You spin me right round, baby

[This is another one of those posts where it’s probably wise to start off by saying that I speak only about myself and for myself in this post. Ymmv, and I’m not judging you if you feel differently about either yourself, Richard Armitage, or me.]

[This post delayed significantly, twice, by Pesky Colleague.]

If I like teaching so much, why I am so goshdarned relieved on Thursday night when I know it’s all over until Tuesday morning?

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The point is I now have four mostly free days and it’s time to make hay while the sun is shining, which it is practically always doing here. I’ve had my breakfast and downed a triple espresso and the thoughts are burning to get out.

That many-faceted face: Richard Armitage as Philip Durrant in Miss Marple: Ordeal by Innocence. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Judi posted this week the first in a series about being a fan. I’ve been wanting her to write about this ever since she started blogging, so I am excited, both about the information and perspective she has to relay and the straightforward, open tone she’s taking. A really important moment in that post refers to her recognition, upon meeting the object of her interest in an early fandom, that he was using humor to express veiled contempt toward some of his more extreme fans, and how that killed the experience for her. (Though this is not the topic of this post, in case the tangent comes up: I’m not criticizing Mr. Armitage’s behavior toward his fans or predicting that he’ll ever behave badly toward us.) In responding to this moment in judiang’s post, jazzbaby1 discussed her feelings about the question of expressing admiration or approval for the object of the fandom, and raised the question of how it could be done meaningfully — so that the person is aware of the reaction his work causes — without creating the potential for being mocked. A vent for the feeling of admiration that enhances the emotions around the experience but doesn’t carry with it the potential to destroy the feeling of admiration that created it in the first place.

Jazz makes the for me incredibly productive comment that it’s easier for fans of musicians to know what to do. In their experience of fandom, they can fuse together in a crowd and sing along with the performer. And this action  simultaneously has the potential to affect the performer, who can’t help but notice the crowds of people blissing out to his performance, and to allow the fans to have the experiences they seek. I’m particularly intrigued by this comment, akin as it is in what it describes to what William James said about the “oceanic feeling” as a component of religious experiences. During such experiences we loosen or lose the boundaries of self. And the resultant peak or flow experience has the potential to be shared between performer and audience. What her comment suggested to me is that the potential for such an experience is a reason that, despite my convoluted reservations, the theatrical fantasy exercises such amazing force in my life: Richard Armitage has talked about the potential flow experiences in stage acting, I’d have the potential to be present in that and not just witnessing it behind a screen that separates me from an event that took place months or years ago. And it would be legitimate as long as I stayed in the audience, as long as I submerged my identity in that of a faceless crowd in a darkened room.

“Ever since the watermelon?” Whatever that means. A Servetus favorite from Paul Simon’s Graceland (1986).

Reading each of these posts clarified something for me:

There’s something that separates me from what each of them is talking about. Judi talks about fandom for camaraderie — which is great, and the camaraderie of this fandom has been a totally unanticipated benefit, but I didn’t start fangrrling to get it. If Armitagemania ends, I’ll do my best to hang on to friends I’ve made here but not possibly not replace the community per se (you wouldn’t believe how introverted I am in real life; how I often long to be alone). In response, Jazz discusses the desire to express affection we have come to feel for someone of whom we think highly but do not actually know, and asks if there can be an appropriate way to do that. Judi’s answer in the comments says essentially that she sees following the person’s career and buying DVDs of his work as sufficient and she doesn’t feel any further need to express approval or appreciation to the fan object beyond that. Then Jazz says that as a natural encourager, she wants to encourage, but doesn’t know exactly where that should go.

What Judi describes about her initial fandom I feel, I suppose, about certain authors or musicians. I’ll always buy every album Paul Simon puts out, for instance; after I had my own income, I always bought every book Robert Parker published in hardcover. But I’d never have written them about their work, although Graceland and Early Autumn were hugely influential for me. I couldn’t have finished tenth grade without Early Autumn — it was like a sudden road map to an adult life, recommended by a perceptive English teacher who got a sudden, unwilling glimpse into what was happening in my family during a particularly bad year, and I’ve read it at least four dozen times. And I wouldn’t have been able to start writing my dissertation without Graceland, which I estimate I’ve listened to several hundred times from beginning to end.

But I’ve never had the feeling that I had anything to say to either Simon or Parker. My attention to them has quite simply been much less intense. Parker’s work was a useful guide, and even though I view it very differently now than I did when I was sixteen, it still has that quality. But it lends me insight more than emotion or dissolution of boundaries or loss of self. Graceland is beautiful and also appeals to me intellectually and spiritually (“angels in the architecture / spinning in infinity”), but it is more of a door to a flow experience than anything else. When I listened to it while writing my dissertation, it occupied some level of my mind that needed to be distracted before I could free myself enough to do a sort of writing that I found difficult, but in itself it did not give me flow — it only opened the door to it. Neither of these works in themselves give me a Jamesian oceanic experience. Their stuff teaches me, and moves me, but it doesn’t cause the constant, repeated loss of self and related release of feelings of such amazing well-being as does watching Armitage.

A line from Strike Back 1.3 that seems metaphorically relevant.

Now, I also support his work in the way Judi mentions. I have purchased everything I can get my hands on, and writing about his stuff is also a method of support. I wish I could pay royalties on every viewing of North & South; since I can’t send him money, I displace some of that energy by making occasional donations to charities he supports. But in light of the flow I feel in response what he does, I often do feel the need to say more to him directly than I could through such means.

I also sympathize with Jazz’s statement about encouragement — that’s my relentless MO as a teacher — but it’s also not what I feel in this case (although I suppose I could — if I read an interview in which Mr. Armitage was represented as expressing discouragement, I could see myself writing to him to cheer him on, but I’m not about to send him notes on his acting). I’m not Richard Armitage’s teacher. Am I his student? Maybe. I certainly have learned things from him. I wrestle with this issue a bit because I’m not entirely clear on the distinction between Richard Armitage as channel for a flow experience that I have elsewhere, and experiencing his work as a flow experience in itself. Maybe he’s both. But in sum, fangrrling Richard Armitage — Armitagemania — is broader, grander for me than what I feel for artists whose work I appreciate or support. Watching Armitage has facilitated flow in other areas of my life, especially the revival of my writing, which seems like a direct outlet for a fantasy life that he and his work have lit on fire. But watching him is not only, or even primarily, a means to an end — it is an end in itself. Something this blog demonstrates in ample detail. I hate to admit it, but I fear that the fan I most resemble in Judi’s post is probably “Daria” (NB: not to be confused with GiztheGunslinger), and this blog just might be my lavish, unaffordable, egoistic, unsolicited gift to Richard Armitage.

At the same time, it’s also my lavish, unaffordable, egoistic, but very much necessary gift to myself, a kind of writing that has no purpose other than to indulge my desires. It’s not writing for anything or anyone except me; it doesn’t have to pay off or conform or serve any purpose but my pleasure and that’s what makes it worthwhile. Since what I feel is different (I’m not going to say “more profound,” because I don’t want to lend something that looks and feels like craziness from both outside and in any unnecessary legitimacy), the intensity of it is why I’ve put such a big, mostly arbitrary wall around it for myself (for instance, incessant blogging okay as long as fenced in by the “no letters to Richard Armitage” rule). I don’t think I would be writing this blog if it were just to give him positive reviews of his performances (though he has gotten those here, as well). I’m a fan of Richard Armitage because fangrrling him makes me feel good — leaving the quality of his work aside; I concede the general point that while he may be a great actor, he may not be as great as I think he is — and so the need to show appreciation comes, I think, because appreciating Armitage makes me feel great and it’s inconceivable to me that letting him know about it wouldn’t leave me feeling even greater. If it could happen in any way that I could conceive of in my fantasy, it would be a way to enhance the oceanic feeling even further.

“The Night I Fell in Love,” from the Pet Shop Boys’ album, Release (2002), a song about an imaginary fan / artist encounter. Here’s the story behind the song.

In my rational moments, however, about 94% of the time, I conclude that Richard Armitage already knows how much he has moved the hearts of millions with his work (most of whom will never contact him) because fans ahead of me in line have told him, and because he gets more and more work. In sum, it is really only rational to conclude that Richard Armitage does not want or need anything from me in that regard: that he is a big data point in my universe, one that makes my day, every day, and I am a tiny, tiny, tiny, vanishingly small one in his. My voice is not significantly different from anyone else’s. And the very rationality of that conclusion — in the face of this sentiment that seems to me worlds apart from other affinities I experience — drives me a little crazy, I guess. How can this grand passion not be as significant to him as it is to me? The camaraderie, the potential to squee in groups, helps a little in that it gives glimpses of the oceanic feeling. But in the end, for me the fangrrling experience seems to about something to do with laving a spongy ego that, after years of deprivation, will demand all the sensory input it can get. A self that just wants to feel, feel, feel — and whether watching Richard Armitage is the doorway to that feeling, or whether Armitage is the feeling itself, doesn’t matter, because I won’t put any obstacle in the way of that.

So I think I’m in another category than Judi and Jazz, and I think that’s part of what tortures me — because no matter how good Armitage’s work is, and I think it’s very good, and would think that even if I weren’t infatuated, and I have written about it, and will continue to write more about it — the explosive energy in my fangrrrling is does not spring from a critical response, or from the impulse to inform him how great he is, or to encourage him. He doesn’t need that, and it’s not where my energy as a writer comes from. The writing is not the cause, it’s the response to something deeper and more visceral. It’s about how seeing him and his work makes me feel, it’s about flow not as a tool to create, but as an end in itself that inevitably generates certain consequences (the good fruit that proceeds necessarily from the good tree, to use a biblical metaphor wildly out of context). The lack of an outlet for certain feelings probably intensifies their potency — the oceanic feeling, the loss of self, is confined to a single person, and there’s no one else to share it with. Thus my image of Richard Armitage and I are trapped in my same, rather mortally bounded, brain, stroking my ego at every opportunity and chasing each other around in frustrated circles to make me feel good, as fantasy follows fantasy unabated and the writing, for good or ill, floods from my fingers.

This all, were it more broadly known, might not make me worthy of mockery; it would make me worthy of being adjudged human. But talking about it falls beyond the pale because in the end, oceanic feelings are dangerous outside of the religious and social contexts designated for their expression. The bounding of the self is necessary for society to work in the rational ways that it does, for me to realize that I have nothing to do with Richard Armitage, to create respect between persons. The loosening of the boundaries of the self in a situation where the other participant is more than just an idea or an image threatens the very basis for the fantasy as it endangers the creative act of the object that gives the fantasy life. The resulting control of the fantasy (or the attempt to control it in the face of challenges to self) generates the boundaries of self that intensify the experience of the fantasy, that make it particularly visceral, forbidden, joyful, transgressive. The fantasy threatens to loosen the boundaries of the self. The self makes the fantasy more intense.

And Servetus, so very eager to be free of her past identity, spins, more or less ecstastically, in circles.

For some reason I was thinking recently about this now absolute classic post about how becoming a fan of Richard Armitage can affect one. Just as good now as when it was originally written. This is how it looks from the outside, and somehow the crazy 1980s aesthetic makes it look even weirder now:

But this is how it feels on the inside:

Thanks to Judi and Jazz; I’m finding this discussion extraordinarily productive. I know this got wildly abstract at the end, but I’m fascinated again.

~ by Servetus on October 23, 2011.