On the eve of my “new” life …

[While I was writing this, I saw the trailer for Strike Back 2 on the TV in my motel room! This is the first time I’ve ever seen Richard Armitage on actual U.S. broadcast TV, I think!]

All of the visits are done, and tomorrow I’ll be home. Maybe I’ll write a bit about the trip, eventually. I intensely love Middle America with all of its foibles, and they were on display in droves this trip. But for now, my thoughts are turning toward putting my feet under my mother’s table again. There’ll be plenty of challenges there as well, and I thought it would be well to take a bit of time to rest and contemplate them, or at least make a list of the ones I am aware of, so I decided to take a night for myself tonight and I’m holed up in a Motel 6 about a day’s drive away. It will probably be a long day of driving tomorrow as there’s a museum near here that I’d like to visit and have been meaning to for years, and I’m not sure when I’ll come this way again. I wouldn’t have written tonight except that, wow, it feels like a lot has happened, and I feel the need to muse.

What a devastating blow: Mulubinba and Nat both deciding to stop blogging / take a break. Go over to their pages and give them some love. Those blogs are both very important markers of the development of Armitageworld. I respect both of these women immensely, and I hope they’ll occasionally add a post or two as time permits. I, for one, will be eager to publicize anything else they write.

Blogging is an inherently finite genre. The reason for a blog can appear suddenly, and disappear just as suddenly, along with the circumstances that made it possible. So it’s not surprising to see blogs spring up and then suddenly stop updating or get deleted. Sometimes the goal of the blogging is accomplished, or perhaps people get to the end of what they have to say on a topic, for instance, or the time in their day that was devoted to blogging disappears or seems better devoted to some other project. That’s all normal. Blogging here on this topic is of central importance to me in my search for an explanation of what’s happened to me, and what my new identity should be, as I’ve said before. Armitagemania saved me. I plan to continue to blog here, and have taken some steps toward doing so, but the plan is only ever as good as the parameters for the plan, as blogging is almost never the most important activity in one’s life. If my parents’ illnesses become significantly worse, for example, that will affect my plans, too.

If the next paragraphs read vaguely, that’s intentional.

There’s also the issue of context: the world in which the blogger feels herself to be located and situated as a writer can change in the blink of an eye. An activity that feels desirable or acceptable one minute can appear troublesome the next. What bothers me does not bother you, but what does not bother me drives you crazy, and so on. One has to be in a particular emotional place to write anything that is personally meaningful, and sometimes the context in which one writes makes finding that place impossible. That’s happened to me a number of times in other situations: the context that frameworked a particular piece of writing disappeared or was destroyed and the writing task, and the prose associated with it, became unsalvageable. I have more than one lengthy unpublished manuscript that this has happened to.

Audiences for certain kinds of writing can disappear overnight out of circumstances beyond anyone’s control, of course, and when those changes happen because of personal circumstances in the writer’s life, that’s one thing. That’s happened to me, too. No point in writing a love poem to someone you’ve fallen out of love with, for instance.

What’s sad, though, is when it happens because other people in the same community intentionally damage or destroy the context for certain kinds of writing. I think we’ve all experienced this on the web. A blogger expresses a political opinion, and she’s showered with violent hate comments or threatened with rape. It’s not always mean-spirited; sometimes it happens out of truly high-minded intentions. In the case of Richard Armitage, for example, a tiny group of people, maybe only a handful, are vociferously devoted to policing what others can ask, say, or discuss about him in open forums, and I really do believe that this action is motivated by an honestly and strongly felt desire to protect him. On “Armitage Protection Mode,” see what Frenz said today, in a very intelligent post. I can only reiterate what I’ve written about this before: that I personally don’t think that on the whole, other fans are endangering him, or that if they are, there’s anything we can do or not do to protect him from them / us by means of our behavior on the Internet. And furthermore, in my opinion, such policing is a waste of time that could better be spent on responding to a core cause of Armitagemania for many of us, which is, in my opinion, the need for an outlet for our inherent and often unfulfilled creativity, an impulse that his work calls forth in so many of us.

Yes, I’m aware that some fans of Mr. Armitage don’t like this blog, and that a lengthy piece has recently been written in allegory on the incredible danger it and, by extension, I pose to Richard Armitage. I’ve been honest here, perhaps a bit too honest at times, and that always involves a risk. Like Armitage, I’m an adult, and belief in the legitimacy of what one is doing requires one to have a thick skin. If I write about my fantasies and the role that they’ve played in a really difficult phase of my life, I expose myself to the possibility that some people will not understand what I mean, and by speaking at all, I am thus colluding in a misunderstanding. I think everyone who speaks occasionally asks herself if it wouldn’t be better for her to have been silent or to shut up forthwith. I certainly have and continue to accept criticism, both public and private, for writing what I write, although ad hominem attack has always been and continues to be verboten.

Just as I don’t love everything that happens in Armitageworld, I can’t expect everyone in the world to love the blog or even understand where it comes from or believe that my impulses are benevolent. I, for one, never was very and am definitely no longer interested in policing others’ activities. Some people can never be pacified, and discussions with them are pointless. Their threats are tiresome.

~ by Servetus on June 21, 2011.