Tears Without Cause
An Eponymous Introduction
There is only one gesture which signifies that we have understood anything at all: tears without cause.1
I don’t mean to intrude, so please excuse me if I make a mess.
My earliest memories (and some of my fondest ones) are of tears. Tears of sorrow or tears of joy - this is an ambiguity whose recognition popularly entails a skepticism towards tears. They may be seen as inauthentic or deceitful - “crocodile tears”. But tears meant to deceive are no less beautiful or bloody than any other kinds of tears. They all deserve our attention.
I also remember times when I wanted to cry but couldn’t - times that I heard the news about the death of a friend but couldn’t shed a single tear until years later, silently by a grave. It’s often these dry tears, building up over years and exploding outwards all at once, that affect us the most.
The ambiguity of tears contains within it their true, conspiratorial nature — an endless motorcade of grim signification that is both unmistakable and, paradoxically, unspeakable. All tears may pass beyond the hermeneutic veils of everyday life and become tears without cause, flowing upwards towards Heaven rather than down into the Earth2. Tears that may not even be tears and do not require them - offered up in moments of ecstasy between lovers or by the conscious procession of red dirges in the dark. These tears are constituted by what remains of us when one has stripped oneself of the corpse and the dead world that lies around us. Blood from our eyes, their flow towards Heaven is a flow through the cracks of everyday life and its heartless geometry. To follow our tears into what lies beneath the scaffolding is to resurface the scars of the past, refuse the future, and finally bring ourselves to bear upon the present.
This is perhaps the only meaning of redemption left to us.
Image Used For Post is Asger Jorn’s “Paris by Night”
“There is only one sign that indicates we have understood everything: tears without cause.”
Emil Cioran, The New Gods, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 113.
"Show me a single tear swallowed up by the earth! No, by paths unknown to us, they all go upwards.”
Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.