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.