Anna, Richard Armitage, and the meta-issue: Where will grace take us next?

I never anticipated this.

Gmail makes it easy — I can easily search for every word I exchanged with Anna. Much of what’s in my correspondence with her is hard to talk about — even if it relates to Armitagemania — so I can’t talk about the specific things that are making me cry at the moment — many of them ironies. That someone in her situation would write to console me about my own, for instance. In retrospect: who should have understood better than she?

I wish she had been able to let me console her as she consoled me; I wish she had let me understand her even as she let me be understood. But maybe she needed that; maybe she needed to be in control. Maybe she needed to think about the possibility that someone would console her daughters in the way that she consoled me.

I wish I could publish some of the extremely meaningful things she wrote to me.

This is the thing — and I’m sure it’s occurred to everyone (beyond the people who met her in New Zealand): I didn’t know her. Aside from the fact that I had just a few exchanges, I never met her. I “know” people who met her, but I can’t produce a “degrees of separation” chart for her because even the people I know who met her — I never met them in the flesh.

I sit at my computer for much of the work day and much of my free time. I’m not short of “real life” friends — in fact, I said to Pesky yesterday that I have more real friends than I can keep track of, in all the different settings I’ve lived in in my life — but there’s something about computer friends that I can’t really explain.

[As I write this — a former student whom I taught as a freshman writes on FB to announce that she passed her doctoral defense. It’s been a hard road for her but she “will overcome.” Let us rejoice with those who are rejoicing …]

Something happens, and the computer makes a little beeping noise — to remind us to take notice.

I reread my correspondence with Anna and I sobbed. Because she wrote to me about my mother’s situation. Because she tried to console me about other things happening. Because she had specific advice about specific situations.

Because about an hour ago a virtual friend who knows me only because of this blog wrote to say, “I need your help with something.”

Because about nine months ago virtual friends who “knew” something was wrong contacted me and put together a “help” team.

Because, in Meri’s words, “I came into this RA related world with not much else on my mind other than perving at Richard to be brutally honest.
Now after 6 months, I find I’m concerned about people I may never ever meet in my life, I worry over their health and family issues even though I am so far away and can offer no real support, only cyber hugs and words of encouragement.”

Because last night, when I told Pesky about this and said, I can’t believe that the reassurance of someone who consoles me via an untraceable handle means this much, he took me in his arms and hugged me till I could breathe normally again.

We fall into this hole of enchantment with the label “Richard Armitage” on it, and we enthuse about Richard Armitage and we write about Richard Armitage and because we have no faces and no bodies and no pasts and no futures, we share our secrets …

We can help each other because in this weird decontextualized world in which our actual commitments are unknown or mostly don’t mattter, we can actually speak over fences, jump over boundaries, ignore judgments of each other we might have made otherwise.

We can look at each other honestly precisely because we don’t “see” each other.

Maybe if I’d have met Anna in person, I’d have discovered some dealbreaker. Maybe she’d have expressed some political opinion I just can’t live with. But in this world around Richard Armitage, we could be friends. She could teach me things I might not have heard otherwise.

In our fandom for Richard Armitage, we discover other commonalities and we work to free each other.

As the partner of my Ph.D. student wrote in her FB response to her partner’s announcement of a successful defense:

Where will grace take us next?

In loving Armitage, we come to love.

This enmeshment. I don’t know what to say. But please. Grace. Take me further, G-d. Take me further, friends.

Take me further.

~ by Servetus on May 6, 2013.