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rugbytackleAuthor: Ashlyn K. Toliver
Rating: PG (wow, can’t believe it myself)
Warning: Seriously melancholy – sort of like Joy Division in prose form (okay, maybe not that sad).
Summary: Viggo reading poetry at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA.
Author’s notes: After reading Anne’s hauntingly beautiful Linger on a rainy night bus ride home, it made me wonder not just how I would feel if I were in the audience listening, but how I feel about Viggo personally. Thanks sis for the inspiration.
The title actually comes from a poem I wrote years ago that for some reason I can’t find and the only extant copy belongs to my first girlfriend and partner-in-crime Arabella, who’s probably running around County Roscommon making love to every redheaded lad and lass she can get her hands (and other assorted body parts) on.
P.S. Don’t worry, sis, Karl’s really getting it now!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I shouldn’t be here.
I felt like a fraud, in the standing-room only old church that is now Beyond Baroque, one of the few poetry venues left in the cosmetically-enhanced whore that is Los Angeles. The fact that it’s still here – amongst the overpriced bungalows and Frank Lloyd Wrong architecture, surrounded by teeming immigrants crowded into tiny apartments whose rent is more than most of them make in a week and by the artsy bohemian hangers-on who plan to die in their little slice of heaven so close to the beach and the overachieving botoxed jet set who are doing everything they can to move the undesirables out – is a little miracle in a city nearly devoid of them.
I didn’t plan on being here, just stopped to see what was going on.
Something should have keyed me in that he was here. Poetry readings in general don’t garner much interest in a town that is known for taking the poetry of prose and attempting to hip it up for the enjoyment of the bored uneducated who can’t appreciate Jane Austen without it being turned into bad Fox melodrama starring pretty vapid young people who can’t act their way out of a paper bag but who are willing to show skin.
I should have guessed by the numbers of young women and girls, some actually dressed as Arwen (it’s at least 80 degrees out here even though it’s early evening). Some wore t-shirts with his face – the face of Aragorn or High King Elessar Telcontar – emblazoned like a coat of arms. May of them held dog-eared copies of Lord of the Rings with his picture on them and looked as if they were meeting Jesus face to face.
Somehow I wound up inside the small venue, crushed amongst Viggo’s faithful acolytes wondering what the hell was I supposed to do now?
I didn’t want to be here.
“…Your steady hands/Cradling my grateful skull:
Were you taking/In my face to
Save an image/You’ve rarely allowed yourself
After leaving/That cold alcove?
Am I a photograph you gaze at in moments of weakness…” Communion by Viggo Mortensen
I saw him from my vantage point, surrounded by a cage of white light that was mercilessly revealing every crease, every shadowed strain, every nervous twitch of his jaw, every desire to be anywhere but here and he seemed so sad, so wearied, so trapped, a wild thing on display for the momentary thrill of those whose pens and pencils may have well been icy daggers.
Et tu, Ashlyn?
I used to attend poetry readings in San Francisco, and even got up the nerve – after several glasses of absinthe – to read some of my small scribblings to the laid-back and receptive crowd of college students, sexy goth boys (usually one of whom I would end up going home with that night and making scary, forbidden love to the sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Tinderbox), and old beatniks who still spoke of Ginsberg and Kerouac and Monk and Davis as they’d been back in the day. Those impromptu get-togethers at places like Muddy Waters and The Grind were nothing like this silent surround-sound cacophony.
It wasn’t merely his words that cut me to the quick, but the soul-deep pain contained within the delivery. My heart bled for the lonely figure up on that stage. How could we all stand around him like this, crowd around him like the Romans did when they hungry for blood? Is that what we’ve become, barbarians at the gate of his sanity all jostling for a piece of him?
How many of these rapt faces were really here to see fantasy made flesh only to leave disappointed when the man before them did not fulfill his un-chosen role of father-figure, hero, or sexual god?
They were all here to take.
I’m not like them at all, want nothing from him…and yet what did I have to give? And what could he accept?
What could I give to Viggo Mortensen that he didn’t already have? More importantly, what would he accept from a nobody – an anonymous face in a sea of faces that surrounded him practically everyday, wanting him to be what he could never be. Would he understand that whatever I had came from an honest place and asked for nothing in return?
I gazed at him for a moment, trying not to be lulled by his voice, so soft and broken in like a pair of tattered, well-loved jeans. He looked much older now, not quite the virile king of men or the seductively evil tempter of innocents. The blue-grey eyes lacked a certain exuberance, and were more like stormy seas. I saw silver in his hair, lines of life etched clearly on his face like tree rings.
For all of that he was still beautiful to me, his soul-light beckoning like a beacon in the fog, but I still didn’t want to be this close.
There’s a safety in distance.
Though I wrote stories about him having erotic adventures with Sean Bean, it had never been one of my wishes nor my intent to meet him in person. I knew we shared the same city, but his circles were not my circles and my circles were not his and I was content to have it so. True, the Viggo I wrote about was human and flawed, much like the man before me, enthroned upon an angry chair, but the character I’d put pen to paper to was created of chimerical images, perceptions shaped by my own will. Not that I’m ashamed of my creativity being expressed in such a fashion – and truth to tell, I’m actually proud of my work, reclaiming a sexual vocabulary for myself and others who read and enjoy such things. In fact, if were possible for us to meet and talk as just regular people, I was certain that he’d understand the deeper issues of women writing slash, and we’d probably get into the whole feminist dialectic thing – but we were from two different worlds now.
God, how cliché, but as someone I dated told me once, it wouldn’t be a cliché if it weren’t true.
Our worlds are different, and it had nothing to do with his being white and my being black – that’s never been an issue. He was an actor, someone that people watched, worshipped and wanted to be. Everything he says and does becomes fodder for the masses. I’m not into that. I like being plain old me with my short red hair and dark brown skin who owns more books than clothes.
I have nothing to offer save myself, but our worlds would never collide and he would never know the real me.
Just as I could never know the real him – the man he was inside – imperfect, private, and a little absent-minded, but a loving father.
His soft-spoken intonations of raw emotion worried at my psyche, drowned me in their sorrow and hurt and I felt as if I was intruding upon private memories not meant for my ears. Shame welled within me as if I exposing his naked wounds to assess and to dissect, though I was merely a passive listener, here in the place of secrets and only by happenstance.
Then again, I thought to myself – how on earth could anyone ever know someone like him once they’ve made the transition from poet and painter to personality on screen? It’s not like I could walk up and ask him out for coffee and conversation simply because I find him attractive.
At least, not anymore.
At one time, back in the eighties when he was married to Exene, punk’s reigning princess, I might have been able to hang out with him. Back in the days of angry high school rebellion with my blue hair and combat boots that went with everything, from frayed jeans to frilly taffeta party dresses held together with safety pins – the days I used to hang out with my other punk friends and sneak into clubs to hear John and Exene sing of alienation and anger and dreams deferred, to slam our bodies around like tattered satellites until sweat-soaked and exuberant with our blood singing through our veins – I remembered seeing him in the crowd, but being young and still unsure I remained silent yet curious. Brashness had yet to become a part of my personality though I was just on the cusp.
And whose fault is that, I demanded, my Gemini mind growing tired of my self-flagellation, just slightly angry at the man himself whose muse was shooting arrows into my already bleeding heart and determined to finish the job. He might not have asked for fame, but he sure as hell didn’t turn it down when it came and it can’t be my fault that something about him resonated within me long before the ‘Rings films. It can’t have been my fault that I cannot ease his loneliness, to be there for him just as a friend.
Besides that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really like his paintings. Modern slashes on canvas do nothing for me, being a Pre-Raphaelite lover myself.
With that last childish defiant thought, unobtrusively I slipped away from the shadowed confines out into the warm fading sun as his voice shimmered and faded the further I got from that claustrophobic atmosphere.
I breathed a sigh of relief and slowly walked away, the weight of his loneliness easing from my chest. At least from me he will have some privacy, and I am content to admire him in my own way.
That is my only gift...the gift of silence. It would have to serve.
The End
Rating: PG (wow, can’t believe it myself)
Warning: Seriously melancholy – sort of like Joy Division in prose form (okay, maybe not that sad).
Summary: Viggo reading poetry at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA.
Author’s notes: After reading Anne’s hauntingly beautiful Linger on a rainy night bus ride home, it made me wonder not just how I would feel if I were in the audience listening, but how I feel about Viggo personally. Thanks sis for the inspiration.
The title actually comes from a poem I wrote years ago that for some reason I can’t find and the only extant copy belongs to my first girlfriend and partner-in-crime Arabella, who’s probably running around County Roscommon making love to every redheaded lad and lass she can get her hands (and other assorted body parts) on.
P.S. Don’t worry, sis, Karl’s really getting it now!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I shouldn’t be here.
I felt like a fraud, in the standing-room only old church that is now Beyond Baroque, one of the few poetry venues left in the cosmetically-enhanced whore that is Los Angeles. The fact that it’s still here – amongst the overpriced bungalows and Frank Lloyd Wrong architecture, surrounded by teeming immigrants crowded into tiny apartments whose rent is more than most of them make in a week and by the artsy bohemian hangers-on who plan to die in their little slice of heaven so close to the beach and the overachieving botoxed jet set who are doing everything they can to move the undesirables out – is a little miracle in a city nearly devoid of them.
I didn’t plan on being here, just stopped to see what was going on.
Something should have keyed me in that he was here. Poetry readings in general don’t garner much interest in a town that is known for taking the poetry of prose and attempting to hip it up for the enjoyment of the bored uneducated who can’t appreciate Jane Austen without it being turned into bad Fox melodrama starring pretty vapid young people who can’t act their way out of a paper bag but who are willing to show skin.
I should have guessed by the numbers of young women and girls, some actually dressed as Arwen (it’s at least 80 degrees out here even though it’s early evening). Some wore t-shirts with his face – the face of Aragorn or High King Elessar Telcontar – emblazoned like a coat of arms. May of them held dog-eared copies of Lord of the Rings with his picture on them and looked as if they were meeting Jesus face to face.
Somehow I wound up inside the small venue, crushed amongst Viggo’s faithful acolytes wondering what the hell was I supposed to do now?
I didn’t want to be here.
“…Your steady hands/Cradling my grateful skull:
Were you taking/In my face to
Save an image/You’ve rarely allowed yourself
After leaving/That cold alcove?
Am I a photograph you gaze at in moments of weakness…” Communion by Viggo Mortensen
I saw him from my vantage point, surrounded by a cage of white light that was mercilessly revealing every crease, every shadowed strain, every nervous twitch of his jaw, every desire to be anywhere but here and he seemed so sad, so wearied, so trapped, a wild thing on display for the momentary thrill of those whose pens and pencils may have well been icy daggers.
Et tu, Ashlyn?
I used to attend poetry readings in San Francisco, and even got up the nerve – after several glasses of absinthe – to read some of my small scribblings to the laid-back and receptive crowd of college students, sexy goth boys (usually one of whom I would end up going home with that night and making scary, forbidden love to the sounds of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Tinderbox), and old beatniks who still spoke of Ginsberg and Kerouac and Monk and Davis as they’d been back in the day. Those impromptu get-togethers at places like Muddy Waters and The Grind were nothing like this silent surround-sound cacophony.
It wasn’t merely his words that cut me to the quick, but the soul-deep pain contained within the delivery. My heart bled for the lonely figure up on that stage. How could we all stand around him like this, crowd around him like the Romans did when they hungry for blood? Is that what we’ve become, barbarians at the gate of his sanity all jostling for a piece of him?
How many of these rapt faces were really here to see fantasy made flesh only to leave disappointed when the man before them did not fulfill his un-chosen role of father-figure, hero, or sexual god?
They were all here to take.
I’m not like them at all, want nothing from him…and yet what did I have to give? And what could he accept?
What could I give to Viggo Mortensen that he didn’t already have? More importantly, what would he accept from a nobody – an anonymous face in a sea of faces that surrounded him practically everyday, wanting him to be what he could never be. Would he understand that whatever I had came from an honest place and asked for nothing in return?
I gazed at him for a moment, trying not to be lulled by his voice, so soft and broken in like a pair of tattered, well-loved jeans. He looked much older now, not quite the virile king of men or the seductively evil tempter of innocents. The blue-grey eyes lacked a certain exuberance, and were more like stormy seas. I saw silver in his hair, lines of life etched clearly on his face like tree rings.
For all of that he was still beautiful to me, his soul-light beckoning like a beacon in the fog, but I still didn’t want to be this close.
There’s a safety in distance.
Though I wrote stories about him having erotic adventures with Sean Bean, it had never been one of my wishes nor my intent to meet him in person. I knew we shared the same city, but his circles were not my circles and my circles were not his and I was content to have it so. True, the Viggo I wrote about was human and flawed, much like the man before me, enthroned upon an angry chair, but the character I’d put pen to paper to was created of chimerical images, perceptions shaped by my own will. Not that I’m ashamed of my creativity being expressed in such a fashion – and truth to tell, I’m actually proud of my work, reclaiming a sexual vocabulary for myself and others who read and enjoy such things. In fact, if were possible for us to meet and talk as just regular people, I was certain that he’d understand the deeper issues of women writing slash, and we’d probably get into the whole feminist dialectic thing – but we were from two different worlds now.
God, how cliché, but as someone I dated told me once, it wouldn’t be a cliché if it weren’t true.
Our worlds are different, and it had nothing to do with his being white and my being black – that’s never been an issue. He was an actor, someone that people watched, worshipped and wanted to be. Everything he says and does becomes fodder for the masses. I’m not into that. I like being plain old me with my short red hair and dark brown skin who owns more books than clothes.
I have nothing to offer save myself, but our worlds would never collide and he would never know the real me.
Just as I could never know the real him – the man he was inside – imperfect, private, and a little absent-minded, but a loving father.
His soft-spoken intonations of raw emotion worried at my psyche, drowned me in their sorrow and hurt and I felt as if I was intruding upon private memories not meant for my ears. Shame welled within me as if I exposing his naked wounds to assess and to dissect, though I was merely a passive listener, here in the place of secrets and only by happenstance.
Then again, I thought to myself – how on earth could anyone ever know someone like him once they’ve made the transition from poet and painter to personality on screen? It’s not like I could walk up and ask him out for coffee and conversation simply because I find him attractive.
At least, not anymore.
At one time, back in the eighties when he was married to Exene, punk’s reigning princess, I might have been able to hang out with him. Back in the days of angry high school rebellion with my blue hair and combat boots that went with everything, from frayed jeans to frilly taffeta party dresses held together with safety pins – the days I used to hang out with my other punk friends and sneak into clubs to hear John and Exene sing of alienation and anger and dreams deferred, to slam our bodies around like tattered satellites until sweat-soaked and exuberant with our blood singing through our veins – I remembered seeing him in the crowd, but being young and still unsure I remained silent yet curious. Brashness had yet to become a part of my personality though I was just on the cusp.
And whose fault is that, I demanded, my Gemini mind growing tired of my self-flagellation, just slightly angry at the man himself whose muse was shooting arrows into my already bleeding heart and determined to finish the job. He might not have asked for fame, but he sure as hell didn’t turn it down when it came and it can’t be my fault that something about him resonated within me long before the ‘Rings films. It can’t have been my fault that I cannot ease his loneliness, to be there for him just as a friend.
Besides that, to be perfectly honest, I don’t really like his paintings. Modern slashes on canvas do nothing for me, being a Pre-Raphaelite lover myself.
With that last childish defiant thought, unobtrusively I slipped away from the shadowed confines out into the warm fading sun as his voice shimmered and faded the further I got from that claustrophobic atmosphere.
I breathed a sigh of relief and slowly walked away, the weight of his loneliness easing from my chest. At least from me he will have some privacy, and I am content to admire him in my own way.
That is my only gift...the gift of silence. It would have to serve.
The End
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 04:26 am (UTC)I think you've nailed it. Damn.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 07:52 am (UTC)It makes me glad that I live on the other side of the world so I'm not tempted to become one of these
How many of these rapt faces were really here to see fantasy made flesh only to leave disappointed when the man before them did not fulfill his un-chosen role of father-figure, hero, or sexual god?
You paint a very sad picture of Viggo's reality.
surrounded by a cage of white light that was mercilessly revealing every crease, every shadowed strain, every nervous twitch of his jaw, every desire to be anywhere but here and he seemed so sad, so wearied, so trapped, a wild thing on display for the momentary thrill of those whose pens and pencils may have well been icy daggers.
Thanks for letting us have a glimpse inside your soul...how you feel...how you think.
A wonderful piece of writing.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-04 04:38 pm (UTC)I've never met Viggo but it is true that back in my punk days I had seen him watching his then wife, Exene Cervenka on stage. I didn't really know who he was at the time and I was a wee bit underage *snicker* but he seemed just content to look at all us tattered and heavily-made up punk kids slam dancing in mosh pit.
Honestly, meeting his would be too hard on me because I'm an empath and can read people's emotions all too well. It's true when I say there's safety in distance. Besides, as long as he bestows his creativity and his convictions upon the world, that's a gift I will accept gladly without need or want of recompense.