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| [A Guided Tour of Ten] |
Garden is a quiet moment for meditation, taking stock of what has come before. There is a strong contrast between the clarity of the main guitar melody and the moody atmosphere that surrounds it, at attempt to make sense of a seemingly senseless world, an effort to pierce the veil that obscures what he hopes is reality, a truer world than the one he lives in (in a lot of ways Garden is a very Platonic song)
The dissatisfaction that is driving the singer is a mixture of the personal and something much larger—the ways in which the sensory overload of the lives that we live interfere with our ability to create meaningful personal relationships, our ability to create and sustain the attachments that create real value, rather than the illusions that we force ourselves to accept.
In that respect Garden is about resisting temptation, learning to look past the bright lights, the sales pitch, the shiny object. Truth and meaning (and love) is found when you try to peer into the shadowy depths that do not offer any easy way out, but do offer the possibility (only the possibility) of something more meaningful.
Eddie does a pretty nice job applying this theme to our relationship with society and our relationship to each other (which is filtered through the superficiality of our external world). We can’t separate the two—the type of personal connections we have will be forever bound up with the contexts we situate them in. An impermanent world of smoke and mirrors will never allow us to grasp something tangible. Privileging love will require letting go of the familiar comfort that we are accustomed to, and this is not an easy choice to make, since the temptations to go back are so strong. Opening ourselves up to something more meaningful requires a surrender of sorts, a threatening vulnerability. Love requires the death of old attachments and the walls that we've built around ourselves so that we can be reborn into something new
As such, underneath the questioning and uncertainty of the verses we find the tone of the chorus and the outro, a complicated mix of determination and fear. He is willing to reject what he has to reject, to make himself vulnerable. He has to if he wants to live (a life without love, without humanity, is not a life worth living) but the necessity of his surrender does not make it any less painful, and the song ends with that painful rejection of what he knows and the possibility (always a possibility, never a guarantee) of rebirth.
OTHER SONGS IN THIS SERIES:
Once
Even Flow
Alive
Why Go
Black
Jeremy
Oceans
Porch
Garden
Deep
Release
OTHER GUIDED TOUR SERIES:
Ten
Vs.
Vitalogy
No Code
Yield
Binaural
Riot Act
Pearl Jam
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