| Peter Gabriel – Blood Of Eden Lyrics | 20 years ago |
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I really like what the toolshed has to say. The "moment of forgetting--a moment of bliss" is what makes us feel alive. Sure, the price of heartbreak is a great price, but for those moments of floatiing in ecstasy, soaring above the pain and "shocks that flesh is air to" (as Hamlet would say) is worth it. Each of those blissful moments to which tollshed alludes gets its sweetness from the very fact that death and suffering and heartbreak are on the other side of the coin. The Red Hot Chili Peppers would agree, as they sing: "I like pleasure spiked with pain." If there was no pain, no lapse of judgement and fall--there would be no TRUE bliss. That's the irony of life (at least for the Christian) because we want to get back to the garden, but would life be interesting. We need "imaginary gardens with real toads in them"--this is how Adrienne Rich defines poetry, and this is at the crux of what makes art so powerful--what makes this song so powerful. As for the allusion to Macbeth in "is this a dagger or a crucifix I see," I consider the speaker in the song as one confused by guilt and the destructive force of the subject of the poem. I heard that Gabriel's divorce was a direct result of an affair on the part of his wife. I could be wrong, but I suspect, as in "Digging in the Dirt," that the shame of this cross has been devastating and destructive--after all, in Macbeth it was Lady Macbeth who brought about the fall of Dunsinane, as Eve brought man the knowledge of earthly power. In any case, it was all worth it. It was all "for the union" which God wanted anyway--the union of love. |
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