1. The Road

This book is dedicated to Uninitiated
 
Erotic prose,
Prosaic pose,
Can I have some fun?
Or should I write something?


1. The Road

The road, light and shade of our travels. The sin of civilizations’ souls, the miscarriage of saliva thread, the sticky screws of the chameleon tongue. The road, “do-ro-ga” in Russian. The tip of the tongue goes forward and a bit up to sing a solid “Do” (C) of the major scale, then rises to the mysterious alveolus to produce “Ro” - try to sing it like “Re” (D) of the scale. Finally, why not to complete the composition with, say, the third, though not the last tone of Chinese speech, exhaling the final branchy “Ga”? A stunningly sad and at the same time perplexing work of the articulation apparatus.

I care about the virgin road,
Haystacks that are frozen in the darkness.
Yes, some hay and lots of manure -
That’s a piece of cake, a bit of hay.

However, what hay is there and what straw, even if it’s the last straw thrown into the nose of a Cyclops? Outlived, ringed off, depopulated lyrics of horse traction. Now we need new lyrics that are congruent to the progressing moment. How about a light, barely audible chime of raindrops on a windshield, that will start a downpour, a storm? The sounds of light staccato at the beginning of “Riders on the Storm”, Jim Morrison’s last song. Oh, we need then also to submerge into the neglected aquarium of his artistic tornadoes, I mean by that the experimental film HWY: An American Pastoral.

***
They say that when James Douglas Morrison was studying at Florida State University in Tallahassee, he had a girlfriend named Mary back in Clearwater. She was pretty and intelligent, “Someone special, a spiritual person he could talk with for hours. They shared their dreams. He told her he wanted to be a writer. She wanted to be a dancer in the movies…*”

“For the next eighteen months, while he was at Florida State, Jimmy often hitchhiked the two hundred and eighty miles between Tallahassee and Clearwater to be near Mary Werbelow. Those solitary journeys on hot and dusty Florida two-lane blacktop roads, with his thumb out and his imagination on fire with lust and poetry and Nietzsche and God knows what else — taking chances on redneck truckers, furtive homos, and predatory cruisers — left an indelible psychic scar on Jimmy, whose notebooks began to obsessively feature scrawls and drawings of a lone hitchhiker, an existential traveler, faceless and dangerous, a drifting stranger with violent fantasies, a mystery tramp: the killer on the road.*”

Here’s to you, please, inadvertently dropped quintessence of “Riders on the Storm” from a knowledgeable person.

watercolors were burning in the mountains,
but didn’t burn out because of blizzards
that swept spruce with snow, barely
having time to sweep the burning-colors

His new path, or, if you don’t mind, a fresh offshoot of the old one was an echoing road from Florida to California, from university to university. Burning hot landscape with a lone killer wandering against the backdrop of cool mountains. Yes, and a bivouac in a desert with squeaky scorpions.

That was a wonderful reason to recollect the childhood horror, the brightest impression in his life — an upturned truck with crippled dying Indians scattered along the road. Jim said that one of them, a dead guy, almost a boy was pressing flowers to his chest. Jim’s father, a man of dignity, a naval officer and an admiral later, had no memory of the episode at all, and he even claimed that his son, a devotee of a very peculiar reading, had simply invented all the story. Yes, the same George Stephen Morrison, commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident*.

Jim makes a stop at a gas station after he have seized somebody’s car; the episode is gloriously played out in the film HWY: An American Pastoral. There he twists a bookshelf for quite a long while but does not choose any book. The lingering creak of the rolling shelf, reminding the creaks of pioneers’ vans, bumps into your memory like a psychedelic subconsciousness break-in.

When Jim arrives in Los Angeles, he calls a familiar poet and says that he’s just got out of a desert. Well, some guy picked him up in a desert but then Jim got rid of him, nothing special. After stomping around and urinating into some low toilet Jim leaves for outside. He is heading to the Whisky A Go Go nightclub on the Sunset Strip where vague figures are roaming in the darkness, and it smells of civilization and culture. So,

“Riders on the storm
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown…*”
---

*, * - Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend by Stephen Davis.
* - Gulf of Tonkin Incidents in August of 1964 that led to the U.S. massive involvement into the Vietnam War.
* - “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors: Densmore / Krieger / Manzarek / Morrison.