This is the end, beautiful friend,

This is the end, my only friend,

The end of our elaborate plans,

The end of everything that stands,

The end.

...

The end of laughter and soft lies,

The end of nights we tried to die.

This is the end. 

Sung by the young Jim Morrison, a powerful man looking like Alexander the Great with his long hair. When he stood on stage, one foot at the micro-phone's base the other aside, right hand at the micro-phone's head, the left hand on the stand or at the mic, his eyes closed most of the time and his voice telling us about his visions, dreams and thoughts.

As Ray Manzarek once put it, Jim was the reborn Greek god Dionysus, a modern-day shaman full of feelings, spontaneity, dance and music. With their music and rhythms the band helped Jim to get on his trip, to open himself.

JIM'S WORK

Although he left sixteen hundred pages of poems, lyrics, stories and frames for screen plays, there are only a handful of themes which appear over and over again.

  L.A. and L'America

For Jim Los Angeles was the town he loved and with L.A. Woman  he wrote a lyrical monument for his >>city of night<< with it's freeways, cops in cars and top-less bars, but at the same moment >>motel money murder madness<<, mirroring chaos and disorder, the Manson murders and the troubled time LA was in. Or as he wrote in his Jamaica Journal :

America, I'm hook'd to your cold white neon bosom, & suck

Snake-like thru the dawn, I am drawn back home

Your son in exile in the land of awakening.

Yes, Jim loved the West and in The End  he sings >>the West is the best<< and also >>Ride the King's highway ... Ride the highway west baby<<, another appearance of his hitchhiking.

And when Brian Jones was found drowned in his swimming pool, Jim wrote a Ode to LA describing himself as >>a resident of a city<< who was just picked up to play the Prince of Denmark (Hamlet).

But at the same time he also saw the bad side of L'America, in L'America (Wilderness p. 45) he wrote:

How it has changed you

How slowly enstranged you

Solely arranged you

Beg you for mercy

and obviously criticizes the government and its politics.

  Shamanism

Jim was a shaman, the band gave him the rhythm and the crowd was the tribe. It began with the Indian Highway (See ) and ended with Jim's death.

Jim called himself >>a guide to the Labyrinth<< in a few poems and what else if not a guide is a shaman? He also wrote about the power a shaman has:

I can make the earth stop in its tracks.

I made the blue cars go away

I can make myself invisible or small.

I can become gigantic & reach the farthest things.

I can change the course of nature.

I can place myself anywhere in space or time.

I can summon the dead.

I can perceive events on other worlds,

in my deepest inner mind,

& in the mind of others

I can / I am

He saw the Doors concert as a part of this Shamanism, >>When we perform, we're participating in the creation of a world, and we celebrate that with the crowd.<<

Jim wrote even a song about it, the Shaman's Blues :

There will never be another one like you.

There will never be another one

who can do the things you do.

Showing that he saw himself and his performances on stage as something special and unique.

  Death

  The Hitchhiker

Jim had a very different view of what a hitchhiker is. In his script The Hitchhiker (An American Pastoral) he combines dialogues and dramatic action and tells the story of the hitchhiker and outlaw Billy .

Jim was used to hitchhike in his youth, for example he regularly traveled the 200 miles from St. Petersburg to Clearwater to visit a girl friend, or the trip with a friend to LA after the second trimester in St. Petersburg has ended.

Both, Jim and Billy seem to have a lot in common, but first I'll summarize The Hitchhiker (An American Pastoral).

It starts with a dialog about buying a girl in Mexico brining her up and marrying her. That's what Billy does, but in Mexico he gets drunk and has not enough money for the whore he wants. So he has to hike back to LA.

The first driver who takes Billy with him tries to touch Billy while he's asleep, >>... the man's right hand moving snake-like towards the hiker's left leg. He hesitates and then touches it above the knee Immediately, a .38 appears from Billy's jacket and points at the driver<<. Billy makes him to pull over and shoots him.

There are two more >>incidents<< like this and the next scene is an interview with Billy 's father who describes Billy as a loner since his mother has died and now wants him to turn himself in. Then there are two retrospects, one showing the father learning young Billy how to handle a weapon. The second one shows Billy in his high school year at a rocky ocean-view, dancing around, acting like crazy and howling like an Indian and then shooting the girl he brought with him.

The next scene shows the hitchhiker wandering around in downtown LA where the cops get him. And in the last scenes Billy leaves the vast town, enters a automobile graveyard at night in the desert where he meets three persons (Doc, Blue Lady and Clown Boy) the, as Morrison writes, >>hoboes in Eternity<< who leave before sunrise and the hitchhiker is again, alone.

First of all the beginning of this film script, going down to Mexico and bringing a girl back, is also used in Forest strong sandals (Wilderness p. 48ff.). It also appears in the Paris Journal  (The American Night p. 199) where the poet is talking with Billy and looking back at the good old times.

The motive of the hitchhiker appears in several poems, but in the film script his role described best. In The Crossroads (Wilderness p. 46) the hitchhiker talks with ghosts and we can read that he has >>... a soul already ruined<<.
The death of Billy's mother reminds me first of the Celebration of the Lizard

The body of his mother / Rotting in the summer ground

He fled the town.

He went down south / Left the chaos and disorder

Back there / Over his shoulder.

But it also reminds me of the famous song The End where >>all the children are insane<<. The killer first kills his father and then fucks his mother, of course we must state that Billy did the same.

And the last motive is the >>automobile graveyard<< or >>car cemetery<< as in Wilderness p. 144, another symbol for death.

  Indian Highway

When Jim was a boy of seven or eight he and his family drove back home to Albuerque at dawn.They came to a accident where a truck with Indians had crashed, they were scattered all over the highway and bleeding. Jim forced his father to stop and help them, and while his father and grandfather went to check it out, the soul of one or more dead Indians landed in Jim's soul.

Expect the point with the wandering soul the story can be taken true and the accident was the most important moment in life of Jim. In Peace Frog he sung:

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding,

Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile egg-shell mind.

and on the An American Prayer LP he asks:

Indian, Indian what did you die for?

Indian says, nothing at all.

 The End

There is no doubt that Jim saw his early death coming, he might even have wished for his restless soul. For example in Hurricane & Eclipse he wrote: >>I wish clean death would come to me.<< and in the next poem If only I he ends with >>I would die / Gladly die<< if he could feel his childhood again.

But in Why the desire for death  he compares life to a clean paper and shows both a wish for death and a desire for perfect life.

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