Un texte inédit écrit pour une amie, sur les bijoux. Ce qu'est un bijou, ce que ça peut, a pu ou pourrait être. Visées sur leur sens, leur pouvoir. Rédigé en Anglais, je n'ai toujours pas pris le temps de le traduire, mais je me décide tout de même à le publier en Anglais.
De nombreuses personnes sauront trouver un intérêt au moins à la lecture : se rappeler comment des choses familières ou évidentes en apparence, comme les bijoux, peuvent décliner des secrets, des caches et des possibles improbables et inattendus à l'analyse (même s'il s'agit seulement d'analyse d'impressions, d'imaginaire et de mémoire, sans documentation universitaire, comme ici).
C'est parti :
Jewels are not a mere ornamental system. Jewels are not only linked with beauty, personal aesthetics or aesthetical pleasure (the Greek root ‘aesth’ relates to sensations, before relating to aesthetics as the research of beauty, or as one social conception of beauty).
Jewels are indeed a system of status symbols: social and economic status, wealth or taste, but that's not interesting (for me) at all. In other cases, jewels can be linked with ideas, personal memories or personal decisions, and become even more symbolical than status symbol, in that way.
Of course, jewels are all that… but not only. We’re heading to the symbolical aspect, through disruption and ultimate myth. According to many intuitions, stories and voices, jewels are more. They are like tattoos, daring and hated – love-hate, a challenge and a deeply sensitive blow to finitude.
I
Affording jewels, the question of symbolical price has overshadowed the question of why we offer them, and what are they. What they could be in the myth I’m writing. Because jewels are not mere objects, no things. I think we offer jewels because they have NO price. A jewel is the mystery of being a sign, and of a sign 'being'. A sign being: that’s a glyph. I think jewels are glyphs: materialized signs, or lively signs. What is a lively sign, apart from a name? A name is a particular sign, sign of the particular, and each star has its own color. Let’s explore.
To make it very simple, first, jewels are deeply associated with spiritual identity and essence. We still perceive jewels in deeper ways even if it tends to disappear - and even if we pretend we’re not. Usually, our traditions are way beyond our understanding, so are our actions. The old meanings are not lost, because conscious elements and understanding are rarely the major part of what is transmitted. "Jewel" is a term for many things usually thought as ornamental or sexy, but I want to prove that ornament and sexy derive from deeper meanings of what is a jewel, that these deeper meanings still operate, that Jewels are not mere things - that a tattooed picture, engraved name, a tune or a piece of clothing can hold similar meanings.
A little introductory scene, surely a bit poor but a bit fun: Clara’s party. Everybody’s dressed fine, the party goes well and the guests arrive one by one, and one by one they show that they are the same and yet different, elegant yet subtle and charming. Singular and general. But suddenly: "Oh no! Lily has exactly the same dress as me!”. To what extent is it really a problem of dress? To what extent is it only a question of psychological value or feeling of self? Is that an "odd", or is that a revelation, a really fearful perspective? Does is have a stronger meaning to wear exactly the same dress?
How would you feel if someone different from you was showing up with all the same jewels you wear, or have in your arsenal? Think of your favorite jewels, even the hidden ones: the objects you cling to. If now you imagine that another girl have the same jewels, wear them, with the same intensity and “relation” – does it change anything? Maybe not, but I think it changes something.
We have the problem that our jewels are built on models and series on industrial scale, but it's not a real problem since we always keep the illusion that our jewel is unique. In fact, it may represent an anchor for beauty, the kind of beauty that defines a person, a perfection of its own kind – or let’s say a complex: unity through multiplicity, identity through change. Here: jewels represent an older way of considering the self, and a solution to the issues of self (what makes us a continuity, if wer'e all but change?). Self is a part of the world, and a mirror of the world: as such, it cannot be identical or individual, self is then a flux inside a flux, a changing object among other objects, in the large, continuous and untied flow of the world. Unless... a jewel ties it up. A knot and a portal to unity, not a soul as we usually mean it.
If the self, body and mind, is a random collection, windswept, open to slow mutations and collisions, something that changes more than something that stays the same, that is to say a multiplicity, then the node or core of self is a problem. Rings, torques, tiaras and bracelets stood for something amazing: the self as a knot, a material nexus of self. The eternal part of the knot isn’t the self: it’s the ring, the jewel. Interwoven silver bracelets.
You put your finger into your ring, that is, you interweave your concrete node of self (ring) and your changing body, but consider that the ring itself can be multiple. And it is unique: each person has a particular, singular and strange soul. In parallel, what we call a “person” can divide itself, be a complex: many voices, many destinies, many natures. The node allows you to be one even through multiplicity, and allows this multiplicity. We distinguish between soul and spirit. And cannot talk a lot about spirit… Remember: one spirit for unity of diverse, in humanity, or one unique spirit for each unit, defining each unit’s essential unity? Both can be true together: this idea is called a monad! While atoms are elementary nodes, crashing and composing everything, a monad can include other monads – a flower has a monad, each petal too, etc. Monads are not material, they are not present in space. It’s like geometrical points! They compose space but when you take one, or two, or a thousand, they have NO extension, no space! The unit of space is not spatial (geometrically speaking), and the unit of substance is not substantial (monadology). And what if the jewel was playing a similar role? What if a jewel was the spirit that is not spiritual?
But then I also see men and women (and others) as being complexes of differences. I conceive material, biological, mental and spiritual spheres as one single continuity. When you grasp this idea and go into its details, it gives you nausea or vertigo. “There are other things”, as Jorge Luis Borges puts it.
The idea is that a jewel is needed to achieve any kind of singularity through time and change, and especially to achieve its continuity through the major change which death is. Death: does it change us a lot, or does it make (us) other? Does it make other with us? Will I be myself in Heaven? Then, with the help of this little toupee or ring, the essence is a knot. But body is not accidental or secondary. It is needed too as the changing part, including personality and roles! This essential jewel or concrete essence is small and dense, a summary and the unchanging source of change. Remark that a jewel is dense, concentrated, which points at the other meaning of the word ‘essence’: the essence of a plant, for instant, like in “essential oil”. Body’s linked with this embodied link, embodied link between matter and spirit, but more: between separate realities. Your body is linked in itself by an essence that binds it together and binds it with a star: a jewel around you, crimped into you like a star in the sky (again, each one has its own color, shape and size). A destiny, maybe, but that idea is difficult to link with Christianity, even if I know people that combine them. Like stars, you don’t notice the jewels in daylight, nor the patterns they draw between bodies, you just see them at night, when they appear on the naked body, or when you put them off, in a glimpse.
After that, you cannot be surprised that in Ancient Times, people were buried (dead or alive) with every piece of jewelry. Maybe some pieces were more important than others. Maybe they all had the same purpose of differentiating identities, and anchoring these identities in outer worlds (the core surviving radical change of death, allowing for a new body to arise beyond?), but that the person could have several identities… Maybe someone could be different persons at the time, according to the “soul” he was then wearing (and the study of masks and roles in some tribes points in this direction: the shaman may not be playing a role, he may be literally another person, in his deepest being).
Pure hypothesis, but I “feel” it in my personal relationship to jewels. I cannot wear them since I’m one person, and especially since I believe in free will. The only ones that I ever bore were changing ones, ephemeral jewels: ink tattoos (a lot!), glyphs on my skin with water-ink, thread and wool bracelets (which lose dyed colors with time, lose weight and finally, break naturally, revealing that I’m more eternal than them, in an evangelical paradigm).
Which, again, doesn’t mean that there is no question of being socially valued (attractiveness or symbol of wealth) when wearing jewels.
That said, in another way, jewels are objects linked with erotism while clothes are linked with sexiness. Erotism is not about phantasizing or being sexually excited. It’s about desire in itself, and the elevation of a body beyond “bodiness”, placing it as one object of desire, or precisely “dis-placing” it in the realm of desires: the desire does not end with the object; it is not directed at the object itself. In Gustave Moreau’s paintings, Queens are only wearing jewelry, no clothes, and the feeling it gives is surreal and weird. Fascination of a deep, ancestral kind.
Thought is not universal, it is a systemic phenomenon, engraved and appearing through languages, texts, and objects too. We access to transcendence through images, but not only: through experiences, and materiality is one privileged field of experience (not experiment, here). Music has clearly this “jewel capacity” of being both purely material and purely spiritual.
Chromatic dissonances, plays on symmetry and asymmetry, materials: you might now see what I “see” in jewels: I hear music! Each star has its own color, but also its own song. A song is about waves and frequencies, rhythm and chords, and light is that too: pulsating, accretiating and waving. Colors and sounds (repetitive ancestral sounds) are the differentiating factor, the core of sameness, and the possibility of difference. But these objects are paradoxical. Firstly, they're not “ordinary” things (not functional, not replaceable nor replicable). Secondly, they're many in themselves: a unique composition, stable, however, because they are considered as such to measure change. Metronomics. Time flies, people and things pass away, but what is remaining?... Answer: the clock itself. Cycles and spheres, globes and swirling or round movements are recurring in jewels. Not a coincidence: clocks are jewels (!), and especially when attached to wristbands, with the reduction factor (a core has to be smaller than the whole, condensed, like the essence or cristallization – that's why a bigger clock is no “jewel”).
You might start to grasp what I try to evoke, that jewels stay beyond aesthetics (or under), beyond status symbols and especially far from “I get it because I want it because I like it”.
What I describe is distinct from protection amulets, enchanted objects that include jewels – so called ‘gris-gris’. I’m talking about personal objects, unity through multiplicity, and not about functional magic.
Magical objects can exist in limited numbers, roughly the same, even though incompatible with the idea of a formal model (formal meaning numerically defined, in the computer controlling unmanned machines that produce EVERY object we live with nowadays - or I should say, we "function" with), because they are in fact concretized, fossilized and “alive” objects that represent our uniqueness and beauty.
Piercings < earrings < bracelets < rings < seals…. There is a gradation and obviously, what I describe doesn’t work the same for each of them since the last ones tend to be more unique than the first ones. Now about the materials that compose jewels:
Metals and stones, crystals, these are natural elements to tie the knot, to craft a core; not just there because they are beautiful (are they, really? I’d call them fascinating, not beautiful). They're not linked with jewels because they are “economically valued”, rare, useful, or beautiful (again). They are fascinating because they are not really earthly materials, and definitely not materials like the others: I’m sure we still see them as elemental materials - not elementary: elemental. They are present in jewels because they were created directly by primary forces, primary forces (or the primary God). Beyond time, before and after, they still evoke the fire of the mountain in the heart of Earth (technically true), and they are not passing even if we pass away. They are old as the world and they survive our body: that is why jewels are made of these materials. And that’s another aspect of the idea I feel about jewels: they are crimping us into eternity and transcendence.
Each soul and each person can be synthesized in a special way, and one of the strongest “metaphors” is the ring or the talisman (which is a concrete, a real metaphor we live with every day if we wear them): like a cristallized name. It has a taste, a touch (sometimes warm, sometimes cold, metal's living! changes color, etc.), it has a complexion (skin), a shape, it's a substance and a movement and a musical tune at the same time.
I + I
Jewels are pure signs and linked with transcendence, but also without universality, that’s why they are ambiguous for Christians. Tribes and communities are concretized in non-universal objects, which means, by definition: not all humans are concerned.
I’m not sure how to interpret the fact that jewels are more important in tribes. Maybe it is just a coincidence, but there are many clues that led me to think that a jewel can also stand for the spirit of one tribe or community. In fact, I think we often misunderstand the meaning of altars, sacred ‘pylons’ and statues in ancient times: we see them in the modern sense of representations of Gods, representation of invisible deities, symbolical bodies, while they may have stood for unique nodes of the deity, and sometimes the People as a deity! You find this is tribes in Polynesian Islands. A huge crocodile for instance, both jewelry and sacred object, is the heart of the essence of the tribe – the tribe itself, as a perpetuating, unchanging, material and yet mysterious glyph (the glyph appears when you take a sign and cut the link with its reference to consider the materiality of the sign, in itself – it’s a personal concept, extended from a linguistic one).
Sacred jewels in ancient thought (and still active thought for some people around the world, for sure): not images but beings, not symbols but livings, not houses and not even bodies, but incarnated essences. Urns may have the same importance than what it contains. You bow before a statue and adore, you don’t meditate. Huge collective jewels? Maybe. That would be propped by the fact that each tribe had its own god, so that convert people from other peoples didn’t mean anything.
The Jews, led by a leader and a God they hardly know for who He is supposed to be (in stories), become a people after their escape from Egypt. They become a people for the first time with Moses, it is important. They come from immigrant brothers and live with traditions in a country they do not own. We know them and their history as a unity, that’s why we sometimes fail to see that during the many decades they lived with Egyptians, in Egypt, they were not a community in the fullest sense. They were not a community within a community, because they were accepted after their introduction by Joseph. They were only enslaved in the end, after a long period of life with Egyptians. Enslave a group of people, and you will help uniting them as a people.
So they are here, in the desert, and Moses goes on the top of a mountain to receive something that constitutes a society (the Law, and laws), and the people decide to do what? What a coincidence: they decide to melt all the gold jewelry into one big sacred collective god, that they are ready to worship in itself, not just as an image. They are becoming a people, so they incarnate their collective soul in a big jewel. But evolution was on its way, with the Ten Commandments including the interdiction to worship one’s own soul, even a collective “own” soul, and, even more, the interdiction to represent the only living God. God is two steps ahead of them. Independence is the major sin, the one and only deadly sin.
In that context, we see how the holy Tent of God in the Hebraic past was a strong step toward abstraction, and a yet differentiating way to know God – He would extend the Tent, come and go, be present or not, etc. And more: the chest of the alliance may have been the first representative sacred object! The chest of ALLIANCE, closer to a metaphor (with a memorial object: staff of Aaron, not active any more) – closer to a symbol, but still needs a material container when modern alliances are entirely abstract: treaties, pure signs and ideas.
Entirely abstract, really? No, you guessed it: we still exchange rings for some kind of alliances… But we may not realize what it used to mean, or what it still means underground (a Celtic bride exchanged jewels with the bridegroom, and then they had to eat the heart of some ox, the raw beating heart of a sacrificed ox, together. That’s what I call living things together!). Today, our wedding rings are only signs of symbols, not even plain symbols: they act as a social sign of the alliance, not as the materialized alliance.
Fragments of stones, gems and artifacts, talismans, amulets, and... Seals. Silently but surely, the first idea of jewel is changing, and Christianism holds a special place in this change.
Superstition and idolatry can be understood in a limited way (objects for luck and avoid the bad eye), in a large way (religions, which adore humanity through humans or human-like gods, or matter – that we then deprive of any life and spiritual part – including animals and plants). It is then defined as a subversion, an error in the final object of adoration and a sin of hubris: subversion between god and the creation/creatures (even Angels), thus unbalancing all the harmony and hierarchy.
That’s why this notion of jewelry is hardly compatible with a Cartesian Christian doctrine (our understanding), and the evangelical understanding of the gospel. These objects are not magical in themselves, not even when they are used by fallen Angels or coveted by sinful desires.
But to some extent, we have representations and we have corporeal rites to seal and symbolize concretely our beliefs (the meal of the Lord – when we symbolically eat flesh and drink blood). Why not wearing jewels? Why eating and drinking?
Some insights about this. Hypothesis: because it means assimilation with the inside, that is, a spiritualized (or abstracted) belief. We have a name: Jesus; and a seal: the spirit. Our abstraction, the idea of a person and the idea of a spirit (the composed representation we have of them), are highly abstract, and clearly abstractions of what is in the Old Testament. The fire and the wind in the desert, the law, not eating and not touching blood leaks, and the sacrifices, burning food and pouring wine, etc. We now eat and drink: the heart, the thoughts, the intentions, the relationship, the spirit, the temple, etc. is in our interiority.
In other words, Christians follow a religion of the sign and idea replacing jewelry.
Incarnation is the height of jewelry, but one time for all: the ones who worship an image, either mental or physical, a picture or a representation, do not know God. How can we know we do not adore a false inner representation of God? Because knowing God adequately would mean absolutely, which is surely not possible if you’re not God yourself; but at the same time, if we’re stuck with more or less concrete representations, we’re making unintentionally the superstitious mistake. This question has answers, I just wanted to raise it to consider that concrete spiritual signs are ambiguous but not absent for us, even after the great abstraction of Christianism.
However, relatively to our souls and selves, we find some resurgence in the Bible…
In the book of Revelations, each Christian receives a little white stone with a new name on it (a name that nobody else knows). That's not an ornamental stone, neither aesthetic, nor "social". It's not only a gift to rejoice, it's not a present like we use to conceive presents (consumable things, useful or pleasurable, even when affectively charged). This alloy of a little white stone + a new name may be crazily close to what I tried to explain about jewels: concretized souls, incarnated principles of particularity, and the pure sign (a new name, that nobody else would know, not used and unique!) written on it. In my language, I call it a glyph, the mystery of incarnated sign.
It's not about being synthesized in a totem. It’s now linked with scripture – not nature any more. Scripture is a system of signs that links language to the archive, a more material dimension (because sound, and the kind of sign that sound leaves in our memory is less tangible and objective for us than paper, walls, rock, sand or visuals on a screen, derived from hard drives). Every time a sound is archived (written, in some way), it is through a kind of scripture, but we usually cannot read ourselves without the help of some machine we created. Disks and hardware, vinyl or silicon are the material part of the language that allows us to listen to music files or reproductions. To some extent, this is linked with our question of the nature of jewels, because it is all about a dialectics of invisible and visible, eternal and material, body and soul, etc. And these are applied dialectics, as I try to show with some examples.
When something reads for me or when I read, a presence is “summoned” or “called” or “assumed”, which is of a different nature than the support. Books are also lived that way. When reading, the book disappears, its real presence disappears, making way to an unreal presence. Unreal does not mean illusionary or un-existing, of course. What is absent becomes present (lived voice, music, live text, life and objects described or stories told), and what is present becomes absent (the book or the computer or machine). The Name is another condensation of experiences and presence summoned, in-vocated and evocated, which explains that we, Christian and modern minds, associate the ancient jewel notion to the Name. The combination is Scripture, or more precisely, Glyph (and petroglyph in our biblical example: Eternal Name + stone).
The roundness of the pebble and its matter is the combination of many intuitions and meanings: the elemental factor, the condensation and reduction factor (a core), the rock material (as Jesus is a rock), roundness of eternity and totality, plus this Name nobody can read… Secrecy, and seal impossible to unseal, unsealed (like a secret revealed to become a secret).
That’s also why a ring with things written into it is so powerful, especially when no one or few can read it. And I’m not talking exclusively about the Lord of the Rings, even if I think that Tolkien reflected deeper than me on the meaning of rings.
We, modern Christians, tend to conceive the Bible as an abstract message, an ideal gospel, and tend to hide the dialectical movement of body, signs and ideas. But it doesn’t last long until it reappears through the question of body and individual soul/universal spirit, or else.
Etymologically (Greek), ‘hieroglyph’ means “sacred glyph”. People who named the first scripture of Egyptians in that way may have understood that this religious transfer from jewels (magical artifacts) to signs was operating in there, and operating through images (or replicas)!
That’s what I find crazy in this process: we start from presence and head to absence, through images – from the material essence to the essence of matter, and language is the path we travel.
II
We have to endure a reversal to some point. The embodied essence becomes a body again, and then a symbol.
To some point, it appears that the collusion of essence and matter (particular and infinity, tangible and supernatural, change and identity) is reversed or caught up by the logics of language. To make it simple: if you apply language to a jewel, you transform the raw essence into a mere sign.
In that second idea, the jewel becomes an ornament towards essence, where there was a materialized essence. Even if this sign is necessary and beautifully carved, crimped with stones, chiseled and all, it is in its way to become a symbol. But this is a process and there is an intermediary stage in which the jewel is a container of the essence, before going purely symbolical.
This is how jewels become symbols: through a reflection, when their own logic is applied to them. This is the core of the second idea: if a jewel is a material essence and a particular being – being the changing principle of identity or being what particularizes –, thus this particular being need a soul or an essence of its own, a reversed or upside/backside dimension.
And here, in this intermediary stage, jewels change from particular objects to containers, envelopes, cases, boxes… The French word ‘écrin’ have kept this ambiguity. An écrin is both a jewel and a container of jewels. This is clearly what we meant: the jewel is a box, but a jewel-box and a box-jewel.
Here, I want to add the vivid example of perfume. You have already heard or remarked to yourself this very common idea: we pay a lot for the package when it comes to perfume. I my perspective, it is not accidental: the package or a bottle and the bottle itself constitute this jewel with a soul, or this jewel in the process of becoming symbolical. The container is the real jewel, and the beautiful body-like bottle of perfume is a replica of the body with a soul. Is it necessary to remark that a bottle of perfume contains mixed essences?
And of course, the perfume itself is translucent, intangible (relatively to the bottle) and, we don’t want to miss that: it is what particularizes someone. Scent is the symbol of soul, because of the ethereal properties of perfume: it is volatile, it disappears even if contained in a bottle (that same jewel-bottle)! Ethereal, translucent, intangible yet sensitive, particularizing (“his scent”, “her perfume”) and changing without a clue: yeah, that sounds about right: a jewel inside a jewel, before that the inner jewel disappears in the era or purely symbolical jewelry.
The jewel now resonates like a usual conception of the body as a container of the soul. In fact, the intermediary stage is also the one of the replica, of the homunculus, doll, figurine or model. Images: I // I. The original object I re-presented by its Image, a secondary thing, symbolical, referential, but sensitive, recognizable, limited and reproducible. The jewel used to be the core, but now the core is being replaced by the container of the jewel itself, its bland material body or the sign of its presence, sensitive, defineable and reproducible. And this replica thing has a lot of avatars, such as the drawings of gods in Ancient Egypt put into a cartridge (the ovoid or rectangular box drawn around hieroglyphs), or the seals of beetles and scarabs, or the armies of figurines in Asia (maybe linked to this eternity and replication thing). Some Greek texts tell us of a usual artifact called a ‘silène’, which is a carved box (wood or else), representing an ugly god and containing beautiful figurines of greater gods. This year, I know a girl who is wearing little figurines as earrings, it’s funny. A man and a woman, two earrings. Her name is Tonantzin, she is Christian and bears the name of the Mother Goddess of Aztecs, with Aztec and Briton blood running through her veins.
Essence to body, body needs an essence, and essence to body again… Do we continue this movement till eternity, to infinity? Are we really losing the proximity of ultimate life and truth? The essence of All? Are we losing it to this movement of boxes-jewel? Do we ever stop this whirling infinity with a step “beyond”? Yes we do: essence to body, body to image, image to sign, sign to absence of any beyond.
At that point, the question is about desire and passion. I wondered: could the object of desire become this intermediary jewel, meaning this object of desire as a sign of transcendence? In other words, don’t panic: do we desire an object, or what is behind the object, what the object is a sign? Do you desire me, or do you desire… my desire? A chain of desires and the object is either a mere sign, or a hidden one, at the end of the chain.
When jewels are a body that points to something else, we can think of desire, parallel to language.
I can now develop what I had in mind relatively to erotism and desire. It didn’t work in the first part, because erotism is exactly the movement of desire as a symbolical process!
The real object of desire is always lost, ultimate and absolute, whereas the objects that embody desire, that desire take as the One and ultimate being of pleasure and achievement, they are always finite. In the erotic logic, we always chase something else, whether we know it or not (which does not mean that there is only deception and disappointment in grasping, conquering or consuming some object of desire – it just helps to understand a lot how we live).
Ultimate meeting and meeting of the ultimate is always postponed and deferred, because the origin of desire, what opens it, is precisely the loss that opens our consciousness and humanity (same idea in the Genesis in the other sphere of good and evil: what opens the awareness of good/evil is the sin, and the sin is of learning about good and evil – too late, right from the beginning – before Law, God’s order was not fully understandable). Thus, achieving desire would mean return or achieve being other than a desiring humanity. An achieved humanity does not desire. But then, could we call it humanity?
Erotism is linked with sexuality because sexuality is often taken as an ultimate pleasure – and it may be – or simply the ultimate meeting with other – in a strange unity. But in the erotic logic, even actual sex is only active as a sign, which, again, does not deny pleasure and instant, ephemeral satisfaction. On the contrary, caress and clothes are erotic because they keep the game of hide and seek, revealing nudity while concealing it, feeding the fire of desire itself. The movement and mystery of beauty implies a loss or a lack, a distance and a tension. The sign is a hint towards some ultimate change in the meaning of jewels, and maybe jewels are also this today: symbols of the person, as hints and signs of what is at stake, simultaneously stating that the last word of the self is not here, impossible to get, definitely not on the surface, but hint! Jewels as powerful erotic signs, and personal ones. Tension is preserved through the hint, the reflexion of another beauty, even if that one, behind the jewel/sign/desire/word (the Word?) is irremediably other.
What is clearly important is that the essence is now invisible and immaterial “again” (it is not really “again”, in a mythological-historical approach, but for us who usually assume a mere ornamental or symbolical meaning of jewels, it looks like a “return” to symbols). This culminates in the post-modern and structural way to think, in psychoanalysis, modern linguistics, disappearance of the essence and ideal meaning, only pure signs and experiences, without transcendence.
This is not really true, but these are broad outlines of a movement philosophers have also spotted in other questions than jewels.
Conclusion
After the fusional unity of realities in jewels (I), there was the separation and abstraction, or replica part, with intermediary stages (I + I), and soon, there’s the symbolical era where ultimate and finite are separated for good (II). Faith is there, possible when transcendence is not in objects any more (and not fully understandable by reason, by the way)…
That’s it, some intuitions, not particularly original (even though I didn’t read about it specifically, I’m sure someone have explained similar things way better).
A poem is a jewel, but not any jewel. The poem is the dart of joy placed in the gut of eternity. The poem enthralls matter and soul, sign and experience. The poem is a broken jewel that spits light. The Poem is the ultimate jewel that doesn’t exist, that’s why we must still write poetry.
None of what I have written here is about jewelry!
to M., 2012
