i think it's common knowledge how much I used to cry. weeping was one of the few ways I knew to express any emotion, and especially to express that every emotion that twists together and wrenches your heart from your chest in deep, wet, wracking sobs. It's been years since I cried with any regularity, and it had been months since I cried from anything other than laughing, which may have something to do with hormones. but since getting covid, i have been crying so much. i've cried at least three times in the past week alone! i probably will again tonight; sometimes you just feel everything so much
As an individual line this feels like a nonsequitur, a line that can only exist in an allusion that ends in a caesura like something out of teixcalaanli poetry, so we are in luck that it is merely an exceprt from a longer bridge:
From which we can derive not tears but three reasons for our tears that are already there:
- The idea of breaking out into tears in a particularly, immediately, incontrovertibly mundane place is one we all know well. It's also an embarassing thing, a thing we would rather hide about ourselves. No one is proud to have wet their pants, spilled a milkshake, or cried in a grocery store, but these are all things that just happen to people over the very long course of being human. The inscrutable irrational is nevertheless a part of ourselves, and to divorce our identity from our unintentional foibles is to assume we only exist along lines of script and presentability. Fie to that. But...
- The deli aisle in particular is the place where we most commonly confront both cruelty we are powerless to and profit from, and our material morality. To look on meat and not think "this meat was once flesh, as I am flesh, and lived, as I have lived", or think "am I else but meat? what makes me different from this?" To both know the cruelty involved - or else, find some way of not-knowing it, enough not-knowing to eat what you need to live another day and find more meaning tomorrow. Our place as humans not crying in the deli aisle is to comfort the ones who are, whether they are existentially disembodied by the remnants of bodies surrounding them, or for no reason at all. Get them away from there and they may recover; showing them that grace and love is why we are here with each other.
- The grocery store isn't just a place we all have to go sooner or later and all have to breakdown in tears at sooner or later. It's also the site where transactions become most necessary; where the immediate means for prolonging the self are waged and tallied against coin that always seems to buy less than it did before, except not always, there is work for you to do to wage and tally each permutation of the food you could eat and the deals you could make, in scale or scope or degree or kind. The selection has too many prices and values, and some are time-sensitive, and some are gambles on your own future energy and how much you'll eat and your skill at turning the meet pieces into food to feed on, and all weighed against your money today and the money you'll need tomorrow. You fall apart one night at a grocery store as the entire weight of capitalism pulls at every part of you... unless you have a light to guide your way.
Ideally, you'll have someone you love with you, in which case this song gives them a good guide on the attitudes to carry; but in this pitiful era I think distance should be assumed as the default. So instead you carry these words with you, words as replacements for intimate touch, what words are made to be, that it's okay to break down and cry. Let these words wrap around your shoulders and guide you to somewhere else to be, that somewhere else where being someplace else lets you be someway else. You're gonna be okay. Why would I mind?
