{"id":669,"date":"2026-04-04T18:52:46","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T18:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/?p=669"},"modified":"2026-04-14T14:03:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T14:03:12","slug":"dark-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/2026\/04\/04\/dark-wood\/","title":{"rendered":"DARK WOOD"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

DARK WOOD<\/strong><\/em> (2023 – ONGOING)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMidway upon the journey of our life \/ I found myself within a forest dark \/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost<\/em>.\u201d (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. H.W. Longfellow, 1472\/2016)

My first major narrative endeavor\u2014left me adrift in a sea of possibilities. Seeking structure, pool\u2019s edges, I turned to the mythic arc of Dante\u2019s Inferno. Dante, lost in a shadowed wood and beset by beasts, is rescued by Virgil, the poet\u2011guide 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\u2019s role in the story transcends mentorship; he is a symbolic bridge between the lost self and the soul\u2019s latent purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet, while Dante\u2019s daemon was clear, mine remained elusive. This search for an inner guide prefigures the alchemical journey: first through albedo\u2019s purification of material, then into citrinitas\u2019 dawning light, where the Wise Old Man archetype\u2014 Jung\u2019s inner mentor\u2014 first emerges (Jung, 1968).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would it be a figure I admired? An environment? An idea or material with whom I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2013 a visual setting through which the user\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2011awake, 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\u2019s greatest influences: Zdzis\u0142aw Beksi\u0144ski. His surreal environments\u2014 fungal textures, jagged structures, and disfigured bodies protruding from mist \u2014had imprinted on me since childhood. His work taught me to sense the sublime within obscurity [2].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though I continued developing these scenes for the game and digitized the charcoal drawings for interactive use, I gradually<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Borges\u2019 fable of the 1:1 map \u2014a fictional empire that creates a map so exact it coincides with the territory itself \u2014haunted 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\u2019s a warning against perfect representation: that the map, once indistinguishable from the territory, becomes useless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), extends this idea, arguing that such hyperreal maps no longer represent the world \u2014they 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this spirit, I found alignment with the Situationist International and their concept of alternative cartographies. Psychogeographical maps like Guy Debord\u2019s Guide Psychog\u00e9ographique 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 d\u00e9rives\u2014drifts through urban environments that unveiled hidden psychic contours (O’Rourke, 2021).
Like Blok\u2019s rigid systems,
traditional cartography can<\/p>\n\n\n\n



[1]
Although I first chose charcoal for its blending qualities rather than its symbolic value, I later discovered that in alchemical practice charcoal\u2014 organic matter reduced by calcination\u2014 serves as the impure residue which, when washed or burned to white ash in the albedo (\u201cwhitening\u201d) stage, symbolizes purification (Abraham, 1998; Rulandus, 1893\/1964).

[2]
In a 2002 interview, Beksi\u0144ski denies any inherent \u201cmeaning\u201d in his paintings, describing them instead as \u201cinner landscapes,\u201d 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\u2014 numbing himself in order to deal with \u201cnothingness\u201d (Beksi\u0144ski &
Janowska & Mucharski, 2002). In a later 1997 interview with S\u0142owikowski, he spoke of an \u201coneiric\u201d painting method shared with the Surrealists\u2014 a spontaneous approach in which
symbols and narratives emerge organically rather than being imposed consciously (Beksi\u0144ski & S\u0142owikowski, 1997)
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obscure personal or lived experience; imbuing the internalized structures with experiential truth, I found in mapping a metaphysical and transformational act.
Jung\u2019s Red Book (2009) offered a compelling precedent: a cosmological exercise and visionary map of the inner world, composed through active imagination. His pages are not representations of any empirical reality but invitations into a psychic one. They chart the chaos and archetypes of the unconscious, making visible what would otherwise remain submerged. Like the Situationists\u2019 d\u00e9rives or Borges\u2019 failing empire, Jung\u2019s cartography eschews legibility in favor of becoming\u2014a process rather than a product.
Similarly, my Dark Wood evolved from artifact to ritual, a \u201cknowledge that grows from inside of being in the unfolding of life\u201d (Ingold, 2013), where the artist becomes a\u201ccollaborator\u201d with the medium.
Gradually, I surrendered to the charcoal\u2019s grain. Design abandoned, I let the medium guide me, tracing figures that appeared to me in the noise like those in static on nights in isolation.
Alan Watts, in Reality, Art and Illusion (2014), posits that consciousness is the ability of our mind to pick out significant things in any kind of wadge: (the artists) \u201csaw the animals and creatures that they painted just as you might see something in a Rorschach blot. And then they brought it out.\u201d Here, alchemy emerges.
Tim Ingold (2013) says that making is \u201ca correspondence with materials\u201d \u2014a conversation where creator and medium co-author the work. I began to sense another consciousness in the work, a Third Mind (Burroughs & Gysin, 1978) born from correspondence. It was no longer just me drawing; the charcoal, the grid, the static\u2014all conspired to unearth what lurked beneath, in ritual that became my process.The only thought\u2014forest. The grid, like my compartmentalised perception, attracts rhizomatic branches that sprawl freely through automatic drawing. The work becomes meditative: a space where rational thought dissolves, and I converse with emergent images. Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s theory of the rhizome (1987) describes a model of knowledge and identity that spreads horizontally and non-hierarchically, allowing for multiplicity, connection, and rupture without origin. Like my thought-forms, the figures emerging from charcoal follow nonlinear paths of association, resembling the rhizome\u2019s sprawling logic.
Conditioned since childhood to hierarchize thoughts\u2014labeling some unworthy, absurd, banishing them to the unconscious\u2014this process felt like liberation.
In these meditative sessions, a state of flow enveloped me \u2014an almost electric attunement, as if dialing into a frequency just beyond perception. Through the symbiosis of body and rhythm, I honed an ability to trace that razor-thin threshold, descending in tightening spirals into the depths of my unconscious: a dungeon where shadows whispered and the familiar dissolved.
One late night in the studio, working on a drawing, it dawned on me. Presenting itself so clear like a diamond bullet burrowing right into my forehead, a thought. You are collaborating with god. I felt a sense of unity, unlike any, before being shocked by this thought and frantically trying to suppress it. The rationale again establishes control. Yet I can\u2019t stop thinking about it.
To mitigate lingering control over composition, I turned to dilapidated foldable maps from my childhood\u2014pre-GPS relics torn and taped, through \u2018incorrect\u2019 rearrangement I was mirroring the shamanic dismemberment of Burroughs and Gysin\u2019s Cut-Up Method (1978).
This cut-up technique, much like the shamanic journey of fragmentation and reintegration, echoed the process of creative dismemberment and reconstitution. The torn map\u2014once a tool for navigating the outer world\u2014was now an altar, a field of invocation.
This was no longer about orderly design, but about opening the work to the forces that might speak through it. These explorations drew me deeper into the disruptive power of non-linearity: a mode resonant not only with psychedelic states and esoteric traditions but also with the collaborative spirit Burroughs called the Third Mind (Burroughs & Gysin, 1978).
In the collapse of linear time and rational authorship, I found space for a different kind of magic \u2014one that emerges from interplay, improvisation, and the unknown. The grid became a folded paper\u2019s spine, smeared with charcoal, revealing fissures in the material\u2019s skin.
Just as my perception folds reality into language, in erasure I revealed figures, cut them vertically, rearranged, erased again, then split them horizontally\u2014repeating until the paper became covered in figures. This was more than a cut-up; it was alchemy through repetition, a pattern-making technique where coherence surrenders to infinite variation.
The work being finished for me started to feel like an afterthought to the process itself. Many of the patterns ported to the digital realm and made to dance to the static of the screen, the video game became only as one of the versions of the Dark Wood, rather than its main form.


References:
Borges, J. L. (1999). Collected Fictions (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin Publishing Group.

Burroughs, W. S., & Gysin, B. (1978). The third mind. Viking Press.

O’Rourke, K. (2021, July 16). Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City. The MIT Press Reader. Retrieved May 5, 2025, from https:\/\/thereader.mitpress.mit.edu\/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city\/

Ingold, T. (2013). Thinking through Making. YouTube. https:\/\/youtu.be\/Ygne72-4zyo?si=fEwM3HrxozmYsKdw

Jung, C. G. (2012). The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (S. Shamdasani, Ed.; S. Shamdasani, M. Kyburz, & J. Peck, Trans.). W. W. Norton.

Watts, A. (1973\/2014). Reality, Art and Illusion. Better Listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    \n
      \n
    1. get lost in the dark wood\n
        \n
      • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
      • allow noise to show the way\n
          \n
        • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
        • let go of thought\n
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          • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
          • allow to be guided\n
              \n
            • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
            • follow the pattern\n
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              • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
              • grow from dark to light\n
                  \n
                • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
                • grow from thick to thin\n
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                  • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
                  • everything is connected\n
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                    • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
                    • map the inner landscape\n
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                      • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n
                      • find the inner guide\n
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                        • repeat the word<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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                          In search of fertile soil we wandered a path which seemed straightforward, yet now it has started to deteriorate, leading to fallow ruins. Led astray into unknown lands, we found ourselves far away from the familiar path, lost in pitch dark forest. Not being able to define forms before our eyes, we become aware of all the potentiality that might be hidden in this darkness. It is incoherent noise, chaos, a microcosm of our awareness before language and material things. Stare into this grain long enough and you might for a moment see connections between points which create branching structures, you might see patterns, you might see figures, images, faces or creatures who also inhabit this forest. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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                          1. Without much though make a dot on the paper with your eraser.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

                            Before all hope is lost of finding your way you realize that there is light, the one definable pattern before our eyes, it is the the word which is the moon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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                            1. Under our breath we repeat the word while we look into its light.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

                              Repeat the word under your breath and allow it to be the only thing in your mind as you gaze onto its light. Allow the word to dissolve into pure vibration going through from your head to your hand holding the eraser. When you catch yourself slipping back to thought, don\u2019t chastise yourself, just calmly return to the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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                              1. Erase dots outwards from the first light, following visions which are revealed to you.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

                                As your gaze softens, you might see the negative space between patterns as if looking through the surface. To map this terrain you excavate hidden patterns by methodically erasing the negative space. You make dots growing outward, following the patterns and figures while repeating the word. You make small leaps every time you make a dot, synchronising with the mantra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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                                1. You refine the mapped out terrain by maintaining a balance with the surroundings.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

                                  While exploring outwards, when one can\u2019t find any immediate lines to follow, they might also return over their explored lines and refine these by creating a balance between light and dark. Just like rivers and branches, the energy which you channel into this map wants to flow, so allow it to. When meeting someone else\u2019s map, one has to create balance with them also.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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                                  DARK WOOD (2023 – ONGOING) \u201cMidway upon the journey of our life \/ I found myself within a forest dark \/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost.\u201d (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. H.W. Longfellow, 1472\/2016) My first major narrative endeavor\u2014left me adrift in a sea of possibilities. Seeking structure, pool\u2019s edges, I turned to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":58,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":962,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions\/962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/athanor.one\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}