The Doors of Perception
Jim Morrison would throw a massive party at the cemetery in Paris
Where his mortal remains were buried one bleak summer day in 1971
He was the man who came back through the door
To attend his own wake and to read more
From Joyce’s work-in-progress Finnegan’s Wake
Anybody who has passed through the wall
Will be changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born
She may be wise enough to be unsure of everything,
She will question everything
As did William Blake who saw through the material screen
To what is really always there
These wise fools were often locked away in prisons and lunatic asylums
As was the case with the beautiful soul John Clare:
Less self-satisfied, humbler, seeking to fix if only for a while
The ever-slippery relationship between words and gods
And the, as yet, unfathomable mysteries that surround us.
John Marks
Fri 29th Mar 2019 12:19
Thanks Jon and Etchy.
I imagine Jim would have been thrown out of his own wake for being drunk and disorderly. The women would want him to stay but the men insisted he go. As his father was an admiral, and as Jim had an adventurous spirit, I think he would have set out by sea to see how far he could go. Edward Lear showed enormous prescience when he wrote in the mid-C19 an account of the future adventures of the ghost of Jim Morrison:
The Jumblies
BY EDWARD LEAR
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’
They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.