“I avoid your words.”

That was the complete text of the e-mail I received this evening from a woman who is officially dead to my readers over at TTAC but very much alive to me. It was in response to six heartfelt paragraphs packed almost to Eliot-esque levels with allusion, alliteration, allosaurian anger and allotropic assemblages. I avoid your words. Her brilliant malice, fueled by fear, fills my sails like the trade winds. In rapid but random order I considered: Robert Farago, Joseph Campbell, Lena Dunham, and Lady Duff Twysden. Warning: troubled water ahead.

TTAC’s founder, Robert Farago, once told me, as I fretted about some minor point of editing or clarification, “Jack, your words are just soldiers! You send them out to die! And don’t worry about it!” He’s right, of course. Some words are mercenary, marshaled in prosaic platoons to promote a car or pay off a debt to a PR person or jump the line for the next press drive down the Stelvio Pass. I’ve never done that sort of thing very well, I’m sad to say.

But I believe in the power of story and I am not afraid to send my words to die again and again in service of that ideal. It matters. It’s important. It’s as simple as this: real life has no frame. There’s no guiding principle. There’s no story. We are born and we die. It means nothing. He who made kittens put snakes in the grass and the wicked among us do in fact triumph with crushing regularity and your friends get cancer for no reason and you can slip in an instant and let your child’s hand go and he can be killed by a passing car and there’s just nothing behind it.

The power of story, the power of myth, is the power to frame, to make the senseless understandable. It’s literally part of the human mind. You are forever framing stories to make what happens before your eyes understandable. Otherwise it’s all flashing colors and autistic terror. The actual output of the human eyes and ears bears no resemblance to what you wind up perceiving. The eye sees a succession of dark shapes and the mind builds the story of a flying bird or a falling object. The eyes flash in the motion called “saccade” and the mind interprets the images in a way that does not quite include a particular improbable shape motion and the car moves forward under the control of that mind and the motorcyclist dies and the response is “I didn’t see him.” Better to say this: he wasn’t part of the story. It’s fatal. Not being part of the story.

Storytelling is a basic human action. We create reality through storytelling, the same way our minds assemble the unreliable evidence of our senses into a consistent narrative. History books are storytelling. Documentaries are storytelling. As we age, our stories become our memories. How many times have you discovered that your memory of an event — the story — was simply wrong? In the long run, the story is all we truly have. Ask Nick Drake or Kurt Cobain about the power of story. The stories they chose to believe killed them more surely than a pill or a shotgun. The Holocaust was built on the back of a story, a framing device intended to help Germans understand why their world didn’t work to their satisfaction. The “Miracle On Ice” is a story that turns a simple and completely plausible hockey game into legend.

Storytelling is power. He who controls the past controls the future. The Chevrolet Citation, for example, sold in numbers no passenger car in the American market is ever likely to surpass or even match again. It was a success in every financial measure possible. Still, we consider it to have been a failure. History determined that the Citation was part of the story of General Motors’ failure in the Eighties. The framing story of the Citation is one of failure.

I am a storyteller. Here is a short story: On Christmas Eve of 2009, I met a recently divorced young woman, overly tall and pretty in a Mediterranean but decidedly imperfect way. I fell in love with her that evening. She didn’t know it, but I certainly did, and over the course of the next two years I tirelessly contrived to seduce her in a process that was made exceptionally difficult by the fact that we lived 421 miles apart and had no legitimate reason to ever cross paths again. She became entirely and wholeheartedly mine in a process that seemed magical and accidental to her but in fact was engineered every step of the way with a precision considerably greater than that used to design the Chevrolet Citation.

Our cross-country romance, which took place in various hotels and destination spots from Las Vegas to Palm Beach, suffered from a bit of a story problem. I viewed it — I wrote it — as the tale of two brilliant and capricious people who met periodically for the purpose of violent passion. She saw it as the story of a woman who had finally met her perfect and permanent match. These two stories were in no point compatible.

Along the way, I wrote about her, most often on TTAC, giving her a nickname and constructing a character for her from her most memorable characteristics, sayings, and actions. I did it as a way of loving her when she wasn’t around — an evocation, a ritual, a retelling, a very human action — but she saw it as an attempt to create a version of her that didn’t truly exist.

“You write this person,” she said, “but that person isn’t me, even though she says the things I say and does the things I do.” Now there’s a question to ponder. How could the character not be the woman, if I drew the character directly from the woman? Perhaps I created through omission; I included the wine-soaked bedsheets but left out the nights she spent catching fireflies with her children. I quoted her fiery responses and witty sayings but omitted the times she was tired, or sad, or desperate with financial and medical worry. I was no better than the Cro-Magnon who sees the flash of the tiger in the forest then scrapes the boldest details of his recollection onto a cave wall.

When it all went bad and we called it quits, she stopped reading me. She knew it was a way she could hurt me; she could reject my story. If you’ve watched the HBO series “Girls” this year, you’ve seen the extremely uncomfortable scene where Adam’s new girlfriend disapproves of the apartment which serves as his artistic space. Things go downhill very quickly in the moments that follow. It’s a hard scene to watch but it’s also an exceptionally honest one. Those of us who consider ourselves creative don’t always draw a solid line between our work and our selves. The construction worker holding a sign probably doesn’t care what you think of his sign-holding, but I cared very much about what she thought of my writing. Later on, when we met again as friends of a sort, she insisted that I read what I’d written about her to her aloud. She understands a lot about power and meaning. She wanted to hear it in my voice. Now, she doesn’t even want that. She’ll write her own story about us, and about herself, from here on out.

Lady Duff Twysen is not a name that most of us recognize, but Brett Ashley is. Lady Brett Ashley, the anti-heroine of The Sun Also Rises. Lady Ashley is repeatedly and thoroughly fucked throughout the course of that magnificent book; by bullfighters, boyfriends, Jews. Everybody fucks her but the protagonist, Jake Barnes. He’d like to fuck her, but he can’t; he was injured in World War I. We’re meant to understand that the injury was substantial and it likely involved everything down there. Jake can’t have Brett. He tries to fuck her by proxy, setting up a meeting with a young bullfighter for her. Later, he takes a beating from the most despicable of her lovers for having done so. He is thoroughly unmanned in the course of the book. It’s one of the saddest works of modern fiction a man could possibly read, or write.

Now here’s the thing: in the early drafts, “Jake” was “Hem”. He was meant to represent the great author himself. Brett Ashley was a cave drawing of Lady Duff Twysen, a woman with whom Hemingway traveled between the wars. Splendid. Brett Ashley, meet Drama McHourglass. You’ll be great friends. Everybody does it. Everybody wants to frame what they’ve experienced. The Sun Also Rises is, on the face of it, not much more than Hemingway’s travel diary, with a few names swapped out.

But Hemingway’s dick worked. I repeat: Hemingway’s dick worked. I have no idea why he didn’t repeatedly put the proverbial boots to Lady Twysen, but there was nothing biological about it. His dick worked. The whole tragic device of The Sun Also Rises is an invention. Contemporaneous reviewers believed that Jake’s injury was meant to symbolize a sort of emotional detachment, an inability to connect engendered in the men of the era by that brutal trench war, that senseless bloodbath, the hundreds of thousands dead in the ground for no reason anyone could truly understand.

All of that may well be perfectly valid, but I’ve chosen to create, and believe, a different story. I believe that Hemingway loved Lady Twysen, but for reasons that only the two of them will ever know, there was a conflict of story between them. It just didn’t work out. Maybe they both wanted it to, maybe the strengths of their desires were not evenly matched. We will never know. It hurt him like a physical wound. He looked in the mirror, a man who created himself from a sickly child with just an iron will and a belief that he could shape his own story, and he saw some defect, something missing, something as critical to his relationship with Lady Twysen as Jake’s injury was to his relationship with Lady Ashley. Something was broken, wounded. All the Cliffs Notes will tell you that Jake’s injury is similar to that suffered by the Fisher King in Grail mythology. Hemingway’s just using shorthand here. The similarity is deliberate. It’s meant to be a stand-in for something more complex, more delicate, something that he didn’t feel equal to expressing in print.

The lesson of all the stories considered above is this: You can desire someone with a force that is beyond words to describe, with a violence that physically shakes you. You can yearn for someone, long for them in a way that makes you heartsick. Yearning and longing. Robert Bly called them “those strangely un-American feelings.” You can love someone so strongly that you are willing to stand aside and let them be fucked by a bullfighter or God knows what, just because you want them to be happy. And the only consolation you’ll get out of it is one you create yourself. A story that you’ll write. That it could have worked. If you hadn’t been hurt in the war. If you’d met a decade earlier. If you’d seen her first. Something. Anything. Could have been different. And you would be together. Happily ever after, till death do you part.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?