the tears of things
witch geese, penguin enlightenment, and a very pretentious t-shirt
The room was dark, my head heavy, my eyelids finally closing after a nightmarish day. Then came the voice, authoritative and clear:
You’re drowning.
It sounded like an accusation, or a judgment.
I sat up in bed with my eyes still shut.
Maybe I am, I said into the empty air, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.
I lay back down again, and slept.
*
One of my favorite t-shirts is black with an antique diagram of the cosmos in shimmering silver ink. Clouds, planets, and an angel all float in their delicately rendered spheres.
AD ASTRA, read the Gothic letters at the top. To the stars.
It was for this motto I bought the shirt so many years ago. But it’s the verse printed below the heavens—Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt—that moves me now.
The words are Virgil’s, from Book 1 of the Aeneid. There are many translations, but they all amount to something like:
There are tears of (or for, or at the heart of) things, and mortal things touch the mind.
The first time I read the text in English, I wasn’t sure if ‘tears’ rhymed with ‘fears’ or ‘pears’. I could imagine it either way: sometimes, as Maggie Nelson says, “a membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.” A tear in the fabric, as it were. The key for me, with my remedial Latin, was lacrimae—tears, as in sorrow. As in crying. As in drowning in.
One of the articles I read noted that the verse is often misunderstood; it is not, as it may initially seem, a complaint, or a forecast of eternal misery. For context, scholars point to the sentence’s second half, the mortal things that touch the mind. Virgil was saying that life is painful, yes, but that in recognizing the difficulty, in seeing our own sorrows reflected in one another, we are comforted. We are moved. And it is this that makes us human.
*
Part of me wants to search every newsletter I’ve ever sent you for the words tired and exhausted. Sick, ill, isolated, sad. What percentage of these missives include confessions of suffering? I don’t need to count them to tell you. It’s most of them.
The accuser in the dark would like me to feel self-conscious about this. It tells me it’s unseemly and selfish to be honest when I’m in pain. But I have other data, compelling data, that tell a different story.
When I feel lonely, I listen to sad songs and feel less alone. When someone I respect says they’re going through a hard time, I respect them more, not less. I feel grateful that they’ve trusted me, and more comfortable opening my own weary heart in return.
And every single time I say I am struggling, someone says I am, too. Thank you.
*
My therapist tells me about Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who coined the term “tragic optimism.”
The phrase makes me laugh, as my therapist knew it would. That already sounds like me.
He laughs, too. It is.
Tragic optimism, he explains, is the determination to create meaning no matter how bad life gets. Unlike classic optimism, which promises that everything will be okay, tragic optimism says Even if it isn’t, we can still do something. We can still help each other.
How do you create meaning? my therapist asks. He already knows the answer. He just wants me to say it.
Outside in the twilight, all the birds are going to bed. A deep-blue veil envelops the white pine. My own face, pale and serious, watches me from the window glass. I look down at my broken fingernails, then out again into the dark.
I try to tell the truth about the hard things.
*
The black t-shirt has begun to show its age. After fifteen-plus years of nearly weekly wear, the cotton is thinner, the tag faded to blankness.
Last month a small hole appeared just below Virgil’s text. A rent in the fabric. A tear in the thing.
Over time, this hole will expand and eventually be joined by others. Someday in the not-too-distant future I will have to let the t-shirt go. Tonight, though, the tear is not a flaw but an enhancement. A reminder. An honest and mortal thing.
other things i wrote
If you have not yet read my essay “Bat Facts” (which is actually about my experiences of gender and danger, but does still include a lot of neat facts about bats), here’s another opportunity.
Last month I asked my peers over at The Last Word On Nothing to write about some good things that have happened in their lives. Several themes emerged in their responses; the image above is a hint.
tenderness toward existence days
CW for food mentions.
The theme this month is cozy, warm, thankful, and kind.
Tenderness Toward Existence Day (the original!)(tomorrow, January 19!)
Penguin Awareness Day (20)
International Sweatpants Day (21)
Come in from the Cold Day (22)
National Pie Day (23)*
National Blueberry Pancake Day (28)
*Not to be confused with Pi Day, 3/14. We’ll observe that one, too. There is no such thing as too much pie, or too many reasons to celebrate.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I am so, so glad you’re here.
The perfect painting up top is by my witch-friend and collaborator Rebecca Chaperon; you can find more of her amazing work here. The enlightened penguin photo is from Unsplash. The witch geese and t-shirt images are all me.
tragic optimism gang rise up
Loved this. The "tears of things" made me think of Shinto-- which would say there are tears (💧) in things bc there is life in all things