Full of hot tears and with tongue of lead... —Christine de Pizan
I’ve struggled with how to write through the tears, rage, and anger we have all been feeling this last couple of weeks. I feel desperately heartsick.
When I shared with my teenage son what happened in Texas, my tears rose up as soon as the words met the air. I shared text messages with friends who also burst into tears watching kids at the bus stop that day as they went to pick up their own children. The tears of so many who are reporting on and sharing the rage we all feel.
I tried to read poetry and history, the two most consistent balms I know of— searching for some overlooked truth to try and distract or soothe even a little the feeling of collective trauma that is humming through the country. Because what else can we do but continue on, one breath after another, trying to make any sense of the hells of the world we keep witnessing? How to stop this insane dread of greed and power that is complicit in these constant, sacrificial acts.
I found myself reading Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-1430) again this week—this time, her writing on politics, and of mourning. I thought of the pathos evoked so beautifully in Mozart’s Lacrimosa—a movement of the Requiem said to embody the cries and tears of the mourner. I was reminded of the haunting beauty of the word lachrymose, of tears and lamentation as the origin of poetry, the fire that began the chants and song that gave way to language. Robert Pogue Harrison—from his work on The Dominion of the Dead, a work I keep returning to the past couple of years—writes:
Poetic figuration renders the shadow images of Hades—the realm of the Invisible—visible and audible….Hence poetry’s affinity with—if not the very invention of—the afterlife.
Christine de Pizan is most well known for writing The Book of the City of Ladies in c. 1404, but her political works include several texts that are prefaced, infused with, and marked with tears. She writes of the floods of tears as a widow lamenting the loss of her husband as a single mother. She used the lyric “I” to bring in an audience, to create a space where they could cry tears with her. In giving voice to her tears on the page, she invites all who read her poetry to witness and participate in her grief. She channels the floods of tears into inspiration, relying on her pen to relay them from a private expression into a political and public act.
After this public expression of her tears and mourning, Christine de Pizan turned her tears towards the state, channeling them as a means of authority and counsel. Through the sanctity of her tears, she claims the role of moral and political advisor—and intercessor—to lament and mourn the political upheaval of France. She translated tears into writing to communicate political ideas, to remove the limitations she would face otherwise as a woman with political opinions. “Sad and in tears,” she wrote that the world is “badly governed” in a letter to the poet and diplomat Eustache Morel (also known as Eustache Deschamps, c. 1346-1407)—purposefully associating her name with a respected intellectual in a public text.
Her descriptions and laments come to serve as memory-keeper of France’s past and grim present. She wrote of France’s morality as something that was once alive, but now dead and thus, to be mourned. She bemoans the abuse of widows, the state of taxes, lying diplomats, Charles VI’s madness, and other crises of war. She acts as the country’s chief mourner and political conscience—and again, those who read her poetry participate in her grief. As a widow sanctified by her mourning, she demonstrates her awareness of proper social rules, giving weight to the words that follow. Her grief, her tears—and what she mourns—demanded an audience.
In late Greek and Roman tombs, there are small, spindle-shaped bottles—most likely they once held perfumes and unguents for the burial of the dead. But their name, lacrymatory, indicates another meaning—that these small bottles held the collected tears of the mourner. Mourners would leave them with the buried, as a symbol of their grief. The Old Testament makes a curious reference to this practice, which is why the bottles were first thought to collect tears by early archaeologists:
…put my tears into your bottle, are they not written in your book? (Psalms 56:8)
Christine de Pizan collected her tears in her book, turning her texts into a lacrymatory so that she would not be alone in her grief at the state of the world, using her public mourning to create a collective of others who could also bear witness and share in that grief. Her testament of mourning would ultimately collect more than her own tears—it would become a flood to influence and affect those in power. As Elaine Bow writes:
Christine does not advocate for complete social upheaval, but her weeping does attempt to bring French women together in political action…she writes, “Cry therefore, cry, ladies, maidens, and women of the French realm.” For Christine’s women, tears are not a passive activity, but an active move to highlight their political plight….She asks them to use their cries…to rouse the populace to empathetic action.
The past is so often treated unfairly—romanticized and talked of with the presumption of its backwardness, that the present is so far beyond those who lived in the past. Of course, change happens, but progress as a linear line is a cultivated myth that continues too often to keep us thinking uncritically about the present.
Organizations that collect the tears and rage of women to affect society are working in Christine de Pizan’s legacy. There is solidarity in knowing that voices from the past also saw and mourned what those in power inflict on society. As small as it might seem, knowing women have been mourning but also writing and fighting for centuries gives me more resolve to also write and fight towards change in a society enthrall to a minority rule, that continues to allow the murder of children in classrooms while claiming to care about the potential unborn children of a mother’s body.
Harrison again writes:
The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.
The dead are important and we owe them our attention—to remember what others before us have witnessed, have written about, and that time is longer than the sometimes too-much now.
In The Need for Roots, the incomparable Simone Weil wrote of the need for knowledge of the past:
It would be useless to turn one’s back on the past in order simply to concentrate on the future. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that such a thing is even possible. The opposition of future to past or past to future is absurd. The future brings us nothing, gives us nothing; it is we who in order to build it have to give it everything, our very life. But to be able to give, one has to possess; and we possess no other life, no other living sap, than the treasures stored up from the past and digested, assimilated and created afresh by us. Of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital than this one of the past…For several centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, real progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy, but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.
There is so much wisdom that has been forgotten—systems and ideas that we too often continue to deny or re-create badly. We are told that feminism didn’t exist until the 20th century; that America’s founding fathers enslaved men and women but wrote about equality so we’re told to overlook the bondage of others that gave them their wealth; we have been told of dark ages, that because earlier generations didn’t understand medicine and science as we do today that they understood nothing; we’re told to dismiss old wives tales and folk wisdom as backward. And yet there are always people who knew and understood the world in ways that can offer us something richer—or serve as an important warning.
We owe the past the respect to uncover the faults of those who came before us, and to give voice especially to all of those who were just trying to live an ordinary life, or those who were trying to live an exceptional life and were ignored and worse, oppressed.
We owe the long-dead and we owe the recently dead—children who were murdered by another child in this country, and the African-American men and women—many of them community elders—murdered in the last weeks. To ensure their stories, voices, and their lives haunt those in power who continue to deny truth, reality, and history, in the blind malfeasance of their power.
We need those who have passed, as well as the stories of the past, so that we can point to it in truth, and expose those who continue to manipulate and exploit in the name of their own individual power.
We can’t forget and move on from stories like we have had to collectively witness these past weeks, months, years. We have to give weight to the past in order to build a future worth building. Otherwise, we cede it to a minority control in the hands of wealthy white men yet again, building a future based on lies and ignorance. That is not a future I want to give power to.
Harrison again writes:
To cope with one’s mortality means to recognize its kinship with others and to turn this kinship in death into a shared language.
If we mourn collectively, respect the dead, and turn tears into floods of action, we can become a much larger, wider, and timeless kin—a community of past and present who refuse a society that ignores both the dead and the living in favor of temporary power.
"To ensure their stories, voices, and their lives haunt those in power who continue to deny truth, reality, and history, in the blind malfeasance of their power." Yes, this.
✊🏽❤️
Thank you for the thoughts and considerations in this newsletter! I was reminded of The Crying Book by Heather Christle. It's a brilliant meditation on society and tears : https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/heather-christle/the-crying-book/9781472154705/