Euphoria, thy name is (still) Armitage

Richard Armitage quietly formulates a cunning plan for world domination. Or tries to hide the confusion he experiences in response to that ditsy interviewer. Either way, it’s all good. Richard Armitage, interviewed on Lorraine, September 17, 2010. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

I’m struggling with continuing the Armitagemania onset narrative and my discussion of Mr. Thornton, which is what I really want to be writing about the moment, and I said to a friend the other night that when I see an image of Richard Armitage, I just can’t stop grinning. She said, so just write about the grins.

OK, but I don’t necessarily want this to be just another goo goo ga ga post. Though I think I could write one of those almost every day. Because I still have that reaction almost every day. And I wake up wanting to write about Richard Armitage.

Armitagemania still takes up a lot of time. More time, maybe. I’m not compulsively rewatching everything the way I did for most of the first year — rewatching is probably down to five hours a week or so now — but the writing about it takes time now, and the answering comments, and I’m doing more “other stuff” now — work, life planning. So I spend a lot of time “just” fantasizing now. It’s not “just” fantasizing, because these scenarios are helping me to work through events from my day, career issues, even stuff that relates to my creative life. I’ve found that when I’m really tired (as I was last night) rather than trying to write, I’m better off simply going to bed, lying down in the dark, exploring the fantasy that pops into my mind — and then thinking and writing, the next morning, about its implications. Strange, that I could see myself so much more clearly through the prism of an actor and his work than I ever have before.

Still makes me grin like the first time whenever I see it: Richard Armitage at the first press conference for The Hobbit, February 11, 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Sometimes this seems silly, even to me. On the days when I teach, I have to be fully on task — the organization of the week is shorter here and thus much more intense — but I still use pictures to energize me during breaks. We had a particularly intense session this week regarding Catharism and I came back to my office afterwards and saw my screen filled with images of Armitage and thought, bizarre, really, you just spent a whole seventy-five minutes embroiled in a heated conversation about the social contexts and implications of late medieval religious persecution, something with direct political relevance to the present, and now you come back here to flip compulsively through screencaps of a British actor that you’ve already looked at dozens of times. How frivolous! From an academic standpoint, I feel no shame — academics are interested in what they’re interested in — but that tiny little step out of Armitagemania always reminds that this feels, indeed, like a mania.

Except. I finally figured out what the last thing was that I felt this way about was. It hid itself because the two things seemed to be in such drastically different categories. I’ve been making the wrong comparison all the time, because it wasn’t a man — real or imagined. Or not in a conventional sense, anyway. Armitagemania, as I learn to work through it, is not about actors or crushes, per se, although learning about those things has been important to me. It’s about studying something that appears to offer explanations about developments in one’s own life.

***

The last time.

Fall of my senior year of college. I have independent study Wednesday mornings at ten with a professor I adore. When I asked him to do independent study with me the spring before, the professor said to me, “Okay, I’ll do it with you, but only if you read the German sources in the original. I know you don’t have any Latin yet, but you should read everything you can in German.”

This task is a fool’s errand (and later I’ll understand just how fully that’s the case). I’ve only just dipped my toes into introductory German (although I’m 100% German-American my family stopped speaking it at home after WWI, as did many, and with a few weird exceptions — my grandfather taught me to count in German before I could do it very reliably in English, and I know some hymns and Bible verses — I’ve had to learn everything I know about German from a textbook) and the sources are in a pre-modern, non-standard dialect, which is emphatically not what we’re learning in class. Not only that, but the originals are published in big folio volumes — in a tiny fraktur typeface. It’s taking hours and hours of time just to ferret out the simplest sentences — and yet I can’t make myself stop. To the point that my professor in the Don Quixote seminar (a requirement for my major) has warned me twice that my preparation is not up to par — and after a year in México I’m still a fluent Spanish speaker at this point. But Quixote be damned (I did eventually get my act together enough to read and enjoy it — way funnier in Spanish than in English) and my GPA in the major be damned, I can’t make myself stop reading these German sources.

The evening before one of these meetings, halfway through the semester, something finally clicks, and I can read and read and read. So much so that I forget what time it is, and read through the night, and when my roommate leaves for her 8:00 class and reminds me of what time it is, I ignore her. I just keep reading until the phone rings. It’s my adored professor, wondering impatiently where I am. I excuse myself and promise to be right there. Then I look at myself; there’s no time to change, so I take my dirty sweatshirt off and turn it inside out and put it back on and pull on sandals and run up to his office at upper campus, the weighty folio still clutched under my arm, my fingers still at the place where I was when I got his phone call. I burst into his office, breathless. He says, “You could have taken time to shower and comb your hair. Weren’t you wearing that sweatshirt yesterday? Did you stay up all night reading?” I nod. He laughs. “Sit down and tell me what you learned. I think you just found a dissertation topic.”

Well, not quite, but a senior thesis topic, one that got me a fellowship. And then an M.A. topic. That did lead to a dissertation and over a dozen publications. And the general area that contextualizes the writings of this author became my research field and I spent almost twenty years on it before it lost even a tiny little piece of its allure, and even then, not because of the subject matter. A topic that kept my attention focused for over two decades and illuminated important truths to me about my past and my development and my worldview. And something that was, by the way, totally legitimated by the research world — with scholarships and fellowships and a job and invitations to speak at conferences and all the honors that mattered to a scholar at my stage of development.

The thing is, that was supposed to be legitimate because it was supposed to get me something: a thesis topic, a career, a job. But I wasn’t studying it for those reasons — I was studying it for me. No one ever said the amount of time I spent on it was profligate. I spent $1,000 during my professional life buying the translation of his collected works in English, and roughly $10,000 buying the German and Latin critical editions — at least ten times the amount of money I’ve spent studying Richard Armitage. Who I am also studying with such intensity, who I am also essentially researching, because of his meaning. If that weren’t the case, I’d never have gotten in this far.

***

Lucas North / John Bateman researching Maya Lahan — feeling that he has to see her again — Spooks 9.2. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

No one is going to give me a fellowship for Armitage Studies, no government is going to pay me to investigate the circumstances of his career or translate his writings or examine his reception among other contemporaries — this is a fascination that I’ll have to pursue on my own. And who knows what it will end up meaning in the end. But it has the same kind of grip on me as the thing that motivated my professional life for so long. That’s the person I recognize again now, the person who had to know, the beginning reader who’d go over a sentence again and again to puzzle out what was actually being said, who’d jot down notes and questions, who’d collect boxes of data and reflect again and again.

Whether or not there’s a way to make this pay, in or out of a classroom, Servetus is back. Every day that it becomes easier to turn on the computer, easier to read the books, easier to look at the pictures, Servetus is back. It’s not obsession; it’s immersion.

And so, I grin. When I flip, first thing in the morning, to see what the Picture of the Day is — a vision into the things that fellow fans find beautiful, as well — a smile emerges on my face that stretches from ear to ear, that widens my eyes and makes me take a deep breath. I won’t claim that my fantasies are innocent; they most certainly are not, but when I look at these pictures I am gripped by a sensation of quotidian purity and intensity that is emphatically not prurient. It’s like suddenly the air just got a whole lot cleaner and butterflies start flying past at high speed as my eyes get wider and wider and I have the feeling that I’m going to discover what I need to know. Looking at pictures of Richard Armitage, as much as anything else in my life recently, makes me grin in a way that reminds me to believe in my own potential and legitimates a kind of attempt to understand pieces of the world that I’d mostly forgotten about.

And if forget about the significance of the quest to understand I can always turn to a picture of Richard Armitage and be reminded of what it’s important — and grin.

So yeah. Still grinning. Every morning. Every time I see his face.

~ by Servetus on January 27, 2012.