Post by darkstar3 on Jan 31, 2011 14:30:50 GMT
A Shaman’s Sojourn Through The Doors
By: Danny Sugerman
Creem Magazine
The Doors Special Edition
Summer 1981
As the years go by Jim Morrison, the personality, becomes more and more vague. And I begin to fear I’m losing my mind or worse, one of my best friends. But as his laugh loses it timbre and the eyes their childlike devilish glint, his life emerges in perspective. Repeating the experiences we shared doesn’t intensify, it dilutes. Where there should be images accompanied by emotions and heartbeats and tears and all the other internal goings-on that constitute that profound loss, memories become rigid…but I don’t feel like I’ve lost Jim Morrison.
Because I continue to love Jim and his Doors as passionately as imaginable. I feel as if I’m sharing Jim. I recognize his current accomplishments and share them with him, in an intimate, ultimately very spiritual way. I know now, for example, that Jim did not die in vain. His reason for going to Paris has come to pass – and that is, his lyrics are now being listened to and the Doors’ music is being appreciated and Jim Morrison the freak, the carnival act, the enfant terrible, is not overshadowing the essence, the message, the meaning. The Wild Child is gone but the Poet/Singer is alive and well. And I know Jim would dig that. Meat directly to spirit. Pass Go and collect, as it is. When the Doors were at their most believable, when they were at their most believable, when they were there socked into the Universal Mind Wall Socket, they were outright religious musically and Morrison – always visual – with words and in images as well. The street punk reincarnated as a choir boy. The Fallen Angel. Dangerous and sullen, yet beautiful, androgynous, innocent.
Morrison once said of the pregnant pause the Doors would occasionally employ during their concerts. “Well, they (the audience) either get you or you get them. If I don’t have them, or I lose them, then I just stop everything and get’em” In other words, their purpose was clear. To get us. To take us with them, shake us, awaken us, rake us over their coals of darkness, despair, and fear; always stoking us with hope, always hope, Ray Manzarek’s carnival-esque organ, Morrison’s careful insertion of gentle reminders that no matter how bad it gets, there is always hope, always salvation.
One of the other ways Morrison caught us and dragged us willingly along was to set us up, then catch us off guard. “Moonlight Drive” is the Doors at their unpredictable, beatific best. Rimbaudian images in a California invitation, a love song with thoroughly devastating lines” “There’s nothing left open and there’s no time to decide/We’ve stepped into a river on our Moon Drive.” Off-guard, we were swept into the current the Doors provided. They’d given us no other choice. You went wherever Morrison wanted to take you.
Writers said it was mass hypnotism. A séance (an idea Jim loved, supporting his “shaman” infatuation). But could we reasonably expect someone to keep taking our trips for us, vicariously appreciating, forever the passenger, never the driver? For how long? Can you expect, in effect, magic? Is it fair?
It wasn’t fair it wasn’t easy either, Morrison would probably say. Expectations are never fair, and living up to them is tiring as hell.
So even when the Doors stopped being a religious experience they became, like so many religious experiences, a religion. The ritual changed, and the high was different. It became blues and rock and Jim smiled more. The leather pants went into the closet and the beard sprouted. The music grew and the band, always tight, now glistened with professionalism and grit. There was still plenty of evil imagery, lots of reptiles, seasons and water; sex and death, blood and death, joy and death, hope and despair, and all sort of emotional yin-yangs and contradictions, enough to make an attender at least think. Morrison once said: “I don’t care if they love us or hate us. As long as we made ‘em think.”
Because aware that yes, there is a choice. But you gotta make it. ‘Course Morrison wouldn’t resort to such direct speech, because he liked to make getting there half the fun. Wake Up! He screamed as us, and I can still see him drunk at the Palms Bar, face in hands, thinking of all the possibilities.
There are words which a writer uses which are more revealing than all the facts a biographer can amass. Some of the words used to describe the Doors and Jim were: charismatic, sensual, mysterious, hypnotic, brilliant, sexy, dangerous, evil, angry, mournful…Jim was not evil, though his behavior often was. He didn’t want to go to hell. He did want to dynamite it. In order to do that, he had to travel in Lucifer’s direction, along his path. Jim knew he had to stand directly in front of hell before he could storm its gates and reveal it, expose the domain of evil, until not a shred of mystery was left. “The evil is in the mind,” Jim would say. Morrison went through hell to prove it did not exist. He went to hell so he could live forever in heaven.
Morrison lived in Los Angeles longer than he lived anywhere else and he loved the town harder than any man I know. He wrote of his love in “L.A. Woman,” transforming the city into a bride. In saying goodbye to L.A. he wrote a love letter, a delicious song of longing and lust: “I see your hair is burning/hills are fill’d with fire/if they say I never loved you/you know they are a liar/drivin’ down your freeways/mighnight alleys roam/cops in cars, the topless bars…”
The freeways are the girl’s loins, and we climb them, the lush green hills, the hair alive, on fire. And like the best poets, Morrison gives his love real elements, color and life. Where Arthur Rimbaud had his girl with the violet eyes, Morrison just as surely had his woman/city of night. Updated. Crude, lusty, horny, sensuous and gamey.
Physically he might have lived in L.A. but it wasn’t until he was saying goodbye to it that he wrote directly about his home. Earlier, he was much too obsessed with the region within. L.A. was certainly an influence, like the books he read, but only an influence at best. He was always searching, never revealing anything concrete to his legions, always giving only tantalizing glimpses: “Strange eyes fill strange rooms/voices will signal their tired end/the hostess is grinning/the guests sleep from sinning/hear me take of sin/and you know/this is it.” “Strange Days have found you!” “I won’t come out,” he wrote inhis childlike scrawl in a notebook, “you must come in where I construct a world that rivals the real.”
The strange thing is when you were with Jim on the town, the inside world would suddenly, without warning, leap out and seize anyone within its range. Sometimes its grasp was reassuring and gentle, but sometimes the inner terror would leap from the shadows of his soul and fall intoxicated onto the lawn, or out a window, into your soul. Flat on your back staring into a colorless space with rhythm or sense, other than that of falling, falling, and you having no control, aware of nothing else but Jim’s laughter ringing in your ears, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Let’s run…Run? Jim. I can’t get up.
Jim probably died from self indulgence, like Joplin, Hendrix, Dylan Thomas and Hemingway…and like Joplin and Hendrix, Morrison made it so much fun, so appealing. But unlike Janis and Jimi, Jim was not into drugs. He was into booze. “I hate scoring,” he said. “besides getting booze is easy. It’s just across the counter. And it’s much more sociable. Booze beats dope anyday for me. It stimulates conversation…What can I say, Soul beats money and booze beat dope.” Morrison drank with such a flair, made it look like you were missing something if you weren’t drunk. He told buddy Michael McClure he couldn’t picture not drinking. He loved it.
Drinking doused the fire inside, made it tolerable, numbed the pain and enabled him to unlock other worlds the pain otherwise overrode and blanketed. Without the pain Morrison would most likely be alive, but he would not have generated the magic and the charge that was abundant and powerful. He would be alive, yes, but we would not know him, we would not care for him as we do now. A cruel irony of fate is we care most passionately for those who hurt, those we have no hand to help. Even while Jim was alive, it was obvious to those who knew and loved him: we could not deal with his pain for him. We could only mutely wish it would go away. Between the hours of joyfully joining in with him on his littered path of genius and shit, we would remind ourselves that this man who is so absorbing to be with, for whom there is nothing we wouldn’t do, this man we love so much, this friend, is killing himself. Occasionally someone would say, “I wish you wouldn’t drink so much, Jim” to which he would retort, “I don’t tell you how to live, why are you telling me?” “Because we care, Jim.” “Well, don’t care.”
Critics of the biography No One Here Gets Out Alive complain that Jim is painted too dark, too destructive, insensitive and cruel. How could I honestly say I was a friend? They are only part right. Allow me to use this article as a vehicle for clarification.
It is simple to say Jim was this. Jim was that. Too simple. Jim was one of the most complex beings, the most driven individual I’ve ever encountered. If No One Here Gets Out Alive is guilty of anything, it editorializes too little and concludes nothing, makes no judgments and awards no compliments. Jim was simply too much the changeling to be labeled and defined. I leave that to the critics.
Morrison was obsessed with finding out; finding the meaning, the pulse of the world. As has been said of Rimbaud, he want to “see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything.” He traveled as quickly as possible, always forward, purposeful and fast. But was you advance with a mission the government is there ahead of you. Morrison had a purpose alright; he proposed to set us free. The government was ahead of Jim, with its restrictions, its shackles, courts and laws. He was constantly arrested and harassed.
Time and time again they beat Jim down. In New Haven, breach of peace was among the charges. How does a truth seeker breech peace? Phoenix, Arizona – inciting a riot, on the streets of L.A., and in the air above – drunk and disorderly; and finally in Miami, Florida, where the list of charges would take up half this page.
The only law Jim abided by was to “be true to yourself.” The law of nonconformity. And he found that by rock writers he was ultimately regarded as a fool. For trying to take his audience to Paradise Now, instead of later, he was ridiculed. By the same writers who licked their lips and sharpened their pencils and dished out delicious adjectives adding up to (if you took them literally): Jim was the new messiah, the Doors as messengers from a strange new wonderful world. Then he was told no one appreciated his words. Then he was told no one appreciated his efforts, no one was listening, he was a cheerleader with no game going on, except the gigantic game in his head.
Jim really believed rock ‘n’ roll went on trial in Miami. He spent his last cent attempting to change the obscenity laws in this country. And now, we see, we must credit the Doors for their slackening. Jim would dig that too. That effort, also was not in vain. He had said fuck and shit, got drunk, allegedly dropped his drawers and no one cared. Another dirty Doors show. Early on, writers loved him for his filth and his sex. Later on, he went on trial for doing it only too well. The song was nearly forgotten for the fight.
Jim had the choice of fighting his detractors. I asked him in one of his last interviews how he dealt with detractors. He told me with a smile on his face. “I either fight or run.” Jim would have easily spent the rest of his life fighting, or running. But he could not, would not, compromise because compromise was not a word in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic. A person who went whole hog or die. In this lies Jim’s purity, his innocence. For him to limit his self destruction, or curb his cruelty, to limit his behavior in any way would have meant compromise. He could be kind and he was often charitable and hospitable. But Jim did cultivate these traits; they were not his goals. They had nothing to do with his search, his attempt to merge with everything and everybody at once – to make this world come. That was Jim’s concern.
However, his charm, his enormous generosity, was so extreme, it was self destruction and totally selfless. He literally gave himself away. Money, he gave it away. He could not say no. When Morrison drank, the room drank. He spent little directly on himself but hosted his friends to rooms, food, wine and women. Eventually, he fled L.A. to go to Paris, not to hide from his enemies, but to ditch his friends. In Paris Jim found new friends, more bars, and without a focus for his enormous talents or his huge rebellion, without any satisfying results evident from his strident search, he became bored, confused, depressed. And he drank.
The pain of the mission because the pain of no mission at all. Simply because, unbeknownst to him, he had already done all he was supposed to do for Chrissakes. Evident to all, although no one wanted to admit it, was that Jim died for the simplest reasons: like a retired career man who has a sudden heart attack because he lacks purpose. Jim died because he had nothing left to do.
It is plausible, but unlikely that Jim continued to run and fight. It is only true that if there were a man alive who had the ability, the means, the nerve to dive into anonymity, it was Jim. He did go to Paris to escape, and Paris was not escape at all. But the reason – Jim did not have any reason to stage his own death. Sure he was sick of being Jim Morrison, especially the Jim Morrison people wanted him to be, that he was not any longer. He could not escape that. Jim was ultimately a realist. He knew that if you can’t deal with your problems in your own backyard, you can’t deal with them in someone else’s. And his backyard was not his problem. What he was looking for was not outside, it was inside; running would do no good. And he was sick of fighting. So he continued doing what he has been doing all along, what he knew how to do, one of the few things in life he enjoyed doing…to relieve the suffering, he drank.
We know now the issue between good and evil was decided long ago. Evil belongs to the world of make believe. Of our artists, our modern messengers, we ask that they keep their feet and words firmly planted in our reality, but bare their soul, press the peddle firmly to the metal, keep their heads in the sky, soar. Of course, reality for one obsessed with visions and miracles becomes subjective rather than objective and Morrison was nothing if not a man of letters, who dealt with images and visions. He was never our reality, yet he could whisper in our ear and fulfill our fantasies because he was communicating from beyond. It was Jim’s belief that if he bathed himself in fear it would cease. He stared at death to vanquish it. He constantly contradicted his favorite writer, William Blake, who claimed that wallowing in the muck is not the best way of cleansing oneself. “Bullshit!” Morrison screamed. Drown yourself in the darkness until your pupils swallow your skull and burn light into the dark. Morrison was also the sort who believed that if you pulled hard enough on midnight you could unroll the dawn.
I like to believe Jim died to be heard. He speaks to us from beyond, even now, forever. Underwater, not underground, he continues to move and delight us as we peek at his distorted, larger than life image, languid and sensual. Without physical image and neither on nor off stage theatrics to interfere, his words emerge gloriously riding and jumping the Doors’ timeless music. Morrison was this generation’s electric poet, there is simply none finer.
By the way, if No One Here Gets Out Alive has a message, its not to turn Jim into a hero for making self destruction look like so much fun (as some have claimed). The less for those of us not destined to be visionaries is not to kill yourself for any reason, because if you can’t find it at home, you can’t find it traveling, either. Destruction is a very final process, but rather the process of a profound symptom of a gigantic unanswered question, asked by only a select few. And then, if you are of that ilk, then you don’t get – then no one there gets – out alive.
Of course, none of us get out alive anyway. Much of what Jim wrote was on the premise: Sex begins it, death ends it. He lived each day knowing and believing each drink, each performance might be his very last. There will be no encore. There will be only what always was: Jim’s words/the Doors music. And for all of us, that should be enough. We never had the right to expect anything more.
END.
By: Danny Sugerman
Creem Magazine
The Doors Special Edition
Summer 1981
As the years go by Jim Morrison, the personality, becomes more and more vague. And I begin to fear I’m losing my mind or worse, one of my best friends. But as his laugh loses it timbre and the eyes their childlike devilish glint, his life emerges in perspective. Repeating the experiences we shared doesn’t intensify, it dilutes. Where there should be images accompanied by emotions and heartbeats and tears and all the other internal goings-on that constitute that profound loss, memories become rigid…but I don’t feel like I’ve lost Jim Morrison.
Because I continue to love Jim and his Doors as passionately as imaginable. I feel as if I’m sharing Jim. I recognize his current accomplishments and share them with him, in an intimate, ultimately very spiritual way. I know now, for example, that Jim did not die in vain. His reason for going to Paris has come to pass – and that is, his lyrics are now being listened to and the Doors’ music is being appreciated and Jim Morrison the freak, the carnival act, the enfant terrible, is not overshadowing the essence, the message, the meaning. The Wild Child is gone but the Poet/Singer is alive and well. And I know Jim would dig that. Meat directly to spirit. Pass Go and collect, as it is. When the Doors were at their most believable, when they were at their most believable, when they were there socked into the Universal Mind Wall Socket, they were outright religious musically and Morrison – always visual – with words and in images as well. The street punk reincarnated as a choir boy. The Fallen Angel. Dangerous and sullen, yet beautiful, androgynous, innocent.
Morrison once said of the pregnant pause the Doors would occasionally employ during their concerts. “Well, they (the audience) either get you or you get them. If I don’t have them, or I lose them, then I just stop everything and get’em” In other words, their purpose was clear. To get us. To take us with them, shake us, awaken us, rake us over their coals of darkness, despair, and fear; always stoking us with hope, always hope, Ray Manzarek’s carnival-esque organ, Morrison’s careful insertion of gentle reminders that no matter how bad it gets, there is always hope, always salvation.
One of the other ways Morrison caught us and dragged us willingly along was to set us up, then catch us off guard. “Moonlight Drive” is the Doors at their unpredictable, beatific best. Rimbaudian images in a California invitation, a love song with thoroughly devastating lines” “There’s nothing left open and there’s no time to decide/We’ve stepped into a river on our Moon Drive.” Off-guard, we were swept into the current the Doors provided. They’d given us no other choice. You went wherever Morrison wanted to take you.
Writers said it was mass hypnotism. A séance (an idea Jim loved, supporting his “shaman” infatuation). But could we reasonably expect someone to keep taking our trips for us, vicariously appreciating, forever the passenger, never the driver? For how long? Can you expect, in effect, magic? Is it fair?
It wasn’t fair it wasn’t easy either, Morrison would probably say. Expectations are never fair, and living up to them is tiring as hell.
So even when the Doors stopped being a religious experience they became, like so many religious experiences, a religion. The ritual changed, and the high was different. It became blues and rock and Jim smiled more. The leather pants went into the closet and the beard sprouted. The music grew and the band, always tight, now glistened with professionalism and grit. There was still plenty of evil imagery, lots of reptiles, seasons and water; sex and death, blood and death, joy and death, hope and despair, and all sort of emotional yin-yangs and contradictions, enough to make an attender at least think. Morrison once said: “I don’t care if they love us or hate us. As long as we made ‘em think.”
Because aware that yes, there is a choice. But you gotta make it. ‘Course Morrison wouldn’t resort to such direct speech, because he liked to make getting there half the fun. Wake Up! He screamed as us, and I can still see him drunk at the Palms Bar, face in hands, thinking of all the possibilities.
There are words which a writer uses which are more revealing than all the facts a biographer can amass. Some of the words used to describe the Doors and Jim were: charismatic, sensual, mysterious, hypnotic, brilliant, sexy, dangerous, evil, angry, mournful…Jim was not evil, though his behavior often was. He didn’t want to go to hell. He did want to dynamite it. In order to do that, he had to travel in Lucifer’s direction, along his path. Jim knew he had to stand directly in front of hell before he could storm its gates and reveal it, expose the domain of evil, until not a shred of mystery was left. “The evil is in the mind,” Jim would say. Morrison went through hell to prove it did not exist. He went to hell so he could live forever in heaven.
Morrison lived in Los Angeles longer than he lived anywhere else and he loved the town harder than any man I know. He wrote of his love in “L.A. Woman,” transforming the city into a bride. In saying goodbye to L.A. he wrote a love letter, a delicious song of longing and lust: “I see your hair is burning/hills are fill’d with fire/if they say I never loved you/you know they are a liar/drivin’ down your freeways/mighnight alleys roam/cops in cars, the topless bars…”
The freeways are the girl’s loins, and we climb them, the lush green hills, the hair alive, on fire. And like the best poets, Morrison gives his love real elements, color and life. Where Arthur Rimbaud had his girl with the violet eyes, Morrison just as surely had his woman/city of night. Updated. Crude, lusty, horny, sensuous and gamey.
Physically he might have lived in L.A. but it wasn’t until he was saying goodbye to it that he wrote directly about his home. Earlier, he was much too obsessed with the region within. L.A. was certainly an influence, like the books he read, but only an influence at best. He was always searching, never revealing anything concrete to his legions, always giving only tantalizing glimpses: “Strange eyes fill strange rooms/voices will signal their tired end/the hostess is grinning/the guests sleep from sinning/hear me take of sin/and you know/this is it.” “Strange Days have found you!” “I won’t come out,” he wrote inhis childlike scrawl in a notebook, “you must come in where I construct a world that rivals the real.”
The strange thing is when you were with Jim on the town, the inside world would suddenly, without warning, leap out and seize anyone within its range. Sometimes its grasp was reassuring and gentle, but sometimes the inner terror would leap from the shadows of his soul and fall intoxicated onto the lawn, or out a window, into your soul. Flat on your back staring into a colorless space with rhythm or sense, other than that of falling, falling, and you having no control, aware of nothing else but Jim’s laughter ringing in your ears, yelling at the top of his lungs, “Let’s run…Run? Jim. I can’t get up.
Jim probably died from self indulgence, like Joplin, Hendrix, Dylan Thomas and Hemingway…and like Joplin and Hendrix, Morrison made it so much fun, so appealing. But unlike Janis and Jimi, Jim was not into drugs. He was into booze. “I hate scoring,” he said. “besides getting booze is easy. It’s just across the counter. And it’s much more sociable. Booze beats dope anyday for me. It stimulates conversation…What can I say, Soul beats money and booze beat dope.” Morrison drank with such a flair, made it look like you were missing something if you weren’t drunk. He told buddy Michael McClure he couldn’t picture not drinking. He loved it.
Drinking doused the fire inside, made it tolerable, numbed the pain and enabled him to unlock other worlds the pain otherwise overrode and blanketed. Without the pain Morrison would most likely be alive, but he would not have generated the magic and the charge that was abundant and powerful. He would be alive, yes, but we would not know him, we would not care for him as we do now. A cruel irony of fate is we care most passionately for those who hurt, those we have no hand to help. Even while Jim was alive, it was obvious to those who knew and loved him: we could not deal with his pain for him. We could only mutely wish it would go away. Between the hours of joyfully joining in with him on his littered path of genius and shit, we would remind ourselves that this man who is so absorbing to be with, for whom there is nothing we wouldn’t do, this man we love so much, this friend, is killing himself. Occasionally someone would say, “I wish you wouldn’t drink so much, Jim” to which he would retort, “I don’t tell you how to live, why are you telling me?” “Because we care, Jim.” “Well, don’t care.”
Critics of the biography No One Here Gets Out Alive complain that Jim is painted too dark, too destructive, insensitive and cruel. How could I honestly say I was a friend? They are only part right. Allow me to use this article as a vehicle for clarification.
It is simple to say Jim was this. Jim was that. Too simple. Jim was one of the most complex beings, the most driven individual I’ve ever encountered. If No One Here Gets Out Alive is guilty of anything, it editorializes too little and concludes nothing, makes no judgments and awards no compliments. Jim was simply too much the changeling to be labeled and defined. I leave that to the critics.
Morrison was obsessed with finding out; finding the meaning, the pulse of the world. As has been said of Rimbaud, he want to “see all, feel all, exhaust everything, explore everything, say everything.” He traveled as quickly as possible, always forward, purposeful and fast. But was you advance with a mission the government is there ahead of you. Morrison had a purpose alright; he proposed to set us free. The government was ahead of Jim, with its restrictions, its shackles, courts and laws. He was constantly arrested and harassed.
Time and time again they beat Jim down. In New Haven, breach of peace was among the charges. How does a truth seeker breech peace? Phoenix, Arizona – inciting a riot, on the streets of L.A., and in the air above – drunk and disorderly; and finally in Miami, Florida, where the list of charges would take up half this page.
The only law Jim abided by was to “be true to yourself.” The law of nonconformity. And he found that by rock writers he was ultimately regarded as a fool. For trying to take his audience to Paradise Now, instead of later, he was ridiculed. By the same writers who licked their lips and sharpened their pencils and dished out delicious adjectives adding up to (if you took them literally): Jim was the new messiah, the Doors as messengers from a strange new wonderful world. Then he was told no one appreciated his words. Then he was told no one appreciated his efforts, no one was listening, he was a cheerleader with no game going on, except the gigantic game in his head.
Jim really believed rock ‘n’ roll went on trial in Miami. He spent his last cent attempting to change the obscenity laws in this country. And now, we see, we must credit the Doors for their slackening. Jim would dig that too. That effort, also was not in vain. He had said fuck and shit, got drunk, allegedly dropped his drawers and no one cared. Another dirty Doors show. Early on, writers loved him for his filth and his sex. Later on, he went on trial for doing it only too well. The song was nearly forgotten for the fight.
Jim had the choice of fighting his detractors. I asked him in one of his last interviews how he dealt with detractors. He told me with a smile on his face. “I either fight or run.” Jim would have easily spent the rest of his life fighting, or running. But he could not, would not, compromise because compromise was not a word in his vocabulary. He was a fanatic. A person who went whole hog or die. In this lies Jim’s purity, his innocence. For him to limit his self destruction, or curb his cruelty, to limit his behavior in any way would have meant compromise. He could be kind and he was often charitable and hospitable. But Jim did cultivate these traits; they were not his goals. They had nothing to do with his search, his attempt to merge with everything and everybody at once – to make this world come. That was Jim’s concern.
However, his charm, his enormous generosity, was so extreme, it was self destruction and totally selfless. He literally gave himself away. Money, he gave it away. He could not say no. When Morrison drank, the room drank. He spent little directly on himself but hosted his friends to rooms, food, wine and women. Eventually, he fled L.A. to go to Paris, not to hide from his enemies, but to ditch his friends. In Paris Jim found new friends, more bars, and without a focus for his enormous talents or his huge rebellion, without any satisfying results evident from his strident search, he became bored, confused, depressed. And he drank.
The pain of the mission because the pain of no mission at all. Simply because, unbeknownst to him, he had already done all he was supposed to do for Chrissakes. Evident to all, although no one wanted to admit it, was that Jim died for the simplest reasons: like a retired career man who has a sudden heart attack because he lacks purpose. Jim died because he had nothing left to do.
It is plausible, but unlikely that Jim continued to run and fight. It is only true that if there were a man alive who had the ability, the means, the nerve to dive into anonymity, it was Jim. He did go to Paris to escape, and Paris was not escape at all. But the reason – Jim did not have any reason to stage his own death. Sure he was sick of being Jim Morrison, especially the Jim Morrison people wanted him to be, that he was not any longer. He could not escape that. Jim was ultimately a realist. He knew that if you can’t deal with your problems in your own backyard, you can’t deal with them in someone else’s. And his backyard was not his problem. What he was looking for was not outside, it was inside; running would do no good. And he was sick of fighting. So he continued doing what he has been doing all along, what he knew how to do, one of the few things in life he enjoyed doing…to relieve the suffering, he drank.
We know now the issue between good and evil was decided long ago. Evil belongs to the world of make believe. Of our artists, our modern messengers, we ask that they keep their feet and words firmly planted in our reality, but bare their soul, press the peddle firmly to the metal, keep their heads in the sky, soar. Of course, reality for one obsessed with visions and miracles becomes subjective rather than objective and Morrison was nothing if not a man of letters, who dealt with images and visions. He was never our reality, yet he could whisper in our ear and fulfill our fantasies because he was communicating from beyond. It was Jim’s belief that if he bathed himself in fear it would cease. He stared at death to vanquish it. He constantly contradicted his favorite writer, William Blake, who claimed that wallowing in the muck is not the best way of cleansing oneself. “Bullshit!” Morrison screamed. Drown yourself in the darkness until your pupils swallow your skull and burn light into the dark. Morrison was also the sort who believed that if you pulled hard enough on midnight you could unroll the dawn.
I like to believe Jim died to be heard. He speaks to us from beyond, even now, forever. Underwater, not underground, he continues to move and delight us as we peek at his distorted, larger than life image, languid and sensual. Without physical image and neither on nor off stage theatrics to interfere, his words emerge gloriously riding and jumping the Doors’ timeless music. Morrison was this generation’s electric poet, there is simply none finer.
By the way, if No One Here Gets Out Alive has a message, its not to turn Jim into a hero for making self destruction look like so much fun (as some have claimed). The less for those of us not destined to be visionaries is not to kill yourself for any reason, because if you can’t find it at home, you can’t find it traveling, either. Destruction is a very final process, but rather the process of a profound symptom of a gigantic unanswered question, asked by only a select few. And then, if you are of that ilk, then you don’t get – then no one there gets – out alive.
Of course, none of us get out alive anyway. Much of what Jim wrote was on the premise: Sex begins it, death ends it. He lived each day knowing and believing each drink, each performance might be his very last. There will be no encore. There will be only what always was: Jim’s words/the Doors music. And for all of us, that should be enough. We never had the right to expect anything more.
END.