Poetry is the only possible language of man since the universe must be translated.

The galaxies do not exist – they have to be translated. We know this since each generation sees the universe differently.

The world does not exist by itself – it has to be translated. We prove this since each generation sees the world differently.

It is hard for any man to understand that he always looks at empty space. What makes it “solid” is the speed of perception, as what makes “matter” is the speed of electrons.

Because the material illusion is nothing in itself (“the atom is empty”), therefore “world” does not exist independently from a perceiving mind.  It is thus created from nothing. Any created perception of “world” is by default poetic. In Story Theory, the most any world can be – is a human’s representation of “world.”

Without the words of the poet, we would see chaos: we would “see” nothing. In Story Theory, any human perception within the illusion of “world” is necessarily an act of poetry.  It may be a narrative, yet if it references language using symbols, then it is a school of poetry.  These are facts.

Only a man is caught in the act of making “world.” Homo Sapiens is caught daily looking for something that does not exist. All men manifest their existence by trying to interpret “nothing” because when they do they make “something.” Usually, they make “world” with corresponding terms for living in the same “made up” world. Therefore, all members of the class of Homo Sapiens are poets.

We all experience our interpretation of nothing – that is, the perception of world. If the perceived world was something – that is, if the world actually existed – it would not need interpretation. And this leads us to the only known human agency.

Only a human mind makes an interpretation. That is, only a human mind makes a world – and all the named objects within the world. If “world” actually existed independently from our mind, we wouldn’t need to exist. Man would not be necessary to make an interpretation.

We find, in fact, man is necessary, since he is the only known perceiver of world. In this view, poetry is the only proof of the existence of man. And the poet is thereby the only necessary act of the human mind.  Only the poet is a maker.

Poetry is an interpretation of experience using symbols allowing clarity to the self-conscious mind. Poetry is important since the galaxy in which he finds himself must be translated. Poetry explains to Homo sapiens why he buries the dead with reverence of futurity.  This is evidence of futurity – as our mind is agency of the same.

Poetry comes from the Greek Ποιώ, which translates as “to make”. God did not create the world, He “ποίησε” it. That is, He “poetized” it.

Likewise, when a world is made, it is made by a man’s interpretation – his poetic representation. Therefore, in Story Theory, the most a man can do, the most any man can do, is to climb up into his own poem. Poetry is the central issue of the human condition. We have to explain that.

Poetry in Greece arose as a way to express the unspoken using the word in a metric (measured and calculated) mode. Our mind constructs geometers of relations when expressing the imperceptible. Poetry is valid only in powerful juxtaposition to all other human qualities – know and unknown. Poetry is the evidence of things seen and unseen, but real.  Just by saying a thing, a world, that world becomes viable.

To give an example, a young child does not know “beautiful”, since “beautiful” does not exist on its own. No animal knows what “beauty” is – only a man using his symbology to denote beauty. You “make” beautiful by creating the relations between “ugly, harmonious, deformed, elegant or maimed.”  Every man’s beauty is utterly dependent upon the language he uses to “make” his own beautiful, elegant, harmonious, ugly and just. Poetry is thus the source of all human values.  To teach poetry is to teach the steps of beauty in each generation – anew.

Every culture and every language thereby “makes” beauty – each is different – and cultures pass this “creation” down from generation to generation. Never for a moment does any human quality exist independently from learned acquisition. They are created, outlined, demonstrated, and learned by rote.

We know beautiful art only by gaining an aesthetic sense over time. (And even then the outcome is in doubt.) Men perform this poetic work with great passion and exactitude – usually called education.  No one is born appreciating Caravaggio, Turner, Milton, Cezanne, or Shakespeare.  The human sense of beauty is learned.

Love is likewise both artistic and irrational.  Love is made – that is, it is poetically created from nothing at all.  Love between two people does not exist independently from the lover or the beloved. Love does not exist until it is created. That is, we “make” love happen – only when we bring it – make it – from nothing – from non-existence. That’s why Plato said that every person that “is touched by love” is suddenly a poet.

In common usage, we say we “make love” because that’s exactly what we do. We make. We become poets when we make something from nothing. That’s what the mind of Homo Sapiens does. It’s a poetic organ. It is a poetic membrane.

We can continue these examples. Our names are not real. “Mark” is not real – “Mark” does not exist – I make him exist. I alone create and give “Mark” context and meaning. The letters of my name do not exist. We don’t say “M” because “M” exists on its own. We make “M” only in relation to “L” and “N” and the other letters of the nonexistent alphabet. Alphabets do not exist – they are made – and then learned by rote.  Like poems, alphabets would disappear if men disappeared. Without poetry or alphabets, world would likewise disappear.  Worlds and men hang on poetry.

Any other animal mind might signal to us our incomprehensibility. The alphabet does not exist at all – except as symbolic poetry inside the mind of Homo sapiens. With this non-existing alphabet, we make up many schools of poetry – including science, novels, machines, laws, cosmology, etc. Yet, to our point, none of these things exist outside the human mind. All these things would drop dead to the ground and never move again without a human mind. Therefore, the entire world is the act of poetry – a human mind making stories and interpretations of empty space.

“World” is the act of climbing up into its own poem.

To “poetize” is to know the word God and to know the word of God is to make God. Man thereby perceives the unspoken, and the unknown, as a geometry of relations. Poetry is a geometry of relations.

To better understand the human experience (and the human world) we need to have readers of poetry – not professors of science and math. Why? Because science and math are exactly other schools of poetry. Science and math use symbols to make plausible interpretations of “world” That is, they are subsets of poetry. Science and math are precisely linguistic representations of possible worlds. Science and math do not exist. We poetize math and science into being.

As the reader may test, science, religion, and romance have separate data-sets – separate selections of possible poetical perceptions of “world” – using symbols – always symbols.

The average human is confused – and how should he not be confused? His world is influenced by alternating interpretations of distinct worlds. How to ground his perception of reality, for example, when he transitions from linguistic science to linguistic Eros, from the linguistics of religion to the linguistic constraints of technology – and all in the same day! This is the crisis of modernism.

Each school of poetry, each “data set,” has its own “logic” of empirical evidence. Each linguistic “data set” exactly cancels the excellence, the beauty, the logic, of the other!

The modern is merely glutted with a superabundance of competitive possible worlds – and he has no philosophy to decode his predicament of a balkanized cacophony! The fixity of modern knowledge is utterly balkanized into separate schools of poetry – each denying the reality of the other.  We are daily nostalgic for the Age of Faith – where the notion of asking troubling questions did not even enter the mind of the average citizen.

Story Theory unlocks the code of the human mind. In Story Theory there is a linkage between all linguistic interpretations of human reality. All human power is expressed in symbols and all human secrets can ultimately only be preserved in poetry. Every beauty originates in a human’s story of beauty.  First, beauty is described and only then it is perceived.  That is the protocol of the human mind. Greece, Rome, and Christianity gave the basic narrative for 2500 years of the perception of beauty in painting and music.

That perception is now hanging in the balance – and thereby so are Western men.