Editorial:
Fifty years after his death, Gorian Delpâture takes us to the most intimate, the most inaccessible place of the artist Jim Morrison: the poet’s psyche. We discover – through a text which is also a literary game sprinkled with quotes from Morrison’s words and extracts from authentic interviews – the inveterate reader of novels and poetry, the disciple of William Blake, the lone wolf. Far from the cliché of a rock singer, Jim Morrison turns out to be an honorable candidate for the Nobel. Gorian Delpâture offers us a moment of contemplation, of inner meditation within this fantastic ball of energy. He makes us live in the heart of the “simple American poet”.
It is with great pleasure and interest that I read this story which takes the opposite of the impression that the singer had made on me during our recent meeting. It was two years ago, a demonic story that takes place, as it should since the Rolling Stones, in St. Petersburg and not in Bulgakovian Moscow. I had bought tickets at the Lensovet theatre, a place known for its very contemporary productions and little appreciated by a certain segment of the Russian population, like this seller of tickets for the Mariinsky who showed all her contempt – “Lensovet, this is not theatre! – with regard to two tourists who swore they did not want to set foot in a theater again following an evening spent at Lensovet. I had been attracted by the title of the play played, “The Demons”, one of the many theatrical adaptations of the immense Russian literary heritage. Now it happened that there was no mention of Verkhovensky, Stavrogin and his abominable crime, there was no reference to the Dostoyevsky plot! Instead, two couples alternately acted out household scenes. A woman had the whim of lighting cigarettes without smoking them, which had the gift of exasperating her companion who constantly asked her the reason for this mania. She refused to give him one. Couples moved between instruments and microphones. The stage was actually set up for a rock concert. And between each household scene, a rock band played and Jim Morrison took his place in the host body of an actor of prodigious talent, predisposed to rock spiritualism sessions. And from the first appearance, all the spectators and myself, seated in tight rows of conference chairs, “we had a great visitation of energy”. In this theater, the singer fascinated by cinema and literature had come back to life, I saw “an electric shaman on stage”. And we became eager to see the actor-singer come back to life, we were in need. We didn’t care about the marital problems of actors who were very sympathetic. In short, we were on the verge of a trance, and when we left the room, there was a rush to the doors to buy The Doors records. It touched me a lot to know that even there, where the West is lost and dissipated in the mists of the Neva, Jim Morrison had suddenly been able to make a completely unexpected, lively and enjoyable appearance in order to seal our first meeting.