Photo by Rinck Content Studio on Unsplash

Diamonds: Deconstructing ‘What Is’ from What is Imagined

“We have only to speak of an object to think we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it.” — Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire

A working title of the foregoing was “the psychoanalysis of diamond”. I prefer this title in many ways, but it also comes off as a bit presumptuous being that I am by no means a professional in the schools of psychology nor particularly psychoanalysis, but nevertheless, here we are. Despite the actual title, the essay proceeds from my preferred initiate.

Why “psychoanalysis”? As Bachelard suggests in the epigraph of this essay, the object that we choose suggests more about ourselves as the one who has chosen it than it does about the object itself. On an Earth with, for all intents and purposes, a veritably infinite array of options for which to choose what is meaningful to our cultures and what is not, we might ask: is it that diamonds are as appealing to the eye as they are due to some intrinsic fact concerning the nature of diamond, or is it that we have evolved to see diamonds, as rare as they are, as they are? A wonder to the eye, they are. Not mere granite are they. And what can be said about marble that is not swiftly outdone by what can be said about diamond?

Diamond certainly occupies a curious place in our minds. As metaphor it might be used in a variety of different ways, some of them apparently contradictory such as being a metaphor for purity or, conversely, superficiality in its relation to luxury and elegance and then pageantry and theatricality. That being said, diamond has gained these connotations, these symbolic pregnancies, due to its historical use and what that use has suggested to the culture at large and about those who have chosen it as an important artifact or pinnacle of some kind by which to focus attention.

Diamond has attained a certain height in the hierarchy of earthly artifacts; a height that appeals to our greatest concerns on, for instance, the ordering of the value of money or character. Though, again, diamond is simultaneously suggestive of character defects concerning authenticity. However often we might deem the carriers of diamond as inauthentic, they are very rarely associated with seediness or down right unwholesomeness but, rather, elegance and sophistication. But the inauthenticity suggests a proneness to lying, because diamond is a symbol and as a symbol it can be used, and often is used as a mask, a disguise for what we know to be the case about all humans: that we are subject to the undignified circumstances of death, of defecation, of a sexuality that has inherited an unduly repressive and wholly archaic biblical mindset. The diamond suggests permanence in a world of impermanence. Without a doubt, whatever is permanent surely could not be subject to such earthly embodiments. What is permanent occupies a place in the formal world, transcending space and time, as perhaps a god might. We may thank Plato for such an idea. However useful it may be for so much of our endeavors in logic, for instance, it has reached its latitude here in the earthly realm of what does actually come and go. Though we might, nonetheless, say that despite the brute fact of impermanence, diamond can certainly appear to the human reckoning as an artifact of seeming supernatural character.

These dichotomies might point to a further point which is that a singular attribute may be, let us say, noble in and of itself, it is nevertheless not capable of holding to or ought not hold to the in and of itself under all circumstances, which is to say that an attribute used effectively under one circumstance — if adhered to too rigorously — becomes a point of weakness or stagnation under another circumstance. For instance, purity — a rather important metaphorical aspect of diamond — suggests innocence which, furthermore, suggests naivety and then ignorance. Is there a further degradation? Perhaps ignorance at an extreme is suggestive of not mere ignorance but a person’s desire to preserve and defend out of ignorance precisely what that person is most ignorant of.

And if we are to still follow Bachelard’s epigraph, perhaps there is something worth following in relation to purity. Though very near to pure diamond itself may be, it is not perfectly pure and perfection — however it manifests, whether in metaphor or in our sincere attempts to accomplish a task thusly — is a tyranny to anything that did not attain perfection.

The issue here is not that we have attained what is good but that we expect more of good than it need be. Indeed³, what we expect is perfection, and what we get is tyranny. In perfection, mere goodness becomes detestable, sacrilege, or, at best, apparent laziness. But what is perfection, really? What is the expectation that it has placed on our minds, our habits, our relationships? Is this not the greatest fault of the mind: to imagine a better world but to be self-deluded in our capacity to attain it, that we can imagine a world and desire such a world and be expectant of a world that can never be nor has ever been?

In every sense of the word, the idea — for it is merely an idea — of perfection is a tyranny of the mind, not merely in the most fundamental aspects of our relationship to ourselves but also how there is absolutely no other way to acquire deeper knowledge or skills than by error.

Even here. The word error is balanced in our minds with the anguish that we had failed to be less than what we can imagine, that we had not lived up to our own expectations. And yet under what circumstance has error not revealed the knowledge we most needed and, further, the knowledge we most avoided? How much suffering might have been assuaged had we called error something more appealing when we had encountered it the first time before life had, let’s say, chewed us up and spit us out? How easily we might have assimilated an error under such circumstances, and thus learned from it.

The diamond holds a very unique position in the mind of humanity. It is pregnant with much that humanity ascribes to the artifacts of culture, much that humanity values, and much that it would do well to value less or not at all. The diamond, as any symbol, is pregnant with the historical weight of its use, and so by its use the living fact of what we call diamond is subsumed by story, by narrative.

To understand our relationship to diamond and what it represents to us, to our stories, and to the manner in which we use them to tell new stories in the hopes of better navigating our world, we might first ask, simply, what is a diamond?

Briefly, diamond is a rather small, compact geologic formation. Under immense pressure and heat the elements other than carbon are pressed from the scene of the formation. What remains is something very near to being strictly, only carbon. Its compact nature is what lends to its crystalline structure. The structure occurs because of the nearness of the atoms. The atoms order themselves in a manner that appears rather rational but in truth they could not have been ordered in any other way due to how compressed the atoms are. There is literally nowhere else for them to go. At depths from the Earth’s surface reaching 500 miles, the pressure diamond experiences in its formation is equal to 100,000 atmospheres and temperatures of approximately 5,000 degrees Celsius. It forms within a rocky substance known as kimberlite. Some of these kimberlite deposits “explode” toward the surface where it is mined or found in alluvial deposits. Diamond is the most pure naturally occurring substance on Earth. There are many uses of diamond due to its hardness, but most recognizably, diamond possesses a certain beauty that the human eye cannot easily deny.

These basic facts in mind, the most notable quality of diamond is that the attributes of it and how it forms have brought to bear a functionally pure geologic artifact. It is its purity that lends to its hardness, its beauty and, therefore, its value. And needless to say, value is the concern. As with any symbol, the greater its symbolic weight in the culture, the greater its value or lack thereof, for there are certainly types of symbols that possess what might be termed a negative value. Though as already mention diamond does possess negative connotations in our culture it further possesses kinds of positive value and arguably its greatest value is that which concerns money. And it is money and the manner in which diamond appreciates monetary value that we turn next.

In the ascertaining of value, the gemologist examines the diamond for imperfections. The typical imperfections of a gem or diamond are known as inclusions and striations. Inclusions are minerals other than the primary that have been trapped in the diamond during its formation; striations, on the other hand, are grooves, scratches or marks of any kind on its surface or that have occurred within the gem as a result of its formation or handling.

Since a gem could not have been formed — and therefore its value ascertained — for instance, without inclusions, we might say that the fact of imperfection itself predicates the gemologist’s profession since the gemologist’s profession is in essence the determining of the type and value of a gem. In other words, a gem exists as a fact before it is thought of and, therefore, used as a gem. Needless to say, the gem as it is — cracks, striations, inclusions and all — precede the terms of the gem appraisal and, therefore, its value.

We might reiterate here that the perfect diamond is, for all intents and purposes, non-existent since such an ideal must predicate the living fact of any gem for it to be the case. And here we have an important predicating matter concerning our symbolic relationship to diamond, for a symbol exists at a remove from its counterpart in the living facts of the world itself, that is to say that a symbol points to its counterpart in the living world.

The living world is composed of the brute facts of existence itself: the sun, the stars, the trees, the rocks; these names are mere place holders in the mind that exist irrespective of their symbolic inheritance we have bestowed upon them. But it is its symbolic value that appreciates its worth in our minds. Indeed, the sun is arguably the most symbolically pregnant fact of our world, for it is by the sun that we see and so it is by the sun that our imaginations are colored and, no doubt, that we or anything here is even known to exist at all. Indeed, “You’re an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself, exploring itself,” as Alan Watts said in his lecture “Still the Mind”.

We might say, indeed it seems very near to the truth of things, that the closer to the ideal of our symbolic valuation the brute fact is, the greater its symbolic value, i.e. it’s monetary value as far as diamonds are concerned for our purposes. But monetary value is a very superficial way of ordering value, however “functional” it may be in our culture. For functional it may be, appreciating value purely on the monetary order contains a kind of value that feels rather empty and, in a way, painful in relation to the above quotes.

So let us go further in deconstructing the conflation of money and value in relation to diamond. In order to ascertain the value of a gem, it is clear that we must understand a gem in terms of its living reality, which is that no gem exists according to an ideal, but that the fact of any gem precedes our valuing of it. That being so the gemologist must determine the value of a gem not by whether it has failed to be perfect — since that would presuppose living fact of any diamond and that is an impossibility — but that there are imperfections and to what extent the stone has subsumed those imperfections in its formation and whether that summation aligns with our preconceived ideal of value.

And here we have an important consideration, for a diamond without doubt possesses a particular kind of beauty. It is difficult to say precisely what beauty is or how the human eye comes to be attracted to it so. It may well be that humans are simply attracted to shiny things in the same way that we are attracted to the shimmering glance of another’s eye. Another’s gaze is an important aspect of our social circumstances. It is by another’s gaze, however momentary, that we assess much about what may or may not be developed by our social acumen. Indeed, the noticing of that shimmering of another’s glance has spelled the beginnings of every love affair and every war even in the furthest historical corner that can be conceived to relate to it.

Though we might note how extraordinarily difficult and rare the geologic qualities that are requisite to the formation of a diamond are. Might we think differently if the reverse were true of granite? Though such is the case in one person’s life, attraction to the shimmer in another’s eye might well have an evolutionary origin that is no less applicable to a geologic time scale, and no less seismic in its implications as the aftermath of a war might be compared to an abrupt geologic shift or, furthermore, what anxieties might be dispelled by the ending of a war due to the consummation of a love affair. But that is only an interesting question with no certain answer.

Nevertheless, the digression does reveal a further interesting consideration concerning purity in contrast to that which is not, for the diamond is a remarkably pure geologic artifact. Might we then say that it be purity of some kind that allows the aforementioned shimmering to occur and thus what provokes our own glancing eye?

Perhaps, it seems we might at this point tackle the question of purity more straightforwardly. What is purity in relation to a diamond? It is a not uncommon assumption to say of the diamond that the closer the diamond is to being composed entirely of carbon, the closer it is to being unflawed in its purity. But, according to the Gemological Institute of America, “Diamond is the only gem made of a single element: It is typically about 99.95 percent carbon.” Which is a statement in conflict with itself, for however near to pure a diamond may be, it is nonetheless not purity incarnate, which is to say that it is not perfectly pure, however functionally pure it may be. But, of course, functionality is an attribute of what it means to be in the world as a living fact.

Might we also say that however alike I am to humans in general, it is my difference however minute they might be, that define me, or rather what give me a greater resolution against the social fabric in which we all exist. And in this sense, we champion sameness in the expectation of purity while simultaneously diminishing what would have otherwise giving our persons its greatest clarity in relation to our fellow humans. Indeed, what a tragedy it would be to be more alike, to be more normalized in an ocean of normal people.

And we can see that the same bares out in relation to the diamond. At a glance one is inclined to say that the closer to pure the stone is, the greater its beauty, which implicates a kind of sameness in how we determine what is and is not beautiful. The rule being: the nearer to pure the diamond is, the greater its beauty and, therefore, the greater its value. This begs the question: can it be that purity is what transmutes value in the monetary sense to the stone? And how does any artifact acquire value in the monetary sense or otherwise?

Value in the monetary sense correlates with the value we grant to life. The time spent on a particular task carries an expectation of compensation because it is our life and the experience we have gained or hoped to have gained elsewhere that we have sacrificed for the task in question. Money is what compensates us for the relinquishment of the other paths for the one we did. But neither money nor diamond possess an existential corollary in and of themselves to how or why we value our lives as individuals, although they do possess an imagined corollary to it, and we in our western culture agree to partake of this correlating narrative.

And so, we have explained value in relation to diamond, but we have not examined how or why we value purity. It seems that purity is pregnant with a kind of narrative in the same way that money correlates to the narrative of life. You see, there is value in purity in a similar way that there is value in innocence or goodness because we might have chosen thievery or malice as morals to live by instead, and so our culture compensates us with social value for having not chosen these latter two paths.

To be innocent or good is to be without the blemishes of a life lived ignobly². And, furthermore, this narrative of purity is a corollary to life for life itself subsists in a narrative form, does it not? It seems by this examination that we value purity for its imagined narrative correlation to a life well lived, which is to say that purity is a term that possesses a symbolic weight to what it means to be a human thusly leading a well-lived life, and we as a collective have agreed to partake of this narrative. Indeed, to throw away a handful of diamonds even if I disagree with the symbolic value imbued to them does not negate the symbolic value that so many others have imbued them with. And so, purity is of value because we value life and, most importantly, life well-lived among and with other people.

Though purity in the sense described above denotes a positive tone to our narratives, whether of life or those we have invented, there is a further step in need of being taken because all strengths become weaknesses if relied upon too completely because to revolve one’s life about purity as near as one can, is to revolve one’s life about perfection and — in much the same way beauty is lost when it is subsumed by a categorical sameness — therefore, is to be subsumed by the impossibility of an ideal.

And here in the Hope Diamond we see the living reality — apparently — of the summation of these aforementioned ideals. When in view of the famous Hope Diamond, one is struck immediately by the absorbing nature of the gem. But the most striking aspect of the gem — its dazzling blue — is not a matter of the gem’s elemental purity, but rather a lack thereof, for the dark-grayish blue is, in fact, a characteristic imbued by trace amounts of boron. Therefore, to bring the diamond a shade closer to pure carbon would be to extinguish the diamonds most alluring characteristic — it’s dazzling blue — and, thus, rendering the diamond a transparent white. (Here it might be noted that that aforementioned .05% impurity typical of diamond is a crucial, differentiating aspect of this particular diamond.)

Though to use the qualifying description of white is itself inaccurate because it relates too closely to the ideal. A diamond that is capable of holding color at all suggests imperfection because it is the imperfection within and about the diamond that light is refracted against so that we are able to see a diamond at all. Such inclusions, that is trace elements embedded in the diamond upon its formation, are a factual matter of any diamond whether blue as the Hope Diamond or “transparent white” as another more typical diamond.

And if we are somewhat imaginative and yet somewhat logical, we might conjecture a further point and say that a perfectly pure diamond would be perfectly transparent to the human eye. Therefore, a perfectly pure diamond is quite literally nothing more than an apparition, a ghost of a once living fact because perfection is, simply put, a figment of the imagination. In terms of the diamond, perfection does not simply mean that it is unseen but rather that it does not exist, for s far as the gemologist is concerned, the value of a diamond is what composes its essence to the human eye — which is to say that a diamond that cannot be valued or let us say is beyond value is not only unreal but is utterly meaningless.

We, likewise, have come to appreciate the flaws of the Hope Diamond not because they are flaws in the typical sense but because they are idiosyncratic of the unique qualities of its individual beauty — a beauty that transgresses the ideal of categorical sameness. The blue is, in fact, its greatest flaw and, simultaneously, its greatest mark of value. What we appreciate most about the Hope Diamond is the manner by which it transcends its flaws and in its transcendence we recognize the greatness of its beauty. Indeed, a handful of white diamonds is simply a handful of white diamonds. However valuable each may be in the monetary sense, much is lost when it is clear there are so many others indistinguishable from the first.

In this sense, the Hope Diamond’s blueness cannot be considered a flaw at all if our criteria of value assumes “flaw” as a prerequisite of the judgment, and, therefore, the word “flaw” has been rendered meaningless by the fact of our appreciation of the beauty that sets it apart from so many other diamonds. For the fact of it being blue, of it containing imperfection, is instead what ignites the attribute of virtue, of beauty and so we value it all the more because of its flaws and the manner by which it has used them to be what otherwise would have called its beauty into question.

Though I am sure at this point the reader has made a metaphorical relationship between the above and how that might relate to us each as individuals, but it would be something closer to a living fact to make it all the more real by actually stating it. By accepting the inevitability of flaw, we diminish our preoccupation with it, and so we are then able to find insight into ourselves through our knowing of its existence in ourselves, and thereby we may transcend what would have otherwise have impeded or gone utterly unrealized in our capacity for transcendence of ourselves. But if we do not recognize our flaws, then there is nothing for the light to refract against, and so we are forever trapped in a world of apparition and imagination of who we really are and what we could have been if only we could see ourselves more clearly.

For if we, for instance, suffer from depression and the requisite low self-esteem, then endeavoring to understand what a low self-esteem is and what it means to have confidence in one’s self — confidence that is at a remove from egoism — might one be all the stronger for having traversed firsthand the route to confidence and the trademark signs that would lead one back to a lack of it? In this instance, would not that person then be stronger than one who has never suffered from depression because the one who has suffered has effected a more intimate knowledge of its mechanisms and so are under a stronger impression of how to see themselves out upon its recurrence?

To be clear, the idea of flaw seems to predicate the existence of any individual entity, for its counterpart perfection when it is an ideal is a consideration about one’s essence. But this is an inaccurate formulation according to the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who said that “existence precedes essence”. And in this sense the living reality of the diamond must and does precede our consummate idea of flaw, which is a quality deemed essential to it only after the diamond has already been of existence.

So, might we choose a more appropriate rendering of the diamond’s qualities and — No! further still — of ourselves? A rendering that does not subjugate and funnel our human capacity for freedom of choice by an untenable idea such as perfection? Flawed as we deem ourselves to be, what human does not possess flaws, and if all humans possess flaws, then perhaps we have formulated the conception of ourselves in a too fantastical way. Perhaps then there is existential purpose in our “flaws” and the idea of flaw might better suit our circumstances as not flaws but something that is indicative of a way forward, a passage to greater depth or strength — a poros (poros is a Greek word which means passage or way), for certainly to shine light upon our “weakness” is to show us the way forward, which is to say that when we see that we do not possess confidence we have begun to see the passage or way to it.

When we see the gem’s blue and we are struck by how mesmerizing it is. We perhaps even think to ourselves: “What purity of color! What beauty even. It is a wonder of nature to have been constructed so harmoniously with itself.” Little knowing that upon closer scrutiny its most dazzling attribute is in fact a degradation of purity, though we appreciate it nonetheless, for it has subsumed its supposed flaws and become an art onto itself.

Though flaws we had deemed them to be, perhaps by shining the light upon them we will see them more clearly and know that in fact, in living fact, that our flaws are so integral to what it means to be human that we might instead recognize them not as flaws but as what makes us whole, what makes us human, and there is much good and meaningful perfection in that. Otherwise, we might reside in the world as little more than figments of our own imagination. To be whole is to both accept that you are subject to error and that accepting it is to be in possession of the desire to transcend it. Truly, the fear of error is error itself, as even the most pure diamond will put on display for those that would look.

And in this sense, we have deconstructed our relationship to diamonds, to monetary value, to purity, to perfection. From here we can recapitulate our relationship to these ideals. This essay is very much a study in unexamined ideals and how they predicate the narrative patterns of our life. By learning to understand ourselves in relation to such narratives, how to deconstruct ourselves out of them, we can instead direct ourselves toward standards that are actually tenable, that are actually livable so that our ideals — as impractical as they are — do not predicate our lives and our relationships.

Indeed, the power of the human reality is choosing the life we would like to live as opposed to living the life of the narratives we have merely woke up in, or have been thrown into by no fault of our own.

Footnotes

1. the definition of this ancient Greek word is attributed to Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=po/ros
2. That being said, I do not want to get too far away from our topic by having to define every term so we will restrict our inquiries any further to only purity and hope that you are quite capable of expounding further by your imagination on such terms as ignoble or blemish.
3. I use the words “indeed” and “for” a lot and I use them interchangeably. Bear with me. I am the only person editing this, and to seek perfection to assuage mere irritation would mean that I would never finish anything ;).