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Saturday 23 February 2013

Miracles Of Life

Okay there's Danica Patrick. And there's now also Lauren Stojackovic. She's the 30 year-old female (very 'mature age' for an apprentice!) apprentice jockey who just won the million-dollar Blue Diamond Stakes which is the richest Australian race for Two-Year Old Race Horses. And it was an outstanding, and a clever ride, notwithstanding the horse is a champion.

I have to admit I've been 'riding' this horse for several months now and I always believed that it could, and would, win the Blue Diamond.
Stojackovic on Miracles Of Life

Perhaps you are someone who cares neither about diamonds nor race horses but if you have an open mind let me explain very briefly a few things:

There are horse and then there are HORSES! Same goes for diamonds too. Today there are too many tricks and simulants and fakes and there are also drugged athletes and (there is) cheating at sports. All that kind of thing frankly takes away the inherent thrill and excitement in rare and unique performances. A diamond - a cut diamond - is a performance; the way the edges throw fire and the way the crystal ricochets light is how the diamond 'performs' after it has been through an artist's and an engineer's hands.

There were tears aplenty at the race track today. The rider's father was on course and he couldn't stop himself as his daughter flew across the line in front. The trainer was a battling virtual unknown against some of the world's best international trainers.

A natural, mined blue diamond;
can't get this out of a test-tube
And the horse is rather small...

And that's about the only diminutive thing I can say about this thoroughbred. One thing you should know about all race horses is that they get their speed from the mother's side (what's called the dam's side) and this particular animal's mother was by one of Australia's greatest ever speedsters - Rory's Jester. Rory's Jester is one of the top three or four all-time greatest sprinters in Australian racing history. It was a brutally efficient, undefeatable hulk, although a show-pony style of reddish blonde-coloured thing.

And this modern version 'Miracles Of Life' looks visually similar and destroyed her rivals today in the same contemptuous manner, racing up to the leaders authoritatively at the final bend and muscling ahead and then blasting away into the pages of illustrious history. This is a great horse. The jockey is reported to have whispered to the horse just before the start that there was about a minute for them now between being a really good horse and a truly great horse.

If you know anything about horse racing then you know that race horses think, and feel, and have a warrior spirit and enormous courage and incredible will to run fast and a generous pride in winning which they share with everyone who cares about them.

Okay you might not have the same sentiment about horse racing and the animals and all of that racing folklore - not everyone is into this game... But you can't know about life unless you know things that are somewhat similar - peculiar, almost unscientific, sentimental things that seem to defy logic. Except they never ever do. People just don't want to believe reality, however; they are so hell bent on defining the world in some way they think will be able to be put in a test tube no matter what.

Best,
Calvin J. Bear

Monday 18 February 2013

That Colourless Stone


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.
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.
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!