Organs of Sense

In the way we talk about crying, it is often said that we are ‘moved to tears’ like it’s a small town outside Dorset; some strange emotion reassignment or at the very least to a greater place or space that we are not normally present in, so completely immersed are we, that it is impossible to think that it is within us, a part of us, a sensation that we truly inhabit, no – that’s just not British.

But maybe this is the answer, that tears are a physical manifestation of sensation, something that we all too often believe we posses, or are put on us ‘that film made me cry’ and so on, the truth is nobody really knows why we cry emotional tears, and maybe that is because we are so lost and distanced to the ‘now’, to the world, that we miss the obvious. Maybe its something that cannot be explained through science, of course we can dissect tears, induce tears and factualize about tears until we are blue in the face but so far we haven’t found anything concrete, because perhaps like religious / spiritual belief or art, science cannot pin it down, there is no answer. Nobody really knows why we believe in god. So strung up are we in trying to explain everything through this over used language, naming things, explaining things using limited culturally specific grunts known as words, that we could miss that alongside art, music and poetry, tears are a highly expressive form of communication as the English poet Abraham Cowley once wrote ‘Words that weep, and tears that speak.’

image by H.V Carter MD from Gray's Anatomy