Topaz Crystal, from Surrender of Man

Editor’s Note

Bry Best, Developmental Editor

From the very beginning of Naomi Falk’s The Surrender of Man, we understand the author to see art objects as those with a potential to remake our world. She writes in the preface that “each surface I encountered thus becomes shocking, forcing me into new feelings. I aim to discover what it means to experience my life outside the jading shackles of apathy.” This calls to mind for me Victor Shlovsky’s idea of defamiliarization, where he argues that poetic language is that which removes one from the world that one has been living in and places one into a different world: one that looks entirely the same but has, in the process of defamiliarization, unmade the habituation that comes with living. He argues that art’s aim should be to “remove the automatism of perception.” 

This reminds me, too, of what scholars and readers and fans and authors know to be true about speculative fiction: that the “novum” of speculative fiction makes the world strange but also reflects our own world back to us. Speculative fiction is suited to this kind of reflective work precisely because of its defamiliarization of the structures of everyday life. 

The Surrender of Man, called a “memoir-in-series” by its indie publisher Inside the Castle, follows the author as she explores the relationship between pain and art. Each chapter begins with the reproduction of an art piece that she encountered “in the pursuit of [her] own self-expression.” Through these explorations, we begin to understand the way arts unmakes and remakes her world. 

Falk ends her preface with the following passage: “pain takes the shape of a stone or a painting your interpretation of an object on a given day won’t remain very long—indeed, the text within these pages breathe in and out of synchronicity with their creator. It will transform each time you wake, and inhabit repressed fantastical shapes while you sleep. It will grow meaningful to you and change you, like an old friend. I must find the depths of pain, swim toward the bottom to know the intricacies of heart and manifest myself in what I see to set the world ablaze.” In the excerpt that we’ve published here, Chapter 6 of the book, she explores an exhibition of gems and stones at the American Museum of Natural History, focusing on a piece of topaz on display.

Something of her method strikes me as speculative here. Perhaps the “novum” of this experiment is the rock itself: the turn away from the advancement of technology and toward the sublime geological processes that “extend past human life, taking hundreds or thousand of years. Slow and circumstantial, hidden away.” In the following meditation on topaz, its long life, and its changing meaning in human history, Folk moves from physical objects into her memories, stringing together a series of discrete events from her life, as if the topaz itself is the narrative force around which she remembers her past and her world.

She imagines looking into the stone, extracting feeling from it. But of course she can’t. What I find interesting here, though, is the methodology that structures the book. How do we narrate a life? How do we sort the seemingly-infinite phenomena of experience into discrete packets of meaning?

Topaz Crystal
(an excerpt from The Surrender of Man, 2025, Inside the Castle Books)

MY TARNISHED LEATHER COWBOY BOOTS SILENT against the carpet in the larkshadow-lined hall of stones and gems. I felt gauche and new to Earth while gazing upon roomfuls of knowledge and bits of our world so ancient and unwilling to sway in even the harshest storm. The American Museum of Natural History has rooms devoid of guests atop its cityblock green, especially on a weekday morning, and it’s raining. Anyone whose been here is familiar with the old dioramas and the midcentury installations (though with many updated wall texts and labels). Some of the agedness of the place amuses me: the maroon shades of the carpet and the wood paneling. Tiny sculpture of a person on plastic farmland waiting to be set up straight. Dead flies and dust particles trapped behind the glass. And in a more updated portion of the museum … a taxidermized capybara!!! The place is massive, and I imagine its upkeep is something to behold. Other aspects of the museum I meet with a critical eye. But it’s the earth and space sciences part that I love.

Before the Hall of Gems and Minerals underwent a mas­sive renovation, reopening in June 2021, it was dark and, I felt, appropriately cavelike with deep indigo carpeting. Gems were spotlit and communicated space-bending magic. I gravitated toward a part of the room that glowed. A person like any other who loves shiny things. The stone on the pedestal was uncased, solitary as it harvested any glance of light from its surroundings, like an angel. It was so bright it seemed to ring. 

(I understand anything worth regarding to be worthy of overthinking: the disturbed curl of tornado around its eye or dust in the garden. We spend so much time trying to decipher what should and shouldn’t produce ekphrasis [on the Web: “It’s really not that deep, bro”], when really we’d be better off banishing the distinction and thinking too much into everything. With all our agency, all the capacity we have … to interpret and see the world in the designs of our thoughts. This stone is not the product of human creation but from a point of aesthetic theory/environmentalism/history/provenance/wanting to observe, why ignore something so special?). 

Below the surface of green Earth, topaz forms in meta­morphic zones and at the end of a metamorphosis, when magma cools and shapeshifts into igneous rock. The timespans of these processes extend past human life, tak­ing hundreds or thousands of years. Slow and circumstan­tial, hidden away. As is the case with all precious gems, topaz has signified different things to the people of our world across time, but has most consistently registered as a status and commodity of wealth. In the 1730s, a couple hundred years after Portugal colonized the land compos­ing Brazil, the land was plundered for its topaz deposits. Time crunches between the characters in these sentences and expands in the spaces between words. 

The topaz it sang a wordless dirge as I circled it in the room. I wanted to see how its interpretation of the world extended through so many jagged angles, hundreds of them, even thousands all at once. I felt incapable aside the unflinching glamor. I ignited the gas of feeling onto it, emoting. Photograph after photograph I took of this stone, trying to document it thoroughly so as never to forget how it reallocated light like phantom glow under the water of a cave. The phone, as it is today, captures so little, though I find that the photographs I take help me to maintain my memories and create a narrative to my life for the moments when I feel lost. I scroll through them under the covers. I look at them on the airplane. I lament the phones I lost whose photos weren’t saved on the Cloud or a backup device. Patchworks of life that will remain barren in the great photostream of my life. 

Just years before this encounter at the AMNH, I’d dreamt of reflective and prismatic jellyfish as lovely as topaz in the sky on a cloudy day, had attempted to take photos of them, unsuccessfully, repetitiously. The redemptive quality of this encounter, that I was able to document now what I’d been unable to back then, was not lost on me. At times we are given the chance to re­pent and should take it. 

I imagined looking out from within this stone-from its unchanging solitude-its surfaces in hazy and distorted images would remind of the view behind eyes perpetually on the brink of weeping. In fact, topaz is not particularly refractory, absorbing light, vessel-like. It seemed unfair that I was unable to reach into it, could only (if it weren’t a cardinal sin) extract feeling from its surface. A topaz crystal from Minas Gerais, Brazil, or possibly from Santa Maria de Itabira, curator Dr. George E. Harlow of the Museum tells me over email: “The ambiguity is because it was found on display without attribution in 1971 as the previous mineral hall was being disassembled.” The cu­ration of such a museum and the acquisition of an object like a topaz is unknown to me. I imagine it is fueled by a similar passion to the one that strikes the heart of conservators who must command knowledge of so many areas, foremost being chemistry and art. These people are holy to me, holding together threads of our world that, when combined, launch the education of the public and our un­derstanding of art toward undiscovered realms. 

Any eye might be drawn toward something so bright and miraculous. The arrangement of molecules that brought this specimen into its final form had no dependency on our interference, but was brought to the surface by our hands so that we may see what lies beyond our sight. I tend to bend in awe of the presence of something so old, whose stories and visions cannot genuinely be known by me but only contrived by me. Though, had it remained intact below the stone from which it was mined, light would not have had the opportunity to pass through. Its concealed potential would remain potent, knifelike. I sometimes think that which haunts our world-both beyond and within-loses duende once exposed. It burns out and crumbles under the weight of dissection. What I’m trying to suggest is that this spillage of the specters wandering my mind might deflate my experience of them. Then they will die and rot within me. But any piece of writing is hope.

WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL, I FOUND SOLACE IN PRIVATE conversations with my English teachers. I’d sit in their classrooms (or the library) during lunch; seek answers … Their sensitivity to characters in literature and vast inter­pretation of images and feelings made them open to the problems faced by young folks. One middle school teacher was sympathetic to my anxiety around anonymous MyS­pace bullying. A college professor helped me through the drug addiction and eventual death of a friend. 

Near the end of high school, my teacher taught an entire unit on existentialism. He had us read a few of the greatest hits to illustrate the foundations of the existentialist school of thought: Waiting for Godot, The Stranger, more stories than theory, which I found incredibly effective since I had not yet had the opportunity to rigorously explore the latter. We looked at stage adaptations of Beckett’s play and discussed how different iterations of the play’s set gave a visual lan­guage to the absurd. So, then, the antidote to meaningless­ness was art. I could be the agent of my own meaning; the answers would come from my perception and understanding of the world and those around me. No systems of belief or patterns of faith would need to open my path into each new year of my life. It was the most sacred thing I’d ever learned. Near the beginning of Estragon and Vladimir’s banter: 

ESTRAGON
The Bible ... (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.

VLADIMIR 
Do you remember the Gospels?

ESTRAGON 
I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy.

VLADIMIR 
You should have been a poet.

ESTRAGON 
I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn't that obvious? Silence.

VLADIMIR 
Where was I ... How's your foot?

Perhaps my own tendency to sentimentalize everything sheds a tender light on this moment within an otherwise abysmal play. It seems so sophomoric to mention a piece of literature which is, I imagine, standard to the American High School Experience. But I love Estragon’s uninten­tional sidestep into waxing lyricism. The interpretation of a map as a work of art (it surely is, see chapter in here on Alex­ander Si). The momentary gleam of a hopeful imagination and ensuing self-deprecation. An artist’s mark, coming into the dialogue of the play like the hand of god.

©2025 Naomi Falk

Naomi Falk is a writer, editor, and book designer. Her work fixates on art, pain, and the ways in which we engage and disconnect our sensory perceptions. She is the production director of powerHouse Books, the co-founder of the print magazine NAUSIKÂE NYC, the senior editor of Archways Editions, and founder of Crop Circle Press.