Jim Morrison

By: Erik Rittenberry

"People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up."

~ Jim Morrison

Below is a brief stream-of-consciousness tribute to the great Jim Morrison who was born 80 years ago today.

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Before The Doors came to be, before the fame, the music, the women, the blackouts, the Miami shenanigans, the arrests and banned venues, and his untimely last breath in a Paris bathtub, Jim Morrison, little Jimmy, was a long-haired film student, an anonymous drifter, a son of a naval admiral, a punk, a dreamer, a voracious reader, a renegade, a spiritual provocateur, a demented rambler fueled up on Kerouac and acid with his thumb to the skies, hitching a ride west out of Florida with the poems of Rimbaud in the back pocket of his ragged jeans.

There he is.

Coming and going, loitering on the fringes of big cities, conversing with the outcasts, the hobos, the unwanted, streetlights gleaming on shards of broken beer bottles littered in alleys, a razor blade pulled to his throat one night in a New Orleans dive bar by the lover of an erotic lesbian he tried to fuck on a whim.

There he is.

Writing, reading, reciting poetry, jotting down conscious expanding thoughts in spiral notebooks, scraps of dialogue overheard at rundown bars, passages laced with the wisdom of Nietzsche and Joseph Campbell, poems too, so many poems written as the whiskey sang in his veins.

One more pill, one more drink, hell yeah, there it is, little Jimmy, a drunken Dionysus in exile from the age of anxiety — that arid time when the post-war folks were paralyzed by fear, their minds riddled with a peculiar unease, everyone everywhere just blindly conforming to the whims of authority — shit man, they’ve become walled-in, these good folks, TV-hypnotized, domesticated flesh caged up in soul-crushing offices as widespread consumerism transformed the many into functionary pawns of an unforgiving machine.

Not Jimmy though, Jimmy wanted a great awakening. He wanted to cancel his subscription to the Resurrection. He wanted to shatter the brittle wall separating the finite from the infinite and break on through to the other side. He was always straddling that fine line between life and death, groping in the dark awaiting that desperate scream of the butterfly before he was to sink on down into that Big Sleep.

Poetry was Jimmy’s true calling, forget everything else. “Listen,” he tells us, “real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through any one that suits you.”

A poet is what he is, “the priest of the invisible,” “the unacknowledged legislator of the world,” to attain and reveal the unknown, to push the established limits, to throw all the senses into a frenzy and awaken the eyes to see beyond the imaginary horizons that confined us.

Jimmy understood that to become a poet you must live with a fierce intensity. You must gulp down the chaos and revel in the world's agony despite it all.

Jimmy saw that the people, the great masses, had been led astray. They’ve been uprooted from the cosmic jungle and now find themselves in the profane wasteland of modernity where they have lost contact with the center of who they are.

“The body tries to tell the truth. But, it's usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.”

There he is.

On the road, on the road again because the west is the best, arriving in Juarez at midnight, big fat rats scurrying across the damp seedy streets. Little Jimmy sitting there spitting his broken Spanish to Mexican prostitutes in a boozy cantina, journeying further and further on that lonesome highway to the end of the night — this is life, Jimmy yells, hell yes, fuck it we’re all mad.

Up to Cali the next day, California love, barefoot Jimmy ditching his film school graduation to smoke dope on the warm sands of Venice Beach with nothing but dingy jeans and a ragged shirt he’s worn for 7 days straight, visions of Indian blood on dawn’s highways, Shamanistic dreams on moonlit drives, ride the snake, ride the snake to the end of the night where the doors of perception will open for those who knock.

There he is.

Summer of 65’ on a hot August day, Jimmy encounters his old film-school buddy Ray Manzarek walking along Venice Beach. “Yo, Jimmy,” Ray says “what’cha been doing, man?”

“I’ve been writing, even wrote a few songs,” Jimmy says.

“Well shit, let’s hear ‘em.”

Jimmy kneels in the sand, collects his thoughts, and slowly sings…

Let’s swim to the moon/uh huh
Let’s climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin’ that the
City sleeps to hide…

“Those are the greatest fuckin’ song lyrics I’ve ever heard,” Ray says, “shit, let’s start a rock ’n’ roll band and make a million dollars.”

Jim, with an ornery smirk and a subtle nod: “fuck yes, that’s what I had in mind all along.”

Thank you so much for reading. You can find me around the internet at the following:

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