As a child, Tom Lutz was well-acquainted with tears.
“I come from a weepy family,” the author recalled during a recent interview. His father, a corporate executive, cried. His mother cried. His sisters and brothers cried. And so did he.
“Growing up, you just think your family’s normal. Later, I became fascinated about why we wept. I used to think of crying as a sign of our great emotional maturity, a sign of our great intimacy. But, more and more, I came to see it also as a form of escape, as a sign the conversation was over, that the intimacy was bounded.”
It was a paradox. The Lutzes, a family with German-Catholic roots, living on the East Coast, were so at ease with one another emotionally that they were willing to cry openly. But, once tears were shed, the situation moved away from words and rationality, and the crier, far from being the victim, suddenly had the upper hand.
If that sounds complex, it is. But then nothing about crying is simple, as Lutz discovered when he began researching his book “Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears,” newly published by Norton.
Weeping is a human trait: Only humans weep. Humans have always wept. Yet little is known for certain about why we cry. Or even what happens when we cry — to our bodies, to our psyches. Or what it means when we cry.
“Weeping,” Lutz writes, “often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalize complex, `overwhelming’ emotions, least able to fully articulate our manifold, mingled feelings.”
So it’s no surprise that it’s difficult for us to put into words what’s happening when our tears flow. Or why they’re flowing.
“Tears are sometimes considered pleasurable or profound, and sometimes dangerous, mysterious, or deceptive,” notes Lutz, 46, an English professor at the University of Iowa. “In all cultures, some tears, like those we call crocodile tears, are a breach not just of etiquette but of ethics. Some weeping, like that of medieval Christian fathers in prayer, was considered sacred. . . . At other times, as when Stan Laurel, Art Carney or any number of other clowns cry, tears are a source of mirth, sometimes poignant, sometimes not.”
Tears, in many ways, are a mystery, and their meanings vary from culture to culture and from era to era.
Consider just one aspect of crying: the complexities of male tears.
In many human cultures, women have carried the heavier load when it comes to crying. But not all. For example, in Montenegro in the early 1900s, men were expected to do the major weeping at funerals, even if they didn’t know the deceased. Reporting on one such ceremony, an anthropologist wrote that the men “mostly did not know the poor boy’s name and had to be coached in the details before beginning to wail, but within a minute or two they were sobbing bitterly. Coming home people compared notes as to who had cried best.”
In 18th Century Europe, men who cried at the opera or symphony were honored for their sensitivity, their tears being seen as proof of their moral worth.
Expectations, of course, were much different in the mid-20th Century America of John Wayne where — the Lutzes to the contrary — crying was considered solely the preserve of women. When Wayne had to show a strong emotion, he furrowed his brow or tightened his jaw. Weeping was, well, for sissies.
What would Wayne think of his action-hero descendent Bruce Willis who, at the emotional climax of “Armageddon,” while saying good-bye to his daughter from the surface of an earth-threatening asteroid, lets a tear roll very wetly down his cheek before going off to save the world?
Yet, as Lutz notes, even at the height (or depth) of the men-don’t-cry era, men cried. “Lou Gehrig cried at his farewell speech in 1939, and Babe Ruth cried at Yankee Stadium in 1948 when it was announced that he had cancer. Mickey Mantle sobbed in the locker room when injuries kept him out of a World Series game in 1951.”
And, four decades later, in another locker room, Michael Jordan wept as he cradled the NBA championship trophy, following the Chicago Bulls’ first successful title run.
True, American males at the present turn of the century are far from blubbering weepers. But crying is much more acceptable for them than it would have been for their fathers. There’s even a certain cachet attached to a judicious shedding of tears — a cachet that politicians have been quick to take advantage of in recent years.
In 1972, when Edmund Muskie cried while defending his wife’s reputation during a campaign appearance in New Hampshire, he was promptly hounded out of that year’s presidential race. One of his loudest critics was Robert Dole, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, who argued that Muskie’s tears proved he lacked the emotional stability to lead the nation.
That was then. A quarter of a century later, it was Dole who was running for president and Dole who was weeping, seemingly at the drop of a hat. “In 1993 he wept on camera as he related to CBS’ `60 Minutes’ the story of his father visiting him in the hospital in 1945,” Lutz writes. “He teared up recounting his story of the war on several other occasions . . . in 1996, repeating his tearful visit to (his hometown of) Russell for the cameras twice.”
While some commentators saw Dole’s tears as evidence that he wasn’t as thick-skinned and hard-hearted as he’d always seemed, Lutz is skeptical. “It would be more correct to say that Dole cried in order to prove that he was a man with feelings: his tears were produced for the camera, in a 1990s version of kissing babies, designed to show that he had the right kind of stuff to be president.”
Yet, in American politics, what’s good for the gander is definitely not good for the goose.
Crying may be acceptable and even advantageous for Bob Dole or Bill Clinton, but not for any woman seeking office. If Hillary Rodham Clinton were to weep while responding to some charge against her in the New York Senate race, her tears would be trumpeted as evidence of her weakness. (That’s what happened to Pat Schroeder when she cried in public in 1988 during her campaign for the presidential nomination.)
“Politics,” Lutz notes, “now has the distinction of being the central area of public life in which men cry more often than women.”
Of course, there’s a lot more to crying than whether men or women do it. Psychologists have theories about the benefit of weeping. Physiologists have explanations about the mechanical processes of the body that cause tears to flow. Philosophers and novelists over the centuries have weighed in with their thoughts as well.
But what Lutz found when he began his research for “Crying” several years ago was that no one had ever tried to take a comprehensive look at weeping. “There was virtually nothing there,” Lutz said in the interview. “And to find this much free room was exhilarating.”
There was no academic specialty of lamentology or lacrimiolgy — indeed, no books that pulled together the insights and ideas of the various disciplines, such as sociology and psycholgy.
And, as Lutz delved into the subject, he found it more complicated than anyone could have expected.
Take something as seemingly simple as tears themselves.
In fact, Lutz points out, there are three kinds of tears: “Basal tears are the continuous tears that lubricate our eyeballs. Reflex or irritant tears are produced when we chop onions, for instance, or get poked in the eye. Psychic or emotional tears are those caused by, and communicating, specific emotional states. These different kinds of tears . . . contain differing concentrations of chemicals, hormones, and proteins.”
Or consider the physical processes that cause tears to flow.
Physiologists are split on whether weeping is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system, which runs things in the body during times of intense activity, or by the parasympathetic nervous system, which runs things after such activity when the body is returning to rest.
That’s a key question because, depending on the answer, crying is a sign that something is happening right now or that something has already happened.
Or consider the theory, held by many psychotherapists, doctors and nurses, that crying can provide a catharsis through which a patient achieves better mental health.
In fact, Lutz notes, “After a century of therapeutic theorizing and research, there is still no hard evidence that tears are in fact cathartic, and there is some to suggest that they are not.”
For one thing, if weeping is regulated, as some researchers believe, by the parasympathetic nervous system, then they don’t cause anything at all. They’re just a signal that a period of high tension or emotion has passed.
For another, a study of 200 college students discovered that, although the students thought their tears were beneficial, those who cried had worse — not better — health and experienced no reduction in stress.
Not that Lutz thinks tears are without value. Not at all. Indeed, he argues that those ancient and not-so-ancient thinkers who envisioned a world without tears were misguided. “In this world,” Lutz writes, “tears will always be with us. If learning to stop crying is necessary to maturation, to stop altogether is to be less than human.”
At heart, his book is an argument that we need to take weeping more seriously than we do, to recognize its complexities and the need to study and understand those complexities.
For him, crying is like poetry. It’s almost always more than it seems.
“As a communication medium,” he writes, “tears are like very early radio: they grab everyone’s attention and sometimes the signals can be picked up quite clearly, but they are at best diffuse in their broadcast and spotty in their reception.
“And like any language, they can be used to persuade or evade, to clarify or obscure, to reveal or disguise the self and its motives. They can be used, like any language, in the full gamut of human projects, from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Some thoughts over the centuries, compiled in “Crying” by Tom Lutz, about tears and why they flow:
17th Century French philosopher Rene Descartes believed that tears were a sort of rain caused by condensation when hot blood came in contact with tiny cool winds that he theorized were the animating force inside the body.
– In 1994, the ruling junta in Ethiopia declared it a crime for mothers to cry for their “disappeared” sons. Their fear was that such tears would lead to efforts to avenge the dead.
– In some parts of the ancient world, mourners would collect their tears in vials that were then sealed and buried with the dead.
– 17th Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that crying is caused by powerlessness, and that’s why children cry more than adults, and women more than men.
– According to St. Thomas Aquinas, tears are enjoyable. Any action, he wrote, “that befits a man according to his actual disposition, is always pleasant to him. Now tears and groans are actions befitting a man who is in sorrow or pain; and consequently they become pleasant to him.”
– Tears, according to Shakespeare, are “women’s weapons.”
– In the 1980s, researcher William Frey discovered that tears contain 30 times the manganese found in the blood. Since autopsies of some chronic depressives have found concentrations of manganese in the brain, Frey concludes that crying may be a way of keeping depression at bay.
– In a 1998 book, homeopath Peter Van Oosterum suggested that the cure for sadness is to drink a solution containing one’s own tears.
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WHATEVER THE CAUSE, THE CONCLUSION’S THE SAME
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Some more thoughts about crying:
– According to one study, the average American baby cries 4,000 times in the first two years of life — or about 5.5 times a day.
– As many as a third of all U.S. infants suffer from colic, i.e., excessive crying. Some babies cry as many as 18 hours a day. Usually, infants grow out of the problem by age 1.
– Behaviorist James B. Watson argued that excessive crying in infants is because of “too much mother love.”
– In Albert Camus’ novel “The Stranger,” the central character is convicted of murder because of testimony that, a week before the killing, he failed to cry at his own mother’s funeral. Such seeming hard-heartedness was enough to earn him the death penalty.
– In 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy was widely praised for her bravery when she refrained from crying during her husband’s funeral.
– Daniel Webster cried at his own eloquence. “A burning tear drop that gathered in his eye, and trickled down his pale cheek, showed how deeply the orator himself was moved,” wrote one reporter.
– German poet Heinrich Heine noted that crying always comes to an end: “Whatever tears one may shed, one always blows one’s nose.”
