Part II - The Gospel according to Joe: Meditations on Joe Pug’s Sketch of a Promised Departure

1. Fast Asleep inside the Garden

   
   

With the opening song, Pug’s engagement with the Gospels is unavoidable. “The Garden” in the title might turn out to be an allusion to Eden or Gethsemane (the latter being a sort of reference to the former). Indeed, the song turns out to be a retelling of Christ’s experience in Gethsemane, and hence, a recounting of events from the gospel narrative, particularly the passion week. The speaker begins, “I arrived in town a week ago with a stone around my neck / and the girls lay roses down / pretty girls lay roses down.” Now, a “stone” isn’t necessarily a millstone, but stones around necks evokes Christ’s warnings for those who cause children to stumble: it would be better to have a millstone around your neck and be cast into the sea than to harm a child. But the more direct suggestion is that the speaker carries a burden. There are no roses in the gospels, but on Palm Sunday, of course, people (girls included, I suppose) lay palm branches down on the occasion of Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem. Pug’s speaker arrives in town with a burden and is lauded by the locals. In the song’s present, then, it’s Maundy Thursday, the day before the crucifixion. All I’ll say about his verb choice is that he’s in exalted company: cf. “Lay Down, Sally” by Eric Clapton and Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay.”

*Go listen to the music, the podcast, subscribe to the vault, read the dispatches, sign up for the newsletter, and buy stuff.

The next lines begin to round out the portrait: “I arrived in town a week ago with a beast upon my tracks / he wore an iron crown.” Like this pursued personage whose arrival is lauded with roses, Jesus was also being pursued by a beast–the heel-biting serpent of Genesis 3:14. In scripture, this is the dragon, Satan, the prince of the powers of this world and “the ruler of this world,” whose reign could not be called benevolent. His crown is cruel, hard, and crude—iron rather than golden or silver. This menacing beast would also work as the Roman Empire–the iron age super power that’s going to drive the nails into Christ’s wrists and ankles. In any case, this coronated beast stands as a mortal threat.

Other parallels in the song are even more conspicuous. The speaker’s friends are fast asleep inside the garden, their teeth stained red from “the wine they had to drink.” The allusion to the Last Supper and communion is obvious, but the augmentation here is that they are “dead to dreams like they promised not to be.” This certainly mirrors the disciple’s avowals of loyalty to Christ and his kingdom–especially Peter’s during the Last Supper. He said he would never betray Jesus, and yet he couldn’t even stay awake to watch and pray with Him that night. The substitution of "dead to dreams," though, indicates another layer of meaning. If this album uses Christ's story, it's not necessarily about Him. In fact, by using the Gospels as a figurative lexicon to tell his own story–or the story of an everyman–Pug writes a narrative that's about both its literal and its figurative component. In this moment, it's as if Pug were lamenting some milieu's failure to "keep the flame" along with him ("Bright Beginnings"). The speaker seems to be in trouble for living the dream out even after his companions have made their compromises (cf. "Brother John (Charcoal on Paper)").

Christ’s response to His friends' failure is to ask, “So could you not watch with me one hour?” He then explains their limitation: “The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:40-41). It can never hurt a Christian to recall both Jesus' merciful explanation of the disciple’s failure along with His plaintive question.

The speaker has a sense of doom throughout the song. “Don’t tell me how it ends, I think I know,” he says, and then explains he’s without allies while a gang’s out for blood. In the next verse, he adds, “It’s plain to see for anyone who’s read their history.” In the context of the album’s contemporary substitutions for the nouns of the Gospels, I can’t help noticing that this phrase about history contains the sense of heroes continually getting scapegoated and martyred–but more on that in the discussion of the next song. As a student of mine pointed out, the line also fits with the Old Testament prophecies about the suffering servant, the New Testaments interpretation of these prophecies, and Christ’s apparent understanding of himself as their fulfillment: “But He was pierced for our transgressions / He was crushed for our iniquities / Upon Him was the chastisement that brought us peace/ And with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Prophecy isn’t history, exactly, but as the national-religious literature of a people group, it would be an apt stand-in here.

A certain ambivalence comes out as well. The speaker says he’d “love to leave the garden” but his “heart is on a string.” The sentiment mirrors Christ’s own attitude when he falls on his face and prays, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:42). It strikes me that there might not be an instance in the Gospels that more succinctly demonstrates the hypostatic union, Christ’s simultaneous existence as God and man. God in the flesh, fully perfect and divine and yet wholly human, felt this fear, weakness, and even reluctance to carry out his mission. He even went so far as to pray that another way be found to save sinners. Almost in the same breath, he prays that the Father’s will be done rather than his own. He went through with it because he loved the ones he would die for. You could say his heart, too, was on a string.

P.S.

I return to this piece long after it's initial composition to make an observation about the figurative and literal aspects of storytelling. Even as I write this, it occurs to me for the first time that this album might just be an allegory. I've been working under the impression that the meaning is more polyvalent, but it could be the case that Joe Pug is just using the story of Christ to do nothing more than tell a story about himself. And that would be alright, but I don't think that's all that's happening. Maybe I can't decide whether it's just an allegory or not because what J.R.R. Tolkien says about the subject is true:

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read 'just as a story'; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends.

Tolkien to publisher Sir Stanley Unwin, pp. 174-5

*Go listen to the music, the podcast, subscribe to the vault, read the dispatches, sign up for the newsletter, and buy stuff.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “109: To Sir Stanley Unwin.” 31 July 1947. The Letters of J.R.R. 

Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. New York: 

HarperColllinsPublishers, 2023. 174.