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
