Tied up in mental knots [do not skip disclaimer!]

[I wrote this a few weeks ago, as Passover was beginning, and then I chickened out and published something silly instead. It doesn’t make sense, entirely, in the chronology of where this blog has made it in my personal journey story; I need to finish writing about North & South, and there’s a meta-post on the role of beauty in North & South, too. Those are all about 2/3 finished, and have been difficult to write. Weird that I’ve gotten to a place where it’s easier to write about my emotions than to do something analytical. Servetus has really come a long way, baby. The point of publishing it now is that it makes in terms of what’s been happening in my real life recently. Also I’m given courage by this, which just appeared and made me think I’ll find a way of talking about this more concretely with others who are experiencing this attraction in a creative way as opposed to harvesting opprobrium. This post does not involve descriptions of sex, but it definitely involves reflections about the metaphorical meaning of sex fantasy for me. Earlier, I’d just have pushed this out there, but now that I’m aware of how incredibly uncomfortable this sort of thing makes some people feel, I’m a bit tense. So be aware. If you don’t want to read my musings on what role sex fantasy might play in my emotional and creative life, do not read this post. Thanks.]

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Good Friday: Things swirl around in my brain and I should be doing something but I don’t have any appointments and my favorite place to be is lying in bed with you in my fantasies.

This gives me feelings of unease: That at the end of the day I look forward to going home: to turning off the lights, stripping, crawling into bed, nuzzling my face into the pillows — and fantasizing about you and your dramatic brethren. It makes me nervous, that at the end of the semester I rely on morning fantasies to talk myself into taking up the burden of my days. That I think about ways to find more time to fantasize about all of you and then write about it afterwards.

For a long time it was fantasies that involved characters you’ve played, and these were mostly about comfort and safety. Mr. Thornton for work stuff. Porter for support, for instance. Lucas North for encountering trauma but not being able to speak about it. For a long time I didn’t fantasize about you as yourself at all. It seemed forbidden. You only yelled at me in my dreams; my therapist at the time said that this image reflected an inner conflict I felt about blogging and about writing in general. Then I started fantasizing about you as yourself, but didn’t admit it to anyone. Then I started writing down the fantasies about you. And then I admitted it.

When you’re you in the fantasy, it’s different. Not like when it’s one of your characters. Actors are supposed to help people achieve catharsis, according to the Greeks; but actors in their guises as characters. Not actors as people. Right? But somehow you’re a character. Except when you’re not. When you’re you, I don’t call you Richard, although I’m convinced that that’s who you are. I don’t call you anything in my fantasies. You look like Richard Armitage, you have his eyes, and his body, and what I imagine to be his soul, but I’m still trying to figure out who fantasy Richard Armitage is.

Why do I want the fantasies to take over? What if the fantasies took over?

You, in the media in which I experience you, affect me like no picture I’ve ever seen, like no person I’ve ever met, on every level. I have no explanation for this effect; I don’t fall for actors; I have never spent hours looking at anyone’s face, real man or image of celebrity, or maybe only the person whose life I research; but the rush that comes from watching you is incomparable, it’s been unparalleled for over two years, and it gets more and more intense as the weeks past. With you, I experience registers of emotion, of physical sensation, I never knew existed, that no one who has touched me physically has ever provoked, or which I had only read about in novels or psychology books. You give me a capacity to feel I never would have credited myself with. You don’t just let me unload emotions; you teach me how to experience them.

The visceral arousal I feel in response to you I can’t describe in words or images. I’ve always had a rampant libido; I have the “wrong” balance of hormones for a woman. So I’m not unaccustomed to being preoccupied with sex or aroused in situations where I can — and want rationally — to do nothing about it. I’ve had to put my desire under conscious rational control since the summer after I turned sixteen, so you certainly didn’t wake me up from any pristine, virginal sleep. But I’ve never had this experience of being all desire, all eyes, all mouth, all senses, all — body, that I have when watching you. I’ve understood, dimly since I left home, and concretely since my mid-twenties, that the demands of libido could make me do something I would never do under any other circumstances. I know all to well how the will to come can make me forget all my morals. But I’ve never seen the possibility that my life could be one long persistent orgasm, that sexual attraction could be the basis of a flow that would persist without interruption. Indeed, I would have called this a delusion, a notion created by the people who commodify human desire.

Until I saw you. You not only move me beyond rationality — that’s happened to me before — but you lead me to desire non-rationality actively. Watching you leads me to conclude that it’s the only thing. And to think that only my fears stand in the way.

That alone is disturbing enough, that you could teach me somehow to desire beyond certain boundaries, but let me also concede that the possibility that you could help me abandon my fears is just as tantalizing, just as all-encompassing. So let me concede ultimately that the intense fantasy of sex allows me the fantasy of anger as well.  Desire was at least something I was allowed to feel and allowed to talk about. But anger –anger was something so forbidden for explicit discussion or expression for most of my life that I almost never felt it physically until I saw you. I would have said until relatively recently that I never get very angry, because I simply didn’t acknowledge much in myself the thing I saw in others and read about in books, the reaction that’s called anger. About a decade ago someone explained to me that the absolute absence of feeling, the fuse that shuts off everything temporarily until I feel a desire to smooth things over, this nothingness that I sense in certain situations is anger, and if not dealt with, it can become rage, which is much more dangerous than anger. I know I am angry when I feel nothing. So anger as a feeling is also a fantasy for me, a much more forbidden fantasy than sex has ever been. I could always admit to myself that I desired, even when I couldn’t show or pursue it. Anger, in contrast, has been so forbidden that I couldn’t even acknowledge it.

Rationality break. In my real life, I note that emotions are culturally conditioned and not absolute. “Research shows” (I put that in scare quotes because I am trying to be ironic on purpose) that historically, different cultures develop different metaphors for discussing emotions. In the century I study, for instance, the apocalyptic metaphor played a role equivalent to the role that sexual metaphor plays today — creating a particular relationship between the subject and object that constitutes the boundaries of the emotional world people live in. In our world, the dominant metaphor is sex. In it, sex becomes a way of constituting different kinds of conversations. Sex grants legitimacy for a speaker and determines falsity or incredibility; it conditions our notions of virtue and creates shame; it is a thing without which we cannot get, so much so that even people who do not experience sexual desire are subordinated in a discourse that insists that their reactions are a disease or a dysfunction — that their “asexual” reactions are a “not,” a negation, of the thing, sexuality, that is seen to create the world for most of us. In our world, sex gives us the power to draw lines and make judgments. Sex is thus irretrievably conflated with power.

So I fantasize about you and get aroused. I want to come and come and come. I can’t feel there’s anything in my brain outside of that. That is sexual. But it is also an attitude toward emotion and the location of personal and cultural power, one that gets expressed via this particular metaphor because my historical circumstances give me the particular language that I have.

Which means, for me, that I also fantasize about you sexually and I get so angry about everything. Angry about why I am the awful way I am, about why my life has come to this sticky place, about all the destructive wishes I have that I can never, ever express, about all the thoughts that are not legitimate and can never be legitimate, that are so bad they cannot even be thought, let alone spoken. About the curse of a detailed memory, about never being able to forget things that have happened and the way that the corresponding emotions have etched themselves poisonously into my brain. About all the little remnants of rage that filter into my days from every piece of my life that I can’t forget, and drop like bombs onto positive feelings whenever the latter appear, and make me shut off. (Khandy, if you’re reading this, now you know another reason why The Gruinard Project appeals to me so much.) As much as fantasy about you lets me feel desire, it also lets me witness my own anger and the rage it’s fermented into, over the years. The intensity of a sexual fantasy of the like I’ve never experienced has finally opened a door to experience my own negative emotions. And they are frightening, so frightening that even in sexual fantasy they only come out tentatively, metaphor hidden behind metaphor; even I, who know what these fantasies might be about, struggle to discern, struggle to acknowledge.

Why do you let me get so aroused, Richard? Why do you let me get so angry, fantasy Armitage?

Fantasy about you legitimates extremes of feeling that I can’t acknowledge rationally. It puts them in a safe place — in fantasy, or lately, on my blog. Making them real by writing them down is a reminder to myself that I can have the full emotions, the existence of which you’ve demonstrated for me. And when those emotions are there — sexual arousal, but also other emotions, you make me believe, on some level, that I could experience certain feelings, that I could even live without the creatively paralyzing fears that bedevil me.

Richard Armitage: you make me think I could learn to live without fear. You teach me that I could dare to feel in the same depth with which I have always dared to know.

It’s not easy. If you’re an elusive piece of myself with whom I’m fighting out decisive identity issues around emotion and creativity, they’re not easy, either. If only I could love you without policing you, without constantly having to judge myself for loving you. As a fantasy you allow me the vision of losing control, but in the end I am still, always, always, always in control. It’s hard work, to have to be in control all of the time. I’m so tired, fantasy Richard, of doing all of the work. If I could only know that you loved me. If I could only know that you would stay.

I conclude you are safer than a therapist. Even if you don’t always say anything, still you hold all my secrets. If I keep watching the fantasies with you, maybe you will tell them to me in words or images I can bear. And I am not letting you go until you speak. I can make you stay here, even if I know you don’t really love me, I can police you into staying.

~ by Servetus on April 28, 2012.