Every tear, on every face, tastes the same

I was listening to a Mavis Staples song the other day, (accompanied by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco on the album, "You are not alone," which he produced), when I heard that lyric. I thought to myself, "Damn, that is a beautiful line." In so few words it says so much about shared human experience and emotion, and in this case, pain and sadness. It's poetry, and it got me stuck in time for just a second.

Do all tears taste the same?
But then I thought, "Wait, do all tears really taste the same?" I'd be lying if I hadn't tasted my own, and maybe a couple others'...but I haven't done the necessary research. So I read through some studies performed by trained researchers.

It turns out, most tears consist of electrolytes, proteins, albumin, lipids, mucins, and other small molecules, all in varying degrees, but particularly affected should the crier be beset by disease. So, Jeff Tweedy, all tears do not taste the same, especially to the refined palate.

This is sometimes what happens when you look too deeply into something; you can forget where you started from, and what it meant. But don't confuse this with the cliché, ignorance is bliss; it's not quite that. The beauty I knew and the emotion I felt for a moment from hearing that phrase wasn't ignorance. Quite the contrary.

The value of a good communicator
It turns out Jeff Tweedy is a good communicator. Mavis and Jeff probably wouldn't have gotten very far with "You are not alone," singing about albumin and mucins in varying degrees.

Often, this is what being a communicator means--finding meaning in something which is frankly uninteresting to very many people, and making it understandable, interesting, and even inspiring. If you've done any science writing, you may know this.

Deane Morrison just had a piece the other day, a perfect example of taking the mundane to many and making music from it. Read "From sunlight to synfuels," to see what I mean. Think of the difference if the researchers had simply published 100 pages of their findings. Maybe being a good communicator is about staring into the abyss and coming right back out again, only to say, "it's not that deep; I found a way out."

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not saying that there isn't beauty in an atom, a quark, or even dark matter. They're beautiful to someone--namely, most likely, the brilliant scientists and researchers many of us work with. The parts, the whole: the atom, the universe. The tear, the pain, the sadness, the disease, and the mucin. We need everybody at every level to understand this world and make it better, but that understanding always comes from communication, and the best of it from those capable of staring into the abyss unscathed.