Post by Admin on Jul 29, 2019 4:56:18 GMT -5
Ten Years Gone was originally published in article form with commentary by Ms. James in the 1981 Creem Magazine Special Edition devoted to the Doors on the tenth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s passing. An unedited portion of the interview also appears at the end of the article - this section of the piece is uncorrected, the original being unavailable. Parts of this interview were also published in The Doors Illustrated History.
I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter of 1968. He as more alive and afire than I would ever see him, and I was a moonstruck groupie. It was a recording session for Waiting For The Sun, their third album. I was with a writer who was interviewing Morrison for the New York Times.
Jim was coming out of the studio "to get a bite to eat" with Pamela, his lady. His hand shaking mine was firm, enthusiastic, running a current of controlled power. My writer friend and I went inside and sat with he others, waiting for Jim to reappear.
Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang Not To Touch The Earth on the other side of the soundproof glass. Most of the time his rich, urgent voice was unheard, while engineers and producer Paul Rothchild frittered and fettered down the instrumental track. Along with Ray Manzarek's searing organ and the sinister chords of Robby Krieger's guitar, we watched Morrison dance and sweat, the stallion muscularity contracting inside the glove-tight black leather jeans, while he wailed and belted out, "Nothin' left to do but run, run, let's run…."
That night, his face shaped pleasure - his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He was all there. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, suggested. Pamela in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw from side to side, followed his movements with her heavy-lashed urchin eyes, providing cigarettes, chain-smoking.
When he came into the tracking room, his body radiated heat. He seemed to glow in the dark, with a hot red aura. His presence was abristle with electricity, and he was in total charge of that massive voltage.
The last time I saw Morrison was in April of 1970 - almost fifteen months before he would slip on through to the other side, out of the lonely back door of Parisian hotel bathtub.
That April day, the 14th, he had just got in from Phoenix, where he had contended with an obscenity and disorderly conduct rap - the result of some clowning with a stewardess on board a flight to Phoenix several months before. He called and said he had "gotten out of it." We went to a house high in the windings of King Canyon, a house chilled and dust-veiled from a long absence of human presence.
In the front room, shriveled oranges like mummified heads filled a bowl, books lay split open on their spines, and dust made the print faint, greyed the picture of the Greek deity Themis, and beneath the book, a shiny rectangle of dustless wood. I replaced it carefully.
Moldy bread lay in the kitchen; on an empty refriderator, a lone, unopened bottle of cognac. In the bedroom, a wine glass by the bed had evaporated to a ruby drop at the bottom from a thin red line close to the rim. The sheets on the tousled bed smelled of coldness and mildew. Ivy reached its tentacles across the doorsills on the porches and across windowpanes as if seeking entry, stretching instinctively to take over the forgotten citadel. On the mirror in the bathroom, a message in red lipstick began, "You bastard…"
He moved more slowly that day, as though he carried an onerous weight with every motion, and this, maybe, was what made him look heavier. His eyes were duller, and he was tired, cruel and stubborn, inflicting pain with dumb frustration, barely hoping to shatter the blind boundaries and plastic facades that shut him out from all women he had ever known that were at that moment incarnated into this one puzzling woman.
His tenderness and brutality shoved each other aside, ursurping his mood by turns, battling through the motions of a lost cause, a defeated was against the pretenses that make people unreal.
Fifteen months later he gave up entirely and formally, conceding in body what he had granted in spirit, victory to the forces of decay and duplicity. The people close to him buried him quietly and private. They refused to allow an autopsy. An exhumation was prevented despite rumors of mysterious, deadly drugs, which continued to flourish and swarm pestily among the L.A. fringe circuit for years afterward.
If they had examined his dead body, I think surely what they would have found was that the cause of Jim Morrison's death was simple despair.
That April afternoon up in King's Canyon, he said, "I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming out. There are two ways I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out – one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism."
At one point, taking the stand of "erotic politician" to the ultimate, Miami was Morrison's attempt to fuse the erotic with the violently shocking, taking up the bloody cloth from Lenny Bruce and straining it beyond its proprietary limits.
It was not the extradition tangle, the legal battle with police, lawyers, judges, that delivered the mortal wound and drained his spirit, so much as the failure of his revolutionist call to rise up and overthrow the shackles. Although detractors said that he lost control and "blew it" at that fatal Miami concert, it was neither accidental nor a mistake. He felt this, but few would share his view. Badly timed, maybe; not carefully calculated, granted – but it was the logical culmination of everything he was trying to say in words that seemed to go unheard.
To the city fathers, what was "indecent" exposure and "obscene" was at the same time, and more accurately, an overwhelming insurrection of instinctual, primal invocation, the animal-language, body-language pleas to the "television-children fed, the unborn living, living dead" to recognize their true nature, the reality of blood, nerves and feeling life.
He screamed, "WAKE UP!" a hundred times, in a hundred ways and verbatim - and few eyes had flickered. There was only one thing left to try, and he tried it, and it only served to show him how obstinately society would cling to it's shackles, protect its blinders, and publish those who unlock the doors if its cells.
"It my poetry aims to achieve anything," he told me, that April night, "it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
What destroyed him was their refusal to set themselves free.
Miami and the early months of '69 were some kind of turning point for him. When I saw him in September of that year, he was beginning to recover a mild current of the charge which had galvanized his work on those first three albums. Soft Parade had appeared that summer, and it was distinguished by a paucity of Morrison's dynamite presence and raw nerve lyrics; in style and content, it was a striking departure from its three predecessors.
But Morrison's energies were opening channels through fields less pop. His poetry, privately printed, handsomely bound, was making its way from hand to hand by that fall, 1969. The following spring, 1970, those poems were published in one volume called The New Creatures* by Simon and Schuster. Also, that was the season of creating Morrison Hotel, and Jim's deep interest in the blues had dug in and was filling him with renewed hopes and plans. He talked excitedly about the possibility of presenting a TV special on the history of the blues.
He indicated that he was setting his sights on a new audience, somewhat more canny than the ones who screeched for Light My Fire in big concert halls. He suspected strongly that if he could not shudder the masses with his vision, he might be able to reach a chosen few.
He had shaved his beard and looked almost like Morrison of early "ride the snake" nights at the Whisky. But there was a certain daimon that had left him and not returned. He was more solemn, smiled less readily, moved with low vibrancy, without the coiled, ready-to-spring tension, no longer weightless. He seemed almost saintly - calm, thoughtful, resigned. The bow string held back for 23 years and abruptly released - as he once described himself - was vibrating less intensely. He said, with a mocking laugh, "The love-street times are dead."
We walked down to the Garden Spot on La Cienega for dinner. That was the evening we talked about drugs. I told him about stories I'd heard of his acid escapades, and he laughed and said, "I'm not interested in drugs," almost scornfully, and lifted his martini glass towards me, rotating it slightly with a smile that said that this was the "Crystal Ship." Another time I offered him some speed, pot and once or twice some very superior downers, and he declined always, once with a derisive shake of his head, saying, "I don't need any pills."
That September night at the Garden Spot, we also talked about his lyrics, Nietszche's Birth Of Tragedy From The Spirit Of Music, the history of the blues, and William Blake. Are some really "born to sweet delight." and some "to endless night." Is flesh our prison? Morrison's questions and ideas were similar to Blake's in many ways, as were the two poets' conceptions of the human spirit, its entrapment in blind deadened flesh, and that the five senses are but atrophied filters of knowledge.
Jim said, "I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But that unknown was once very well known - its where our souls belong. The only solution is to confront them - confront yourself - with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You ARE free."
I asked what he meant by "freedom."
He said, "The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him - unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him."
I needed to understand how anyone could have the power to take away the freedom to feel.
Jim explained patiently, "Some people surrender that freedom willingly - but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society - parents - they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you are born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true, feeling nature. You imitate what you see. Our culture mocks 'primitive cultures' and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses."
Over the sound system at the Garden Spot came the just released Beatles' Come Together - Jim was listening. "I like that song," he said.
We went back to the blue Shelby and he looked through the L.A. Times for a movie.
I asked a ponderous question: "Jim, does civilization have to be sacrificed to reclaim our freedom?"
"What is civilization?" he asked.
"City life, technology, habits, behavior, social rules, institutions, all of that."
"How important is `all that' to you? Is it more or less important to you than your freedom? If it's less important, then you can leave it alone. If it's more important, then you have to destroy it. By yourself - for yourself. Each person for himself. If you want your true self to survive.
In November of that year, on a rainy afternoon, Jim, his brother Andy, Jim's Irish pal Tom, publicity man Leon Barnard and I sat drinking boilermakers at the Palms Bar on Santa Moncia Blvd. Periodically, two or three of us would get up and shoot some pool. There was almost a fight between Jim and a big redneck pool-shark who got a little too belligerent.
Part of the time Jim sat and talked with me against the background din of the others - especially Tom - getting progressively more rowdy. Occasionally Tom teased me playfully, with phrases in foreign languages and dirty little jokes.
Jim was a master at holding his liquor. After seven or eight boilermakers (whisky shots with beer chasers) he was smooth, even, self-contained, articulate. But desensitized, no. If you looked closely, or brushed his consciousness with a slightest touch, there was that psyche like an exposed nerve, his raw, bare awareness, that nothing could muffle or shelter or insinuate.
He saw too much. Too seldom did he find respite in the sweet blindness that overtook the others. Something Tom said made Jim think of The Birth Of A Nation. Jim observed that this film was a classic, a definitive American epic. "America was conceived in violence," Jim said. "Americans are attached to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They're TV-hypnotized. TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth Century culture's disease is the inability to feel the reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotions over symbols, but in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead."
We walked through the rain to Elektra Studios on La Cienega. Outside, Andy and Tom wrestled playfully, rolling in the mud below the steps. Paul Rothchild stood in the doorway and scolded them like a schoolmaster.
Inside, "Roadhouse Blues" got cooking with John Sebastian wailing on harp. Pamela was waiting with two of her women friends, all vogueishly dressed, amidst a crowd of L.A. ultras, "Strange Days" survivors, meandering around the tracking room, while Jim uttered his primal scream, "WAKE UP!!" in a vacuum, writhing and jerking in useless gestures of thwarted rebellion.
One thing Jim taught me that I never lost is to forget or dismiss shame over suffering, and in the same way, to fight fear of pain.
"Pain is meant to wake us up," he said, that night. "People try to hide their pain, but they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters."
I had heard plenty about Morrison's dealings with women. The L.A. gossip circuit was as rife with these legends as with those of his consumption of prodigious amounts of acid prior to mounting a bike and careening down the narrow windings of Laurel Canyon, screaming.
"I'm no biker," he said to that tale, and if the drug myths were inventions too, how reliable could the sex myths be?
I might have considered myself warned, but dismissed the hearsay. Even if it was that extreme, I had to find out for myself.
I am sure I was an anomaly among groupies, in beguiling him to spend so much of our time through the night talking, and playing with, of all things, his sexual philosophy.
"Sex is full of lies," he said. "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."
But he was like a captive performing tiger, never quite tamed, never safe to turn your back on: at any moment could come the surprise lashing out of the big paw full of claws. He could be tender and funny and in the next instant, arrogant and mean.
At one point, I told him, "You look like a Greek god." He shook his head, laughing with the bashfulness and insecurity of any ordinary guy.
Between Waiting For The Sun and the day I closed the door of the ivy-netted house in King's Canyon, I talked with him, drank with him, spent nights with him, but most of all, took a moonlight dive into the "wet forests" and blue deeps of his mind.
Because my admiration for him stretched beyond carnality and beyond rock-star fixation into an overwhelming interest in the man's words, his ideas, his written and sung poetry, I found something more. He would astonish me with delight and with pain, and surprise me anew each time he gave me a chilling glimpse of his loneliness.
At three or five in the morning, sometimes, he called and said, "Come and get me. Come and take me away…" as though it was some winged denizen of heaven he had dialed.
He was a stranger, a "rider on the storm" thrown into this world. There was a shop on La Cienega, "Themis," where Pamela sold candles like giant unended root systems…and there was the argument over whether Jim was allowed to crash there at night. The first time he took me back to his hideout, we both struggled to pull his boot off a purple swollen foot, sprained when he kicked in an eight-by-ten plate glass window at the Doors' headquarters the previous night and jumped to the floor, ever in search of a "soul kitchen" to sleep all night in, refuge from the "stumbling neon grooves."
He was surrounded by an ever-present, teeming collection of buddies, gofers, groupies, associates and hangers-on. But when I said that I wanted to be his friend, he put his arm around me in quick acceptance, thanking me with feeling in his voice that I seriously recognized to be nothing other than need.
After he was gone, I was sorry about nothing except that I hadn't given him more. For what I did give. which was to plunge my greedy curiosity and eagerness into his mind in thirst for his ideas, had seemed to me no gift at all. But it was clear that it had seemed so to him, because he gave me so much in return - desperately careful in his explanations. only because he saw my craving to understand.
He always betrayed surprise when he saw that he had made himself understood, that his message had flown true and reached home and beat its wings in my innards. Of course, that was in the later days, when he felt his messages so fractionally received.
Jim Morrison was a revolutionary. He pitted the politics of eroticism against the bastion of unfeeling, rigid, insentience. He stormed the institution of flesh "that chains us," and "eyes that lie."
"The shaman is similar to the scapegoat," he said, as we walked through the rain on La Cienega and leaned inside a doorway against the wall, watching the cars crawl past. "I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their fantasies onto him and their fantasies come alive. People can destroy their fantasies, by destroying him. I obey the impulses everyone has, but won't admit to. By attacking me, punishing me, they can feel relieved of those impulses."
"Isn't that what you meant about people having a lot of wild emotion over symbols - pop idols, for instance?" I asked.
"That's right. People are afraid of themselves - of their own reality - their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's all 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?"
"Is that why you said, `my only friend, the End?"
"It's strange that people fear death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend."
We started walking back. The rain was coming harder, and we were lightly dressed. But the session break was over and he had to be back at the studio. It would be a long night.
* The Lords and The New Creatures
UNEDITED INTERVIEW SEGMENT:
Lizzie: I think fans of The Doors see you as a savior, the leader who'll set them all free. How do you feel about that?
Jim: It's absurd. How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie – people claim they want to be free – everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security…How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?
Lizzie: Why do you think people fear freedom?
Jim: I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But it's ironic…That unknown was once very well known. It's where our souls belong…The only solution is to confront them – confront yourself – with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Lizzie: What do you mean when you say "freedom"?
Jim: There are different kinds of freedom – there's a lot of misunderstanding….The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. ….You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him – unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him.
Lizzie: But how can anyone else have the power to take away from
your freedom to feel?
Jim: Some people surrender their freedom willingly – but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents – they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you are born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.
Lizzie: Are you saying that we are, in effect, brought up to defend and perpetuate a society that deprives people of the freedom to feel?
Jim: Sure….teachers, religious leaders – even friends, or so called friends – take over where parents leave off. They demand that we feel only the feelings they want and expect from us. They demand all the time that we perform feelings for them. We're like actors – turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom…endlessly searching for a half-forgotten shadow of our lost reality. When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder….the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.
Lizzie: Do you think it's possible for an individual to free himself from these repressive forces on his own – all alone?
Jim: That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you. You have to do it on your own. If you look to somebody else to do it for you – somebody outside yourself – you're still depending on others. You're still vulnerable to those repressive, evil outside forces, too.
Lizzie: But isn't it possible for people who want that freedom to unite – to combine their strength, maybe just to strengthen each other? It must be possible.
Jim: Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is….Most people love you for who you pretend to be….To keep their love, you keep pretending – performing. You get to love your pretense…It's true, we're locked in an image, an act – and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image – they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it – they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.
Lizzie: It's ironic – it's sad. Can't they see that what you're trying to show them is the way to freedom?
Jim: Most people have no idea what they're missing. Our society places a supreme value on control – hiding what you feel. Our culture mocks "primitive cultures" and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses.
Lizzie: In some of your poetry, you openly admire and praise primitive people – Indians, for instance. Do you mean that it's not human beings in general but our particular society that's flawed and destructive?
Jim: Look at how other cultures live – peacefully, in harmony with the earth, the forest – animals. They don't build war machines and invest millions of dollars in attacking other countries who political ideals don't happen to agree with their own.
Lizzie: We live in a sick society.
Jim: It's true….and part of the disease is not being aware that we're diseased….Our society has too much – too much to hold on to, and value – freedom ends up at the bottom of the list.
Lizzie: But isn't there something an artist can do? If you didn't feel you, as an artist, could accomplish something, how could you go on?
Jim: I offer images – I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached – like the Doors, right? But we can only open the doors – we can't drag people through. I can't free them unless they want to be free – more than anything else….Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up. A person has to be willing to give up everything – not just wealth. All the bullshit he's been taught – all society's brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren't willing to do that.
Lizzie: In your early, first album, stuff, there's a definite feeling of an apocalyptic vision – "break on through"- a transcendence. Do you see this as a still existing possibility?
Jim: It's different now. (Pause) It used to seem possible to generate a movement – people rising up and joining together in mass protest – refusing to be repressed any longer – like, they'd all put their strength together to break what Blake calls "the mind-forged manacles."…..The love-street times are dead. Sure, it's possible for there to be a transcendence – but not on a mass level, not a universal rebellion. Now it has to take place on an individual level – every man for himself, as they say. Save yourself. Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.
Lizzie: What causes that?
Jim: If natural energy and impulses are too severely suppressed for too long, they become violent. It's natural for something that's been held under pressure to become violent in it's release…a person who is too severely suppressed experiences so much pleasure in those violent releases…they're probably rare and brief. So he becomes infatuated with violence.
Lizzie: But then – the real source of evil isn't the violence – or the infatuation with it – but the repressive forces.
Jim: That's true – but in some cases, a person's infatuation with violence involves a secret complicity with his oppressors. People seek tyrants. They worship and support them. They co-operate with restrictions and rules, and they become enchanted with the violence involved in their brief, token rebellions.
Lizzie: But why is that?
Jim: Tradition, maybe – the sins of the fathers. America was conceived in violence. Americans are attracted to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They're TV - hypnotized – TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movie, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.
Lizzie: But why? What makes us run away from our own feeling?
Jim: We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
Lizzie: I don't really understand.
Jim: Pain is meant to wake us up. People try and hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. (Pause) Pain is a feeling – your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
Lizzie: Do you still see yourself as the shaman? I mean, lots of Doors fanatics look to you to lead them to salvation. Do you accept that role?
Jim: I'm not sure it's salvation that people are after, or want me to lead them to. The shaman is a healer – like a witch-doctor. I don't see people turning to me for that. I don't see myself as a savior.
Lizzie: What do you see them turning to you for, then?
Jim: The shaman is similar to the scapegoat. I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their fantasies onto him and their fantasies by destroying him. I obey the impulses everyone has, but won't admit to. By attacking me, punishing me, they can feel relieved of those impulses.
Lizzie: Is that what you meant before, about people having a lot of wild emotions over symbols – pop idols for instance?
Jim: That's right. People are afraid of themselves – or 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?
Lizzie: Is that why you said, "My only friend, the End"…..?
Jim: Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate….That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend…..
Lizzie: People see sex as the great liberator – the ultimate freedom. Aren't a lot of your songs pointing the way to freedom through sex?
Jim: Sex can be a liberation. But it an also be an entrapment.
Lizzie: What makes the difference?
Jim: It's all a question of how much a person listens to his body – his feelings. Most people are too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.
Lizzie: How can we break through the rules and lies?
Jim: By listening to your body – opening up your senses. Blake said that the body as the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the "windows of the soul." When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience….
Lizzie: In some of your songs, you present sex as an escape – a refuge of sanctuary – like "Crystal Ship" or "Soft Parade" of "Soul Kitchen." I've always been fascinated by the way your lyrics suggest parallels between sex and death – "Moonlight Drive" is a beautiful example. But isn't this an ultimate rejection of the body?
Jim: Not at all – it's the opposite. If you reject your body, it becomes your prison cell. It's a paradox – to transcend the limitations of the body, you have to immerse yourself in it – you have to be totally open to your senses….It isn't so easy to accept your body totally – we're taught that the body is something to control, dominate – natural processes like pissing and shitting are considered dirty….Puritanical attitudes die slowly. How can sex be a liberation if you don't really want to touch your body – if you're trying to escape from it?
I met Jim Morrison for the first time in the winter of 1968. He as more alive and afire than I would ever see him, and I was a moonstruck groupie. It was a recording session for Waiting For The Sun, their third album. I was with a writer who was interviewing Morrison for the New York Times.
Jim was coming out of the studio "to get a bite to eat" with Pamela, his lady. His hand shaking mine was firm, enthusiastic, running a current of controlled power. My writer friend and I went inside and sat with he others, waiting for Jim to reappear.
Soon we were watching him from inside the tracking room while he sang Not To Touch The Earth on the other side of the soundproof glass. Most of the time his rich, urgent voice was unheard, while engineers and producer Paul Rothchild frittered and fettered down the instrumental track. Along with Ray Manzarek's searing organ and the sinister chords of Robby Krieger's guitar, we watched Morrison dance and sweat, the stallion muscularity contracting inside the glove-tight black leather jeans, while he wailed and belted out, "Nothin' left to do but run, run, let's run…."
That night, his face shaped pleasure - his eyes held light, interest, intensity. His mouth moved in motions of pleased surprise. He was all there. He argued, criticized, consented, refused, laughed, suggested. Pamela in a green velvet coat, waist long red hair, jerking her delicate jaw from side to side, followed his movements with her heavy-lashed urchin eyes, providing cigarettes, chain-smoking.
When he came into the tracking room, his body radiated heat. He seemed to glow in the dark, with a hot red aura. His presence was abristle with electricity, and he was in total charge of that massive voltage.
The last time I saw Morrison was in April of 1970 - almost fifteen months before he would slip on through to the other side, out of the lonely back door of Parisian hotel bathtub.
That April day, the 14th, he had just got in from Phoenix, where he had contended with an obscenity and disorderly conduct rap - the result of some clowning with a stewardess on board a flight to Phoenix several months before. He called and said he had "gotten out of it." We went to a house high in the windings of King Canyon, a house chilled and dust-veiled from a long absence of human presence.
In the front room, shriveled oranges like mummified heads filled a bowl, books lay split open on their spines, and dust made the print faint, greyed the picture of the Greek deity Themis, and beneath the book, a shiny rectangle of dustless wood. I replaced it carefully.
Moldy bread lay in the kitchen; on an empty refriderator, a lone, unopened bottle of cognac. In the bedroom, a wine glass by the bed had evaporated to a ruby drop at the bottom from a thin red line close to the rim. The sheets on the tousled bed smelled of coldness and mildew. Ivy reached its tentacles across the doorsills on the porches and across windowpanes as if seeking entry, stretching instinctively to take over the forgotten citadel. On the mirror in the bathroom, a message in red lipstick began, "You bastard…"
He moved more slowly that day, as though he carried an onerous weight with every motion, and this, maybe, was what made him look heavier. His eyes were duller, and he was tired, cruel and stubborn, inflicting pain with dumb frustration, barely hoping to shatter the blind boundaries and plastic facades that shut him out from all women he had ever known that were at that moment incarnated into this one puzzling woman.
His tenderness and brutality shoved each other aside, ursurping his mood by turns, battling through the motions of a lost cause, a defeated was against the pretenses that make people unreal.
Fifteen months later he gave up entirely and formally, conceding in body what he had granted in spirit, victory to the forces of decay and duplicity. The people close to him buried him quietly and private. They refused to allow an autopsy. An exhumation was prevented despite rumors of mysterious, deadly drugs, which continued to flourish and swarm pestily among the L.A. fringe circuit for years afterward.
If they had examined his dead body, I think surely what they would have found was that the cause of Jim Morrison's death was simple despair.
That April afternoon up in King's Canyon, he said, "I rely on images of violence, which bring the shock of pain, to penetrate the barriers people erect and defend, not simple defenses; the phony facades people live behind. Blocking their perceptions from coming in, and blocking their feelings from coming out. There are two ways I try to shatter those facades, or at least make a hole where something can get in, to let the trapped feelings out – one way is violence, pain. The other is eroticism."
At one point, taking the stand of "erotic politician" to the ultimate, Miami was Morrison's attempt to fuse the erotic with the violently shocking, taking up the bloody cloth from Lenny Bruce and straining it beyond its proprietary limits.
It was not the extradition tangle, the legal battle with police, lawyers, judges, that delivered the mortal wound and drained his spirit, so much as the failure of his revolutionist call to rise up and overthrow the shackles. Although detractors said that he lost control and "blew it" at that fatal Miami concert, it was neither accidental nor a mistake. He felt this, but few would share his view. Badly timed, maybe; not carefully calculated, granted – but it was the logical culmination of everything he was trying to say in words that seemed to go unheard.
To the city fathers, what was "indecent" exposure and "obscene" was at the same time, and more accurately, an overwhelming insurrection of instinctual, primal invocation, the animal-language, body-language pleas to the "television-children fed, the unborn living, living dead" to recognize their true nature, the reality of blood, nerves and feeling life.
He screamed, "WAKE UP!" a hundred times, in a hundred ways and verbatim - and few eyes had flickered. There was only one thing left to try, and he tried it, and it only served to show him how obstinately society would cling to it's shackles, protect its blinders, and publish those who unlock the doors if its cells.
"It my poetry aims to achieve anything," he told me, that April night, "it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."
What destroyed him was their refusal to set themselves free.
Miami and the early months of '69 were some kind of turning point for him. When I saw him in September of that year, he was beginning to recover a mild current of the charge which had galvanized his work on those first three albums. Soft Parade had appeared that summer, and it was distinguished by a paucity of Morrison's dynamite presence and raw nerve lyrics; in style and content, it was a striking departure from its three predecessors.
But Morrison's energies were opening channels through fields less pop. His poetry, privately printed, handsomely bound, was making its way from hand to hand by that fall, 1969. The following spring, 1970, those poems were published in one volume called The New Creatures* by Simon and Schuster. Also, that was the season of creating Morrison Hotel, and Jim's deep interest in the blues had dug in and was filling him with renewed hopes and plans. He talked excitedly about the possibility of presenting a TV special on the history of the blues.
He indicated that he was setting his sights on a new audience, somewhat more canny than the ones who screeched for Light My Fire in big concert halls. He suspected strongly that if he could not shudder the masses with his vision, he might be able to reach a chosen few.
He had shaved his beard and looked almost like Morrison of early "ride the snake" nights at the Whisky. But there was a certain daimon that had left him and not returned. He was more solemn, smiled less readily, moved with low vibrancy, without the coiled, ready-to-spring tension, no longer weightless. He seemed almost saintly - calm, thoughtful, resigned. The bow string held back for 23 years and abruptly released - as he once described himself - was vibrating less intensely. He said, with a mocking laugh, "The love-street times are dead."
We walked down to the Garden Spot on La Cienega for dinner. That was the evening we talked about drugs. I told him about stories I'd heard of his acid escapades, and he laughed and said, "I'm not interested in drugs," almost scornfully, and lifted his martini glass towards me, rotating it slightly with a smile that said that this was the "Crystal Ship." Another time I offered him some speed, pot and once or twice some very superior downers, and he declined always, once with a derisive shake of his head, saying, "I don't need any pills."
That September night at the Garden Spot, we also talked about his lyrics, Nietszche's Birth Of Tragedy From The Spirit Of Music, the history of the blues, and William Blake. Are some really "born to sweet delight." and some "to endless night." Is flesh our prison? Morrison's questions and ideas were similar to Blake's in many ways, as were the two poets' conceptions of the human spirit, its entrapment in blind deadened flesh, and that the five senses are but atrophied filters of knowledge.
Jim said, "I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But that unknown was once very well known - its where our souls belong. The only solution is to confront them - confront yourself - with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You ARE free."
I asked what he meant by "freedom."
He said, "The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him - unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him."
I needed to understand how anyone could have the power to take away the freedom to feel.
Jim explained patiently, "Some people surrender that freedom willingly - but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society - parents - they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you are born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true, feeling nature. You imitate what you see. Our culture mocks 'primitive cultures' and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses."
Over the sound system at the Garden Spot came the just released Beatles' Come Together - Jim was listening. "I like that song," he said.
We went back to the blue Shelby and he looked through the L.A. Times for a movie.
I asked a ponderous question: "Jim, does civilization have to be sacrificed to reclaim our freedom?"
"What is civilization?" he asked.
"City life, technology, habits, behavior, social rules, institutions, all of that."
"How important is `all that' to you? Is it more or less important to you than your freedom? If it's less important, then you can leave it alone. If it's more important, then you have to destroy it. By yourself - for yourself. Each person for himself. If you want your true self to survive.
In November of that year, on a rainy afternoon, Jim, his brother Andy, Jim's Irish pal Tom, publicity man Leon Barnard and I sat drinking boilermakers at the Palms Bar on Santa Moncia Blvd. Periodically, two or three of us would get up and shoot some pool. There was almost a fight between Jim and a big redneck pool-shark who got a little too belligerent.
Part of the time Jim sat and talked with me against the background din of the others - especially Tom - getting progressively more rowdy. Occasionally Tom teased me playfully, with phrases in foreign languages and dirty little jokes.
Jim was a master at holding his liquor. After seven or eight boilermakers (whisky shots with beer chasers) he was smooth, even, self-contained, articulate. But desensitized, no. If you looked closely, or brushed his consciousness with a slightest touch, there was that psyche like an exposed nerve, his raw, bare awareness, that nothing could muffle or shelter or insinuate.
He saw too much. Too seldom did he find respite in the sweet blindness that overtook the others. Something Tom said made Jim think of The Birth Of A Nation. Jim observed that this film was a classic, a definitive American epic. "America was conceived in violence," Jim said. "Americans are attached to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They're TV-hypnotized. TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth Century culture's disease is the inability to feel the reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotions over symbols, but in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead."
We walked through the rain to Elektra Studios on La Cienega. Outside, Andy and Tom wrestled playfully, rolling in the mud below the steps. Paul Rothchild stood in the doorway and scolded them like a schoolmaster.
Inside, "Roadhouse Blues" got cooking with John Sebastian wailing on harp. Pamela was waiting with two of her women friends, all vogueishly dressed, amidst a crowd of L.A. ultras, "Strange Days" survivors, meandering around the tracking room, while Jim uttered his primal scream, "WAKE UP!!" in a vacuum, writhing and jerking in useless gestures of thwarted rebellion.
One thing Jim taught me that I never lost is to forget or dismiss shame over suffering, and in the same way, to fight fear of pain.
"Pain is meant to wake us up," he said, that night. "People try to hide their pain, but they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters."
I had heard plenty about Morrison's dealings with women. The L.A. gossip circuit was as rife with these legends as with those of his consumption of prodigious amounts of acid prior to mounting a bike and careening down the narrow windings of Laurel Canyon, screaming.
"I'm no biker," he said to that tale, and if the drug myths were inventions too, how reliable could the sex myths be?
I might have considered myself warned, but dismissed the hearsay. Even if it was that extreme, I had to find out for myself.
I am sure I was an anomaly among groupies, in beguiling him to spend so much of our time through the night talking, and playing with, of all things, his sexual philosophy.
"Sex is full of lies," he said. "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."
But he was like a captive performing tiger, never quite tamed, never safe to turn your back on: at any moment could come the surprise lashing out of the big paw full of claws. He could be tender and funny and in the next instant, arrogant and mean.
At one point, I told him, "You look like a Greek god." He shook his head, laughing with the bashfulness and insecurity of any ordinary guy.
Between Waiting For The Sun and the day I closed the door of the ivy-netted house in King's Canyon, I talked with him, drank with him, spent nights with him, but most of all, took a moonlight dive into the "wet forests" and blue deeps of his mind.
Because my admiration for him stretched beyond carnality and beyond rock-star fixation into an overwhelming interest in the man's words, his ideas, his written and sung poetry, I found something more. He would astonish me with delight and with pain, and surprise me anew each time he gave me a chilling glimpse of his loneliness.
At three or five in the morning, sometimes, he called and said, "Come and get me. Come and take me away…" as though it was some winged denizen of heaven he had dialed.
He was a stranger, a "rider on the storm" thrown into this world. There was a shop on La Cienega, "Themis," where Pamela sold candles like giant unended root systems…and there was the argument over whether Jim was allowed to crash there at night. The first time he took me back to his hideout, we both struggled to pull his boot off a purple swollen foot, sprained when he kicked in an eight-by-ten plate glass window at the Doors' headquarters the previous night and jumped to the floor, ever in search of a "soul kitchen" to sleep all night in, refuge from the "stumbling neon grooves."
He was surrounded by an ever-present, teeming collection of buddies, gofers, groupies, associates and hangers-on. But when I said that I wanted to be his friend, he put his arm around me in quick acceptance, thanking me with feeling in his voice that I seriously recognized to be nothing other than need.
After he was gone, I was sorry about nothing except that I hadn't given him more. For what I did give. which was to plunge my greedy curiosity and eagerness into his mind in thirst for his ideas, had seemed to me no gift at all. But it was clear that it had seemed so to him, because he gave me so much in return - desperately careful in his explanations. only because he saw my craving to understand.
He always betrayed surprise when he saw that he had made himself understood, that his message had flown true and reached home and beat its wings in my innards. Of course, that was in the later days, when he felt his messages so fractionally received.
Jim Morrison was a revolutionary. He pitted the politics of eroticism against the bastion of unfeeling, rigid, insentience. He stormed the institution of flesh "that chains us," and "eyes that lie."
"The shaman is similar to the scapegoat," he said, as we walked through the rain on La Cienega and leaned inside a doorway against the wall, watching the cars crawl past. "I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their fantasies onto him and their fantasies come alive. People can destroy their fantasies, by destroying him. I obey the impulses everyone has, but won't admit to. By attacking me, punishing me, they can feel relieved of those impulses."
"Isn't that what you meant about people having a lot of wild emotion over symbols - pop idols, for instance?" I asked.
"That's right. People are afraid of themselves - of their own reality - their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's all 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?"
"Is that why you said, `my only friend, the End?"
"It's strange that people fear death, the pain is over. Yeah, I guess it is a friend."
We started walking back. The rain was coming harder, and we were lightly dressed. But the session break was over and he had to be back at the studio. It would be a long night.
* The Lords and The New Creatures
UNEDITED INTERVIEW SEGMENT:
Lizzie: I think fans of The Doors see you as a savior, the leader who'll set them all free. How do you feel about that?
Jim: It's absurd. How can I set free anyone who doesn't have the guts to stand up alone and declare his own freedom? I think it's a lie – people claim they want to be free – everybody insists that freedom is what they want the most, the most sacred and precious thing a man can possess. But that's bullshit! People are terrified to be set free – they hold on to their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It's their security…How can they expect me or anyone else to set them free if they don't really want to be free?
Lizzie: Why do you think people fear freedom?
Jim: I think people resist freedom because they're afraid of the unknown. But it's ironic…That unknown was once very well known. It's where our souls belong…The only solution is to confront them – confront yourself – with the greatest fear imaginable. Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Lizzie: What do you mean when you say "freedom"?
Jim: There are different kinds of freedom – there's a lot of misunderstanding….The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. ….You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him – unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him.
Lizzie: But how can anyone else have the power to take away from
your freedom to feel?
Jim: Some people surrender their freedom willingly – but others are forced to surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents – they refuse to allow you to keep the freedom you are born with. There are subtle ways to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see.
Lizzie: Are you saying that we are, in effect, brought up to defend and perpetuate a society that deprives people of the freedom to feel?
Jim: Sure….teachers, religious leaders – even friends, or so called friends – take over where parents leave off. They demand that we feel only the feelings they want and expect from us. They demand all the time that we perform feelings for them. We're like actors – turned loose in this world to wander in search of a phantom…endlessly searching for a half-forgotten shadow of our lost reality. When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. It's a subtle kind of murder….the most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces.
Lizzie: Do you think it's possible for an individual to free himself from these repressive forces on his own – all alone?
Jim: That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you. You have to do it on your own. If you look to somebody else to do it for you – somebody outside yourself – you're still depending on others. You're still vulnerable to those repressive, evil outside forces, too.
Lizzie: But isn't it possible for people who want that freedom to unite – to combine their strength, maybe just to strengthen each other? It must be possible.
Jim: Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is….Most people love you for who you pretend to be….To keep their love, you keep pretending – performing. You get to love your pretense…It's true, we're locked in an image, an act – and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image – they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it – they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.
Lizzie: It's ironic – it's sad. Can't they see that what you're trying to show them is the way to freedom?
Jim: Most people have no idea what they're missing. Our society places a supreme value on control – hiding what you feel. Our culture mocks "primitive cultures" and prides itself on suppression of natural instincts and impulses.
Lizzie: In some of your poetry, you openly admire and praise primitive people – Indians, for instance. Do you mean that it's not human beings in general but our particular society that's flawed and destructive?
Jim: Look at how other cultures live – peacefully, in harmony with the earth, the forest – animals. They don't build war machines and invest millions of dollars in attacking other countries who political ideals don't happen to agree with their own.
Lizzie: We live in a sick society.
Jim: It's true….and part of the disease is not being aware that we're diseased….Our society has too much – too much to hold on to, and value – freedom ends up at the bottom of the list.
Lizzie: But isn't there something an artist can do? If you didn't feel you, as an artist, could accomplish something, how could you go on?
Jim: I offer images – I conjure memories of freedom that can still be reached – like the Doors, right? But we can only open the doors – we can't drag people through. I can't free them unless they want to be free – more than anything else….Maybe primitive people have less bullshit to let go of, to give up. A person has to be willing to give up everything – not just wealth. All the bullshit he's been taught – all society's brainwashing. You have to let go of all that to get to the other side. Most people aren't willing to do that.
Lizzie: In your early, first album, stuff, there's a definite feeling of an apocalyptic vision – "break on through"- a transcendence. Do you see this as a still existing possibility?
Jim: It's different now. (Pause) It used to seem possible to generate a movement – people rising up and joining together in mass protest – refusing to be repressed any longer – like, they'd all put their strength together to break what Blake calls "the mind-forged manacles."…..The love-street times are dead. Sure, it's possible for there to be a transcendence – but not on a mass level, not a universal rebellion. Now it has to take place on an individual level – every man for himself, as they say. Save yourself. Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.
Lizzie: What causes that?
Jim: If natural energy and impulses are too severely suppressed for too long, they become violent. It's natural for something that's been held under pressure to become violent in it's release…a person who is too severely suppressed experiences so much pleasure in those violent releases…they're probably rare and brief. So he becomes infatuated with violence.
Lizzie: But then – the real source of evil isn't the violence – or the infatuation with it – but the repressive forces.
Jim: That's true – but in some cases, a person's infatuation with violence involves a secret complicity with his oppressors. People seek tyrants. They worship and support them. They co-operate with restrictions and rules, and they become enchanted with the violence involved in their brief, token rebellions.
Lizzie: But why is that?
Jim: Tradition, maybe – the sins of the fathers. America was conceived in violence. Americans are attracted to violence. They attach themselves to processed violence, out of cans. They're TV - hypnotized – TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movie, theatre, pop idols, and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead.
Lizzie: But why? What makes us run away from our own feeling?
Jim: We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.
Lizzie: I don't really understand.
Jim: Pain is meant to wake us up. People try and hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. (Pause) Pain is a feeling – your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.
Lizzie: Do you still see yourself as the shaman? I mean, lots of Doors fanatics look to you to lead them to salvation. Do you accept that role?
Jim: I'm not sure it's salvation that people are after, or want me to lead them to. The shaman is a healer – like a witch-doctor. I don't see people turning to me for that. I don't see myself as a savior.
Lizzie: What do you see them turning to you for, then?
Jim: The shaman is similar to the scapegoat. I see the role of the artist as shaman and scapegoat. People project their fantasies onto him and their fantasies by destroying him. I obey the impulses everyone has, but won't admit to. By attacking me, punishing me, they can feel relieved of those impulses.
Lizzie: Is that what you meant before, about people having a lot of wild emotions over symbols – pop idols for instance?
Jim: That's right. People are afraid of themselves – or 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?
Lizzie: Is that why you said, "My only friend, the End"…..?
Jim: Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate….That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend…..
Lizzie: People see sex as the great liberator – the ultimate freedom. Aren't a lot of your songs pointing the way to freedom through sex?
Jim: Sex can be a liberation. But it an also be an entrapment.
Lizzie: What makes the difference?
Jim: It's all a question of how much a person listens to his body – his feelings. Most people are too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.
Lizzie: How can we break through the rules and lies?
Jim: By listening to your body – opening up your senses. Blake said that the body as the soul's prison unless the five senses are fully developed and open. He considered the senses the "windows of the soul." When sex involves all the senses intensely, it can be like a mystical experience….
Lizzie: In some of your songs, you present sex as an escape – a refuge of sanctuary – like "Crystal Ship" or "Soft Parade" of "Soul Kitchen." I've always been fascinated by the way your lyrics suggest parallels between sex and death – "Moonlight Drive" is a beautiful example. But isn't this an ultimate rejection of the body?
Jim: Not at all – it's the opposite. If you reject your body, it becomes your prison cell. It's a paradox – to transcend the limitations of the body, you have to immerse yourself in it – you have to be totally open to your senses….It isn't so easy to accept your body totally – we're taught that the body is something to control, dominate – natural processes like pissing and shitting are considered dirty….Puritanical attitudes die slowly. How can sex be a liberation if you don't really want to touch your body – if you're trying to escape from it?
