The song “Your Lost Little Girl” was a metaphorical symbolism for everything Morrison believed in. It reflects Jim’s terrible disposition for authority and his goal to show people the way to freedom. He believed that to accept authority was to become authority. His excessive drug use and drinking fueled him to write some of the most original and visionary music ever. It also led him to a mind state that left some people thinking him insane and others thinking him a god.
James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, December 8, 1943. Due to his family’s constant moving because of his father’s job in the Navy, Jim grew up a very shy child. It was difficult for him to make friends, so he developed an early interest in literature. He excelled in school and had an IQ of 149. Jim identified with an intense line of poets, writers and philosophers who resisted authority and were insistent on staying true to their nature: Blake, Poe, Rimbaud, and VanGogh. Jim claimed that one of the most influential event in his life, happened when he was 4 years old.
His family drove up on an accident involving a bus full of Pueblo Indians, who were mostly dead. Jim was terribly upset when they could not help. He later stated that one of the dead Indians had passed his soul to him. He was severely punished by his father. Morrison’s utter distain for authority was largely due to his father’s strict authoritarian approach to parenting. His father, a rear admiral in the US Navy, expected Jim to keep it on the straight and narrow, and to follow the only way of life he new.
This fueled Morrison’s rebellious nature. It was during his UCLA film school days that this attitude led him to drugs. He mainly experimented in hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. He also developed a strong taste for liquor.
Jim never lost his deep love of poetry. He became particularly infatuated with the poetry of William Blake and the writings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was his own dark style of poetry that caught the eye of fellow classmate Ray Manzarek who was a classically trained keyboardist. After hearing Jim’s early attempts at lyric writing they decided to form a band.
They recruited Robbie Krieger and John Densmore from the Psychedelic Rangers and The Doors were born. Jim got the name from Aldous Huxley’s book on mescaline, The Doors of Perception, which quoted a William Blake poem, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as is, infinite. Jim’s problem with authority led him to believe that to truly be free, you must break away from society. He was interested in anything about revolt, disorder, and chaos.
He believed these to be the road to freedom. When asked in an interview what freedom really was, Jim responded “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. ” He wanted to show people the way to freedom. Jim’s experience with death and the Indians stuck with him profoundly through the years. In fact, he never stopped claiming the soul of one of the Indians was with him.
Jim never actually called himself this, but his fans considered him a shaman or a king. Jim once said, “The shaman…he was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an…uh…unusual individual. And, he would put himself into a trance by dancing, whirling around, drinking, taking drugs—however.
Then, would go on a mental travel and…uh…describe his journey to the rest of the tribe. ” Which is exactly what Morrison would do. In the song “Your Lost Little Girl” Jim was saying that the little girl was society or the people as a hole. In the song he said, “I think you know what to do, yeah I’m sure you know what to do. ” He knew people knew the way but were scared.
He was challenging people to find their true self when he asked, “Tell me who are you?” The people were this lost little girl who was looking for themselves in order to truly achieve freedom. If everyone would dare to face him or herself and find out who they were then they wouldn’t be lost. He had faced himself, therefore facing his fears. Whether he liked what he saw or not he had nothing to fear and was therefore free. Feel to be his own person. Free to feel.
Morrison knew that he could not force people into freedom; rather he tried to open the doorway for them. He believed people knew the way to freedom, but were just scared to break away from the chains that they had grown accustomed to. Jim was once quoted saying, “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 bull*censored*! People are terrified to be set free-they hold onto their chains. They fight anyone who tries to break those chains. It’s their security…how can they expect me or anyone to set them free if they don’t really want to be free?”The uncompromising, strict nature in which Morrison was raised, bread a deep loathing for authority in his heart. This rebellious nature of Jim’s which led to incredible amounts of drug use and drinking is what spurred his dark lyrics and what some would say brought him to the end of his short lived life. Some people thought Jim had a death wish, but I find it difficult to judge the way he chose to live and die. It was his insatiable thirst for life that killed him, not any love of death.
Morrison’s short tragic life is the stuff of which our heroes and our gods of youth are made. Nonconformist, poet, drug addict, alcoholic, accidental spiritual leader and insane are some of the labels you could hang on Jim Morrison. If you ask me, he was a free spirit ready and willing to share his wisdom (if not a little misguided) to any who would listen. He knew that people knew the way as he stated in “You’re Lost Little Girl,” but that they were scared to break away from the unfeeling nature that society bestowed upon them. “If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel”(Jim Morrison).Bibliography:
