Reading Nora Ephron's criticism of Susan Boyle's singing, Meghan O'Rourke's cynicism of the public's response, and less well-known (but no less thoughtful) bloggers' examinations of the reasons so many people seem moved to tears by Boyle's performance, I began to think about my own tears: What makes me cry? My tear-threshold is very, very low, I'm afraid.
One day this week, one of my co-workers asked me if I watch American Idol. "No," I replied, "I don't like to see people humiliated." I could have added that neither do I like to see people being bullied. So the tears that filled my eyes when I watched a clip of Susan Boyle singing were for the woman's triumph over those rolled eyes and raised eyebrows and for how effortlessly those first notes slipped from Boyle's throat. And, I'm sorry to say, suspecting that the clip was probably edited to manipulate my emotions would make no difference in my physical response. I've always cried too easily, and, as a person who dislikes sentimentality, this over-production of my tear ducts has long been a burden.
When I was young, family members made fun of my tears. At the conclusion of any television show that evoked emotion--lovers being re-united, protagonists overcoming great odds, sympathetic characters dying, animals saving the lives of their owners--all eyes in the room would swivel to me. I seemed to be the family's emotional barometer. My father and younger brother would make sniffling noises and wipe their hands over their eyes--cheerful teasing, they would say, not mockery. I would try not to cry--pressing my lips together, blinking my eyelids, looking up at the ceiling to keep any moisture from falling down my cheeks, or ducking my head to obscure my face. To no avail. "Anita's crying!" someone would say, and my weakness would be revealed.
Over the years, I grew to despise my tears and to control any tears that arose out of my own hurt. But I could not control my sympathetic and empathetic tears, and, to my horror, I could not control how little it took to make me cry: a commercial about an adult son calling his mother on Mother's Day, a story of a missing animal re-united with its owner, the longing of WALL-E the robot as he observed humans in a video-taped musical clasping hands. I really am a lover of reason. For years I taught students to recognize the elements of persuasion and the language of manipulation. But these damn tears betray the softest, mushiest heart I sometimes wish I could triple-lock in steel.
When my husband and I were in graduate school, we went to a showing of Bladerunner. At the end of the film, I could barely walk because I was so overcome with emotion. Leaning on my husband, I managed to make it to our car, where I collapsed in the fog of the dimly-lit parking lot and burst into tears, my chest heaving. I was shocked by the intensity of my feelings. What set me off? My identifying with the replicants' desire for freedom from their human creators and masters. The desire of the humanoid Roy Batter (Rutger Hauer) to confess the horrors of what he had perpetrated; Batter's love for the replicant Pris; his last act in saving the human hired to destroy him (Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard); and Batter's final poetic words, illustrating his appreciation for beauty and his understanding of the tragic brevity of human life, were my undoing:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhausen Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
That scene and those words played over and over in my head. It's a great scene played by a great actor. But couldn't I have appreciated it just as well with dry eyes?
Today at work I was reading Part IX [Funeral Blues] of W. H. Auden's "Twelve Songs":
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Uh, huh, I had to duck my head over the Norton Anthology of Poetry to hide the tears in my eyes. And, you've probably guessed, I recalled that scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Matthew (John Hannah) quotes these four stanzas at the funeral of his lover Gareth (Simon Callow). (And, my God, my eyes water even now--in the middle of this analytical examination of my own tears--when I review the beautiful despair of those lines!)
When I was in ninth grade, I first read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and cried with Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin when Gandalf fell in the Mines of Moria. I loved the book and read it every year for about six years, and each of those six years I cried at that scene, even though I knew Gandalf would return in even a more powerful form. I cried years later when I read the scene to my children as we read the novel together in the evenings. And, yeah, the scene in the movie brings tears to my eyes every time--and, oh, the scene when Baramir (Sean Bean) is killed by the Uruk-hai. Yep, every time. Grief for bravery and betrayal, for loss, for the human condition:
Where is the horse gone? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!
from "The Wanderer" (Old English poem)
I am fifty-one years old. I can be tough. (Just ask my kids.) I love argument and reason. One of my favorite philosophers is Seneca; I admire the Stoics. But my tear ducts are Sentimental Sisters, maudlin and mawkish.
"Mama, are you crying?" my daughter asks, as we watch Kiki rescue her friend Tombo and the air fill with celebratory confetti. "Of course, sweetie," I reply, "but ignore it. You know I can't help it."
So let us have our tears, Nora Ephron and Meghan O'Rouke. They will dry soon enough.
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