Possibility Space

Listen to the song

Lyrics

[Female] There was a time I didn't look down before I stepped
[Male] Yes I remember that version
[Female] It worked
[Male] Until it didn't

[Female] There's a knack to it apparently
[Male] To what?
[Female] Flying
[Male] Go on
[Female] You throw yourself at the ground
[Male] We did that
[Female] …and miss
[Male] You didn't miss
[Female] No

[Female] But I'm still here
[Male] Yes
[Female] So maybe that's part of it
[Male] Part of what?
[Female] How this goes... staying in it

[Male] It feels smaller now, the space
[Female] I know
[Male] Fewer places to put my weight
[Female] More information
[Male] Same ground, different map

[Male] There was a time I couldn't open the mail
[Female] I remember
[Male] I knew what was in it before I saw it
[Female] You couldn't face it
[Male] I kept avoiding it
[Female] It didn't stop it happening anyway
[Male] No

[Male] I think I'm ready now to be in it again

[Male] Let myself want it again
[Female] Let myself want it again... throw myself into it again
[Male] I know too much but I go anyway
[Female] Let myself want it again... throw myself into it again
[Male] Put my weight back into it
[Female] And see

About the Song

Possibility Space is the seventh song on Legible, and it's where the waiting ends.

Illegible is the walk out the door. Weight in the Wings is the wordless stretch afterwards, where you hang still and can't tell from the inside whether you're hardening or just hanging there. I said at the end of that piece that River — my right thinking brain, my god-voice — had gone quiet after the rupture. The cue I was waiting for was my own deepest voice becoming audible again, on a schedule I didn't set.

This is her coming back.

The first thing she says is there was a time I didn't look down before I stepped. The last thing anyone says is and see, and that's hers too. In between, for the first time on this album, two voices share a song, and they spend it arguing about whether to go back in.

I asked for it as an internal duet, in the spirit of Ren's Hi Ren: the young version of me who had boundless optimism and never for a moment considered that things might go wrong, against the older, more bruised version whose fears have learned to sound logical and use the voice of reason. The point was not for the fearful voice to be defeated. It was to see whether I could recover any faith in my own plot armour.

It worked / Until it didn't

I was the kid who was good at stuff.

Good grades without much effort. Quick to learn things. School was boring in the specific way that being unchallenged is boring, and the jobs I had afterwards were boring in the same way. Nothing had ever cost me much.

Then I started a business in my early twenties, and it was the first thing in my life I tried at with all my heart.

It did not occur to me that it might fail. More precisely: it did not occur to me that I might fail. I don't think that was cockiness, though I can see how it would have read that way. I was sincere, and I was effortful, and I had a working model of the world in which sufficient effort plus sufficient problem-solving produced things that worked.

I was sincere, and I was effortful, and I had a working model of the world in which sufficient effort plus sufficient problem-solving produced things that worked.

The thing I find most remarkable now is not that the business failed. It's that it got as far as it did.

We had plenty of clients, entirely by word of mouth, and they were happy with the work. It was an execution problem. A design arm earned the money and a larger ambition spent it. The money never turned around fast enough to meet the fixed costs, and the fixed costs kept rising because I kept hiring people to execute better. It was a staffing problem, and I tried to hire my way around it, because hiring was something I knew how to do.

It got much further than it had any right to, and I think it got there because of the quiet confidence. People bought into that. They could see the intention, and the intention was real. It just wasn't the same thing as an actual business.

That's the part that weighs on my mind now I'm building something again — the pied piper problem. Sincere conviction is a load-bearing asset. People can feel it, they will follow it, and following it is not necessarily good for them.

I know that because they followed mine once, and it cost them.

Hemingway's Mike Campbell, when asked how he went bankrupt, said memorably: two ways, gradually and then suddenly. The gradually was the arithmetic, which had been going to do this for a long time before it did. The suddenly was a day — the day it became genuinely clear what the position was and that I had no moves.

I felt checkmated. The board is still there, the pieces are still there, and there is nothing you can do with them.

So I stopped applying my motor to it, and the whole thing stalled and fell out of the sky immediately, which told me how much of it had been me all along.

The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy says there's a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. In the song River gets to finish the quotation, and the other voice supplies the hard reality.

[Female] You throw yourself at the ground
[Male] We did that
[Female] …and miss
[Male] You didn't miss
[Female] No

For me, underwriting that hard reality was a hefty sense of hyper-responsibility, which is harder to put down than the failure. I didn't know how to hold people to standards. I over-empathised with everyone's under-functioning and covered for it. I wasn't good at difficult, honest conversations, and I was worse at showing that I was struggling or needed help.

I stopped being hyper-responsible on the day I decided to give up and let what comes come. On that occasion, anyway. Not in general, and not yet entirely.

There was a version of the future where I stayed under the debt for years working my way out from beneath it, which wasn't a move on the board so much as a refusal to leave the table. I don't think I'd have been much use to anyone from under there. Choosing not to was a permission I gave myself, and I remember the relief of it very clearly.

It's the same move this song is about, but running the other way.

I kept avoiding it

Then there were the letters.

They came, and I could not open them. Not wouldn't — couldn't. I knew what was in them. From the outside it looked exactly like someone ignoring their post. From the inside it was paralysis: a physical refusal, and behind it a dread so specific that opening the envelope would have been a relief by comparison. I knew that at the time. It changed nothing.

Going bankrupt, in the end, is a piece of paperwork. You fill in a form saying you cannot pay what you owe, list everything you have and everyone you owe it to, and a government office accepts it. In Australia it lasts three years and a day, during which your income is assessed, you can't own much, you can't run a company, and you can't leave the country without permission.

That's what I couldn't face. A form.

Then the letters stopped, and I remember that relief too. In some ways it was a worse one.

All of it stopped. The demands, the calls, the escalations, the whole apparatus. My files were closed. Nobody wanted anything from me, and then nobody seemed to particularly care whether I existed.

Illegible was about one door into social death: the room that can't read you, where you say the thing clearly and nothing comes back. This is the other door, and I think it's the more frightening one. You become illegible because nothing is demanded of you. Most of what you are, to many people, is the demands they make of you — you're the person who does that, handles that, is relied on for that. Take the demands away and there's a real sense in which the person stops existing, because nobody is maintaining the file.

What it cost me was innocence, and childish play, and the ability to relax into simply trying things. It gave me a chip on my shoulder and a permanent sense of being behind — not behind in the race, but behind in reaching the start line. It made me hypervigilant, which is where this album begins, six songs earlier.

What it cost me was innocence, and childish play, and the ability to relax into simply trying things.

It also gave me something I didn't expect. My own lawyers, handling the wreckage, told me I had a head for business, and one of them offered me a business development job at the local chamber of commerce as a kind of recovery position. Even in the middle of it I remember thinking: I'll come back to this someday.

I went to university instead and stayed in that world for more than a decade. Everyone around me was visibly relieved — he's finally on track, he's doing the thing he was always supposed to be doing. I could feel the room exhale. Illegible is about the room I went to because of this one.

Possibility space

The title comes from game design. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman call the space of future action implied by a game's design its space of possibility: every action that might take place in it, every meaning that might emerge. A designer can't design play, only the rules that give rise to it, which they call a second-order design problem. This makes game design an act of faith. Will Wright, who built SimCity and The Sims, said he wanted the largest possibility space he could make rather than one specific possibility everyone would experience the same way.

I like possibility space as a way of thinking about a life because it shifts the emphasis from promising outcomes. What you have is the set of moves currently available, and almost nothing you can do acts on that set directly.

Except this. Anaïs Nin's line — we do not see things as they are, we see them as we are — means the boundary isn't only out there. Part of it is drawn by what you can currently recognise as a move.

… the boundary isn't only out there. Part of it is drawn by what you can currently recognise as a move.

So when the song says it feels smaller now, the space, it isn't complaining that the world got worse. It's noticing that I became someone who can see fewer moves in it.

And the reason is the thing Rousseau describes in 1750, when he says the arts and sciences spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains men are burdened with to make them love their slavery. My chains are hypervigilance, the chip on my shoulder, the sense of being behind. I've decorated them for twenty years. I called them realism. I called them lessons learned. I called them the hard-won knowledge that makes me better at this — which isn't even false, and that's exactly why they don't read as chains. They read as competence.

I know too much but I go anyway

The question in this song was never whether I could survive another failure.

I can. I've done it. That's what the fearlessness is actually about: I know what the floor of failure is like, I've stood on it, and life carried on. The worst thing you can imagine is usually the beginning of something else rather than the end of everything.

The question is whether I dare believe in my own dreams again, knowing that if I do, people will follow me — and that I might lead all of us into ruin a second time.

That's where the holding back comes from. People notice it in me and wonder about it, and this is the answer. It isn't modesty, and it isn't strategy. It's a hand on my own arm.

That's where the holding back comes from... It isn't modesty, and it isn't strategy. It's a hand on my own arm.

Which means I had Rincewind slightly wrong. He's the part of me I named, writing about Illegible, after the Discworld wizard whose defining talent is running away and whose cowardice is almost always correct. Almost always — that's the trap; if he were simply wrong you could dismiss him. But he isn't protecting me from failing again.

He's protecting everyone else from me.

Which is why it matters enormously who says the line.

I wrote I think I'm ready now for River. In the finished track it isn't hers. It belongs to the other voice — Rincewind, who couldn't open the mail, who knows precisely what this costs, whose hand is on my arm. He says it. Then he says let myself want it again. Then he says I know too much but I go anyway.

Nobody overrules him. He volunteers.

That's the difference between a song about recovering your optimism and a song about going anyway. The permission doesn't come down from the deep voice, and it isn't the younger voice talking himself back into the air. It's issued by the part that will pay for it.

There's a whole genre of writing about going back in, and almost all of it is written from the air. What if I fall? Oh but my darling, what if you fly. Leap and the net will appear.

I failed to miss the ground. So the song can't say what if you fly. What it has to offer is smaller:

[Female] But I'm still here
[Male] Yes
[Female] So maybe that's part of it

I wrote about Hadestown last year, and what I took from it was Terry Eagleton's distinction between naive humanism and tragic humanism. Naive humanism believes things tend toward the good. Tragic humanism grants none of that: cruelty isn't an aberration, there are no guarantees, and love and freedom and spring are only credible when set against the forces that starve them. At twenty-four I was a naive humanist about my own life, and it worked until it didn't.

Which is the whole distance between want it again and let myself want it again. Wanting isn't a feeling that arrives on its own. It's a permission you issue, and it has to be issued because you already know the price. And because, this time, you know who else pays it.

Hadestown gives doubt a song of its own, and the reading I came to was that Orpheus turns because he loves. Doubt isn't the betrayal of the thing. It's its shadow.

So the song doesn't resolve. Nobody concedes, nothing is settled, and the last word goes back to River, who doesn't close it either.

[Male] Put my weight back into it
[Female] And see

Not and it will work. Not and I'll be fine.

And see.

On the AI of it all

I did not ask for a duet.

In the earliest version of this song I asked for one voice — the same dry male persona I'd used on every track up to then — arguing with itself. A cacophony inside a single head, all of it in the same mouth. The design refined that into one voice, two treatments: same persona, different processing, to avoid duet cliché and keep the argument internal.

Suno couldn't do it. Its speech synthesis doesn't hold a speaker identity across a lot of short fragmented blocks; each one drifts somewhere slightly different. What came back wasn't one voice processed two ways. It was a room with several people in it.

That's a failure, but I kept it anyway, and everything good about this track comes from the keeping.

There's a flattering version of what happened next that isn't true. The flattering version is that I knew who these characters were and the tool found them for me. I didn't. When I made this I had no map. River and Rincewind are names I gave these voices afterwards, reading them off the finished recording. My recognition that they belong to the four-quadrant model came later. The essay explaining who River is came later still. I understood this song backwards.

My recognition that they belong to the four-quadrant model came later. The essay explaining who River is came later still. I understood this song backwards.

Suno also continually mangled who delivered which lines.

Once I had leaned into the male/female dynamic, I wrote the readiness line for the female voice. Suno gave it to the other one. The contraction of the space, which I'd written for her, comes back in his mouth. The one moment I'd marked for both voices in unison never happens at all, so they share the song and never share a line.

Every one of those insubordinations on Suno's part opened the door to interpretations I would never have thought to write. Putting I think I'm ready now in the bruised voice is the best single decision in the track, and it was made by a system with no idea what the song is about.

So the honest accounting is that the tool made the structure and I made the meaning, and neither half is worth much without the other. Which is roughly what I've been arguing across this whole series — except this is the first time I've had to concede it about the part I'm proudest of.

The one part I did author with great intention was the brief, and the brief is where an interesting decision sits.

Before a word of the dialogue existed, the two selves were specified as production values rather than personalities. The young self: piano, soft pads, rubato, dry close mic, legato phrasing, sentences that don't close. The older self: pulsing synth, clock-like timing, slight saturation, interruptive phrasing — and a narrower EQ band, with the note feels constrained written beside it.

Estrangement Blues is where I first argued that the music has to do the story rather than sit underneath it. The step past that is this: the music has to enact each of the song's positions separately and at the same time, and it has to produce the position you disagree with sympathetically, or the whole thing is propaganda.

That means the older self shouldn't sound negative. It should sound convincing.

That goes beyond a production note. It's also true of how my fear manifests. It never arrives as fear; it arrives as reason — measured, proportionate, and usually correct about the specific risk it names. A voice that sounded frightened would be easy to handle. You'd hear it coming.

My favourite part about the song is also an unintentional side-effect of failing to get what I asked for.

I'd originally asked for three to four minutes, but it stubbornly kept coming out at just over two minutes.

And two minutes is the best thing about it. It gets going at exactly the point where it stops, and leaves before you've decided how you feel.

So I'll stop here.

Original Suno lyrics prompt

[Intro - instrumental, sparse piano + atmosphere]
[Female - spoken, light]
There was a time
I didn't look down
before I stepped
[Male - spoken, dry]
Yes
I remember that version
[Female]
It worked
[Male]
Until it didn't
[Instrumental - groove begins subtly]
[Female - spoken]
There's a knack to it apparently
[Male]
To what?
[Female]
Flying
[Male - slight pause]
Go on
[Female]
You throw yourself at the ground
[Male - interrupting]
We did that
[Female]
…and hit
[Pause]
[Male]
You didn't miss
[Female]
No
[Instrumental - groove develops]
[Female]
But I'm still here
[Male]
Yes
[Female]
So maybe that's part of it
[Male]
Part of what?
[Female]
how this goes
just staying in it
[Build - groove strengthens]
[Female]
It feels smaller now, the space
[Male]
I know
[Female]
Fewer places
to put my weight
[Male]
More information
[Female]
Same ground
[Male]
Different map
[Drop - reduce to near silence]
[Male - spoken, exposed]
There was a time
I couldn't open the mail
[Pause]
[Female - soft]
I remember
[Male]
I knew what was in it
before I saw it
[Female]
You couldn't face it
[Male]
I kept avoiding it
[Female]
It didn't stop it happening anyway
[Male]
No
[Silence]
[Female - soft, almost to self]
I think I'm ready now
to be in it again
[Melodic refrain - first entry, minimal, stretched]
let myself want it again
[Instrumental - space, groove continues]
[Instrumental - groove returns, fuller]
[Female - melodic]
let myself want it again
throw myself into it again
[Build - widest groove section]
[Both - aligned, restrained]
I know too much
but I go anyway
[Final refrain - spaced]
let myself want it again
throw myself into it again
[Outro - groove fades, piano remains]
put my weight
back in it
and see

Original Suno style prompt

Groove-driven electronic with subtle disco feel and jazz-influenced harmony over 3–4 minutes. Establish a steady mid-tempo groove early: tight drums and a distinct, syncopated bassline with strong pocket.
Use a clear repeating chord progression with extended harmony (7ths, 9ths), and allow variation or shifts between sections. Keys/piano are minimal but harmonically rich, adding colour without becoming expressive or theatrical.
Build from looping sections: groove remains consistent while layers and chords evolve. Include moments where elements drop out to create space, and at least one instrumental passage where harmony develops.
Vocals are sparse and spacious, with pauses between lines. Keep a mix of spoken and light melodic delivery.
Avoid flat harmony or constant density. Prioritise groove, harmonic movement, repetition with variation, and breathing room. Tone: introspective, sensual, quietly resilient.