Fissures

Brian Dillon, 2008
(Page 3 of 6)

Draining Seizure. Photograph by Nick Cobbing

Seizure flirts with certain venerable narratives about crystals, architecture, space and time. Of the scientific and aesthetic stories that attached to crystals in the nineteenth century, none is more sharply defined in the Victorian imagination than the idea of an enclosed and crystalline world – an inviolate universe that, paradoxically, turns out also to be a portal to other worlds and other times. In general, the novels of Jules Verne, for example, describe eccentric versions of the bourgeois interior set adrift in time and space: plush enclosures that can travel beneath the oceans, through the air or even to the moon, allowing their passengers to encounter the vast unknown without ever straying too far from their air-locked floating libraries.

The exception is A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864). Here the travellers descend into an interior appointed in kitsch splendour – we might say that the planet itself becomes a spacecraft or a time machine. Verne describes the sight that greets his protagonists as they explore the depths of an Icelandic volcano:

That which formed steps under our feet became stalactites overhead. The lava, which was porous in many places, had formed a surface covered with small rounded blisters; crystals of opaque quartz, set with limpid tears of glass, and hanging like clustered chandeliers from the vaulted roof, seemed as it were to kindle and form a sudden illumination as we passed on our way. It seemed as if the genii of the depths were lighting up their palace to receive their terrestrial guests.

What the guests uncover, before emerging again in southern Italy, is a fanciful world of living fossils: ancient mammals and even dinosaurs. But the substance of the planet itself, more plausibly, contains its own crystalline archive – the earth, it seems, is made of compacted time.

According to the elaborate account ventured by John Ruskin in The Ethics of the Dust (1866), the earth also conceals in the form of crystals certain hardened allegories of the moral life. In a series of playful (not to say bizarre) dialogues with a group of schoolgirls, Ruskin outlines his crystalline ethics:

… their goodness consisted chiefly in purity of substance, and perfectness of form: but those are rather the EFFECTS of their goodness, than the goodness itself. The inherent virtues of the crystals, resulting in these outer conditions, might really seem to be best described in the words we should use respecting living creatures – ‘force of heart’ and ‘steadiness of purpose’. There seem to be in some crystals, from the beginning, an unconquerable purity of vital power, and strength of crystal spirit. Whatever dead substance, unacceptant of this energy, comes in their way, is either rejected, or forced to take some beautiful subordinate form; the purity of the crystal remains unsullied, and every atom of it bright with coherent energy.

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