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.
