There’s an area called Popular at Technorati. I rarely drop by there. When I remember it exists, I check out a few blogs to see what’s up, like crossing a virtual ocean to the far side where I bang my head with mysterious invisible hammers until I’m appropriately stupefied and return home full of wonder (kind of) and none the wiser.
This past weekend, by way of some other subject, I was reading a little on Cecil Rhodes and the diamond industry. So, day before yesterday, one of those days when I remembered the Popular section of Technorati existed, passing my way through on the way to far shores, I saw in the popular book section the title, The Truth About Diamonds. No author’s name attached. You’re snickering at me already, that I was thinking, “The truth about diamonds. Human misery, depths of despair, DeBeers, diamond cartel, Sierra Leone, colonialism, blood diamonds, slave labor.”
Clicking on the link, I was transported to Amazon and a photo of Nicole Richie looking professionally bored in a diamond tiara. The book is a novel. She is given as having written it. Most of the people who post reviews of it imagine that she has and some think it’s great writing, like she’s telling you her story over a cell phone, like “People” only all about Nicole, and others think it’s bad writing by an unaccomplished Nicole. You can choose the cover you want. One of the covers has her with the tiara and another does not. I read the tiara cover may have been felt to be too Paris Hilton, though if that’s true I don’t know why they’re offering it as an alternative. Looking at the two covers, I was trying to figure out who Nicole Richie was trying to look like now and I wasn’t sure. Instead of Amazon having it where you can click on the cover and read a couple of pages, one instead gets to look at the two covers.
The American Museum of Natural History devotes part of its website to the what, origins, history, mining, industry and art of the diamond. It’s not well-written. There are pages and pages on how diamonds come to be formed and what they’re made of. The text is colorless and plodding. There’s a way of presenting facts so that they slide off the table onto the floor and they do a good job of that. I bet myself that the history of diamonds and capitalism would be slim in comparison and as I supposed it would be the couple pages on South Africa and the diamond had the names of a few white men and mentions of their rivalries and that they were rich and became richer. A white boy discovers a diamond on his father’s farm. A man working for the railroad (who I find elsewhere was acquainted with diamonds from Sierra Leone) is credited with discovering the diamonds in Namibia. White faces. What of the peoples who lived there. Like whites discovering gold in the Black Hills and grabbing treatied lands from the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, who had been aware of the gold but to whom it didn’t have the same meaning it did for the whites. The last sentence on Rhodes states he died a controversial figure. No history to that. Facts slide off the table onto the floor stuff. They have a picture of workers crawling in the sands of Namibia looking for diamonds circa 1910.
I don’t understand diamonds. I never have. The American Museum of Natural History site doesn’t help me to understand diamonds and their history, the glitter and allure people talk about. The fire. I can appreciate they are amazingly hard and that they are very old. Hard means great for work purposes to me. I can see how if a diamond fell in my hand, I would be able to appreciate it for what it is, like I do other minerals, I like minerals and rocks, and I understand it has peculiar qualities. I can see holding it in my hand and appreciating its existence and its peculiar qualities. I don’t at all get appreciating it at the expense of the health and well-being of another. That escapes me.
The website has a picture of a 128 carat Tiffany diamond with 90 facets. The setting designed for it was “Bird on a rock” and a bird of diamond and gold is perched upon it. The large diamond flashes yellow. It should be magnificent but to my eye looks awkward. The bird is stilted, unattractive. Lots of craft. It looks like a fancy toy bird. Something about it seems as childish a toy bird as I’ve ever seen. I realize the piece, to my eye, looks dishonest, forced. It is worth a hell of a lot of money. And I don’t get it.
I look at pictures of diamond bracelets and rings and am reminded that I don’t get it. Last year my mother-in-law showed me that she had ended up getting her mother’s diamond engagement ring several years after her death. I can understand her attachment to the ring because of her mother but I don’t understand the diamond. Especially in a setting. It looks cold and sterile to me, sitting in those rings.
Things decay. Time corrodes. I understand that most all one gathers and produces in a lifetime is going to fall to pieces in a few years or decades and a diamond isn’t going to do that. I appreciate that about diamonds. I still can’t imagine one costing a life.
Maybe there are simply some people to whom diamonds don’t speak, and I’m one of those individuals.
The American Museum of Natural History does a very poor job of making me care about the diamond or appreciate it. They present a few examples of jewelry and a couple I find interesting but the photographs are poor. I rememer having looked at a website of the work of Faberge once and doing a search I come to a page at The Best of Russia which features some of Faberge’s work. And the imperial diamond tiara of Catherine the Great. It’s beautiful, all 5000 diamonds of it. Yes, some stunning creations on that page. Going beyond it to Imperial Style, certainly, these are beautiful rooms, amazing craft. Incredible what humans are capable of dreaming. And conceiving. When I was growing up, in school I was sold such extravegamce as civilization at its pinnacle, leisure affording reign to the imagination. As if at the other end of that balance wasn’t a terrifying cost someone else was paying.
Oh, there was a bit of a punitive edge, an acknowledgement that too much could be a bad thing. If you didn’t live in America. In America it was just good old free capitalism prosperity.
But I’m talking about diamonds.
A diamond isn’t just a diamond, of course, not when it reaches human hands. It becomes a symbol as well.
The American Museum of Natural History give this early legend about diamonds:
Aristotle says that no one except Alexander ever reached the place where the diamond is produced. This is a valley, connected with the land Hind. The glance cannot penetrate to its greatest depths and serpents are found there, the like of which no man hath seen, and upon which no man can gaze without dying. However, this power endures only as long as the serpents live, for when they die the power leaves them . . . Now, Alexander ordered that an iron mirror should be brought and placed at the spot where the serpents dwelt. When the serpents approached, their glance fell upon their own image in the mirror, and this caused their death. Hereupon, Alexander wished to bring out the diamonds from the valley, but no one was willing to undertake the descent. Alexander therefore sought counsel of the wise men, and they told him to throw down a piece of flesh into the valley. This he did, the diamonds became attached to the flesh, and the birds of the air seized the flesh and bore it up out of the valley. Then Alexander ordered his people to pursue the birds and to pick up what fell from the flesh.
Cecil Rhodes and others would call me a savage for not getting the diamond which conducts heat so that if you hold it to your lips (so I read) it feels cold and collects the warmth from your lips. It “robs your lips” of their heat is how the American Museum of Natural History puts it, in their attempt to get me to appreciate the diamond. I think of this when I read of the diamonds attaching to the flesh, the scavenger birds descending and gripping the dead flesh in their talons and rising, the people following the birds to pick up the diamonds as the dead flesh released them.
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