She keeps the agate close to her, now, in the breast pocket of the down jacket she wears as she strides down the brisk avenues of New York City. At night, it hangs in the closet while her heart beats beside me.
I’ve read somewhere that a person’s true appreciation or understanding of a work of art is revealed by how carefully, how purposefully, he holds it.
The heart forms in the cavity of the chest and waits for its collector.
Just north of town, we visited a small cove along a well-traveled beach trail. On a crescent of sand, one family stood by the waves and then raced upslope, laughing, just ahead of the tumbling froth. In the evening light, we found bits of agate even on the pathway, gems stepped on and worn down by passing flip-flops.
One of them, the pebble I now pinch between my thumb and forefinger, is scarlet through and through. A mouse’s heart, no larger. It has a network of veins.
Carnelian, I’ve learned, is a type of orange to fiery red chalcedony. The name suggests “flesh,” but the word is actually a sixteenth-century corruption of “cornelian,” after the bitter cornel cherry. The stone is supposedly healing, grounding, stimulating. As you might imagine, it’s said to enhance blood flow.
I remember the night I found her: It was late, but I could hardly tear my eyes away. We danced together in an old Victorian house, never imagining all these years to come.
Perhaps it was the way we caught the light. What if it had shone differently?
Collecting, I follow my instincts, but I look up, now and then, to take my bearings so as not to overlook any ground: always the worry that the one plot you miss, the one niche you glance at too casually, will inevitably hold the greatest discovery.
Throughout history, agates have been carved into cameos: an oval broach or pendant with a delicate and detailed portrait, often of the beloved in profile. This carving is done at the edge of two layers in an agate so that the background is one color, the relief another.
Large agates are sculpted into cups and figurines, or simply halved to serve as bookends. Others are cut so delicately that they look like a slice of smoked salmon.
In The Book of Agates, from which a few items of this collection have been mined, the author and rockhound Lelande Quick understands when he writes, “There are few thrills to equal the satisfaction of personally finding a beautiful agate or other quartz gem and then processing it yourself into a gem of great beauty.”
Another memory: Out for agates one morning in Yachats, I spotted a bald eagle on the beach beside a rock. But I suspected it wasn’t a rock. Through my binoculars, I watched as the ivory-naped bird picked and tore at the mass with yellow talons as large as my hands. When it flew, I walked across the sand and discovered a headless seal pup. Squatting, I reached out to touch its fur and feel the skin of its flipper. I pinched a claw and its soft sheath slipped off in my grasp. Now it also rests in my bowl.
All these stones, heavy in my hand—somehow, it is they who carry me away. They are an instinctual, if not witless attempt to hold experience by the experience of holding.
Perhaps such a desire is what Emerson means by “Guard well your spare moments.”
Or is it simply, as Benjamin writes, the “spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions”? Those days, just before or after a full moon, when the ocean rises and falls to its extremes, stripping back the sand to awaken gravel beds buried for centuries?
Oh, spare me, you say. But how can I?
There is a fascination that wells up inside me. The Latin fascinat means “bewitched.” But saying it aloud now, I hear mainly “facet.”
As she turned her face in the low western light of a Yachats evening, she looked young and striking. Her skin seemed carnelian in the orange glow across the Pacific, and her laugh crashed over me, as it has so many times. We shared a beer.
But in that moment, I think I also understood that she and I would continue to change at the hands of the carving: the stiff breeze, in good times and in bad, those shifting sands.
“I adore wearing gems,” Elizabeth Taylor said, “but not because they are mine. You can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it.”
Galileo wrote that we covet precious stones because we are afraid: “It is scarcity and plenty that make the vulgar take things to be precious or worthless; they call a diamond very beautiful because it is like pure water, and then would not exchange one for ten barrels of water. Those who so greatly exalt incorruptibility, inalterability, etc. are reduced to talking this way, I believe, by their great desire to go on living, and by the terror they have of death. They do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world.”
If I were immortal, oh the collection I would have. Oh the places she and I, we, would go.
Or would it all grow tiresome? As the Chinese proverb goes, “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”
One might choose to arrange these stones according to chemistry, the way some gather type specimens for a museum drawer. Or one might have an eye only for aesthetics.
A few of the names of agate, its manifold forms: breciatted, ruin, calico, dendritic, ovoid-bearing, faulted, flame, fortification, eye, iris, rainbow, jasp, lace, mocha, moss, plume, sagenitic, stalactitic, tube, landscape.
Those who collect for science often wish to complete their collections, which fulfills a sense of self. It is an accomplishment. But those who collect for the sake of collection, as art, cannot finish for long. Their self will seem to disintegrate.
Many will still believe that collections are a disguise for sheer acquisitiveness, or just misdirected energy. But I hope the activity need not be seen in such a light.
Perhaps that people return to collecting especially in their retirement, when time begins to feel of essence, suggests this gathering is a natural inclination. It triumphs over self-consciousness and often leads to its own discoveries.
“I have been busy with a single art,” wrote W. B. Yeats, in preface to one of his collections, “that of the theatre, of a small, unpopular theatre; and this art may well seem to practical men, busy with some programme of industrial or political regeneration, of no more account than the shaping of an agate; and yet in the shaping of an agate, whether in the cutting or the making of the design, one discovers, if one have a speculative mind, thoughts that seem important and principles that may be applied to life itself, and certainly if one does not believe so, one is but a poor cutter of so hard a stone.”
I was tempted to write that an agate is like a piece of my own bone, broken off. But it’s clear to me, finally, that the closest a body owns to an agate is the eye: Blue or green. Hazelnut and almond.
Not long for its socket.
Even as he went blind, Galileo stared upward at glinting worlds.
Two years after he published his Natural History, Pliny the Elder perished in the eruption of Vesuvius that buried Pompeii in 79 A.D., a pyroclastic flow that rolled over the countryside, creating new hollows in layers of ash.
Hollows in which agates may well form, when we are all gone and yet another epoch has descended upon the earth.
Agates in the shapes of bodies, clinging to one another.
A salmon’s second journey begins with its “collection.” At the Cole M. Rivers Hatchery north of Medford, Oregon, the crowder is drawn through the holding pond once a