I lost my art by degrees, starting in the autumn of the year I moved to London. Day by day by week by month, a little more of whatever had made me capable of painting ebbed away. For all my recent life, my mind had been filled—overfilled, it seemed quite often—with wild imaginings: terrible landscapes, alien gods and sex, all taking their cue from the lines of the real, so that a child with a dog became a mighty starship between binary suns, and then the suns became the eyes of an overwhelming state. I had seen life as fantasy, and painted it in my fivefold way. I had lived somewhere between worlds. And now all that was fading to grey.