The Importance Of Being The Lizard King

I recently overheard a young American couple talking at a sidewalk cafe in Barcelona who were apparently on some sort of pre-packaged tour of Europe. The wife was of the opinion that people here were friendlier than in Florence. The husband asked "which one was Florence again?" The wife replied, "that's where we had that really bad sushi at the hotel, remember?"
People who understand the profound tragedy and horror (as in Conrad's character Kurtz "the horror..." ) of this cringe-worthy exchange will perhaps think I have joined that motley crew of unfortunates who routinely stumble through Europe, led by bored guides who could point to a Giotto and declare it to be a Delacroix and not generate so much as a raised eyebrow in response, when I describe my next pilgrimage site. Such are my travels that as well as taking in the important, the obscure, and those places that might only have meaning by virtue of what they historically represent, on this tour of ten pilgrimage sites I am also visiting places which have become important relatively recently, while ignoring the vacuous or sordid reasons why anyone would make a point of coming here in the first place.

On today's program, another double header, pilgrimage site number 8 is the last resting place of "The Lizard King" himself, Jim Morrison, lead singer of "The Doors." That Jim Morrison died at the age of 27 of a drug overdose is not entirely unexpected or even unusual. Jimi Hendrix died at age 27, as did Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and most recently Amy Winehouse. Twenty-seven seems to be the age at which pop stars shuffle off their mortal coils. As F.Scott Fitzgerald once wrote "there are no second acts in American lives", and Morrison may very well have been a spent force as he retreated to Paris, with his trial for obscenity pending in Florida. If the poetry of his posthumous work "An American Prayer" was a sign of the direction his oeuvre was heading, Morrison's legend was well-served by dying at his own hand. Morrison suffered from asthma, which apparently he did not bother to control very well. He had been coughing up blood for two weeks, but still insisted on getting drunk on whisky every night and snorting cocaine. The combination of out of control asthma, whiskey, cocaine and heroine eventually caught up with him, and after a long night of drinking and shooting heroine, his lungs filled with blood while asleep in a bathtub on July 3, 1971. The official French coroner's report put the cause of death as "heart failure", which is not unlike writing "lead poisoning" after getting shot.

Morrison is buried in a simple tomb at Cimetière du Père Lachaise in the 20th arrondissement. Whether he deserves to be buried in the company of such notables as Bizet, Balzac, Callas, Chopin, Delacroix, Modigliani, Piaf, Pissarro, Proust, Seurat, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Marcel Marceau and countless other greats is debatable. Nevertheless, so many hordes of American pilgrims, and others, have come here to pay their respects and leave mementos that damage has been done to adjacent tombs by those who routinely camp out overnight to sing Doors tunes by candlelight, holding spontaneous happenings, and generally making pests of themselves with their total disregard for the overall sanctity of the place. A tree nearby is covered in bubblegum as it is now some weird totemic part of the pilgrimage experience to "chew one for Jim". Needless to say it's a disgusting habit, but it seems to be tolerated in lieu of the damage which could be done to all the adjacent tombs. The thinking by some that this piece of ground is somehow American soil, and the frequent conflicts between the ground's keepers and the Mongol hordes of pilgrims who come to pay their respects have caused this tomb, of all others at Père Lachaise, to be a matter of continuous consternation. Morrison's tomb is now permanently guarded and fenced off to prevent graffiti, vandalism and such to other surrounding tombs, and while I was there I asked the guard, who appeared to be very bored and spoke with a raspy voice between long drags from the cigarette that precariously danced on his lips, if this was still an issue. Apparently not so much since they have tightened surveillance. However, he was of the opinion that of all the places to be buried at this cemetery, being anywhere near Morrison's grave was the worst, "un fiasc".

There is a Greek inscription under his name which I make out to read "to his own daemon accordingly" (apologies in advance to any Greeks). In ancient Greek mythology a daemon was an inspiring guiding spirit of Nature which at times was like a muse to philosophers, writers, painters, etc. Consequently if we translate it as: "He was true to his spirit" , it would describe him well.

The fact that a drug-addicted singer of pop tunes with delusions of being an important poet should be buried in this Paris cemetery only because he happened to drop dead here is mildly ironic. The choice of Paris as a destination in the first place was no doubt because he was harboring a fantasy of joining that class of expatriate artists which have included F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Luis Bunuel, and many others. In many respects, Morrison's mediocrity is the diametric opposite of the immense talent of the subject of pilgrimage site number 9, the tomb of Oscar Wilde. Unlike Morrison, Wilde was supremely well-educated, perfectly fluent in English, Irish, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and being thoroughly well read, he could effortlessly extemporize on any subject and come up with the most brilliant witticism or remark on command. His works have stood the test of time, and his plays, especially his masterpiece "The Importance of Being Ernest", are regularly performed by theatrical groups all over the world. His humor is as fresh now as it was 120 years ago, and the pathos and depth of his poetry has few equals. That he died a lonely, penniless death in exile after brilliantly defending himself on the charge of homosexuality (illegal at the time in England) and serving his time in brutal prison conditions is one of the great tragedies of English literature. Who knows what masterpieces of Wilde's later years we have been deprived of.

The tomb of Oscar Wilde has me a bit perplexed; it is fairly rectilinear Art Deco-ish affair and depicts what appears to be an Assyrian gryphon. I am missing the connection between Oscar Wilde and this mythological Middle-Eastern animal. The answer might be as simple as someone having gone to "Tombstones R' Us" and chosen something "nice", but again, there is no interpretive plaque.

According to the very friendly guard at the Morrison grave, Oscar Wilde's final resting spot has also seen some damage, though this time inadvertent from those making the pilgrimage to pay their respects. The tradition for over a hundred years by admirer's of Oscar Wilde has been to kiss his gravestone while wearing red lipstick. So many women (and possibly men?...) have done this that it has left enormous deposits of crimson on the porous stone, at times colouring large parts of it, which in turn has been repeatedly cleaned off. As lipstick is deeply penetrating , slowly the stone has been worn away with each cleaning. The Irish government stepped in and provided the funds to restore the monument and to surround the tombstone in glass, thus allowing the custom to continue, but stopping further "accelerated erosion." In lieu of this unsanitary pathogenic custom, I purchased a single red rose to place at the foot of his tomb.

Messages from all over the world are written on the glass, usually with lipstick, and all four panels of glass are covered with hundreds of kisses. As usual, click to embiggen:

Paris, in the Spring, is lovely; the city shines, the air is clean, the tourists have not arrived, and if they could only stop all that ridiculous accordion music which seems to be everywhere, including the metro...

For those who are still worried, yes I did revisit the Louvre and caught the new DaVinci installation (by itself worth the trip to Paris) and yes, I did revisit the Musee d'Orsay, Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, and yes, I will be going to the poetry event at Shakespeare and Co., and yes, I do know Paris reasonably well, this being my fourth visit. Traveling around Paris on my mountain bike is a bit like driving a Sherman tank through a rose garden. I feel self-conscious when stopped at lights surrounded by French cyclists riding a type of bicycle that doesn't really exist in North America; a city bike, similar to a ten speed with thin wheels but upright horizontal handlebars, fenders with integral lighting, chain guards, internal hub gears, and integrated racks and locks. It's terribly thin and elegant, nothing like the (literally) military-grade machine I'm riding around in. Unlike British Columbia, where the mountain bike is the default choice of bicycle, no-one here rides mountain bikes in the city. In a subtle way it is the equivalent stupidity, though not as grotesquely egregious, as those urban North Americans who own SUV's that have never seen so much as an unpaved city parking lot, much less the undeveloped tracts for which they were nominally designed. Parisian bikes seem to say "Paris is lovely in the Spring, let's just wander about aimlessly, taking in the beauty of it all, stopping at bistros and listening to accordion music." My bike says, "Let's invade Iraq, whaddayasay? Anyone?... Anyone?... Bueller?..."