The unbelievable revealed in a piece of agate doesn’t just provide futile aesthetic delight it reveals the « multiple coherence » of the cosmicity of the Universe. It is so vast and primitive that even the most precise sciences stem from this point and run off it. » ( Images, images…). Didn’t Greek philosophers speculate about atoms well before they were actually discovered? Didn’t Dmitri Mendeleïev anticipate the elements in his periodic table before they actually found their place on it? Didn’t primitive magic institute concepts (substance, nature, forces) that would be taken up by the sciences? And so Caillois wrote about the famous piece of agate in the possession of King Pyrrhus of Epirus: « every fragile relationship conjectured and risked by poetry, that move, enlighten and enrich us, stems from the same bias of divination. Both follow similar and increasingly tantalizing directions that rapidly become infinitely more sophisticated in nature. Because « there is a secret connection between the blind ways of inert matter and those of freedom and imagination. On the other hand, sublime aesthete and XIth century Chinese artist and poet Mi Fu ponders his piece of agate, and sees « Yen Chang » (an «inkwell mountain» containing dentrites – tree-like patterns), that he had obtained with some difficulty by exchanging a painting of great value, and he loses himself in a « mystical journey » in which « a dust particle offers up a world », a Taoist phrase nodding to spiritual ecstasy.īetween these two extremes lies the path of « diagonal science » investigated by Roger Caillois, simultaneously conceptual and perceptive scholarly and intuitive. Science explains that agate crystals occur when gas cavities (vesicles) fill up in basalt lava, revealing the habitual fusion of sediments of frozen silica with chemical elements and a multitude of other colours found in nature during the course of « blind and mechanical happenstances. » (Roger Caillois). The approved segregation of knowledge means that scientific explanations and poetic divagations find themselves on opposing sides. These crystals enlighten the imagination about the work of the divine. It harks back to a sidereal geological era well before mankind’s unrefined ancestor walked the earth and when agate was already speaking volumes about his landscapes, abstractions and dreams. The colourful clarity of agate tells stories of images frozen in time.
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