In which Richard Armitage’s tweets remind me of things I learned in London

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I’m really glad Richard Armitage answered this question. I asked a similar, more vague one — what is the collaboration with Yael Farber like? — but this one is better than mine because it asks for something much more precise. 140 characters, after all. Or less, by the time the handles and any hashtags are added. I think this was supposed to be a hashtag, no? Preparation to become Proctor: “CowsVoiceSalemMillerMillerMiller”. I’m not sure it will catch on. But I wonder what it means. If Richard Armitage has a stream of consciousness voice that speaks inside his head, anytime he lets it go, seriously or for the purposes of humor, I’m curious.

Finding and then taking hold of that stream every day — a real battle for me, anyway. I really didn’t know what would happen when I started on this journey of blogging about Richard Armitage. I felt helpless, and reanimated, and driven to know, to figure it out — and I gradually became able to feel pleasure again, and then was able to write, as I hadn’t in years. The writing was the journey and somehow it gradually turned into the goal as well. It’s one of the things that I desire all the day long — to feel human, to be more fully human, to act in concern with that humanity, to be humane. I want to write about what’s true (even when I do so in a veiled way, or rather, when the truth appears to me in its veiled guises), and that includes finding words precisely for the things that are hidden because they don’t fall into the categories of permitted, acceptable, civilized. The search first for what is real and then for the words to talk about it to other people — a liberation for myself, and I hope, for some of the people who read it.

No one does this perfectly, me least of all. But in the wake of all the inspiration I was exposed to in London, I was wondering what would change for me. Because I felt changed. I remember waking up on Thursday morning and seeing that someone had tried to start a fight somewhere about one of the usual things and thinking: trivialities. Not part of the big picture, so why do I even care about this? But there’s a weird paradox to knowing what the big picture is — you have to look at a fair amount of detail to discern it; just as there’s a weird paradox to being a fan — it gives you a kind of joy free that’s deeply unfettered, deeply human, moving beyond the feelings of the civilized to connect you with something broader; but the potential extremes of the experience end up exposing you to all this discourse about marking the most appropriate, acceptable boundaries of the civilized. We are all growing all the time, if we want to, but it’s not a linear, direct process.

So this is a nice message, a great reminder after seeing that play. Search for truth. Search for what’s real beyond the permitted. In what you do, release the burning humanity — in all of its facets, good, evil, desirable, distasteful, beautiful, sublime, quotidian. Or at least witness it — it is your obligation.

Theater is a sort of playground for that kind of information as writing is, no? It’s rather silly to say that actors are playing or not doing real or important work, or to make the point that theater is not real, or that real life is sadder than theater. It’s another way of prioritizing the values of civilization over the uncivilized. The first claim will appear to silly to anyone who’s ever seen a truly great play, the second is obvious, and the third is only sometimes the case. Rather the point of theater on this view is that it be sufficiently (however-we-define-that-term) realistic that it allow us to experience that search for the true, real, the burning, the humane, on an unreal level that then gives us courage to live out the search for truth and humanity and face what we find in our own, real lives and worlds. As another group of tweets said,

Truth, humanity, uncivilization, the move beyond what is allowed — that’s what I am looking for now. We’ll see how it goes.

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~ by Servetus on September 13, 2014.