Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine

Friedrich Nietzsche described in his notebooks (which were published posthumously in The Will to Power) a choice between ‘active ‘ and ‘passive’ nihilism. One of his many aphorisms on nihilism was that it is the result of the highest values devaluing themselves. Values such as truth and justice can come to feel like they are not merely ideas, but that they have some supernatural power, particularly when we say: ‘The truth will set you free’ or ‘Justice will be served.’ When these values turn out not to have the power attributed to them, when truth turns out not to be liberating, we become disillusioned. According to Nietzsche, we can then become active nihilists and reject the values given to us by others in order to erect values of our own. Or we can become passive nihilists and continue to believe in traditional values, despite having doubts about the true value of those values. The active nihilist destroys in order to find or create something worth believing in. In epistemology (the theory of knowledge), nihilism is often seen as the denial that knowledge is possible, the stance that our most cherished beliefs have no bedrock. There are, however, several problems with trying to base morality on reason. 

One such problem, as pointed out by Jacques Lacan in ‘Kant with Sade’ (1989), is that using universalisability as the criterion of right and wrong can let clever people (such as the Marquis de Sade) justify some seemingly horrific actions if they can manage to show that those actions can actually pass Kant’s logic test. Another problem, as pointed out by John Stuart Mill in Utilitarianism (1861), is that humans are rational, but rationality is not all that we have. Though we might say we want to be free and independent, such liberation can feel like a terrible burden. This was expressed for example by Søren Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) when he described anxiety as the ‘dizziness of freedom’ that arises when we look down at what appears to us as the ‘abyss’ of endless possibility. Rather than letting ourselves feel powerless in a world that seems to have stopped caring, we should ask where nihilistic views of the world are coming from, and who benefits from our seeing the world that way. 

For example, as Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), we can certainly develop very complicated and very successful models for describing reality, which we can use to discover a wealth of new ‘facts’, but we can never prove that these correspond to reality itself – they could simply derive from our particular model of reality.  This leads to another problem, the problem of infinite regress. Any claim to knowledge based on some foundation inevitably leads to questions about the foundation of that foundation. Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction. He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, the revaluation of values, and the affirmation of life. He shifted allegiances: writing books, for example, in support of the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but later delivering blistering critiques of both. Not surprisingly, scholars range widely in their interpretations of Nietzsche: was he a poet or a philosopher? A nihilist, moral relativist, or Nazi sympathiser? A critic or a system builder? Anti-Christian or Christian? In the face of this complexity, Nietzsche offers an interpretive key: his references to dance (Tanz). 

Taken together, these references light a path that begins in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and wends through every major work into his final book, the posthumous Ecce Homo (1908). Nietzsche’s dance references call attention to the sensory education that he insists is necessary for creating values that ‘remain faithful to the Earth’. Nietzsche calls the effect a ‘magic transformation’: spectators’ sensations of suffering and terror yield to feelings of ‘metaphysical comfort’ and the notion that ‘life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful’. In Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche elaborates that all human symbolism – even music – is rooted in the ‘imitation of gesture’ at work in ancient tragedy. He writes that the human impulse to move with others ‘is older than language, and goes on involuntarily… even when the language of gesture is universally suppressed,’ as he observed among Christians of his day. When humans don’t learn how to move their bodily selves, Nietzsche insists, their senses grow dull. As Zarathustra exhorts: ‘You higher men, the worst about you is that you have not learned to dance as one must dance – dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you are failures?’ Source: https://aeon.co

"Everything is broken up and dances." —Jim Morrison

"Dance related metaphors are central to Nietzsche's philosophy; dance is a reminder about the work of overcoming oneself and to free oneself from anger, bitterness and despair." Jim Morrison was very influenced by Nietzsche. Although Morrison‘s work displays a strong Nietzschean influence, his early explorations with sensory perception relate more specifically to William Blake and Aldous Huxley.  The terror celebrated in Morrison‘s work goes beyond the Nietzschean acceptance of life‘s suffering. Morrison‘s familiarity with the poetry of Blake, as well as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, encouraged his attraction to darker themes. Although many of the nihilistic thoughts echo those of Nietzsche, Morrison‘s fondness for absurdist texts instills in him a preference for nonsense rather than rationality. Morrison suggests that the absurdity of the world enhances man‘s sensory perception and allows the world to be whatever can be created in the mind. Morrison confronts conflicting feelings of remaining in the role of the spectator or assuming the unpredictable role of the actor—a problem he will ponder often throughout his career. Morrison recognizes "self-deception may be necessary to the poet‘s survival." Jim Morrison‘s self-doubt extends beyond his abilities as a writer to his abilities as performer as well. 

Jim Morrison: “Nietzsche said once women are the loveliest swans in the world. He's wrong about women, though, they aren't fools.” He just laughed at some Philosophy Professors who wrote about Nietzsche. Like Walter Kaufman's chapter of his Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist  (1956) about “Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates.” “It's nothing but a lie,” Jim said. “It's not true.” I waited for his reaction. “That lousy Sophist,” Jim declared. “What an old ugly pederast. Socrates lurking in Greek law courts so he could pick up enough gift of gab to con innocent young men into the sack! They should have killed that fucker decades before the hemlock.” Jim wasn't going to be fooled by Kaufman. “He taught Plato a skeptical philosophy and utterly ruined him. Why? Because Socrates wanted to kill off the Greek religion – another Sophistry – a lawyer's rhetoric. And what happened? That poor bastard Plato takes a trip to Egypt. Ever read The Egyptian Book Of The Dead? It's nothing but a primitive form of the ‘allegory of the cave’, i.e. the love of the dead. Pure nihilism! These philosophy teachers – they can get rid of ‘God’, but they can’t get rid of Socrates? Why, it’s ridiculous.” Jim often favored the German culture over England's. Jim exempted the Irish, the Scotch, and the Welsh.“I never knew an Englishman I didn't despise," he said, "or an Englishwoman I didn't love.” Jim thought the class structure and behaviourism had ruined England: “It's a shopkeeper’s mentality. Survival at any price.” —"Summer with James Douglas Morrison, A Memoir" (2011) by Dennis C. Jakob

One of Jim Morrison’s most important lines is “weird scenes inside the gold mine,” a lyric from The End that metaphorically describes what he has found (weird scenes) and where he has made those findings (the gold mine). What T. S. Eliot called the artist's final destination “the still point,” Morrison would eventually use other expressions including “the gold mine,” “universal mind,” “the perimeter,” and “the only solution.” Each symbolizes the same illumination and ecstasy. In her 1968 Saturday Evening Post essay Waiting for Morrison, Joan Didion distinguished The Doors from their peers, saying, "The Doors are different. They have nothing in common with the gentle Beatles. They lack the contemporary conviction that love is brotherhood. Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death and therein lies salvation." In any case, Didion is quite perceptive in using the word "salvation," for it's one of the most important themes of Morrison. On the other hand, her lasting and oft-quoted characterization of the group as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex” is cute but extremely trite. Ultimately, Jim Morrison wasn’t primarily interested in sex, as his lyrics show. He is interested in timeless pleasures and treasures that go beyond the physical. Didion is regarded as one of our sharpest cultural observers, but her understanding of The Doors is quite thin. Sex and death are useful as starting points for getting into The Doors (and they have been endlessly cited as Morrison’s obsessions), but it is unfortunate that many critics remain stuck there. Going to a Doors concert was about participating in a Neuro Linguistic Musical Programming experiment that could go in unpredictable directions. Doors music is about what Joseph Campbell called “the soul’s high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God.” The Doors combined poetry, mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and tragedy.

Sex sells, and Morrison was certainly oozing sex in his persona. On the other hand, his lyrics took us far beyond sex to something timeless and ethereal. Yet his message was difficult to hear over the controversy and confusion. As the band attracted more attention, audiences hoped that Morrison would do something outrageous onstage. In the beginning, audiences came to the concerts to hear music. Later, audiences came looking for a freak show. Michael Cuscuna interviewed Morrison for DownBeat magazine and found a totally different person from the one he expected. Cuscuna writes that he was initially “dismayed at the prospect of encountering another rock ego.” However, he ends by saying, “in Jim Morrison, I found to my surprise a beautiful human being who, not unlike Charles Mingus, has been a victim of sensational publicity and harassment by silly journalists.” The crowds of rock and roll explorers became a mob of weekend voyeurs who came not for adventure but to see a freak show. The audience no longer saw Jim Morrison as the poet who used stage theatrics to communicate. They now wanted Morrison to “do his act.” Robin Richman said of The Doors that “their music has no meaning, only mood.” Such a comment is entirely ridiculous and condescending. Richman’s piece appeared in Life Magazine in 1968 and essentially told America that Morrison’s lyrics weren’t worth paying attention to. As another scathing example, Dave Marsh wrote in 1979 when he was an editor for Rolling Stone that The Doors were the most “overrated group in rock history.”

For one reason or another, dozens of critics who have been listening to The Doors from the very beginning haven’t the slightest knowledge of what Morrison was all about. Really. They are entirely keyless when it comes to grasping Morrison’s vision. In his review of the doc When You’re Strange, Stephen Holden called Morrison “faintly ludicrous” and “a charismatic male pin-up strutting about in leather pants. He started out with psychedelics and ended up a burnt-out drunk. As a case study of a self-destructive performer consumed by his own mystique, he remains in a class by himself.” Tom Robbins summed Morrison up in July 1967: "Sexual in an almost psychopathic way, Morrison's richly textured voice taunts and teases and throbs with incredible vocal control and the theatrical projection of a Shakespearean star." Bernard Wolfe, sent by The New York Times Magazine as a replacement for Robert Gover to do a hatchet job on Morrison, eventually published in Esquire magazine his 1972 essay: Jim Morrison: Slamming the Door in the Woodstock Nation. Morrison had befriended Wolfe over the course of time, and despite Wolfe’s overall lack of insight, his article is full of witticisms. On the sex and death themes that have been endlessly worked over by critics, here is Wolfe’s question and Morrison’s response: "What transcendence did you have in mind, death through sex or sex through death?" Morrison replied in jest: "The first on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, the second on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays." 

  

Morrison never explicitly identifies just what "the other side" is, but he gives us a good idea of what it isn’t. The first stanza ("You know the day destroys the night, night divides the day / Tried to run. Tried to hide. / Break on through to the other side") puts it somehow outside the eternal cycle of day and night. Morrison’s “other side” is atemporal, outside of time. The second verse ("We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there / Can you still recall the time we cried? / Break on through to the other side") indicates that the other side is beyond ordinary pleasures or treasures. "Arms that chain, eyes that lie / Break on through to the other side" negate the physical as the ultimate treasure. He desires something other than sex. The gate symbolizes the passage. Many critics have assumed that the other side is simply death. Within the context of the album, however, and especially in view of End of the Night, which in a sense completes this song, it becomes clear that the other side refers to something positive rather than negative. Morrison’s notion of death is actually one of rebirth. Morrison's "death theme" is a "rebirth theme." Morrison once discussed Light My Fire with Bernard Wolfe, saying its theme was “liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death.” End of the Night in a sense complements Break On Through. However, by comparison it is a very gentle and melancholy song. The message is stated at the outset, "Take the highway to the end of the night" and “take a journey to the bright midnight.” The highway and the journey are one and the same, both lead to "the end of the night." This destination of the "bright midnight" involves "bliss" and "light," unmistakable symbols of joy and euphoria. "Sweet delight" is somehow involved; this positive experience is then set against the contrasting "endless night." The darkness has come to an end. One critic contends that the song is about "irredeemable alienation," but the words support the opposite view. One of the themes of The End is internal travel. Morrison sings “there’s danger on the edge of town.” Danger here refers to one of the three core elements of the hero’s journey: overcoming the obstacles. Morrison tells the listener to "ride the king's highway" and to "ride the highway West." In between is the line "Weird scenes inside the gold mine."

The placement suggests that "the gold mine" is somehow associated with going West. This passage is an invitation to encounter what Morrison called the “dark forces,” symbolic of obstacles that must be defeated on the journey to liberation. We next encounter the image of "the blue bus," which is said to be "calling us." When he says “the West is the best,” he’s not talking about California, he’s talking about the mythological West, which is very much of a landmark within that whole hero’s journey, to reach his Shangrila. When he says “The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on,” Morrison has stopped singing and now he’s talking, and he’s also going into third person. So he’s transformed himself into a character, and he’s commenting on this third person, the killer, and he’s talking. And then later he says he took a face from the ancient gallery, so he’s putting on this mask. In concert, when Jim Morrison sang this song, he would sometimes put his hand over his eyes as if to symbolize a mask, so he’s speaking through a character, not in the first person. The End is an invitation to "ride the highway West," "ride the snake," "take a chance at the back of the blue bus." Somehow, these essentially identical commands tie in with the recurring apocalyptic motif of "the end", "the only solution." The End is also about liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death. When the music subsides, Morrison sings “the end of nights we tried to die,” indicating a final ending. The song is a cogent, anti-Freudian prescription for salvation emanating from deep and authentic psychoanalitical knowledge. Freud misinterpreted and distorted the Oedipus myth to suit his own purposes. Morrison summons up the Oedipus Complex in order to challenge its very foundations, not to act it out.  That is Jim Morrison speaking in the role of a character. When critics say that Jim Morrison wanted to violate a taboo, that is completely misreading the lyrics. What is going on here is that the treasure that Morrison’s talking about in terms of the gold mine and go confront the danger in order to win the treasure, that treasure has to do with an anti-Freudian view of the world in terms of what’s possible for liberation. And it’s an anti-Oedipus Complex view. 

Bernard Wolfe wrote, "What an ingenious formula: Morrison did resurrect something in the paved-over human potential, something at least assumed to be there, fantasy freedom, fantasy sex, fantasy departure, through the trick of escaping from the human realm or going through the motions of escape.” Despite the occasional darkness, from the haunting eeriness of End of the Night to the chilling visions in The End, Morrison’s overriding images are beautiful and positive. He ultimately emphasized light over darkness, but light cannot be achieved without first conquering dark and dangerous obstacles. Morrison was ultimately a “light-bringer and emissary of the light.” And Morrison, when you look at a song like When the Music’s Over, right after he screams out, “We want the world and we want it now,” he says, “See the light. Save us, Jesus, Save us.” And the light, meaning love, the sun and the dawn, are the prevailing themes in The Doors, not the dark, the night, the chaos and the abyss.

Many critics focused on Jim Morrison's sex-appeal and 'bad boy' persona. Critics like George Will and Stephen Holden never got beyond their absurd impressions of Morrison as shallow sex symbol. Frank Lisciandro, Morrison's close friend, has written that a deliberate misinformation campaign about Morrison began while he was alive and is still operating today. Most of Morrison’s supposed exploits are, in Lisciandro’s view, a complete fabrication. "I asked him once how he dealt with all the trashtalk. Jim counseled me on the importance of growing a duck's back, so the vitriol rolled right off his back." Although Jim had many adventures, he was a gentleman. He called the groupies 'groovy ladies'. As Eva Gardonyi explained to Lisciandro, "Jim knew these girls who danced at The Phone Booth, the go-go dancers. He did know all the girls in there, he liked them and he respected them. He thought that these girls were honest. He had a real empathy for them." The list of vitriolic anti-Morrison critics is long: Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, George Will, Timothy White, Stephen Holden, Caryn James, Stuart Maconie, Richard Williams, Dwight Garner, Steve Heilig, Leonard Cassuto, Alex von Tunzelmann, even Robert Christgau or Greil Marcus occasionally. Marcus dissects the performance of The End at The Singer Bowl in 1968 where Morrison is in front of a cacophony of screaming and abusive fans, as a “bizarre, ugly seventeen minutes.” —Jim Morrison and the Secret Gold Mine (2017) by David Shiang