crying

Care may be questioned with care, joy with joy.¹

The cry may be questioned with a cry.

• (I suppose that’s what this is…)

It seems unkind to approach the cry with the same kind of linearity that has barred it from consideration and legitimacy. It seems unkind to approach the cry with the measuring stick of the academic…

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.²

We cry before we are taught language. We cry as the animal cries. The cry is on the edge of communication. Between human and animal; between language and action; between noise and song; between surrender and hope. The cry is an image of past and an image of future; a lamentation of something too late and the breeze of a fantasy.³

We cannot look at the cry through the goggles we’ve grown accustomed to. The straps of the goggles have dug too far into the back of our head, the hair is matted beneath, and the skin is irritated. Remove the goggles in order to forget the weight of the goggles. Remove the goggles and the dust of history gets in your eye and you cry. Remove the goggles and the microparticles of glass and aluminum get in your eye and you cry.

Maybe then, the best lens to look at the cry through is the tear—the common smudge that blurs the field of vision, blurs edges and horizons, blurs names and time. Through a tear, the cry is a color rather than a symptom; an atmosphere rather than an event; an echo rather than a performance. Through a tear, the cry of a baby looks a lot like the sudden cry of a solar flare—looks a lot like the slow cry of the sun’s light. This, too, is the danger of the cry (and the tear)—the blur connects but also consumes. The cry becomes the network. Through a tear, the color of a cry may shift into the deep, sad red and all will be melted in its smudge.

We make the surrogate in order to forget the cry. We make the screen. We make the glass horizon where the mind glides freely (does it?) and the body is forgotten. The tear is rejected by the screen—it rolls off the surface. The screen reflects the tear and the crying face. It used to be that, with enough tears, one could drown the machine, short the electronics—but the surrogate today is coated in hydrophobic skin. The ports of entry disappear. An ocean of tears and still the surrogate is safe. The cry cannot get in. We make the heaven we were promised and store it in a server deep in a mountain. We make the heaven we were promised and lodge it in some satellite, drifting in the purgatory of orbit. Body-less and protected from time.

Recently, I’ve been crying more regularly than I used to. I find myself crying in the bathroom. I am crying in the bed and on the floor. I have lost control. My cries twist into their signature, self-affirming loop: I cry because I have lost control—the cries are further evidence that I have lost control—I cry because I am crying—I cry because I am crying…

The cry emerges out of lack. The sound becomes a companion. A limb of tears appears. The cry is linked to time (but what isn’t?). We lack control over time. We lack everlasting life.

Maybe I cry my tears in the hope that I cry a river that turns all the way back to its source—all the way back to some Arcadia or all the way back to my first cry, entering into the world—so that I might avert the sins I am bound to commit or the presiding apocalypses or the promised confrontation with death.⁴ Outside time, this loop of tears for tears would mean nothing—the streams would be bereft of the gravity that moves them.

I am eager to sacrifice the body so that the mind can live on. I offer my tears as sacrifice (as evidence of agnition, as evidence of my penance, as evidence of my sincerity, as evidence of my trust) just as Alexander offers his earthly possessions and his family as sacrifice to God on the condition that time is turned back to the morning before the announcement of the apocalypse. The plea is answered and the end of the world averted, but Alexander’s mind is swept into the hysteric time of the cry. His body is swept away by doctors. Time has turned back, but the apocalypse still looms. God awaits another sacrifice.⁵

He realized there was no escape out of time, and that that moment he’d been granted to see as a child, and that had obsessed him forever after, was the moment of his own death.⁶

The cry emerges out of too much. Too much history that has been and too much history that is to be or too much history that is, may be, or, simultaneously… A broken sentence that unravels into empty everything. A cry of too many lives lived and too many lives to be lived, lived all at once. This is great and this is terrible. Too bright and too dark. Overwhelming color. Dim cry, vibrant cry.

• Suddenly, the cry is swallowed by silence.