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My thesis is that there is no human knowing without story. This thesis insists that the poets contribute to intellectual thought, not because they are more intelligent as a group, but more radically to the modern reader, I mean to show that there is no human thought, no intellectualism at all, without first, the prior, the necessary mechanism of human story. The agents of human story are poets, the “makers” of human personality. Poets are the makers of what is human, and the philosophers of the West should not have excluded poets in subsequent nation building. Poets should not have lost intellectual prestige in Western thought around 400 BC, and subsequently, should take their place again at the forefront of human conceptualizing. Each chapter shall build the case that poets have the cunning to interpret future man. Poets must capture the texts again. The texts are what become human.

There is no art; there is only a manifestation of personality. Art expresses only one quality: human personality. All great art is only a clear and precise manifestation of personality. Any claim to knowledge of a god is, in effect, a claim for a superior manifestation of personality. Every weapon man has made, every technology, every book, every design, is an expression of personality. All that men can make is personality. Everything made by men is a derivation of personality, including airplanes, guns, buildings, music, and murder. The discovery of human personality starts from the “story-makers”, the poets. This is the first formal philosophy that recognizes the actual mechanisms of human conceptualizing.

Poets are the creators of human personality: not the logisticians, not the engineers, not the philosophers, not the politicians, not the schools, not the biologists. Rilke and Kafka created the modern age, not Roosevelt and Churchill. Political institutions fail to create personality. Only the poet can create what becomes human. I can confirm that Ian Fleming has more influence on the military men of my generation than any Catholic saint, any parent. All the military pilots I fought with in war thought they could be James Bond, as a previous generation of pilots patterned their story of masculine heroism on John Wayne. There is a long tradition in the West for crafting our own personalities after our myths. Odysseus and Achilles were the archetypes of all ancient Greek and Roman boys. Our minds are governed by poetry, not by finance. We remember stories, not balance sheets.

All human thought proceeds from human story. As a child I remember making stories and perceiving stories of the outside. Never for a moment does an infant first learn to think, it only recognizes the outside world via the scenario of story. An infant only grasps human consciousness when it is able to recognize a simple fragment of story from its surrounding. This is why the infant has no memory until the age of 4 or 5. In fact, we don’t see the phenomena of the outside world at all until we can make a story of it. The world has to be translated before it can be seen. Story is the medium of this translation by the human mind.

We even have to be reminded when young to notice the beauty of nature. The appreciation of nature is a learned response; that is, it’s a story we learn to appreciate. Thus it is an aesthetic sense, developed for its own sake, not for any purpose of utility. We cannot see as humans, we cannot have concepts, we cannot express human personality, unless there is a prior activation of story in the human brain, a mechanism, as it were, that permits us to perceive outside phenomenon. Lets go through some examples.

When we meet a beautiful woman, our mind immediately begins to craft a story of future bliss in the imagination. In the space of a few hours we construct, not thoughts, but stories of our possible and desired life with this person of beauty, even before we can be sure that such a desire is reciprocated. I have proven this thesis on more than one occasion.

We make story when we prepare to go to a job interview. We paint of picture of what we should say in response to questions, of what clothes to wear. There is no “thinking” being performed, this is a story-making scenario of hope and fear. This process continues in each human moment without stop. When we gather at a family reunion. When we prepare for vacation. When we meet friends. When we undertake a task. When we arrive, and perform at work. Each time we do the activity of living in the world we make a prior story of our “outside”. The perception of the outside world is based on the story we make of our activity and our being. This theory is testable by each human in every moment of breath. It continues in sleep, and is called the dream state. We exist in a story-making machine. It never stops, not even in death. There is a clue here I must investigate; there is a pattern I must trace to its source. Does the reader recognize his life? His life is located in the mechanism of story.

The only quality that qualifies a human, as human, is story. This statement, if true, utterly changes Western conceptualizing. This statement, if true, will change the life of every reader, take us out of earth, and impel Western man to reach his fullest fate and possess the galaxy. Story is the assurance of our future deeds.

As a clue to my presentation, I shall draw upon alternate histories, never before examined by history departments. France, for example, never existed until recently. The story of France was started by the politics of royal power in Paris about one thousand years ago. Only after ten centuries and the extinction of the hostile country people (and the Cathars), could France actually be realized outside of Paris. French was not spoken in all of France until the last century. Parts of France still remain hostile to the hegemony of the Paris elite culture. Most modern nation states contain a similar nasty secret, Great Britain (Ireland), Serbia (Kosovo), Bosnia, Russia (Ukraine), China (Tibet), Italy, Spain, Turkey, India, Israel (Palestine) and Pakistan to name a few. Nation-Story has enslaved entire peoples locked in a continual freedom movement, trying to get their own stories back.

Unfortunately, most stories, and the limitations of our stories, are tied to space and to confined areas of land. Thus the limits of the earth are a serious limitation of the human personality. We are forced to fight, kill, or escape. Even if we want to be peaceable, others will not give us this choice. We can escape from these patterns of power, fighting over the same parcels of limited land. There is an unlimited vacuum waiting for our story to take root in space.

The exclusion of the poets, the story-makers, from the public forum of ideas was a toxic mistake in what has subsequently been named Western philosophy. Human good and evil, all good and evil, proceed from human story – not from some supposed material reality. The five senses do not define reality. Even scientists are now forced to visualize this fact in such fictions as String Theory. All human qualities of whatever dimension, description, conception, first have originated from a man’s story.

Why is story important for Poetry? For Philosophy? For Art? Simply this: The story of our being determines the external manifestation of our being. We externalize what is in our minds. Our story of being is our story of god; there is no difference. God is a concept that contains the human discussion of values, dreams, ethics – the possibilities of joy in our being. So the story we make of god certainly determines what is accepted in our manifestation of our art. The Greeks made majestic statues of their gods. Christianity made icons in painting of Jesus, Mary, and the many saints. Therefore, the story of our being directly influences our artistic representation and our poetic possibility. The story of our being is now being reconstructed in this generation. I will insist that humans themselves as individuals have no reality, no personality, except through the story they make.