On a damp morning in Granada, I watched a conservator trace an eight-point star across a cracked tile with a strip of brass. The line did not describe decoration; it mapped a discipline, one decision repeating until a wall became a quiet instrument.
The grid is not a cage
At the Shah Mosque, turquoise does not merely fill the surface; it steadies the mind against scale. The miracle of the pattern is that every border admits a larger order beyond the frame, so the reader stands inside a sentence that has no final period.