Читать книгу The Crying Book - Heather Christle - Страница 8

I suppose some people can weep softly and become more beautiful, but after a real cry, most people are hideous, as if they’ve grown a spare and diseased face beneath the one you know, leaving very little room for the eyes. Or they look as if they’ve been beaten. We look. I look. Once, in fifth grade, I cried at school for a reason I cannot recall, and afterward a popular boy—rattail, skateboard—told me I looked like a druggie, and I was so pleased to be seen I made him repeat it.

Ovid would prefer that I and other women restrain ourselves:

There is no limit to art: in weeping, you need to be comely,

Learn how to turn on the tears still keeping proper control.¹

The length of the cry matters. I especially value an extended session, which gives me time to become curious, to look in the mirror, to observe my physical sadness. A truly powerful cry can withstand even this scientific activity. You lurch toward the bathroom, head hunched over, tucked in, and then gather your nerve to lift your gaze toward the mirror, where you see your hiccoughing breath shake your shoulders, your nose like a lifelong drunk’s. It may interest you for a while to touch your swollen face, to peer into one bloodshot eye and another, but the beauty’s really in the movement, in watching your mouth try to swallow despair. It is not easy, after looking, to convince the crying you mean it no harm, but with quiet and with patience—you are Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees—the crying will slowly get used to you. It will return.

To cry or not to cry is sometimes a choice, and no telling which is the better. Not true—if you are alone, or with only one other, cry. To cry with more people present, concludes the International Study of Adult Crying, can lead to a worsening mood, though that may depend on others’ reactions. You can be made to feel ashamed. Most frequently criers report others responding with compassion, or what the study categorizes as “comfort words, comfort arms, and understanding.”² If you are alone, comfort arms are still available; you hold yourself together.

It is fortunate to have a nose. Hard to feel you are too tragic a figure when the tears mix with snot. There is no glamour in honking.

Once I was unexpectedly dumped in public. A campus parking lot one afternoon. I put all my crying into my mouth, felt it shake while I stalked to the car, inside which I let the crying move north to my eyes and south to my heaving gut. The car is a private crying area. If you see a person crying near a car, you may need to offer help. If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.

Twice I cried hysterically while driving. Once, sixteen, and without money for the toll or a sense of how I might live the next day. Once, twenty-one, and mid-move, with a car full of belongings and the sudden apprehension that I had driven an hour in the wrong direction. If you cry in the car while it’s raining, it feels like the windshield wipers should tend too to your face. Comfort words, comfort arms, comfort swipe.

I cried when I heard Alice Oswald recite Memorial, her excavation of the Iliad, marking each warrior’s death. I cried while a friend held her new son and told me about a conversation she’d had with her own mother, Sheila. My friend had realized that one day she’d no longer need to wash her boy’s feet, and the thought wounded her. “Mom,” she asked Sheila, “do you still miss that?” Sheila replied, “I’d give anything to wash my son’s feet.” As I write this down it sounds utterly servile. At the time I could not help but weep. Motherhood gets me. I cry whenever I watch a representation—whether fictional or no—of birth. I have also cried at the gym, on the elliptical, watching a trailer for some dumb and heartbreaking movie. I waited until my sister’s car was one hundred yards into her move to Maine, and then I cried. I cried in front of a crowd—mortifying—while reading a poem I wrote for my dead friend Bill. He would have laughed. He would have liked it.

Do you remember the hopelessness of watching a parent cry?

When Bill died I went to a museum and cried.

I do not allow roadkill to make me cry anymore.

When I was young my nose used to bleed so badly at times that when it finally began to clot, my nasal passages would clog up, and I’d cry tears of blood.

There are chemical differences between emotional tears and those produced by physical irritation. People who sniff emotional tears show decreased sexual arousal.³ Once I started to cry during sex, not about the sex, but rather the mawkish Belle and Sebastian song playing on the stereo. People cry in response to art, most frequently to music. Poetry gets claimed second.⁴ People can even cry about architecture.⁵

The first thing you ever did was cry. According to William Derham, writing in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1708, at least one human began crying while still in the womb, which led to skeptical responses from correspondents who thought the noise must have been a “Groaking of the Guts, or Womb, or the Effect of . . . Feminine Imagination.”⁶ “Scarce a Day,” insisted Derham, “in all the five Weeks escaped without Crying little or much,” though the boy was, he went on to say, “since its Birth, a very quiet Child.”⁷

I met Bill at a poetry reading when we were both still living in New York City, and we made plans to meet up, talk poems, try a friendship. Eventually we rendezvoused at a lousy bar near Union Square. “I’m pregnant,” I told him, and ordered a drink.

After the abortion I bled for weeks. One evening so much it frightened me. I called the clinic and they said to go to the emergency room, but I didn’t have any money. I called Bill and he said he’d come over. He spent the night in my bed while I cried and bled and cried. It was the only time we kissed.

I speak to Lisa and Lisa speaks of parallel crying, the crying that comes alongside art but not precisely from it. Plot does not jerk the tears from you; some other force corresponds. This pleases me, as I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.

Most crying happens at night. People cry out of fatigue. But how horrible it is to hear someone say, “She’s just tired!” Tired, yes, certainly, but just? There is nothing just about it.

I remember watching my mother cry one brief winter day, though I can’t recall why she was so sad. Perhaps there was no reason, only an atmosphere: my merchant mariner father’s absence at sea, the endless demanding presence of my sister and myself. I remember the brightness of the room, sunlight assailing every surface.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Kent State in 1970, one witness mistook the tears of students crying at the deaths of their classmates for tears produced by gas—the lacrymator the National Guard had weaponized against protestors. Years later, she told an interviewer:

I still was convinced, for some crazy reason, that there was just tear gas. [. . .] I had no clue where the ambulances were going or why there were so many of them and why they were so loud and moving so fast and why people were crying so hard and hugging each other and being so hysterical. So I kept walking. [. . .] And they drove me home. Shelly and Mark drove me home. And my mother was standing in the driveway crying, waiting for me, thinking that I was one of the dead people at Kent. And she was crying. [. . .] I don’t even remember what happened after I got into my parents’ house, other than there was a lot of crying on my mother’s part. And I don’t remember crying at all.⁸

The National Guard threw tear gas canisters at the students—“laid some gas,” to use their phrase—and the students threw them back, an act of protection and defiance: No, thank you; we don’t want this. Retaliating, escalating, the soldiers aimed their M1 rifles.

Among the remedies for tear gas—a cold-water rinse, a turn to face the wind—the command to remain calm sounds hardest to put into practice.

In the photo that came to represent the massacre, a fourteen-year-old girl kneels beside the body of a slain student, her whole body an anguished question.

Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a “woman’s weapon.” It has been a very long war.

Yi-Fei Chen, a design student in the Netherlands, literalized the metaphor after a demanding professor made her cry. She constructed a brass gun that collects, freezes, and shoots tears: tiny icy bullets. Chen presented the object at her graduation, where she accepted an invitation to take aim at the head of her department.⁹

I get irritable reading the “crying expert” Ad Vingerhoets’s deeply researched and meticulous book Why Only Humans Weep, for what feels like his aggressive lack of compassion or wonder, but then am intrigued by a sudden pronouncement: “All tears are real tears,” he says, though some may be “insincere.”¹⁰

We scrutinize the tears of other people for their sincerity. We can even doubt the sincerity of our own. In Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth writes of a child’s strategic crying at the fast food restaurant:

His mother explained to me that this was no true grief—this was pretend grief. This was grief, she said, designed to get something. And I thought, have I anything but pretend grief? And I asked myself what I meant, in these daily excretions of pretend grief, to acquire? And I couldn’t answer. And I felt true grief.¹¹

Here is another term for pretend grief: cry-hustling, coined by the poet Chelsey Minnis (a nom, by the way, de plume, or perhaps de guerre).

A woman is cry-hustling a man & it is very fun.

You have to cry-hustle because it is good to cry-hustle . . .

And there’s nothing else you can do.

Because no one will agree to any of your reasonable statements . . .

And they have to counter-argue . . .

Then you just have to break down and cry-hustle . . .¹²

The tears of white women are subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponization has so often meant violence toward people of color, and black people in particular. The tears could be real, by which I mean physically present, or imagined, metaphorical. Whether they exist on the face or in the mind, the tears of a white woman can shift a room’s gravity. They set others falling to help her, to correct and punish those who would dare make her weep.

As far as words go, crying is louder and weeping is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of cried, the velvet cloak of wept. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted dreamt was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which d has never dreamt.

In his poem “Weeping,” Ross Gay traces the etymology of the word from the proto-Indo-European root wab- through an imagined progression, pretending it

means the precise sound of a flower bud

unwrapping, and the tiny racket a seed makes

cracking open in the dark . . .¹³

Some mornings I awake with an enormous sensation inside me and cannot identify whether the urge is to cry or write a poem or fuck someone. All at once? My body has cross-indexed the impulse.

I have not cried for some days when one morning I wake much earlier than usual. We have just moved into a new house and—because I am not yet accustomed to the skylight above the bed—the sound of rain against it stands between me and a return to sleep. In the kitchen, while I wait for coffee to brew, the BBC World Service tells the story of a man, L.D., whose ship capsized during World War II. Their distress signals mistakenly ignored, the surviving sailors floated for days in their life vests. When the sharks arrived they fed first on the dead, then the living. L.D. says there was nothing you could do beyond hoping you weren’t next.

It’s still so dark out that there’s no real point in pulling back the curtains, but I do anyway, making the lit room visible to anyone else awake at this hour, and at the same time locating within myself the knowledge that I could not have reached such acceptance. Knowing that I would have given up.

After days of dehydration, one sailor slipped out of his life vest and swam down into the Pacific, believing in his delirium that the ship’s water supply was within reach. He surfaced, ecstatic with having satisfied his thirst, and soon died, the brown foam at his mouth a mark of the salt water he’d swallowed.

At last, after four days of misery, a navy plane spotted the men. I wonder whether when the rescue crew at last pulled him to safety, L.D. wanted to cry with joy, whether his body would have had any water left for tears.¹⁴

One night in the nursery, a boy sits crying. He has found his shadow and is desperately trying to re-adhere it to his body with soap, but cannot get it to stick back on again. When the sleeping girl wakes, a series of questions leads her to realize the boy is motherless. This shocks her into utter sympathy.

WENDY. Peter!

(She leaps out of bed to put her arms round him, but he draws back; he does not know why, but he knows he must draw back.)

PETER. You mustn’t touch me.

WENDY. Why?

PETER. No one must ever touch me.

WENDY. Why?

PETER. I don’t know.

(He is never touched by any one in the play.)

WENDY. No wonder you were crying.

PETER. I wasn’t crying. But I can’t get my shadow to stick on.¹⁵

The denial of crying by a tear-streaked person is such a commonplace that it has become a joke. Look up “I’m not crying” on YouTube and the first few hundred results display people—very often children at a school talent show—singing the comic song by Flight of the Conchords, in which they blame their tears on the rain. I am growing to hate this song. It is in the way of my finding evidence of people actually crying, actually denying it. However hard I look all I find is this unfunny music.

When I was five, I auditioned to play Wendy in Peter Pan, a part the children’s summer theater company predictably assigned to an older girl. The announcement brought me very close to tears. Then they declared that the part of Tinker Bell would be played by my younger sister. I was to be “a fairy.” I was to be a very sad, very wet fairy.

The following year, in Alice in Wonderland, they cast me as the understudy to the small Alice: not the large Alice who weeps gallons of tears, but the shrunken one who nearly drowns in them. I spent the whole summer praying for calamity to befall the real small Alice, but she came to no harm. Instead, I performed in my other role: a centipede dancing insignificantly in the flower garden.

In those years I was entranced by The Wizard of Oz, the first movie I ever saw on VHS, and loved to act the story out with my family. I remember insisting, during one game, that my mother—the Wicked Witch of the West—had to stay in the kitchen (her castle), while I skipped down the Yellow Brick Road to my Emerald City bedroom. My dolls were Munchkins, my sister the Scarecrow. I don’t remember whether my father was there. He might have been the Tin Man; he might have been at sea.

I fear that to write so much about crying will tempt a universal law of irony to invite tragedy into my life.

A folk tale “common to . . . country people belonging to the States of New York and Ohio,” and recounted in an 1898 issue of The Journal of American Folklore mocks those who would cry at the thought of some possible future sorrow:

Once there was a girl. One day her mother came into the kitchen and found the girl sitting crying with all her heart. The mother said, “Why, what is the matter?” The girl replied, “Oh, I was thinking. And I thought how someday perhaps I might be married and how I might have a baby, and then I thought how one day when it would be asleep in its cradle the oven lid would fall on it and kill it,” and she began to cry again.¹⁶

Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk the dangers of real life.

Some people will write about one thing as a way of not writing about something else. Like Tony Tost:

I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I am going to describe the lake: it’s blue, with swans.¹⁷

It does not have to be swans. It could be elephants, as it is for Amy Lawless:

When an elephant dies

Sometimes all you have to do is be there

And no one will judge you

If you don’t say something witty.

Sometimes when an elephant dies

I want to grab a bunch of scientists

And one scientist will wipe the tear

Out of the elephant’s eye

And say “I can explain” and draw the bone

From the mouth of the living.¹⁸

People have long made occasional reports of elephants weeping emotional tears, though for just as long skeptical observers have retorted that the animals cry only in response to physical pain. Whether or not it actually cries, the elephant is famous for its mourning. In 1999, Damimi, a seventy-two-year-old captive elephant, “died of grief,” following the death of her younger elephant friend, who died while giving birth. According to the BBC, “Zoo officials said she shed tears over her friend’s body, then stood still in her enclosure for days.”¹⁹ Eventually she starved.

Such behavior is not limited to elephants in captivity. In the wild, writes one ecologist, “Mothers often are observed grieving over their dead child for days after the death, alternately trying to bring the baby back to life and caressing and touching the corpse.”²⁰ The word I have seen people use most frequently to describe the way elephants examine the bones of another when a herd comes across a skeleton is reverent.

It is hard to say, sometimes, whether tears are the product of physical or emotional pain. Take, for instance, this account of a white man hunting an elephant in South Africa in the late 1800s. At this point in the narrative, the animal is wounded, unable to escape, and his hunter decides to experiment on his prey, shooting bullets into its body at whim until he declares himself “shocked to find that [he] was only tormenting . . . the noble beast,” and decides to move on to killing:

I first fired six shots with the two grooved, which must have eventually proved mortal, but as yet he evinced no visible distress; after which I fired three shots at the same part with the Dutch six-pounder. Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened; his colossal frame quivered convulsively, and, falling on his side, he expired. The tusks of this elephant were beautifully arched, and were the heaviest I had yet met with, averaging ninety pounds weight apiece.²¹

Hunters are not the only ones who make elephants cry. Mabra elephantophila, a moth species found in Thailand, feeds on elephant tears. Another, Lobocraspis griseifusa, will not wait for tears to appear; if a creature’s eyeball is dry the moth will irritate it until it begins to water.²²

I learn the word for tear-drinking: lachryphagy. One could speak, for instance, of the lachryphagous thirst of bell hooks, who, as a child, watched old men who

approached one like butterflies, moving light and beautiful, staying still for only a moment . . . They were the brown-skinned men with serious faces who were the deacons of the church, the right-hand men of god. They were the men who wept when they felt his love, who wept when the preacher spoke of the good and faithful servant. They pulled wrinkled handkerchiefs out of their pockets and poured tears in them, as if they were pouring milk into a cup. She wanted to drink those tears that like milk could nourish her and help her grow.²³

Milk and tears are the only bodily fluids humans can generally imagine drinking without overwhelming disgust.

In Turkey, on Mount Sipylus, rainwater sometimes seeps through a limestone rock formation, and people associate this “weeping rock” with the story of Niobe, who was punished for her pride in her children—neatly, mathematically, completely. She boasted that Leto had only two children to her fourteen, and so those two took revenge: Apollo killed her seven sons, Artemis her seven daughters. Her husband took his own life. Niobe herself could not stop weeping. She turned to stone, but even that could not halt her tears.

A fragment from Sappho tells us, “Leto and Niobe were beloved friends.”²⁴

I have no sons and no daughters. I have many beloved friends, some with one child or two.

I have not wanted to approach the subject of the crying infant, because my husband, Chris, and I are trying to create one of our own, but my research keeps listing in that direction. Last night, in bed, I read of how parents in various cultures try to stop the wailing of their babies. Some tell them to stop their shouting, a command the babies eventually obey. Some shout more loudly than the baby’s own cry, and then laugh until the baby is too confused or distracted or entertained to continue.²⁵ A colicky baby is simply a baby who cries excessively, in some cases eighteen hours a day.²⁶ I worry I will be a colicky mother. I worry I will not be a mother at all.

I worry I will be a colicky mother because I am periodically overcome with complete, encompassing fear and despair, and when I am suffering thus, my crying can go on for hours. I rock myself on the floor and keen. I don’t know why. It is one of the things my body does, like sleeping or making poems.

Around this Ohio house we rented to take the job to support the existence of the imagined baby, very few cars drive by. For the first time since we adopted our cat, we feel safe letting him explore the outdoors. A few moments ago I heard him meowing to be let back inside, and when I opened the door I saw the evidence of a fight with the neighbor’s cat: a scratch beginning just beneath the corner of his left eye. A red path for where a tear might run.

I have begun in our new house to gather what Chris has dubbed a “crybrary.” Crying by Tom Lutz. Pictures & Tears by James Elkins. The latter begins with my new favorite table of contents. I’m drawn to its gentle teasing, its naming without judgment: Chapter 1, “Crying at nothing but colors,” Chapter 5, “Weeping over bluish leaves.”²⁷

All this reading could prove a mistake. What if—to use an example from the crybrary—just as James Elkins’s years of study in art history interfered with his ability to cry at paintings, my meager months of tearful research alter the way I weep at my life? Or should I be glad for the change? The summer is ending and the darkening evenings—which in other years brought me fatigue and sorrow—now close over me lightly. There have been seasons of such tears I thought myself lost. Mad. Maybe these books are a protection.

Sometimes suspicion of tears—an intellectual detachment—is warranted. Consider the actor who told his friend Tom Lutz that “whenever he needed tears for a scene he conjured up a daydream to elicit them,” most recently imagining “he was on the Titanic as it was sinking . . . and that he was handing his wife and baby son into a lifeboat.”²⁸ Lutz, curious about the actor’s explanation that “the image produced the most intense feeling of loss he could imagine,”²⁹ probed further, and at last his friend

realized that the scene’s effectiveness on him was based on the fact that others were watching and approving of what he was doing—the captain of the ship, the first mate, the other men taking charge of the situation. This daydream, this mini-melodrama, makes him weep because in it he consummately fulfills an iconographic social role.³⁰

Of course an actor’s tears are purposefully generated. I know this, though I can set the knowledge aside when I watch a movie. But the artifice does not end there. It goes on, it spreads, so that even the one crying—the one to whom the tears ought to be legible—achieves at first only a superficial understanding. “Boy, why are you crying?” He does not know. He cannot say. And when he can, the reason is embarrassing.

When one director needed the young Shirley Temple to cry for a movie scene, he told her that her mother had been “[k]idnapped by an ugly man! All green, with blood-red eyes!” Temple wept, the camera rolled. Both Temple and her mother were angry when they learned of the director’s unnecessary deception, as the young performer already knew how to cry on cue, so long as the scene was filmed in the morning, before events of the day could “dilut[e her] subdued mood.” “Crying,” said Temple, “is too hard after lunch.”³¹

One afternoon the test says yes, pregnant, good job, very clever. I do not cry. Chris does not cry. I call my mother, who says, “I’m going to cry,” and who does. My faithful throat lump shows up. I notice it. I begin to accept its invitation, when it occurs to me that I am fulfilling an iconographic social role, and my slide into tears abruptly stops. “It’s okay,” I tell my mother, “It’s a big deal. You’re allowed to cry.”

Weeks later, on a plane, a terrible tanned businessman drops a full bottle of water on my head. I’m bruised, surprised, tired, and his apology is inadequate. He does not feel bad enough. I do not want to cry, but I do, or I think I do not want to cry, but the unthinking part of me does, or perhaps, as the books say, these tears are a form of communication, an instruction to the man to feel worse. I summon up all my theories, trying to place them between me and the crying, trying to slow my breath with reason, but nothing helps. If I want to cry now I cannot. If I do not want to I cannot stop. Perhaps I ought to have surrendered to it, the wave of oncoming of tears. The empty seat next to me I count as a blessing.

People often cry on planes. A survey of Virgin Atlantic passengers found that 41 percent of men “said they’d hidden under blankets to hide their tears,” while women “reported hiding tears by pretending they had something in their eye.”³²

Why planes? Perhaps it is the stillness of the ride, after all the stress of motion: you get to the airport, part from loved ones, half undress and unpack yourself through security, huff and sweat to the gate and onto the plane. The body at rest suddenly finds its feelings have caught up, and—as you’ve neglected them in favor of more practical concerns—they arrive loudly, demanding immediate physical expression. Or maybe it is the blankets. Online one person tells me, “i cried in the airplane when my twin sister told me i was ugliest when i smiled. i threw a blanket over my head and cried.” Lately, when I get on a plane, I imagine the blanket the flight attendant hands me is still damp with the last passenger’s tears.

Maybe they are the tears of Mary Ruefle, the poet, who—in an essay on making poetry by erasing books—writes of a moment when she told her airplane seatmate about her work, which the woman kindly and sweetly misunderstands, and then:

as the air of the airplane was suddenly warm and oppressive, I struggled to remove my overcoat, and when she reached out to help me I was overcome by this unexpected and tender gesture of assistance and to my great embarrassment, and for reasons having nothing to do with our conversation, I began to cry. And she said, “Don’t worry, dear, God works in mysterious ways.”³³

Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying. Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won’t say just.

I want the act of reading these tears, of placing them alongside one another, to make not story, but relationship emerge. This tear and this tear and this one. I mean what Jack Spicer meant when he wrote to Federico García Lorca, who was dead:

I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.³⁴

A real tear that you can taste, a moon that has nothing to do with crying. (The latter does not exist.)

Walking through Fort Greene one weekend, Bill and I found a box of free books on the sidewalk, a fantastic collection of anthologies for schoolchildren from the Penguin English Project, published in the 1970s. We flipped excitedly through the pages, delighting at the casual way the editors let poems adjoin children’s conversations, let photographs brush against myth. Bill tried to convince me to take all the books for myself, but I made him keep one. A souvenir of our happy day. Years later, when Neil Armstrong died, I returned to one volume’s transcript of the moon landing to make from it an elegy. I wonder where Bill’s book is now, feel afraid it has been thrown away.

The baby is my first thought upon waking each morning. I sleep, I wake, with my hands over my belly. She stirs and before any other image can occur to me I flood into the moment when I will first hold her. What will I say? “I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real,” writes Robert Desnos to his beloved, “I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.”³⁵ In the dark, in the new morning, I meet my shadowy child. You’re here, you’re here, it’s you, hello, and I swipe away my tears before they hit the pillow. In the dark of the ultrasound room we saw her face in black and white, her bright nose, her actual mouth. What will I say through both of our crying? And my tears, here, now in this bed, are they merely the perfunctory by-product of the iconographic scene? And why merely? This transformation will happen, I will become a mother, a shadow, “a hundred times more shadow than the shadow that moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.”³⁶ The weight of her, warm, on my chest.

One morning, digging up weeds in the front garden, I listen to a lecture on emotion elicitation techniques: the stimuli researchers use to induce feelings in their laboratory subjects. The professor introduces a video often used to elicit happiness, and—because I am only hearing the podcast through my headphones—I can’t see the woman celebrating her Olympic gold medal, but listen dutifully as I loosen the earth around another dandelion. Then the professor introduces a video that researchers have found a reliable tool for eliciting sadness. Distracted by my digging, I don’t catch whether the video is documentary or fictional, and I immediately begin to worry about the boy whose small voice now reaches my ears. His father, a boxer, is dying. His father is calling for him. And when his father goes silent the boy pleads, “No! Champ! No! Champ. Is he out? Is he out? What’s the matter, Champ? Champ, wake up! Wake up! Wake—wake up! Champ, wake up, Champ! Hey, don’t sleep now. We got to go home. Got to go home, Champ.”³⁷ I cannot keep up my digging. I am crying all over the soil. I mistook myself for a researcher, when I am a weeping subject.

Days later I learn that the clip comes from the 1979 film The Champ, and I watch the death scene onscreen. This time I know I do not need to worry for an actual child, but the tears return anyhow. I’m reminded of a story by Amy Hempel that ends with the narrator recollecting what she knows of a chimp who could communicate using sign language:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.³⁸

When I first heard this story read aloud over the radio I was utterly unprepared for the crying it invited, and in my confused sadness, went looking for this chimp, only to find that Hempel had fictionalized and intensified a somewhat different story. Upon learning of a caretaker’s miscarriage, the real chimp, Washoe, signed Cry.³⁹ I examine my feelings, report to myself: This stimulus elicits zero tears.

Someone says tears, and the noun triggers the expected verb: fall. Always they fall like rain. These sentences, a long and inattentive marriage. Or sometimes, less frequently, tears land. On the page, on the face of the beloved. In space tears neither fall nor land. In a video, an astronaut—a Canadian with a mustache—demonstrates this by squirting drinking water from a silver pouch into his left eye. He is not even slightly sad. The water clings to itself, a clear glob, a large and misshapen meniscus.⁴⁰ If a drop escapes into the air, it’s not hard to say what it does next. In space every noun marries float.

Besides his disappearance at sea, Bas Jan Ader, the Dutch-born performance artist, is most famous for a few short experimental films. In I’m Too Sad to Tell You the handwritten title appears for several seconds, and then the film cuts to Ader weeping—tears spilling from his eyes, head nodding and shaking by turn, mouth opening and closing as if to swallow his sadness—for just over three minutes. I do not know why he is crying, but when I watch I feel myself nodding with him, affirming his great sorrow.

In his series of “Fall” films, Ader slides off the roof of his house in a chair, hangs by his arms from a tree until he drops into a river, tilts sideways and falls over a sawhorse, rides his bicycle with no hesitation into a canal. Again, the films provide no reason for his actions, but elsewhere, in a brief artist’s statement, Ader offers an explanation whose simplicity and clarity seem to me inarguably accurate: “When I fell off the roof of my house, or into a canal, it was because gravity made itself master over me. When I cried, it was because of extreme grief.”⁴¹

A fall is elementary, primal, basic. It is, in the words of Anne Carson, “our earliest motion. A human is born by falling, as Homer says, from between the knees of its mother. To the ground. We fall again at the end: what starts on the ground will end up soaking into the ground forever.”⁴²

The events then, of a life, could be reduced to a swift symmetry: fall, cry, fall. If we are in the mood for reduction.

On the moon, where the astronaut Alan Shepard cried, gravity exerts one sixth of the force it does on Earth. Tears fall, but more slowly, like snow. I learned this as a child at Space Camp, where I cried because I wanted to play the role of mission specialist in our mock flight, but was assigned instead to be the public affairs officer. Mine was not to do, but to describe.

In my first version of the sentences above, I wrote that it was Buzz Aldrin who cried on the moon, but my memory failed me. Neil Armstrong also did not weep, or at least his tears did not fall. Back in the lunar module, Aldrin photographed Armstrong with wet eyes. Would tears have dropped had they been here on Earth?

Aldrin triggers Neil Armstrong, but Armstrong does not trigger Aldrin. Theirs is an unequal marriage. After they returned to Earth, Aldrin drank his sorrows away, then two wives. The tears behaved according to tradition, falling like rain on the land.

Today again snow falls from not that far up in the sky. Inside me the baby is floating like a noun in space, but she can tell which way is up, which way down.

Almost as soon as movies were invented they flew a rocket ship into the moon’s eye, stimulating tears.

I heard a story of a young guy who used to go for walks with an older poet, a dispenser of lyrical wisdom. Leave the moon alone, he advised.

Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”⁴³

A person who “cries for the moon” wants too much—wants, in fact, more wanting—weeps into the lack. You can’t make a wish upon the moon.

Shirley Temple cried real tears when a classmate died, she writes in her autobiography, and they stained the page of the classmate’s yearbook photo. To the official caption, “She would give you the moon if she had it,” the actress made a small addition, “carefully ink[ing] one word, ‘Dead.’”⁴⁴

Asked about the moon’s composition in 1902, children respond:

It is made of rags . . . or the man in it is stuffed with them . . . it is a picture with yellow paint . . . made of yellow paper . . . putty . . . gold . . . silver . . . honey . . . cotton . . . a lucky stone . . . a cake of ice . . . of many stars . . . air . . . brass . . . a plate . . . a balloon . . . clouds . . . a ball . . . tallow . . . a lamp, candle or gas . . . of light . . . of dirt . . . water . . . cloth . . . a bundle of sticks on fire . . . milk . . . butter . . . felt . . . lightning . . . made of dead people who join hands in a circle of light . . . some bright dish hung up . . . water and dirt like the earth . . . a dead skull . . . a water pail . . . it is God, Christ, or anyone else . . . is the face or head of some dead relative or friend . . . stuck through the clouds, or the body goes straight toward the sky and is hidden from us by the head.⁴⁵

Their collection of answers acts upon me like a spell, leaves me enchanted, bewitched. It is a “heap of language,” a pile of moon dust. Or it is a house made entirely of windows, in every one a child’s round face.

This winter, if the wood from outside the supermarket was too damp to catch fire, we’d add Fatwood sticks from inside the supermarket, and this is civilization, which NASA says will come to an end in the article I won’t read, because today I don’t feel like crying.

We don’t need wood anymore. It is the first day of spring and I need daffodils, but they’re not yet apparent, so instead I look at the picture my mother sent me of her mother in a whole field of them. Kew Gardens, perhaps, the park just minutes from their flat. I think of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” which ends with a journey to the hospital:

On the way

we passed a long row

of elms. She looked at them

awhile out of

the ambulance window and said,

What are all those

fuzzy-looking things out there?

Trees? Well, I’m tired

of them and rolled her head away.⁴⁶

Mr. Williams, I too had an English grandmother, but I don’t know her last words, only that she died in South Africa near her older daughter, who moved there with her husband, formerly a student of gardening at Kew.

We treat the dying as if they’ve lost their reason, as infants who’ve somehow misbehaved. We want them to be good. The dying want their mothers, but their mothers are nowhere to be found, are maybe still back among the flowers. How Bill died I do not understand. I mean this literally. I do not know what happened. By then we barely spoke. If I saw him at all I saw him agitated and drunk, and it was simpler to avoid his company.

Who moves to South Africa in 1962? My aunt, a white English woman. Her husband, a white Dutch man. We did not visit until 1992, when Apartheid was coming at last to an end. White people seemed fitful, afraid. “I’d rather burn my house down than let them have it,” said one, in his pinched accent. I remember only a single instance of crying from this trip. My sister and I, trapped, in our aunt’s backyard pool. The Rottweiler—a pet or a guard dog—circled and circled, growling, would not let us out. Of the few commands he understood, my uncle most often told him to voetsek, Afrikaans for “fuck off.” We were afraid he’d tear us in two.

Early this morning the radio says divers have taken the first photographs of a steamship that sank in 1880, when it was split in two by another ship in heavy fog. Standing in the darkness of the kitchen I understand this as a metaphor for giving birth.

Errol Morris’s documentary about the former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War, borrows its title from a Prussian military theorist, who wrote:

Finally, the general unreliability of all information presents a special problem in war: all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.⁴⁷

Last night the television played endless clips of crying politicians, including one misty-eyed candidate whose impending grandparenthood has pundits predicting her campaign’s emotional weather.

Struck by associations and without pen or paper, I run from the kitchen to search the house for what I need, and when I turn my head for a moment away from the page I’ve begun to scribble, I see the milk I was warming on the stove is about to boil over.

When my baby is born the smell of milk will draw her slowly up to my breast. I’ve seen videos, the newborn inching gradually to the nipple, through the confusion of the brightest light she’s ever known.

People talk about the fog of pregnancy, the forgetfulness, the book neatly put away in the refrigerator. The other week I tried to make a new friend, but became distracted before writing down my phone number’s last two digits.

I prefer to cry with a friend, but these days I am often alone. Exhausted by an argument with Chris, I retreat to the solitude of the bathroom.

Another friend tells me that upon learning she was pregnant she thought, “I’m not alone anymore.”

When I am sobbing on the bathroom floor, what does the baby feel?

Chris knocks on the door and we postpone the argument, but I cannot stop weeping all over the linoleum. The argument is about the cat, whether he will be allowed to sleep in the room with us, with the baby. All I can think of is the cat’s own crying, which I cannot bear. People often mistake the cries of a cat for those of an infant. They say this may be a wise adaptation on the animal’s part. I am crying because I am afraid of losing myself in the fog.

One fog points to another. I can see in my pregnant tears the shape of those shed in other moments. This frightens me. Am I lost already? How far? How far to go?

When I am in the fog of despair I fear I cry too much to be a good partner or parent or person, that something within me is utterly broken, that any reprieve—a day of joy! a poem!—is temporary and somehow false. But that is the fog doing its work, making everything large and grotesque. When the fog lifts I can point up, say Look, it is a cloud.

One of the ways Chris loves me is that he waits while I cry. He tells me it will pass. He does not leave. And when the fog lifts he makes space for me to write.

When the contractions begin, I take a shower. My hair has reached a point of greasiness that makes it difficult for me to concentrate on anything else—even giving birth—and I figure I have some time. But when I get out of the shower the contractions are just four minutes apart. Every time one hits I hand the hair dryer to my sister, who has flown out from New England along with my mother for the occasion. When the pain recedes she passes it back. Eventually I give up, wind the long strands into a bun. Days later, delivered and delirious, when I finally take my hair down again, it will still be wet.

The pain is very bad. I do not shed tears. I moan. I try to find words for myself, an adequate image. I am a giant bear riding a tiny tricycle of pain. I am a brown paper bag with no bottom and the pain is falling through me. It does not diminish the pain, but it gives me something else to hold in my body: the satisfaction of having shaped an accurate description.

After a night of vomiting with every contraction and a day of sucking popsicles through the glorious numbness of an epidural, the doctor tells me it is time for a C-section, and that—as I am at risk for massive hemorrhaging—he may have to remove my uterus along with the baby. I sink into a terrible dry calm, while my sister, who has not slept, begins to cry. I understand she is crying because she is witnessing a difficult and maybe sorrowful event. I understand I am not crying because I am the event.