After the Flood - Chapter 2

After escaping the shipwreck and avoiding the monsters of illusion that swim with every mariner amidst the Sea of Perception, I have been on firm ground for the better part of three days.

I know the place. I have been here before. Actually, I think I never quite left, and everything is new and old to me at the same time as it splits in the most beautiful of harmonies, the 50/50 path of things.

The place is inhabited and it has certain rules, one such as I can now begin bending, but that one must not break under any circumstance. Such a thing would bring about folly and certain death, in one form or the other. The road is long, but not endless, but one will never get where one wants if one tries to by-pass the rules of this place.

It is beautiful here, a safe port away from the raging sea. Not that I don't like the sea. I do. Very much so. But it is very womanly, and one such as I must stick to firm ground because I could try swimming and diving forever, but that is not the point of my existence in this place. My escape, my desire and my destiny lie on the firmness of the ground.

I am not afraid of the water, I am not afraid of the imaginary things that lurk in the depths of my being and that sometimes reflect in the mirror images of the waves, but I know the rules of the sea. The Sea accepts its own and allows others to pass as long as do not overstay their welcome. I almost overstayed. That is why Ulysses leaves the goddesses he encounters throughout his travels. He makes all of them his, because they love him and cannot refuse him, but he is not for them. And he leaves.

In much the same way, I awake on this third day. Knowing my place of belonging, sensing my superiority but accepting my masculinity - responsibility, prowess, resolve, aggression, sexuality, malice, humor, instinct, lust, violence, the power to destroy and unmake things, the power to help things grow, the longing for the hunt.

But there is no fanfare to my affairs, for all my advantages I am still a man, a male. And a true man must know when to recoil, even as he passes the labyrinth. A true man must worship the feminine as it is all the things he is not, it is all the things he can conquer and enslave, but without It, a man's life would be devoid of meaning. It would be empty.

Rashness, arrogance, ambiguity, affection, visceral desire, malevolence, jocularity, wantonness, subterfuge, the power to give life and sustain it, the power of understanding how things grow, the longing for union are all the things I will never have, or that I do have but that are not mine to have and I should give back onto the sea. I will keep them as mere residual trinkets, because a hunter takes trophies, but always lets the strange creatures go free. This place needs its strange creatures.

I now have shops and hypermarkets so when I do hunt, I merely leave my mark, as a good hunter who understands the Way of Change in himself and the Others.

I am a hunter, I was a hunter. But now I just watch and track down. Because that is the hunt. The kill is for nourishment, and the rules of this place make it so that one does not have to kill anymore. I like this civilization. It has it advantages, if one knows of The Rules...