| The Doors – Light My Fire Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Of course this song is about passion and sex, but Morrison also probes darker territory. Being a fan of Nietzsche and Freud (see: The End), he is also interested in the relationship of sex and death. Sex is a brush with annihilation, and orgasm is at once the center of creation and the feeling of complete disconnection from the world. Indeed, the french sometimes call orgasm "la petite mort" or "the little death." Morrison makes the metaphor explicit with the line "And our love become a funeral pyre." He uses the image of fire here and in the chorus to express this duality of passion and destruction, two impulses which in fact have much in common. But rather than a violent destruction (the subject of another discussion), his appears to be a more nirvana-like and ascendant end, declaring, though he says it is a lie, "we couldn't get much higher," and evokes the image of his ashes blowing away in the smoke. This song can be read as a kind of nihilistic view of sex as a metaphor for life, in which the end (death) and the beginning (orgasm) are indistinguishable. It may also be seen as a commentary on the hopeless entanglement of love, sex and death in romance. One commenter remarks the lyrics remind him of a lover's joint suicide, like a willing Romeo and Juliet. The glamour of death lends Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers their place in our hearts, and the same may be said of Morrison himself, whose tragically young end has made him a sex god, immortal in the same way he seems to dream of becoming in this song. |
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