I wrap my emotions in language, swaddling them, bandaging them. I suppose the alternative is to abandon them, to abandon myself. I fear, always, that I am repetitive; I don’t think anyone wants to hear, again, that I do not have a mother. I am tired of telling people, again and again, that my mother is dead. But this is the nature of lament: it echoes, repeats itself, and it is repetition that remakes the world as a place that I can inhabit. The void is invisible if I do not speak it, write it.

I want to redeem crying but I do not want, exactly, to celebrate it. I am aware that it is an indulgence; I do not give myself permission. I do not want, ever, to use crying as weapon or as armour.

I want to redeem crying because I can’t escape it, but I would rather be a witch.

I can’t wrap tears in language; liquid seeps, weakening paper.

Swords, too, play a role in Arthurian legend, in the stories that link Pagan worldviews with the theology of Christian mystics. The quest for the Holy Grail begins with a sword, is made possible by it. I remember, from childhood, the story of King Arthur drawing a sword from a stone. I do not know, until now, that the most significant sword in this story, Excalibur, rises from the water, a gift from the Lady of the Lake.

Excalibur is, in Arthurian legend, inscribed with spells, with words.

In many traditions, the Lady of the Lake is a witch.

It is not shameful, perhaps, to cry. It is shameful, rather, not to be loved, to lack an easy source of consolation. It is shameful to need more than I receive. It feels like melodrama to recount these things, but tears are the stuff of melodrama, as is motherlessness, a soap opera trope. I am formed by melodrama; I take melodrama’s form. How can I write about crying, about wanting, about wishing to be loved, without asking the reader to love me, too? It’s a transgression of boundaries, untoward and embarrassing, but it’s all I’m ever doing; I am trying to make the plaintive desirable, to turn lament into love song.

I want this essay to read like the Ace of Cups, all celestial perfection, but I fear it is, like the Nine of Swords, simply a dark chamber with no clear exit. In crying, we are swept away from ourselves; our vision blurs and we lose our grounding, are unable to see the world clearly. It is too easy to despise myself, to see feeling and thinking as enemies, constantly locked into opposition.

In Aubrey Beardsley’s illustration, in circulation at the time of the Waite-Smith tarot, the Lady of the Lake is represented as a hand emerging from the waves, holding a sword. I think of the tarot aces, of the Holy Spirit as the hand on the Ace of Cups, emerging from the clouds. I can read this, in secular terms, as a suggestion that intelligence is a gift from the emotions rather than something apart, as an indication that feeling is not opposed to thinking, but might support it, that I might seek a sword in the waters of myth.

I guard against, these days, thoughts of Hannah. I feel a sharpness around my nose, a shallowness in my chest, as tears come toward my eyes, when I do think of her, but I don’t think that I’m in danger of spilling over. If anything, I’m in danger of retreating, of refusing to feel. I didn’t run from the pain, at first, shuffling tarot cards that promised catharsis, but it never abated; the cards returned to the deck, were dealt again. I felt hollow, afterwards, each time I tried to date somebody else. If want and will were truly twinned, everything would be much easier. Each time I start to want someone, something, I am pulled back into the pain of it all. I imagine a deluge of tears, brace against them.

Why does everything feel quotidian, diagnostic, only five minutes after it feels profound?

‘Fountain of fountains, and of all fountains,’ wrote A.E. Waite, in his initiation ritual for the Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. ‘Grace on the soul descending, as rain on the dry grass. Dew of Divine Speech, falling in stillness on the heart, filling the soul with Knowledge.’

It’s a matter of belief, I suppose.

‘Cups symbolise receptivity’, Rachel Pollack writes. The chalice is important, too, in witchcraft; it is the cauldron in which things are melted down, are mixed together toward magic. It is, like an ace, a beginning. The Ace of Cups can signify an opening of the heart, hint at positive possibilities, opportunities for growth. I wonder if, eventually, I might see myself as the pond, beneath, providing a space in which waterlilies flourish, rather than seeing myself as rivulets and tears that fall through space, seeking a vessel.

There is so much slippage between witch and mystic, between pagan and Catholic, between loss and love. This is, perhaps, why so many people have been desperate to shore up the divisions, place restrictions on tears.

The mystic’s text begins with volo, but I can’t figure out how it ends.

I read the rest of The Mystic Fable, seeking an answer to this question, long after I read the pages on volo, on the opening of mystic texts. Michel de Certeau, too, writes of mourning, of bereavement as an animating force. He argues that mysticism is itself a response to loss, brought about by the birth of a secular modernity. The attachment to God is intensified by the loss of God.

The mystics, too, were mourning, I think.

‘The Mystic is refusing to mourn’, de Certeau writes.

I return the cards to the pack, softened by my fingers, creased through contemplation. I can’t say that I believe in nothing, though, even if I don’t believe in a Christian God. I am reluctant to admit this, having grown up, and cried too often, in a disenchanted world. I do believe in incantation, in synchronicity, in the poetry of image; I do believe that words are spells.

I think, sometimes, that I might believe in crying, too.