Beckoning West
Laura Dvorak

Leonardo Da Vinci’s "Last Supper" is heuristic. Googling "Last Supper" returns 35,100 hits. Leave your computer and visit Cuzco’s cathedral, where an impressive display of paintings includes"Last Supper" Incans hunched around a platter of roasted guinea pig.

Googling "fiberglass last supper" provides two images, one a sculpture created by classically trained Belgian Albert Szukalski. It rises, life-size, from Mojave's hard pan, plaster robes whirling in frieze. Szukalski was born sixteen months after Jim Morrison, and could pass as his brother, with brown hair, bitter chocolate eyes, and a brooding pull around the mouth.

"Last Supper" celebrated its twentieth anniversary October 2004, years after Szukalski and Morrison were gone. Szukalski died from cancer at 54. Morrison died at 27 from unknown causes. He was haunted by death for years, after witnessing a grisly accident. "Peace Frog" recounted “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.” Jim loved the West:

Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get there, and we’ll do the rest.

Albert also loved the West for its freedom from restrictive convention. However, the West wasn't free enough to allow "Last Supper" in Death Valley.  Instead, his ghostly figures huddle on the sidelines, sheltered by the Funeral Mountains and nestled in the Amargosa Valley where tumbleweeds thrive. Wild mules nibble the Russian thistle, then disperse the seeds from the plant romanticized by the Sons of the Pioneers who crooned “drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds” in horse plodding cadence.

Magenta shadows melt with the rising moon. A robed figure beckons, extended sleeve revealing hollow inkiness, overture to Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell":

If the doors of perception were cleansed
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things
thro’ narrow chinks of this cavern.

Jim Morrison enrolled at UCLA in 1964 where a colleague persuaded him to form a rock band. The Doors appeared on London Fog’s stage in September 1965. Jim earned $5. He was a sculptor of ghosts and his lyrics seduced audiences into perception-altering journey and visions of insanity:

It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end.

Szukalski and Morrison, creators of timeless, mesmerizing legacies, likely never met. But their messages coalesce. The robed figures in the desert signal distress and indecision.  Morrison's poetry is infused with unrest, deception, and the futility of war: “When the music’s over / turn out the lights.”

Mojave skies shelter the men of Galilee, sentinels in this sandy, wind-swept valley. Like Jim's Woman in the Window, there is no stopping them.

Laura Dvorak is a native southern Californian who earned her M.A. (Communication) and M.S. (Interdisciplinary Studies) in the 21st century from San Diego State University. Now there's time for the really fun stuff.