sniff sniff

I never cried all that much as a kid. I did as a baby, of course, and you know for the usual reasons that kids cry - owie, evil sister trying to kill me, not getting the last cupcake... the usual. I've heard that empathy is something that is undeveloped in childhood. Children are psychopaths! No, that's not what I meant...  maybe. Actually I do know that we're hard wired for empathy and even babies have some emotional connection to the distress of other babies (although I would suppose that has self-interest at heart to some degree - egocentric emphatic distress if you're being saucy - but at least it shows some theory of mind).

I was baffled and irritated by that sort of empathic (if that's really the right word for it, which it somewhat isn't) crying that occurs at sad movies. I'd get mad at my mom when she did. The one time I started to tear up at a scene in Lady and the Tramp, I was confused and annoyed. I mean, they're anthropomorphic drawings of dogs! Being so outwardly emotional always struck me as slightly self-aggrandizing when I was younger. Verging on daisy-chains-of-angels silliness. Let those characters have their feelings! Don't hijack them to show how sensitive you are. At the same time, I felt like the movie had tricked me or manipulated me somehow.
Empathy stems from relating external cues to internal sensations. This is partially extrapolated from experience with others and partially from the fact that we tend to "feel" the emotions of others by subconsciously mirroring their facial expressions, which in turn affects our internal chemistry and mood. From there, we build a lexicon of increasing complexity and begin making connections. In a sense, this is no different from the rational functions that humans apply in most aspects of their lives, except that we are less conscious of doing these things (one of the reasons it surprises me that there is such a dichotomy between "feelers" and "thinkers" since I secretly believe they're similar processes manifesting in different arenas). As the lexicon develops, we (maybe) become increasingly sophisticated and capable of differentiations, predictive models, and variatons. We reach a point where we can abstract emotional complexities from one situation and then re-particularize them in another with a fair degree of accuracy. We may start by envisioning the way a certain set of behaviors or circumstances would affect us, but become increasingly able to apply the elements of those circumstances to the value, moral and historical matrices of others. Which is why I sometimes think that theory of mind is, in many regards, emotional imagination.

I suppose the dream world that children live in is - in a sense - stemming from some of the similar places where empathy develops. When kids play in their fantasty world, they do essentially don the mind of another human being, even if it is simply an idealized version of themselves or their favorite super-hero. Make-believe is to me a means of making sense of the world in more complex ways than people necessarily underestand. And the process extends beyond our interactions with people, as we tend to have a bias for personification of ever-increasing abstractions. Maybe we feel for our pets or stuffed toys. Maybe eventually we feel life in stories and later music. When I was a little ballerina, I certainly felt music embodied in me even before I understood what that could mean - all I knew was that I felt what it "felt" and expressed what it expressed.

When I was still fairly young, I - of course - was dancing in the Nutcracker. The school I attended was led by a woman who had once had a fair amount of clout in the ballet world and maintained good connections. Every year, she hiked ticket sales significantly by bringing in guest professionals to perform the dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. This particular year, the male lead was a guest dancer from the Bolshoi who had been doing a short time at the PNB and his partner was from San Francisco. Kind of an obscene contrast - two worldclass dancers and... the five year old nose-picking brigade. I must have been in the final dance, because I remember being backstage as they danced and peeking onto the stage to watch and then I found myself sobbing. Of course, it may well have been exhaustion, or perhaps frustration at the awareness of the distance between myself and these dancers, but I also think it was simply that it was beautiful in this inexorably visceral way.

This happened again when I was in my early teens and I found myself soggy during a performance of the Appassionata. The experience was odd, but fascinating, and I quickly realized that other people in the auditorium were also sniffling. Not long after that I remember my Dad asking me if I ever cried during the opera in a way that seemed phrased as an accusation that I did not. I was perplexed because I actually had begun to do so and was still a little bewildered by the sensation and occurence. Funnily enough, I still feel a little embarrassed about doing so and avoid actively wiping my tears or anything that might indicate I'm doing so to people around me, as if I still think there's something affected or aggrandizing about doing so. But I think in a sense, it's because the experience is so personal that I wouldn't want another person intruding on my connection with whatever it is I am connecting with.

It's been a downhill water slide from then. First it was beautiful music, then back to dancing (I've scared a few tango partners in my day who thought perhaps they'd accidentally butchered a toe upon seeing some glistening eyes), and of course from there to stories and movies and all the rest. I pretty much expect when the house lights go down at the opera house that I'll emerge severely dehydrated and looking like I lost a pretty severe fight with the baritone (why I wear eye makeup to these things, I'll never know). I draw the line at crying at sappy or "unbelievable" and/or hallmark pablum... most of the time and mostly because my sense of self reintrudes at the crucial moment, insulting my pride by being too simplistic or overtly manipulative, which in turn immediately alienates me from the emotional experience.

Anyways, this sort of crying is so fascinating to me (as I become a softer and softer touch in my older age and vaster experience). Self-centered crying (from pain, frustration, anger, sadness) may be a little mysterious, but it makes some kind of concrete sense to me - it gets you things, it releases hormones and endorphins. I even get why we sometimes make ourselves cry, because you really do feel incredible afterwards and it's cheaper than developing a drug habit. Empathic crying (as in crying with or for another individual's pain) extends from there. It's an impressive leap that we are so hardwired to feel the emotions of others, but the impulses mirror self-centered crying. Aesthetic crying - I guess that could be seen in a number of lights. Maybe it's actually an expression of empathic filtered through and reborn from a coded language of artistic expression, maybe it's purely a sensation of being entirely overwhelmed by an experience, maybe it's actually a psychic pain at seeing something that embodies The Beautiful (in all those neo-platonic ways) and recognizing our distance from it. I really don't know. Then there's happy-crying! Where did that come from?  

I have little wit and few answers for this really, but I thought I'd blather for a bit.