I wrote the following post about a week after originally asking the question: What is Gabriel Byrne's secret mojo?  I was driving in my car, thinking deeply on the subject, when it occurred to me that what  most of us wanted was to meet him, to know him, to get close and stay close enough to him to absorb some of the talent and perfection that we perceived that he had, so we could keep it for ourselves.  I believe that is a key to his attractiveness.  Well, that and a face that could launch a thousand ships. Below is my answer post:

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I've thought about it for an entire week now since first posing the question about our Magic Man’s mojo. I’ve heard from those of you who think it comes down to his eyes or his smile or his brains and his intellect, his kindness, his sadness, his vulnerability.

But as I pondered Gabriel again on my drive home, it dawned on me that what we want is not just to listen to him, look at him, talk to him, touch him or be touched by him. We want to catch lightening in a bottle and drink it down. We admire him. We want to wallow in his aura, rub it all over us and hope some of it clings to our own. We don’t want to just “lick him all over”, we want to devour him, every molecule of his body, from head to toe with a knife and fork, and then grab a piece of bread and scoop up any leftover crumbs to make sure we’ve ingested every last drop of him.

When I look and listen to this man and I experience what he gives to his audience, I want to be a poet, I want to be well-read, I want to be thought of as brooding, I want to travel the world and be on talk shows, I want people to adore me, I want to be thought of as “kind to my fans”, I want to be a talented writer and actor, I want to get more interesting to the opposite sex as I get older. I want people to think my typically “ugly” features are really stunningly beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never wanted to be a man. But isn’t this the crux of our madness, that we think so highly of him, that if we were pressed to choose one man on the planet to be, we’d choose him?  If we suspend belief for a moment and pretend that god said we must come back in our next life as a man.

Wouldn’t that man be Gabriel Byrne?