When you're strange

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down

The Doors

How ironic that a few days after claiming I hate poetry, I would happen across "When you're strange", a documentary retracing the life of Jim Morrison and the Doors.

Of course I did say that I quite like some American poetry and in that, is my saving grace, I suppose. Listening for the first time to the Doors' lyrics reminded me of some of the poetry that I've found beautiful in the past. 

Typically I don't listen to song lyrics. Most of it is crap and detracts from the actual beat and rhythm of a song which, in most cases, is the best a song has to offer. If, for instance, I were to actually listen to a 50Cent or Kesha song, I'd be turned off music forever. Well...I don't really listen to either of them but I have the worst memory when it comes to naming people I like. That said, even those I do like (I love electro, rock music and all its variants which I can't for the life of me distinguish), contain either silly lyrics or very straightforward lyrics. The only lyrics I do seem to know are Backstreet Boys, which I listened to when I was 14.

Most of the time I listen and dance to the instrumental and can rarely quote from a song. 

And then come the Doors.

The poetry in the lyrics are like seeing a painting that speaks to you for the first time. There's that moment where you get the sense that someone, somewhere has succeeded in making that swirl of emotions inside you, materialise and even, comprehensible. Psychiatrists exist for a reason and that is that if others remain a mystery to us, the most difficult people to understand are our own selves. You feel less alone and relieved and, in my case at least, motivated anew.

I actually learned something from the documentary. I saw many different things; how hard it must have been to know Jim Morrison (I do not envy his girlfriend or his band), what incendiary times does to and for the creative, how being lonely destroys, how I don't even agree with everything Jim Morrison said or believed.

But I learned one thing which I think I knew but hadn't managed to express yet, which is why the documentary was like that painting:

Beauty of words is one thing. Being a wordsmith is a talent and a precious gift to own. But it all means nothing if nothing is being said with it.

You can craft the most beautiful of sentences but if the words don't act as the vessel they are meant to be, the entire act is forgettable.