Coast Range. Nick Neely
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Название: Coast Range
Автор: Nick Neely
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781619028593
isbn:
Which explains why I have a strange desire to place this stone on my tongue.
“It is believed that to look upon the agate is to rest the eyes,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “If held in the mouth, agate quenches the thirst.”
Not surprisingly, the amygdalae are those lumps of brain matter, one buried in each hemisphere, responsible for long-term memory consolidation and the sense of smell, among other things. They let us remember the ocean air.
Here’s one that reminds me of a lima bean. It’s what’s known as a “fancy agate,” creamy and nontransparent, but laced with a web of orange lines: broken, and then refilled.
The act of collecting is often a psychic pleasure or necessity, but of course it can also be a genuine investment: You can spring for paintings, antiques, cars, and diamonds.
To collect semiprecious fragments would seem an act of protest, then, of withdrawal.
But if collecting springs from a wish to gain control, to possess, then perhaps to gather unique stones is to coerce the earth by holding some of its finest specimens hostage.
Walking below the wrackline in Yachats, I snatched up a perfect, glowing agate. Nearly pellucid, with a hint of green. The size and hue of a peeled grape at Halloween.
But inside drift gauzy clouds.
It is like a glass fishing float washed in from Japan, where they adore the miniature. Where they build pedestals to cradle their “viewing stones,” which pose as mountains.
The original crystal ball clearly must have been agate, for it already contains visions within. Rorschachian shapes. Lifelines.
Coincidentally, it’s been found that those people who respond unusually to inkblot tests tend to have larger amygdalae, suggesting those regions are central also to creativity.
In agates, people imagine tiny wings. Insects in amber.
When I found that smooth, sea-green stone and turned to show her, a step behind, she gasped, took it into her hands. “It’s yours,” I said, and immediately I was jealous.
She keeps the agate close to her, now, in the breast pocket of the down jacket she wears as she strides down the brisk avenues of New York City. At night, it hangs in the closet while her heart beats beside me.
I’ve read somewhere that a person’s true appreciation or understanding of a work of art is revealed by how carefully, how purposefully, he holds it.
The heart forms in the cavity of the chest and waits for its collector.
Just north of town, we visited a small cove along a well-traveled beach trail. On a crescent of sand, one family stood by the waves and then raced upslope, laughing, just ahead of the tumbling froth. In the evening light, we found bits of agate even on the pathway, gems stepped on and worn down by passing flip-flops.
One of them, the pebble I now pinch between my thumb and forefinger, is scarlet through and through. A mouse’s heart, no larger. It has a network of veins.
Carnelian, I’ve learned, is a type of orange to fiery red chalcedony. The name suggests “flesh,” but the word is actually a sixteenth-century corruption of “cornelian,” after the bitter cornel cherry. The stone is supposedly healing, grounding, stimulating. As you might imagine, it’s said to enhance blood flow.
I remember the night I found her: It was late, but I could hardly tear my eyes away. We danced together in an old Victorian house, never imagining all these years to come.
Perhaps it was the way we caught the light. What if it had shone differently?
Collecting, I follow my instincts, but I look up, now and then, to take my bearings so as not to overlook any ground: always the worry that the one plot you miss, the one niche you glance at too casually, will inevitably hold the greatest discovery.
Throughout history, agates have been carved into cameos: an oval broach or pendant with a delicate and detailed portrait, often of the beloved in profile. This carving is done at the edge of two layers in an agate so that the background is one color, the relief another.
Large agates are sculpted into cups and figurines, or simply halved to serve as bookends. Others are cut so delicately that they look like a slice of smoked salmon.
In The Book of Agates, from which a few items of this collection have been mined, the author and rockhound Lelande Quick understands when he writes, “There are few thrills to equal the satisfaction of personally finding a beautiful agate or other quartz gem and then processing it yourself into a gem of great beauty.”
Another memory: Out for agates one morning in Yachats, I spotted a bald eagle on the beach beside a rock. But I suspected it wasn’t a rock. Through my binoculars, I watched as the ivory-naped bird picked and tore at the mass with yellow talons as large as my hands. When it flew, I walked across the sand and discovered a headless seal pup. Squatting, I reached out to touch its fur and feel the skin of its flipper. I pinched a claw and its soft sheath slipped off in my grasp. Now it also rests in my bowl.
All these stones, heavy in my hand—somehow, it is they who carry me away. They are an instinctual, if not witless attempt to hold experience by the experience of holding.
Perhaps such a desire is what Emerson means by “Guard well your spare moments.”
Or is it simply, as Benjamin writes, the “spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions”? Those days, just before or after a full moon, when the ocean rises and falls to its extremes, stripping back the sand to awaken gravel beds buried for centuries?
Oh, spare me, you say. But how can I?
There is a fascination that wells up inside me. The Latin fascinat means “bewitched.” But saying it aloud now, I hear mainly “facet.”
As she turned her face in the low western light of a Yachats evening, she looked young and striking. Her skin seemed carnelian in the orange glow across the Pacific, and her laugh crashed over me, as it has so many times. We shared a beer.
But in that moment, I think I also understood that she and I would continue to change at the hands of the carving: the stiff breeze, in good times and in bad, those shifting sands.
“I adore wearing gems,” Elizabeth Taylor said, “but not because they are mine. You can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it.”
Galileo wrote that we covet precious stones because we are afraid: “It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water. Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etc. are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire СКАЧАТЬ