"I saw the darkness in my heart"
"And the darkness still has work to do
"The knotted cords untying"
In this song and many others by peter gabriel, the themes of the intertwining and interpenetration of opposites can be found: the polarities of woman and man, light and darkness, insight and insanity, kindness and cruelty, agony and ecstasy, divinity and humanity, silence and sound, signal and noise. I'm sure this song has many personal meanings to him, probably related to a specific relationship and the difficulty and growth it afforded him, but he writes in a mysterious enough way that each of us can draw our own associations and meanings from the songs.
In centering this song around images of Man, Woman, Eden, Darkness, Uncertainty, Unheard Souls, Distant Thunder, Tenderness, Stillness, Bliss, and Union, there is fertile ground indeed to spawn so many meanings, one for each listener. For me, the lines I quoted initially, about darkness having to the work of untying knots is particularly interesting and meaningful. The myth of Eden is commonly called The Fall, and this connects with darkness and death (blood) and curses, but I believe peter is implying that there is something useful going on here, that these tragic separations can bring higher and more refined unions down the line. Here is my own speculation about the meaning of Woman and Man in Eden:
Maybe in the standard fall of man garden of eden myth, what was really going on was this: God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but this was just a kind of test to see if they had the spunk, courage, autonomy and initiative to become equal Gods with him someday. They passed, and in fact "The Fall" was really graduation from Divine Elementary School. History has been like Secondary School, in which humanity attains the awareness, social, ethical and technological sophistication and power to link together in a higher level of synergistic harmony, in which each autonomous human individual is also holonically linked and synergistically co-creating with all the others. So once we pass this test, in other words, once we figure out the social systems and psycho-spiritual development patterns to create this higher synergistic network of powerfully creative, equal, loving, harmonious, autonomous and freely interconnecting individuals then we graduate to full Godhood, and together create our universe and our own creatures. And only as we awaken to our collective Divinity will we realize that the Fall was in fact a graduation and our misperception of it as a fall was a kind of childish longing for the protection, safety and lack of responsibility of innocence. We have to get over our species-level Mother Complex, our desire to have some beneficent parental authority figure take care of us and make the tough decisions for us so we can play in innocence. Once we do, we'll realize that God as a Father has a truth to it, but now that we are mature we are equal to Him, and don't have to cower in fear from his wrath or enjoy the protection of his "omnipotent" but patronizing care. We take our place as adults in new relationship to our Creator, just as we as humans eventually take our place as relative equals with our parents once we completely grow up.
"I saw the darkness in my heart" "And the darkness still has work to do "The knotted cords untying"
In this song and many others by peter gabriel, the themes of the intertwining and interpenetration of opposites can be found: the polarities of woman and man, light and darkness, insight and insanity, kindness and cruelty, agony and ecstasy, divinity and humanity, silence and sound, signal and noise. I'm sure this song has many personal meanings to him, probably related to a specific relationship and the difficulty and growth it afforded him, but he writes in a mysterious enough way that each of us can draw our own associations and meanings from the songs.
In centering this song around images of Man, Woman, Eden, Darkness, Uncertainty, Unheard Souls, Distant Thunder, Tenderness, Stillness, Bliss, and Union, there is fertile ground indeed to spawn so many meanings, one for each listener. For me, the lines I quoted initially, about darkness having to the work of untying knots is particularly interesting and meaningful. The myth of Eden is commonly called The Fall, and this connects with darkness and death (blood) and curses, but I believe peter is implying that there is something useful going on here, that these tragic separations can bring higher and more refined unions down the line. Here is my own speculation about the meaning of Woman and Man in Eden:
Maybe in the standard fall of man garden of eden myth, what was really going on was this: God told Adam and Eve not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but this was just a kind of test to see if they had the spunk, courage, autonomy and initiative to become equal Gods with him someday. They passed, and in fact "The Fall" was really graduation from Divine Elementary School. History has been like Secondary School, in which humanity attains the awareness, social, ethical and technological sophistication and power to link together in a higher level of synergistic harmony, in which each autonomous human individual is also holonically linked and synergistically co-creating with all the others. So once we pass this test, in other words, once we figure out the social systems and psycho-spiritual development patterns to create this higher synergistic network of powerfully creative, equal, loving, harmonious, autonomous and freely interconnecting individuals then we graduate to full Godhood, and together create our universe and our own creatures. And only as we awaken to our collective Divinity will we realize that the Fall was in fact a graduation and our misperception of it as a fall was a kind of childish longing for the protection, safety and lack of responsibility of innocence. We have to get over our species-level Mother Complex, our desire to have some beneficent parental authority figure take care of us and make the tough decisions for us so we can play in innocence. Once we do, we'll realize that God as a Father has a truth to it, but now that we are mature we are equal to Him, and don't have to cower in fear from his wrath or enjoy the protection of his "omnipotent" but patronizing care. We take our place as adults in new relationship to our Creator, just as we as humans eventually take our place as relative equals with our parents once we completely grow up.