The Cristallo Vision

The lexicon of the lapidary was one of my go-to resources of imagery in the blissed-out daze. 

Just about every variant on the word "crystalline", just about every type of precious stone, was deployed in an attempt to evoke the post-Cocteaus sound palette. Along with related adjectives and nouns: iridescence, coruscation, opalescent, et al. 

Such that Saint Etienne amiably took the piss in the advert for Foxbase Alpha:

"embellished with delicate spirals of cristallo" - touché, you cheeky monkeys, touché! 

Now I'm quite inventive and came up with countless permutations. Now and then I'd spy a recondite or technical specialist term and save it for deployment ("halation" was one discovery I wove into a review of, I think, Bark Psychosis).

However the shtick was getting labored by a certain point - the metaphors overly encrusted.  I was running out of steam. So one time, doing the singles, having shot my cristallo wad with Single of the Week #1 by Papa Sprain, when it came to Single of the Week #3  by Butterfly Child  (like Sprain, acolytes of A.R. Kane and debuting for H.ark!) I resorted to borrowing a chunk from J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World:

The onset of self-parody is acknowledged: "Frost-whorls, chandelier shrapnel, you know, the usual"

Actually "snowing in colour"' is quite nice. Snowflakes being a subset of the poetics of crystal, or at least adjacent (along with icicles, frost, etc).  

But yeah I had to ride out the review with a chunk from "The Illuminated Man", the precursor story that then got expanded into The Crystal World. 

This is all just a build-up to  pointing you towards this excellent in-depth blogpost at {feuilleton} on J.G. Ballard's neglected novel from his catastrophe period,  The Crystal World.  John Coulthart examines the novel's affinities with psychedelia (even though JG's brief dabble with LSD was unpleasant) and the connection between gemstones and psychedelic visions, Then he looks at links to  J.G.'s beloved surrealist painters. And being a designer himself,  helooks at some of the different covers to editions of The Crystal World from over the decades and all across the world. 

I think the one I have is the ugly American edition.  I really covet this Max Ernst "gatefold" 

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A musician or outfit called Locrian did an album based around The Crystal World about 15 years ago: 

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Talking of the poetics of the crystal, I wonder if Gaston Bachelard wrote anything about this area, to go with his delves into the imagination of fire, air, space, water, et al. 

I recall reading, or reading about, Roger Callois's The Writing of Stones, a mystical appreciation of minerals, crystals and dendrites. In their dispassionate perfection, Caillois glimpsed Eternity, "the motionless matter of the longest quietude". 

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Talking of the Crystal Vision, or even the Cristallo Vision

Feels like a Stevie song even though it's Lindsey singing lead. 

Well, that's because she wrote it.

I bracket it with "Silver Springs" which has the iridescence factor 

Stevie and Lindsey did "Crystal" on their pre-Fleetwood album 

And then Nicks did it again solo, finally singing lead

 

Stevie seems to have a poetics of the lapidary thing going on judging by "the crystal vision" appearing in "Dreams". 

"Crystal vision" or "crystalline knowledge" - that suggests both purity of perception and imperishability of perception 

The death-defying epiphany, stepping outside Time.  

Walter Pater's moments... 

Precious memory as precious stone