Against the White Page
A page without ornament, the monks believed, was a page without argument.
Last winter in Yerevan I watched a restorer lift gold leaf from a thirteenth-century khoran. The ground was lapis, not parchment. Every margin held birds, pomegranates, and saints.
The margin is not a mistake
Modern interfaces treat emptiness as a virtue. A white field is called clean, as if clarity required absence. The Cilician scribes thought otherwise. They filled the lapis ground with birds, pomegranates, and saints because density aided memory.
A page that fears ornament fears the reader. Decoration is not distraction; it is a map.
We do not need interfaces that look like manuscripts. We need interfaces that honor the same contract: nothing bare, every mark a map.