a founder of the codex

Diamond

Adamantaria pressa·the Pressed Light

From Greek adamas, unconquerable, the old name of the diamond, and Latin pressa, pressed, the unconquerable stone made by pressure.

Level: Conceptorganism
Phylum: Forceimage schema
Class: Boundaryits scratch hardness
Niche: Extremophileabsence
Mode: Attachmenthow it keeps existing
Stage: Matureindividuated
Status: Living
Habitat: Market

Its kinds · Roget, 1852: Inorganic Matter · Wilkins, 1668: Stone · WordNet, 1990: Substance · Llull, 1308: I · Elementative

Pressed Light, the whole specimen — Plate XII. Adamantaria pressa, the whole specimen.

Diamond is carbon pressed deep in the earth into the hardest crystal, which eruptions carry to the surface and cutting turns into scattered light.

What is pressed hard enough for long enough becomes the thing that scratches everything else.

behavior It grows in the dark for ages, rides to the surface in a few hours of eruption, and then outlasts everything it is set into.

provocation

What pressure has made something in you harder and clearer than it would have become alone?

Each draw is the being derived afresh by the current laws at another seed (laws §11); the chosen one leads (where they sit in the morphospace).

I Dissection

Each organ answers one question about the idea. The framed one, its boundary, is the dominant organ: the being's class, the one the idea could not lose and stay itself.

Kernel of Diamond — Fig. 1. Kernel
Tetrahedral lattice
Which premise, if it were false, would kill this idea?
Diamond is pure carbon in which every atom is bound to four neighbours at the corners of a tetrahedron, a lattice so tight that it is the hardest natural substance.¹
drawn as: tetrahedral lattice · view: transparent

Boundary of Diamond — Fig. 2. Boundary
Scratch hardness
❦ dominant organ
What sets it apart from what it is not, and how does it keep that distinction?
It scratches every other mineral and stands at ten, the top of the scale of hardness, and the Greeks named it adamas, the unconquerable.²
drawn as: scratch hardness · view: in situ

Intake of Diamond — Fig. 3. Intake
Cratonic keel
What must it feed on to work? What has to be present, noticed or supplied?
It feeds on carbon carried down into the mantle on old sea floor or held there since the earth formed, in the roots of the oldest continents 150 kilometres down or more.³
drawn as: cratonic keel · view: microscope

Mechanism of Diamond — Fig. 4. Mechanism
Lithostatic pressure
How does it turn what it takes in into what it gives out?
Under the weight of the rock above, at some fifty thousand times the pressure of the air and over a thousand degrees, carbon atoms are forced into their densest order and the crystal grows layer by layer.³
drawn as: lithostatic pressure · view: at work

Output of Diamond — Fig. 5. Output
Brilliant cut
What does it make possible, visible or knowable?
Cut into many facets, it bends white light and splits it into flashes of colour, the fire for which it is prized.⁴
drawn as: brilliant cut · view: transparent

Dispersal of Diamond — Fig. 6. Dispersal
Diatreme
What part of it travels into other minds, ideas and fields, and by what vector?
Kimberlite eruptions carry it up from the mantle in hours, and it travels in thought as the promise of what lasts forever, the stone of the engagement ring.^{3, 5}
drawn as: diatreme · view: magnified

Decay of Diamond — Fig. 7. Decay
Cleavage plane
What can it not digest, where does it fail, and what does it leave behind for others?
Hard as it is, it is brittle, and a sharp blow along its crystal planes splits it clean. Flawed stones and splinters are crushed into grit for saws and drills.³
drawn as: cleavage plane · view: pressed

II Meaning associations

No relations recorded yet.

descent membership food web resemblance or friction

Lineage

A founder, dissected by hand.

Kin

same kind in Roget Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Cloud, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Lake, Rain, River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Wind

same kind in Wilkins Amber, Ash, Clay, Petrification, Salt, Sand

same kind in WordNet Amber, Ash, Clay, Salt, Sand

same kind in Llull Amber, Archipelago, Ash, Clay, Cloud, Emergence, Entanglement, Entropy, Erosion, Fire, Frost, Iridescence, Lake, Petrification, Rain, Reflection, Resonance, Resonance (second reading), River, Salt, Sand, Storm, Weightlessness, Wind, Winter, Self-Ending Order

same phylum Fear, Fire, Glossolalia, Oblivion, Spring, Storm, Volition, Rushmaker, Self-Ending Order

same dominant organ Amber, Aura, Cloud, Equinox, Frost, Possession, Reflection, Solitude, Threshold, Tongue Horizon, The Shared Cell

Genome

pressure
carbon
hardness
brilliance
depth also in Lake

III In the world

Echoes

an engagement ring
the Big Hole at Kimberley
the Koh-i-Noor
a diamond-tipped saw

IV Record

How it was drawn

its draw 2, a point in the morphospace (laws §8), drawn by flux-2-klein-4b.safetensors.

axis	value
book	pathemata
symmetry	asymmetric
organization	solitary
silhouette	columnar
scale	hand
proportion	tapering
growth	encrusted
articulation	telescoping latent
openness	hollow latent
skeleton	spicules latent
locomotion	jetting latent
pattern	reticulate latent
coloration	nuptial
substance	crystal
surface	mottled
palette	obsidian
luminosity	points
transparency	layered latent
gesture	dissolves
unity	unmarked latent
modality	unmarked latent
causation	unmarked latent
determinacy	dissolving latent
fusion	becoming
anomaly	sideways
graft	quipu
technique	silverpoint
viewpoint	below
value	chiaroscuro latent
balance	top heavy latent
density	graded detail
rhythm	regular latent
saturation	muted latent
appendages	bladders
anchor (body)	a diatom, a glass shell in two halves perforated with ordered pores
anchor (detail)	a comb jelly, an oval glassy body with eight rows of beating iridescent combs

Sources

W. H. Bragg and W. L. Bragg, The Structure of the Diamond (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 1913)
Pliny the Elder, Natural History (77 CE), book 37, on adamas
Robert M. Hazen, The Diamond Makers (1999)
Marcel Tolkowsky, Diamond Design: A Study of the Reflection and Refraction of Light in a Diamond (1919)
Edward Jay Epstein, The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (1982)

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