Story of a Tear

 

Tears. Maurice Mikkers

 

“Sometimes we are not given the choice between tears and laughter,  

but only in tears, and then it is necessary to know how to decide for the most beautiful.”  
(Maurice Maeterlinck)

 

Recently I was very curious about the story of Maurice Mikkers.

I happened to read about him because this former Dutch lab technician be keen on micro-photography.

It opened up a world that I was completely unaware of.

 

It seems that, in 2015, while he was working on a project to show the crystallization of the active ingredients of certain drugs, his foot hit against the kitchen table in his home in The Hague, the Netherlands.

The pain made him in tear and, since he had a microscope nearby, he decided to collect a tear to observe it and try to dry it, so as to bring out the crystals of its salts.

Once he was able to photograph the structure under the microscope, Mikkers began asking friends and relatives to focus on a specific emotion that could trigger tears, so that he could collect, catalog and photograph them.

Hence a photographic project called “Imaginarium of Tears” was born.

 

At first I was stunned.

And I thought that all tears were the same, water and salt.

Not at all!

Tears have different composition, cause and function.

It's not that simple to cry.

Tears are made up of 98% water, the remaining 2% is mainly composed of electrolytes, numerous proteins (albumin, lactoferrin, immunoglobulins...) and glucose.

They have five functions: cleaning, lubrication, nutrition, optical transparency and defense of bacterial infections. All this for our dear eyes.

And they are of three types: basal tears, reflex tears (those to be clear when we peel onions), and psychic or emotional tears.

The latter are those produced during emotional crying (from joy or sadness) and have a chemical composition different from other types of tears: they contain a greater quantity of prolactin hormones, adrenocorticotropic hormones, leu-enkephalin (an endogenous opioid and powerful anesthetic), potassium and manganese.

Here, goodbye to my naive ignorance.

And welcome to the secret world of tears.

 

This is chemistry, and it goes hand in hand with psychology.

Because tears also have a specific social function, not just physiological for the eye.

 

Psychology tells us that tears have evolved over millennia.

Just as they are an integral part of the evolution of our existences.

If there were no desperate crying, the newborn would never get the care, protection and love they need from their parents.

It is called “vocal crying” because it's noisy and acts as a reminder for those who cannot hear, or do not want to (any parent remembers with anguish the nights spent without sleep to get up continuously, towards the cradle of the crying baby).

As soon as he is able to crawl, the crying becomes silent, addressed to a specific person, as a secret dialogue between child and parent.

But this silent cry is not so far from that of animals that in this way they do not prove weak in front of predators.

 

And when do we grow up?

The question becomes even more interesting.

It's then that the tears become fundamental.

 

This is how the psychologist Ivana Thano describes the function of tears, in her very interesting article: 

“Reduce action: by making the vision blurry, tears decrease our propensity to attack.

Discourage the aggressor: tears become a signal of pacification, establishing, if only for a moment, a hierarchy in favor of the other.

Guarantee relief: crying signals the state of social need and the simultaneous submission to those who want to offer care.” (Dr. Ivana Thano)

 

Different kind of tears at microscope

The tears become an immediate way to discharge the toxins accumulated during stressful situations, and discharge testosterone.

This is why we cry more in the evening, as if it were a lavender of the soul.

And stopping crying harms the psyche, so the studies say.

While as regards the crying of women, according to a recent research, “The action of mammalian chemosignals”, female emotional tears can carry chemical signalers that act as “modulators” of sexual arousal, physiological balance, level of testosterone and brain activity in men, reducing them.

 

Also in the same article, the doctor explains that culture can also influence crying. 

“Where and how you grow up affects the way you cry.

This means that although you are an individual with its unique and irreproducible characteristics, the social context and cultural variables greatly affect the quantity and quality of crying (benefits derived). To understand how much culture and its social rules influence the experience of crying, think about the beliefs of the Indonesian tribe of the Toraja. For the Toraja to cry (audibly) as adults, it is taboo, except in two very well-defined situations: after a bereavement and during the funeral, and for women, when they are unable to get pregnant.” (Dr. Ivana Thano)

I am reminded of the story of Eos, the goddess of the dawn of Greek mythology, who became the deity Aurora, in ancient Rome.

Eos is described by Homer, in the Odyssey, as opening the gates of heaven for the sun to rise every morning, a beautiful woman in saffron-colored robes.

She had various lovers, including Orion and Ares, the god of war, who was also the husband of the powerful Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, who did not take too well the betrayal of her beloved and for this she punished Eos to continually fall in love with mere mortals.

In fact, one day, walking through the city of Troy, Eos saw the beautiful Titone. She kidnapped him and led him to Aethiopia, where they had two sons, Emathion and Memnon, the latter killed by Achilles in the Trojan War.

Since that day, every morning Eos inconsolably cries for her own son and her tears form dew.

 

“Eos”. Evelyn de Morgan, 1895

Every time we walk through the meadows, in the morning, with the light that gently caresses the drops of dew among the plants and flowers, we know that they are the tears of pain of a mother for her dead son, punished for her thirst for love.

But this story does not end there.

Let's go back to talking about flowers, for a moment, or marigolds.

According to Greek mythology, marigolds originated from Aphrodite's own tears. It's said that Aphrodite was saddened by the death of her beloved Adonis, pierced by a boar sent against him by Ares, her jealous husband. The goddess began to cry and her tears, as they touched the ground, turned into beautiful marigolds.

Tragic common destiny for Eos and Aphrodite, united by hatred and tears.

 

It's always poetic as in ancient mythology everything is transformed, and the elements of nature become parts of a tale of loves, deaths, divinities and human miseries.

 

I have never tried to hide my tears, which I find very difficult.

I believe they are a kind of washing of the soul.

Crying is good.

“The eyes that cry the most are also the ones that see best,” said the great writer Victor Hugo.

 

And it's fascinating that someone thought of photographing tears under a microscope, to see the structure that differentiates a tear of panic from that of a broken love.

It's interesting because it makes special what, perhaps, we thought was a simple and univocal physiological and psychological reaction.

Tears are all the same. But no, it wouldn't have.

And there are micro-photographs to testify it.

 

However, I continue to prefer a naive and poetic vision of this universal act: in the end, tears are what unites us in every corner of the planet.

I don't like cataloging very much, if not those of libraries, but that's a different matter.

It also makes me shiver a little at the idea that a single emotion, enclosed in a tear, can be put on a slide under the lens of a microscope.

And then we are so sure, dear Maeterlink, that it's so simple to label an emotion?

 

I don't think they are watertight compartments: fear, anger, disappointment, love, nostalgia... Like colored pencils arranged in gradation in metal cases.

The idea that a single tear is the fragile container of nostalgia makes me smile a little. Then what? Homesickness, of the beach we walked on in the summer, of middle school days, of a country we can't go back to?

Or of sadness. Of abandonment.

Of course, a single moment produces a cry that happens in that instant, but often also brings with it heaps of sensations that have not been able to explode, like an avalanche that overwhelms everything: stones, branches, trees, people.

 

I don't know.

 

It's nice to know that tears are not so obvious, and have a history, a function, a complex portrait.

But the tears of pain that become dew in the morning are the closest to my feeling.

Because it's indefinite, elusive, much more complex than a slide in a laboratory.

 

There are things that cannot be photographed.

And I say this reluctantly, as a photographer.

 

But maybe it's better this way...

 

“You can forget the person you laughed with, 

never the one you cried with.” 

(Khalil Gibran)

Penang. Malaysia – 8 October 2018

Imaginarium of Tears

 

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• Writing as A Resistance: Agota Kristof 
• And You Cry 

Italian version