![]() ![]() I’ll return to the detail of this story, not least because Mehta’s writing so often reaches large questions through small local instances. Although shed for reasons of our own, which even we might not have known for certain, they provided us with a connective release from guilty burdens.’ Reversing his position with analytic ease, Eissler now says: ‘When you cry is not as important as that you are able to cry.’ Mehta doesn’t comment on this change, but clearly thinks his tears are inseparable from his new perception about the springs of sorrow: ‘As I left Eissler’s office, I felt united with my father, through our longest-delayed tears. Many people can cry on demand.’ He quotes Hamlet’s speech to the players: ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba/That he should weep for her?’ But then Mehta suddenly thinks he understands his father’s tears – they are the language of one form of guilt covering for another – and begins to sob uncontrollably himself. ‘What is there in crying? Crying in and of itself is not a sign of emotional health. ![]() The analyst, Kurt Eissler, a man closely identified with Freud, shrewdly says that one can grieve without weeping. Mehta is remembering his father’s tears at a particular, unlikely moment, and has been talking with a New York psychoanalyst about his inability to weep at his father’s death in 1986. This perception is precisely where Ved Mehta’s memoir The Red Letters ends, and with it his extraordinary 11-volume autobiography, Continents of Exile, begun in 1972. That’s why tears are transferable from one grief to another, and may be genuine even when they pick the wrong occasion. ‘Sorrow’s springs are the same,’ Hopkins says. We are always the subject of our own tears, but not the only subject and knowing the many other reasons why we weep is a complicated affair, often a matter of stealthy Freudian displacement rather than anything resembling immediate cause and effect. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be mourning for as well, and however deep or shallow that mourning may be. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. I have always thought of the conclusion of this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. Early and late she will have been crying for herself: ‘It is Margaret you mourn for.’ The child will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why.’ And in any case there will always have been a secret reason for her grief. Leaves fall stuff happens we get over it or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart ‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. ![]()
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