1media/Onyx Calligraphy.jpg2018-08-04T20:37:20+00:00Paul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f112Agate onyx, "Calligraphy onyx" 13.5 x 12 x .5cmplain2018-08-04T20:37:41+00:002015052515464814a4c0HQQBav3f7JwRct3g20150525154648Photo by Paul A. HarrisPaul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f1
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12018-07-31T20:42:37+00:00Roger Caillois Mineral Collection29gallery12018-08-11T18:07:47+00:00Roger Caillois bequeathed his renowned mineral collection to the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The collection, featured at the 2013 Venice Biennale, can be seen at the galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie. The following pages present images of selected pieces from the collection, paired with passages from Caillois's The Writing of Stones (Trans. Barbara Bray, University of Virginia Press, 1985). This content supplements but also contextualizes the excerpts from Caillois's Pierres réfléchies featured in Rock Records, as well as treatments of Caillois in the issue by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Paul Prudence, and Paul A. Harris.
Caillois's opening words in The Writing of Stones provide a portal through which to enter this virtual gallery.
"Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of color or pattern. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They act through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation" (The Writing of Stones, 1-2).
12018-08-09T21:38:27+00:00"Calligraphy" (onyx)4plain2018-08-11T18:10:36+00:00"Onyx, with its dense deep black, is a special substance.... I can well understand why ... an ancient lapidary said it reflected the shadows rather than the images of things. The grain of onyx is so fine that the veins it contains, utterly free though they are, can follow their whims with impeccable precision. In the best examples the lines are so regally sure of themselves that the need to seek for models is abolished. They express, they represent nothing but their own clarity. Without precedent, without meaning, they simply are--grandly adding to a world of appearances that does not contain their like" (The Writing of Stones, 64; 68).
