Music I Love/29

The Doors

I/am/scared/of/doing/this/but/I/am/not/a/writer/who/quits.

The first thing I have to write about is Light My Fire. This was a passport to heaven and to hell, a journey into my own self with no assurances that I would come back, whole and intact. Here was this boy/spirit/ancient Greek god who was urging me on, saying that “…the time to hesitate is through; no time to wallow in the mire/waiting we can only lose/and our love become a funeral pyre.”
I wish a lot of things when I think about the Doors and Jim Morrison and Light My Fire. One is a wish that it had some kind of warning label which said that highly sexed, sensitive young girls should not buy it, not listen to it, and retreat into the Carnegie Library until 1971. People, many times over, say that Jim Morrison came to occupy a space in many cultures and at many times. A shaman, he was called, a holy man who conducts others through their spiritual and sexual journeys. Just watch him singing, and listen. He gets lost sometimes and his eyes slightly cross and HE IS GONE.

“You know that it would be untrue/you know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you/girl we couldn’t get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire/come on baby, light my fire/
Try to set the night on fire….”

This shaman didn’t have to tell me what I needed to do to “get much higher.” So OK yes I refused to wallow in the mire of what I was taught not to do–get down on my knees and accept that communion wafer–and did I emerge, after the trip, “whole and intact?” The jury’s out on this one. Yes/and/no.

Other songs that were important to me? Riders On The Storm, a song composed in a minor key, haunting, with the sound of the rain in the background; Love Me Two Times, yet again in a minor key, a warning to a young girl that yes, he is going away from her but please baby please just let me have a little more to keep me going; and especially, in my case, Strange Days…
“People are strange/when you’re a stranger/faces look ugly/when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted/Streets are uneven when you’re down..”
I know this song and these words because I lived it; after the trip everything looks backwards and out of place, the street signs are pointing the wrong way–my body that was clean was now dirty. It took months to wash off the dirt and the sweat and the tears but then there’s Break On Through To The Other Side. There’s really another side? Where? When? Do I have to do it alone or will there be somebody? It could be anybody, just some/body…but I was prepared to break on through to the other side ALONE. Not really alone/alone but with books and ideas as my guides. I drew together all my DH Lawrence books, read what he had to say about solitude and being alone and how fertile and productive it could be. Lots of long walks, too much sleeping because after a day of this–because it was a hellish journey–I couldn’t stand myself or what my head was thinking, obsessively, like mantras.
That winter, on our educational television station, the films of Ingmar Bergman were broadcast on Friday nights. I was Breaking on Through; Bergman’s awful, deadly images,death, falling apart, playing a chess game with Death; it all made sense, just as Jim Morrison told me; my parents, all dressed up, going out to some stupid dinner party, looking at me watching this stuff then shrugging and walking away. The last part of the end of school, people having senioritis, planning their prom dresses, and my mother hated me–oh yes she did–for being who I was and Breaking On Through.

…and then there was even more death but…

…suddenly you’re in a parachute slowly descending over Pittsburgh and I had broken through. All women know that life is circular. It’s the men who insist on drawing “time lines.” So around the circle I went, Jim Morrison’s face looming in the background, all four of them playing their music on the inner sound stage of the soul; heaven/hell, merging/falling, shining clean/dark and dirty, dead/alive.