No more. Now I became something else. Before, I’d struggled to find something to say. Now I had so many things in me that I didn’t know where to begin, and they came out jumbled together for a while, producing a crazy paving of vibrantly coloured lizards and birds fading Escher-style into buildings after Le Corbusier—who had so far extended himself as to draft the new city of Addis Ababa for the Fascists all combining into a woman’s face. I worked on it for a day and then tore it apart in a fury for failing to meet my expectations. My skill, or perhaps my mental discipline, was incapable of rendering the thought that was in my head—and that was how it went for the next weeks, as I sought a new understanding of what I was. Liquid silver bubbled in my mind and before my eyes—strange shapes, futures and pasts and presents colliding with blatant symbols of politics and sex, science and rock and roll, but I could not express what I saw. The idea would burn in me, simple and obvious and filled with a restless and infectious energy, so that I knew anyone who saw it would be struck by it, penetrated and inverted and remade as I had been, and yet I could not hold that certainty in my mind and transmit it to the canvas. It leaked, warped and split, so that with each brushstroke my attempt to make an image became instead a battle with evanescence: frantic repairs to a ship sinking before it was even in the water. I wept, wasted canvas, and began again, and again. I stopped ripping up my failures, but set them aside on the ground like discarded library books, until my studio was crowded with a map of my footsteps around and around the desert of my limitation.