Faculty Forum You Cannot Conceive The Many Without The One -Plato- Issue No. 11 Spring 2009 This publication is available to our academic ing the same way, and you can feel community as contributors desire to publicly share them gearing up, preparing to say “I scholarly-based thoughts and opinions. Please sub- mit contributions (ten double-spaced pages or less) love you,” and you don’t want it, as a Word attachment, in 12-point font, to emer- you don’t want that moment to [email protected] or [email protected]. come. It’s not that you don’t want Authors, please note that you are writing for an audi- to hear it, or that you don’t love ence that includes faculty, staff, and students. them back, it’s that the spell is going to break the second they put it to THE LONG WINTERS’S those words. Don’t be in love with “ULTIMATUM”: LANGUAGE AND THE me right now, not yet. Just want me, DEATH OF ROMANCE passionately, for a little longer. By Roderick’s expressed attitude, one that C. Bryan Love might be said to reflect the stereotypical Assistant Professor of English ethos of the young hipster, is self- consciously self-centered. It is a mindset in John Roderick, songwriter and guitarist which the “magic” in a relationship resides for The Long Winters, told CMJ New Music in the raw, unspoken and therefore unfixed that his songs are about “being with some- emotion that fuels the tangling of bodies, one,” with a narrow focus on relationships but the “magic” disappears once the mo- mentum is codified, once it is harnessed by that don’t work. [1] At the magazine’s prompting, Roderick indicated, apparently language and framed by traditional expecta- quite reluctantly, a little bit about his song tions. Indeed, taking steps toward giving “Ultimatum,” which appeared first as an over to those traditional codes and expecta- acoustic bit on an eponymous EP, then later tions is associated with an unbearable loss as a rocker on the LP Putting the Days to of physical and emotional freedom. Bed: Roderick would seem to be depicting what is arguably one of the more common prob- I mean, I could describe what the lems in relationships today, a tendency to song “Ultimatum” is about, the spe- worship infatuation at the expense of the cific incident, but it would be bela- many other essential ingredients in working boring the obvious. Everyone has relationships. It is a fixation with the first been in that situation, where you frantic stage of coupling that coincides with really want to be with a person, you a dread of what happens when one “settles want to hold them and you think down,” with all that is implied in that about them all the ... time, and you phrase. This dread can lead to a kind of see it in their eyes that they’re feel- emotional stasis and a reluctant retreat from what may very well be a functioning rela- My arms miss you, my hands miss you tionship, and this sort of drama is at the cen- The stars sing I’ve got their song in my ter of Roderick’s song. head Blue in the broad light of day The subject matter of “Ultimatum” may Your claws are snagged on my face be familiar, but the way it is expressed is Say it: I wish we were naked not always. Like many really interesting And I wish that I could take it when you rock songs, “Ultimatum” is filled with turn on me highly emotive but somewhat vague and/or unusual language and imagery. Here [My arms miss you, my hands miss you Roderick’s is not the style of contemporar- The stars sing I’ve got their song in my ies such as Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben head] Gibbard, whose songs are often character- I don’t want my words twisted ized by a simple elegance, familiar stories I don’t want you to listen too closely graced by beautiful, sometimes unusual but Or wait for me impatiently quickly grasped metaphors. Instead, And I hope I can keep seeing you Roderick offers a thick blend of attention- As long as you don’t say you’re falling grabbing, highly emotive impressions and in love sentiments that seem to hang together rather Crave translates into slave loosely, challenging the listener/reader to No one can harness the rain stitch the pieces together into a more-or-less And I can make myself into rain coherent narrative and tease out its deeper You’ll feel me on your cheek and on meanings. your sleeve The first important piece of information [My arms miss you, my hands miss you we get about the song is, of course, its fore- The stars sing I’ve got their song in my boding title, “Ultimatum.” Clearly, dealing head with a demand is at the heart of the song. I don’t want my words twisted The lyrics eventually establish what this I don’t want you to listen too closely ultimatum is: basically, the speaker says to Or wait for me impatiently his lover, “I can/want to keep seeing you as And I hope I can keep seeing you long as you don’t say you’re falling in As long as you don’t say you’re falling love.”[2] The singer seems to feel intensely in love that he must walk away from an apparently But I can feel you about to forget enthralling relationship if the words “I love Yes, I can feel you about to forget…] you” are uttered by his companion, the pre- [3] cise sentiment that Roderick laid out in the The first verse sets the table. Although CMJ New Music piece. there is no clear indication of it in the lyrics, The lyrics of “Ultimatum” are as fol- I will operate under the assumption that the lows: song is about a traditional heterosexual rela- Student why do you dream of me tionship. It is possible, or likely, that the When you dream of your acre of trees? images in the lyrics are grounded in the real It was agreed: I came to burn leaves experiences of the songwriter, but the ordi- It’s all I ever claimed to do nary listener lacks this context and is left A plowman I’ll never grow into with much to puzzle out. First of all, the -2- singer’s lover is described as a “student,” or literally “never”?), with its obvious implying youth and, given the way the song sexual meanings. He is not wedded to the unfolds, naivety, a lack of sophistication in “acre of trees” or the one who would dream the ways of romance, at least as the speaker him there, with “dream” conveying the ro- sees it. The question, “why do you dream mantic notions of the dreamer but for the of me / When you dream of your acre of speaker shading into a word such as “trap” trees?” immediately links the student or “suffocate.” So, from the outset the (“you”), property (“your acre of trees”) and situation seems familiar and bleak: the the singer (“me”), pointing to domesticity. woman wants a stronger commitment of But it does so within the context of the some sort, is yearning to draw the man into wildness of the recent intensity of the rela- a fairy tale domestic scene, one that she en- tionship; this is, after all, an “acre of trees,” visions them shaping out of her Edenic not a “duplex in suburbia” or some other “acre of trees,” and the man is at best mundane dwelling at the heart of yuppie flinching, and possibly insisting that it is life. Consequently, the common, often be- never going to happen. Indeed, the singer labored fissure between passion and do- suggests that his “student”-lover once mesticity is established in the song’s first “agreed” to his sense of their arrangement two lines, and the fact that these lines take and is somehow breaking faith with him by the form of a question reflects the inserting him into her fantasy. speaker’s exasperation that things have come to this point. The chorus of the song, repeated several times, emphasizes both physicality and the Next, the singer describes the limits of soaring highs of infatuation: “My arms miss his commitment, at least at the moment. He you, my hands miss you / Stars sing I’ve got begins with the phrase “It was agreed,” im- their song in my head.” First of all, it is im- plying that he and his lover had at some portant that the singer’s arms and hands point come to terms, although the exact na- miss the woman in question. Hearts and ture of their understanding, how clearly it minds and souls, omnipresent in the lan- was formed and how seriously it was taken guage of romantic love, are conspicuously by the lover, is unclear (perhaps a flawed absent here. Secondly, there is the curious “student”-“teacher” relationship is implied). line “Stars sing I’ve got their song in my Regardless, the singer insists that like some head.” “Stars” could mean the shining orbs half-hearted itinerant groundskeeper, he of the heavens, usually associated with “came to burn leaves / It’s all I ever claimed wishes and longing and often imbued with to do.” These lines begin clearly to estab- various magical and religious connotations lish the limitations of the singer’s present (perhaps implying a prayer to stop the lips commitment to his lover.