I kept going. I knew by now that creation was a game of stamina as much as inspiration, and that each failed effort would eventually teach in combination with some stray additional thought the answer that I needed. Finally, in despair and exhaustion one night, I realised between breaths that my difficulty was in itself a boundary condition, an inherent edge of the work. There was nothing I could imagine that would set off or expose a truth about the Emperor beyond what was the man himself. He was like the notional neutronium: a state of political matter so dense as to be irreducible. He was not to be embellished in the way of any other project, but was rather fundament from which the rest of the picture must derive. I began, therefore, with lions, faint ghost images buried beneath the paint so that they seemed to hang in the air, and sketched in the outline of the throne room and the window beyond. The Emperor I painted last, heavy and opaque, in an almost traditional Venetian style, so that it seemed Haile Selassie was the only thing in the world made of real substance and everything else was mist. He fairly shone upon the viewer, a black demiurge in dark gold whose eyes encompassed a nation of rising modernity and sparkling towers, a space which existed first and foremost in his mind. In my own tradition now, upon my other canvases I presented details of his body—a curled hand, a commanding mouth, a shining eye—and visions of his vision, exploring more fully all that was suggested beyond the window. I rendered it as something flavoured with America, Russia and Europe that was itself their ancient parent and their natural progeny: a striving and baroque contra-Corbusier landscape with whispers of NASA’s bold orbital homesteads, not carving the land but made gentle and irregular by the contours of the great Simien Mountains. Five pieces in all, creating a single truth: the August One’s gaze, as I saw it in my mind, emerging from the flat surface at right angles and penetrating the real space before it, not judged by the viewer but weighing and assessing them instead. I called it Tewahedo, which is not only the Ethiopian Church but also the Ge‘ez word meaning "unified." At length I delivered it, and the Emperor hung all five parts alone on the wall of the grand receiving room. He commissioned pictures of it for release to the global press. Newsweek ran it as part of a feature on the Land of the Rising Lion, and the opinion column of the New York Times nodded sagely and heralded my talent amid the other stars of a burgeoning continental renaissance. London’s Daily Mail called it fallacious and bombastic, which meant that the Guardian asserted it was the product of genius. Later, when I saw the poster campaign for that first Star Wars film—the one that is now heretically referred to as the fourth—I thought I recognised the traces of my work in its composition, and was delighted at the idea.