But There's Light to the Left and to the Right
Two days ago it was thirty years since The Proclaimers released their first album. They are hands-down one of my favourite bands, and although their 500 miles song is universally known their entire corpus appeals to me, through its rawness, its ability to balance lyrical cleverness with the genuine and insightful, to drill right down to the basics. And at the moment I've been thinking about one of their most beautiful songs, 'Shadows Fall', which is about those moments when sadness emerges out of nowhere, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, to tint the glass through which we see life slightly and temporarily darker.
Emotions are weird. The clever scientist bods at Christ's tell me that we all actually do things and then ascribe emotions to particular actions in order to rationalise those actions - I run, a physiological response to a particular situation, and only after the fact does the 'fear' that I had believed to be the motivation for my running actually crystallise. I call these feelings 'fear', or 'anger', or 'love', because I need to fit my own behaviour into an ordered and explanatory pattern, one that is consistent and simple, because if you can't rationalise your own emotions then where do you stand on the vexed question 'who am I, and what for?' The problem with this is that in fitting my feelings into these preconceived categories I box them in and, to a considerable degree, create them. The social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth has suggested that 'The [emotional] process' in any given instance 'almost always begins before the name [of an emotion is ascribed to that feeling].... The realization of the name [of the emotion] undoubtedly changes the feeling, simplifying and clarifying' it. If you begin to think of yourself as 'angry', you start to act 'angry', to perform 'angry', even if only to yourself.
What motivated this blog post was my own inability to pin down, define or name my feelings in a particular instance yesterday - to attempt to thickly describe emotions that can't be captured in a single word. Cutting to the chase, last night I had a big ol' cry in front of me pals. I was quite drunk, which goes a long way towards explaining this particular event, but it also came very much out of nowhere. At no time earlier in the day was I feeling uncomfortable, sad, any nameable emotion of that type, which could have left me thinking 'this might happen to me later today!' Yes there were 'reasons' - recent unfortunate events which I won't go into, the fact that Father's Day is always a little difficult for me, also more generally the weirdness of coming out of the other end of an incredibly intense period of exams. But I hesitate to just call this 'sadness' in action, because I was fine earlier in the day, and the whole affair hit me like a freight train, the culmination maybe of several different rivulets of thought not totally at the forefront of my mind running suddenly and climactically together. As the Proclaimers note, sometimes 'shadows fall without warning... and there's no peace to be found.'
I'm an historian, so let's place this occasion in some appropriate context to explain why it's been on my mind so much, namely the number of times I have cried since December 2011 (I don't remember before this point):
- Once on the day my dad died (yikes!); and once in the shower the day after.
- Once in 2014 (three years later!), when a director in a show asked me 'what the fuck I was doing' (tsk tsk).
- In late 2015, several times, because of Cambridge exam worries; a couple of times in March 2016 for the same reason; and ditto two weeks before my first exam this summer.
Actually, throughout this period I wept somewhat more than is recorded here because I have the fun and relatively uncommon ability to cry on cue, something I developed whilst working on the show Brass. For the record, it's not about thinking about a sad memory; rather, I have kind of learnt how to trigger and bring on that particular physiological response through just trying to do so, and it's hard to explain the mechanics of that.
In any case, I am certainly below average on the cry count!! The male mean, according to AgingCare.com, is 7 times a year, and I seem to have achieved only about 10 crying sessions over the last 5 and a half years. The female average, incidentally, is apparently 47 times a year, one of the most striking instances for the comparatively few but significant ways in which patriarchy as it manifests itself on the deeply-ingrained level of human behaviour and culture constrains men as well as women: 'boys don't cry' and all that jazz. But I do find it odd in my case, because I have obviously recognised this disparity for myself, and know that crying etc. can be relieving and cathartic - yet actually doing it more is not something which has resulted from this self-awareness, and however 'aware' you are of cultural norms it is a lot harder to defy them in practice.
I suppose the reason why I'm writing this post is because I was genuinely flummoxed by the event, and the task of interpreting it. Am I 'sad' at the moment? Not really. Confused is a better description; internally nervous and unsure, perhaps. What confuses me most is the fact that crying in this instance does not seem to have acted as a form of catharsis for whatever stress I was under; rather, the whole thing just made me wonder what on earth was the matter, and why I wasn't feeling what was the matter before the events occurred. Maybe the crying exacerbated and even created feelings of 'sadness', because that term is the only tool I have to rationalise the act of crying; or maybe I have simply not cried enough to feel the full effects of the catharsis!
I write this post as an alternative form of catharsis. Airing emotions in a public forum like this is maybe a little odd, but I see it as a way of working things through and working things out. When I cried the other night I became much more honest (read: aware?) about several things that were clearly on my mind, however unconsciously and unbeknownst to the pre-cry me; and then before I went to bed I worried that that honesty would be hard to recapture beyond that rare crying (and admittedly also quite drunk!) situation. But I see this blog too as a place where I can be frank and honest, and if we're to do anything about the 'Men and their Constrained Emotions' problem we have to got to start talking frankly and honestly (and publicly, I think!) about what we feel and how we understand those feelings. This blog is about where I can see sky, and I am so lucky to see a sky which for me is mostly clear and bright and blue; but it has to be about the clouds and the shadows as well, because the sky wouldn't be beautiful if we only ever saw it one way. Finally, I hope this blog post makes some sense, because it's late, and I've no time to re-read the thing!
RJLF
Emotions are weird. The clever scientist bods at Christ's tell me that we all actually do things and then ascribe emotions to particular actions in order to rationalise those actions - I run, a physiological response to a particular situation, and only after the fact does the 'fear' that I had believed to be the motivation for my running actually crystallise. I call these feelings 'fear', or 'anger', or 'love', because I need to fit my own behaviour into an ordered and explanatory pattern, one that is consistent and simple, because if you can't rationalise your own emotions then where do you stand on the vexed question 'who am I, and what for?' The problem with this is that in fitting my feelings into these preconceived categories I box them in and, to a considerable degree, create them. The social psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth has suggested that 'The [emotional] process' in any given instance 'almost always begins before the name [of an emotion is ascribed to that feeling].... The realization of the name [of the emotion] undoubtedly changes the feeling, simplifying and clarifying' it. If you begin to think of yourself as 'angry', you start to act 'angry', to perform 'angry', even if only to yourself.
What motivated this blog post was my own inability to pin down, define or name my feelings in a particular instance yesterday - to attempt to thickly describe emotions that can't be captured in a single word. Cutting to the chase, last night I had a big ol' cry in front of me pals. I was quite drunk, which goes a long way towards explaining this particular event, but it also came very much out of nowhere. At no time earlier in the day was I feeling uncomfortable, sad, any nameable emotion of that type, which could have left me thinking 'this might happen to me later today!' Yes there were 'reasons' - recent unfortunate events which I won't go into, the fact that Father's Day is always a little difficult for me, also more generally the weirdness of coming out of the other end of an incredibly intense period of exams. But I hesitate to just call this 'sadness' in action, because I was fine earlier in the day, and the whole affair hit me like a freight train, the culmination maybe of several different rivulets of thought not totally at the forefront of my mind running suddenly and climactically together. As the Proclaimers note, sometimes 'shadows fall without warning... and there's no peace to be found.'
I'm an historian, so let's place this occasion in some appropriate context to explain why it's been on my mind so much, namely the number of times I have cried since December 2011 (I don't remember before this point):
- Once on the day my dad died (yikes!); and once in the shower the day after.
- Once in 2014 (three years later!), when a director in a show asked me 'what the fuck I was doing' (tsk tsk).
- In late 2015, several times, because of Cambridge exam worries; a couple of times in March 2016 for the same reason; and ditto two weeks before my first exam this summer.
Actually, throughout this period I wept somewhat more than is recorded here because I have the fun and relatively uncommon ability to cry on cue, something I developed whilst working on the show Brass. For the record, it's not about thinking about a sad memory; rather, I have kind of learnt how to trigger and bring on that particular physiological response through just trying to do so, and it's hard to explain the mechanics of that.
 |
| Crying on stage in BRASS; photo by Matt Hargraves. |
In any case, I am certainly below average on the cry count!! The male mean, according to AgingCare.com, is 7 times a year, and I seem to have achieved only about 10 crying sessions over the last 5 and a half years. The female average, incidentally, is apparently 47 times a year, one of the most striking instances for the comparatively few but significant ways in which patriarchy as it manifests itself on the deeply-ingrained level of human behaviour and culture constrains men as well as women: 'boys don't cry' and all that jazz. But I do find it odd in my case, because I have obviously recognised this disparity for myself, and know that crying etc. can be relieving and cathartic - yet actually doing it more is not something which has resulted from this self-awareness, and however 'aware' you are of cultural norms it is a lot harder to defy them in practice.
I suppose the reason why I'm writing this post is because I was genuinely flummoxed by the event, and the task of interpreting it. Am I 'sad' at the moment? Not really. Confused is a better description; internally nervous and unsure, perhaps. What confuses me most is the fact that crying in this instance does not seem to have acted as a form of catharsis for whatever stress I was under; rather, the whole thing just made me wonder what on earth was the matter, and why I wasn't feeling what was the matter before the events occurred. Maybe the crying exacerbated and even created feelings of 'sadness', because that term is the only tool I have to rationalise the act of crying; or maybe I have simply not cried enough to feel the full effects of the catharsis!
I write this post as an alternative form of catharsis. Airing emotions in a public forum like this is maybe a little odd, but I see it as a way of working things through and working things out. When I cried the other night I became much more honest (read: aware?) about several things that were clearly on my mind, however unconsciously and unbeknownst to the pre-cry me; and then before I went to bed I worried that that honesty would be hard to recapture beyond that rare crying (and admittedly also quite drunk!) situation. But I see this blog too as a place where I can be frank and honest, and if we're to do anything about the 'Men and their Constrained Emotions' problem we have to got to start talking frankly and honestly (and publicly, I think!) about what we feel and how we understand those feelings. This blog is about where I can see sky, and I am so lucky to see a sky which for me is mostly clear and bright and blue; but it has to be about the clouds and the shadows as well, because the sky wouldn't be beautiful if we only ever saw it one way. Finally, I hope this blog post makes some sense, because it's late, and I've no time to re-read the thing!
RJLF
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