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