6. The past in the present
transcript
Tom Lutz: I was coming of age at a moment in which men were being encouraged to be more emotionally expressive.
So one of the things that had kind of accidentally happened was that my ability to cry was actually a kind of boon to my to my swinging single life.
Women responded very positively to these tears. And as I say I'm not sure it ever occurred to me and I don't I'm pretty sure it never occurred to me until I met my wife 20 some years ago and we were having our first intimate moments together.
Laying in bed together, I told her the story of my tragic youth. And as I told it, I let a little tear drop out of one eye. And it seemed to have no particular effect and so I let another one drop. And that had no effect. And eventually I said to her, “You know, this usually- I usually get a little sympathy when this happens. I’m a little surprised that you’re having no reaction to this at all.”
She said, “Hey look. You know I've been around the block, I've been trying to before. The jury's still out on you. We’ll see what this actually means in a little bit.” And I thought, well that’s really interesting and I fell in love and we got married.
And after we talked about crying for a couple of days she said, “You know, that’s the book you should write. You should write a book about tears?”
Because I had, as it turns out, thought about it a lot, although not with the idea of writing a book. Just, cause, one, it was a little strange, my family’s relation to tears. It was just a little bit strange.
_______
Jesse: Hey, this is Jesse - and you’re listening to Man-ish. Tom Lutz wrote the book on crying. I say the book because if you’ve read any modern studies of tears, you inevitably come across a reference to his book. And as we near the end of our crying series, we’re going to hear from Tom Lutz himself.
Just a heads up, if you’ve been listening to the show, you know that I yammer and then someone else yammers and then I yammer again. In this episode, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to shut up. It’s a different format I’m trying out, but I think it works really well for this story. I think you’ll like it.
So here it is. The third and final installment of Boys Don’t Cry: The Past in the Present.
_______
Tom Lutz: Weeping is a form of demand. It's like please pay attention to me, please take me seriously. It’s the reason why babies cry. They need something. So to have your tears rebuffed, that is to have somebody not react to them, is a memorable moment. It's a moment where you realize the boundaries of yourself.
A very early memory of crying is running in from a bad event on the playground or wherever we were playing, boys making fun of me, the other boys making fun of me, and I ran and I talked to my mother to get some solace.
And she said, instead of comforting me, she said, “Well of course they're making fun of you wet your pants.” And I had not realized of course at that point that I had wet my pants, obviously, or I would have understood that's why they were making fun of me. And I also didn't realize that I was crying until she said that and I came to out of this emotional fog and took stock of where I was. And I was wet above and wet below. And both of them were a surprise to me. I think I was four or five.
I became very interested in Sartre's theory of emotion. He uses the fable of The Fox and the Grapes. The fox is looking up at a bunch of grapes. And the fox wants the grapes. And the fox understands that he wants the grapes. He tries everything. He jumps, he tries to climb on things. He can’t get the grapes.
And when he realizes that he can’t get the grapes, he says, “Ah, I hate grapes! Ah no, I don’t like grapes. Grapes can go to hell.” And walks away.
And Sartre says that’s what emotion is for. It’s when reality does not meet our desires, we retreat from reality into bodily sensation. The bodily sensation of emotion. A way out of an uncomfortable reality.
They never praised us because--they told me later when I became a parent myself and I thought, “Hey that was weird, you actually never said a nice thing about us to us”--they said, we’ll, we thought you would stop trying.
It was a moment in the history of childrearing in America. You don’t praise the child. In fact, you don’t give them any emotional interaction. Best if you don’t touch them at all. That it was important to have some kind of intermediary between the parental body and the punishment. And therefore the belt is one way to do that or the rod is one way to do that. It’s not me spanking you, it’s the belt spanking you, it’s the belt hurting you. I was never confused as to whether it was my father or the belt. I thought it was my father with the belt. I thought they were a team. I thought they were working together.
The earliest description of tears that I found, on these clay shards found in the Sumerian desert, the 14th century BC, it’s the story of the death of Osiris. His sister Isis finds him dead and is weeping and those tears eventually bring him back to life. When she’s weeping, the shard says, is translated as saying, “She continued sating herself with tears, drinking of them like wine.”
And it’s this idea of tears as autointoxication. You’re getting drunk on your own tears. It’s a form of pleasure, it’s a form of something very different than sadness, very different than what we usually associate with tears, which is grief and sorrow and frustration and all of the other negative emotions that cause tears. This is tears as pleasure, as intoxicating.
The house was a Dutch colonial so it had to some dormer windows, including in mine which had double hung windows, I pulled the bottom one up. I could kind of shimmy out the side, sit on the window sill, hold onto the small roof above me, pull myself up and just basically kind of jump from the window sill up half way onto the roof, land on my belly, pull myself up, and I would just climb up, walk across the roof, over the peak and start down the other side.
And there was a tree growing next to the house there and I could kind of grab onto that tree hug it and shimmy my way down that tree and then head out to wherever I was heading, usually to my girlfriend’s, whereever my girlfriend happened to be.
And then on the way back I would just go the opposite direction, shimmy back up the tree, walk across the peak of the roof, lower myself down onto my belly, feet dangling, trying to feel out where the windowsill is, grab it with my feet and start lowering myself back into the window. Sometimes just in time for my father to come down the hall and wake us up to go to school.
What we thought we were discovering in the, let's say, the 1980s, the about male expressiveness, the 18th century was way ahead of us. The 18th century man of feeling, the 18th century kind of- you know if you think of “The Sorrows of Young Werther” or something like that where Werther is just weeping on every other page and it’s a sign of how special he is. I mean Werther weeps much more than any of the women in that book. And the same with Henry Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling,” the men are the main weepers. “Dangerous Liaisons,” same thing. So, we were kind of rediscovering more than we were discovering the range of male expressiveness.
Yeah, it was one night in particular that I came home with a bad report card. It was- these were bad days in the house. And I was a terrible student by turns. I would have have half F’s and half A's and then my father would get it and he'd beat me up and then the next time I would go from an F to an A in English and from an A to an F in Math. I had trouble staying focused on anything in school, so I was just a bad, bad student.
And this particular day the report card came in and my father was kind of interrogating me about how could I possibly get an A one quarter and an F the next. It made no sense and I just agreed with him.
And for some reason, the thing that enraged him the most was when he would be doing this kind of moral interrogation and my answer was, “I don't know,” which was honest. I really had no idea why I was the way I was. I could not figure it out. And I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I spent a lot of time trying not to think about it.
So he just, you know, had me by the hair. And was knocking my head against the wall with each bad answer that I gave him. And once in a while give me a back-of-his-hand across my face.
And so I I left that session noticing that there were some, you know, that he had had pulled a bunch of hair out and there was some blood on my scalp.
And I was just feeling really sorry for myself. I snuck out of the house which, I did a lot, climbing out my window and down a tree and I went over to where I knew my girlfriend was babysitting. And I went in and just kind of fell into her arms. She was a wonderful young woman, she really was a young woman at that time, and held me in her arms and I was weeping into her shirt.
But it was a moment that was so powerful for so many different reasons. And partly that- the kind of understanding that there was solace for me out there in the world, even though there was none at home. The way I was feeling about my predicament, I could share with somebody and they would they would they would agree with me about that predicament, that was, that's powerful. Combined with this erotic charge which I later as I did my research realized is part of the long story of tears.
It was a little strange, my family’s relation to tears. It was just a little bit strange. We would be together for Thanksgiving dinner and my father would say something about the latest baby born into the family or somebody’s graduation or something and start to cry a little. And the tears would spread around the table and we would all be weeping a little bit.
Excerpt from “Floating with Alice:” Like Alice’s tears when she gets small, ours were our distress and our deliverance. And they were, among other things, our sincere inarticulate attempts to rewrite the past in the present.
I started to think, okay, there’s something not exactly right about this. There’s something not quite kosher.
I was convinced that I was damaged by this relationship with both my parents really, but my father primarily. And that, that was why- in the ways in which I was a bad person, that was why. And so my kind of drug-use and my over-drinking and, you know, basic self-medication--these things were the result of that failed parenting.
And, as I say, I’m not sure it ever occurred to me, and I’m pretty sure it never occurred to me, until, I met my wife 20 some years ago, and we were having our first intimate moments together and I was telling her the tragic story of my childhood as I’ve told it to you.
I was 40 years old when we got together, so I had fallen in love many times. I do think that there was something that felt like- you know that Randy Newman song, “Feels Like Home to Me?” There’s this kind of idea that something feels like home as a positive idea. For me, feeling like home has never been a particularly positive idea. And so, I’ve always kind of looked for things that didn’t feel like home. And in 99% of the ways that this can be true, my wife did not feel like home.
Uh, there was a point in our relationship where you know there was nothing I wanted more than for him to kind of confess and plead for my forgiveness.
You know this kind of like, “I see I did it wrong.” And in a great tear jerker movies like “The Imitation of Life” or any number in which parents and children finally resolve their differences, those moments are just moments that get floods of tears from the audience. And so that was the scene I was hoping for.
There is somebody walking upstairs from where I am right now. Let me go ahead and move into another room.
We did have a moment where, I guess, he was what we would now call an alcoholic. And I said, “You were drinking so much that you probably weren’t even aware of how brutal you were being.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah. That, that- you maybe right.”
And that was a moment where we kind of wept together a little bit. And it felt terrific.
We really respond to images of perfect role fulfillment. We weep when the errant daughter reunites with her mother. When the prodigal son returns, when the teacher kind of helps the kids kind of stand up and deliver. These are moments when the role is being fulfilled perfectly.
We all have these social roles. We all understand at some level what our social role demands of us. And we all know that we kind of fail at our social roles all the time. None of us are perfect parents. None of us are perfect sons or daughters. None of us are perfect teachers. None of us- right? Whatever our social roles are, we’re always not quite living up to the ideal. And so when we see it represented, it can make us weep.
And then cut to years later. And as I started having children myself and started raising them I would just- all of a sudden the whole thing took on an even darker tone for me. I just could not imagine smacking my daughter in the head. It was just so far beyond- I just- I found it so astounding at a new level. And of course he was my kids’ grandparent and he would sometimes start yelling at them and they would get really frightened. And at one point I told them that, you know, he’s got to stop. He can’t do that anymore. That I wasn’t going to let him damage them either.
And his, his- he said, “Well, I think that I did exactly what was right in bringing you up. And you went through this very bad period where you were high all the time and couldn’t keep a job and, you know, just imagine how bad you would’ve been if I hadn’t beat you.”
That was an interesting moment.
I stopped seeing them as forms of sincerity. I started to see tears as always multiply determined. As, as I say, both engagement and escape. I couldn’t just assume that they were a form of emotional maturity. I had to assume they were both emotional maturity and emotional immaturity. I couldn’t assume that they were a form of perfect engagement with the person I was with, I was probably also escaping something with the person I was with at the same time. So that kind of muddled nature, the muddled motivations that make for crying, I started to regularly doubt the pure motives behind any moment in which I was tearing up.
That said, all three of my kids are big weepers. I was just at my son’s wedding. We all were weeping. We’re still a family that interprets them primarily as engagement and primarily as engagement with the moment and with each other.
So, I’ve kind of recovered from the writing of the book and have a normal, weird relationship to tears again.
We all have these social roles.
We all know that we kind of fail at our social roles all the time.
None of us are perfect parents. None of us are perfect sons or daughters. Whatever our social roles are, we’re always not quite living up to the ideal.
And so when we see it represented, it can make us weep in that interesting mix of longing and regret. That is the complex that helps us weep.
So, I wish you the best of luck.
_______
Jesse: A special thank you to Tom Lutz. If you liked what you heard, you should definitely check out his essay “Floating with Alice” or his book, “Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.” Both are excellent.
Also, special thanks to Shoshana Walter, Rachel Rhodes, and Randy Newman.
To find links related to this episode, including Tom’s book, go to Man-ish’s website: man hyphen ish dot weebly dot com and open the page for this episode. There, you can also find links to any of the music you heard in this episode.
And that’s it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
So one of the things that had kind of accidentally happened was that my ability to cry was actually a kind of boon to my to my swinging single life.
Women responded very positively to these tears. And as I say I'm not sure it ever occurred to me and I don't I'm pretty sure it never occurred to me until I met my wife 20 some years ago and we were having our first intimate moments together.
Laying in bed together, I told her the story of my tragic youth. And as I told it, I let a little tear drop out of one eye. And it seemed to have no particular effect and so I let another one drop. And that had no effect. And eventually I said to her, “You know, this usually- I usually get a little sympathy when this happens. I’m a little surprised that you’re having no reaction to this at all.”
She said, “Hey look. You know I've been around the block, I've been trying to before. The jury's still out on you. We’ll see what this actually means in a little bit.” And I thought, well that’s really interesting and I fell in love and we got married.
And after we talked about crying for a couple of days she said, “You know, that’s the book you should write. You should write a book about tears?”
Because I had, as it turns out, thought about it a lot, although not with the idea of writing a book. Just, cause, one, it was a little strange, my family’s relation to tears. It was just a little bit strange.
_______
Jesse: Hey, this is Jesse - and you’re listening to Man-ish. Tom Lutz wrote the book on crying. I say the book because if you’ve read any modern studies of tears, you inevitably come across a reference to his book. And as we near the end of our crying series, we’re going to hear from Tom Lutz himself.
Just a heads up, if you’ve been listening to the show, you know that I yammer and then someone else yammers and then I yammer again. In this episode, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to shut up. It’s a different format I’m trying out, but I think it works really well for this story. I think you’ll like it.
So here it is. The third and final installment of Boys Don’t Cry: The Past in the Present.
_______
Tom Lutz: Weeping is a form of demand. It's like please pay attention to me, please take me seriously. It’s the reason why babies cry. They need something. So to have your tears rebuffed, that is to have somebody not react to them, is a memorable moment. It's a moment where you realize the boundaries of yourself.
A very early memory of crying is running in from a bad event on the playground or wherever we were playing, boys making fun of me, the other boys making fun of me, and I ran and I talked to my mother to get some solace.
And she said, instead of comforting me, she said, “Well of course they're making fun of you wet your pants.” And I had not realized of course at that point that I had wet my pants, obviously, or I would have understood that's why they were making fun of me. And I also didn't realize that I was crying until she said that and I came to out of this emotional fog and took stock of where I was. And I was wet above and wet below. And both of them were a surprise to me. I think I was four or five.
I became very interested in Sartre's theory of emotion. He uses the fable of The Fox and the Grapes. The fox is looking up at a bunch of grapes. And the fox wants the grapes. And the fox understands that he wants the grapes. He tries everything. He jumps, he tries to climb on things. He can’t get the grapes.
And when he realizes that he can’t get the grapes, he says, “Ah, I hate grapes! Ah no, I don’t like grapes. Grapes can go to hell.” And walks away.
And Sartre says that’s what emotion is for. It’s when reality does not meet our desires, we retreat from reality into bodily sensation. The bodily sensation of emotion. A way out of an uncomfortable reality.
They never praised us because--they told me later when I became a parent myself and I thought, “Hey that was weird, you actually never said a nice thing about us to us”--they said, we’ll, we thought you would stop trying.
It was a moment in the history of childrearing in America. You don’t praise the child. In fact, you don’t give them any emotional interaction. Best if you don’t touch them at all. That it was important to have some kind of intermediary between the parental body and the punishment. And therefore the belt is one way to do that or the rod is one way to do that. It’s not me spanking you, it’s the belt spanking you, it’s the belt hurting you. I was never confused as to whether it was my father or the belt. I thought it was my father with the belt. I thought they were a team. I thought they were working together.
The earliest description of tears that I found, on these clay shards found in the Sumerian desert, the 14th century BC, it’s the story of the death of Osiris. His sister Isis finds him dead and is weeping and those tears eventually bring him back to life. When she’s weeping, the shard says, is translated as saying, “She continued sating herself with tears, drinking of them like wine.”
And it’s this idea of tears as autointoxication. You’re getting drunk on your own tears. It’s a form of pleasure, it’s a form of something very different than sadness, very different than what we usually associate with tears, which is grief and sorrow and frustration and all of the other negative emotions that cause tears. This is tears as pleasure, as intoxicating.
The house was a Dutch colonial so it had to some dormer windows, including in mine which had double hung windows, I pulled the bottom one up. I could kind of shimmy out the side, sit on the window sill, hold onto the small roof above me, pull myself up and just basically kind of jump from the window sill up half way onto the roof, land on my belly, pull myself up, and I would just climb up, walk across the roof, over the peak and start down the other side.
And there was a tree growing next to the house there and I could kind of grab onto that tree hug it and shimmy my way down that tree and then head out to wherever I was heading, usually to my girlfriend’s, whereever my girlfriend happened to be.
And then on the way back I would just go the opposite direction, shimmy back up the tree, walk across the peak of the roof, lower myself down onto my belly, feet dangling, trying to feel out where the windowsill is, grab it with my feet and start lowering myself back into the window. Sometimes just in time for my father to come down the hall and wake us up to go to school.
What we thought we were discovering in the, let's say, the 1980s, the about male expressiveness, the 18th century was way ahead of us. The 18th century man of feeling, the 18th century kind of- you know if you think of “The Sorrows of Young Werther” or something like that where Werther is just weeping on every other page and it’s a sign of how special he is. I mean Werther weeps much more than any of the women in that book. And the same with Henry Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling,” the men are the main weepers. “Dangerous Liaisons,” same thing. So, we were kind of rediscovering more than we were discovering the range of male expressiveness.
Yeah, it was one night in particular that I came home with a bad report card. It was- these were bad days in the house. And I was a terrible student by turns. I would have have half F’s and half A's and then my father would get it and he'd beat me up and then the next time I would go from an F to an A in English and from an A to an F in Math. I had trouble staying focused on anything in school, so I was just a bad, bad student.
And this particular day the report card came in and my father was kind of interrogating me about how could I possibly get an A one quarter and an F the next. It made no sense and I just agreed with him.
And for some reason, the thing that enraged him the most was when he would be doing this kind of moral interrogation and my answer was, “I don't know,” which was honest. I really had no idea why I was the way I was. I could not figure it out. And I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it. I spent a lot of time trying not to think about it.
So he just, you know, had me by the hair. And was knocking my head against the wall with each bad answer that I gave him. And once in a while give me a back-of-his-hand across my face.
And so I I left that session noticing that there were some, you know, that he had had pulled a bunch of hair out and there was some blood on my scalp.
And I was just feeling really sorry for myself. I snuck out of the house which, I did a lot, climbing out my window and down a tree and I went over to where I knew my girlfriend was babysitting. And I went in and just kind of fell into her arms. She was a wonderful young woman, she really was a young woman at that time, and held me in her arms and I was weeping into her shirt.
But it was a moment that was so powerful for so many different reasons. And partly that- the kind of understanding that there was solace for me out there in the world, even though there was none at home. The way I was feeling about my predicament, I could share with somebody and they would they would they would agree with me about that predicament, that was, that's powerful. Combined with this erotic charge which I later as I did my research realized is part of the long story of tears.
It was a little strange, my family’s relation to tears. It was just a little bit strange. We would be together for Thanksgiving dinner and my father would say something about the latest baby born into the family or somebody’s graduation or something and start to cry a little. And the tears would spread around the table and we would all be weeping a little bit.
Excerpt from “Floating with Alice:” Like Alice’s tears when she gets small, ours were our distress and our deliverance. And they were, among other things, our sincere inarticulate attempts to rewrite the past in the present.
I started to think, okay, there’s something not exactly right about this. There’s something not quite kosher.
I was convinced that I was damaged by this relationship with both my parents really, but my father primarily. And that, that was why- in the ways in which I was a bad person, that was why. And so my kind of drug-use and my over-drinking and, you know, basic self-medication--these things were the result of that failed parenting.
And, as I say, I’m not sure it ever occurred to me, and I’m pretty sure it never occurred to me, until, I met my wife 20 some years ago, and we were having our first intimate moments together and I was telling her the tragic story of my childhood as I’ve told it to you.
I was 40 years old when we got together, so I had fallen in love many times. I do think that there was something that felt like- you know that Randy Newman song, “Feels Like Home to Me?” There’s this kind of idea that something feels like home as a positive idea. For me, feeling like home has never been a particularly positive idea. And so, I’ve always kind of looked for things that didn’t feel like home. And in 99% of the ways that this can be true, my wife did not feel like home.
Uh, there was a point in our relationship where you know there was nothing I wanted more than for him to kind of confess and plead for my forgiveness.
You know this kind of like, “I see I did it wrong.” And in a great tear jerker movies like “The Imitation of Life” or any number in which parents and children finally resolve their differences, those moments are just moments that get floods of tears from the audience. And so that was the scene I was hoping for.
There is somebody walking upstairs from where I am right now. Let me go ahead and move into another room.
We did have a moment where, I guess, he was what we would now call an alcoholic. And I said, “You were drinking so much that you probably weren’t even aware of how brutal you were being.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah. That, that- you maybe right.”
And that was a moment where we kind of wept together a little bit. And it felt terrific.
We really respond to images of perfect role fulfillment. We weep when the errant daughter reunites with her mother. When the prodigal son returns, when the teacher kind of helps the kids kind of stand up and deliver. These are moments when the role is being fulfilled perfectly.
We all have these social roles. We all understand at some level what our social role demands of us. And we all know that we kind of fail at our social roles all the time. None of us are perfect parents. None of us are perfect sons or daughters. None of us are perfect teachers. None of us- right? Whatever our social roles are, we’re always not quite living up to the ideal. And so when we see it represented, it can make us weep.
And then cut to years later. And as I started having children myself and started raising them I would just- all of a sudden the whole thing took on an even darker tone for me. I just could not imagine smacking my daughter in the head. It was just so far beyond- I just- I found it so astounding at a new level. And of course he was my kids’ grandparent and he would sometimes start yelling at them and they would get really frightened. And at one point I told them that, you know, he’s got to stop. He can’t do that anymore. That I wasn’t going to let him damage them either.
And his, his- he said, “Well, I think that I did exactly what was right in bringing you up. And you went through this very bad period where you were high all the time and couldn’t keep a job and, you know, just imagine how bad you would’ve been if I hadn’t beat you.”
That was an interesting moment.
I stopped seeing them as forms of sincerity. I started to see tears as always multiply determined. As, as I say, both engagement and escape. I couldn’t just assume that they were a form of emotional maturity. I had to assume they were both emotional maturity and emotional immaturity. I couldn’t assume that they were a form of perfect engagement with the person I was with, I was probably also escaping something with the person I was with at the same time. So that kind of muddled nature, the muddled motivations that make for crying, I started to regularly doubt the pure motives behind any moment in which I was tearing up.
That said, all three of my kids are big weepers. I was just at my son’s wedding. We all were weeping. We’re still a family that interprets them primarily as engagement and primarily as engagement with the moment and with each other.
So, I’ve kind of recovered from the writing of the book and have a normal, weird relationship to tears again.
We all have these social roles.
We all know that we kind of fail at our social roles all the time.
None of us are perfect parents. None of us are perfect sons or daughters. Whatever our social roles are, we’re always not quite living up to the ideal.
And so when we see it represented, it can make us weep in that interesting mix of longing and regret. That is the complex that helps us weep.
So, I wish you the best of luck.
_______
Jesse: A special thank you to Tom Lutz. If you liked what you heard, you should definitely check out his essay “Floating with Alice” or his book, “Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears.” Both are excellent.
Also, special thanks to Shoshana Walter, Rachel Rhodes, and Randy Newman.
To find links related to this episode, including Tom’s book, go to Man-ish’s website: man hyphen ish dot weebly dot com and open the page for this episode. There, you can also find links to any of the music you heard in this episode.
And that’s it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
credits
A special thank you to Tom Lutz, Shoshana Walter, and Rachel Rhodes. If you liked this episode, be sure to check out Tom Lutz's work below.
Tom Lutz: Floating with Alice and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. Tom is also editor in chief of The Los Angeles Review of Books. |