On Rings Part 5

Big Rings

I often have the experience of someone telling me that this or that ring is “too big” or “too small” and so on. But of course it’s not the ring, it’s the person’s taste that we’re talking about. One person only wants bold statements, bright with colour on their hands. Another seeks the absolute minimum – convention requires her to have, say, an engagement band, and she wants the most modest band possible. It has nothing to do with the size of the person or the size of the hands.

Edith Sitwell with rings

Edith Sitwell was petite, but her rings were not.

Some big rings I made in the early ’90s.

I like making big rings, simply because they give me more scope to do things with metal and stones. I’m happy to make small ones, but big rings are more fun.

Ring: Silver, opal, ebony, shakudo

Ring: Silver & kameeldoring

Sometimes the material wants size – these two rings use wood along with silver, and due to  limitations of strength one can’t go too small.

Ring: Silver, topaz

Ring, silver, opaque ruby crystal

The ring above allowed me to fool with the convention of using claws to set stones.

And sometimes one just gets a big stone, which encourages a bold statement.

Three big rings

Ring: Memento Vivere, Silver, gold, shakudo

There are times when I have a lot to say, and need room to say it, so the ring ends up being big. You’ll have to click on the photo to see the detail. This ring conceals a golden goddess and has the words “MEMENTO VIVERE” (remember that you are alive).

Three architectural rings: Silver, paua shell, aquamarine crystal, carnelian, paua shell

If you’d asked me when I was twelve what I was going to be when I grew up, I’d have said “an architect”. In the end it was my brother who became the architect, but over the years I have made a number of architectural rings. In the rings above I used various techniques: The first was carved in wax and then cast, the top of the second was carved from a big aquamarine crystal, and the last was fabricated from sheet silver, and is modeled on the Norman church in Staffordshire where an ancestor was the Rector from the 1840s.

Ring, Silver, jade, ruby

Ring: Silver, Jade, Ruby

This large ring was great fun to make. The ruby, a cabochon, is set at the bottom of the ring.

On Visiting Göbekli Tepe 4: Wonder

I suppose some background would be in order here. Göbekli Tepe is a site in South-Eastern Turkey, about 20km from Şanlıurfa, and about 40km from the Syrian border. It lies between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and is more or less in the middle of the Fertile Crescent. It is situated on a limestone hill, and is the highest feature in the landscape around. According to carbon datings, the site was founded approximately 11500 – 12000 years ago, at the very beginning of the Neolithic era, and right at the end of the last Ice Age. Archaeologists refer to the period as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, which is generally divided into two: PPN A and PPN B, and Göbekli Tepe starts at the beginning of the PPN A. It appears to have been inhabited for 2000 years, then back-filled by the inhabitants and abandoned.

Pillar with bags (?) and birds emerging from the dig.

The area is thought to have been lush at the time, with forested valleys and highland grasslands, all teeming with game and full of edible plants, including the precursors of barley, wheat and rye. It seems to have been so congenial that it allowed an unprecedented lifestyle: sedentary hunter-gathering, which means that humans established settlements where they lived most of the time, and were skilled in exploiting the land without having to move on. Göbekli Tepe is not such a settlement. Rather, it appears to have been built by sedentary hunter-gatherers for non-residential purposes.

Stone Circle seen from above. Some pillars are covered over.

Beyond this, everything is speculation. We don’t know what they did there, (though feasting seems a possible component in view of all the bone fragments) or why they did it. We don’t know what the carved forms on the pillars meant for the builders, and we are scarcely in agreement about what they mean for us. But we can safely say that the entire complex meant A LOT to them – enough for them to invent new technologies and put in vast amounts of physical labour to achieve it. So it has a rather special status – standing as it does at the very fountainhead of what was later to become “civilisation”, it is nevertheless an unknown. Its pillars, writhing with carved life, are blank of meaning but present a rich ground for projection.

We can note that the depicted forms are almost entirely male, that they are often of an aggressive or threatening nature (lions, boars, scorpions, lots of snakes, etc.) but that there are also food animals depicted. We can observe that many of the pillars have arms, hands, belts and loin-skins, and deduce that they represented beings of some sort, but we don’t know what sort. Ancestors? Proto-gods? We neither know nor can we have any idea of what the original builders’ and users’ experience of these things were. We can see in the excavated hollow in the hill the layering of the stone circles, one above the other, and deduce that they were bringing in enough material to significantly raise the ground level, but we don’t know why, or whether it was a slow accretion, or if the material was brought in in one or more pulses of activity. We know that much of the back-fill consists of what one might expect to find on a PPN A midden or garbage heap (but not on a “temple”) except for the admixture of a great number of smallish limestone stones – material of a portable size, from fist to pebble.

Central pillars. Note the arms, and the fox on the further pillar.

One can look at broken pieces of limestone tuns or barrels, as well as a few complete ones, and wonder what was in them. Klaus Schmidt and others think they may have found remains that are diagnostic of brewing barley beer, but one can’t really be sure.

Limestone vat near the “Lion enclosure”.

One can speculate whether the preponderance of bones from crows, ravens, rooks and vultures indicates that the site had something to do with the disposal of the dead.

Hole in a stone.

One can wonder about the meaning or function of the circular holes that are found in various pillars and stones, or the doorway-shaped openings in others.

But eventually we must concede to our ignorance, and to the manifest presence of the things themselves, their poignant signification of ancient concerns, of loss, of time that passes, of their position at the very beginning of who we have become. What we have, besides our ignorance, is the pillars and structures themselves.

And the pillars are, in the original sense of the word, awesome. In-turned, solemnly facing each other across their oval or circular spaces,  they have weight and presence; they stand upright like people but are higher than mammoths; they have endured great time. Though science may extract various facts and numbers from them, our only route to their meaning is finally a sort of empathy.

Pillar which was excavated fallen.

If the place is to be seen as humanity’s first (known) attempt to make something (we might now call it architecture) that was seriously awe-inspiring, it can also be seen as an early serious commitment to place, or to a place. This is no longer the intimate and mostly portable sculpture of the Palaeolithic, whose owners had to move along to follow the source of their food. These people made a place that was itself an artefact, at which at least some of them could dwell, and to which they could and return. They used it for 2000 years. If you stand among the stones and try to imagine what these things meant for their makers, you cannot fail to be impressed, to be filled with both wonder and wondering.

T-shaped pillar.

Visiting Göbekli Tepe 3: Anatomy Lesson

Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson’ (from Wikimedia)

The necessary art of anatomical dissection has saved many lives, and continues to do so. Without its procedures, medical science as we know it would not be possible. But we can’t really look at the image without wincing, for all the knowledge that it brings.

At Göbekli Tepe it’s a little the same. The hillside has been cut open for the sake of knowledge, revealing the layers and strata of the hidden interior, and bringing to our eyes structures that were previously unseen. There’s a certain brutality about the process.  Knowing that everything removed from a site is irreplaceable, and thus that excavation is a type of destruction, the archaeologists must nevertheless dig, with deepened knowledge of the human story as the prize.

A stone circle at Gobekli Tepe

Of course, nothing is simple. The archaeologists must work under multiple pressures, and fit their painstaking activities in with the weather, with the pressure from local authorities to excavate the site quickly so as to make it available for tourism, and with the sometimes conflicting imperatives of revelation and preservation. Every generation of archaeologists finds the previous generation’s techniques problematic, as techniques get more and more refined. What for one excavator is material to be removed in order to expose the more interesting objects below, may for another present a rich trove of information through analysis of pollens or changes in dust deposition. The millions, perhaps billions, of flint tools aren’t of much interest – whereas for a British archaeologist a trove of 50 flint tools would represent a significant find.

But we all do want to know what’s in that mound, and the only way to find out, short of still-unheard-of technologies, is to dig it out and have a look.

For the spectators at the public dissection that Rembrandt recorded, the interior of the body was unknown territory, and only by cutting into the body could it be revealed:

Detail from Rembrandt’s “Anatomy Lesson”

Pillars and stays at Gobekli Tepe

The hillside has been stripped of its skin of living plants and soil, the connective tissue of rubble, bones and flints removed, and the walls and pillars lie revealed like organs and bones. The photos show clearly the tensions between preservation and spectacle. Preserved for all those millennia, the stones are now exposed to the weather. Those with more detailed carving, it seems, are encased in wooden boxes during the winter months. The pillars need a complicated system of wires, stays and bits of wood to remain upright. And, because of the precariousness of the whole arrangement as well as to protect the stones from despoilation by tourists, the pillars and their immediate environment are not accessible. Wooden walkways have been constructed which allow the spectator to look down on them. This gives the exact opposite experience to the intended one. The builders of these enclosures went to great pains to make big pillars and carry them to their intended site. They clearly wanted something which would overwhelm the spectator. The pillars at Göbekli Tepe are arguably the biggest things made by humans up to that time. By marking them with arms, belts etc, they were signifying that these are beings like us, and they wanted really big beings.

Seen with their heads at knee-level or below, the pillars are diminished. In any case we have seen many bigger things, and are less likely to be impressed by sheer scale than people of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

Walls and pillars at Gobekli Tepe

Nevertheless I was impressed, almost overwhelmed. In the next post I’ll try to work out why.

On Visiting Göbekli Tepe 2: The Approach

Imagine a flat limestone plateau, the highest feature in the countryside around – anything higher is way over on the horizon, where various dim blue mountains, including Mount Nemrut, can be seen. The only vegetation is the short winter grass that covers the hills and a paradoxical stand of olives right on the top. In the summer, when the grass has withered, the place is dry and semi-desert.

On the one side of the plateau is a round hummock. Göbekli Tepe means “Pot-belly hill” in Turkish and it is to this hummock that the name refers.

Gobekli Tepe

There’s no geological reason for a round bump of mixed rubble to stand on top of a limestone plateau, and it turns out that although Göbekli Tepe is big, it is entirely human-made. Inside the rubble are the remains of more than twenty large circular stone enclosures, dating back to a two-millennium period that began eleven and a half thousand years ago.

Once, we are told, the area was a paradise. Forested, at least in the valleys, teeming with wild game, and full of the grasses which would become wheat, barley and rye, it was so lush that the human inhabitants were able to adopt a pretty-much unprecedented life-style: Sedentary hunter-gathering. This means that the local ecology was providing food faster than the humans could exhaust it, and they were able to settle down. They still had no pottery. Bones of a great variety of animals have been excavated at the site, but there is no evidence of domestication.

Stone table with cup-shaped indentations and plinth.

Before encountering the excavated mound, one comes across areas where wide rock surfaces have been enhanced. Here are a series of cup-shaped indentations carved in the limestone, as well as a pediment for a pillar. The rock is also cut with channels whose function is to catch run-off and direct it into several cisterns.

Water Cistern: Gobekli Tepe

Even if the climate was more forgiving then than it is now, this is the top of a hill and has no natural springs. For people to have conducted the mass activities that the excavation suggests, water must have been important. It’s not feasible to carry water uphill in quantities that could have sated the thirsts of the hundreds of people needed for the transport of each pillar. I don’t know if anyone has conducted a study of these water-works. They would provide a meaningful upper limit to the number of people who could be accommodated on the hill.

If one is alert, the very ground on which one walks can take on a meaning.

Footpath, Gobekli Tepe

Bone fragments, flint and obsidian tools, and lumps of chalky limestone lie everywhere. Everything is an artefact, and was put or dropped there by people. This picture is not cherry-picked – it’s just a part of the pathway, and all of the ground is like this. In a more meticulous conservation environment one would walk on a raised walkway.

Footpath – Flint artefacts

Here’s another random view of the pathway. Enlarge it and count the flint tools and flakes.

Before I arrived at the excavation pit, the whole thing shifted for me. I realised that it was all artefact, that everything marked the ancient human presence, not only the potentially awe-inspiring pillars in their enigmatic circles. So I could approach the whole mound as itself an ancient mystery, rather than as something that obscured the more interesting structures of pillars and circles which are embedded in it, overlapping, built one over the other.

The accretion of stones around Göbekli Tepe, like almost everything else about it, remains unexplained. I imagine that for ancient visitors to the site, carrying stones was an important part of the ritual associated with going there. Large parties of people would have been required to carry and place the very large number of stones that make up the structures. It is clear that a lot of additional stone was carried in. My speculation is that visiting the site somehow involved bringing stones and adding them to the mound. Eventually the ground level would rise, and new structures would be built on top of the old.

Looking down into a cistern

More on Göbekli Tepe in my next post. We’ll actually get to the stone circles.

On Visiting Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe stands on the top of a high limestone hill in the bleak countryside near the Turkish city of Sanliurfa, or more commonly Urfa, in South Eastern Turkey, 40km from the Syrian border. Situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates, it lies roughly in the middle of the “fertile crescent” – though the immediate countryside does not present the appearance of much fertility, a topic I’ll come back to in a later post. It is the oldest built temple that we know of. Dating from the very beginning of the Neolithic, about 11,500 years ago, the people who built it were hunter-gatherers who had neither pottery, agriculture, or animal husbandry. By the time they left the site, perhaps 2000 years later, all three of these practices were in place, and humans had embarked on the path that would lead to civilisation.

It has been partly excavated by teams of German and Turkish archaeologists for the last 16 years or so. Only a small portion of the site has been excavated so far. What has been revealed by these excavations is staggering: A series of stone circles (four have been excavated and there may be as many as twenty more underground) dominated by large, sometimes elaborately carved, T-shaped stone pillars or monoliths, up to 5m tall.

These stone circles are in an excellent state of preservation because, for unknown reasons, the builders of Göbekli Tepe covered the entire site over with hundreds of tons of mixed rubble before departing. For 9 500-odd years nothing was exposed to the weather, nothing was plundered for building material or turned over by the plough. This means that, paradoxically, its stones are better preserved than those of some much more recent sites elsewhere – even Roman or Byzantine.

We visited in December 2012. Unless they are locals, visitors to Göbekli Tepe are investing considerable resources in getting there. But they’re likely to be disappointed unless they have made a parallel journey of knowledge. In other words, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you might not see anything much.

In prospect, the site is awesome – one learns about it from articles on the internet, most of which point back to an article in National Geographic, where huge stone monoliths loom over the camera, which comes close to the dramatically-lit stone carvings.

A view of Gobekli Tepe from the National Geographic article.

Who wouldn’t want to stand in the oldest built room, surrounded by pillars that are clearly also beings, and re-experience the spatial dimension of what the builders of the place experience? Well, you can’t. And it’s not that simple anyway.

For perfectly good reasons to do with conservation, the stone circles are not directly accessible to the public. One can see, beyond the excavation on the stone plateau, the initials and graffiti left by contemporary visitors. Other reasons are architectural. The people of 11500 years ago weren’t really great architects, and their structural methods were simplistic, even though their masonry was not crude. The structures revealed by removing the rubble are not stable, the stone pillars standing precariously in their prepared slots in the floor, some having toppled over. The public simply should not go in there.

So we look down on the structures from boardwalks erected around the pits of the excavations. In the winter, some of the pillars are covered with wooden boxes – seemingly to protect them from the weather.

Stone circle with boxed pillars: Göbekli Tepe

There is no dramatic lighting. Everything is wet or drying out – there has been recent winter rain.

Boardwalk above the Gobekli Tepe excavation.

Many of the pillars, down at foot level, need help to stay upright.

The pillars were slotted into keyhole slots in the stone base, and I winced to see how almost-aligned this pillar is. You’ll have to click on the picture to see it. The scaffolding is clearly necessary, but visually intrusive. You can see the rubble exposed in section. In the cut-away hillside in the background shows more, and patches that may indicate structures rather than random stones.

Pillar base carved into bedrock: Göbekli Tepe.

I felt great sympathy for the archaeologists involved in the dig. Basically, everything is an artefact, deliberately put there – the whole of the Gobekli Tepe mound having been put there by people. So some of the artefacts – stone pillars, walls, floors – needs must be privileged, while others – fist-sized rocks of the local limestone, bones of birds and animals, needs to be carefully sifted, labelled and put aside in order to expose the structure: the walls, seats, floors and circles or ovals of pillars that are exposed.

The rubble blurs things. It appears that the entire site was subject to continuous or intermittent deposition of rubble. People kept bringing it in, either at a fairly steady pace or in surges, as, say, to bury a particular stone circle. This means that circles were built on the site on top of one another as the rubble got higher. It presents considerable problems to the excavator. To get at the lower strata, one would have to destroy the equally interesting upper layers.

Nobody knows why any of this stuff was done, nor what the meaning of the stone pillars may be, nor do we have any idea at all what the people who built the stone circles were thinking. Anyone who says otherwise should be taken with the utmost scepticism, especially if they are promoting an agenda.

Pillars at Göbekli Tepe in their winter warmers

These things are huge and impressive but they are diminished by perspective and the fact that you are looking down on them. I surmise that much of purpose of the labour of cutting and transporting the stones to the site was to give the intended viewer something seriously big to look up to.

It all sounds a little disappointing, but it wasn’t. In my next post I’ll write about why.

On Rings Part 4

Rings with natural elements

The frustrations of using the natural world as a model are obvious: No matter how refined our skill, it is impossible to replicate natural forms in all their detail. They are patterned all the way from the obvious forms that we see down to the exquisite arrangement of their molecules. At best we can refer somewhat simplistically to the patterns we encounter.

Spring Flowers

The techniques of casting appear to offer a way around this problem. If we can’t fabricate a natural form, perhaps we can cast it? It turns out that, to some extent, we can. To over-simplify, what one does is to encase the thing you’re casting in plaster of Paris and put it in a kiln until the organic material has burned away. Precious metal is then melted and poured into the resulting cavity, and voila! An accurate casting. Of course, it’s not really that simple. Ash residues cause porosities in the product, or prevent the metal from flowing into smaller details. Very fine detail is beyond casting process – you can cast a pod but not a leaf (unless it’s fairly thick.) You can cast a beetle but not its antennae, and the legs will be a problem. Nevertheless, one can get a fairly close approximation of the shape and surface of the original.

Pod Ring: Silver, garnet

Pod ring: Silver, carnelian

The bezels of these pieces are cast from the pods of different species of eucalypt.

Ring: Silver, chalcedony

Yet another eucalypt, with a bit of the bark cast to form the shank.

Star Pod Ring: Silver, amethyst

I found a pod with a five-fold symmetry. The outside of the pod was furry, which resulted in this rough surface. I cut the tip off the pod, and drilled a setting into it.

Ring: Silver, diopsite

This one is cast from bits of dried seaweed, which has a wonderful bumpy texture. The problem is that as soon as the seaweed comes into contact with water (in the plaster of Paris mixture) it swells, writhes and distorts. I solved the problem somewhat by dipping the dried seaweed in beeswax which made it more manageable.

Two rings: Silver, blue lace agate

These rings are made from sections of a long flat leaf that I found in the fynbos. The lower one includes a bit of the seaweed and two little flowers made of blue-lace agate.

There’s another kind of casting that takes advantage of natural resources – cuttlefish casting. Here two cuttlefish are ground against each other until they are both flat, and then the envisaged piece and its sprue, the channel through which the metal will flow, is carved in negative (or impressed) into one or both surfaces. Care must be taken to key the two halves (align them correctly) when they are bound together for casting. The technique is quick, and allows for some very pleasing effects.

The cuttlefish has a wonderful texture resembling wood-grain. Here are two rings made in that technique. The top one was made with a particular pod in mind.

Ring: Silver, Shakudo

Cuttlefish cast ring

Part 5 here.

On Rings Part 3

Normally I am not interested in executing a client’s designs. I have enough or more of my own, and in situations where I am functioning merely as labour, I can’t be competitive in terms of price. Other workshops have economies of scale, and a number of workers to share overheads.

But there is one situation in which I insist on stepping out of the way and letting the client’s ideas come to the fore – the creation of engagement and wedding rings.

These rings have a special place in our culture, both as a public statement of marital status and as a signal of aesthetic preferences. To the jeweler, the challenge is to get out of the way and let the clients decide what it is that they want. Usually, if they come to me, they want a certain style of metal-work. They want the ring to appear “magical” or to contain certain symbolic motifs. What I do is give them a couple of picture books on rings – the books I use are The Ring by Sylvie Lambert and Rings: Symbols of wealth, Power and Affection by Diana Scarisbrick. I ask the couple to spend some time together looking at the books, and to bookmark the things that they like – whether an entire piece or a detail. This gives me an idea of what they’re after. Then we select a stone, or stones, or they give me a stone from a grandmother’s ring, and I come up with a design, which may be a scrawl on paper, and, once we’re all sure what we’re about, I make the piece.

Because these rings are supposed to be worn for life, there are certain constraints – the thing must be robust enough to endure a lifetime of wear (no soft stones or very fine engraving, no pointy little bits), should be more comfortable than a dress ring has to be, should make allowance for the probability of being sized, and above all should be sufficiently complex to support the projection of symbolic meaning which will make the ring magical for the wearer.

Betrothal ring: Silver, gold, diamond, ruby.

 My interpretation of a jewish betrothal ring.

Ring: Silver, gold, chrysoprase, diamonds

This client wanted to make a statement. The colour of the stone was important, as was the inclusion of ancestral stones.

Ring: Silver, gold, sapphire

My wife Julia’s “engagement” ring. We remain very engaged.

Fede ring set: Silver, gold, jade

A set of 2 wedding bands and an engagement band.

Part 4 here.

On Rings Part 2

The natural world in which we live presents more foliage than anything else to the eye. Only in the most hideous built environments or deserts, are leaves, flowers, tendrils, vines and all the glories of the vegetative world missing. With this in mind, it is surprising that foliage is almost entirely absent from rock art, only appearing as motifs, with rare exceptions, once “civilization” sets in.

For me these natural patterns are an endless source of refreshment. Here are some rings with foliage patterns, using different techniques.

Piercing and engraving:

Ring: Silver & Iolite

Ring: Silver & Iolite

Ring: SIlver, Gold, Amethyst

Ring: Silver, gold, sapphire

Some inlay

Ring: Gold, silver, shakudo

Ring: Silver, Topaz

Ring: Silver, Topaz

Inlay and engraving

Ring: Snowflake obsidian, silver, shakudo

Carved using burrs

Ring: Silver, gold, peridot

Ring: Star ruby, white gold

Ring: Star ruby, white gold

Part 3 here.

On Rings – Part 1

I love making rings for the finger. They offer the same problem over and over in an almost-infinite variety, and the solutions to the problems are almost as various. At the same time rings afford a very circumscribed task. The body dictates that the ring should fit the finger, and that it should be within the bounds of acceptable comfort. This means that the ring is necessarily a small object – something  of the exact scale for which my tools were designed. And it means that, being small, the job will soon find closure. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a ring for more than three days.

All rings enjoy a symbolic dimension – which is to say that they carry some meaning in addition to their material presence, most especially for the wearer. This is what I pay the most attention to. The ring, unlike most other artworks, is destined to be incorporated in the wearer’s body image, so it will have a special kind of appreciation. I want my rings to say something through colour and form which will both fit in and enhance the wearer’s ambience.

I am not often asked to make the minimal ring – “a plain gold band without any decoration”. When the request does come, it is usually from a man who doesn’t want to appear decorated. I try to decline. Being a one-man workshop, I can’t compete with mass-production setups in terms of cost. If I do make such rings, I tend to make them thicker, heavier and more smoothly rounded than the usual wedding band. This gives the ring a very satisfying feel.

The rings I enjoy all have some decorative elements, and I like to set stones in rings. Here’s an example which is both decorative and has a number of stones:

Ring: silver, fire opal & assorted faceted stones

But more commonly I work with a single stone per ring. I am decidedly not in favour of the idea that the ring should present the stone, and that for that purpose the metal should get out of the way as much as possible – leaving us with, at an extreme, a simple band with a claw setting holding a diamond.

I am a metal-worker, and I think that my designs and work in that medium should contribute as much or more to the design. Below is a ring with a single diamond which refers to baroque jewellery, and gives, to me, a satisfying unity of symbol and material.

Baroque Ring: Gold & Diamond

Baroque Ring: Gold & Diamond

Of course, sometimes the client wants the stone to be “presented”. They’ve paid a lot of money for it, and it must be the main feature of the piece. In the ring below, the client had a beautiful Burmese sapphire. I managed to foreground the stone while still doing a bit of sculptural stuff.

Ring: Gold & Sapphire

Ring: Gold & Sapphire

The motif of two hands has a long tradition. In Ireland, they are called fede rings. The first one I made was when I was still an apprentice, in 1972. I wish I still had a picture of it. It was made in 18ct gold and had 3 hinged bands – the middle band carried a heart, and the outer bands had two hands that clasped each other over the heart. Very sentimental, but the pleasure I got from the technical challenges was immense. So over the years, I have made various fede rings.

Rings, silver, gold, jade, diamonds

Fede ring: Silver

Fede ring, 2 bands: Silver

Fede Ring: Gold, SIlver, Sapphire

Fede Ring: Gold, SIlver, Sapphire

I must remind the viewer that these things are a lot smaller than the photos.

I could go on about rings for days, but for the moment I’ll stop here.

More to come in part 2.

The Statisticians

THERE WAS a land where people were divided and set apart from one another in enmity — men against women, rich against poor, belief against belief, tribe against tribe, class against class, children against the old, and so on. Nevertheless, they were constantly forced up against one another by the density of their numbers, by vehicles that could carry them anywhere at great speed, by greed, by trade, by need…. This situation created a lot of trouble for everyone, and violence, strife, robbery, rape.

Now this land had a wise ruler whom I shall call John, and this John, on hearing of the plight of the people, was at first disbelieving. He lived in a palace with high walls, and wherever he went he was surrounded by smiling faces and armed guards, and never came in contact with the poor and aggrieved, except in a ritualised manner. He was tempted to remove the minister who told him but, being a wise ruler, he decided rather to find out for himself what his people suffered.

“Oh really?” he said to the minister, “And can you please tell me what the status of my median citizen might be?”

The minister went away and conferred with the gatherers of figures, the bureau of census takers, with the economists and the statisticians, and after a suitably long time, he returned to the Wise Ruler. “Your majesty, your median citizen is a woman who….”

John stopped him right there. “I do not want a woman. What is the condition of the median man in the land?”

The minister did not argue. He went away and consulted with the economists and the statisticians, with the bureau of census takers, the gatherers of figures, and after a slightly shorter time, he again returned to the Wise Ruler.

“Wise one, your median citizen is a man like yourself, of the same cast and colour. Like yourself he is five feet and nine inches tall, but in every other respect he is different from you. He is considerably younger than you are….”

“My age! My age! What is the median for my age?”

Again the Minister consulted, and again returned to John.

“Wise one, he lives in the direst poverty, and has many children but no work. He is ignorant and bigoted, knows nothing of the world beyond the horizons of his own suffering.”

“Show him to me.”

“Sire, you must understand that there is no such man—he is a figment of the imaginations of the gatherers of numbers, the bureau of census takers, the economists and the statisticians. They compose a man out of averages.”

“Nevertheless, show him to me. Find the man who most suits your description. But do not disturb him. Leave him ignorant of the search, and come and tell me.”

The minister ordered the bureau of spies and the bureau of informers to search for a man who fitted the description. Maximum discretion was advised. They sought in the demographically correct areas, but had problems finding anyone who perfectly matched the set of attributes. At last, and with great stealth, a certain spy found a man who seemed to match the requirements of the statisticians. The spy told his handler, and the handler told his director, who told the Chief Spy, who told the Minister. The Minister ran to the Wise Ruler.

“Wise One,” he said, “we have located the man you seek. He is the same height and age as you, and lives in this very city.”

“I wish to observe him without him knowing it,” said John. “Find out what can be done. And remember, his life must not be disturbed in any way.”

The Minister consulted with the Commission on Surveillance and with the Ministry of Oversight. He called in consultants in the fields of Observation and Supervision from the world of trade.

“We can insinuate various devices into his house, and possibly onto his person. These could allow you to see him, but the pictures you see will be blurred and inaccurate. You will be able to hear him, if he speaks near a device. Were it not for your absolute condition that he should not know that he is watched, it would be a simple matter to buy his co-operation. In that case you could observe everything.”

“Do what you can without,” said John.

When they were ready, the ruler observed. The man was poor and had back trouble. He had many children, though it was sometimes difficult to tell whose children were whose, as there were many other adults who came and went through the man’s house. Sometimes he went to seek work. His wife worked as a cleaner. When she was out working, he took whatever money he could and went drinking. He argued and beat her when he came home. He had another woman, or women.

The Ruler disguised himself as a common man and, slipping away from his guards, met his subject at a drinking hall. There he bought him drink and engaged him in talk. The man was the same height as him, but fat and jowled, and his breath was short. He sweated as he drank and smoked. He had few ideas and little to talk about. All of his aspirations were those of others and his desires were for things the Wise Ruler already knew to be worthless. His knowledge was little and twisted, though this did nothing to limit his arrogance. So instead of conversing, the Ruler and the subject exchanged pleasantries and clichés. But try as he may, Wise John was unable to hide his irony and distance for long, and the man soon became first suspicious then abusive under his questioning. The Ruler had to flee, and later had difficulty explaining his black eye to his aides and sycophants.

The next day the Ruler summoned the Minister, who came running, quaking with fear.

“This man, in what respects does he not resemble the statistical mean?”

“Sire, he was a ninety nine percent match. The best we could do. The mean has three point seven four children and he has four, but we could not find anyone with a partial child. There are a number of other small differences.”

“He was the best you could do?”

“Yes, sire.”

“The man is arrogant, mean, and violent. He is a drunk.”

“Yes, sire. The majority of poor men of his status are intermittently these things.”

“And the women?”

“The women are more sober, in general.”

“But they are oppressed by the drunks?”

“Yes, sire.”

The ruler shook his head. “This man hardly deserves to live.”

“That is already taken care of, sire. The man has an incurable disease. He will die within a few years.”

“Does this not make him unique?”

“Sadly, it does not. Most men of his type are thus afflicted.”

Then the Ruler called a great convocation of the wise of his realm. “My citizens are poor and ignorant. They are violent and angry, drunk and hungry, and unable to see the path to their own welfare. Added to this, they are burdened with avoidable disease and early death. I am determined to empty the coffers of the state, change the laws, or do whatever it takes to raise them above their misery. I call on each of you to offer such advice as you can, and will pay heed to the most persuasive.”

The convocation went on for many days. The most persuasive were a group of wealthy merchants and traders from other lands, who, being wealthy, could afford to hire the best thinkers and rhetoricians.

“Give us free rein, sir, for trade creates wealth, and wealth is what the land most needs,” they said, and they said it so seductively and with such implicit power that the Wise Ruler took their advice.

At the end of five years, the Wise Ruler again called the minister, and told him to again find the median man. The Minister again consulted with the economists and the statisticians, the census-takers, the spies, the informers, the observers and surveyors.

They found another man, for the first had died, and in any case conditions had shifted. Again the Ruler observed him. He was poorer than the first, and had more troubles. He too was ignorant and arrogant. He was angry, scared and powerless at the same time. He coughed. He did occasional menial work, or none. When need pressed he tried small crimes.

The Ruler called in the traders, who arrived late. “My people are worse off than before,” he said.

“Well, sire, it is too early to say, really, but we think our plan is already starting to work—quite a few people are already substantially richer, including yourself and those you love. The effects will soon trickle down.” And they took him to their lands and honoured him and lent him more money.

And after another five years, the Ruler again observed his median citizen. He sat despondently outside a crowded shack among barren fields. He was fashioning himself a weapon to rob his neighbour. His children were hungry and dirty. He hit them if they cried.

The Ruler summoned the leaders of the traders in his land. When they had gathered he commanded his guards to slaughter them, which they did. Then he emptied his coffers in the service of the poor, and in the effort to raise all his citizens to adequate living. The thieves among the poor benefited greatly from this programme. None will trade with a murderer of traders, so soon his country was bankrupt, unable to secure the necessities of life. Then the poor, armed by crime, rose against the Wise Ruler, and finding him in the Palace as they looted it, hanged him from a tree in the Palace Gardens.