30. On knowing what will make me cry

Lessons from Emily Ogden

Thank you so much to everyone who followed along with my road trip via Notes from the Road. It meant a lot to share the miles with you. These mini essays were sent out to paid subscribers only; if you’d like to read them (and future paid-only content!), consider upgrading to a paid subscription for $5/month.

When my sister and I were kids, our mom sang us to sleep every night. It was a tender ritual: me nestled in the top bunk, my sister below, each of us wrapped in cloud-printed sheets. My mom would kneel on the blue carpet of our room and sing her regular lineup of songs, an order we knew by heart. 

I was painfully attached to my mother and separation from her was unbearable, so she tape-recorded herself singing the songs so that I could listen to them when she was gone for bedtime. The next evening, our babysitter played the recording as she was putting us to bed, and I immediately began to wail. There was no hope of consoling me. 

Some of the songs in that lineup still make me cry today: The Circle Game, The Grey Funnel Line, You Can Close Your Eyes. I’ll queue them up with full knowledge they’re coming, and they still elicit a welling of emotion in my chest that pools and rises up my throat, slipping out the corners of my eyes. The songs summon an intensity of feeling—melancholy for the passage of time and growing up, missing the people I love and feeling alone after they leave—that can be hard to access, but this music draws it out.

Earlier in the summer, I read Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing, a collection of seventeen essays that weave together personal history and literary canon in an attempt to address the question of what to make of all the uncertainty in our lives. There’s a passage in one essay, “How to have a breakthrough,” that I can’t get out of my head. Ogden writes about her now husband and recounts an interaction when they had first started dating:

“I was in love with John, a revelation. We got together in Boston after I returned from Greece. Almost the first time I went to his apartment, he brought out his guitar unasked and sang. I could not believe the audacity of playing unbidden. Irritated, ruffled, I fell in love. If I am ruffled, it has always meant he can steal up on me and move me to tears. Certain songs that he plays make me cry every time, even though I know that they make me cry every time; even though I do not think a person should ever permit themselves to be reliably moved.” 

Even though I do not think a person should ever permit themselves to be reliably moved! 

I was ruffled by this line. Surprised by it. As a person who permits myself to be reliably moved, I grew defensive. My list of songs that make me cry has grown to include Me & My Dog (boygenius), Dinner (Kacey Hill), Funeral (Phoebe Bridgers), and Adam Complex (Charlotte Day Wilson). These are songs that make me miss and hate mental illness, long for old relationships, mourn people who have died, fear being alone, wish I was more than I am. 

Songs that reliably make me cry help me make sense of my world, and sense of myself. Reliable crying is a form of body trust. My body is doing what I expect it to do: weep. I know how these songs make me feel, and even when sadness itself feels uncomfortable, it is still soothing to be moved in a way that feels familiar. But Ogden has a response to that, one I hadn’t considered. 

In an interview published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ogden says,

“​​Not knowing then is a capacity to resist the temptation of having an overweening theory; to resist the temptation of having things settled. A theory that promises to sort our experiences out in advance is relieving. But it is not necessarily enlivening, and it is not necessarily true.”

Ogden’s entire book is about making peace with not knowing now and, sometimes, not knowing ever. When I think I have things figured out, when I am comfortable in the familiar, that is when I am deluding myself. Ogden continues,

“And so, the problem to which I see not-knowing as a solution is also a problem that comes after knowledge, after theory, after falling in love, after deciding you’re an opera fan: how do you retain the capacity to be surprised by the objects of your commitments?”

Yes, I love these songs, and yes, they make me cry. But perhaps I am missing something from the music I love the most by expecting it to stir up the same thing every time. 

A little over a year ago, Charlotte Day Wilson’s album ALPHA came out. I listened to it on July 9, 2021, understanding it as an album dedicated to love. A few days later, my relationship ended suddenly, and overnight it became an album dedicated to heartbreak. The last track on the record, Adam Complex, became an anthem, and it makes me cry still, no matter how I interpret it. It’s a song whose meaning has changed for me and the fact of that change allows for the possibility that my interpretation can continue to evolve.

My last few months in Boston, I started really falling for someone. I knew it was happening; I allowed it to happen. And somehow, I thought that this knowledge would protect me. Or I thought that, because I’d been in love before, I would be prepared for how I’d feel when my summer romance ended and I moved to California. But those kinds of knowing are false. Love is new and different each time, and history has not given me the tools to protect my heart. Nor do I want to. I don’t know what my future with this person, or any person, will look like, just because I know the date of my departure. It’s tempting to indulge an overweening theory that there’s an end, or even an open end. But neither is necessarily enlivening or true.

Ogden asks us, “How do you retain the capacity to be surprised by the objects of your commitments?” And I don’t know. It’s painful to relinquish my tired expectations of how the future will play out and how I’ll feel as it’s unfolding (I just want to cry to my sad songs dammit!). But I am making peace with the possibility that there is something greater to be gained by remaining open to whatever new thing they may rupture, or heal, within me. Perhaps that is the only way to love.

No fortnightly faves this week (it’s been a long week), but if you liked this, please do think about becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subs make this newsletter possible!