"We are stardust" sang Joni Mitchell in "Woodstock," and that was a pretty cool Aquarian image, with grains of truth--as well as the stardust--in it. But it turns out that we are something even cooler, if only, when we are conscious, latently, nascently, incipiently. We are diamonds.
This morning I was in the incredibly luxurious (relatively speaking) cab of my tractor (it's heated, has both a radio and a CD player--hey, my driveway's almost half a mile long; I'm not gonna shovel, and I think engine noise is bad for your hearing)--listening to Weekend Edition on NPR, and I heard the most marvelous and interesting thing I've heard in ages. There's a company in Switzerland (and, it turns out, at least one in the US, too) which takes human ashes and turns them into diamonds. Who could ever have imagined that, or thought to do such a thing, or that that would be possible?
I find that nearly magical to consider: we can have jewelry--a necklace, earrings, anklets, rings, nose rings, who knows--made from a loved one. Or even a hated one, if you wish. There have been as many as nine diamonds made from one person's ashes (Chances are that person didn't eat enough carats....). And they're almost all blue, which I love, having spent much of my life in that condition, if not hue. The blue in the diamonds may come, they (there "they" are, again) think, from trace amounts of boron in the human body. Really? "Trace amounts" are enough to color the whole thing? That may explain why a few diamonds come out black: "trace amounts" of evil, perhaps? But you'd think there'd be more of those, then. And boron? It's a rare element, caused by "cosmic ray spallation." And we're right back to the stardust again.
The major drawback to the ashdiamond process is that, in the humanash factories, diamonds are created just the same way as they are in the wild: through the application of enormous amounts of pressure. What--there's not enough pressure on us before the ovens? First life, then a blast furnace, then subjected to intense pressure? I think I'll settle for being a lump of coal.
The songs, then:
All The Diamonds In The World Bruce Cockburn
Big Blue Diamonds Van Morrison
Black Diamond Bay Dylan
Black Diamond The Replacements
Blue Diamonds Rusted Root
Diamond Ernest Ranglin
Diamond The Guggenheim Grotto
Diamond Joan Armatrading
Diamond Dust Jeff Beck
Diamond In The Rough Shawn Colvin
Diamond Joe Dylan
Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend T-Bone Burnett
Diamonds At Your Feet Muddy Waters
Diamonds In The Rough John Prine
Diamonds On My Windshield Tom Waits
Diamonds In The Coal John Stewart
Diamonds Made From Rain Clapton
Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes Paul Simon
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds Fabs
Rubies And Diamonds Carla Olson & Mick Taylor
Shine On You Crazy Diamond Pink Floyd
I Dug Up A Diamond Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris
Heavy Pressure Tanita Tikaram
Under Pressure David Bowie
Pressure Neil Young
Tuesday, noon till twoish on www.wool.fm. See ya then. In the meantime, shine on brightly.
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