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So she placed her tears on slides and began photographing them. From more than one thousand photos, one hundred experiences are represented in her book The Topography of Tears. The first two are Tears of timeless reunion (in an expanding field) and Grief and gratitude. They look like aerial maps (for her, of her emotional terrain), abstract forms made up of systems of the body—veins, capillaries, nuclei. Other photos have captions like The irrefutable, In the end it didn’t matter, The brevity of time (out of order) losing you, and Tears of elation at a liminal moment.

Rose-Lynn explains: The lines, shapes, patterns, and movement of tears reveal the sacred geometry of her feeling. The images visualize what pain looks like. And gratitude. And grief. And awe. With more than thirty measures of our body’s physiology, scientists can vaguely point out profiles of twenty or so emotions. With her photography, Rose-Lynn enables us to see that hundreds of complex feelings have distinct neurochemical profiles revealed in the shape of tears. William James would have said Whoa.

In looking at Rose-Lynn’s photographs of tears of human emotion, I am transfixed by The pull between attachment and release, which is reproduced below. The lighter shape seems to be floating away, to my eye, from the first. Grief comes in fleeting waves of attachment and release.

Visual art also documents the geometries of our social lives: the symmetries of love between parent and child in depictions of Madonna and child by Raphael or da Vinci, or waves of collective effervescence in the drunken dinner scenes of the Dutch master Jan Steen, also found in room 837 of the Louvre. Sebastião Salgado’s photos of masses of wet, muscular bodies working in unison in Brazil’s Serra Pelada gold mine, which at its peak employed fifty thousand men, capture the sublime, hellish horrors of extraction-based capitalism, and how it reduces individual minds and bodies to means of production.

The pull between attachment and release. Rose-Lynn Fisher

Visual art also allows us to see the deep structures, or sacred geometries, of the natural world. In the mid-nineteenth century, Ernst Haeckel described scientifically more than four thousand kinds of single-cell protozoa. Haeckel also believed that he could reveal scientific truths by drawing the species he studied, producing one hundred illustrations he would publish in a series of ten installments in Art Forms in Nature in 1904. This book has more than one hundred arresting renderings of jellyfish, sea anemones, clams, sand dollars, fish, and the occasional insect. Viewing his drawings is a strange and beautiful epiphany: the drawings reveal the signature qualities of each species in exaggerated artistic detail, allowing us to imagine how it adapted and survived in highly specific ways. In marveling at the symmetry and geometries shared by the species he drew, Haeckel enables the viewer to see the relatedness of different species, that the diverse forms that life takes are unified by a life force, or “artistic drive,” in Haeckel’s phrasing. His drawings allow us to see Darwin’s idea about the evolution of species from earlier, primordial forms.

Rose-Lynn shows me photographs from a more recent series, of ghostlike cells originally from a fragment of her own bone. They look like the sign for infinity—drifting and, to my eye, unaware of how they, the product of a simple genetic variation in one group of cells, can introduce complex pains, horrors, insights, and wonders into a human’s life. The geometries of all our lives, the traumas we have encountered, or the beauty, the curse you may feel running through your family’s history, and its blessings, are found in the shape of cells we cannot see and in random mutations of our DNA.

Toward the end of our conversation, I sit in the living room near the small table with rocks strewn across its surface. Rose-Lynn calls out as she is making a cup of tea in her kitchen: “Awesome and awful. It’s so striking that they go together.”

We discuss the ninth-century etymology of “awe,” and how the meaning of the word has changed.

She continues.

“Awesome and awful . . . they are mine to reconcile.”

For Rose-Lynn, “art is a language, which through flashes of insight reveals the answer that exists within a question.” In art we see life patterns, for both living and dying. In that moment of reconciliation, we might consider what to make of this cycle of life and death.

Hints of Vast Mysteries