Early in Heather Christle’s book-length essay exploring the phenomenon of tears, the writer notes that she has “always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones”. She is considering this in light of a friend’s description of the notion of parallel crying, an act that comes alongside art but not precisely from it.
The phrase is something of a metaphor for the book itself, a text constructed alongside crying rather than precisely from it, a work of free association across themes and ideas that mimics the writer’s conclusions regarding our tears: “Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around.”
This is a book that captures the myriad forms of these tears, places one alongside the other by means of anecdote, quotation, criticism and memoir. The aim, writes Christle, is to make “not story, but relationship emerge”. “This tear and this tear and this one.”
During the editing process, Christle colour-coded her paragraphs to establish the book’s shape. The end result sees the tears in question organised into strands that emerge as contemplations of the colour white; of the moon; of the scientific basis for tears; of the art and literature of crying.
Christle, who has published several poetry collections (this is her first work of non-fiction), is poised and precise with her sentences, and even though the book is the result of copious research (there are 198 endnotes), that heavy lifting is integrated lightly into the text.
Thus, a discussion of elephants’ capacity for mourning – “the word I have seen people use most frequently to describe the way elephants examine the bones of another when a herd comes across a skeleton is reverent” – is so delicately captured it almost hurts physically to read. Or, as part of a reflection on the way the moon’s lack of gravity makes tears fall more slowly than on Earth, she adroitly reminds us that although Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, did not cry when he stood on the lunar surface, the tears manifested in other ways upon his return. “Aldrin drank his sorrows away … The tears behaved according to tradition, falling like rain on the land.”
Rangy and focused
As with other books of this ilk – Maggie Nelson’s Bluets comes to mind – Christle’s work is both rangy and focused. The theme of the book is crying, in an era when there is a lot to cry about, even though those tears, inevitably, are unequally distributed. Christle is aware enough of this to call herself out for her privilege as a white woman who is allowed to cry, whose weeping can in fact be weaponised, to bring “violence towards people of colour, and black people in particular”.
She teases herself, too, for her wallowing: “Hard to feel you are too tragic a figure when the tears mix with snot.” But even white women’s tears can receive short shrift if they do not fit an acceptable narrative. Examining the iconic photo of the 14-year-old girl kneeling in anguish beside a slain student at the Kent State massacre, Christle writes: “Tears are a sign of powerlessness, a ‘woman’s weapon’. It has been a very long war.”
Christle has personal reasons to cry. The book emerged following the death by suicide of a friend, and was written during her own journey into pregnancy and motherhood, as she worries first she will be a colicky mother because she is “periodically overcome with complete, encompassing fear and despair” and then after the baby arrives she does indeed find herself, sleep-deprived, “collapsed on the floor and in tears” – a place plenty of mothers I know have found themselves, whether western culture, with its continued cult of (unsupported) motherhood, allows them to admit it or not.
Bill, the friend who died, makes periodic appearances in the text, there in person as a support after the author’s lonely, nasty abortion; later agitated and drunk as the distance grows between them, but there again after his passing in stream of consciousness emails the writer has saved, and which remind her of the person he once was, the person she has lost. “I wish I could love him again, and better.”
Paragraph’s primacy
Like much of the writing of Maggie Nelson and Sarah Manguso, among others, this is a book given over to the supremacy of the paragraph. Most of the blocks of text are short. Some are just a few lines. All are self-contained, entities in their own right: you feel the need to pause after each, breathe in the poetic sparseness. The work cleaves, too, to that of Jenny Offill, who also works in gappy fashion, with the white space between her textual fragments a fundamental aspect of her recent craft.
There is a danger, of course, that Christle’s text pays too much homage to the work of Nelson or Offill; that it fails to mark out its own ground. On the other hand, if, as some have suggested, little books made up of interconnected fragments – often those that foreground the experience of contemporary motherhood in a disjointed world – present as the radical form for our era, then there is surely room for many such works.
These are books that remind us – when we need it most – that we move in relationship rather than individual adventure, that the tender connections between our tears are all we really have to hold.
