Worldbuilding Whitman

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Structure and Stories

On my vision quest different words, poems, songs, and phrases would repeat in my mind.

Rhymes and expressions are ways oral storytellers preserve the structure of their stories - through this structure the narrative unfolds.

Sometimes the details change, but the bones are always the same.

Tradition and Creation

Musicians perform the same song different ways. Fan fiction lets readers expand the author’s universe. Role-playing games let players create the action in a story.

I think about how langauge creates a world, and new ways to play with the same language to create different worlds: a multiverse.

Generation

I am using my world-building engine to create a new world from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. I am using the AI engine of midjourney to create visual source images. This last piece is inspired by Stephen and evertunes.

At the end of this project, I will reflection on both midjourney and ex-worlding and how to used these tools to create new worlds from older stories. But for now I am enjoying the worlds being born.

Atoms Whisper (song of myself 1 & 2)

Atoms whisper
        soul spears stir
eddies of wind beds as 
tongues  buzz'd 
      whispers of night

dark-color'd sea-rocks  bank
          spectres in books 
                  filter  millions of suns
              belch’d words 
      original energy

                        
            look through!
                 learn to read!
      take things!
                    delight alone!


                        Smoke ripples blood and air and
          embraces, a reaching  third hand:
                 myself 
                 parents
                 green leaves 
                 wood soil 
                 me 

rising from bed  
       crowded with perfumes 
                       mouth forever play
                             shine and shade sound
beating vines &
supple 
boughs

http://ex-worlding.herokuapp.com/populate/40/