The most cathartic crying I’ve experienced in my life has also been the most unexpected. The one time that immediately comes to mind is being in a hotel room at the mouth of a valley in Pushkar with my ex-boyfriend, G, and best friend, I, on New Year’s eve. We took a stamp each after our plans to trek to a forest rave were dashed on account of the biting December cold, confusing coordinates to the location but mostly, the lack of enthusiasm to be uncomfortable while melting our faces off amongst a group of strangers.
We were in an unremarkable hotel room, save the view from its large windows, of the dry valley, dotted with brittle shrubs, reedy trees with drying leaves and in the distance, a magnificent tree called the ‘flame of the forest’ or Palash tree in its fiery red glory that swayed in the wind. At night, the valley was doused in the asphalt darkness and we could see the milky way right by the window; nebulous, glowing, devastating.
I remember my ex put on Youtube, to this live performance by Polo&Pan, songs laced with samples from world music to afrobeats to house-tinged dance music (a concoction better suited for MDMA than LSD), at Cabaret Sauvage in Paris. About fifteen minutes into the set, G switched the lights off and our faces were immediately illuminated by the silky blue of the moon. For a brief moment, my friends looked like sacred sculptures and I knew I was beginning the trip. I tried dancing but my limbs were jelly so I keeled over and fell on the bed. The beats convulsed and folded over me, collapsing all dimensions of my reality.
By the time the sun rose in the sky, I looked to the Palash tree, its flaming red leaves opening and closing like a bold mouth, like the tree was breathing as I was and the cold morning opened up to me like an oyster pearl. I was asleep and G lay about, watching the trees with his eyes half-glazed and my tears began to flow. It’s hard to express how unlikely this scenario is. My closest friends know I’m a messy and frequent crier but I’d rather die a slow, painful death than cry in front of anybody. We weren’t a group of people who are particularly sappy or sentimental and if anybody had suggested that this weekend, I’d cry looking at the majesty of a blood-red tree, I’d have dismissed the idea as out of hand. But right then, staring at the tree and resisting the urge to run naked into the zero degree cold, I felt present on a level I never thought to want. I swear I saw G’s eyes moisten but of course, we didn’t exactly talk about it. Later, we sat in silence across from the Holy baths, sipping juice and clicked photos of the cloudy sunset.
Crying has always enjoyed delicious notoriety— from the sadgirl aesthetic of affluent girls in the West to the lonely longings of writers to the actual performance of crying. In 2018, London's Tate Modern opened a new installation that is supposed to evoke forced empathy. The installation has a crying room that produces vapors that make those inside cry. Their logic? Crying automatically induces a sense of empathy. To the obligatory self-portrait of a crying artist by Clifford Owens to Crying Man, a public installation by Korean artist, Yangachi to Roy Lichtenstein’s beautiful girls crying- we love it when women cry. In 2010, Marina Abramović performed at MOMA where she sat silent and still, ‘like a mountain’ and stared into the eyes of anybody who was brave enough to engage with her. The central atrium of MOMA was empty apart from a table, two chairs and Abramović in a red gown. You could sit there for as long as you like (or bear it) and so many people cried during the experience that newspapers dubbed her the “artist who makes people cry.”
This experience has been described as “holy” by her— as the borders of body versus environment melt and the distinction between life and art disappear. Emily Hornby says— “Rather than the individual gazing at the artist’s work, the artist flips the dynamic on its head and gazes at the individual as the masterpiece…Abramovic absorbs the audience’s gaze, laden with anxiety, and gazes back with neither judgment nor expectations, asking nothing in return.” The experience, described by Abramović as an “energy exchange,” offered “unconditional love.”
Do you think you cry easy? Sometimes, I lie in bed, strolling through photos of dogs and babies and burst into soft tears or when I think back to hesitant meetings with old lovers and remember the most painfully intimate moments we’ve shared together. Not the sex but the moments where I’m stunningly weak and human. Like a baby who needs care, support and affection or it’ll breathe its last. Like, when I’m sick, unable to get out of bed and they feed me a warm bowl of rice and dal. Or when I throw a temper tantrum in the throes of PMS, only to regret it later. These moments where I’m naked, gasping for some dignity, unable to extend myself the love I need, so aware of my own mortality. These moments come hurtling at me, as I sit across from an old lover and watch them read the menu, pretending not to know their order.
Sometimes, I think myself into a corner about the crushing futility of it all and start to cry. Sometimes, in the ocean, when I’ve swam deep in and the shore’s a hazy line, I feel the kind of happy nobody should be allowed to feel, I cry.
As I get older, I become a bigger crier. Anything’s an excuse to set me off— a film, a protest, an episode, a song, an article, the sight of smiling kids playing in the sand, a DM, an Instagram page on people holding hands, anybody I love crying. There is no way too craven or moment too small to cry anymore.
In 1970-71, Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, created a body of work which includes a black-and-white silent film, still photographs and a postcard all related to him crying. He mailed the postcards to his friends with the inscription “I’m too sad to tell you.”
There seems to be an overall tension between the sincerity of the artist's captured emotions and performance aspects of the works. Some artists feel the works are at once intensely personal and yet very arbitrary. There was a true reason for Ader's sadness, but that is not shared with us. Others think the reasons for his sadness are beside the point. In his view, Ader walks a fine line between sincerity (the sadness is real) and melodrama (the work is staged multiple times). Some view the work as an ironic statement of the artist taking on all of the embarrassment of the expressed emotion while leaving it open as to whether or not the viewer takes on the embarrassment as well.
The process of life has been softening. The fragility of it all—how moments of transcendence commingle with notions of transience—is feeling especially close to the surface. Art informs crying and vice versa and what is a flaming-red tree in the middle of a desert on a soft, cold morning if not art?
by Dmitri Matkovsky
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