One way Armitage pictures work for me

First, for fun, read this. Heaven knows we need some!

Thursday night and I’m done teaching for the week (not done working, but done teaching). This was a stressful one. It would be silly to run through all the details. Among other things, however, I’d like to repeat this message to anyone who’s feeling like they can’t cope. I know it’s the time of year when people start to think that. Remember that if you can’t cope, people are there to help you. If you don’t have someone close to you, here’s a link provided by a reader of this blog to an index of emotional support resources worldwide.

One piece of the mess was that I was grading like wildfire every day of this week. Grading is just becoming an ever worse experience for me. Knowing that this was going to determine the week meant I had to make sure to look for the animating desire that makes a day hold its potential for joy each morning, and it wasn’t possible to find it every morning. I was up all night grading last night, and it wasn’t possible to find it this morning. Put on a happy face and jolted myself into energetic action and taught all my classes and independent studies and was done, but I was filled with desperation. I wanted to sob. Things are so much better than they were, but will they always be like this?

But at least work was done. I started flipping through the many, many pictures at RichardArmitageNet.com, looking for the one that would take the edge off. It took me awhile, but the second I saw it, I knew. It’s this one:

Richard Armitage five ways, from that oh-so-elusive Recognise Magazine photoshoot, June 2011. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Specifically this piece of it:

Richard Armitage, detail of above.

Now. There’s a ton of stuff going on in these photos, which are meant to push every possible sexual button available given the fact that he’s so fully covered by his clothing, and by prioritizing the thing that got me today, I don’t want to deny the other things. The “modest Armitage” trope. The “sharp-dressed man” theme. The “I’m more than masculine enough to wear bright colors, including hot pink” advertising. And all the very obvious “I’m about to take my clothes off for you” hints here — collar, buttons, wrinkled shirt, fiddling with cufflinks, stroking the loosened tie — with ironic or challenging (as opposed to bedroom) eyes that suggest power even as the subject engages in the process of hinting at disrobing for the viewer, a trope that makes the photo so really alluring. Yeah. All there, all good. No complaints, photographer, you got me coming and going.

Richard Armitage, detail of above.

But what got me today was the thumb and index finger on the cufflink (and the way he seems to have the edge of the cuff pressed between index and middle finger). And it wasn’t sexual. It was a combination of this way of touching even inanimate things in gentle ways that he seems to show sometimes and gets me all emotional because he makes me believe in things I don’t actually credit so easily, and the very fact that he’s rolling this impossibly small cufflink — so small that it’s hidden in the photo — carefully in his elegant, but from this perspective rather disproportionately large fingers.

It’s the detail. It’s the care with the fingers around the tiny little detail that’s moving me, that’s dislodging this whole clod of things that I haven’t been able to let go of all day.

To explain, I offer the following. And, by the way, I’m not justifying this stance as a normative position, I’m just explaining something about myself.

One of my issues with grading is that it points up all the errors in the world for me. I see one tiny mistake and it’s a synecdoche for every other one. Yeah, I was raised in that house where if you got 98% on a test, someone wanted to know why it wasn’t 100%, and I have completely integrated that perspective into my own personality, although I direct it primarily at myself rather than at others. I’m a bit of a perfectionist (though not perfect, of course, but incessantly annoyed by my own imperfections), and it annoys me to see mistakes. But not in the sense that it makes me angry at the students. On the whole I’m a stringent but not punitive grader. It’s that when I see consistent errors, I think of all the times that that error appeared before and no one corrected it, so that the student is either unaware that it’s an error, or doesn’t care enough about his/her own work to try to make it as perfect as possible. Students make a lot of mistakes honestly, but they also make a lot of mistakes they could avoid. And to me, the appearance of errors tends to signal a world in which not enough care has been taken. And that is just one of things that grading triggers: the feeling that everything about the world is hopelessly flawed, and that no one is paying attention or cares.

So I see this picture in which this perspectively large implement — Richard Armitage’s hand — is employed in twisting, or toying with, or caressing, or removing, a cufflink, and I think: a detail. Someone (the photographer, or Armitage, who knows — all of this material is staged) cares about a beautiful detail. Someone is paying attention. Getting the detail right, in my mind, means the restoration of the possibility of getting the world right. It makes me hopeful. And willing to return to the fray of looking at all the many imperfections in this very imperfect world, and trying to respond to the ones I can do something about.

~ by Servetus on April 20, 2012.