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0750dec
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almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.
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jewelry
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I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.
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Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors." But color--like sound and scent--is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe--and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them."
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In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: 'like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead, like the red lotus, like saffron, like the resin of certain trees, like the eyes of the Greek partridge or the Indian crane...and like the interior of the half-blown water lily.' With so many gorgeous descriptive possibilities it is curious tha..
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In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own.
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Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them--if we want to see it--there is blood, dust, lo..
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What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.
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in Pliny's time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered--as many did until the seventeenth century when this 'fact' was still being quoted as a gemological curiosity--how anyone could have thought to experiment with such a thing ... He did not realize that the story was probably a metaphor, perhaps with the same root as the Christian symbol of the Lamb of God. A diamon..
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Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing. And when we believe it, perhaps it is true.
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Once upon a time Apache land would have stretched farther than the horizon, through New Mexico almost to Texas, but as white men found gold, silver, turquoise, and copper beneath its surface they carved up the territory like children sneaking to the fridge and slicing off a chocolate cake bit by bit: hoping at first that the loss wouldn't be noticed but ultimately not really caring.
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Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently--as the Scottish pearl-fishers, too, had learned to their regret. These creatures are a barometer of how we are treating our planet. Sometimes in our greed to make them produce pretty things for our pleasure we forget that they deserve our respect.
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The probable reason that nobody at Mikimoto wanted a writer to go to the pearl farms of Ago...was because something terrible was happening in that bay. Since the 1990s, pollution has been pouring into the water, partly as a result of careless husbandry but also from untreated sewage from all the hotels that bring people in to enjoy the 'unspoiled wilderness'. No wonder the Japanese farmers were pulling out their oysters after just nine mont..
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The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonishing in its banality.
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Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.
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958a557
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But color--like sound and scent--is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe--and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them. While
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Art history is so often about looking at the people who made the art; but I realized at that moment there were also stories to be told about the people who made the things that made the art. My
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White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz--in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3
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The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity--like all Creation--was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potential.
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When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as "white." When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as "colored."
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The best way I've found of understanding this is to think not so much of something "being" a color but of it "doing" a color."
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Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World's Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet
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Gloria
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Emily Kame Kngwarreye
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