for language. Not just vocal music but, according to Darwin, even instrumental performances had their roots in the animal kingdom. He called attention to the "drumming to the snipe's tail, the tapping of the woodpecker's beak," perceiving them as the forerunners of our musical rhythms. He heard prototypes for human song in the croaks of frogs and the squeaks of mice, in the sounds of alligators and tortoises, even in the "pleasing" notes produced by the "beautifully constructed stridulating organs" of insects and spiders. "Love is still the commonest theme of our songs," Darwin noted, asserting confidently that birds "have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we do. This is shown by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women, both civilized and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes."
Yet even Darwin hedged his bets, noting that bird songs serve an additional purpose, allowing the mate to assert territorial claims as well as court the female. Meanwhile a growing body of research has documented the aggressive qualities of bird song. In the 1970s, ornithologist Douglas Smith found that birds surgically deprived of their singing ability were far more susceptible to territorial intrusions by other males. Around this same time, zoologist J. R. Krebs demonstrated that when recordings of a male's song are played on loudspeakers, the sound alone can dissuade rivals from entering his territory. The hormone vasopressin and its avian counterpart, vasotocin, have emerged as the key "missing links" connecting these different spheres of behavior. The injection of just a tiny amount of vasotocin in a frog's brain immediately leads to the initiation of mating behavior, and stimulation of vasopressin receptors in certain brain regions can turn a promiscuous vole into a monogamous one. Some have even started calling vasopressin the "monogamy hormone." Researchers have found that vasopressin not only plays a key role in regulating our sexual behavior—men in a state of sexual arousal show markedly higher levels—but is also linked to musical aptitude in humans, and even to receptivity in listening to music.
If song and sex share the same hormonal triggers, might they also possess an intertwined evolutionary history? Research conducted by Sarah Earp and Donna L. Maney at Emory University in 2012 shows that the neural patterns in female songbirds when exposed to the mating songs of males of their species resemble neural responses in the mesolimbic reward pathway of humans enjoying a musical performance. Neuroscience strikes another blow for Darwin! And, coming back full circle to The Descent of Man, recent research tells us that the avian hormone vasotocin, which differs by only one amino acid from our "monogamy hormone" vasopressin, is connected to increased singing by male sparrows and the acquisition of stable stereotyped song patterns in songbirds. Certainly there are many missing evolutionary links between the white-throated sparrow and the Homo sapiens performing in a rock band, but the basic functionality seems the same. In a survey of thousands of commercial recordings, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller found that 90 percent were recorded by males, most of them made during their peak years of sexual activity. This finding matches results, drawn across a wide range of species, that mating display practices tend to be exaggerated in one sex. If we judge by the Billboard charts, males initiate most of the musical courtships in human society, just as with Darwin's birds. "Music is what happens," Miller explains, "when a smart, group-living, anthropoid ape stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of runaway sexual selection for complex acoustic displays." Source: www.popmatters.com
50th Anniversary of Easy Rider: Situated at the end of its decade, Easy Rider literally and symbolically marks the turning point at which the idealism of the 60s curdled into the indulgent solipsism of the 70s. Though Wyatt and Billy’s long hair, sideburns, and far-out couture outwardly align them with the flower children and estrange them from squares at small-town diners giving disapproving looks, they’re far from avatars of peace and love. In his essay for the booklet accompanying the Criterion Collection’s home video release, critic Matt Zoller Seitz describes the film as “a freewheeling take on freedom – what it means and what it costs”. Tapping into that sentiment afforded Hopper and the trailblazers who’d follow his example their own version of the liberty he prized without romanticizing. After all, as Wyatt mumbles around a lonely campfire, they blew it. In the oft-cited campfire scene near the end, Wyatt tells Billy, “We blew it.”
That line has been taken as an indictment of the American counterculture, which, like so many protean revolutionary movements, started self-destructing once it gained enough prominence to effect real change. One can read it that way. But the line strikes also as a more personal sort of confession, an admission that they have ultimately succumbed and bought into their own outlaw version of the capitalist rat race. For the New Orleans sequence with Karen Black and Toni Basil, while tripping on LSD, Hopper persuaded Fonda to talk to a statue of a woman in a cemetery as if it were his mother. “Oh God, how l loved you,” Wyatt sobs. The film’s piquant final shot—the camera rising away from Wyatt’s shattered, burning bike—suggests a soul’s ascent to heaven. It could represent the death of a man, or of a dream of revolution. Source: www.theguardian.com
Jim Morrison: "Real poetry doesn't say anything. It just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors."
-Frank Lisciandro: What’s the background of the “Graveyard Poem”?
-Ron Alan (music producer): That took place a night that we played at a club called the Sea Witch which was on the Sunset Strip, right across from Ben Franks, a little east of that. Jim had come down and we had been hanging out for about three days. We met Pamela and Peggy (Green) and we all took some acid and we saw the graveyard across the street; right there on Gower. On Gower, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard, there’s that very large graveyard. Anyway, it was like two or three in the morning and we were looking at that graveyard and we figured, that’d be a real good place to go. So me, Jim, Pam and Peggy climbed the walls and went into the graveyard. The minute we got into the graveyard, we saw a white rabbit and we chased it until he got away. And we just stayed in there and walked around. It was like almost defying death in a way, to embrace it. There is death, why hide from it. We were on acid and it was kind of like laughing in death’s face in a way. Then, Peggy got freaked out, she laid down on a grave and started crying and kicking her feet. And that’s in Jim’s poem, it’s the line: “One girl got drunk and balled the dead”. The cemetery scene from Easy Rider comes from Jim's Graveyard Poem. It was the greatest night of my life/Although I still had not found a wife/We were close together/We tripped the wall and we scaled the graveyard/Ancient shapes were all around us/The wet dew felt fresh beside the fog/Two made love in an ancient spot/One chased a rabbit into the dark/And I gave empty sermons to my head/Cemetary, cool and quiet/Hate to leave your sacred lady/Dread the milky coming of the day ―Graveyard Poem. Jim also wrote that song “My Wild Love” that night. “My wild love went riding... My wild love’s crazy, she screams like a bird, she went to the devil...” And then that came out on the next album Waiting for the Sun.
-Ron Alan: Obviously, Jim must have loved Pamela a lot or else he wouldn't have been with her. He didn't have to be with anybody, he had pretty much the whole world at his feet as far as girls were concerned. But there was something about her that, well, somehow they connected, and whether they agreed all the time or not, it doesn't matter. Somehow their souls connected. He really cared about Pamela. That's the only girl he really cared about.
-Frank Lisciandro: He never talked about his conquests?
-Ron Alan: No, never. He was so far beyond that kind of thinking. He would talk about things he would reflect on what he would see in life if he was going to talk about anything. He was kind of a loner. His friends, he could count on one hand.
-Michael McLure: Pamela called me when she got back from Paris after Jim’s death. She was living in Sausalito, living with some very strange people in a house over there. And then she gave me Jim's portmanteau, like a leather doctor’s bag that opened on the top with one handle at the top. I gave it back to her and said to her that it was clearly my understanding that Jim considered her to be his editor and I thought it would be a good thing for her to edit it. Then I did say to Pamela, “Look, the place you’re living in is not a place to have anything you’d care to keep. Put it in a safe, put it in some kind of a bank vault before it disappears.” And unfortunately, that’s what happened, it disappeared. The portmanteau itself was one of the most impressive examples I’ve seen of how a poet works. What was in the portmanteau was a hundred-and-thirty-page manuscript. I laughed, because I thought I had been like Jim’s best friend. I mean he had no other literary friend, you know, and he never told me about this portmanteau. I laughed and I thought, “He’s as secretive as I am; he’s as secretive as any writer.” —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro
Writing a prose poem can feel like accepting the unconventional; it is a form that invites the reader to re-invent it, and Morrison effectively establishes a conflicting ambiguity in his prose poem Notes on Vision: "Look where we worship. 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. A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision. A gray film melts off the eyes, and runs down the cheeks. The Passengers change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam from car to car, subject to unceasing transformation. Inevitable progress is made toward the beginning (there is no difference in terminals), as we slice through cities, whose ripped backsides present buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move ahead or fall utterly behind. Farewell." Morrison paints a very gloomy, pessimistic picture of modern life and its message is irrefutably clear. The first stanza of this poem reveals an enigmatic and horrific description of the effect of the cinema, as the melted eyes are running down the spectators' cheeks instead of tears. The opening part of the poem scans as blank verse ("A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind, astonishing vision"), owing its force to the tension between the flatness of the delivery and the grotesque quality of the imagery. —"Unravelling Jim Morrison's Poetic Wilderness" (2017) by Koben Sprengers
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