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I am not really sure what it is about, to be honest! More accurately, it seems to be about a number of things…on a number of levels. Mainly it’s about a phenomenon I learned about whilst at University called “the hermeneutic pathos” – which is the tendency for people to project meaning into seemingly disparate events. The tendency to over-interpret things. Astrology, for example. Although there is no discernible logical or empirically demonstrable relationship between the stars and our lives, this has not discouraged people from projecting meaning into the stars! Whilst at university, I attended a great course called “The Enlightenment” which basically covered the major themes and figures – from Rene Descartes to Mary Wollstencraft. Anyway, one of the books we read was Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”. One literature lecturer – whose name I do remember but won’t share here for reasons of propriety – asserted that when poor old shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe was washed up, half-drowned, on his deserted island and lay face down on the beach, he was really symbolically “raping” the island. My friend Hayden e. Davies and I absolutely p*ss*d ourselves laughing when we heard this. Talk about over- interpreting! What a complete load of tosh! Another lecturer, the late, great Professor Frank Cioffi – the only person I ever met in the flesh who I consider a bona-fide genius – taught us the phrase “the hermeneutic pathos” to describe this tendency to over-interpret. Armed with this phrase I wrote the song “Gardens”. I had noticed that there were at least three gardens mentioned in the Bible – the Garden of Eden; the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; and the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus was betrayed by Judas Escariot and denied by Peter. Noticing that bad things had happened in at least two of these gardens, the song surmises that gardens are “treacherous places”. A good example of over-interpretation! On another level, the song is about storytelling. The politics of narrative. Also at University, I read Paul Johnson’s excellent “History of Christianity” where he chronicles how the early church whittled more than 40 gospels down to the familiar 4. I was very interested in this – how the elevation of a dominant narrative was an essentially political act. I thought it would be interesting to revisit some of the other gospels. Imagine even a lost gospel. A really matter-of-fact, even prosaic, gospel. One that just chronicled the everyday. Injected with the kind of sarcastic, observational wit that young students commonly trade in. A gospel according to the quintessentially bored, know-it-all teenager. Making quickfire value judgements about how cr*p things are. So…that’s another thing going on in the song.
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This song dates back from around 1990, when I was a third-year undergraduate at the University of Essex.