Diamonds Are Forever
©David Boyne
Recently, while driving my car down the Pacific Coast Highway in heavy traffic and passing pellatons of cyclists as colorfully clothed as South American Macaws, and with dog-walking pedestrians playfully darting out from behind parked cars to interrupt my dreamy gazing past the cliffs down at the surfers and pelicans and waves on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, I was thinking about and paying intensely close attention to, everything, absolutely everything, except driving my car, when I suddenly had the brilliant idea that there are not one, but two kinds of diamonds on this planet.
The first kind of diamonds are those lumps of coal Nature selects, not to put in my Christmas stocking, but to compress, heat, and transform into tiny transparent rocks harder than any other stuff on this planet. These are the diamonds that DeBeers has paid generations of myth-makers, that is, advertising agencies, to dupe generations of men, women, and children, into believing a simple but utterly false ABC:
A: Diamonds are rare. (They are in fact, plentiful.)
B: A woman is not truly loved nor truly prized unless and until a man buys a diamond for her, and she shows off the tiny transparent rock to other women, while blushing with pride as she publicly contemplates the proof that she is truly loved and prized. (Unlike wisdom, health, strength, or compassion, possessing this kind of diamond is worthless unless other people know you have it.)
C: A man does not truly love nor truly prize the woman he loves and prizes, until he buys a diamond for her. (Then turns purple from stress as he privately contemplates the third job stocking potato chips in grocery stores at night that he has taken to help pay for the tiny transparent rock.)
Of course, I am an idiot. But it strikes me as very odd to hold in one’s mind this hardest of earthly substances as a symbol of sacred, loving union. Why not a flower, instead? Or a goose-down comforter? Or a glass of water? Is it because these things do not last “forever?” (Please, what does? Even that fat and happy lump of coal snuggled deep in the bosom of Mother Earth thought it was going to be a lump of coal forever and then—WHAM!—it was just another diamond in Snoop Dogg’s nose.)
I could be wrong, but I suspect the idea of change, that Life is in fact a cycle that includes aging and death, makes lovers uncomfortable. And DeBeers knows it.
I have a solution. I suggest an alternative metaphor and symbol and gift for those intent on till-death-do-we-part-romances: Silly Putty®.
Unlike diamonds, Silly Putty® is supremely pliant. It stretches in all directions, can be rolled into a tight ball, or flattened to a pancake. Silly Putty® is easily impressed, and even imitates its surroundings. (Including the ability, when pressed down on a comic book page, to copy that image of Spiderman or Wonder Woman.) You can break Silly Putty® into a million little pieces, then recombine those pieces into a whole, so what if a few go forever missing. And, most importantly, Silly Putty® bounces. And most most importantly, Silly Putty® has absolutely no ego. These are all the very same qualities that Life has been trying to teach me for half a century that we must possess and exercise if we are to thrive in and be happy in a romantic relationship.
Perhaps the most world-changing advantage in making Silly Putty®, rather than diamonds, the global metaphor and symbol and gift for those in romantic thrall, is how cheap it is. After all, it’s man-made stuff. Should anyone be intent on marriage and need Silly Putty® to gift their intended with, they can simply dash into any 99ç Store, Wal Mart, Target, or Toy R Us, not to mention buying it over the internet. And the cost of Silly Putty® will never require anyone to choose between expressing their eternal love, and taking their prescription medications.
This is important because, like all the other myths of scarcity and lack that we buy into, our lust for supposedly scarce diamonds creates competition, conflict, corruption, and ruined Life. If men and women under the influence of love would simply present one another with eggs of Silly Putty®, rather than diamonds, then no man, woman, or child would be a slave in a mine with some other man, woman, or child aiming a machine gun at their back to keep them digging diamonds from the earth.
(About that egg which Silly Putty® comes in? Have you ever noticed that diamonds are presented in a black, velvet-lined, coffin-like box? In contrast, Silly Putty® is presented in a colorful plastic egg, a nifty symbol of birth and regeneration, and the cycle of Life.)
I could be wrong, but if we were to re-write the myth authored by DeBeers and ilk, and substitute “Silly Putty®” for “diamonds, ” then drug dealers could go back to dealing drugs to make their money. Dictators could go back to dictating to stay in power. And the advertising agencies employed by DeBeers could all get work with the Silly Putty® company, teaching them how to convince every man, woman, and child that they are neither truly loved nor truly loving unless or until they get or give an egg of Silly Putty®.
Oh, if only I were King of the Forest…
But, as mentioned so long ago and far away, at the start of this assaying essay, whilst auto-piloting my auto down Highway 101, I became aware that Life has been trying for half a century to teach me about a second kind of diamond found on this earth.
This other kind of diamond is also plentiful; in fact, the supply is inexhaustible and is continually being added to by every man, woman, and child on the planet. Like those tiny transparent rocks, these other diamonds are also created under intense pressure and heat. But unlike the hard-ass diamonds, these other diamonds are soft as a baby’s behind, and don’t take millennia to form. They form in a heartbeat, the blink of an eye, the quick of a gasp.
What are these other kinds of diamonds?
Memories, of course.
But not your average, every-day, run-of-the-mill, ordinary memories, like where you parked the car, or if you left your cell phone on your married lover’s nightstand, or how many pints you can down in what number of hours divided by your body weight and still be under the legal limit if pulled over on your way home from the pub. No not those.
Diamond memories are tremendously compressed moments of the infinite Now, flash-crystallized in a transparent, indestructible thought-form that we can instantly dig up any time we want—and often when we don’t want—from the deepest deeps of our memory mines.
Huh!?
Never mind. It wasn’t that important. Let’s press on.
Once made, we carry these diamonds for the rest of our lives. I have a theory, #71,565-B Pat. Pend., that upon our deaths, we cash-out, and deposit the diamonds we’ve collected during our Life on this earth, into the joint account of humanity, which others call our collective consciousness. Thus, each and every one of us, whether we birthed children or not, adds to the inheritance of future generations. (If we go through Life concentrated on collecting happy diamonds, instead of angry diamonds, or resentful diamonds, or anxiety diamonds, not only do we live a happier Life, but upon returning to whence we came, we leave a legacy of good feelings for those who follow.)
It strikes me that my wordy explanation of these other diamonds is failing to make my meaning unmistakable. Therefore, as door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman all over the planet declare, just before they dump a large can of black sludge on your wife’s great-great-grandmother’s Persian carpet which Teddy Roosevelt gave to her after she saved his life by shooting an attacking lion while on safari in Kenya in 1907, “Allow me to demonstrate!”
When it comes to this second kind of diamond, I’ve got a million of them, each one formed when the coal of my trance-like, unconscious living was instantly and terrifically compressed, super-heated, and transmuted into a tiny transparent and indestructible thought-form.
Here we go:
During the 1983 transit strike in Manhattan, with the entire city in gridlock, I am on my bicycle, blasting toward the speed of light, weaving through gridlocked cars and trucks and pedestrians flowing like a roaring mountain stream around these immobile rocks—and I swoosh past a guy getting out of his car as if I and my bike are made of quicksilver, and, already 20-yards past him, I hear him yell in anger, amazement, and grudging admiration, “Ya-cra-zy-mo-ther-fuck-er!”
Here’s a diamond memory that I’ve even given a title:
Snow
Falling
Snow
Falling past street lamps
Glowing in the hush,
We left a restaurant called Rhinocerous.
Walking, embracing,
Not talking,
At your doorway we turned
To see past
Snow falling,
Our mingled footprints
Imprinted on the sidewalk
Like a happy dance chart.
It takes two to tango.
Here’s another one:
Alone, standing at the railing in the center of the promenade on the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight New Year’s Eve—no, not going to jump—but watching fireworks burst low over distant Central Park, I turned around at the sound of a woman’s voice behind me, “Would you like some of my champagne?”
Oh, this one just popped up from my memory mines:
After yearning for a dog of my own for all my life, at age 35 I finally finally finally got the 8-week-old ball of golden retriever fluff I had imagined all those years. My girlfriend and I took him to the beach on the coast of Washington and he loved every moment, as he would for the next 11 and one-half years. But the best diamond moment of that first weekend with Newton was when, so tuckered out from all the excitement of the beach, the sensory overload, even while game for more, his whole body began quivering, tremoring, and I gathered him up and carried him over my shoulder, snugged against my warm neck. (Some diamond moments get captured on film. See above.)
Sometimes memories come in pairs, or clusters, like diamond necklaces or bracelets or tiaras. Sometimes seconds, or years, can pass between the separate diamonds we slowly shape into such jewelry.
Here’s a diamond with both light and dark compressed into its tiny transparent form:
In a crowded department store, Jack’s mom entrusted the care of her 5-year-old son to me while she shopped. I lost him. For a long full minute of eternity, I ran everywhere inside that store, pushing past anyone who stood in the way of my increasingly heart-pounding-heart-aching frantic search—until I found him, hidden in between a long double-rack of women’s winter coats. Is there a word that goes far, far beyond “relief?”(Note: What was Jack doing hidden inside that double rack of women’s winter coats? “Smelling the smells.”)
Strung onto that diamond came many others, courtesy of Jack, with perhaps the final one coming at a time coinciding with my realization that, after five years together, it was no longer a good thing to be a couple with his mother. That was when 9-year-old Jack, with me in a bookstore, where we spent several hours almost every weekend before going to a matinee movie together, casually, conversationally asked me, “David, is it all right if I call you Dad?”
A nifty thing about collecting our diamond memories is that we can take any one of them out at any time and simply admire it, or maybe drop it into a new and different setting, like an essay, or a cocktail party, or a letter to our Congressional Representative, whom we did not vote for, just to privately admire how brilliantly it catches the light of day.
There is a sub-group of diamond memories that I call Industrial Diamonds, because they are so easily reproduced, replicated, over and over. Here’s one of those easy to recapture and reproduce industrial diamonds:
Sometimes
When pierced
By the Ridiculous joy
Of being Alive…
I run
Through the house,
Naked
Wet from the shower
The dog chasing and barking…
And I Sing
Cartoon-opera
Loud.
LOUD!
Figaro! Figaro! Figaro! FIG—A—ROOOOOOO!
Another quick example of an industrial diamond is how, each and every time I cross the Golden Gate Bridge on a bicycle, I form a new tiny transparent diamond. If I were to board a plane right now and fly to San Francisco and rent a bike and ride it over the Golden Gate Bridge—I would have another diamond for my collection, and for my legacy.
By the way, every single time we make love, no matter with whom, no matter the state of our romance at that moment, it is a diamond memory. This is the true wisdom embedded in the bumper sticker slogan, Make Love Not War.
In closing, I will add that recently, while auto-piloting my car through the throngs of cyclists and herds of pedestrians and stray dog walkers randomly darting out from behind parked cars, and just after crashing into the realization that there are in fact not one, but two kinds of diamonds on this planet, I mentally zoomed forward into the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, the simple explanation and reason why each and every one of us has chosen to take on physical form and be born into Life on this Holodeck we call Earth, is because we want to experience, enjoy, and collect as many diamond moments of Being as we can.
Could it just maybe really after all is said and done, be that simple?
I invite anyone who reads this assaying essay to take a moment, dig out a diamond or two from their own memory mines, and send it to me: db@GreenFlashPublishing.com
I’ll publish them on ICBWB.com. Just so we can all see how brilliantly these diamonds catch the light of day.
