Taboo sits in a world of dune sand, blowing light, aware of many thoughts and forgetting many others. The sun is warm, but the air is shallow--very cold, and with chilly fingers the air teases the hackled skin of Taboo's every thought. Taboo is thinking about the heft, the weight, the exhaustion of every step he took to climb the hills of sand through the hollow wind that breathes across the sun.

During one such thought, someone takes a photo.

The hike from the base of Colorado's Great Sand Dunes to his seat, that moment of Taboo's contemplation, takes a length of time. How much of that time does the photo capture? Or does the photo only capture a single, isolated frozen moment?

What story can Taboo Tenente tell you, to provide you all information you need to know, in order to understand Taboo's longer journey from the photographed moment of contemplation to the moment of this article's writing?

Telling One Story

When you write a story, you must only tell one story. True, every story has an inside and an outside. True, every story owns the rights to the smaller stories contained within. True, all writers and readers bring with them libraries of stories and impose them upon other stories written and read.

But the writer of a story must always remember the single story in the moment of telling. What thread of motivation ties one moment to the next? That thread is One Story. If the One Story is good, many important things will remain unsaid, and the reader will hear them anyway.

Theme? Meaning?

Flannery O'Connor distrusted the value of theme. She preferred to think in terms of meaning. Theme is forced. Theme is generic. Theme is man fighting for himself against the universe. Meaning has no summary. A story has meaning if and only if the story is superior to its own summary.

Here's an example: what does Catcher in the Rye mean? Is it a "Coming of Age" story? Yes, of course. But the story has meaning because the story can never find proper reduction. Catcher in the Rye has meaning precisely because the story has already been reduced to its smallest possible size.

Purpose

Five years after that mystical moment sighed through his perch atop a mountain of sand, Taboo finds himself regularly walking around Lake Wingra, in Madison, Wisconsin.

A thin swath of oak, maple, pine, and prairie rings the lake. Taboo walks the six-mile path five times weekly. He has a girlfriend, a job, an apartment, and a car--obtained in that order. On occasion, these items work the way they're supposed to work.

Taboo is working as a vocational case manager for individuals with developmental disabilities. Some of his clients grasp his testicles through double-layer jean-canvass. Some urinate on the kitchen floor while huffing angry, petulant faces in his direction. Still, Taboo finds the work rewarding.

But Taboo believes he is living an unhealthy life. He attributes his lack of health to laziness; and therefore forces himself to make time for an exercise regime of lake walks. Eventually, he values the walks more than the other items in his life, and refuses to compromise his walks for anything: weather, work, friends--even for health.

Taboo discovers that exercising for health was never the purpose. What, then, was the purpose?

Motivation

When you write, where do you find the beginning of a story? Where do you find the ending? Purpose finds itself at the end of a well-conceived story, as does meaning. Motivation, however, is harder to locate.

We think of laziness as the antithesis of motivation: you have the motivation to accomplish a purpose; your laziness prevents the accomplishment of purpose.

Let's say Taboo's motivation for walking was a feeling of laziness, and a dissatisfaction with laziness. Finding motivation was the intended purpose. Taboo did accomplish a purpose, but did not find access to the well of motivation he sought. What purpose did he accomplish? To figure out the solution, he'll have to wait for the story's end.

But Taboo looks back and discovers a photograph of sky and sun and sand and decides that some link exists, a path to get here from there. He can accept that the end has yet to be told, but he decides to believe that Desire connects two moments within a lifespan. How did Taboo get here from there? He got here through a single, complex, hidden, unspoken desire.

Whose Story?

Here's my question: who owns the story? I've just outlined one potential story about Taboo. The story hasn't yet taken shape; I've only designed a frame, of course, and should I want to write this story, I will have to return to step one: I must determine the One Story that I want to write.

Then I must decide who will tell the story. For example:

1. I have created a narrator, Taboo Tenente, to tell the story of my Blog--not only this post, but also the story of my entire blog.

2. Taboo Tenente created a character, Taboo, to embody this article's particular protagonist.

3. Taboo Tenente has decided to tell this story about his past-self (Taboo) with third-person omniscience, but the reader is aware of the connection between storyteller and character: they are the same person, separated by a gulf of time.

I, on the other hand, have created Taboo Tenente to speak with a first-person voice. My interest is to remove myself from these articles, to somewhat protect my real thoughts, and to allow myself the distance to write with a sense of irony--these articles are reflections of my real, unprocessed thoughts. I create Taboo Tenente to search out the purpose of each.

Today I've tacked a photo of myself to this article--not a photo of Taboo Tenente, not of Taboo, but of myself. Then I let Taboo Tenente get on with the boring business of logically figuring out if there's any real meaning to be found.

No doubt he'll come up with something. He's good at finding intuitive though inevitably awkward meaning. Once he's exhausted himself with his purpose, I can usually get back to the business of my own writing, my own living.

But let me tell you something about this damned Taboo Tenente: he can be a persistant asshole. He gets my lazy ass up at three in the morning sometimes, wanting to know all the why-ses and how-ses that I've been afraid to explain to him. I believe I've given him enough shit to deal with on his own, as things stand, but Taboo Tenente isn't one to take advice.

All that shit I dump on him never does the trick. He always wants to know more and more. Insufferable: why am I sleeping? Why am I working? Why am I writing?  How can I write so much and return with nothing?  And sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I find that it's actually nighttime and Taboo Tenente has spent nearly the whole day mucking up my life.

Or fixing my life, I suppose. Everything is relative, you see--depends on who's telling the story.