Late thirty- or early forty-somethings together, or The Way We Live Now

Armitage thinking. Maybe. A pose is typically both more and less than it appears to be. I always wonder what happens in the second immediately after the shutter falls. Does he lift his countenance, so that we see him grin or stare at us as he lets his right arm fall, or does he grimace and drop his head, extending the arm across his forehead? Photograph by David Venni, 2009. Source: Русскоязычный Cайт Pичардa Армитиджa.

***

Uhtred is reflecting on his youth from the vantage of old age in the background as I start to write this. One unmistakable problem with human life is the difficulty of reflecting on things as they happen. Friends with kids all say that the days are too long and the years are too short, but they are not the only ones who feel that way. Why does life go by so quickly? Or should we just embrace the increasing pace with which the moments pass? Should we try to juggle many balls, or concentrate on one purpose that we call our own, or fulfill the promise that others see in us? Should we do familiar things and succeed at them, or try new things that are hard, and risk failure? I’m not certain. Who can tell?

Though it may unintentionally repeat some stuff mentioned elsewhere already, this post marks my belated effort not to threadnap from RAFrenzy. Longstanding readers know that one cause of my Armitagemania is an experience of severe over-identification with Mr. Armitage. I began to read press about him and interviews he’s given in January 2010. My perusal of his creative work has been enhanced by this extraneous information, but it’s not just that — it’s that I see so many similarities between our lives. To counter this reaction, I developed a four-level epistemological scheme to remind myself and others what we can reliably know about Richard Armitage based on the information we have. On that scheme (and even though I never published the final post in that series, because I lacked the energy at the time to deal with the controversy I feared), I usually force myself to read between C and D, thus subjecting my identification to a reading against the grain. I was interested in how the reactions to this question lined up based on the questions asked; Nat wanted to know what popped out at readers in response to the piece, a strategy that demanded interpretation of what was important and thus pushed the reader from A to B. RAFrenzy’s commentators were a bit edgier, and she and some of them discussed the response of feeling manipulated and how they felt about it, with the information emerging that the piece was following the generic conventions of a regular feature in the Times in which people are asked to describe their day; the discussion both of generic convention and the awareness of feelings of manipulation  — no matter how people felt about it — pushed many of those readings from B to C and even toward some features of D. I should note that reading at C or D does not constitute an interpretation of Mr. Armitage as a dissimulator, or even anything negative: one can accept happily that little that one perceives about the world based on certain kinds of sources is very reliable. Most of what this feature narrates is entirely of a piece with his previous statements, not all of which have been patently transparent. As I’ve noted, the hide/reveal dynamic at the foundation of pudens depends on most interpreters of a text taking a position between B and C, and the resulting unsettling or provocative uncertainty about the reliability of the interpretations we advance. Individuals will take different stances in this dialectic. Mesmered, notably, prefers opacity, noting that she wants Armitage to remain an enigma. Indeed, many of RAFrenzy’s readers were happy with the information as presented in this feature even as they acknowledged that they were not reading the full picture and being manipulated in line with tropes that mirrored those of the magazines we read as teenagers. In order not to deceive myself about my place as interpreter, I try as much as I can to read at D, but what I say below is a departure from that stance, as it is definitely a B reading. That doesn’t mean the interview isn’t saturated with tropes, both shared cultural ones (“I respect my heritage,” e.g.) and more specific rhetorical patterns typical of Armitage’s statements to the press. I could give a D reading, but I’m exploring the B reading here because the questions it raises are still resonating in my emotions a few days later, particularly after what happened during this work week, and I wonder if historians who read sources like this feature in another century will see them as symptomatic of anything about the mood of our lives. At the same time that I consider this reading sympathetic, I continue to ask myself whether the speculative quality of this kind of writing is entirely fair to Mr. Armitage. It’s certainly too presumptuous. On the other hand, this is my blog, and this summer I was able, finally, to establish for myself that the real Mr. Armitage is not part of its target audience. As I said at the beginning, he’s a text that I interpret to understand my life.

***

I still don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s being roughly the same age as Richard Armitage (I’m two and half years older) and the many assumed common experiences that entails, even across oceans. Maybe it’s a certain kind of upbringing (with parents who say: work hard, don’t take anything for granted, don’t call attention to yourself, eat healthy food, come see us at Christmastime) — being “raised right.” Maybe it’s superficially similar experiences in childhood and adolescence (early water trauma, bookishness, important years of musical education that did not lead to a career as a musician and an on-again, off-again relationship with one’s instrument(s) as an adult, performance experiences that emphasized responsibility to the collective — be on time, learn your lines, no fooling around–, the move “away” in late adolescence, a life path that differs strongly from one’s parents’). Maybe it’s knowing that I’ve listened to a lot of the same music. Maybe it’s having had a roughly similar career trajectory (a career that demands significant creativity, a slightly surprising “big break” in one’s career in one’s early 30s, being on the cusp of a modest success that potentially promises more, not having thought ahead of time what success might entail in other realms of one’s life; being overtaken by the demands of the job and feeling some sort of need to keep it going). Given what I understand about various remarks he’s made about wanting to maintain the freedom to pursue work he likes as long as he can and not getting too comfortable, we may both be autotelic personalities. Or maybe it’s just that I also often eat microwaved oatmeal (or, as he calls it, “porridge”) for breakfast. But boy, do I overidentify with what I know about this man.

So I read this interview and think that mutatis mutandis, I could have given it. It’s like he’s describing my life. Right down to that porridge, which almost reads as emblematic. Easy to buy, easy to store, easy to cook, little mess, leaves time for fifteen minutes more sleep in the morning. Pi’s called the habits described here “living the life of the mind,” “dull as dishwater” and “in a rut.” Guilty as charged — at least in terms of what I am speculating is the sense in which she meant those remarks, i.e., as a reading of this feature, not as a description of the real qualities of a life as actually lived. I love that she said those things, because they spoke to me at a gut level. Skip the next section and go directly to the picture of Lucas North’s bare chest if you don’t want to read how my rather boring life as I depict it below is like that of Richard Armitage as depicted in this interview. I beg your forgiveness in advance for the repetitive employment of the words “too,” “also,” “like,” and “as.”

***

Photo of Richard Armitage in the Times, September 12, 2010. Source: Richard Armitage Net, crediting the scan and cropping of the image to Orpheus; original photo by Joe McGorty, credited in the feature itself. Fortunately, Orpheus cropped the photo so I don’t have to talk about my fascination with the way the inseam of his right jeans leg is twisted and seems to call attention to his fantastic thigh musculature. Though the graceful draping of the left hand is clearly in evidence. Yeah, my eyes can’t escape this photo, or the intriguing curves of his eyebrows over that arresting gaze. A pose is simultaneously more and less than it appears to be. The physical stance says “this is who I am.” But: Have you asked yourself what “NO ESCAPE” refers to in the larger sense?

Like Mr. Armitage, I work long days and if I am not standing on the mat at the appointed time, usually no one can take my place, at least in the short term. Despite recent gains in productivity due to the tech boom, the minute remains unforgiving, and most creativity or developmental activity can’t really be hurried; I, too, need my sleep (it also comes easily), struggle to rise on time, and need a failsafe to make sure I rise. I also have worked out all the quick ways to make a nourishing breakfast, how long it takes to cook each, and how to make them in microwave- and dishwasher-safe crockery and thus prevent a pileup of dirty pans. Not dirtying unnecessary dishes in the first place is important because I, too, neglect mundane household tasks until the situation gets out of hand. I also leave worn clothes on the floor and re-wear items because I’ve forgotten or lacked the time to do laundry. A great deal of my free time goes to training / preparation for work, partly because I enjoy it — I chose this career and I worked hard to get here — but also partly because I don’t want to be embarrassed by lack of awareness or preparation. Fear of not being up-to-date on secondary literature, or not being able to answer students’ questions, are the scholar’s equivalents of incentives to train for scenes in which one has to “appear half-naked.” During my education I also underestimated the amount of time I’d have to spend on such repetitive preparations. But, as for Armitage, what makes it worthwhile for me is the excitement of the flow experience, which I, like him, experience as a longed-for loss of control with an addictive rush. I’ve been fortunate to experience it both in the classroom and as a researcher and writer.

Continuing the parallel narrative: as I’ve written, the Servetus family ate local. My mother usually cooks a dinner made from actual ingredients, and I love to eat at her table, not because of its high art, but because of her perfect execution of simple meals. I too have an abiding respect for my family and its roots in local beliefs and customs, though I live and work outside of these by my own choice. My work, which I also experience as a performance, is exhausting and all consuming and demands a period of “switch off.” Just as Armitage turns to activities that earlier in the day were “training,” I tune out with periodicals, books, media, and the world of my thoughts. The overall mood of this interview is that the most crucial parts of the day outside of performing or rehearsing are spent alone. Like Armitage, I also stew and avoid unnecessary confrontation (though I suspect I can be pushed into them more easily than he). I don’t experience violent outbursts, but one of the major revelations of two years of therapy was the extent to which my quotidian sunniness is a pose that hides anger and rage. I, too, have a fuse that wears out, not often, but with frightening results. I don’t get there very often, but (in parallel to Armitage’s statement about exploiting emotions he doesn’t like) I accept this about myself and find that it has its uses.

Like his evening, mine is devoted to preparation for the next day of work and future plans, with which, as he expresses with inadvertent elegance, one must “catch up” because one is always already behind. My apartment is also strewn with books and papers, mostly in piles. I didn’t have cleaning help either until last fall, when I realized that what I also thought of as “organized mess” was eroding into dirt because I rarely saw it exposed to daylight. Then again, given recent revelations about the clandestine activities of the British boulevard press, Mr. Armitage probably has good reason to preserve his private sphere, not just his confidential scripts, from any cleaner he doesn’t know personally — up to now, one presumes, his profile hasn’t been of enough general interest for anyone to bother hacking his cell phone, but he may be getting there. No secret scripts in my apartment, but certainly a few things I’d take extreme measures to prevent strangers from seeing, and recently I recognized that the mess supports my introversion, although it’s hard to know what causes what. Like Armitage, I find something I like to eat for dinner and eat it over and over. (Saves energy puzzling about what to make and time spent seeking out unusual ingredients for creativity elsewhere.) A one-dish meal involving couscous and an omega-3 rich fish like salmon is fast and hard to mess up once you know not to overcook the fish. To end the story, I also have a huge pile of books next to my bed (and on the nightstand, and propped up on the headboard, and actually in the bed, too, which is often hard on the books).

The only significant divergences I see here from my life are the twenty years spent resident in one area — something true of almost no professional my age I know in the United States, as we gravitate from school to school, fellowship to fellowship, job to job, while developing actors establish networks and contacts in a limited number of places at first before they attain the stature to work wherever they please — though I share another experience of his: traveling abroad for work long enough to need a local social life and more than a hotel or trailer, but not long enough to establish a real life much beyond that with colleagues — and the question of baths. I never voluntarily immerse myself in water (I was in a bath most recently in 1993) except in nightmares. Showers only, please. If I were cooking the salmon and tomato couscous recipe from Jamie Oliver’s iPhone app, I’d be tempted to simplify it slightly (who’s got time to crush fennel seeds?). And, although this departure may not be significant, like many of Natalie’s readers, I feel that microwaved eggs approach impalatability. Servetus likes eggs for breakfast, too. If she has a lot of time, she eats them in a diner; if she has none, she hardboils and peels them the night before and eats one the drive to work. Most often, however, she stops at the big student dormitory on the way to her office from her parking garage and buys them to go in a breakfast taco (recipe in link, picture at left). These — especially the tortillas — may be harder to find in London than here. Oh, the sadness of a life without breakfast tacos. But I digress.

These are the lives — his and mine — of geeks. Yes, in answer to the question your eyes ask as they widen when you walk into my office and see the loaded shelves, I can tell you “what’s in” every book among the hundreds there. I live the life of the mind and I share it with students and readers in creative ways. Sometimes I even write for you, dear readers. But the most significant moments of my day virtually always happen when I am alone; indeed, I have to preserve my solitude in order to keep those things happening, because I am emotionally dependent on their occurrence. When this is good, it is very very good. And yet. On some days the freest moment of my day, the only divergence from the rut of my material life, is the consumption of that breakfast taco. The last time my parents came to visit, unfortunately during the academic term, they left two days early, explaining that they not only found my apartment too sloppy, but that they experienced by life as stressful and boring in equal measure. Not only is it better to be alone, it’s quite frequently easier.

Mr. Armitage, too, has expressed the sentiment that his life as he describes it to interviewers is boring. More than once. It’s not that either of us mourns this, I suspect. Not precisely.

***

Lucas North (Richard Armitage), navel-gazing in a very literal sense as he follows Harry’s eyes to the tattoos he’s brought back from his captivity in Russia, in Spooks 7.1. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. Do we probe our own scars most closely when our attention is directed to them by the glances of spectators? If so, if we’re not prepared, every interview must become a potentially risky opportunity for the performance of self.

Back to boring. I think Mr. Armitage’s statements in this vein are often read as feints (D), the attempts of a very private individual (an impression confirmed in this feature) to deflect the romantic euphoria of overeager fans for their single idol by insisting that he’s just a normal guy. If that’s the case, the strategy is backfiring, as for many of us the conscientious guy next door is even more alluring than the sexy celebrity who strides down every red carpet, even if we do like a man in formal wear (some enough to write over 10,000 words about it). (Or maybe he’s using reverse psychology.) Though I’d still look at the pictures, I’d be much less interested in him as a creative artist if he were the regular prey of paparazzi or gossip columnists, as jazzbaby1 wrote somewhere recently (can’t find the link).

But his statements also make clear that the A reading is surprisingly plausible here, as his report of his own experiences in a day is remarkably concrete. Mr. Armitage is not living the life of a star, and not just out of an oft-expressed personal inclination against that. As the Times feature seems to substantiate, he marshals his limited time do all the preparation and overlearning that fuel the quality performances he’s delivering regularly — the piece reveals the scaffolding, the notional girders that support an apparent effortlessness on screen that makes it look as if these performances cost him nothing. I hope we all realize that the reading at night to feed his mind and spirit is just as essential to that end as the morning trip to the gym on behalf of his abs, even if the result of the latter is more immediately visible than the former and he (sadly) gives us more detail about his diet and exercise than about his reading. Now, I suspect most readers will pick either A or C/D for their understanding of this interview. But though some interpretations may be more persuasive than others, divergent readings never have to exclude each other; what’s interesting about them is how they collide, how we doubt and undermine a particular reading even as we provide it.

So just to be contrary, I’m going to continue to plumb the B reading, and here’s why. Considering the genre of the medium as an influence on what’s said in the piece (strategy C), pushes us back towards B. The apparent intention of the feature is that by describing the details of one’s day, the subject creates an implicit picture in microcosm of the meaning of his life. By avoiding too much conscious self-reflection, the narrator thus calls it forth in his audience; the narration thus invites the reader to ponder the similarity of his own life to that of the subject (the B reading strategy). In short, the boundaries placed on the reflections of the narrator as to meaning call forth a conceit in the mind of the reader which suggests to us that we can indeed understand our own lives by understanding Richard Armitage’s. (And if pudens works between B and C, the piece does an especially good job of keeping the reader in delicious suspense about “the real Armitage.”)

Perhaps this conclusion about the rhetorical impetus of the piece appears to me in such stark relief because what Mr. Armitage offers us here is so evocative of a certain kind of life, one that so many people “our age,” and probably many others, are leading right now.

***

Closeup of Lucas North’s tattoos immediately following the scene above in Spooks 7.1. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. Nice view of the iliac crest here, of course, with the veins close to the surface of the skin making Lucas (Richard Armitage) look even more vulnerable. But has anyone else found intriguing that the Gnothi Seauton slogan is written on Lucas’s body just at the boundaries of the abdomen and the groin — the physical margin that marks off both vulnerability and male generativity? Whoever made the decision to write that there (cough) seems to be telling us rather forcefully that self-knowledge is the key to creativity. Laying aside whether it’s true, there’s also the nagging question about whether it’s a sustainable life strategy for very long. Knowing himself in Spooks 7 and 8 seems to redeem and condemn Lucas simultaneously. Like Lucas, who importunes his ex-wife to spy for him the second he attains a semblance of control, sacrificing relationship to bolster a reorientation of his sense of self and vocation in the career he’s followed since university, we are left with no NO ESCAPE from who we think we are. For the late thirty-something and the early forty-something, awareness of self seems to become both more immutable and more inexorable.

So, B says: the material in this feature describes the life of the better sort of geek. He’s always had raw talent, but he had to learn how to channel it. He’s not so awkward and naive any more as he was once, physically or rhetorically or politically, and his dreams are coming to fruition. He’s learned not only how to pursue his art, but also how to sell it. It’s the life of the geek who’s well on his way to having made it but is still not sure what “making it” means except in a general sense. He’s been working so hard for so long that he hasn’t always had the luxury to think in tremendous detail about what he wants to achieve, in part because whatever artistic goal is on the table at that moment demands all of his workmanship, all the honing of the skill.

The demands he makes on himself in this regard stem not from any necessary or apparent artistic insufficiency on his part, but from what he learned as a child about investing goals with moral ethos. What’s worth doing is worth doing as well as it can be done. This kind of geek will not risk providing a performance that is less good than he knows it could be. Certainly not for his audience — but especially not for himself. In practice this is harder than it sounds — it involves not just “doing your best” in the sense of “trying hard,” and moves beyond knowing what your best is and striving to reach that; ultimately, it requires knowing what your best is in the grand scheme of your artistic ambitions, of everything you could be, and the last is the hardest and most daunting of all. To put it in classical terms: you can’t achieve an end without significant investment in techne, but techne leaves little room for contemplation of telos. (Note I read at cross purposes to Aristotle here, regarding both skill / technique and intention / wisdom as essential to the fulfillment of art.) Yet, to know where you’re going, you have to keep telos in mind.

Now: It’s not that the geek doesn’t have goals and values, or that he can’t articulate the ones he’s been working towards. On the contrary, those matters have been driving him forward all along. Rather, it’s that he’s been so single-minded for so long, putting in the necessary time, that he hasn’t been able to devote much attention to keeping his eyes not just on the artistic telos, but also on the potential conflict between the goals, practices, and values that relate to this end, and the possibility that he also has or in the course of his experiences is developing desires that fall outside their scope. Moments in our geek’s personality thus begin to collide. This rather abstract description of the geek’s experience should sound strikingly familiar to you, because put in these terms, it’s the process that Richard Armitage told Vulpes Libris he builds into the characterization of every role he performs. Armitage’s characters as artistic creations are thus constructed to experience exactly the same kind of potential conflict about identity as the artist who produces them.  This fashioning is an element of their energy, and of what makes them so compelling in terms of our personal identification with their problems; they are trapped in the same bind between potential and reality inherent in certain moments of the human condition: trapped between reality and desire, between circumstance and aspiration, between the thing they feel they need to be, the thing they know they can be, and their own frailties and obstacles.

Mr. Armitage’s day circumscribes that particular meaning: of a life given to an art that demands all, even, perhaps the time to think with more concentration about how one’s own desires and wishes are developing and changing, and how one’s own activities contribute to or detract from what one has defined in vague terms as one’s own artistic telos. I thus read the feature about Mr. Armitage as a still life that traces the contours of a problem, that in my own life, seems to be emerging at the very beginning of mid-life, just as one begins to realize that time, life, and energy are limited and that choosing one thing means having to neglect or abandon another. This is a “day in the life” of the life of the single, creative professional who’s on a journey of self-discovery that is tangled up in unclear ways with artistic or professional ambitions, who has to know himself well enough to make choices, because he’s starting to realize he’s not going to get it all in anymore.

Let’s get concrete. B says: The tone of the feature is upbeat; this is Richard Armitage’s life as he lives it, and it reads as energetic and a bit endearing and certainly very tiring. Busy, busy, got to keep in shape, of course eat right, vegetables, fish, healthy meals, I live in a bit of a mess and got a bit of a temper and I am conflict-avoidant so you might not want to live with me, crazy days at work, boring meals, evenings with scripts and books. Of course, a pose is always more and less than it appears. The person who tells the story gets to choose the mode of his performance, and it’s not always easy. But the same details could say: busy, busy, concerned about body image in an industry where looks count and eating healthy because of that even though I wouldn’t bother if I didn’t have to, no time to clean or organize, not a lot of patience with people who might weight down my free time, driven to rage by my frustration with potentially problematic relationships, crazy days at work, can’t take time to think of something new to eat, gotta make sure I’ve got those lines down, thank heavens I’ve got a bath and books at the end of the day to inspire me for the future and to keep me sane. The one almost implies the other.

This is the framework within which I most instinctively understand some of the more poignant statements that explode the canned genre of many of the pieces written about him, for instance, about where he feels himself to be in life: “I am searching for a place where I can just be, not necessarily a physical place to settle down, a state of mind. I like to get home to Leicestershire but I rarely have much chance. Time seems to be so short.” Or in response to an interviewer’s rather impertinent insistence that it’s time for him to start a family: “Yes, I’d like a wife and family. … I’m quite relieved I don’t have that responsibility [of being a parent] in real life, but I look around and my fellow actors are having babies and I’m envious. One day, one day. … [Turning 40 is] part of the problem, isn’t it, because I still feel like I’m 25 in my head. I always thought when I got to 40 it would be OK because I’d feel 40, but I don’t.” I’m not suggesting that Mr. Armitage is constantly angst-ridden about his choices, but I do recognize the situation of the speaker here. I don’t quite know where the last fifteen years of my life went, either. When the questions come up for people in this position, it’s often easier for us to assume one can deal with them some day rather than now, but there’s so little time to think about our state of mind. We wonder whether, in a situation where so much is demanded, we will ever have the opportunity to contemplate the telos of our decisions; indeed, “time seems to be so short” could be the caption to the life of every late thirties, early forties creative professional, and it’s difficult to imagine that it will ever get any better. It’s particularly hard when all is going well, which is what we want, since we also fears the stasis or dissipation of what we’ve managed to put together. Is it really necessary to keep building just to hang on to what we already have? Where do we get the bravery to ask the hard questions when life is filled with the details of maintaining what we have now? Do the easy, familiar, practical? Dare the new, unfamiliar, difficult? Try to slow life down, or embrace the whirlwind pace and accept or deny the heft of the personal price we are inevitably paying for it?

If leading the lives we feel called to live — honing the relevant skills, pursuing the related ends — is the inescapable consequence of self-knowledge, it seems pointless to mourn the pieces of a life we can’t incorporate and better to accept the outcomes of the self-knowledge. This conclusion seems to be a central element of Armitage’s portrayal of Lucas North, John Porter, and Guy of Gisborne, and it is a theme that emerges in both Moving On and George Gently. But self-knowledge, too, is a pose, always simultaneously more and less that it appears to be: much less than a transparent guide to what one should do with one’s life, yet more influential on choices that appear increasingly predetermined by some essential moment of “being.” It’s not clear what comes first: “the place to just be,” or the contingent “being.”

What is the pose? Which is the rut? The whirlwind we’re living in these days? Or the lives we’ve set aside in order to live in the whirlwind? Which are we supposed to embrace? The life of the mind and everything it demands, everything it hints to us that we should renounce? Or an existence without the life of the mind?  Self-knowledge? Or the lack of it? Is there no compromise? No way out?

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) up against a barrier in the London Underground and out of ammo as he’s being chased by a Russian hit squad in Spooks 7.8. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

~ by Servetus on September 16, 2010.