I have now written two long paragraphs which I've decided not to publish, they are two mornings wasted on work I do not wish to show. One of these paragraphs was about some new work I am doing and how this work involves sewing large swaths of canvas together and how I don't like sewing, but then I ultimately concluded that I do sort of like it because I don't have to think while I am doing it, and I don't have to be at the easel where either bloodshed or boredom occur, but it (sewing) is work nonetheless and I like working. It was, for the most part, a confused piece of writing, and that is why I chose not to show it to you. My writing has seen its fair share of contradictory conclusions; in fact, there are many and many times in which the very point of my writing is to contradict what came before it—I love circles, I think god is circular, I think our lives are circular, etc., but this particular paragraph was self-contradictory without in any way being circular, it was therefore incomplete, lacking cohesion and, as I say, confused. The true circular thought or piece of writing is ouroboric, it swallows itself and disappears, it tells everything that turns into nothing at the end, just like us, just like our lives, I call this zero space. (Now you see it, now you don't.) (That is not a description of zero space.) The second one, which I just deleted, was about how most abstract work seems to be derivative, and how a thing is not worth doing if it's going to be derivative. The reason I deleted this one is because the more I uncovered it, the more I realized that perhaps my thesis was wrong, perhaps most abstract work is not derivative—this was a long paragraph about how derivative most abstract painting is, but then I realized that that probably isn't true. It was not an easy fix, I could not just go back and change a few sentences to fix my thesis, the entire structure crumbled if the thesis wasn't true, so I just bulldozed the entire thing. Now, let me say this, because it's still on my mind: A lot of abstract painting is derivative—it is hard to make abstract paintings that are not derivative, I think. There are only so many ways you can get paint onto canvas—wait! Getting paint onto canvas is an action, not a result. There are only so many ways paint can lie on canvas in an abstract way. But, see, there I go again with the same failed thesis! I can have these surface thoughts, but the minute I take my chisel to them to reveal their inner geography, I see how wrong I am. So never mind. Because I think even I, who am not naturally an abstract painter, who is not at home in chaos, who uses narrative to give order and meaning to her life, even I was reaching for and even perhaps came close to arriving at, or perhaps even arrived at, briefly, non-derivative abstract work, so not only was the entire paragraph misleading and untrue, built on a false thesis, why do I even have these thoughts, they are not even my personal experience? (Gone from all of this is the important distinction I also made in the bulldozed paragraph between derivative and influenced by, which is perhaps a topic I'll take up tomorrow.) (Because of these two parenthetical sentences, I have taken this extant circular-enough paragraph and opened it, and now its guts are spilling out.) (I am acting rather violently toward my writing these few mornings.)