Patricia Kennealy-Morrison - FAQ 11

 Did you think Jim was self-destructive? Why would he have felt so?    No truly creative person is truly self-destructive. It may look so, at times, to the outsider, because creative people will do things in the service of their creativity that no non-creative person would ever dream of doing. But it's not destruction, merely another form of creation; and despite the mouthings of those who were too young or too stoned or too ignorant to judge, Jim Morrison was most definitely not into destroying himself. That said, I must also say that since Jim was an addict and not always in perfect self-command, his instinct for adventuring, that edge-walking side of him, did indeed push him into the borderlands of self-destructiveness, and sometimes right over. He often told me that the edges were the only interesting place to be, the fringes, out where all the good stuff happens. You don't have to be an alcoholic to dig that. And the staggering stresses he was under--personal and professional alike--didn't help. He was a beautiful, shy, sensitive, incredibly gifted soul thrown naked and wounded and bleeding into a bear pit the like of which most of us cannot possibly imagine, armed only with his intelligence and his courage and his art; the surprise is not that it killed him but--testament to his spirit and strength--that he lasted as long as he did, long enough to realize he was never going to get out of there alive unless he changed his life. And just when he realized that, and was beginning to act on it, Pam gave him the smack. I'm not going to betray Jim's intimate confidences to me about why he felt as he felt, did as he did. Suffice it to say that he had his reasons, he told me those reasons, I thought they were good and real and true reasons, and that's as far as I am prepared to go.