middle coasts: Matthew Ward, Weeping, and St. Paul's Cathedral (not in any particular order).

One of the funniest people I know is my brother Matt. Ever since we were kids he has made me laugh. We share a love of books (from our father) and a lot (but not all) ideas about the workings of the world. Matt would be my go to guy in any kind of crisis. I know he would be fair and have my back - even if he didn't agree with me. He is a fantastic cook. He is a great Dad.

He also weeps openly. Just like me. Unabashedly.

People Who Openly

Weep in Public

Make Things Awkward

For Everybody

Did you know that there is a FB page with that title? (People who weep openly make things awkward for everybody). Frankly I have never looked at it that way - sometimes it just feels good to cry. If you are a weeper - you can weep for any reason. You're happy. You're sad. You're overcome with emotions that you can't really identify.

Weep copiously
Weep loudly
Weep quietly
Weep silently
Weep openly
Weep unashamedly
Weep bitterly
Weep inconsolably
Weep uncontrollably
Almost weep
Weep a little
Begin to weep
Start to weep
Want to weep
Weep at
Weep for
Weep over
Weep with
Break down and weep
Weep and wail

At Queen Mary University of London you can find the Centre for the History of the Emotions.
They bill themselves as "the first research centre in the UK dedicated to the history of the emotions." Who am I to argue? The Director of the Centre, Thomas Dixon, writing in the online magazine aeon, talks about the history of tears and how they have been seen and through the lenses of time and culture.

From - Timothie Bright, the English clergyman and physician who "...in 1586 wrote an influential Treatise of Melancholie, whose many readers probably included Shakespeare, which described tears as a ‘kinde of excrement not much unlike’ urine." YUCK. Or consider Freud's take "...There are two ideas at the heart of the psychoanalytic approach to tears, ideas that, during the middle decades of the 20th century, entered into psychological orthodoxy among professionals and the lay public alike: repression and regression. The first implies that tears are a kind of overflow or discharge of previously repressed emotion, while the second presents the phenomenon of adult weeping as some sort of return to infantile, even prenatal, experiences and emotions." REALLY?

This next one I find especially creepy and I have to quote it at length, sorry.

If Freud and Breuer understood weeping as essentially an excretory function, one in which tears could be associated symbolically with other bodily fluids, the psychoanalytic theorists who came after extended this framework in a multitude of weird and wonderful ways. In a couple of articles in the 1940s, the influential American Freudian Phyllis Greenacre put forward the view that neurotic weeping in women was to be understood as a displacement of urination. Involved in this theory was the idea of ‘body-phallus identification’ and the production of tears by women as an attempt to simulate male urination.

Greenacre subdivided the phenomenon into those women who exhibited ‘shower weeping’ and those who displayed ‘stream weeping’. The first type weeps inordinately, shedding floods of tears; the second allows a quiet stream to trickle down the cheek. Both types were explained with reference to a ‘struggle about urination in the infantile period of life’, including a strong element of penis envy. The difference between the psyches of these two kinds of women, roughly speaking, was that the ‘shower’ weeper was sadly resigned to her lack of a penis while the ‘stream’ weeper was still in revolt, harbouring illusional ideas of possessing a male organ and weeping in neurotic imitation of the longed-for male urination observed in childhood.

Weird and wonderful indeed.

If you would like to hear more from Dixon - he did an interesting program on BBC Radio3, called Margaret Are You Grieving. It is worth a listen. From the description: In this programme he explores the history of weeping as an aesthetic response to works of art: paintings, writing, music, theatre and film. What it is about works of art and religious symbols that induce weeping and why do we shed tears over performances by actors and singers, fictional characters, abstract symbols, poems, music, metaphysical ideas - in other words things that are not real?

Dixon quotes Rothko as saying that he was aware that his works caused people to weep when standing in front of them. Rothko said that he thought that people who wept in front of his paintings were having the same religious experience that he did when he painted them. Others find them "self-indulgent." This idea of the religious experience is of interest to me - as I am still thinking a lot about an experience I had in London a couple weeks back.

Black on Maroon (1958)

Black on Maroon (1959)

The Rothko's did stop me in my tracks. I sat in front of them for what seemed like hours. His work always has this effect on me. Sacred texts. Meditation mandalas of a sort. And you notice that people visibly slow down and become quieter when they enter the gallery where the paintings are hanging. A gift.

When you leave the Tate Modern you cross the Millennium Bridge (a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Thames) leading you directly to St. Paul's Cathedral. If you follow that link re: St Paul's, you will be as

amazed (I think) as I was reading the first sentence: "For more than one thousand four hundred years, a cathedral dedicated to St. Paul has stood at the highest point in the city. That is a lot of history in one spot.

As I walked into the Cathedral, Evensong was about to begin. This is a liturgy in the Anglican tradition. When it is not sung it is simply called Evening Prayer. It is similar to Vespers in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches. There are all sorts of other details such as the order of prayers, readings and chants that the choir sings. They are pretty much determined by the liturgical calendar.

St. Paul's is HUGE. if you are sitting in the back of the nave or in one of the transepts (the short central arms off the nave) - you can barely see the altar. Even after you have walked the length of the nave and come to the east end - you still have to look down the length of the quire. The quire is where the choir and clergy (or royalty) sit during services . I got as close as I could to the quire and took a seat.

This particular evening the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge was singing. Beautiful. As they began taking their seats and preparing - a gentleman came out to where I was sitting as asked me if I would like to join the choir. Ummm, yes. I think I would.

My images from the Quire

Sitting there listening - is overwhelming. You are thinking: the history, the space, the effect of all of it on you or on someone who lived 500 years ago. If one is religious or not - you cannot help but think about the role of these great cathedrals on the development of civilization. There is so much to see that for awhile you are just a bit stunned - trying to take it all in. And then - it all becomes still - and it is very much like.....sitting in front of the Rothko paintings. It becomes a way to connect to something bigger - some idea, some divine mystery that is represented in both of them...one in the most ornate of ways, one in the most pared down of ways. And I wept openly... and thought how nice it would have been had Matt been there.