When the Leaf Refused to Die: Shah Quli and the Arabesque

On a cloudy morning at the Ottoman court, Shah Quli is summoned to the palace garden, where an official with a long register and silver scissors accuses a leaf of breaking the established order by refusing to fall. The only leaf left on a bare tree says it has not yet completed its curve, and when the official raises his scissors to cut whatever crosses its boundaries, the artist answers that he will draw it boundaries that never end. On the page the leaf's vein opens a door into another vein, branches curl and divide, and the page grows into a room, a wall and a whole palace where patterns walk the corridors in place of people. A dragon appears among the leaves and asks who allowed him to draw life inside ornament, and Shah Quli replies that it was hidden in the curve of the leaf, until the beast becomes part of the balance of beauty and the official learns to call this an ornament that remembers it was once alive. The book then turns into a lesson in the arabesque and the saz style, how a line becomes a stem and then a branch, and ends with an arabesque that pauses at the edge of the page and keeps growing in the eye of the beholder.