Diamond marbles wearing you

A ball of glass and within it a captured sail that has lost its moorings, rolling, rolling, gone… This is the reason why I never played marbles as a child. I saw marbles as vessels carrying some magical moment within. I could not stand it when my then kid brother rolled them, knocking them over and making them disappear in sullen, burrowed holes. The trauma to my imagination was further abraded by his coded victory grunt. The final shattering came from the sound of crested glass gnashing in his pockets afterwards.

I feel the same way now about precious stones cased in their settings in rings, necklaces, amulets or earrings. There is just so much history in precious stones that to encounter them in someone’s neck, ring finger or ankle, sets me in my mind’s journey beyond the Earth’s surface.

Almost all precious stones or gems are found on the Earth’s surface brought there by mining or by some natural processes such as faulting, folding, large-scale uplift or volcanism. The depths from which these processes can carry these gems can go as far as 400 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. Thus, precious stones are really encounters with vessels that bear the accretion of over three billion years of the Earth’s story. There are multiple ways by which precious stones are formed. My fascination lies in its deepest, in the Earth’s deep mantle, 50 to 200 kilometers below the Earth’ surface, where temperatures reach 900 to 1,300 degrees C. There we find rather ordinary-looking rocks called volcanic kimberlites that carry diamonds with them. They are brought to the surface by eruptions in speeds of as much as 10-30 kilometers per hour with the last few kilometers believed to be traversed at speeds nearing 100 kilometers per hour, otherwise those diamonds will turn into graphite. Diamonds and graphite are both pure forms of carbon, the difference between them being only the arrangement of the atoms. In diamonds, carbon atoms are linked in three-dimensional networks, while in graphite, carbon atoms are arranged in sheets. All diamonds are at least a billion years old and many of them, 3.2 billion years old, much younger than the kimberlite rocks that carry them. Thus, diamonds are vessels of deep time – a detail that blows my mind about diamonds, far beyond the fire and price that the rarest of them are known for.

At the time most of these diamonds were being born a little over three billion years ago, trace amounts of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere were just being formed, bacteria was just starting to diversify, and large continents were just starting to form! In fact, the only kingdom then was the Kingdom Monera – of bacteria. It would not be until 1.7 billion years ago that the second Kingdom, Protoctista, appeared. By the time the Kingdom Animalia appeared 600 million years ago, diamonds would have been saying, "been there, done that" to the newcomer in the evolutionary idiomatic parlance.

So like most, a diamond could capture me, but under a different spell. The highbrow posture that the gem culture commands, at the very least, puzzles me. An encounter with a diamond encased in gold and its alloys actually humbles the human as a species because knowing how far closer diamonds are to the birth of this planet makes me feel like they are actually wearing me than the other way around. Just like the Earth actually wears a tree, a river, a mountain, or a recent fixation of mine, a dragon tree. Wouldn’t it just blow your mind if deep inside the precious stone you are fascinated with, was embedded your fullest moment? I guess it’s how the Earth, in one form among a multitude, expresses the fullness of its moments – in its diamonds, in its precious stones. So next time you look at a diamond, let it set you off beyond the lure of its fiery sparkle or how the industry has conditioned you.

So I seek an encounter with a diamond not for exultation in fire or brilliance but for humility, to remind me how tardy my coming has been to the surface. As for fire, I look somewhere else…