The Indigo Girls Create a Space for iPods in the Classroom

Husband
These poems are your rival.
They undress me.
They keep me up nights.
Turn my eyes to soft fruits
ripe and realized.

Husband
These poems are my best friend.
They listen to my monotony,
my unceasing repeating.
Against their patience I can never sin.

Husband
These poems are my passionate suitor.
They go down on one knee.
They beg me, “Marry me. Marry me.”
I find
I give them my hand.

Husband
This could be exciting: poems&me, you&me,
Menage a trois. Permanently,
Happily.

Husband
Is a woman poet permitted bigamy?
Husband
Answer me!
--Angela Jackson

“I don’t care if they’re not turned on; if I even see headphones, I’m confiscating those iPods.” I have a confession: one of the hardest things that I have had to learn to do as a teacher is refuse students when they ask if they can listen to their iPods when we’re writing essays. In fact, I wasn’t fully committed to the confiscation of iPods until my own iPod was stolen out of my classroom, motivating my desire to protect students from the heartache (and financial strain when I soon after just had to replace it with the video iPod) that my over-attachment to that wonder gadget caused. As my iTunes crank through this computer, I know that music and rhythm can inspire the movement of my fingers across the keys on my keyboard more than silence can. Nothing underscores the beneficial effects of music to literary studies more than my experiences with “Language or the Kiss” by the Indigo Girls. When I discovered the lyrical artistry of the Indigo Girls’ lyrics while majoring in English, my commitment to language was solidified, particularly when I heard “Language or the Kiss.” I was attending Brigham Young University at the time and my dating experiences with men who were intimidated or turned off whenever I talked about anything too intellectual had made me start worrying that I was going to have to make a choice like that described in this song—between my desire to attain love and my love of English literature.

I bought the Indigo Girls’ live album after spending the semester studying Tennyson’s exploration of the conflict between commitments to love and community and commitments to art and self in my Victorian Lit. class. As I listened to the Indigo Girls develop this universal theme of the unresolved internal conflict that many artists face when they have to choose between love and fame in “Language or the Kiss,” I couldn’t help thinking of Tennyson’s girl who wove a tapestry and lived happily confined in a tower atop a town called Shallott until one day, one look in her mirror at a boy named Lancelot pimping his ride through the fields below compelled her to abandon the beauty of all of those years of work…and her life. It seems that the speaker of this song feels that pursuing love is tantamount to the Lady of Shallott’s suicide boat ride, which culminated in nothing more than a glance from Lance, who took a passing glance at her corpse and merely pronounced, “She has a lovely face.” Toward the beginning of the song, the speaker of the song explains, “Oh, the fear I've known—/ that I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own./ All I've sown was a song…” (9-12). She seems to think that if she pursues her career as a songwriter, she will always be lonely, only winning the affection of music fans, but never having time to develop close personal relationships outside of her fame. She may feel this way for many reasons: the life of a musician who must constantly travel as he/she tours may be too hard on a relationship (see references to being “alone in a hotel room tonight” in line 25), or it may just be that she wants to dedicate all of her time and attention to writing songs and she sees the time required to nurture love as distracting her from the focus she feels that it requires. The speaker concludes the song with this final verdict: “Unforgiving, the choice still is—the language or the kiss” (30-1). By ending with the words that give the song its title, the speaker makes it clear that the conflict remains unresolved for her, which could be interpreted positively or negatively: either she will always have to sacrifice one for the other (which is why it is “a calling that [says], ‘if joy, then pain’” (21-22)), or one day she will find someone who can love her and still allow her to dedicate herself to her art, because the song ends not with death, but with the persistence of the question and her hope that “the things that mean the most” (writing and art) won’t have to “mean the things I miss” (her desire for love).

In a song about an artist whose primary materials are words, this song provides an excellent specimen for literary study through its masterful use of language. Although she has been “made mute by the virtue of [the] decision” (7) described above, references to language as a motif are frequent in this song: laughter is like a language she can no longer speak after not using it for so long (6) and as she discusses her pressing desire to understand her future fate in the second verse, she chooses to describe her interest in astrology as a form of fortunetelling by writing, “I used to like that alone out on the driveway, trying to read the Greek upon the stars, the alphabet of feeling” (19-20). She references the Greek language primarily because so many constellations, including the Zodiac calendar, have Greek names (i.e. the Pleiades, Aries, Sagittarius, etc.). However, there is a clever pun in her use of “Greek”; for one who has chosen to repress her emotions of love in favor of a more logical commitment to her profession, the “alphabet of feeling” is, like laughter, a foreign language; it truly is Greek to her! As an old maid school teacher has retreated only further into her books for solace as the years have passed in her own lonely virginhood, I can definitely relate. In the third and final verse, she gives us a snapshot of her writing this song, which she calls “my studies with this paper and this pencil” that she is using to work “through the grammar of [her] fears” (26-27). Having chosen language over love, she is forced to use language as her coping mechanism. In other words, language is the source she elects in her quest for healing.

Having elected language over love, the song also makes use of strong and effective imagery to convey the depth of the speaker’s loneliness after having chosen language over love within the narrative of this song. The song opens with a clear image: a person is standing outside a house, looking in on a gathering of five people around a table with six settings, “and there was steam on the windows from the kitchen, laughter like the language [she] once spoke with ease” (3-6). Her description of the steam on the windows highlights the cold that she must feel outside of the warmth creating it inside, and she speaks about laughter as if it is a language that she has forgotten how to speak from not using it for so long, which also conveys her sadness. Since she is looking in from outside, almost like one who feels left out, we have to infer that she is the sixth guest that is missing, but since they had set a place for her, she must have been the one who chose not to attend. In the final verse of the song, she returns to the stars, which were earlier associated with feeling and the antithesis of language, but this time she is sitting “alone in a hotel room,” and when she “[squeezes] the sky out…not a star appears” (25-6). By pointing out the detail that she is alone in a hotel room, she makes it clear that she is touring with her band, which makes sense, since the alternative to love is dedication to her songwriting and touring requires constant road travel. She is looking to the sky for inspiration again, but since it was associated earlier with emotion, feeling, and relationships, she feels that she is not able to capture the stars, literally or figuratively. Perhaps she is starting to learn that to be a true star herself, she actually needs love to inspire her art?

I can only hope that the answer to that last question is “yes,” but as I sit here, still lonely and overwhelmed by the demands of my job as an English teacher and the unread books on my teeming bookshelves, I can’t help wondering…For now, I seem to have made the same choice as the writer of the song, but I still cling to the hope that someday I will find someone who can help me fuse both desires in one.