The writer writes in the wake of the epiphany: then it becomes all craft, somehow to embody the content of the realization which resists description. There it is, all failure, and caught first, before character and narrative, in time — the temporal experience of reading or listening. If this epiphany consists of a recognition that catastrophe has already occurred, that there’s no going back to some kind of Edenic origin, then this writing is always an act of mourning, described in terms of the pre-catastrophic experience. This similarly can’t entirely retain the same context of pre-catastrophic consciousness: it requires new language and form. The act of writing, if it is compulsion and not career, then becomes an act of sustained mourning, its creation the creation of elegies for the past and the world, written out of the acknowledgement of the catastrophe. It is a matter of getting memory, both of the pre-catastrophic past and the nature of the catastrophe, right. The meaning is in the memory, even with the impossibility of the memory’s perfection in language or on the stage. It is not easy to write an elegy that approaches the fullness of the epiphany, and it is torturous to rewrite it and to present it on a stage: it inflicts the pain of its original experience again and again. It will be argued of course that this is not art: art is celebration and beauty and joy: it is collective learning and happiness: it is properly cathartic: we leave the theatre or the page as better selves. Of course, of course. I am mistaken. Please forgive me.