The tears are auto­ma­tic. They drip down the cheeks, dam­pen books, key­boards, din­ner plates, post­cards, stee­ring wheels. I don’t weep from sor­row. I weep as a symp­tom. I don’t want to cry, but I do because of a medi­cine. It is as if my body weeps on its own behalf.

My body has rea­son to weep – more rea­son than I do – but there are times I join my tears in their crying, adding to the tears of side effet the tears of cause. Disease has bul­lied me into Cartesianism, but the mixed tears undo divi­sion through liqui­fi­ca­tion.

Can the tears of sad­ness, once shed, be extrac­ted from the gene­ral waters ? I said, some­thing else, « it is a mecha­ni­cal pro­blem and not a meta­bo­lic one. » I said to one friend, about the loss of ano­ther : I miss this per­son more than I will miss [the impor­tant body parts I will miss]. I inten­ded this to be dra­ma­tic but of course it was mat­ter of fact : of course the loss of a friend is worse than losing organs, limbs, or skin.

Can any par­ti­cu­lar loss be extrac­ted from the gene­ral sor­row ? All of the losing (of body parts, capa­ci­ties, people or rela­tions bet­ween them) com­pounds now into one elixir of loss, fumy and irre­vo­cable. It’s as if in all its crying my body know some­thing about sor­row that I refuse.

The only thing sad­der than exis­ting is not exis­ting, any­way, and eve­ryone should have known alrea­dy how impos­si­bly sad exis­ting is. I’d say « all that can go wrong » but the sad­ness of exis­ting isn’t any­thing gone wrong about it, only what is defi­ni­tio­nal : first we exist, then we don’t.