Richard Armitage and why I squee, or: Reiterating “About Servetus”

A few more days left of the premiere part of the TDOS press blitz. It’s not feeling as intense to me as it did last year, but it’s still pretty intense. What I felt most intensely today, however, was grading pain. I finally put the pen down this afternoon, having annotated in detail every error, lack, and necessary moment for improvement for everyone’s final papers. Now I just wait to see if they actually paid any attention to my suggestions for the revisions they have to do for their final grades. Bimheyrah b’yamenu ([may it come] speedily in our days); it feels at times like my brain is failing. A scant month off and oh, do I need it.

Anyway, what I wanted to write about today is Richard Armitage and the purpose of squeeing as I see it for me.

I still have read no reviews or reports of reviews beyond headlines where I can’t avoid them, but it sounds like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is getting better press reactions all round than last year’s film did. I’m still limiting contact with press (though still reading / watching some interviews) to continue my “no spoiler” and no prejudicial information resolutions ahead of the film.

Thursday at midnight. It’s not much longer to wait. I’m still really excited.

I hope for two things from seeing the film. The second is enlightenment, but that’s not the topic for today. There’ll probably be a fair amount of exploration of that here once I see it, judging by the things that Armitage is saying right now about Thorin’s development in this installment of the story. But the first is something I await when I see Armitage on that screen — just as I’m hoping for it when I see him interviews, or on a livestreamed red or other colored carpet, or even via someone’s cell phone photos: the squee.

Squee: the fully unadulterated, fist-clenching, stomach dropping out of my chest, heart-pounding, faster-breathing, eyes-widening rush that in an instant connects my feet to the ground, my body to the environment, and my brain and my soul to the heavens. The knock-my-whole-being for a loop trigger for flow. I can get that from interviews, and I can reproduce it with pictures, but what I absolutely want when I see Richard Armitage livestreamed or on the big screen is that feeling.

That feeling is the sole reason for writing this blog — the reaction of being body-slammed by forces much larger than I can imagine into experiencing the world not just differently, but in a transformative way. The tidal wave of emotion that hit me in January of 2010 and wouldn’t let go and opened my senses again and let the words pour out. That onslaught of reactions I don’t immediately understand but that leave me so full of energy and pleasure that they have never fully worn off since, and allow me weeks, months, of picking apart the thoughts and sensations that come with them. The reactions that let me see things in my life and myself differently and creatively and productively.

Each new stream, interview, movie is a chance to trigger the re-experience of that feeling, to find new ways to isolate and channel it, to establish more fully my connection to the flow — a little bit in the way that each orgasm shared between long-time, practiced, comfortable lovers calls back echoes of those first passionate, never-to-be-forgotten nights of mutual exploration. Yeah, there’s a sexual component to it all. But also: a mystical component. An intellectual component. An emotional component. A verbal component.

Key to all of the pieces, to the experience of squee: the feeling, the response, is unfiltered, unmediated, unedited, unpredictable and unplanned. It is just what I feel when I feel it and how I feel it. It is a feeling that in the first analysis is forged by the universe just for me at that moment. I might not share it — but when I do, I share the unfiltered feeling, when and how I feel it, without concern for the needs or the discomfort or the reservations of any audience. I have to do this, otherwise it’s not reproducible. The very reason the feeling works as a trigger of flow is that I don’t try to control it, misrepresent it for something it isn’t, or exploit it for other purposes. It is only there to create the conditions to allow the emotions and the words to pour out. And when that happens, I just write about what I want to write about, as honestly as I possibly can. Given my failed writing experiences in the past, I know, that’s all that keeps the words coming out: words for words’ sake, a non-instrumentalized honesty.

I’m not surrendering that approach. Not out of pretension about the quality or importance of anything I write apart from my own context, but because I can’t do any differently. I have to have the words. I will not give up the words, ever again.

And honesty about that is the only goal. It’s the only thing I feel I owe anyone, starting with myself, but continuing on to fellow fans, readers, and including Richard Armitage. Just to move toward speaking more honestly every time I write. Another potential subtitle for this blog could be “describing a fandom journey as a personal growth experience,” and I’m building a self here where I am solely responsible for everything I do. All I know is I can’t go on this path, I can’t keep tuning in on this particular frequency, for any other purpose than for me. I write it down in case it’s of use to other people, and sometimes I hear it is, and sometimes I hear it isn’t, but in the end, whether it’s good or bad for you or anyone else who’s reading, it’s for me. Because of my joy. I don’t know if the fact of this blog benefits Richard Armitage or not (I hear conflicting things from every direction on that score, too), and I kind of doubt it, but if it does, it’s an externality of my own creative needs and activities.

If I ripple, it’s a side effect. It’s not seriousness of purpose in marketing and media distribution that brings me joy. Ever. It’s the connection to an artist and a series of works of his that I can watch and the way that the person and his gift and the way he uses his body and his spirit have changed and still change my life. Every time. It is that artist’s particular art of being and working in the world and watching them develop that hold my attention. I admire intensely that as much as Armitage is clearly cooperating with a promotional plan he still — every single time he says anything about the role of the audience in his work — notes how much and his fellows have sought to bring us something beautiful, wonderful, enjoyable, entertaining, pleasurable.

And for me: flow-inducing. So, too, in much smaller and more insignificant proportion, with this blog. Flow doesn’t get arranged on somebody else’s schedule, nor according to someone else’s priorities. The second I do that I become self-conscious. When I’m self-conscious, I self-censor. And when I censor something that comes right straight out of my own creativity, I lose myself.

Share the love? Absolutely. Exactly as I feel it, and as I have the opportunity to write it down. For me. So I have the words to write — and to love — another day. What anyone else takes or doesn’t take away from that is his or her business.

Or put more simply — I just wanted — just want — as it seems now, will only ever want — to blog about my crush. And how my crush changes my life. Every single day.

~ by Servetus on December 8, 2013.