How to Make a Planet: The Line Between Artistic Enlightenment and Death

There are dreams, I am told, that float behind the closed eyes of the young and unchanged, caressing the slumbering minds with fingertips so gentle that they are tickled into sudden consciousness. A spark glows somewhere in these beginning thoughts that decide what the infant is to become: a god of creation or a god of destruction. This is where it begins. Ceaseless images of fairy tale creatures, the red dragons and the pure white unicorns, the flowing purple lace of the princess' dress, the epic star battles- these are seen and believed by the creators. The destroyers become the cynics, the apathetics, those who do not believe in imagination but in, and only in, cold hard detail, fact, war, and death. A destructive mind lives only for itself, sees only itself and the profit from things, and will be the eventual obliteration of a creative mind. These cynics rest easy on their deathly still foundations of research and argument, while the creators, the children of water colored exodus, do not sleep. A dreamer never sleeps, for there is no time.

When such potential to overcome mortal requirements is realized, the transition begins, and the question between genius and insanity is defined. When daydreams become paintings and stories that fuel endless night upon endless night, the line is then drawn. There is a need, an unmistakable desire to create, and it can become so intense that the mind's rest is forgotten, or even forbidden by the body's want. Production soon consumes, but nourishes these helpless souls, these artistic slaves, and keeps the mind racing forward into brighter, bigger, more elaborate novels and paintings and musical scores until it breaks.

The breaking point, ironically named, is the climax of artistic enlightenment, the greatest of all things the mind has created. It is something that has never before been seen, conceived, or believed. A singing portrait. Notes that inspire the same colour schemes within every mind, constantly, so that the song might be considered oil on canvas. A story so vivid that the characters walk from the page and shake hands with their reader or a dance so perfectly silent it screams volumes.

After such beauty has been solidified, the creators fall into the deepest of sleeps. Some die. Others wake with no memory and are again taught the ways of the brush and the pen in bleached white hospitals, but can never again reach such artistic illumination. On some rare occasions, such an opposition is damned into the soul of the sleeper that he awakes a destroyer god and is banished to the other rim of the planet. Then there are those, the one in a billion that reach consciousness with no consciousness, but have become pure imaginative energy, contained barely within the immortal metamorphosed flesh.

There is such a place, where black has become white, and gray is inverted into nothingness. Everything is so cut and dry, one or the other, that the people have sifted themselves away from each other, each race to its own half, each thought content and free in its own process.

There is such a planet. I created it.