There are some who influence our lives as models fit for emulation. Others simply burn brightly, dazzling and disturbing briefly with their incandescence, before leaving this theatre of life exhausted, the light extinguished seemingly before its proper time.
Into the latter category steps one-time poet and singer with the Doors, Jim Morrison. Some portray him as the great rock god, the lizard king, heir to the mantle of Rimbaud; others as a drunken, debauched caricature of rock music excess. Both are probably in their way correct. But it is in celebration of the lizard king that we come today.....
Jim Morrison's life is sometimes depicted as a tragedy. From first flickerings of success to death in a bathtub in Paris in six short years. I am inclined to read things differently, however. There is a certain 'rightness' about the trajectory of that meteoric life: every note, every one-night stand, every confrontation, each and every shot of whisky, have their place in a story that could be nothing else but short and sharp. It is as if the gods took as a vessel for communication a particular human life and, once done, discarded it by the wayside. It could be no other way. There is only so much daemonic frenzy a human soul can bear and pour forth before it burns out. The same goes for those others who came incandescent, before the fire was extinguished at an early age: Mozart and Schubert; Raphael and Giorgione; Shelley and Keats. Morrison joins their noble ranks. This is the Romantic reading, at least.
At a certain point in his onstage career, Jim Morrison took to berating the audience at the beginning of a concert:'Wake up!' he would yell into the midst of the collective candyfloss. And, while forcing people to awake from their psychic slumbers cannot be done, there's no harm in politely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, they are wasting away in the unwitting throes of a deep unconscious sleep.....
Forty years on, and the collective somnolence continues, now aided and abetted by all manner of socially-sanctioned tranquilisers, the like of which make diazepam seem like a pick-me-up tonic. Today's dumbers and downers come in the form of new technologies, all of which perform the major function of keeping us asleep and blocking the mental pathways into those most dangerous of territories, personal introspection and self knowledge. Take the texting and mobile phone culture: designed to keep the user incessantly occupied, hopping, skipping, and jumping, but always on the surface of things. Info bytes:'I'm on the train.' Never enquiry about the condition of the soul. How many people cannot venture beyond the front door without their constant companion clutched hard in their hand? Next up: multi-channel television and computers. So much information, all there at the push of a key or a button. Total convenience, instant distraction. Ten minutes to spare: time to skim a few dozen channels, check the sports results, the latest celebrity news. Anything to escape that most dangerous and frightening of all things - stopping, being still and experiencing what is really going on. I know: it happens to me. Nowadays, I need to make far more effort to stay still, do nothing, just 'be', than fifteen years ago. I am not immune to the grasshopper mentality which has infected the whole of western 'civilisation' with a collective attention deficit disorder.
And what about digital cameras and home video? The ease and cheapness of digital photography mean that it is now possible to compile a full record of a holiday for family and friends without actually experiencing a place at all! Notice how people no longer stop to directly sense their surroundings. They simply get hold of the camera and click. The non-experienced present exists merely as a potential record of the past.
All of this serves to create a fast-moving, surface-defined mentality that takes itself as the norm so much that it does not even consider slowing down as a possibility. And this mentality of zappy stimulated dissatisfaction generated by full deployment of these modern technologies then feeds into the apotheosis of Control System strategies....... shopping.
Walk into the indoor shopping mall, and the narcosis is complete. Even those who normally go about life with a sense of vital purpose soon acquire the glazed eyes, the slow, soporific way of moving, the massaged brain, the softly-softly idiocy that are prerequisites for hardcore shopping. The population finally reduced to the narcoleptic dream state in order to fulfil its major functions at the service of the Control System: spend/consume and shut up.
While it may be untenable to conceive of this unfolding of modern technologies as part of an active conspiracy, still they are tools and devices that have the full encouragement of our current Control System and its emissaries. Do not think that a technology is neutral. If in doubt, imagine the opposite. A technology that enables people to reflect, slow down in order to become more aware, to go deeper into themselves and the world around them. As a result, they become more interested in matters of spirit and soul, less enthralled by Saturday afternoon shopping and the acquisition of consumer goods. Do we imagine dominator culture happily tolerating such a thing? Actually, such a technology does exist. It was discovered in the 1940s, developed in the 1950s, and popularised in the 1960s. It is called LSD. See what the Control System thinks of that.
The mass sleep of modern uncivilisation would bring no pleasure to Jim Morrison's soul (or souls: he toyed with the notion of being entered as a boy by the several souls of Native American Indians he saw newly dead in a road accident. 'Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind'). Wake up!
Into the latter category steps one-time poet and singer with the Doors, Jim Morrison. Some portray him as the great rock god, the lizard king, heir to the mantle of Rimbaud; others as a drunken, debauched caricature of rock music excess. Both are probably in their way correct. But it is in celebration of the lizard king that we come today.....
Jim Morrison's life is sometimes depicted as a tragedy. From first flickerings of success to death in a bathtub in Paris in six short years. I am inclined to read things differently, however. There is a certain 'rightness' about the trajectory of that meteoric life: every note, every one-night stand, every confrontation, each and every shot of whisky, have their place in a story that could be nothing else but short and sharp. It is as if the gods took as a vessel for communication a particular human life and, once done, discarded it by the wayside. It could be no other way. There is only so much daemonic frenzy a human soul can bear and pour forth before it burns out. The same goes for those others who came incandescent, before the fire was extinguished at an early age: Mozart and Schubert; Raphael and Giorgione; Shelley and Keats. Morrison joins their noble ranks. This is the Romantic reading, at least.
At a certain point in his onstage career, Jim Morrison took to berating the audience at the beginning of a concert:'Wake up!' he would yell into the midst of the collective candyfloss. And, while forcing people to awake from their psychic slumbers cannot be done, there's no harm in politely suggesting that maybe, just maybe, they are wasting away in the unwitting throes of a deep unconscious sleep.....
Forty years on, and the collective somnolence continues, now aided and abetted by all manner of socially-sanctioned tranquilisers, the like of which make diazepam seem like a pick-me-up tonic. Today's dumbers and downers come in the form of new technologies, all of which perform the major function of keeping us asleep and blocking the mental pathways into those most dangerous of territories, personal introspection and self knowledge. Take the texting and mobile phone culture: designed to keep the user incessantly occupied, hopping, skipping, and jumping, but always on the surface of things. Info bytes:'I'm on the train.' Never enquiry about the condition of the soul. How many people cannot venture beyond the front door without their constant companion clutched hard in their hand? Next up: multi-channel television and computers. So much information, all there at the push of a key or a button. Total convenience, instant distraction. Ten minutes to spare: time to skim a few dozen channels, check the sports results, the latest celebrity news. Anything to escape that most dangerous and frightening of all things - stopping, being still and experiencing what is really going on. I know: it happens to me. Nowadays, I need to make far more effort to stay still, do nothing, just 'be', than fifteen years ago. I am not immune to the grasshopper mentality which has infected the whole of western 'civilisation' with a collective attention deficit disorder.
And what about digital cameras and home video? The ease and cheapness of digital photography mean that it is now possible to compile a full record of a holiday for family and friends without actually experiencing a place at all! Notice how people no longer stop to directly sense their surroundings. They simply get hold of the camera and click. The non-experienced present exists merely as a potential record of the past.
All of this serves to create a fast-moving, surface-defined mentality that takes itself as the norm so much that it does not even consider slowing down as a possibility. And this mentality of zappy stimulated dissatisfaction generated by full deployment of these modern technologies then feeds into the apotheosis of Control System strategies....... shopping.
Walk into the indoor shopping mall, and the narcosis is complete. Even those who normally go about life with a sense of vital purpose soon acquire the glazed eyes, the slow, soporific way of moving, the massaged brain, the softly-softly idiocy that are prerequisites for hardcore shopping. The population finally reduced to the narcoleptic dream state in order to fulfil its major functions at the service of the Control System: spend/consume and shut up.
While it may be untenable to conceive of this unfolding of modern technologies as part of an active conspiracy, still they are tools and devices that have the full encouragement of our current Control System and its emissaries. Do not think that a technology is neutral. If in doubt, imagine the opposite. A technology that enables people to reflect, slow down in order to become more aware, to go deeper into themselves and the world around them. As a result, they become more interested in matters of spirit and soul, less enthralled by Saturday afternoon shopping and the acquisition of consumer goods. Do we imagine dominator culture happily tolerating such a thing? Actually, such a technology does exist. It was discovered in the 1940s, developed in the 1950s, and popularised in the 1960s. It is called LSD. See what the Control System thinks of that.
The mass sleep of modern uncivilisation would bring no pleasure to Jim Morrison's soul (or souls: he toyed with the notion of being entered as a boy by the several souls of Native American Indians he saw newly dead in a road accident. 'Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/ Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind'). Wake up!
