An Illustrated Manifesto for Reclaiming Our Deepest Humanity – The Marginalian

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of my favorite children’s books — which, at their best, are always philosophies for living. It may be that our tears keep our hearts from breaking by making living poems of our pain, of our confusion, of the almost unbearable beauty of being. They are our singular evolutionary inheritance — we are the only animals with lacrimal glands activated by emotion — and our richest involuntary language. They are how we signal to each other what makes us and breaks us human: that we feel life deeply, that we are moved by moving through this world, that something, something that matters enough, has punctured our illusion of control just enough to open a pinhole into the incalculable fragility that grants life its bittersweet beauty. To cry is to claim our humanity, to claim our very lives. It is an indelible part of mastering what the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm called “the art of living.”

That is what Argentine visual artist Pepita Sanwich explores in The Art of Crying: The Healing Power of Tears (public library) — part memoir of a lacrimal life, part investigation of the creaturely and cultural function of tears, part manifesto for unabashed crying as a radical act of emotional intelligence.

She begins with the science of crying, taxonomizing the three kinds of tears we produce: basal tears (the lubricant that makes our vision possible), reflex tears (the body’s cleansing response to irritation and foreign particles), and emotional tears (those “custodians of the heart,” as she calls them, biologically unique to the human animal).

Crying, however, is an embodied process — a Rube Goldberg machine of reactions between the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the autonomic nervous system — that does not require tears: We are born without fully developed lacrimal glands and can’t produce tears for the first two months of life, yet new babies dry-cry just the same to express their physiological and emotional needs.

The history of tears emanates the history of science itself, of our yearning to know what we are and what the world is, with all our misguided guesses along the way.

She details a succession of theories about why we cry — from the Galean notion that tears were “the humors of the heart,” to the medieval belief that tears were a tonic that could cure infections and release souls from purgatory, to Darwin’s studies of emotional expressions, which led him to believe that tears gave us an evolutionary advantage in being able to signal for help but puzzled him in their positive manifestation.
We cry when we need to be held, yes — the tears of distress, signaling a need for comfort — but we also cry at what we cannot hold — the tears of joy and awe, which Darwin himself barely held back in his encounter with the spiritual aspect of raw nature. Pepita recalls weeping before one of the world’s largest waterfalls, not knowing how to hold and how else to express her overflowing joy at the transcendent spectacle.

This kind of crying betokens what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” locating its twin springs in nature and in art. To cry before a painting, at the movies, or while listening to music is training ground for empathy. (The word empathy itself only came into popular use in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a work of art in an effort to understand why art moves us.)

This is why crying may be a precious foothold on our own humanity in an age of artificial intelligence that makes the criteria for consciousness increasingly slippery. Pepita writes:

It doesn’t matter how well people program robots and machines; the capacity to feel spontaneous emotion and intuitive empathy is what makes our interactions uniquely and intrinsically human.

It is not surprising, then, that tears punctuate not only the biological history of our species but the cultural history of every civilization — the ancient Egyptian myth that the tears Isis cried over her husband Osiris’s death flooded the Nile; the ritual weeping of the Aztecs; the Incan belief that silver came from the tears of the Moon (and gold from the sweat of the Sun); the ancient Chinese wailing performances for mourning called ku; the Mexican folklore legend of La Llorona, the eternally weeping woman who haunts the forests and rivers at night looking for small children who have misbehaved; the Victorian tear-catcher vials known as lachrymatories.

Because every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world, Pepita’s interest in the phenomenon of crying springs from the amplitude of unabashed tears in her own life. She writes of crying on the subway, crying at the museum, crying at a Halloween party, crying with her young brother upon his first heartbreak, crying while reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids on the airplane taking her from her homeland to a new life in New York City, crying underwater after finishing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking at the beach, crying “with pure love at the grocery store line.”

She goes on to explore such facets of our lacrimal lives as the mystery of crying in dreams, the biological and sociological role of gender in crying, the physiological hazards of trying to suppress tears and the physiological benefits of a good cry, and how crying together strengthens human relationships.

Complement with artist Rose-Lynn Fisher’s mesmerizing photomicroscopy of tears cried with different emotions (which makes a cameo in The Art of Crying as one of many celebrations of other artists’ art), then savor the fascinating evolutionary history of dreaming — our other complex language of reckoning with the mystery of who and what we are.