brushes with Jim Morrison
“I came to see only him,” the woman in white said to Ben and me as we held our map in front of our faces. We ticked off the graves we had already seen in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise and made our way to Jim Morrison’s, but we were having an unusually difficult time finding it. Many of the graves where over one million people are buried are large or front-and-center, but when we saw increasing crowds of people in band t-shirts, wearing fanny packs, or peering at the same maps as ours, we knew we were getting close.
The woman in white walked beside us.“We left a potato at Parmentier’s grave and a kiss at Oscar Wilde’s. We’ve been doing the whole tradition, so we’re gonna stick a piece of gum by Jim Morrison’s tree,” I said as she sipped from her water bottle and wiped a beat of sweat from her face.
“Everyone comes to see Morrison,” she coughed.
“Believe me, I know,” I replied. “That’s why we’re going on this scavenger hunt. Those poor bastards buried right next to him.”
“Yes,” she said solemnly, “those poor bastards.”
In Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, tourists and locals seek out a few graves, each with its own tradition. Nonetheless, some dedicated to the non-famous are visually stunning and are admired for that alone. Still, so many graves have unrecognizable names and gravesites that are less compelling than anything else around. Some of the dead are sans graves, their ashes scattered on a lawn where flowers are thrown.
I often wonder who will visit me when I go back to the earth, but until that trip, it never occurred to me that strangers of my lifetime, decades or centuries later, might see my name next to that of the person they really came to see. Perhaps if my headstone were beautiful, those visitors might see my name but ultimately would be taking a closer look at the aesthetics of my loved ones who outlive me. Those many who were buried before and beside the likes of Morrison, Wilde, Parmentier, Stein, and Noir have more people visiting them than they ever dreamed, generations of being witnessed and forgotten as soon as the visitor leaves their trinket, lipstick kiss, or stone, and move on.
Those who are noticed for their aesthetic quality have something other than the brush with fame, but instead, a brush with somebody’s judgment of what’s not just beautiful but a representation of a long-gone life.
Who could see a massive tombstone with this embrace and not think of touching their loved one in the most agonizing moments? When I saw this grave, I saw my husband holding me, and the name attached did not matter because the universal represented above them took center stage.
One step apart from the beautiful is the bizarre, that which differentiates itself from all the rest, such as this one below covered in mirrors, demanding one observe oneself within the uniqueness of the grave and the person it is dedicated to.
I could not see myself taking a photograph of the mirrors, my image redirected in a thousand obscuring places.
The grave of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier is not visited for its particular beauty but instead is visited out of gratitude for his popularization of potatoes in Europe during his lifetime. The tubers are left as gifts, sometimes with notes for things that the visitor hopes can last longer than even death.
This famous and less beautiful grave creates a brush with intimacy: a wish placed and perhaps granted. Still, a personal wish on a potato becomes a personal touch of the lips at Oscar Wilde's grave, despite the signs admonishing visitors to stop kissing the grave for the love of God. The signs don’t seem to stop anyone.
After buying an overpriced lipstick solely so I could share this intimacy with tradition and a glass wall, Ben and I left for the grave that intrigued me most of all.
We trekked to Victor Noir’s grave, whose effigy with its bulging crotch has been rubbed clean of bronze oxidization.
Here, women touch him, kiss him, leave flowers, and wish for a husband, a child, and a lifetime of love. Some leave pictures of the children that Noir must have interceded for from the grave, an intimacy that this man, who was shot dead at 21 years old in 1870 and only had his monument made years later, was likely surprised at being tasked with on the other side.
The woman in white was overjoyed when the three of us finally reached Jim Morrison’s grave. Straightening her dress and fixing her hair, she, along with Ben and I, stood and stared past the fence at one of the most famous graves in Paris. Next to us, a woman in black played The Doors on her phone, and those six or seven of us standing there stood listening, waiting, and perhaps, in some quiet part of our minds, wondering what we were doing there.
A guard told the woman in black to turn off the song lest she disturb the peace of the man whose grave had not gone one day without ritual in the 53 years since his death. The fence, put in place in 2004, has not stopped everyone from leaving their trinkets, photos, and flowers.
Whoever left these things did so with risk, perhaps a risk that made the very act of leaving flowers more intimate than a kiss on Wilde’s glass or a wish upon Noir’s bronze.
Since the fence was built, many more risk-averse people have left chewing gum on a nearby tree. Those responsible for maintaining the grounds later covered the tree with a bamboo cover, so visitors stuck their chewing gum on that instead.
The woman in black stopped playing the song, and the guards continued to watch us dutifully. The people behind us edged closer, hoping to stand trade places and gain the closeness to Morrison’s grave that those of us at the front had.
I looked at the woman in white and pointed at the grave next to Morrison’s. "That poor bastard,” I said. She looked at me and then peered alongside me at the text on the tombstone.
“1877,” she read the year on the tombstone. “He’s been here a long time. He’s had his fun,” she said as we moved out of the way for others to seek, for one moment, a brush with somebody whose death and burial were more legendary than most could have ever dreamed.