“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark / For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. H.W. Longfellow, 1472/2016)

My first major narrative endeavor—left me adrift in a sea of possibilities. Seeking structure, pool’s edges, I turned to the mythic arc of Dante’s Inferno. Dante, lost in a shadowed wood and beset by beasts, is rescued by Virgil, the poet‑guide who shepherds him into, and across the levels of the underworld, and onto the other side. I recognized in that liminal odyssey my own: a fractured, lost self surrendered to guidance, passing through darkness to reemerge, shepherded by a spectral daemon. Rooted in Platonic philosophy (Plato, Republic, 1992), and later expanded by James Hillman (1996), daemon is an innate force that guides individuals toward their destined calling. For Dante, this figure is embodied in the poet Virgil: an artist he revered for his intellectual rigor, moral clarity, and creative genius. Virgil’s role in the story transcends mentorship; he is a symbolic bridge between the lost self and the soul’s latent purpose.

Yet, while Dante’s daemon was clear, mine remained elusive. This search for an inner guide prefigures the alchemical journey: first through albedo’s purification of material, then into citrinitas’ dawning light, where the Wise Old Man archetype— Jung’s inner mentor— first emerges (Jung, 1968).

Would it be a figure I admired? An environment? An idea or material with whom I’d converse? Or perhaps a psychic chimera emerged from their correspondence? A glimpse into this ungodly amalgamation might be found in the influences referenced throughout this work. A composite figure summoned in the navigation of life.

The Dark Wood from the beginning of the story became my first point of inquiry, the intermediate, anxious zone of (spiritual) lostness before the journey, before being given direction to go down, in order to go up. To make such a space explorable in a two dimensional virtual world, the game engine required a map– a visual setting through which the user’s would explore the world. My initial visual experiments, grounded in the rigid aesthetic of Blok, while easily integrated into the game, failed to capture the haunted ambiguity I envisioned. These early visuals felt too clear, too designed. Only when I turned to charcoal did the vision begin to cohere.

The medium of charcoal became a form of purification [1]: albedo, the whitening stage of the alchemical process. I taped off squares on 21x21cm pieces of paper, which I then saturated in textured, grainy blackness. I revealed forms through erasure of charcoal— leaving a hidden grid, which was used for later digital integration, simultaneously restrained and structured the chaos. What emerged were fog-drenched dreamscapes: grainy and indefinite.

These works became more than just virtual backgrounds, compressed and animated in jittering movement. I was guided by a specific vision I had of psychopompos. Of laying half‑awake, staring into static, until shadowy forms start to emerge and form into landscapes. These became the grounds of my psychic terrains, deeply inspired by one of my life’s greatest influences: Zdzisław Beksiński. His surreal environments— fungal textures, jagged structures, and disfigured bodies protruding from mist —had imprinted on me since childhood. His work taught me to sense the sublime within obscurity [2].

Though I continued developing these scenes for the game and digitized the charcoal drawings for interactive use, I gradually

shifted focus to the drawings themselves. They began to function as individual works, piece by piece, mapping my interior world. The product gave way to process; transformation became the goal.

Borges’ fable of the 1:1 map —a fictional empire that creates a map so exact it coincides with the territory itself —haunted me. As the empire decays, the map falls into ruins alongside the land it mirrors, leaving behind tatters in the desert (Borges, 1946/1999). It’s a warning against perfect representation: that the map, once indistinguishable from the territory, becomes useless.

Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), extends this idea, arguing that such hyperreal maps no longer represent the world —they replace it. In this sense, the charcoal grids and textured environments, digitized for the game, could be understood as worldbuilding exercises. To me, they serve as inner cartographies, formulating alternative ways of perceiving.

In this spirit, I found alignment with the Situationist International and their concept of alternative cartographies. Psychogeographical maps like Guy Debord’s Guide Psychogéographique de Paris (1957) reimagined the city through affective experience rather than geographic precision, suggesting that emotional landscapes could be mapped as valid terrains. The Situationists sought to disrupt hegemonic representations of space with dérives—drifts through urban environments that unveiled hidden psychic contours (O’Rourke, 2021).
Like Blok’s rigid systems,
traditional cartography can

[1]
Although I first chose charcoal for its blending qualities rather than its symbolic value, I later discovered that in alchemical practice charcoal— organic matter reduced by calcination— serves as the impure residue which, when washed or burned to white ash in the albedo (“whitening”) stage, symbolizes purification (Abraham, 1998; Rulandus, 1893/1964).

[2]
In a 2002 interview, Beksiński denies any inherent “meaning” in his paintings, describing them instead as “inner landscapes,” a kind of self-portrait; he echoes Eastern philosophical notions that reality exists beyond our representations and that our images
are mere illusions. He likens his artistic practice to an anesthetic— numbing himself in order to deal with “nothingness” (Beksiński &
Janowska & Mucharski, 2002). In a later 1997 interview with Słowikowski, he spoke of an “oneiric” painting method shared with the Surrealists— a spontaneous approach in which
symbols and narratives emerge organically rather than being imposed consciously (Beksiński & Słowikowski, 1997)