His is, I suppose, the most visited site in Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise. It's a smallish American-style granite marker tucked in amongst skyscraper-like mausoleums. Embedded in the stone's face is a bronze plaque on which an epitaph, in Greek, says: "Truth to your own spirit." Many fresh bouquets and pots of flowering plants are placed about. Three lit votive candles, poems, and messages scribbled on scraps of paper adorn the concrete-framed rectangle of earth leased for his remains. The walls of the adjacent mausoleums are literally covered with graffiti, messages of love to a poet who died young in a bathtub in a Paris hotel. A ghetto-blaster amplifies, but not too loudly, a song recorded by an American rock group which called itself The Doors, having taken their name from the title of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.About 30 young people, smoking and talking away this warm day, are sprawled disrespectfully amongst or straddled upon the surrounding masonry. One girl holds an acoustic guitar while a boy reaches around from in back of her, placing her fingers on the guitar's frets and strings, teaching her chords, perhaps chords to accompany:
The days are bright and filled with pain
Enclose me in your gentle rein
The time you ran was too insane
We'll meet again, we'll meet again.
Oh tell me where your freedom lies
The streets are fields that never die
Deliver me from reasons why
You'd rather cry; I'd rather fly.
I removed from my knapsack the sixteen postcards I'd written but not yet mailed. From these I extracted the one addressed to my beloved Abby and the one addressed to my beloved friend Larry in Lansing, Michigan, who once, twenty years before, while we were both stoned to immobility, and it was two o'clock in the morning, and we were sitting on the floor of his astonishingly disheveled living room listening to Neil Young, had tears in his eyes as he described Jim Morrison as one of the few whom he considered to be his guardian angels.
"Him and Gram Parsons and Hank Williams. And you are one too," Larry said that night, flattering me.
I pressed Abby's and then Larry's postcard against the marker; then I brushed them against the sacred earth.
