Think of all the reasons you have cried before.
How did it feel?
Why do we do this?
Theories as to why we cry are conflicting. Some have suggested we cry as a form of nonverbal communication — that we cry with a purpose. We might also cry to relieve stress or fulfill some other biological function. Scientists have found that tears produced when we cry for emotional reasons differ chemically from other types of tears; I am unsure which theory this fact supports.
There’s also debate about who cries. Some scientists argue that humans are the only animals who cry for emotional reasons. This raises two concerns: How would we know this, and what counts as emotion, anyway?
Get Alex Hubbard’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The Wikipedia article on crying describes the phenomenon as “a complex secretomotor phenomenon characterized by the shedding of tears from the lacrimal apparatus, without any irritation of the ocular structure.” That’s what happens — but is that crying?
Like tears, Bluets is the product of Maggie Nelson’s deep depression. There’s only one scene in the book, however, where Nelson cries. A third of the way through, Nelson sobs immensely. “I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time,” she writes. “I wept until I aged myself.”
I wonder what it means to cry until you age yourself. Partially, Nelson is referring to a physical change. “I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill,” she says. Nelson’s metaphors describe this type of sobbing as something natural, defined by time, and beautiful. Maybe crying is beautiful, or at least can be.
I’m trying to remember the times I’ve aged myself by crying. My first memory of crying was from when my grandpa died. I remember how that night I walked into the backyard of my childhood home. I remember how the sky was dark and starless, but the security lights on the house spotlighted the brilliant green of the grass in the backyard. I remember how the grass felt damp when I walked through it toward the trampoline. We had recently taken the padding off the sides, and I felt the bars and springs press against my stomach as I heaved my body onto the pitch-black tarp. I remember lying on my back, staring at the sky, and feeling my body sink into the elastic. And I remember sobbing uncontrollably.
Crying so intensely feels both warranted and ridiculous. In my head I knew I was crying because someone had died. But I also cried so much I started to forget why I had started in the first place.
I never felt my body change when I wept. But I felt myself age in a way that Nelson called a “rite of decadence” — the luxury of taking the time to be sad and mourn and have a first experience of something. And I aged by learning that loss doesn’t make sense: There’s both a reason to it and, at the same time, an inability to comprehend what’s happening.
“Full of tears will be that day / When from the ashes shall arise / The guilty man to be judged.” The Lacrimosa, a part of the Dies Irae sequence in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, opens with these lines. The text doesn’t go far in explanation here. We’re uncertain who exactly is crying or why.
What would it be like to live in a world where grief made sense? One idiom for fake sympathy is “crocodile tears,” a phrase that comes from the belief that crocodiles cry while eating their prey. The underlying assumption is that this category of tears is duplicitous while other categories are honest, but is that true? In some sense, every tear feels double sided — something at once full and devoid of meaning.
