This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You might have wondered if we had unceremoniously dumped
the entitled opinions opening anthem, but no.
The reason you haven't heard our theme song in a while
is because entitled opinions has been on the road
for the past five weeks.
On the road with Keroak, Nabokov, and Johnson,
with Elman Louise, the easy riders
and the Mary pranksters, with Robert Frank,
Kai Carlson, we, and Lawrence Fairlingetti.
And let's not forget our friend,
Werner Herzog, trekking from Munich to Paris
and no.
Mini 1974.
After all that dynamic propulsion,
it's time to return to a point of fixity,
time to seek out the translucent stillness
of the magic quartz,
time for the in-gathered poise of the self-achieves.
Be in me as the eternal moods of the high-aligned rock
and not as transient things are,
gayity of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness of the mineral glimmer.
Stay tuned friends, we're turning our attention today
to a topic that we'll add to our reputation
as one of the most idiosyncratic podcasts out there.
The topic is crystals.
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I thought I knew what a crystal was
before I started looking into it.
I consulted encyclopedias, Wikipedia and articles.
I read what today's guest has written about them.
I've looked at images and charts
and I've come to the conclusion
that this word crystal might be the archetypical case
of what Wittgenstein called family resemblance,
by which he meant that a word's diverse meanings
are not necessarily connected by one essential common feature
but by a series of overlapping similarities,
some of which have little to do with one another.
Our case in point, we have mineral crystals,
molecular crystals, meteorological crystals,
and even chromosonal crystals.
Indeed, one of the trustees of this radio program,
Irwin Schrodinger, defined life itself
as an aperiodic crystal.
And if you don't believe me,
listen to the show I did on him back in 2008.
It took me a long time to figure out
just what an aperiodic crystal might be
and I've since forgotten how it relates
to the DNA molecule.
But in any case, we know that snowflakes are crystals.
So the ancient theory that rock crystals are produced
by the coagulation of moisture from the sky
in the form of pure snow or ice
is not all that absurd, even if modern science sees things
differently now.
One thing is sure our word crystal goes back
to this ancient theory.
Christalus in Latin is a transliteration
of the Greek Christalus, meaning ice,
which in turn is related to Creos cold
and Creinomai to freeze or congeal.
The most enchanting thing I've come across
in my recent readings on crystals
and their concept is Seneca's account of the rock.
Discussing the difference between ice
and crystal Seneca writes the following.
We might suppose that the waters at form rock crystals
are very dense, but the opposite is true.
It involves very light waters,
which confries very easily precisely because of their lightness.
For celestial water contains very little earth,
and when it has gone solid,
it is made more and more dense by persistent,
long-lasting cold.
Eventually, all air is excluded.
The water becomes highly compressed
and what had been liquid is turned to stone.
There you go.
Crystal is highly compressed celestial water.
I'll hold on to that conception
because it's too beautiful to dispense with
in the name of scientific objectivity.
And besides, our topic today is not so much the science
of crystals as their cultural history,
how they were thought of in the past,
beliefs about their qualities and virtues,
the symbolic associations they assume
in religious and literary texts,
especially in medieval lapidaries and poetry.
Our guest today is my colleague Marissa Galvez,
an associate professor of French at Stanford,
who specializes in the poetry and narrative written
in Occitan and Old French.
Some of you may remember her from the show we did
on the Troubadour Poets some years back.
Marissa published a splendid book in 2012 called Songbook,
How lyrics became poetry in medieval Europe.
And she's also finished a new book
that will appear shortly,
also with University of Chicago Press called,
The Subject of Crusade, lyrics, romance,
and materials, 1150 to 1300.
Recently, Marissa has been devoting a lot of her attention
to crystals and has published on the topic.
I'll mention here her article Crystal Desire
in a volume called Seeking Transparency.
Crystal Desire, I wonder what that could be.
We'll find out soon enough, Marissa,
and welcome back to entitled opinions.
- Thank you very much, it's great to be here.
- Well, crystals might seem like a reckonedite topic
until you start looking into it more closely
and then it seems absolutely central
since the world as we know it could not exist
without crystals.
But I'm curious, what got you interested
in this topic in the first place?
- That's a very good question
and I came upon the topic by accident.
I have a friend who's an architect
and we were talking and she works on
who's particularly interested in different surfaces
that are transparent.
And as she was researching glass and modernists
and 19th century architects' interest in glass transparency,
she noticed that a lot of these architects
were fascinated with Crystal
and especially old stories about crystal going back
to antiquity, medieval stories, mitz,
one's especially about the grail,
one's about crystal grottos where lovers hide,
things about King Solomon and his palace
that had floors of glass that appeared like water
and a shimmery surface.
All these things were fascinating to 19th century
expressionist architects and she was wondering,
she asked me as a medievalist, why is it?
What are these stories about?
And so I looked into it and I noticed that
as much as these stories abound and we're familiar
with a lot of people who study architectural history,
I noticed that some stories in the council Crystal
were left out, mainly ones that had to do with desire
and how poets talk about Crystal as a figure
or metaphor to think through the experience
of desire, erotic desire, erotic love.
So I looked into that and I started to get fascinated with that
and that's basically the genesis of my research on Crystal.
And what I hope to do is,
I mean, every time I talk to more people about Crystal,
artists, poets, architects, other scholars,
people who are interested in alternative wellness
and wanna know about the powers of Crystal as a healing stones,
it's everywhere.
So I think that the idea for the project
is to really kind of describe a cultural history of Crystal
that gets into why we have this particular fascination
of the Crystal, it's transparency,
it's a figure for rationalism, for clarity and transcendence
at the same time, it's always fascinating to people
as a stone that is a figure for essential desire, wonder,
mystery, because it has a gemstone,
it has degrees of transparency.
So it can reflect light, it's refractive.
At the same time as a stone, it's always held these idea
as being a stone of wisdom, of spiritual transcendence.
So all these things go into rock crystal,
which we classify today as just a colorless variety
of quartz crystal, a semi-precious stone.
But from antiquity onward,
people always thought of it as the most precious of stones,
as very, is something very different.
So I wanna go back to that history and just see
how it's accumulated all these meanings and fascinations
with it.
- Right, it sounds like our notion of crystals
has become extremely prosaic these days
and disenchantment.
Is it the translucency of crystals that make them so
amenable to these kind of symbolizations
and metaphoric associations with rationality,
with the purity and virtue?
- Yes, I think so.
It's that the ancients believed it to be, as I said,
has watery origins, it has this idea that it's origins
from the sky, it could preserve or generate cold,
as well as emit light as a transparent body.
So it had this hardness, coldness, as you said before,
but it could also generate heat and refract the heat of the sun.
So it had all these exceptional qualities
as a transparent clear gemstone,
which made it, which the ancients believed it
to be the most precious of stones.
And then following upon that, once you get to the middle ages,
it's crystals, transparency, it's hardness,
it's exceptional ability to carry light among the precious
metals and stones made it a stone held to symbolize
purity of faith or innocence, which is why a lot of the
theologians and you go in the Bible,
it starts to become associated with transcendence,
purity with the eternal light of the heavens.
So it's interesting to see how, in going forward,
after the middle ages, all these things accumulate
and get into people's, for me, my particular interest
is how poets and artists are thinking about erotic love,
but they draw upon all those things that have to do
with the hardness, transparency, cold and heat
that are associated with crystal.
- Yeah, in my intro, I've probably emphasized
not the hardness, but this stability,
the extraordinary stability of the crystal
in its rock form, though. - Yes.
- And that might connect with the contemporary scientific,
molecular understanding of the periodic crystal
as something which has a kind of enduring
solidity of, however, it's the celestial origins
of this rock that is so fascinating to me
in that if you go back to the Seneca quote,
the idea that there's a water that comes from the heavens
and this is condensed and then the stone is,
or this crystal is found in the earth itself,
but it's a kind of avatar of heaven in the earth.
And of course, this is associated with not only medieval,
but even earlier, an aximandrian cosmology,
which posited the crystalline spheres,
that the stars, the fixed stars of the heavens
were kind of embedded in a crystal sphere
that was completely diaphanous and transparent,
and that it was the steady continuous rotation
of this crystalline sphere that constitutes the movement
of the cosmos, and that is a very beautiful notion
that is also connected to love in some cosmic sense,
because I know from Dante's divine comedy
that the closer he gets to the crystalline sphere,
the more intense is the love that drives this whole heavenly
journey that he's on towards God.
- Now I like that idea of the thick city
of the crystalline structure,
or the, I mean, definitely poets to talk about
the experience of pure love as being like a gemstone
that is stable and pure, but I think for me,
the other fascinating aspect that belongs
to the story of crystal as well is the way crystal,
as a medium or as a surface can refract light
can be in a sense of dark transparency,
in which the lover, if they're a social in crystal,
with pure love can also think and have all those
conflicting feelings about desire,
that is the experience of desire.
So this is another aspect of crystal,
so it's not only love as pure gemstone,
the hard gemstone, that's solidity,
but also this idea of surface,
a material of crystal that embodies
the experience of erotic desire,
that's conflicting, has different states,
the mental activity of love,
what goes through a lover's mind when they are in love
with someone but can't get to that person,
so they have increasing effects of trying to crystallize
that love somehow as a mental activity.
So I'm fascinated with all those kind of stories
about crystal in which there's attention,
in fact, between the thick city and the celestial
and the transcendent qualities of crystal,
but then there's also this experiential,
refractive, dizzying, confusing thing about crystal,
because it refracts light and has also those qualities.
- Yeah, yeah, we would have opposite associates
the earth and the sky.
You mentioned the mental process that takes place
in the amorous experience,
and I guess you might have had Stondale
in the back of your mind. - I did.
- Let me just tell our listeners,
Stondale, the French 19th century novelist,
wrote a marvelous book called Love, De La Mu,
and he has this famous analogy of what takes place
inside the mind or soul of a person
who is falling in love with another person.
He says, "Here is what happens in the soul,
"I'll just read this and then we can comment on it."
Number one, admiration.
Two, you think, "How delightful it would be to kiss her
"to be kissed by her," and so on.
Three, hope.
You observe her perfections,
and it is at this moment that a woman really ought
to surrender for the utmost physical pleasure,
even the most reserved women blush
to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope.
The passion is so strong and the pleasure so sharp
that they betray themselves unmistakably.
Four, love is born.
To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing
with all the senses as closely as possible,
a lovable object which loves in return.
Five, the first crystallization begins.
If you are sure that a woman loves you,
it is a pleasure to endow her with 1,000 perfections,
and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction.
In the end, you overrate wildly,
and regard her as something fallen from heaven unknown as yet,
but certain to be yours.
Leave a lover with his thoughts for 24 hours,
and this is what will happen.
Here's the analogy.
At the salt mines of Salzburg,
they throw a leafless wintry bow
into one of the abandoned workings.
Two or three months later, they haul it out,
covered with a shining deposit of crystals.
The smallest twig, no bigger than a Tom Tits claw,
is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds.
The original branch is no longer recognizable.
What I have called crystallization is a mental process,
which draws from everything that happens new proofs
of the perfection of the loved one,
and this phenomenon that I have called crystallization
springs from nature, which are days
that we shall feel pleasure and send the blood to our heads.
It also evolves from the feeling
that the degree of pleasure is related to the perfections
of the loved one,
and from the idea that she is mine.
That's a great kind of analogy.
I happen to completely disagree with his insistence
that it's only when the lover is persuaded
that she or he is mine, that this crystallization
really gets into full gear.
I would say it's more intuitive to assume
that it's actually when you have doubts,
and that there's some sense that there's an unattainability
to the person that that's when you start endowing him
or her with these perfections.
- Yes, and actually we have someone who did that,
Dante did that in his ornamid bachelors
in which he translates the stone coldness,
stony coldness of his lady into what I think is like
a crystal poetic, so transcendence.
He creates, he's so frustrated by her love
that he creates his own metaphysical crystallization
of love as almost a guard against,
as a reaction to her, his frustrated love.
- Yeah, these are four, let me just mention,
these are four poems that Dante wrote,
the Rima Petros, what we call the stony rhymes,
to a lady that is known as Dona Pietra,
Dona Petra, either one, which means the woman of stone
because she's completely unresponsive to his love
and his advances at the winter season,
and you have this highly frigid kind of love poetic, no?
- Yes, and I think, so these poets,
and also going all the way up to stand out
and there's others who do this,
they recognize that crystal is Cassie's origins
of like heat and cold and light and darkness,
and those conflicting elements and qualities of crystal,
they draw upon that for describing and thinking
about the experience of desire and being frustrated
or how, well, taking stand out, even if you have the lover
or your short of it, you create in your mind
this geometric process of increasing perfection.
So there were so many aspects they were tuned to,
the origins of crystal, the celestial ones,
its qualities of heat and cold,
its different degrees of transparency,
but then also that you get in your mental process,
they recognize the crystalline structure
as something as an activity, a mental activity in that,
a mental activity that comes from conflicting states
that are intrinsic to the stone.
So I think that's one of the things that's so interesting
that all these poets, even though they didn't have
what our scientific understandings of crystal,
they were drawing upon all the way to the agents,
all these kind of associations of the crystal.
- Do you see a connection between the solid
and the liquid state?
- In that the crystal is a solidified or frozen water.
And in the remi--
I'm asking because not his remi-patrosi,
which he addresses to this unresponsive woman,
that love is blocked and blockage is not good for that
because it doesn't allow for any flowing.
And it's only when things get moving again
that his soul is actually healing itself.
It's more in-- - Right.
- It's more healthy.
And he has images in the, for example,
even the last kind of pareidizo,
where he speaks about the melting of the snow
around his heart so that actually his heart
can actually start circulating.
They can be a general circulation that relates
to the movement of the cosmos and so forth.
So this kind of frozen, frigid love is also
as associations with death, at least in those poems.
- Yeah.
- So that goes to show you how many associations
you can have around this phenomenon of crystal.
- I mean, it's interesting too.
The watery origins of crystal, a lot of in Islamic architecture
and also biblical counts in which King Solomon
has a floor of crystal that seems to be like water.
The fact that it's like crystal can also have this reflective
quality that makes it seem watery, like Islamic fountains
in medieval counts or described as having crystalline
appearance because it's the water is shimmery like crystal.
So there's many accounts like in the ones you describe,
stoniness is a pure transcendent,
letman can also be death, like the stopping of love
or the flow of love.
They can also be in these other kinds of the watery origins
of crystal, or of such a with fascination
or some kind of mystical, higher experience.
It's not necessarily negative.
So in thinking about this project,
I wanna draw upon all those associations
with the watery origins of crystal as being sometimes
in western literature, something as opposed to the stoniness
of crystal, but then also this kind of shivering
effects of love is a fascination that can be negative,
can be show, can be a distraction from a quest for purity
or transcendence, but it can also just be the experience
of love and different trying to get to an object of desire,
but not, but the process of getting to that.
And that's what I think is important about crystal
that has all these aspects and all these artists,
poets, writers are thinking about how crystal can help them
see that process in a different way.
- Were they interested in the mineralogical aspect
of crystal or were they just using it poetically?
- No, I think they always draw upon like someone
like planning the elder in his natural history.
He's the one that has a catalog of gemstones
and he gives all these describes all the aspects of crystal.
And I think that from those classical,
lapidary traditions, all the poets afterwards
were conscious of the fact that someone like Dante,
for instance, knew about those origins,
knew about it as a precious gemstone.
It's also in biblical accounts
where it's always associated with the purity
of crystal, signifies divine origins,
all these kinds of things.
I think that they are interested in those qualities
of crystal, the lapidary things that were established
from the ancient, the mineralogical qualities.
'Cause Pliny says they're found in the Alpine regions.
Dante also cites it,
crystal is being found in the northern cold climates.
So they were aware of that tradition
and somehow carries through all the poetic accounts of it.
That's what's interesting.
So.
- There's a maybe I should have warned you,
but how about I play you a short song,
which is from our own era,
and maybe I'd like to hear what you think of it.
- Okay.
♪ Be for you ♪
♪ Slap into unconsciousness ♪
♪ I'd like to have another kiss ♪
♪ Our mind ♪
♪ I'd like to have another kiss ♪
♪ Another kiss ♪
♪ My dreams are bright and cold ♪
♪ With pain and nose me and your ♪
♪ I'd like to raise a time ♪
♪ Round one to you ♪
♪ And say when you turn down ♪
♪ We'll need to give you ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Oh tell me well ♪
♪ Your freedom lies ♪
♪ The streets of fields that never die ♪
♪ Delilable ♪
♪ Me from the leaves ♪
♪ I was white ♪
♪ Never cry ♪
♪ I'd love to fly ♪
♪ The Christian is being filled ♪
♪ A thousand girls ♪
♪ A thousand thrills of me ♪
♪ Which dings may your time ♪
♪ When we get back out of the line ♪
- I thought the crystal shift behind came much earlier
in the song I apologize.
- That was great, I was waiting for it
- You could lead up.
- You're waiting for it.
(laughing)
- So there you have a love song that's in the form
of crystal ship, which is, again, bringing together
the solidity of the ship and the liquid, the sea,
- Love that.
- And that it's taking them wherever, you know?
- I love that idea of a crystal ship
that's on the one hand, again, it's like this
transcendent love, pure love,
but it's a ship that's moving in the waters
and it's like that quest for pure love at the same time.
- Yes, and you get a sense that it's probably going
somewhere out of this world,
like there would say anywhere out of this world.
- The celestial world.
- So that's true, yeah.
- The celestial crystal.
- Yeah.
- So in a song like that relies on a century,
all millennia, all associations,
that's in our kind of hardwired in our psyche,
when you say a crystal ship,
it comes with all these associations.
- Yeah.
- So do you have any medieval examples of the crystal desire
that you'd like to share with us?
- The my favorite one, because it combines so many aspects
of crystal as a figure for desire,
it comes from the romance of the rose,
which is a 13th century text in French,
that was, we would think of it as a bestseller.
There was many copies made,
it was translated to many languages.
The story about it is a lover who has a dream
and he's in pursuit of his beloved.
And at one point, he in his dream,
he encounters a fountain,
and he looks into the fountain,
and the fountain has waters shimmery surface,
and at the bottom of the fountain, he sees a crystal.
And he looks in, and he sees,
he thought he saw one crystal,
but now he sees two crystals,
and he thinks, are these the eyes of my beloved?
But there's an ambiguity of whether there's one or two crystals,
and he could be looking at his beloved,
or he could be looking at himself.
And so it's experience of, is this narcissistic love quest,
or is it actually, I see my beloved,
and I can get to her.
And it's all mediated also by the water.
So there's the refractive qualities of the crystal,
and then there's the refractive qualities of the water
adding to that, this dizzying experience of love.
And so he looks in there, and this garden too,
and he also, when he looks at the crystal,
he sees rainbows and all the world reveal to him.
But what he sees changes as he moves around in the garden.
He's written it.
So it's this aspect, the crystal is on the one end,
the stone, but as you move around it,
what you see is on the one end,
they thought it was like a revealed world of everything,
but also it changes according to where he is.
So it's a very confusing, but I think illuminating passage,
because it shows that what they're thinking about crystals,
on the one end, yes, there's this transcendent love object.
But also it's just wondrous, pleasurable experience as well,
about being lost in pursuit of the love object,
and that as they thought at this time,
this is right at the moment of optical science,
they thought of the eye as a crystal.
So there was also this reflection that as he moves,
he has this crystal, I wear, maybe he might be wise
and not just see himself as a narcissistic lover,
but he might be able through this pure love
to see the entire world reveal to him.
So it's kind of, it's fascinating, because it's,
I think it shows that crystal as a stone,
like a holy grail, like I'm gonna get my lover,
but also the kind of wondrous, confusing,
sensory experience of crystals,
well in pursuit of that love object.
And this is all comes into this idea of crystal as a medium,
but also a stone, those two things at the same time,
a crystal that has effects, where you can see many things
all at once, a refractive quality.
And I think there were so a tune to that,
and that's why we were using crystal in this poem
by Guillaume de Loli, so I forgot to say,
that they were thinking about crystal in this way,
right at the moment of the rise of optical science
and Roger Bacon, who is theorizing how the eye is a crystal.
And so yeah, so I love that passage to me,
it really has all the elements of what I'm interested
about crystal in terms of, and also that has been neglected,
historically in terms of a cultural history of crystal.
It's like usually it's just going back to biblical counts
or what the ancient said, but they're in these,
all these love stories in which they're using crystal.
And it might not be just remnants of what they got
from Pliny the Elder or whatever,
but it's still very attuned to all these different qualities
of crystal that we've talked about.
- So it sounds like it's also as a prismatic,
you know? - Yes.
- Yes.
And then how all that conjugates with the rose,
because the lovers also allegorizes a rose,
that makes it even more complicated.
- Right. - Yeah.
- Right.
- That's great.
What do you make of this notion of crystal eyes
and this medieval theory around this time also of extra mission
that there's a light that comes from the eye
towards the object, which contemporary optics, of course,
has disproven whatever that means to be disproven,
but the extra-missive idea that maybe the lovers eyes
are made of crystal that they're providing
the kind of wonder of the phenomenal world
that's being perceived in this kind of intimate relationship
between perceiver and perceived.
- Yes.
And I think this all draws upon the idea that they were attuned
to the physical properties of crystal.
It's like not only the hardness and the transparency,
but the ability to generate heat and also refract the sun trace.
So if your eyes were crystal, it could refract sunlight
to produce a rainbow of light or something like this.
This is what Roger Bacon was understanding crystal as,
you know, that the crystal is a hexagonal prism
that can refract light.
So if you have eyes as a crystal,
it has effects kind of what you were talking about that.
Bacon refract light, it can allow light in, but also refract light,
you know.
So I think those, the heat that could be,
it's has coldness, it has origins and coldness,
but it also can generate heat through refracting the sun,
for instance.
- I wish I had brought in my poor guttorial
because in the very center of Dante's
canticle, purgatory, he articulates the theory of the love
between creator and creatures or creator and creation.
And he uses the analogy of transparency,
or what he calls the diaphanis.
And he says, "Light will come to the diaphanis
and will shine to the degree of this transparency
or diaphanis quality of the stone or the medium.
And the more one is able to receive divine love,
the more that divine love will go to it and shine in it."
And then there's these different degrees of transparency.
And there, the crystalline quality of the diaphanis
becomes the center of this theory of how creator
and creation are connected through a love
which is associated with light, but that needs the medium.
And creation is kind of the medium of this for it to diffuse
itself and infuse all of creation.
So in that sense, it's more than just crystalline spheres
of heaven, it's all of the cosmos
which has this kind of diaphanis quality.
- I love that.
And I think it's important to mention related
to this diaphanis quality is that you have accounts
of nuns praying and when they pray intensely,
their appearance becomes diaphanis like crystal.
They appear as I get closer to God.
And that is the way that the creator is,
they are imbued with the powers of the creators.
That's why they have that appearance of crystal
on their faces.
Also that in many medieval text romance texts,
you have the noble lady is also has a pure crystal quality
to her.
I have one, if I can mention one exception to that,
that I know of, that it's so great
in where a troubadour describes a woman
who he's in love with as having crystal teeth.
And to me, this is so great because it shows that that
is not about transcendent love but about carnal desire.
Because the context is that he's there,
he wants to make, he really wants her in a central way,
not in this spiritual way that we're all used to.
So he's going against the grain there,
deliberately saying she is crystal teeth,
not in a crystal appearance.
And to me, that tells us that he actually wants to be
with her in a bodily corporeal way,
a central way that he's, that's not negative at all too,
but just about a central love that he celebrates,
the pleasure of love.
So I think that, I love to cite that example
because it's drawing from this idea of celestial spheres
transcendent love, but it's also going back to me
between like crystal can be, she smiles
and she has crystal teeth and that too is like,
it's just wondrous like he wants her.
Although it could also be slightly monstrous
and off-putting, I think there's some movies
where you have the gangster types of actually
and put some diamonds on their teeth and it's--
- Yes, right.
- I think you have to be careful there
because eyes and crystals find,
but when you put the crystal where there should be organic form,
there's something about crystals which is nonorganic
or at least we associate as being nonorganic.
- Right.
- It can create some dissident associations in one psych,
so do you intend to go beyond the Middle Ages
in this trans-historical and a multidisciplinary approach
that you're bringing to bear?
- Yes, as I mentioned before,
like this started looking into architectural historians
account of 19th century expressionist, 20th century modernist,
like Mise Vandero and their glass transparency
and from there I've been also interested
in phenomenologists like Beshla and Wojci Kagua,
who talk about these kind of fascinations with crystal
as profound beauty that emerges only from forms
of great acrimony.
So they're theorizing gemstones,
but in the effects of crystal as a kind of how it embodies
the way one thinks about the world
or how the world has effects on us.
And I think they're all using crystal in these different ways
or to think about the wonder of the world.
- So I think in that's mid 20th century,
so I'm just trying to trace all these different accounts
of crystal, usually it's very much dominated by
biblical accounts, the classical applicants,
but I'm seeing this kind of what was seen
to be outlier accounts that are describing
a wondrous, pleasurable, synesthetic experience
of crystal as well.
And as wide, why do they do that?
And they're all drawing upon that,
the biblical accounts, the ancient accounts,
but they're also saying something else.
- I wanted to ask you, Marisa,
about the connection between crystal and glass
because I gather that it was only later
that the two things were distinguished
and that we know that glass is actually non-crystalline,
a morphus solid, whereas crystal is crystalline,
non-morphus solid.
So it was glass and crystal interchangeable
for a certain period of time.
- Yes, I mean, I'm researching this right now,
it's complicated, but what I'm interested in is
even in the 14th century, you have the story
called the Land of Cocaine, a Middle English poem,
in which they say that the monks go to mass
and when they pray, the glass windows become crystalline.
And so there, they use glass and crystal,
and it seems to me, you can have surfaces
that have crystal appearance or crystal effects,
that's associated with the spiritual transcendence
being closer to God, but that glass there are windows.
So there very much attuned to the glass
is a manufactured object.
So crystal, it's interesting, it seems to me there,
there isn't, you know, you can have windows of glass
that are able to have a crystalline quality,
but they don't think they made a hard
and vast distinction, just like mirrors
might have been made out of crystal.
You have to wait until, I think, 14th century
where you have official industries,
and Italy, for instance, where they're making,
there's a whole glass industry,
where it's suddenly disassociate,
I think from these images, kind of this overlap
of glass and crystal.
- So, yeah, you're referring to Venice
and the glass flowing,
and the moron, I wonder, this is my profound ignorance,
I wonder if you could do that with crystal action,
- Probably not, I probably glass is a word of crystal,
I know a lot of art historians, if you have a study that,
and I mean, and I'm more interested in, like, kind of,
stories in which they use the word crystal,
and they talk about crystal effects,
and even though it's not accurate,
or I want to know why are they're using that word,
and what's associated with it, you know?
All these things that we've been talking about,
the qualities that are attributed to it,
the spiritual, celestial qualities,
that is its own story, whether, and leaving aside,
like, all of the geological specificity,
the difference between starting glass,
and which is there, and one can,
I'd categorize that apart,
because that's another aspect, Chris.
I'm also, one, in what we've talked about today,
the association of crystal with erotic desire
is really something, there's a lot to be told there.
- So, I don't know how far up you want to go
on today's program,
and I'm sure you're gonna go further in your book,
but any other major literary works that you want to invoke?
- Well, I think not so much literary works,
it's just references in even our popular culture,
in which there's so much about people are fascinated,
I think because we live in the secular age,
where people are trying to find, kind of,
some kind of spiritual transcendence,
and also have a connection to Earth,
and are very attentive, the fact that we have an ambivalent
relationship to what we're doing to the environment,
what's happening with our ecology,
and so you have crystal coming in there,
which has this history of, like, some kind of spirituality,
and the idea that it could have a fac some one's body,
which has always been there.
We have Native American accounts,
where we know, for instance, that crystals were seen
as objects that were part of very important part of rituals,
and people draw upon that, you can go to end-store,
and have healing crystals, they're categorized,
people are experts at this,
and I think that those kinds of things are also important
to just to kind of look into,
and I'm sure they're getting into,
kind of like literary, very modern literary accounts,
I just don't know about them yet,
or even the song that you played, right,
this kind of, what is the fascination of crystal there,
but it's strong, I found that the crystal has effects,
it's associated with dark transparency,
and hidden passages of our mind,
what we do about desire and synesthesia,
and all these kinds of things,
and also our obsession with the materiality,
like we are fascinating with that crystal
as this different degrees of transparency,
but that it's a material that reflects light,
reflects light, and has a shimmering quality,
so fascinating things,
and so I think there's also that interest there.
- I gather that a lot of people believe in the healing power
of certain crystals, and is that just--
- It's a real thing.
- It's a real thing, and these are not
just superstitious people, these are intelligent people.
Is there anything to that?
I mean, you say that they're probably retrieving
old traditions and perhaps Native American notions,
but you have to pay a pretty penny
to get some of these stones and purchase them
and kind of dwell with them,
and kind of absorb their virtue into your own body.
I know I don't know how much there is to that,
but I'm interested in it as a cultural phenomenon.
It is so strong right now.
Like it, because it became from like this whole new
agey thing, like the Tucson gem show,
but now it's like people are like their experts on it,
they study it, people pay a lot of money
to get these treatments, and so when I'm asking myself,
as I continue this project is how that phenomenon,
very current, contemporary phenomenon,
connects to all this other histories of crystal associated
with desire or architecture or just all this,
even coming up 19, 20th century, but also before that.
- Well, that's great, Marissa.
We had you on to talk about the true goudours
before that book of yours came out, I believe,
and that book has turned out to be a real hit,
and I have a feeling that when this crystal project
of yours materializes, and I think it's gonna take
many forms, not just a book, it might even be exhibits
and other associations with people who are working
on the hard science of crystal,
I think it's gonna be a real fascinating thing,
and just all you out there, remember you heard it,
first, here on in title opinions, so I wanna thank you
for coming on, remind our listeners,
we've been speaking with Professor Marissa Galvez
from my own Department of French and Italian here
at Stanford, and stay tuned, we'll be with you next week.
Bye bye, Marissa.
(camera clicks)
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