I Want to Tell a Story . . .

I want to tell a story, but it immediately becomes a project of infinite proportions.  Every detail calls for a complimentary detail, every character summons up countless other characters, and every event, every emotion, a million others just as important.  Suppose a character says, “I love you.”  Is not the first person who said those words a hundred thousand years ago now a part of this story?  Perhaps those were the first true words ever spoken by a human being.  Perhaps the story of why a long-ago ancestor chose to say those words is the element that must be told as a part of my story.  And must I not also tell the tale of every joy and heartbreak that my character had previously experienced or will ever experience in the realm of love, in order to be true to my original story?  How to cut through this hopeless tangle, and still communicate the full import, the full meaning of the story? 

     Perhaps it is only possible through the vehicle of metaphor to at least approximate the beating heart, the true essence of my tale.  How can one communicate the deepest reality of a story without that queen of language, the metaphor?  Think of Rory Gallagher’s song “Philby.”  It would be hard to imagine two persons more dissimilar than Rory Gallagher and Kim Philby, and yet Gallagher was able to express his own rootlessness and alienation by choosing to identify with the famous double-agent in his song.  In the song, he became a metaphorical “double-agent,” torn between his public persona and his lonely private self, and he articulated those feelings so well that he allowed the listener to recognize them, too.  Is it possible to express the meaning of the words “I love you” through any other means than metaphor, or to prune the branching roads of story with any other tool?