Why I Write

12/23/95
WHY I WRITE
(A REPUBLIC OF WORDS)

Here's my tablet, here's my pen, here's my desperate desire to write. Here's my calm, self-possessed desire to write. We wouldbe writers, we're scattered all over the planet. We're big game fishing off Florida keys, we're carving tombstones in Germany, we’re whaling in Polynesian seas, prospecting for gold in the Yukon and Central America, tutoring in Trieste, jumping ship in mid-Caribbean, piloting paddlewheelers down the Mississippi, wandering the whore-haunted streets of Paris, plowing stony New England farms, cruising for rough trade in the French Quarter, dying in trenches on the Western Front, finding dreams of zen in Big Sur and in San Francisco saxophones, delivering the mail on hot Hollywood streets, goldbricking in Brooklyn, spinstering in Massachusetts manses, male-nursing in Civil War infirmaries,rotting in Gulags, hoboing from coast to coast, and holding forth, in the form of a tall, Adam’s appled, Ichabod Crane, in a Los Angeles International Airport lounge…..

Some of us are under the impression we must do reams of research in order to create what we create. And we're right. Others of us have come to realize that research is exactly what is stopping us from creating.

We collected facts for a time, somehow thinking that facts were what writing called for. But, sooner or later, we saw facts were exactly what was STOPPING the words from tumbling out. It was then that we resolved to write without facts. We decided we knew nothing. We knew not who we were. Except: We were creatures who hungered to write.

We would settle for anything. We would content ourselves with writing the same word over and over again. It didn't even have to be a good word.

And story? We were far past hoping for story. Or character. Gibberish would be just dandy, thankyouverymuch.

This writer is writing as long as he wants to write. When he gets too tired, he will stop. When he feels he is forcing, and wants to stop forcing, he will. When he runs out of words, he will sit quietly and wait for more.

When he gets uncomfortable, he will shift positions until he is comfortable enough to write again, or he will remain uncomfortable, writing until he can no longer stand the strain, or he will quit writing immediately.

Ladies and gentlemen, he's a fucken writing machine! He makes himself comfortable, or uncomfortable, wherever he is. He twists, he shouts, he crawls on his belly like a serpent, but he never stops writing or thinking about writing.

It's unbelievable, ladies and gentlemen, it really is!

How many times has this gentleman set out to write, hopeful as hell, and been turned away at the gates? Turned HIMSELF back at the gates!? It's heartbreaking, ladies and gents, it really is! Or it's hilarious. Because this butthead is making himself the butt of the cruelest joke imaginable.

He's telling himself he's a writer. He's saying writing is his one true vocation. And then he's inventing 1,000 and 1 reasons why he canNOT write!

He says he's a warrior, but he's too scared to fight.

He says he isn't writing well enough, so he must stop.

He says he doesn't know enough, so he has to....you guessed it....quit.

He has no character, he has no plot.

And when you've got no plot you've got to stop.

But wait! What's this?! he realizes he has nothing to say. But you know what, ladies and gents? He's going to write anyway! Because he's at least temporarily too tired to catalogue all the other reasons why he cannot write.

Incidentally, fatigue is number eight on the great list.

Now don't get him wrong. If a writer has to spend his WHOLE life cataloguing all the reasons he cannot write, that just may be the most authentic thing he can do. But maybe he can compromise.

Maybe he can give all his doubts their due, and then maybe he can give all his positive reasons their due, as well.

He can say, for example, that he wants to write because he wants to write. He wants to write NOT because he needs to make money, or create a name for himself. He wants to write NOT because he has an ideological or political agenda. He wants to write NOT because he wants to get laid or because he has taken up the cudgel for his race, or the oppressed, or the obscure, or the beautiful.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to write beautifully, or eloquently, or powerfully, or sympathetically, or movingly. He wants to write NOT because there is revelation in the written word. He wants to write NOT because he has something to say. He wants to write NOT because he knows what he's going to write. He wants to write NOT because he has to write in order to discover what it is he is going to write.

He wants to write NOT because he's creative. He wants to write NOT because he's a show-off. He wants to write NOT because words are what he does best. He wants to write NOT because he's too shy to manifest himself physically instead of verbally. He wants to write NOT because his parents, or mentors, or friends, encouraged him. He wants to write NOT to show his enemies what's what.

He wants to write NOT because he has read and been inspired by great writers and wants to emulate them. He wants to write NOT because he feels engorged and fairly ready to burst with words. He wants to write NOT because he enjoys playing with words and making startling new patterns, combinations, sentences, with them. He wants to write NOT because he enjoys rhetorical forms.

He want to write NOT because he wants to redeem his existence. He wants to write NOT because he hopes to fulfill himself. He wants to write NOT because he has something to prove, although he undoubtedly does...except when he doesn't. He wants to write NOT because he wants to give meaning, or beauty, or hope, or inspiration, or consolation, to others, although he undoubtedly does...except when he doesn't.

He wants to write NOT because he is trying to give himself an ideal reading experience, NOT because he's going to write just exactly what he, as a reader, needs to read.

He wants to write NOT because he is sitting in a vast airline terminal, with hundreds of other people, killing time, waiting for his plane. Although he undoubtedly is. He wants to write NOT because the boundaries of where he stops and others start are blurry, and he's feeling a weird love for all the other travellers and he's giving them what he can in this, the Christmas Season.

He wants to write NOT because someday he's going to die and he wants to leave something behind. He wants to write NOT because whatever else he is doing with his life isn't enough. He wants to write NOT because words are the only children he has.

He wants to write NOT because he loves the rhapsodies, the transports, to which only words can lift him. He wants to write NOT because he knows there's somebody out there, somebody he needs to speak for....and to.

He wants to write NOT because he is transparent, and the words are shining through him.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent the better part of a lifetime in silence and darkness, and now he wants to walk into the music and the light.

He wants to write NOT because he has cleared tons of psychological garbage out of his head and has finally learned to get out of his own way.

He wants to write NOT because he is in love with the sound of his own voice.

He wants to write NOT because it takes his mind off his bad back.

He wants to write NOT because he paid outrageously inflated air terminal captive customer prices for the ballpoint pen and spiral pad with which he is writing, and needs to justify his investment.

He wants to write NOT because it frees him, NOT because it releases a bird which has been caged in his ribs for decades, and which now flies from his throat and his fingertips, and soars towards the sun.

He wants to write NOT because his heart would explode or rot if he didn't. He wants to write NOT because he can no more swallow down his words than he could swallow down sobs of joy.

He wants to write NOT because he could be dead tomorrow, but today he is alive and WRITING. Writing his heart out.

He wants to write NOT because he is smart....or stupid.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent his entire life trying to figure out how to write, yearning and burning to write. He wants to write NOT because silence has been his daily and nightly companion for as long as he can remember.

He wants to write NOT because he has lived with silence so long that he has learned to respect silence as much as noise.

He wants to write NOT because he has chewed on silence like a bitter, unending cud.

He wants to write NOT because he is still young, and vigorous, and bursting with vitality, and overbrimming with words.

He wants to write NOT because he was born to write, fated to write; he wants to write NOT because he is a naturalborn writer.

He wants to write NOT because he has forgotten what he was just going to say because the stewardess walked by and warned him to to fasten his seatbelt and prepare for take-off.

He wants to write NOT because his seat is too small, nor because his neighbor passenger is crowding him, nor because he's overflowing the bounds of his elbow rests.

He wants to write NOT because he feels dissatisfied with his earthly existence and wants to fabricate huge, and/or microscopic, alternative universes.

He wants to write NOT because he is sick of sitting silently, reading what OTHERS have written.

He wants to write NOT because he feels crushed like a mouse by society and general and Hollywood in particular, though in his heart of hearts he feels like a lion and wants to ROAR like a lion.

He wants to write NOT because words are an eternal flame, passed down to him from time immemorial, from before there WERE words.

He wants to write NOT because there are loud, drunken, giggling teenagers sitting in the back of the plane, and in a second they're probably going to get arrested, and the plane won't take off after all.

He wants to write NOT because he has been waiting for this goddamn plane for 5 long hours, and it's STILL waiting on the runway, waiting for its turn to take off, and if he wasn't writing he'd be dead of boredom and/or unexpressed frustration.

He wants to write NOT because he lacks the guts to look a clock dead in the face and ask "What time is it?"

He wants to write NOT because the written word is being crushed by the image and the shouted word.

He wants to write NOT because he doesn't know how, and needs on the job training.

He wants to write NOT because this goddamn jet he's on is taking off NOW, and flying over the black Pacific, and the whole glittering burg of LA is off his starboard wing, like a big ol' mess of rhinestones, glittering in a cauldron of farts.

He wants to write NOT because the plane could crash and kill him at any second, and this is a way to assuage his anxiety and give him wings of angels even if the plane's wings drop off.

He wants to write NOT because a friend of his nearly died last week, and may die next, and mortality is all around him, reminding him that now is the only chance he'll get to do exactly what he needs to do.

He wants to write NOT because he is tired, yet is not finished.

He wants to write NOT because he is a writer, and MUST write.

He wants to write NOT because these words are pouring out of his pen so fast he can barely keep up with them.

He wants to write NOT because he has had his fun.

He wants to write NOT because the time for misery and worst case scenarios is past.

He wants to write NOT because his imagination is exhausted, and he can therefore think of no more ways to sabotage himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is grotesquely specialized, and writing is his specialty.

He wants to write NOT because his left hand has writers' cramp and he knows no way to relieve it.

He wants to write NOT because this plane may crash and burn up him and everything he is writing and will be writing.

He wants to write NOT because writing is a deliverance.

He wants to write NOT because he soon may be senile and no longer able to write.

He wants to write NOT because this is the only chance he'll get to write these words.

He wants to write NOT because he is a writing fool.

He wants to write NOT because he hopes to get laid.

He wants to write NOT because he can have no real life without writing.

He wants to write NOT because it's the right thing to do.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to take his rightful place in the world.

He wants to write NOT because it is his mother's dream for him.

He wants to write NOT because his brother wants a brother he can be proud of.

He wants to write NOT because his dad wants what's best for him.

He wants to write NOT because his friends are rooting for him, even as he is rooting for them.

He wants to write NOT because he has encouraged thousands of other young writers, and not incidentally encouraged himself.

He wants to write NOT because he has spent a lifetime on the sidelines watching OTHERS strut their stuff.

He wants to write NOT because he has been compressed like a dwarf star, and now, at last, is exploding like a super nova.

He wants to write NOT because he's sick of conventional writing, and wants to hear the real thing, straight from the gut.

He wants to write NOT because he's proud of himself or ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because he can't stop himself, especially now that he's learned to get out of his own way.

He wants to write NOT because he does everything else half-assed and backasswards.

He wants to write NOT because he'll bust if he doesn't.

He wants to write NOT because he has to.

He wants to write NOT because he suspects he has something more to say before he says the last thing he's going to say, which is what he, and you, knew he was going to say all along.

He wants to write NOT because it'll do him any good to write, or you any good to read.

He wants to write NOT because those big jet engines are roaring in his ears, and the lights of Vegas are dimly visible on the horizon, and LA is only a memory.

He wants to write NOT because he is building to a crescendo, and the roof is about to fall in.

He wants to write NOT because all events and people are encouraging him to do so, until he has no choice but to write this word. And this.

He wants to write because he wants to write.

He wants to write NOT because his spirit is uplifted or cast down.

He wants to write NOT because he has been to the mountaintop, and wants to share the vision of what he has been given to see.

He wants to write NOT because he's kinda trashy, and even ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because he once had to march endlessly in the Carolina sun, in close order drill, with double pneumonia in his lungs, in preparation for a senseless war, and asked then, and asks now, WHY?

He wants to write NOT because he needs an answer.

Any more than he wants to write because he needs to pose a question.

He wants to write NOT because the muse is a she-bitch, urging and luring and egging him on.

He wants to write NOT because he has the examples of the great deeds of others to spur him on.

He wants to write NOT because he has always known he must.

He wants to write NOT because he again forgot what it was he was going to say next.

He wants to write NOT because his back aches in this cramped seat.

He wants to write NOT because, once again, he has something to prove.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to find out what he's going to write next.

He wants to write NOT because he's standing up for the written and spoken word.

He wants to write NOT because it's the only way he has to address the lies of others and to redress their lost truths.

He wants to write NOT because if he doesn't, he won't know who he is.

He wants to write NOT because he wants to prove that a pad and a pen are all the computing power any writer, or at least this one, needs to get the job done, because the words are the thing, not the gigabytes and Windows 95's and active matrix screens.

He wants to write, in short, because he wants to write.

He wants to write NOT because he is not yet satisfied with what he has written and must write more.

He wants to write NOT because Van Gogh crucified himself for art, and O'Neill went up to his study and wrote "Long Day's Journey Into Night" with tears and blood, and Hemingway blew his head off because he had it and then lost it, and The Bard humbled us all, and Picasso was a wizard, and Jack Kennedy took credit for Ted Sorensen's "Profiles in Courage" Pulitzer, and Ted, upscale stooge, kept his yap shut about it.

He wants to write NOT because he hears songs of unearthly beauty wafting over his car radio, and wanders how he could ever match them.

He wants to write NOT because he has been given every advantage, and owes payback bigtime.

He wants to write NOT because he is sitting here eating toyfood plane snacks, though he is already overweight, and was so depressed in the airline terminal that he had to order a MacDonald's Happy Meal to lift his spirits, and it did.

He wants to write NOT because he's had more than his share of setbacks.

He wants to write NOT because any sensible soul would have killed himself after 30 years of a steady diet of failure.

He wants to write NOT because he was lost and now is found.

He wants to write NOT because it's time for him to be a man.

He wants to write NOT because he must take the stand and testify, despite the threats of the mob, despite the bounty on his head.

He wants to write NOT because he sees life through a glass darkly.

He wants to write NOT because he can no longer suffer fools, especially himself, gladly.

He wants to write NOT because he has at long last realized that he is to be spared nothing.

He wants to write NOT because he has spurned and been spurned.

He wants to write NOT because of his bottomless contempt for himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is not so much brave as he is pigheaded.

He wants to write NOT because he is solipsisstic and Narcississtic, and inflatuated with the smell of his own farts.

He wants to write NOT because of his immense disappointment in himself.

He wants to write NOT because he is ashamed of himself.

He wants to write NOT because his airline seat remains intolerably cramped, and his junkfood seethes in his stomach, and pitiless blackness surrounds the plane.

He wants to write NOT to gob in the face of literary expectations.

He wants to write NOT because Henry Miller said, "The generals of literature are sleeping, we hairy ones must do the fighting."

He wants to write NOT because he has a fairy godmother.

He wants to write NOT because loved ones are angry at him and cannot forgive him.

He wants to write NOT because of his rage at himself, and his refusal to forgive himself.

He wants to write NOT because his friends have stood by him.

He wants to write NOT because, as Fellini's Guido says: "I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway."

He wants to write NOT because writers count for shit in Hollywood.

He wants, he reiterates, to write NOT because he has stood silently by while others crowed.

He wants to write NOT because he's drowning in "The Sound of Mucus," and is tired of Spielberg worship, and doesn't look so hot in jeans any more, and if he reads one more interview of one more actor/actress/director/agent/screenwriter/bestboy/bumboy/supermodel/supertramp/superpol/superstar that bloodvessel that has been throbbing in his temple for 30 years is going to explode.

He wants to write NOT because he must get his priorities straight once and for all.

He wants to write NOT because he is ignorant and no storyteller and knows it.

He wants to write NOT because he fell asleep, Rip Van Winkle-like, twenty years ago in West Los Angeles, and has nothing to show for his long night of the soul, and is desperately, absurdly, trying to rouse himself to action long after the jig is up.

He wants to write NOT because the whole world looks new to him, and he is battered but unbowed, and perhaps, after all, it is not too late to begin.

He wants to write NOT because it's not the size of the dick in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dick.

He wants to write NOT because, as Renoir said, he paints with his prick.

He wants to write NOT because he has by dint of long suffering learned patience, and all things come to he who waits, and yet he is also more impatient than ever.

He wants to write NOT because time seems to have stopped, and evidently he'll never get out alive from this goddamned cramped seat, this goddamned death-plane.

He wants to write NOT because he can't imagine what else to do.

He wants to write NOT because he's got his dander up, and he wants to take back the night.

He wants to write NOT because he's mad as hell, and goddammit, he's not going to take it anymore.

He wants to write NOT because an infant is barking its head off two seats behind him.

He wants to write NOT because he has no family, no wife, no kids.

He wants to write NOT because he has learned to accept the support of those who would help him, and reject those who would cut him off at the knees.

He wants to write NOT because his nose tells him there's a big ol' vein o' gold out there somewhere.

He wants to write NOT because certain of his teachers were bookful blockheads, ignorantly read, and others were inspirations, and others were bullies and helpers both.

He wants to write NOT because his neighbor passenger is asleep, and his legs are taking up more than their share of space.

He wants to write NOT because this goddamn plane is never going to land, and should have landed 3 hours ago.

He wants to write NOT because he eats ice at the cinema, bugging whomever is sitting in front of him with his munching and crunching.

He wants to write NOT because he's been sitting in airline terminals and airplanes for 12 hours, and he stinks.

He wants to write NOT because his shoes pinch and he can't reach down to untie them and he has a crick in his neck and he's never going to get out of this seat and he's obnoxious and his neighbor's obnoxious and yesterday that friend exhausted him with the endless but fascinating tale of his major, life-threatening stroke which was no surprise because the guy was asking for it, furious at everything, floundering desperately, making a major pain in the ass of himself, but still, he didn't deserve to have his head explode. So few of us do.

He wants to write NOT because he saw two AIDs positive guys talking on the public access channel, and one says, "Being doomed really forces you to get your priorities straight and do what you REALLY want to do with your life."

He wants to write NOT because he's exhausted and falling apart and can't even remember what it is he started out to say.

He wants to write NOT because the pilot has announced the plane is landing in just 10 minutes---a whole hour earlier than the writer expected because he forgot Denver is on Rocky Mt. Time.

He wants to write NOT because the lights of Denver are glowing under the plane, and he's probably about to die in a runway fireball.

He wants to write NOT because his overpriced ballpoint pen barely works.

He wants to write NOT because he writes with an awkward leftie's hook.

He wants to write NOT because he has safely, if bumpily, landed, and he has been granted a second chance to live and create.

He wants to write NOT as a way of giving whatever it is he has to give.

He wants to write NOT because he’s a writer-cow, and words build up in him like milk in an udder, and he must regularly milk himself or suffer.

He doesn’t know why he wants to write. He suspects he DOESN’T want to write. He knows he often doesn’t LIKE to write. But he nonetheless HAS to write. And when he goes for long periods without writing, he feels empty and pallid, as if he’s about to fade away. But when he writes something special, he feels as if he has, for a brief moment, filled in the outline of himself and increased his specific gravity. And yet he also feels light as an unburdened hodcarrier who has set down his load of bricks at last, light as a hollow-boned bird, about to take flight from a mountain precipice. He doesn’t need to hang-glide because, occasionally, his words soar and he soars with them.

Usually, the writing is horrible, and meaningless, and unrewarding. The bad, worthless, pretentious, mistaken words pile up like bones in an ossuary, testimony to the death of the writer’s imagination. And then, just when the nearly talentless writer is about to give up hope, something starts happening. He has something special to say. It speaks through him. It re-establishes his place in the world. He is a conduit, a receiver, for transmissions from heaven or hell. He is a living radio, a cosmic court stenographer.

The words unspool with a logic and power of their own. Later, the writer, fretting about the mess and sterility of his Earthly life, may forget about the piece that wrote itself through him. He may stumble upon the piece in a notebook, or old computer, and read it with growing wonder and appreciation, as if it has been written by someone else. He shakes his head, thinking, I wrote this. This wrote me. This is something I molted off. I had to shake this shell in order to have room to grow…..a new shell.

I may never write one more good thing. I may sit down for the next few decades, day after day, hour after hour, and write millions, maybe even billions of words. And none of those words may have merit.

It’s not a sensible way to live. It’s something like prospecting for gold. And the ironic thing is, if I find more gold, more gold in words, I may do it just at the time I give up looking for it. Just when I despair and let go and question why I ever became a writer in the first place, just when I begin to suspect that writing is a damn lie, a siren which has lured me onto the rocks, just when I am nearly sure that I have trashed my whole life in order to write words which no one cares to read or hear, just then, I may feel a strange excitement within.

There’s a bubbling down below. Old Spindletop is about to blow. I’m a wildcatter, I’ve been laying thousands of feet of pipe, deep in the Earth, to no avail, for years. Now the Earth is rumbling crazily. She’s about to spew forth in an orgasm of riches, and it’ll be mine, all mine! She explodes, blowing the Christmas tree of valves a thousand feet skyward. The black gold soaks me. I and my fellow roughnecks bellow with joy! We’ve lucked out! All our hard work, thanks to a merciful God, has paid off!

At long last, after years of wandering in a silent desert, I find myself in the Promised Land. The words flow through me like milk and honey. I am become my own best self. I have no more apologies, no more shame. I am transformed and redeemed. I am St. George, slaying the dragon of my emptiness, sterility, and meaninglessness. I rescue the damsel within, ride off with her, make courtly and carnal love to her, and am saluted by a grateful nation.

Halleluias and hosannahs ring in my ears! And once again the silence falls. Others may think me special, but I know I’m a burned out case. A spent cartridge. Others may find merit in what I once wrote, but I know I’m not writing now. I pray for redemption, but redemption doesn’t come my way. I write a million, no, a billion, words, and none have merit or meaning or grace. I am become a husk of my former self. I wonder how I ever wrote before, and cease to expect to write again. I make an uneasy peace with myself, trying to live while being a man who can no longer write well.

I look up, note what others are doing with their lives, and wonder if I can become, at this late date, something other than a writer. The answer is clearly no. I don’t have my heart in being anything but a writer, but I can no longer write. I am not the thing I want to be, and I am not willing to be any other thing. And so I wait. And I understand the plight of the addict, who is a trial to, and is deserted by, all who love him because he is wedded to a terrible need which sucks him dry and will one day kill him. And yet he loves his witchy muse, who grinds out burning cigarettes on his smoldering flesh, screwing her stiletto heel into the small of his back.

“It hurts so good!” he cries, and he reaches out and tries to embrace her. She turns on her heel, her stiletto heel, and embraces another. He, shameless, trails along behind her, hoping for a glance, a whiff of perfume. He’s grateful just to be near her.

She tells him he’s a creep, she tells him he’s cramping her style and scaring off the lovers she really wants. She tells him to beat it. She disappears with another, with others, with an army of others.

Exhausted and impoverished, he holes up and licks his wounds. He yearns and burns for her, and then begins to think he’s better off without her. He decides to become another kind of writer. Not a writer inspired by a muse, but an uninspired writer, a landbound craftsman who never madly soars, who is always in control of his material. Jilted and unrequited, he resigns himself to a life without passion. No sooner does he imagine such a life, than he laughs and realizes that he can’t go that way. He has to care about what he’s doing. He has to be surprised by it.

His words, every one, have to speak for his whole life. They can’t be mere exercises. They have to be potential miracles. Every word he aspires to write, and he may never write another, has to carry the possibility of redemption and revelation. There has to be the chance that each and every word packages and expresses his whole self, expresses worlds he didn’t know he was capable of imagining. Every word he aspires to write is a child of the marriage of heaven and hell.

The writer goes to hell. The world falls away from him. He is Diogenes, a ragged wanderer, searching for truth. And occasionally, or perhaps maybe never again, the truth finds him. And he tries, in his wanderings and waitings, to comfort himself with memories of past truths, truths which spoke through him. And they are cold comfort. He knows that the only way to live is to live the truth, to let the truth speak through him. But he is silent. He can only wait, in the darkness, for the light to strike.

He is a sentinel, a picket, a living antenna, waiting for word from outer and inner space. Static, reams and billows of gibberish, pour into his sensitive receivers. Blizzards of worthless words blow by him, drift upon his body as he stands his watch. He is steadfast because he lacks the imagination to think of another life for himself. He is Washington at Valley Forge. Freedom seems very far away. Disaster and privation are daily companions.

And then one day: Victory. The tyrannical enemy, silence and meaninglessness, grows careless. The writer sees an opening and strikes across the Delaware, catching the groggy Hessians in their cots. Victory follows victory. Spring rains melt winter snows. The forests explode with leaves and flowers. Songbirds sing their hearts out and procreate in their millions. It is the birth of a new republic, a republic of words, a product of seething imagination, yearning to be free.

The writer is saluted as the father of his country. He extends his hands to his fellow citizens, his readers, and the characters he has created. This world of his, this New World, becomes the hope of the Old. And the whole cycle begins again.

--FIN-