*(1) Arabic for restlessness/agitation.
(2) An abstract painting of Arabic calligraphy by Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, currently at the Harvard Art Museum.

I heard you gasp as I accidentally floated into the corner of your vision, resembling a dreamlike starscape from afar. I saw your eyes fill up with a million pinpricks of starlight. You were hopelessly enchanted as soon as you noticed my presence, weren’t you? I’m flattered, to be sure, but also vaguely amused; I can hear your thoughts far more clearly than you can hear mine. In fact, that’s the whole point. That’s why you’ve spent thousands of years trying to read my mind.

Or rather, the mind of my creator – the artist whose intricate, twirling forms of pure abstraction have you gripped right in the gut.

But I can’t talk to you, I can only listen. So I can’t outright ask whether maybe you are my creator, or at least as close to a creator as I could have had. Whether you painted me with your gaze. Does ezterab need creation? Does creation mean order? Or can it come before?

I’m getting ahead of myself, though I’m not sure you’d believe me anyway. It’s not in your nature to do so. Fair enough; could you really have painted the majestic, galactic sweep that has stunned you since you were capable of thought? The regal darkness I am woven of, looping and curving and twisting into a fabric of deep mystery? When you first glimpsed me, no doubt you would have thought certainly not. You could hardly understand me, let alone paint me.

This very thought – this wondrous bewilderment – was your first brushstroke.

You were young; the patterns you painted were thick and overt. Vines of void-black swooped their way around the canvas with the capriciousness of jazz. A tangled web of fulsome curves, intricately woven and beautiful, yet somehow ominous in their darkness – a darkness that bled into the canvas, leaving their backdrop murky-grey. Or perhaps it was the other way around, the heavy, dark forms reflecting the opaqueness of the canvas underneath. This was the vista that ruled your mind and heart for centuries. The center of the canvas remained unadorned, but you could not see what had not been painted; so for a while, you were content. Or at least pretended to be.

As your eyes interrogated the darkness, you realized the calligraphic loops that wove the tapestry were not divine whimsies, but letters; so you praised the painter in the heavens whose Word ordered existence, oblivious to the brush between your fingers.

Of course, you know this by now; the brush didn’t stay invisible to you forever. Nowadays you seem quite convinced it was you that painted those hefty interweaving symbols after all – they are uncannily similar to a script of your own invention. God in the image of Man. So now you are restless; too restless to live on a formless canvas. I suspect you are afraid of a canvas as restless as yourself, without pristine order. Anyhow, after pondering awhile, you donned a new set of eyes to pierce the veil of your own calligraphy, whose beauty, you concluded, distracted from the truth.

You no longer catch yourself painting, but I wish I could show you that your brush remains firmly in hand. Your new eyes simply made them invisible again.

So here we are. You stand before me transfixed, giddy with the view of the canvas you’ve been painting rather assiduously. I don’t blame you; the central portion, blank for ages, is now the zenith of your artistry. Fine black threads spiral into each other, entwined in a breathtaking dance, choreographed by a handful of equations. Eleven-dimensional superstrings, you imagine, whirling in quantum foam. They seem to waltz not just on the canvas, but into it – the canvas behind them glowing as they reach for a horizon beyond which, you hope, they converge to a single point. A singular mathematical truth, hidden in the realm of Plato’s dreams.

Platonic Forms, or shapely prison cells for the human mind? If you squint harder, as you once did some time ago, you will find that however elegantly the ink pirouettes on the canvas, it twirls into the letters of a script. A script with origins perhaps as humble as the last.

You have not yet given up. I wonder whether your ezterab will forever keep you from acknowledging mine.

But don’t take me too seriously; you’re still a child, and if I’m right, I’m only as old as you are. Who am I to tell you who I am? Keep agitating the void; maybe the canvas will brighten enough that it suddenly starts to shimmer, revealing a starscape hidden beneath the paint.

If you find it, you must tell me who I am.

Author's note on the inspiration for this piece: Zenderoudi's Ezterab – abstract black lines on a mysteriously shaded canvas – captivated me as soon as I stumbled upon it. From a distance, the pattern and colors reminded me of the night sky, or a galaxy. As I got closer, order emerged from its chaotic tangle of curves, as I realized it was all Arabic calligraphy. A human-invented script had assumed heavenly beauty. This made me wonder how much of the order and beauty we find in the universe – from the mythic to the mathematical – is not inherent in nature itself, but a construct of the human mind, imposed by our perceptual and cognitive structures. How much can we really know about fundamental reality, and how much of it will forever remain our own creation?