crying: a dissertation

could my tears tell me anything about philosophy?

This week’s Bewilderment is a reprint of an essay that first appeared on April 12, 2023, in the ‘First Person Singular’ vertical at Memoirland. Thanks to Sari Botton for publishing this there, and to Liz Iverson who alerted me to the opportunity.

“Crying: a dissertation” is the only part of my doctoral work I’ve ever tried to publish; in fact, it’s not exactly my doctoral work, anymore; when I decided to send it out, I completely revised this passage as an exercise in (1) letting go of some of my doubts and anxieties around the dissertation, (2) figuring out how to write a very straightforward personal essay that stayed true to my own experience of complexity and even contradiction, and (3) trying to communicate some of the scholarly ideas in my PhD work—that are also central to my teaching and life—in a way that felt conversational but not reductive. So here you have it, along with a few images of the desks where I wrote that PhD and one of the day I handed the pre-viva draft in. Thanks for reading.

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I wouldn’t describe myself as a crier: I don’t cry at movies; I’m often dry-eyed at funerals, despite a soft heart. But between 2007 and 2012 I spent more time crying than at any other time in my life. Was it a coincidence that during that time I was working on my doctoral dissertation? 

My dissertation was in part about feeling and scholarship. Could one be a scholar and feel things? Everyone around me said no, and so I went through years of research and writing roping off the part of me that, over those years, cried in bathrooms and public parks, libraries, grocery stores, bedrooms (mine and not mine), classrooms, university corridors. I felt crying was essentially shameful: the thing I did when language and logic failed me. My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn't quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

The history of tears is a hidden history. Its geography is the margins: back rooms, alleyways, under the table, in the corner. The philosophy of tears is erasure, impropriety, unnaturalness, witchiness, irrationality. Tears are too much, like anger is, in some bodies. And bodies are at the center of this, because it's a body that produces tears. They come from glands above the eye, leak through our tear ducts and down the sides of our noses. If a person is dehydrated, their glands will not produce enough water to moisten the surface of the eye, which will become irritated. And they will not be able to cry. What I'm trying to say is, there's no way to think about tears without thinking about other things that bodies do, like eat and drink, or like die, fuck, laugh. 

My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn't quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

There's a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists: it's just that certain kinds of people—well, white, educated, cisgender, straight, relatively wealthy, generally Christian men, to put a point on it—get to walk into literature and history and philosophy as if they are that ideal mind. This isn't about laying individual blame; it's that if everyone around you speaks like you, you probably won't notice that you have an accent, but you'll be able to hear the accents of anyone whose ways of speaking are inflected by some difference in place or family or language. You get the picture. If the model for being a serious thinker is someone who never cries, well, what happens to the person for whom tears are always close to the surface? 

About halfway into my PhD, I happened across a book called Pictures and Tears, by an art historian named James Elkins. My method of finding new things to read was not a very scholarly one: I would walk through the library's stacks, dim towers of books on either side of me, and, according to a rule I had instituted, pull off the shelf any book that caught my eye, no matter how unrelated to my thesis. At this point, I hadn't read anything about crying. I hadn't thought about it as a subject, something to look at and form questions about, despite writing about feeling.

I took Pictures and Tears home from the library with me, the green cover snug in my bag between notebooks. In the book, James Elkins asks how and why some people cry in front of paintings, and goes on to wonder about why these responses aren't really part of the scholarly field of art history. To cry in front of a painting is a private kind of scholarship, one that the necessary repetition of the scientific method cannot reach. But for Elkins, this doesn't mean that tears have nothing to offer. It means, instead, that the frame we put around meaning might need to change. As I sat with the book under a quilt my friend had made for me, I realized that instead of having to separate tears and ("real") knowledge, maybe crying in front of paintings could tell me about relationships between kinds of knowing. But I had never cried in front of a painting, and I doubted that I could. 

On May 14th, 2010, at about six o'clock in the evening, I was in Paris—a few days away from my desk and the library and PhD-student-life in England. The Louvre was free that night, and a friend wanted to go, so I did. I was in no particular state of heightened anticipation. If anything, I was prepared to be a little bored, because I like smaller museums better than huge, encyclopedic ones. I did have one reason to go, though: I wanted to see a new painting by Cy Twombly that I heard had been installed. At this point, I can't even recall how I knew that it existed. This preamble matters, because though I'm not usually a blasé person, I was that night. I need you to know that I didn't have a feeling of special excitement about the visit. I didn't really give it much by way of forethought, in fact.

There's a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists…

We walked through sections of European paintings from the Renaissance (obligatory stop by the Mona Lisa and a quick pass through the Botticellis) and then, following small plaques on the wall, made our way through rooms of Roman metalwork. The floors were cool, pale marble. The woodwork was dark. In the rooms, the cases of gold and lead objects glowed. I walked into an antechamber containing two such cases and stood facing the room I'd come from to look at them. They were small and dark and the room, despite being lit with museum lights and the light from the window, felt relatively dark, too. Then I turned to walk into the next room. 

Elkins lays out what he imagines to be the ideal conditions under which one might cry while looking at a painting: go alone, avoid trying to see everything, take your time, avoid others' interpretations. By being with the painting on one's own (and its own) terms, by ignoring others' readings of it, and by spending time alone with it, it might be possible to cry in front of—or because of—it. On that evening in Paris I wasn't alone, but Elkins' other conditions held. When I turned from the darkness of the antechamber and its small wood-framed cases, there, right in front of me, opening into a brightness that felt larger than the actual dimensions of the room, was Cy Twombly's The Ceiling.

In factual terms, this painting, The Ceiling, can be measured and its details can be noted and filed away in the correct art-historical filing cabinet (waiting to be called up in newspaper articles or research or gallery didactics). It is 3,750 square feet in size. It was painted in 2010. It is inscribed with the names of Greek sculptors. Its colors are pale brown-gray, gold, blue, white. The blue field that dominates The Ceiling is meant to call up the water of the Aegean Sea. Those details don't satisfy me, though, in terms of what I experienced that evening. The words, the art historical facts, aren't enough to convey the massiveness of this painting, and its massiveness is part of its meaning. The Ceiling is more, does more, than I can capture in this dispassionate catalogue of color and dimension. What can I say? I burst into tears in the doorway to a world where everything was suddenly blue and white and gold.

I realized that instead of having to separate tears and ("real") knowledge, maybe crying in front of paintings could tell me about relationships between kinds of knowing. But I had never cried in front of a painting, and I doubted that I could. 

When I returned from Paris to the English city where I was studying, many things were unchanged. I still associated tears with acute embarrassment and worried that they made me seem, to others, like an incapable thinker. The process of writing and reading was still difficult, sometimes deeply painful, threaded with self-doubt. The “dry-eyed” theoretical works I was learning to read, and that I had real affection for, were still there. But I brought back with me the equal reality of my spontaneous tears in response to Twombly's blue-white-gold immensity. In that moment, in an immediate and irrefutable way, I learned an also about knowledge that has stayed with me ever since. There is no either-or when it comes to thinking: the same selves who do the work of theory are the ones who grieve a death, or thrill to new attraction; whose hands get pruney in the dishwater and who need to eat and drink. 

I don't know why I cried in front of this painting and not in front of any other, even paintings I love, or others of Cy Twombly's works, ones I've admired. What comes to mind when I look back is simply the size of the painting: how large it was, how high up it was, and how it filled the whole room visually. It seemed to fill the room, and me, in such a way as to welcome me—all of me. Looking at The Ceiling in tears meant looking at it in the first person. It was I, only I, who stood there crying. My tears were my signature, my way of taking on tradition from the place only I could have: I the scholar, finally in the same exact place as the I who could not control her tears.

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August is here; September is coming. Next month I’m planning to write, loosely, in the region of learning to write and teaching writing. If you’re reading this and there was a moment you can remember where a teacher changed your mind/your life/your practice about/of poetry or writing, or a reading you remember that broke your mind open in important ways, would you be willing to tell me in the comments?

Thanks again for reading. See you next week.