The Z-Stone Boom
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I recently found this image on Twitter — sorry, I didn’t keep track of the source. It reminded me of a stone I once found in Ierapetra, in the 1960’s, a blue-green stone with quartz inclusion marking an exact letter ‘Z’. I called it Z-stone and carried it around with my possessions for years. Here is my entry in COWBIRD, which I posted along with a picture of a beach on Martha’s Vineyard.
[by the way, “Ierapetra, or My Sister’s Keeper” is a new novel I’m working on. It relates (loosely) to a time, in the 60s, when I traveled with my late younger sister to Crete. All memories about Ierapetra, such as the Z-stone in this post, go back to that summer, before I started my Ph.D. research.]
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(COWBIRD blog on Nov 9, 2012)
“An unusual blue-green pebble, marked with a prominent ‘Z’ by an inclusion of quartz. The first such stone was found by Joachim Frank on the beach of Ierapetra, on the south coast of Crete. Lying forgotten for almost an entire year in a small boutique in Munich, it became famous later as the prototype for an entire branch of the arts and crafts industry. The anthropologist Christian Schaeffer, in a recent article in Die Welt, goes as far as speaking about the beginning of a new culture: the culture of cipher stones.
What is certainly new is the extent of the production and trade of these stones: in Germany alone 610,000 were collected or manufactured in a single year; 59,000 of these changed owners, with the most esoteric ones going for DM 200 to 800 a piece. What is also new is the popularity of both natural and artificial specimens even among people who’d never before expressed an interest in traditional art.
To keep up with demand, it was initially sufficient to comb the bays of the Mediterranean. These were typically groups of 6 to 20 men who searched the beaches systematically and sold their treasures to the arts trade for top prices. Wolfgang Schmitt, today the owner of Zeta, one of the biggest plants making cipher stones, reminisces not without nostalgia on what he called the gold-digger time. In places like Algiers, Sicily, Crete, and Cyprus, the nailing-shut of each of the newly filled wooden crates used to be celebrated effusively with Champagne.
Those Z-U celebrations are a thing of the past. Only a few beaches are still being turned upside down by entrepreneurs running small backhoes, but the overwhelming majority of Z-stones are now manufactured from stones devoid of inclusions. It is an indication of the size of the boom when a German physicist, asked on TV about applications of laser technology, mentioned in passing the applications in the medical and communication field, but then went on saying that lasers had become so important recently because they “essentially enabled the production of individualized Z-stones.”
[I found this text, which I translated from German, among reports that I sent every semester to the Deutsche Studienstiftung during my studies in Munich from 1964 to 1969. The Studienstiftung is a Government-funded institution that gives out scholarships to students considered meritorious based on their exams. I recently contacted the administrator for archival records on the interdisciplinary workshops they organized at that time. To my astonishment, there were no records on workshops going back beyond 1970. However, she did find a file with all my reports, which I received today, scanned in as a big pdf.
It is a time capsule which moves me almost to tears. I recognize my Sturm-and-Drang time, my pretentiousness in talking about nothing and all, my total lack of focus. I was so young, damn it! The format of the reports encouraged students to share their whole liberal arts and humanistic experience, so I felt no restraint whatsoever in piling up philosophical ruminations, political observations, fictional inventions such as the Z-stone boom, and satire directed at the elitist posture of the institution itself. In one report I even managed to reproduce a computer-permutated version of Goethe’s well-meant poem “Edel sei der Mensch, hilfreich und gut” – “Man should be noble, helpful and good.”]
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