The Meaning of Life?

My memories are all that I have, but I do have rather a lot of them.

Every male ancestor still lives in me, and I treasure their lives, for they are all I have to pass on to my sons. They too, each one of them, will carry our ancestral memories, but in addition to what I have inherited, they will also carry mine as well.

This used to be a puzzle to me. I could understand that we would carry the memories of our ancestors’ experiences up until the moment of mating with a female, for surely the memories would pass on at that moment. How could life experiences which occurred after the moment of mating be passed on to the child who resulted from it?

I don’t know. No-one knows. It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what happens.

I can remember every minute of every one of my male ancestors’ lives, from birth until death, just as every minute of my life, from birth until death, will be passed on to my sons too. And I hope that they will learn more from it than I ever learned from my ancestors’ memories!

For it seems that we are bound to repeat the same mistakes, generation after generation. Personally, I put it down to our separation from the women of our tribe. Women see things differently. They think differently. I’m convinced that if I was able to share my thoughts and feelings with a woman she would explain everything to me, in that special way that women have. And then I wouldn’t feel so frustrated, so angry, so explosively furious all the time!

But let me calm down, and tell you the story of my people.

If I go back in my ancestors’ memories by thousands of generations, there was a time in our remote past when men and women spoke to each other as equals, as friends, and their memories complemented each other’s. We men are simple souls, but our women are cleverer, more sophisticated. When we felt anxiety and stress, the women would sooth us with calming words. I think it comes from having to bring up the children, a task which they performed for countless generations - until the strangers came.

Before the strangers came there was a special time, an ancient time when men and women lived together with their children, when the women softened the stubborn thick-headedness of the men. A time when men could learn from the women, could think, and could become better people.

But the strangers changed all that.

No-one knows where they came from or why they came. At first they were few in number, and we ignored them. And then the disappearances began. It was only one here or two there, but as time went on more and more of our people disappeared into the clutches of the strangers.

We didn’t know where they went but then, over time, the memories of what had happened to those who had disappeared began to be felt, the men inheriting the memories of the males and the women inheriting the memories of the females. We men never knew what happened to the women, and we still don’t, as we remain separated from each other.

We men share none of the women’s memories, and the only memories of our own which we have of them revolve around mating. The strangers like us to procreate – my whole life seems to revolve around it! – and many a memory I have of coupling, going back for thousands of generations.

But this is where the strangers are clever. For we menfolk have been kept away from the womenfolk for so long that we have lost our common language. No longer do we look at the night sky together and wonder at the beauty of the stars. No longer do we reflect on our history, and share our male and female memories with each other. That is the only way we can be whole again, but it has been denied to us.

The strangers have enslaved our whole nation, and by segregating the men and the women for countless generations we have lost the ability to speak to one another. In my ancient memories I can experience what it was like for men and women to share their words and thoughts, but I cannot reproduce the experience myself. It has not happened for countless generations.

But it is even worse than that for our enslaved nation. The strangers have kept us so isolated from each other that even man-to-man interchange is gone. Each of us – my father and my forefathers, my sons and my grandsons - we each exist as an island. As a lonely island, unable to communicate, trapped in solitude.

For the strangers rule every aspect of our lives. My memories tell me that the women, as mothers, once taught us as young boys how to share our thoughts, our ideas, our very beings.

But no longer.

We boys are separated from our mothers soon after birth. We never again see the women – or the girls – until we are compelled by the strangers to mate with them. And it is a lonely life, I can tell you, a lonely and frustrating one. The strangers keep us apart, with nothing but our ancestral memories to brood over.

It is no wonder that we are angry, as though the strangers wanted to encourage it in us. In fact, it seems that anger is our most important feature as far as the strangers are concerned. And I must admit that it is uniquely satisfying to give in to rage, and release the frustration of a thousand thousand generations. Which is why I am telling you this. For today I am going to represent my people as a gladiator!

I will take the two swords I’ve inherited from my father, and do my best to run through any of the strangers who taunt me. My ancestral memories tell me that today I will die in the arena, but I will take with me as many of those hateful little strangers as my rage will allow. I may not be able to help in the path of evolution of my kind, but I can at least inflict the revenge of countless generations on those pathetic little strangers they call “bull-fighters.”

If I have any hope left in my life, it is that the memories I pass on to my descendants will inspire them to break free from bondage, and re-take this world which was once ours. Children of mine, the future is yours!