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As a writer I had to discover how far I could enter into honesty. My first admission in this narrative is to admit that I know nothing about god. I could draw upon no eternal fact, no preexisting knowledge, which could give me a firm basis to discover infallible meaning in human life. I had to admit, finally, that all I was good at was a low-grade failure of all my endeavors in life. I was forced to identify a meaning from the pattern of this failure. As a poet I recognized, that knowing nothing, I had to make a story of my life experience and what I observed in other men. Then I saw that all men did the same as I – and all men fail.

I am certain that a human story-making mechanism has compensated for all the missing eternal facts of the human condition – which, again, no man has yet found. Then I saw that I no more make a story of my life then all other men also make a story of their life. I had to draw conclusions from these basic observations of myself and other men. All the leaders I had in combat, all my teachers in school, all my lovers and friends had no universal information that was eternal and always true for all men; they each only had a story they made, a story that they followed to give meaning to their lives. I accepted their stories as the evidence of their human personality, their being. Nothing else was there.

I do not know any fact of my existence. I go one step further. I observe that no man knows any fact of his existence or condition – other than he is taking breath and has consciousness (some will dispute even this). In lieu of a provable set of facts of the meaning of consciousness, men make a story of their being – and the being of all other men. Some lives are original productions; but most men’s lives are based on the stories others have made, or stories inherited by their teachers. All have equal value. There is no story better than another, there is only the divine code running through all story.

The salient fact (for my thesis) is that men make story of their lives to give value, meaning, and focus. This is how it should be. Without eternal proven facts of our consciousness; without proven, concrete gods of value given to us in a neat package at our birth, we seamlessly, or apparently seamlessly, create a story of our consciousness. In no otherwise can we conduct our lives with value. This is the only bedrock of what I know. This is all the prophecy I have when I observe the birth of my children. This is where I begin my inquiry of how men create their lives, and the meaning and value of human life. I aim at candor.

The following narrative is an exploration into my attempt at this honesty. True to my thesis, I make only a story of the human condition. I can point to no other independently existing facts despite all my rumored cunning and all the science of the men that lived before me. I take a narrative of philosophy from this phenomenon: as all men, I can only make story.

The pretension to honesty has been made before me. Let’s see how far we can still navigate into this unexplored quantity. Of course, at some point, I will certainly fail to explore the deepest truths of men and gods with unbiased honesty. But I am not sure that I, or the reader, will be able to mark the point where I cross the line of mere personal aesthetics.

I have promised the reader that I know nothing about my being. I know only what I observe in the record of man’s story – the story he has recorded in his literature and art. If I had facts that existed independently, eternally, and could be proven by all men, then all I had to do was to make a list of them and all men would be compelled to fall under the authority of these eternal facts. I have no eternal facts.

I have a thesis; a story that seems plausible and I will attempt to articulate this story with a certain clarity. Unlike most philosophic texts, my account will be instantaneously provable by all readers in their own lives. Story Theory, I believe, is a thesis that is proved by all men at all moments of their lives. Even at this moment men make story: they make a counter story; or they follow my story. I have attempted to make this clarity, this definition of human personality, in the separate quantities of poetry and prose.