The Doors and Classical Literature

Jim Morrison was a well-read guy, which was why he suggested the name The Doors to his fellow band members when they were just forming. The band's name is derived from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, which Huxley titled after a line from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.” (This reminded me of Ovid and Pythagoras' statement that “no thing ever dies” (523).) Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore agreed with Morrison that "The Doors" conveyed that which they stood for: open-mindedness, debauchery, and experiencing life fully and uninhibitedly.

Huxley's The Doors of Perception is about his mescaline experience, which he volunteered for in order that he might obtain a different perception of the world while on the drug. He says, “How can the sane get to know what it actually feels like to be mad? Or, short of being born again as a visionary, a medium, or a musical genius, how can we ever visit the worlds which to Blake, to Swedenborg, to Johann Sebastian Bach, were home?” I thought that this was quite Dionysian. The Doors suggest that through their music, like a door, one can enter in and take part in the experience, too. Their music is a gateway to an alternative perception of the world. Huxley says in The Doors of Perception, “The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.” And, of course there is the drug connection. By using alcohol and drugs, people experience the world in different ways than those who do not, and Morrison definitely indulged in both.

In fact, Morrison himself was nicknamed Dionysus by those who knew him because of his love of wine, poetry, and song that he shared with the god. Also like Dionysus, he created a sort of frenzy with his “followers,” especially the girls. But, this was all short lived. In the summer of 1971, Jim Morrison died of a heart attack in Paris. By dying young and wasting so much talent and potential, he became a tragic character. However, it cannnot be said that Morrison did not get a chance to experience life before he died. In fact, this was his demise.

And, in The Doors’ song entitled “The End,” there is a spoken part in the middle where he says, “Father/ Yes son?/ I want to kill you/ Mother, I want to...fuck you” (http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_doors/the_end.html), which is of course a slightly modified rendition of Sophocles’ drama Oedipus the King. He explains that “‘kill the father’ means destroying everything hierarchical, controlling, and restrictive in one's psyche, while ‘fuck the mother’ means embracing everything that is expansive, flowing, and alive in the psyche” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End). In this way, Morrison is like Dionysus Liber, because he was dedicated to and espoused the idea of freedom.

Like Ovid and others with immortal offspring, Morrison and The Doors also “shall have life” (Ovid 549). Their music has only continued to grow in popularity since Morrison’s death and shortly after when they disbanded. And, they prove that the way to becoming a classic is to invoke the classics that came first. Indeed, classical literature has influenced everything that has been written subsequently, and it is certainly true that “all that is past possesses our present.”