Almost as soon as I begin reading Journey to the East, I have The Doors in my head. As I read I’m immersed in Hesse’s world, imagining the sounds of the book (Eastern, mystic sorts of sounds), but as soon as I’ve closed the book to tend to a child’s need or refill my mug of coffee, there it is, the unmistakable sound of Jim’s deep baritone…

Love me two time baby
Love me twice today
Love me two times girl
I’m goin’ away
Love me two times girl
Once for tomorrow, once just for today
Love me two times
I’m goin’ away 

I haven’t listened to The Doors in years, but I did go through a major Doors phase in my late teens. It was around the same time that I discovered what is probably Hesse’s most famous work, Siddhartha. I loved it. The music I listened to all those years ago, immersed in the pages of Siddhartha, comes flooding back as I turn the pages of The Journey to the East. The book is new to me, but I suppose the spirit of the work and the one who wrote it is connected, somehow, via tangled neural pathways, to my teenage self. And that included Jim, Ray, Robbie and John. And Pam. But mostly Jim.

I pull out the Doors album Alive, She Cried. I have two Doors Albums on vinyl, but this is the one that has the song that keeps playing on repeat in my head, forever linked, I suppose, with the words of Herman Hesse. The first track on this album is Gloria. This is significant, because it’s also the first track on Patti’s album Horses. I take it as a sign, pull the old record from its sleeve and put it on the record player.

People often speak of how the sense of smell is one of the most powerful memory triggers. How scents from our past linger in our brains, just waiting to bring past worlds flooding to our awareness when smelled again. Everyone says it’s so, and I believe it. But it’s never happened to me. I remember particular scents and smells of childhood, but they’ve never caused memories to pop up out of the blue. Music, though, will bring back long-forgotten memories in vivid detail. Many of my memories seem inseparable from the music that accompanied them. The soundtrack of my life. First kisses, family gatherings, bus rides to sporting events. Church pews and back roads, driving my first car, a red Acura Integra. Stick shift. Blasting The Doors.

The music of The Doors brings me back to my late teens. And I didn’t just listen to the music. In my typical obsessive way I read every book related to them I could get my hands on. I must have watched the movie with Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison 20 times. Maybe more. I dreamed of visiting the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. I would leave a poem, a flower. Light a candle.

Patti Smith often visits the graves of the masters, tenderly cleaning and tending the graves, leaving offerings, and of course, taking photographs with her Polaroid.

As I’m reading The Journey to the East, and the narrator, H.H., is describing the mystical journey of the League, this sentence captures me:

We visited and honored all sacred places and monuments, churches and consecrated tombstones which we came across on our way; chapels and alters were adorned with flowers; ruins were honored with songs or silent contemplation; the dead were commemorated with music and prayers. 

I thought of Patti Smith and her collection of photographs of tombstones and graves visited. Repects paid. Devotion to her craft and those who came before. I was reminded of my youthful desire to visit Jim Morrison’s grave. And now, some 20 years later, I understand this impulse in a new way. I never went to France, and the list of graves I’d like to visit one day has grown. Changed. Like me. Like everything.

When H.H. speaks of the member of the League, and their goals for the journey, he writes that each

…carried his own fond childhood dream within his heart as a source of inner strength and comfort. 

Not long into the book it becomes clear that the “journey” defies geograhpy and time. It’s so much more than that.