Looking for MERCY
I’ve been haunted by a beautiful song for many years now. It’s ‘Mercy Street’ by Peter Gabriel from his 1986 album So.
The start of the chorus I’ve always taken to be:
Dreaming of Mercy Street
Where you’re inside out
Turns out it’s actually:
Wear your inside out
I was tricked by the play on words. But now it’s got me thinking.
On the face of it, the song is the saddest thing.
Let’s take the boat out
Wait until darkness
Let’s take the boat out
Wait until darkness comes
The title came from Anne Sexton’s 1969 play ‘Mercy Street’. She was also working on a poem called ‘45 Mercy Street’ at the time of her death in 1974, committing suicide, her fifth attempt successful.
Anne, with her father, is out in the boat
Riding the water
Riding the waves on the sea
She had a difficult relationship with her dad and struggled with mental illness most of her life. Writing for her was therapy.
Is that why the song resonates so? What's in the verses?
Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made soft
Are the dreams all made real
All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
She pictures the broken glass, she pictures the steam
She pictures a soul
With no leak at the seam
Maybe the perils of keeping it all in?
Nowhere in the corridors of pale green and grey
Nowhere in the suburbs
In the cold light of day
There in the midst of it so alive and alone
Words support like bone
Maybe that’s why we writers write?
Pulling out the papers from the drawers that slide smooth
Tugging at the darkness, word upon word
Confessing all the secret things in the warm velvet box
To the priest-he’s the doctor
He can handle the shocks
Dreaming of the tenderness-the tremble in the hips
Of kissing Mary’s lips
Not just validation. Wanting kindness, compassion even. New ideas are fragile.
I think it does all come back to that line in the chorus.
'Where you’re inside out' sounds like hell. All your deepest darkest thoughts and feelings on show for everyone to see.
But 'wear your inside out' sounds like an instruction to be your true self, if you can find your way there and it’s safe when you arrive.
Dreaming of Mercy Street
‘Swear they moved that sign
Looking for mercy
In your daddy’s arms
Peter Gabriel seemed caught between the two different meanings when I saw him in 2013. He sung it lying down on what looked like a target, with five giant angle-poise lamps swarming around him.
But I’ve always felt something uplifting in the melancholy. Follow the light out of the darkness. Be you.
I just never knew it was there.
