my tears live in a lake i never touch.
...and for the last 268 days, i have thoroughly documented each encounter with them.
“a pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand.
what longing built our bodies and around what grains?”
- Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
dear little voice,
nothing in us is mysterious. no human mechanism. it is all discovered. all but tears.
a brief evolution of tears in Renaissance art
i have become very interested in this. unlike any other psychological manifestation, my crying consists of a material production: it is made concrete in tears.
i have become so very interested that i have become a kind of anthropologist of tears. for the last 269 days, i have thoroughly documented each instance of my encounters with them. what i have produced is a sort of catalogue of these unlikely intruders.
for example:
tears for uncertainty [07/01/24]
tears for snow [23/03/24]
tears for sister [25/03/24]
tears for life; its immensity [02/04/24]
tears for life; its brevity [02/04/24]
tears for persistent rain [06/05/24]
tears for love (remembering) [07/05/24]
tears for love (forgetting) [07/05/24]
tears for mother’s pain [07/05/24]
tears for poetry [12/06/24]
in the last 269 days, i have cried for fifty-two things. i have cried for love and i have cried for pain. i have cried for remembering and i have cried for forgetting. i have cried for roses and i have cried for rain. i have cried for kisses and i have cried for films and i have even cried for tears themselves. i’ve cried for the unlimitable earth and i’ve cried for change. i’ve cried for a toothache and i’ve cried for a broken bone. i’ve cried for mistakes– for my own and for others’. i’ve cried for happiness. i’ve cried at the sight of a baby turtledove.
there is apparently no unifying cause of my tears. they seem to arise from conflicting sources, and what seems to dissolve them as soon as they arrive continues to also elude me.
“My tears live in a lake I never touch”
— Mary Meriam, from "A Poem" in The Lillian Trilogy.
my tears emerge without warning. and when they leave me, they are never gone: my tears after passing don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled out by the root. when they fade, something of them remains— something harder, more persistent; call it a reminder, call it recollection— like a small seed that might bud again if rain falls. maybe that is because, as Binnie Kirshenbaum writes, excepting when we are asleep: the lachrymal glands in our eyes never cease secreting protein-rich and antibacterial fluid, tears, which keep the eyeball lubricated. in other words, with sleep and death as the only respites, we are crying forever.
i am crying forever.
like antoine de saint-expery wrote in the little prince: it is such a secret place, the land of tears.
Dunya Mikhail, Diary of a wave outside the sea (trans. Elizabeth Winslow and Dunya Mikhail)
according to the special logic reserved only for fairytales, every object has its practical utility: a hair falling from a turret becomes a ladder; an apple brings dreams, a turned over coin in a well grants wishes. likewise, if one is to examine the earliest literary testimonies of tears, a pattern quickly emerges.
in one story, a young girl kind to a passing stranger is gifted a life in which when she cries from her lips fall sweet roses, when she touches water there appears in it shining gold fish, and when she cries white pearls take the place of her tears.
in another story, cinderella plants a hazel sprig on her mother’s grave and waters it with her tears, which turn to perls in the soil, until a beautiful tree grows. in this tree lives a little white bird that grants her what she wishes.
and in another story, the Little Mermaid would have cried too, “only a mermaid has not any tears, and so she suffers all the more.”
Proust described human emotion as “geological upheavals of thought”. as a new anthropologist, this makes much sense to me. there is a sense of immensity to tears— something tectonic at the heart of them: a rising, a falling, a release, a restructuring, a revelation that cleaves the dark, that moves and alters the inner world they spring from.
like in fairytales, in our world too pearls are products of great geological upheaval. the majority of natural pearls are formed in oysters as a response to an irritant. parasitic intruders such as drill worms will burrow through the hard shell of an oyster and trigger its mantle to secrete a hard substance that creates a barrier. the resulting material is a pearl: a foreign substance covered with layers of nacre. a pearl is a product of its irritant. the price of its existence is a necessary upheaval.
the size of a natural pearl can range from a mere millimetre to an average of seven millimetres. pearls that grow to 10 millimetres or more are rare and therefore considered extremely valuable. we take the pearl and we say you are a kind of upheaval and we adore it for this.
a pearl cannot be made. a pearl cannot be earned. a pearl can only be given.
as Kahlil Gibran asks us: what longing built our own bodies and around what grains?
the Ama (sea women) are a group of japanese divers famous for collecting pearls.
even in modern times, Ama dive without scuba gear or air tanks.
photographers unknown.
erosion is a form of devotion: the pearl is a product of a ceaseless accumulation of touch. all of that turning, kneading, moving about. the shards of a mantle shell lodged in an oyster– layer upon layer of aragonite, calcium rolling about and into the genesis of a pearl. the feeling of touch, of abrasion, of deposited layers: of friction– the rubbing against, like hands. what is a tear? all that respiration of valves, the swell of water engorging the duct of an eye, the collision of saltwater with skin.
what is a tear? the stories tell us that it is something of a pearl being formed inside of us.
Georges Dumas’ traité de psychologie (treatise on psychology), written in 1923, was one of the first academic papers to cite “the language of tears.” another kind of anthropologist, Dumas observed that eyes fill with tears when a sensation within a human being cannot be translated into movements, gestures, or action— this explained tears of anger and grief, but it also explained tears of overwhelm; tears of rain and tears of poetry; of unexpected letters and startling intrusions of beauty. Dumas cites Charles Darwin— “according to Darwin, crying is not specific to human beings; there is at least one animal that weeps hot tears—the elephant in captivity, when it can’t unleash the energy of its enormous muscular mass.”
tears are an extension of that inside of us which seeks to go beyond ourselves. they have this in common with art, with love, with language, and with touch.
as i write this now i realise how unnecessary it is to attempt to differentiate any of these modes with different words.
“a tear is an intellectual thing,” the great poet William Blake wrote.
we are born, we love, we speak, we cry out, we keep or cannot keep what is given to us, we hold on to what we can— and occasionally we fail— we are attentive, we are negligent, we are beloved and we are so very alone. things happen and we are changed by them, as we are by each other. sometimes, these things are beautiful and immediate. at other times, these things that happen are not fair, and take time to reveal their importance. always: the moon rises, always: the sun follows, always: we continue to become what we are: and always something beyond our immediate imaginings.
at the end when with our eyes and hands open, both more and less alive, we walk through that final terrible door, we will likely ask: was this enough?
the meaning of it all may very well be to cry.
now the anthropologist inside of me wants to talk about John Updike’s words: “each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. so why be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?”
but i pause— no, i want to mention Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s passage: “human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
what happens inside of the oyster: the death of insularity, or the birth of the pearl? what happens inside of our eyes when we are moved, in that lake we cannot touch, beyond our understanding?
even when I do sometimes want to tear tears and life apart; i know that some time and somewhere beyond me they have the same meaning: tears are sentiment and they are signal. they are a quiet proof of my capacity to be moved; they are evidence of what has been until now unseen and unknown inside of me. they are a physiological protection from pain, but they are also the evidence of it. they are transparent. they are totally opaque. they are the only evidence i have of my humble inner life: when i cry, that’s my heart being rigorous. that’s my soul at work.
these are the only words, i think, i want to tuck in your pocket today:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Let your heart be broken. Allow, expect, look forward to. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Broken, cracked, rent in two. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin.
- Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
like the pearl, who we are and who we become depends largely upon what we are touched by.
i have for a long time considered my life to be an intimate experiment in just how open i can be. it’s a kind of chasing Blue. i have never been interested in the shallows. but if the poet J.D. McClatchy was correct— and I believe they were— when they said that love is the quality of attention we pay to things, then maybe i might just be doing this one thing right.
there are so many poems i could call on right now. so many. but just now i saw from my window the breeze move the white blossoms into a cloud of snow. today all of the little flowers are making their way out of the earth. i woke up with jasmine braided through my hair; in its perfume i rolled over into another dream. the lady who works at the fruit shop gave me a white dandelion. it’s september and it’s Spring. i broke my sandals i was so happy to run in the grass, and i was thinking of someone i love while they were thinking of me too. i saw a swan. it was as white as any shape in the clouds. i think i am falling in love and it smells like jasmine. i am writing to you. it smells like jasmine. and so my catalog of tears— it still grows. and it smells like jasmine.
love,
ars poetica.
little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. it is for this reason that my work will always be completely free, but it takes considerable Time and Love to give to you each week. if it has brought you something, please consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:
PS- below, for you, one of my favourites by Kahlil Gibran:
Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.
“It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life.
Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.”
- Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
Simply stunning. Thank you.
Have you read There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak? The story begins with a single raindrop.
💙🌎
We weep as we give birth. We weep as we hold the dying.