Someone walks into a big empty shop –
there's nothing on the walls, very limited furniture, smooth neat
bare stone floor, a little bit of light coming through a single
not-too-large window pane.
In the centre of the room is a four
foot high plinth with a small square of cream-coloured ceramic tile
set in it like a kind of a built-in serving plate.
In the middle of this serving plate
square of plain, cream-coloured ceramic tile, sits a single rather
small colourless chunk of crystal much like a little translucent
rock.
What are the feelings, the ranges of
emotion, that rush or flow through the visitor?
Most likely absolutely none!
Cynics say that diamonds are all about
the marketing. Which can also be a way of saying that in the absence
of other things that connect with the crystal to render its
meaningfulness to the observer, and in the absence of specific
context, the thing itself has little or no intrinisic function, and
otherwise might even have little or no intrinsic value either.
And I think Western jewellery shops
make that kind of mistake – they tend to have this austere, almost
brutalist and stark style about them, which is to do with
contemporary ideas about architecture; but I feel this does not serve
the expression of what diamonds are about too well at all.
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| Inside the Chow Tai Fook store, HK |
However in Asia, particularly in Far
East Asia and also specifically in Hong Kong and modern China too,
the whole style of diamond vending shops is characteristically very
different to the style that obtains in diamond shops of the West. And
personally I find I can only buy a diamond in a Chinese diamond store
or one which is similarly arranged. Even in South Africa where I
spend time regularly and know one or two authentic diamondaires, the
feel of the diamond galleries tends a little toward the Western style.
Let me describe to you the difference between the two:
You walk into a Chinese jeweller and
you are greeted by rows and rows of glass cabinets at waist-height
stocked with rings and bangles and necklaces and loose stones too -
though mainly just rings – all winking out and reflecting light
from the powerful downlights and cabinet lights that are simply
everywhere. The whole place is hot and bright. And from here you are
swept away into the Aladdin story, really, because it consists of
first noticing one fantastic, bright and enchanting stone, only to be
thrown into confusion upon next seeing another, even as much as five
times more attractive than that first. And on and on it goes and
eventually you find yourself being taken up into the heights of
glittering expense and even to a kind of selfish, ego-driven
Luciferian grandeur. If money is no object to you, there is almost no
limit to the hubris which you can indulge in by simply paying for it.
But that is really about the moral dubiousness of money itself
though.
Well, I can't tell you that there is an
absolute rule that you must only ever buy a 1 carat or greater D IF
with an exceptionally-good aesthetic cut quality...
I can tell you whatever personal
scheming reason you have for buying a diamond is in fact the only
truly significant thing you should think about as you make a
purchase: sitting with a very well-groomed woman in a slightly
darkened dinner room in which there are other rich and self-important
people, it will benefit you to have a diamond on your friend
somewhere visible that possesses a lot of scintillation and grabs the
squinting eyes of the big-headed. If that's what you want to do.
Nowadays of course diamonds are worn in all sorts of places; not
necessarily only those visible ones...
Ultra wealthy people in history have
bought or acquired enormous and otherwise fairly stupid stones all of
which carry some folkloric aspect with them wherever they go – and
mostly they went underground somewhere along the line among very very
very private people. I have a piece of the old Sancy but therein
hangs a tale and I certainly wouldn't admit to such a thing publicly,
so here, I am telling you a lie of course...
But I like to go to
Chinese shops to buy diamonds. I like to see just what an amazing
diversity of mindsets there can be, and I like to use the diversity
of the small colourless stones as symbols of the myriad biases and
prejudices that can almost insanely grip the minds of individuals and
force them even to part with significant money as responses to mere
folklore, nonsense, and otherwise virtual nothingness imbued with
'brilliance dispersion and scintillation' through manufactured human
complication.
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| The new Faberge Campaign by Mario Testino |
My own fantastical
biases and prejudices are not particularly odd: I imagine it is true
what they say that diamonds are the only stones that reproduce
sexually! To me diamonds are about money power and sex. These are
things that are rarely found to be completely understood by humans
anywhere, but are in fact exercised almost everywhere and rather
indescriminately too by all people, and who almost universally each
individually also assume they are at very minimum, the world's
ultimate leading expert on these matters, and if only someone else
noticed it, or if only they had but an extra ten million dollars to
lord over everyone else, then no doubt the clarity of the situation
would also be observed by others!
Oh
boy. Only a certain sense of humour saves the human spirit from being
as direly unbearable as it might often be. I don't have those 'set'
jokes that go with demonstrating a sense of humour, but I sure do
laugh ironically when I think about paying big money for decent
diamonds – it isn't that I couldn't do it or haven't done it; it's
the fact that the surrounding context and all the other stuff that
goes with the scintillations in the darkened restaurant are all
the rest of the necessary
personal expenses to me that the salesperson isn't thinking about
when they give me the steep price on the stone I'm looking at!
