Richard Armitage as god, or rather, tulpa

Tie-askew tulpa? Richard Armitage in Sydney, Popcorn Taxi event, Spring 2013. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Continued from here.

In this post, I’m going to write in the first person as much as possible, so as not to imply that anyone except me does what I’m talking about or feels or thinks in this particular way. Although I think this notion explains well a certain portion of what happens in intense fandom, no one who reads this post should conclude that I’m trying to provide an iron-clad theory that explains every instance of what I’m talking about. As you can tell, I used the term “religion” above without defining it except by its practice, and in the same way, I’m going to use the terms “god” and “tulpa” as a creative framework rather than a scholarly concept.

מִֽי־כָמֹ֤כָה בָּֽאֵלִם֙ יְהוָ֔ה מִ֥י כָּמֹ֖כָה נֶאְדָּ֣ר בַּקֹּ֑דֶשׁ נוֹרָ֥א תְהִלֹּ֖ת עֹ֥שֵׂה פֶֽלֶא׃ or: what is a deity?

Deities are supernatural, we might say — they are thought to be holy or sacred — they are powerful, perhaps all-powerful, over nature, and usually said to have supernatural powers, a capacity to move beyond the laws that govern physical reality. In some cases, their words are considered sacrosanct or prescriptive and they have been named the originators of moral laws. Some were said to constitute the universes which they governed, and often it was a religion’s deity (or the laws of that entity) that judged or determined the ultimate (eternal) fate of individuals. Occasionally, living humans were worshiped as gods, and in any case most deities worshiped by humans have had features that make them seem similar to humans, although some religions try very explicitly to prevent or bar the practice of anthropomorphism.

As the verse in the heading indicates — one defining characteristic of a monotheistic deity is its apartness and uniqueness, its singularity — even in a group of deities. “Who is like you, o Lord, among the gods?” the author of the passage asks, rhetorically. The answer, by implication: no one. Such beings have a variable closeness to the humans who venerate them (they can be immanent or transcendent); they engage in different sorts of revelation (speaking directly or indirectly to their audiences); they can speak on their own behalf or send prophets. Often, a religion or cult is organized around their veneration that involves a set of beliefs, a group of rituals, and a number of obligations or duties.

So — whether or not you think fangirling Armitage is a religion — can we see the similarities, why people might say that fandoms are like cults? Is there any behavior we can recognize, whether comfortably or uncomfortably, as our own?

The jolt in the guts at the beginning: Mr. Thornton (Richard Armitage) objects to Margaret’s presence on his factory floor, in episode 1 of North & South. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Where the Richard Armitage religion intersects with “conventional” religions: revelation and flow

Now I’ll jump ahead, because I don’t want to spend ten thousand words defining the term “religion” or “religious behavior” — I’ll jump to the deity question. For me, for a lot of us, it started with a jolt, a visceral kick in the guts, a sudden inability to get one’s heart rate to slow, maybe even a lightning feeling of seething in the loins, the sudden knowledge — that’s the guy. He’s the one. In my case, as well, a sudden inability to turn off the brain about him — non-stop preoccupation.

Was that it? The recognition of a deity?

Whether it was or wasn’t, the fear about looking once one has seen G-d — וַיַּסְתֵּ֤ר מֹשֶׁה֙ פָּנָ֔יו כִּ֣י יָרֵ֔א מֵהַבִּ֖יט אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִֽים׃ — in this case, looking at the self, was real, at least for me.

What I didn’t realize for a long time — and fought against recognizing as it became clearer — was that these reactions were all part of the same thing. It wasn’t sexual desire vs. romantic longing vs. psychological immaturity vs. productivity as a writer. None of fandom was about one problem — it was all the problems altogether. And none of these things were pathological, as the mainstream psychologists might tell us, or idolatrous or lustful, as some forms of religion might tempt us to think; they weren’t signs of failure to launch romantically, as the common wisdom says, or dried-up middle aged loneliness, as is so often charged. I think in many cases these reactions do respond to concrete life situations — but they are not a pathological response that needs to be abandoned in favor of something healthy or virtuous. Rather, in so far as the signs of fandom related to a personal situation, I believe, they were an attempt of the whole person to respond to the questions at hand, a natural process that goes on all the time. The things I thought at first were separated, the emotions, the accelerated thoughts, the “jolt,” even the desire, not in the sense of prurience but of generativity, productivity, creativity — they were all pieces of flow. They were signs to look in a particular direction. As I admitted to Kathy Jones the other day, I have only felt that intensity and certainty of reaction a few other times in my life, and one was the day when I “knew” I would convert to Judaism.

In my life, flow was separated into pieces. Intellectual flow and writing belonged to the mind and had to be exploited for work (and at that point, were suffering from years of severe drought); emotional and spiritual flow belonged with prayer, in my religious life (which was also become only sporadically effective); creativity had been gone a long time, and desire was this thing I thought was located only in my body, this thing I spent a lot of minutes of my life fighting with in order to be able to think, and for which I found an outlet physically but never in any other sense (which explains, probably, why it was so annoying). As I wrote well after it happened, but long before I had even begun to understand the process, Armitage became the focus for all of those forces, stymied, perhaps because I had chopped them into pieces and boxed them into segments of my life. All of the pieces of flow that were separated pushed together at the image of this man.

Same jolt: Richard Armitage’s entry into the scene as John Proctor in Act One of The Crucible, Old Vic Theatre, June 2014. Photo by Geraint Lewis.

So for me, anyway — Armitage was a focus point of flow, and that recognition was underlined when I saw him perform in London:

This is flow. I am witnessing, experiencing unmediated connection between Richard Armitage and the primal energies of the universe. He is totally in what he’s doing, fully concentrated, fully involved, building the borders of a world with his acting, making this ephemeral thing for us and us alone to see — weaving together a world that will evaporate in a few hours, but in which, while we are there, we will be totally occupied, our every perception controlled by his connection with the sublime.

Sorcerer, indeed.

While it could be glimpsed in pictures, this is what I was supposed to see. This is why I was brought here in spite of everything.

I think that’s one thing I count on these days, and London underline it — Richard Armitage is a reliable source of flow. The question is — how to have him at all times when I need flow?

Worship him as a god — or make him a tulpa?

Latest jolt to the solar plexus: Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) looks down at Azog in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Screencap.

Richard Armitage as tulpa

About six weeks ago I encountered another piece that I needed to describe what I think is going on in the Richard Armitage religion — an article in the New York Times that spawned this title. For me, when I am fangirling most intensely — moments that include fantasies of Armitage, writing about Armitage, thinking about and theorizing about Armitage, talking with other friends about Armitage, trying to figure out who Armitage is, and so — I am building a tulpa.

A tulpa, in essence, is a thoughtform or an emanation — an idea about a being so real and convincing that the being seems to exist, indeed takes on an existence of its own. The purpose of this in the spiritual traditions from which it hails is as a practice or consequence of the contemplative life. But the notion, to me, seems to encompass more than that. For we all engage in world-building all the time, and we acknowledge that what we understand the world to be is not what it is, that huge parts of the world lie outside our comprehension. As children, we build imaginary friends. Many religious traditions encourage the envisioning of an immanent, personal G-d who is present and reveals himself to one personally. Authors talk about imagining characters and then “losing control” over them — so that they try to make the characters do things against which those characters revolt.

And I, as fan of Richard Armitage? I imagine Richard Armitage. I think about him in ways that make him present. So present he seems real to me. In that sense, fangirling is to constructing a tulpa as writing fanfic is to writing original novels — it’s a sort of practice for something bigger. Something where the attractive components are already there, the pieces and parts, and so the practice involves putting those pieces together with one’s own particular pieces of glue.

So about about fangirling? If there is a sense in which fandom is an effort to deal with big life issues, then why call it a pathological one, or write it off as escapism? Why not say — the effort to create a thoughtform is something humans appear to engage in from very earliest youth, in which they engage regularly throughout their lives? Why not call fandom simply a particular kind of world-building? And say that intense fandom is simply the work I need to do to keep the tulpa constituted?

Next time — ways in which the notion of fans as builders of tulpas explains things that happen in fandom every day.

~ by Servetus on May 20, 2015.