Express Yourself
The Art of Dreaming Up Worlds
Alchemical notes on the creative struggle
Note to self: Begin with a feeling.
Or, begin with a place. It doesn’t have to be real. It can be a memory of somewhere you’ve never been. It can be anywhere, as long as you feel your way into it. That’s the only map you’ll ever have, the only True North.
Let it be this, then: a late afternoon sun from a childhood dream setting against an endlessly-tiled, reflective plane.
Don’t begin with a problem. You’re not founding a startup.
Don’t begin with a thought. You are not a thought leader.
Don’t begin with a conference talk submission.
Don’t begin with artifice.
Begin with a feeling.
Strand by strand, start weaving this specific dream into existence. Your looms are myriad, an embarrassment of riches: a piano, or a notepad, or a game engine, or Logic Pro, or Blender, or Visual Studio, or Google Docs, or a WebGL Context. Remember, you who are cursed with always wanting to make too many things: Your choice carries consequences. Your loom will inform, inspire, and inhibit the work you do. Choose it wisely.
Only through devoted, trusting iteration will the raw material ever birth the world that currently lives inside you.
Your eager ego makes coffee and wakes your laptop from sleep. Take a seat at the back of your head and watch as the pixels start blinking to life before your eyes. Bits and bytes coalesce to form skyscapes, terrains, vistas, and color palettes. Observe yourself as you write code, sculpt meshes, hunt for textures: These are artifacts from the real world, building blocks for the imaginary one.
Slowly, the muses grace you with sights and sounds, for in all your unworthiness, you’ve paid the only price of admission: You showed up.
Out of the dark appears an Endless Runner, not the video game genre, but the archetype. Pure, ecstatic, full of forward momentum: It’s a belief in what’s to come, forward in time, forward in space. It’s the one who fills the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run. It’s probably related to what’s going on; such symbols rarely aren’t. Nonetheless, this essence isn’t you and isn’t yours to keep. It belongs to the world. It’s a poem, a musical genre, a cinematic climax, and many other things. Don’t overanalyze it. Draw from it.
Your runner, it turns out, isn’t made of flesh. It’s without form, a pure being of light, velocity, and intention. Light! You’ve read about a newer way to craft light, to subject it to your will. It looks gorgeous. Spend a few days studying it. Like all occult knowledge, it is brittle, unfamiliar, particular in its ways. It will not meet you halfway, in your usual stomping grounds. To work with it, you must unclasp your armor and journey far. Accept its terms. The testing ground is cold, terrifying, and rife with the electric odor of potential.
Remember: There’s always help. Keijiro Takahashi, a talented craftsman, and higher ranking member of your guild, regularly documents his progress for the benefit of all. You don’t share geography or a mother tongue, but you have something more important in common: a language of work. He’ll be your benevolent (if unaware) Virgil as you wander these woods. One of his arcane spells transmutes motion into light, which is just the recipe you were looking for. There is much here you don’t understand, but once you find the active ingredient, you can study it and learn the crux of it; despite appearances, it‘s a thing of simplicity and beauty.
Scribble it down in your grimoire and move on. Grab some puppets from a nearby factory. They’re free, and no one will mind. Dissolve their skin; it is useless for your purposes. Use Keijiro’s spellcraft to transmute their living bones into light.
Commit your changes. Take a break.
In an old church, adrift in the sounds of an older oratorio, you suddenly know that your runner’s bones ache for spirit, for anima and animation, through music. A beloved song’s middle section courses through your veins, the perfect prosodic expression of this nascent world. Snag 16 bars of someone else’s music for this purpose, and transmute paper-thin slivers of muddy, low/mid frequencies into pulsating fragments of light (steal today, replace tomorrow: another guild secret). Let the runner come to life and light with the kick drum. Let it buzz, shimmer, and radiate in rhythm, in bioluminescence, in raw energy.
Observe: Everything in this place is a placeholder. This world will wither, die, and grow anew. The changing seasons leave their mark on imaginary domains, just as they do on real ones. Only through devoted, trusting iteration will the raw material ever birth the world that currently lives inside you.
The sacred writings instruct “Solve et Coagula”: dissolve and coagulate, separate and rejoin, again and again.
That’s how you reach the heart. Commit your changes. Take a break.
You decide (no, nothing of such agency; you are instructed, inspired, given to believe) that your runner is too inhibited in its human form. It needs to take flight, needs to run wild. The metaphysics of metamorphosis are bound by strict rules. A simple-skinned mesh flip is profane, ungraceful, and no solution at all. This process requires the participation of Mercury. This substance is the alchemical agent of spirit, of the Anima Mundi. This Greco-Roman God is the shape-shifter, master of all things fluid, mercurial. Mercury is also the ruling planet of your sign. You are grateful for Providence, for synchronicities that lie beyond your control.
And then: The music of this world. Sit quietly by the old plastic keys and let it pour through you. This is the stuff of the purest muse intervention, and where you are nothing, a scribe, a servant. Observe the old Wittgenstein chestnut: “That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”
You are not in control.
Your DAW is a dear friend, an old soul living in an old shell. A trusty, capable musical instrument that doesn’t require any changing, tuning, or upgrading. Will this machine outlive you? Will your loom be your children’s heirloom?
Hit “Record.” Disappear for a morning.
Over a tempeh salad, you try to figure out why the music you spent hours writing feels so wrong. You’re using the right crayons, but drawing the wrong picture. Realize: The original music hinges on the breathless, unrelenting, dominant, the West's traditional perpetuum mobile, whereas the return to its tonic home is temporary and inconsequential. Your own loop is sonically in the ballpark, but your comfortable reliance on a musical home base makes everything restful, finished, wanting for nothing. It’s utterly unbecoming of an endless run. Keep that in mind for the next version. Solve et Coagula.
The harmony is better, but the melody is worse. This one evokes the square wave revelries of chiptune, of faux-retro pixel art platformers. It’s not right and you’re not a fan. You’re not a fan of most of what you make, you realize, and wonder if it’s the same for others.
Melodies tumble left and right. Musical phrases get cheesier, bleaker, and more pointless by the note. The muse has left the building. Nevermind. Solve. Coagula. Again.
Every conceivable answer feels subjective and frivolous, but you know better: The hard truth is the muses have stopped whispering to you.
After a long while the door to the answer cracks wide open, unlocked by brute force, relenting to your obstinate banging: A good melody has a beginning and an end. It’s in time and of time. It’s not what’s needed here. A good ostinato, on the other hand, is without beginning or end. Anchored in place against the changing harmonic tides, the pattern’s emotional overtones waver even as it remains structurally intact. It’s a Möbius strip of raw intent, a carrier wave of shifting sentiments. It’s much more suitable for an endless run. Immediately upon that realization, the correct notes are handed to you, neatly wrapped and tied with a bow:
Coagulate:
This feels right. Keep feeling for it. Commit your changes. Take a break.
This process is always iterative, an ouroboros. But a few weeks in attempts to revisit this work begin to feel forced. Are final forms prescribed from above? Are endings ever not a matter of convenience, necessity, and artifice? You know that any creative expedition could last a day or a decade. Consider: The Vedas could have been short stories. Ulysses could have been a small limerick collection. Any country song can be retold as a magnum opus, a Great American Novel. All inner work is atemporal and acausal: Without time, hourly rates, milestones, and deadlines, how can you tell which block of marble requires further carving, which canvas needs more color, which world deserves sinking decades into? What grain of sand merits expanding into a continent, a universe? Every conceivable answer feels subjective and frivolous, but you know better: The hard truth is the muses have stopped whispering to you.
Let this world live, then. Let it out into the open. Let it go, let it go for now. Let its myriad possibilities fade into the distance. Let its boundless potential remain unrealized.
If every additional line of melody or code feels artificial and unnecessary, perhaps this is all this little world ever wanted to be: a being of light, velocity, and intention, running into a childhood dream’s late-afternoon sun.
This story is part of The Art Of, an ongoing series by Human Parts that supplies you with instructions for living.
