Armitage, sorcerer?

Richard Armitage, rehearsing The Crucible at the Old Vic Theater, summer 2014. Source: Old Vic on FB

***

I’ve wished for a long time that I understood how you do this to me and not only to me.

Did you sign your name in the Devil’s book? Does your familiar come to me at night? Is it a snake?

How do you enchant me, possess me?

Even if this is a production I will never see, that’s part of your enchantment, that you make me imagine in advance the things that could be. I know the storm will break before it starts because I see the prelude of thunder in your eyes.

This quality of your face makes it seem you should always have acted something — a quiet that paves over emotions even as the emotions are plain to read. Your face is a monolith except for your eyes, which are outraged. Everything is blank except for the look of misery that projects itself from your smile lines.

The stillness that masks seething emotion, the almost-about-to-move that’s constantly, effortlessly or defiantly restrained. The way you hold your head, in the posture of a dancer about to take an offended bow, but then you go somewhere I would never have imagined.

The way it seems you are always about to breathe, or about to breathe out — the freeze frame quality of your acting. As you move, I see (click) anger (click) rage (click) frustration (click) conflictedness (click) restraint (click) resignation (click) love. Your emotions have moved along the axis of a universe and yet your features hardly move, maximally over the blinks of an eye.

Do you live your emotions like that, discreet, brief sensations that flash across your features and are gone? Is that what enchants me, that I see something that I reach my hand toward — even as it is always already gone?

Your extravagant reserve surrounds you like a cloak — the way that you withdraw, the way that you are absent in the second before your emotion becomes explosively, viscerally present — draws me toward you like a magnet. You pull back and draw me forward, and when I am trapped then you strike.

You conjure through your withdrawal, your enchantment paralyzes me to the eyelids. You invoke this thing — with me — that draws me to you ineluctably, if I turn away — I always turn back to look at you just that one more time.

Your gift, it feels to me like a charm we swear together, that puts us in a world alone in which we touch and do not touch and even as I stretch my fingers out, you are gone.

~ by Servetus on June 17, 2014.