All of my life, from the very very beginning has been surrounded by a shape that was present and I could feel, but never have been able to explain. My childhood happened in a family that wasn’t really like the families inside the :fermat: country, my Dad had spent his childhood with a Dad that had traveled all over the world ( Papa had visited all the countries in the world because of his job, even—to our surprise—North Korea, we understood this when we saw a vase with the faces of Kim Jong-il, and Kim Il Sung on it…, what Papa was will remain a mystery to me.), and my Dad had studied in Saint Louis school, a French Catholic school in Tehran, something one of a kind that had really great people coming out of it, people like Nima Yooshig, the Dad of new-poetic era of Iran, Sadegh Hedayat, a satirist, writer, and poet who was one of the earliest modernist writers of Iran, Hosein Ala, one of Iran’s prime ministers and Mohammad Ali Foroughi, another prime minister of Iran and freemason… The school was a strange place, they would teach the courses from 6AM to 12PM, and then teach them again in French from 12PM to 6PM. My Dad basically never lived in Iran. He would come back home, study till 8, watch some Star Trek if Papa permitted, and then go to sleep. Family children were also sent to England for summers. By the time he reached eighteen, he was sent to France for studying and he lived thirteen years there. He lived in Toulouse for much of his time there, and made friends with all sorts of artists and scientists, and became a photographer, sculptor, jazz fan, painter. There was nothing Iranian in my dad. I grew up listening to Sting, Norah Jones, Blue, Chicago, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, … so many Jazz. My Mom has little interest in music, and so this dominated my life like how my Dad was.

The friends of my parents were also people who either lived outside of Iran, or were far different than the culture of this country. And so things that were obvious to others were alien for me. I didn’t listen to Persian music, and frankly, by the time I listened to them at school, I had understood music to a level that these felt not only primitive but hard to tolerate. I still can’t bear a second of these kinds of music. A new wave of very interesting people (the ones that I unify as “concept store culture”) are producing amazing things, including great music, but the majority of Iran’s music is just shamefully bad creation. Creation without care and understanding, without giving a shit, and I hate them so much. So I was always this alien with a specific culture. I have previously written about these in length.

My Dad had fixations on good music, and film, my Mom has always been one of those people that are cheerful about great things, she would always show me to great things in Iran. She works in the Persian Academy and is very used to meet the greatest of Iran’s writers daily. She would bring me the best dictionaries and encyclopedias, we would go to all Book fairs and she would buy the best of the best scientific books for me, she would also buy the nicest children books for me. They never were about the stories, she would buy me books with the most beautiful and cared after illustrations, it was always about quality.

My Mom has this peculiar trait that I so love and that is how she shops. We would always go to stores, and she would find these incredibly special things from the back of the shelves, from places hidden to the eye of everyone. Shopping with her has always been like treasure hunting, or these art collectors, we would go to a mall, scan every shop, see what they got, and find these rare things. This had rendered our home to be a very specific form of a place. Other people would have iconic things that others would know them by that special trait: She loves rocks, he collects plates. Everything in our home was iconic and rare and I now understand anti-environment. People would come and get amazed by every single thing, we hardly had ordinary things. We even had collections of extraordinary things. My Mom has a collection of a very strange tea brewing things, one is a man batting in your cup, the other is an umbrella, there is a dinosaur, music note, … Others would get satisfied by one, she had them all in a collection, and had collections of collections, she has a collection of brushes that look like people, and these collections of rare things are themselves too many.

This became a huge part of me too, I would find rare things, find their connections and have them as collections. And I would also connect everything that I could. We may never have been billionaires, but I think in terms of ideas and seeing human creations, we are billionaires in having seen much of human ideas.

This shape of life, made me try to collect others who I felt I could resonate with. If you don’t have a nation, why not shape one? I loved LEGO, back when it wasn’t the profilicity act of decor sets adults buy, but when it was way more abstract and simple and were the obsessive toy of perfectionists. I had felt that people who love LEGO don’t care about politics or religions or whatever these fucking things are. The scientific world that my Dad lived in, the poetic world my Mom was walking, they recognized no such bullshit as these. They were worlds of people who made nice things, honored great other people, cared, were geniuenly culturally rich, were nerds, loved peace, and were really civilized.

Between LEGO, Apple, Persian Academy, my Dad ’s lab, the Metropolitan Museum, Iran’s Contemporary Arts Museum, Maestro Girba ’s company “Feenk”, the the iA studio, Jony Ive ’s website, the “Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild” marches, Da Vinci Code, UNICEF products, IKEA, … there was something shared. I could see and sense them but I couldn’t and still can’t name them. When I learned about Steve Jobs he clicked into the picture. When I understood that he had ties to LEGO and was a fundamental part of Pixar I was shocked and amazed for the first time.

And then many others came and fitted. Stephen Wolfram , Maestro Victor , Maestro Rachmaninoff , … so many people, they felt like part of this world that I had grown up inside of. I began to see them as a form of family, the citizen of a world within the world I was living inside of. I could, for the first time, see that there is a people without a country, scattered across all the world, who were a people and could even have a nation. These people began to be my compatriots.

And so I always hated to be named an Iranian. I am not. Not only I don’t care about anything about Iran’s culture, I don’t care about any other place in the world. And yet I love my city so much, and I love so many other cities that I have never visited. I am a cosmopolitan in that I really don’t recognize borders, I see graphs. But I see a neighborhood in the graph of people that I really really really love.

My intellectual lineage never was “I want to do this thing, I search keywords in Google Scholar, I find papers”. It happens with me going through everything I could, and each time I saw a creation, a website, a book, a film, a panting, a place, … anything that I felt I got connected to, I would have gone to see who built it, and then I would have found how the philosophy of those people connected to me, sometimes instantly sometimes after years of not knowing why I got so drawn to those people. If I have found these so many different people who each have contributed a part to the graph theories, that is exactly because of this, and all those people I have missed, that is because I still haven’t typed keywords into the search engine. That is why I honor my lineage so much, they aren’t just prior art, they are people I found through really hard search, through doing what I used to do with my Mom in the malls, but in the web, in the media, in the books: scan everything, find rarely seen treasures, explore them. And so these people are not just theorist to me. I first see their shapes, I have more of their personal stories, their ways of lives, how they had connected colors to each other, or furnished their places… than I do of their theories. And somewhat, much of what they say, I already know or have felt, sometimes they give me words to describe my meanings, sometimes they give me synonyms, and sometimes really new ideas which I am too grateful for. But much of their contribution “words or synonyms”, they give me legitimacy. It is like they give me the permission to talk about these things, that I am neither crazy, nor my thoughts are childish, but actually problems that other have spent decades thinking about. I think if I had ever seen any of them, we could have spent lifetimes together discussing various things, and never the theories, and still find it so nice and refreshing. My lineage is a strange thing, it is way bigger than what you see, it is a family, it is a nation, it is a group of contributing thinkers, it is a group with a shared meta-taste, it is a group that lives in a very specific culture, one that is rich, and beautiful, and has infinite dimensions, it is really a nation.

Realizing Maestro Rachmaninoff ’s work on Concerto 3, I thought wow, I loved his music, then discovered he had the same pain, then discoverd he had the same taste in other things, and then discovered he was a contributing factor to graph theories. It is like one of these films where you see random people that are interesting but really different, and then suddenly you see they were all freemasonries, or men in black, or whatever, it is exactly like Tomorrowland, a film by yet again, one other of my maestros “Brad Bird”, who when created the movie I knew it would be a centerpiece to my world just before I watched it, and it was, and it was exactly my world: You see how all these separate amazing people were citizens of a parallel universe. That is basically my nation, and the only one that I recognize.