I saw a Mary J. Blige video the oth­er day called No More Drama. I did­n’t real­ly enjoy the song, and thought she looked bet­ter in oth­er videos. Something she said was quite inter­est­ing, how­ev­er. The lyrics go:

No more tears (no more tears, I’m tired of cryin every night)
No more fears (no more fears, I real­ly don’t wan­na cry)
No dra­ma (no more dra­ma in my life)
I don’t ever wan­na hurt again

I thought about the idea of nev­er cry­ing again. It’s some­thing that just seems so unavoid­able, yet so nec­es­sary. I won­dered why any­one would nev­er want to cry again. After all, the only way you can feel hap­pi­ness is by feel­ing its oppo­site.

There is a sci­ence of cry­ing, called lachry­mol­o­gy, but the resources on this are very scant. The only use­ful source on this sci­ence is the band Tool, which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, is my favorite band. They say that a study has been done and a book on it pub­lished, although any attempts to find such a book have proven fruit­less. Their name is short for tool­shed; when they cre­at­ed the band, they want­ed their music to be a tool­shed for lachry­mol­o­gy.

There are chem­i­cal side-effects of cry­ing, of course. When one cries, chem­i­cals are released which heal the body, allow­ing for much stress to be relieved, not only men­tal­ly, but phys­i­cal­ly as well. It’s not this chem­i­cal process that I’m inter­est­ed in, it’s the very notion of going through life with­out cry­ing that I’m still try­ing to com­pre­hend.

Crying seems so impor­tant, as one goes through many men­tal changes. So many aspects of my men­tal­i­ty have been changed by things that have made me cry. I have learned so much from these things. Some of my best artis­tic endeav­ors were a result of pain in some way.

Does one need to suf­fer to cre­ate? I believe this is true for many peo­ple, includ­ing myself, though not for every­one. After all, some joy­ous works of art come from artis­tic eupho­ria.

Crying can be so beau­ti­ful, and so pro­duc­tive, and so ben­e­fi­cial. Pain can be all of these things as well, some­thing which Tool dis­cuss­es in many of their songs, though not as much, I believe, in their lat­est album.

So why would any­one pos­si­bly want to nev­er feel pain again, to cry again? Why would any­one want to end the world of hunger? Without hunger, we would­n’t be able to appre­ci­ate how good that plain baguette tastes. Without pain, one would become bor­ing, drably, some­thing that I have feared for quite a while.

We need it to cre­ate, to tru­ly feel. Even if one is not an artist, it takes a cer­tain amount of pain to real­ly enjoy life.

And for this I am thank­ful.