'Jesus wept”. But Voltaire smiled. The shortest sentence in the King James Bible tells us the Son of God was susceptible to intense human emotions: He was literally moved to tears by the death of Lazarus.
Weeping is what we all, divine or mondain, do in extreme emotional states. Or do we? By way of contrast, the sardonic agnostic French philosopher preferred to demonstrate his absolute control over circumstances. An ethologist once defined the smile as “the silent, bared-teeth, submissive grimace of primates”. Maybe, but in Voltaire’s case it was a profession of cold, superior intelligence.
Do we prefer to laugh or cry? We readily associate crying with weakness, distress or vulnerability, a loss of control, but its simple connection to sadness is not absolutely clear. Indeed, crying can also indicate joy, pride, boredom, religious ecstasy, frustration and pain. Jo Brand, in a forthcoming BBC Four documentary For Crying Out Loud, has asked whether we cry enough. Curious, perhaps, for one whose trade is laughter to encourage a wave of collective mass hysterical sobbing, but there is more to crying than a noisy snivel and a wet drip.
Crying, it turns out, is a physiologically and psychologically complicated device we use to adapt ourselves to dramatic circumstances. And it’s a uniquely human prerogative: despite what you may have heard about crocodiles, animals do not cry.
Research in the Eighties at the University of Minnesota found that men cry once a month, while women cry five times as much. That statistical variation confirms a subjective belief that men are reluctant to cry because it suggests a sensitivity that might be thought emasculating. Big boys don’t cry? We do not want our knees to tremble, nor our lips: that is why the upper one has in all circumstances to be stiff.
But a sentence that read “Jesus howled with laughter and slapped his thighs” would be both undignified and unmoving, not to mention blasphemous. Perhaps, as the lady says, we really should cry more. It would, the argument goes, demonstrate a healthy range of emotional awareness instead of a tightly bound costive and repressive state. Our lives of quiet desperation would be relieved by more tears.
With the Baftas next week and the Oscars soon after, an international spectacle of celebrity weeping will soon be upon us. It is irresistible to wonder if Colin Firth, having mastered the royal stutter, will at this moment be working on the thespian blubber. He will surely now be checking the connection between the nasolacrimal canal and his ego, making sure his mucous membranes are in good shape for a teary-eyed headshot. Maybe he will practice with onions: the amino acid sulfoxides contained in the allium reliably stimulate tears.
He will with his wet eyes project a compelling mixture of sensitivity, humility, pride: a default blub as the Oscar is handed over. Neurologists know that there is a direct connection between the tear duct and the parts of the brain that process emotions. But there is another direct connection operating here as well: the star wanting to make a convincing public testament that he is not a total glory-hound, but a delicate emotional mechanism. So he cries. If there is a riot outside the Oscars ceremony, the LAPD will use tear gas and we can all join in.
Last December, American politician John Boehner, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, cried on the CBS show Sixty Minutes. We do not know whether his autonomic nervous system had got out of control or whether this was a cynically manipulative attempt to win public preferment: the one certain thing about crying is that since it signals vulnerability and distress, it encourages bonding. Even among voters.
That must be why Richard Nixon, who had been taught to cry by his drama coach, told David Frost in 1977: “I never cry – except in public”. And Gordon Brown found that when his moral compass went on the blink, a video tear restored public confidence in his sense of direction. Then there was Gazza at the World Cup. Or John Terry, not usually seen as the sensitive type. Best of all, the ultimate in gung-ho techno-butch: five-star Gulf War 1.0 General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf confessed to Barbara Walters that he had a little cry now and again. How moving to picture the general jack-knifed over a hanky in his Hummer after a nasty little bout of phosphorus bombing.
The range of synonyms for crying reveals its complexity. We can bawl, blub, howl, keen, lament, snivel, sob, wail, weep, whimper or yowl. Then there are the metaphors. An old Jewish proverb says tears are the soap of the soul, an observation that science now confirms: lachrymation equals purgation. Under stress the body produces adrenocorticotrophin (ACTH) and biochemical analysis shows that this hormone is significantly present in tears. Crying dumps stress hormones. It is a release valve as well as an emotional detergent. We are cleaning up our psychological act and starting afresh.
Why then are we so reluctant to cry? I don’t recall crying much as a child although I certainly did a bit of self-regarding, Sorrows of Young Werther-style sobbing when being messed around by adolescent love interests. I was mocked by a schoolmaster for appearing to cry during Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, but I think that was probably a pose to impress a girl.
It is true that when I got the call to say my father had died suddenly there was a bad moment (I had missed the opportunity to see him the week before), but when my mother died in more predictable circumstances… nothing. Not that I did not care, just that I preferred the Voltaire method of control. Anyway, as another 18th-century Frenchman said “Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d’être obligé d’en pleurer”.
For me it was an entirely trivial matter that made me cry the most. Although he eventually enjoyed himself hugely and made a success of it, my son did not enjoy his first year at university. But he toughed it out and came home only infrequently.
One Sunday I had taken him to the station after a visit. When I returned I found a horrible scrunched-up aluminium foil thing containing a salami sandwich he had silently made (and then forgotten) for the journey. All the dreadful pathos of the Universe, all the parent’s frustrated yearnings for the well-being of their children was there in a nasty silver blob on the kitchen counter. I feel a bit weepy even writing this now.
The science of crying is fascinating. Charles Darwin published his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. To Darwin, crying was just a survivalist matter of the need for lubrication of the eyeball with the added benefit that making the nostrils damp kept the sense of smell alert so our prehistoric ancestors might be able better to detect dangerous predators.
Contemporary science goes a little bit farther. The convention is a tripartite division of crying. There are basal tears. This, the purely functionalist cleansing, which Darwin mentions. Then there are reflex tears, the automatic response to irritation from onions, tear gas or a sharp blow to the nose or another source of pain. Finally, there are psychic tears. These, of course, are the most interesting.
Crying is one of the most articulate forms of non-verbal communication. It is a valuable and effective means of moderating our feelings (we have a “good cry”, you never hear of anybody ever having a bad one); and it is also a profound way of projecting them. A tear is worth a thousand words.
In art, the Man of Sorrows is Jesus naked above the waist and displaying the wounds of the Passion. This is the ultimate “imago pietatis”, the triple distillation of humanity’s terrifying predicament. And the Man of Sorrows is usually crying. The link between the religious idea of crying away sin and our modern understanding that tears are, in fact, a reliable way of exhausting toxic compounds from the brain is both exciting and disturbing: is the expression of profound emotion merely a sort of chemical audit?
Not to the Romantics. The 18th century enjoyed “moral weeping” and Wordsworth tells us of a good cry: “Life’s purple tide began to flow”. Schubert wrote the music for In Praise of Tears. There is a psycho-sexual element to a lot of crying. Virgil thought tears made a woman more beautiful. William James (Henry’s brother) invented Pragmatism. He tells us that “dry sorrow” is damaging and unpleasant, but crying can actually produce a sort of gratification that is erotic in its intensity. Indeed, Dorothy Parker wrote “Lips that taste of tears, they say/Are the best for kissing”. Maybe exchange of fluids is what it really is all about.
Crying does not mean one thing, but many. And tears come in many forms. “I weep for you, the Walrus said/I deeply sympathise/With sobs and tears he sorted out/Those of the largest size”. Thus, Through the Looking-Glass, published in the same year as Darwin’s study of Expression.
Crying indicates vulnerability: psychologists believe we empathise with a tearful person because we are reminded of a baby. But crying can also indicate terrible states of desolation. The critic Cyril Connolly claimed to be able to cry with boredom at demanding dinner parties. More impressively, he wrote: “Morning tears return; spirits at their lowest ebb. Approaching 40, sense of total failure.” That is what you might call a cry for help.
It is not entirely clear whether crying is evidence of emotional maturity or of indulgent self-pity; of pride, shame, joy, sadness or anger. Do tears demonstrate touching vulnerability or an annoying manipulativeness? A wholesome style of fearless emotional nudity, or an embarrassing lack of control? Actually, all of these things.
Laugh? I could have cried. I wonder if we will get to the stage where people say “I am feeling terrific. I must go and have a cry”. When I finished that sentence… I smiled.
- Stephen Bayley is a cultural and design critic
- Jo Brand’s For Crying Out Loud is broadcast on BBC Four later this month