Why blogging is not really an antidote to Armitagemania

John Porter (Richard Armitage) coerces Katie Dartmouth into agreeing that they will get out of their captivity in Strike Back 1.2. Source: Not sure. This was an early screencap, presumably of an illicit copy. Please notify me if you would like credit.

I picked this picture for this post first just because I really like it and often look at it during the day. Then I mused about how it might reflect my wish for someone to swoop in and intervene in some of my RL problems. Then, as someone firmly in the grip of Armitagemania, I wondered if the captivity metaphor was decisive in the decision to pick it for this post. Finally, though, since I can’t tell you why I picked it, I’ll retreat into analysis: Visually, note how Armitage’s right eye is so vividly and strikingly framed by his eyebrow, the shadows in his eyesocket, and the scrape on his cheekbone. This paragraph is a synecdoche for this post. Or maybe a metonymy. I don’t feel like looking it up at the moment.

Two days of doing my thinking about Mr. Armitage in my paper journal instead of on the computer have been very thought-provoking and enlightening. Two days of being trapped with my thoughts. Regular readers of this blog are aware that, like many other fans of Mr. Armitage, I feel as if I am in the grip of something that is unique in my experience of myself and which I don’t completely understand. At times I happily adopt the persona of fangrrrl and completely give in to the squee, at others, I am troubled by it, sometimes deeply. 

Like the much more cheerful RAFrenzy, a blogger who so often speaks to me from the heart, I started writing this blog as a vent and also in the conviction that if I did it for a little while the impulse would wear off and I could return to thinking about other things. That hasn’t been the case, just as it hasn’t for her. No worries, I’m not going to give up the project as hopeless and stop (at least not at this point) or try to deal with it via repression. The many nice comments you’ve written, and the regular numbers of hits on this blog suggest that, whether or not they agree with or even find time to read what I write, a surprising number of people find it worthy of at least a glance. Writing it continues to be a refuge from the problems besetting me IRL and perhaps that’s its most important function. It surprised me how much I wondered what y’all were doing and saying during my brief days away.

Writing in a journal is really different from blogging, though. There’s only one copy, and I can say whatever I like in it. Most transparently, it includes the sort of reactions that women who were raised as I was typically wouldn’t express anywhere except perhaps in a bedroom or after a great deal of alcohol. Though I am not ashamed of such thoughts I would never articulate them in polite society or even on an anonymous blog. But it goes further than thinking things like, ‘boy, does that man have an amazing _____ [insert name of your favorite Armitage body part] and would I ever like to put my mouth on it.’ Everyone has a different threshold in that regard and those lines turn out to be surprisingly strong. I can’t imagine at this point, for example, that any discussion I wrote of Mr. Armitage’s body would ever reference the term “peaches,” though I wrote a great deal in the last sequence about his “posterior.” I continue to muse upon my almost physical rejection of making reference to him as “RA.” (This is not a criticism of you if you do those things. Just pointing out the visceral durability of certain boundaries that are really not all that important in the end.)

How far one is willing to go in terms of discussing things that might be considered vulgar is ultimately trivial, though, in comparison to what popped out to me yesterday as the real issue for me in why blogging hasn’t solved my Armitage problem. Journaling allowed me express feelings that I probably wouldn’t refer to here, or perhaps only obliquely. When I write directly into the text window on this blog, I am already editing myself to speak to you, my known and imagined readers. Thoughts that are too personal, to embarrassing, too troublesome, too vulnerable, perhaps too unfounded get backspaced over and disappear (or at best copied into the text window of a draft post, there to languish, sometimes indefinitely).

In contrast, as you’ve seen most recently with the clothing discussion, other ideas get developed ad nauseam over several thousand words; they become the expression of a sort of neurotic, compulsive glossolalia that conceals as much as it reveals. I have a weird awareness of detail that heavily complicates my perception of anything and that seems to be intensifying as I get older; giving in to it is pleasurable, but also leaves me in a troubling state of ambivalence about most things, as I simply have too much evidence about everything. These really long posts are an attempt to put my finger on something that recedes inexorably from my grasp the more determinedly I reach for it, an attempt to control the uncontrollable.

The most uncontrollable things, sometimes the most unknowable for me, are my feelings, which I never seem to know in an unmediated way. One seduction of blogs is that they deceptively appear to offer us immediacy. We read blogs, I think, because we think we are getting a glimpse into something unmediated, and to some extent I think I write the blog for the same reason. I want to say how I really feel about watching Mr. Armitage, and those of you who share some of my reactions want to read those statements because they speak about the real.

Nonetheless I realized yesterday that writing here has produced another level of  attenuation from the “real”; I think I get to say what I want, and indeed, everything I write is something I want to say, but I am still writing about it for you as well as me. I’m not sure that we can ever talk about something even in the merely virtual presence of others without altering its shape and content. And all the things I don’t say take on an ever greater significance as the blog wears on. Venting a portion of my reactions lends the “private” an ever greater weight as something dangerous that can’t be expressed or perhaps even admitted and thus adds an edge of something like fear or shame or embarrassment to those matters. All of this material takes on more and more meaning, so that even as I write about Mr. Armitage as a means of letting go of the preoccupation with him, the preoccupation is enhanced.

One has to ask oneself where that fear, shame, and embarrassment come from. Shame that my feelings and reactions, which education, until its unremitting emphasis on self-awareness and self-reflexivity, has taught me to polish to a high degree of complexity, are just as violent and base as those of the average fangrrl? Am I upset that in the end, I am nothing more than another member of the human race? Fear that someone could observe my frightening, unrelenting excitement about Mr. Armitage? Am I afraid that Mr. Armitage could observe it? Do I have concerns about the potential of unethical action with regard to him, or perhaps fear of betraying my own ethical principles? What exactly is it that the fear, shame and embarrassment about my reactions to him think they need to defend about me?

I’m not sure what the answer is to these questions. On the one hand, I think I should write in more depth about my feelings; on the other, my experience up till now suggests that trying to write about them just makes them more intractable. If the blog is to succeed in its stated aim, there is no doubt in my mind that it has to become more like a journal. I thought, for example, about trying to write about my feelings here as if there were no readers there, maybe by closing comments on certain posts. I may still try that. I also doubt that I will be able to leave analysis as a means of organizing and marshalling my reactions behind even at all. Though I am troubled by the amount of time I spend writing on this project to the detriment of things I really need to write, maybe I need to write more for awhile, at least until the summer ends.

I am not sure what will happen next. But stay tuned. It will no doubt be either interesting or boring, troubling or joyful. Every blogger has her rhetorical position or works it out eventually. Natalie’s is humor, for example; Phylly3’s is information and context; RAFrenzy’s is thoughtful delight; mine –for better or for worse– seems to be Angst.

~ by Servetus on June 17, 2010.