The Hunger That Burned the World

While men blaze the world alight, women are quietly walking away from the fire.

I. The Well
I once had a dream‚ or perhaps it was a journey in an expanded state, the boundary between those two things being less solid than we are taught, in which women arrived in this world already carrying something. Not a burden. A supply. Love, held in the womb so powerful that it emerged as a living being, maybe several. I was told women are the ones who bring love into the world. They are its first vessel and its first teacher. The infant who drinks from her learns, in that most primal of transactions, that the world is warm, that need is met, that arrival is welcome. That life itself can be trusted.

And men must come and drink from her.

When this movement does not happen, when the mother is absent, or frightened, or herself so depleted by her own unloved inheritance that she cannot give what was never given to her‚ something goes wrong in the place where love was meant to grow. Not simply an absence. An absence that curdles. In the space where love should have spread outward into the world, something else takes up residence. The lack of love, unexamined and unnamed, lit by the flames of shame, becomes violence.

Make no mistake about what we are witnessing.

The God of all violence. The ritualisation and normalisation of mass killing. The deemed-necessary murder of people who have been othered just enough to make their deaths on our screens palatable, by religion, by nationality, by poverty, by the colour of their skin, by their refusal to be useful to power. The global machinery of war, which has never for a moment stopped running and which we call, in our carefully managed denial, an aberration. All of this is the collapse of the masculine as it has been permitted to develop in the absence of love. This is what men become when they have not drunk from the well of life. They spread death. It is the only thing an empty vessel can distribute.

The POTUS today announced about another human being’s death ‘Good, I am glad he is dead.’ This public defiant statement is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.

Everything we are watching in these years, the Epsteins, the cruelties of late capitalism, the degradation of political life, the structural violence built into education and business and medicine, the casual misogyny that courses through culture like a low-grade fever, all of it is the imprint of the unsatisfied beast. The man who arrived in the world and was not properly met. Who was not held long enough, or at all. Who learned, in the first and most formative school, that love is withheld. That the body is not safe. That need is shameful. That the only power available to him is the power of taking. To take without feeling the weight of what has been given, to take and feel entitled to more — this is where the breakdown announces itself. Not just in the laws of culture or civility, but in the laws of nature. In the laws of life itself.

This is not a crisis of politics. It is not a crisis of economics, though it deforms both. It is a crisis of the masculine soul in its relationship to life itself, to the feminine principle that sustains life, that carries it, that makes it possible to trust existence enough to remain in it without destroying it.

We are watching a rebalancing so long overdue it arrives roaring. A correction so large it looks like catastrophe because the imbalance it is correcting is so ancient, so deep, and so normalised that we have long since stopped seeing it. This is not about power, though power is where it expresses itself. It is about something older and more fundamental than power: humility in the face of life. The recognition that we did not make ourselves. That we are held here, like everything else, by something we did not earn and cannot own. As Leonard Cohen says in his song Boogie Streets, we are so lightly here. Life watches patiently, as it always has, until we find our right place in the ecosystem of what allows things to be as they are.

Women, in their millions, are finding their way back to that place. Men, in their millions, are still searching for the well.

A word on language, before we go further. When we say women and men here, we do not mean only bodies or social categories. We mean the archetypal forces, the feminine and the masculine, that move through all of us, that every human being carries in some proportion. Some of us embody more of one facet than the other; some live the tension of both in full. The wound described here is not the exclusive property of people who identify as women, nor is the hunger described here found only in those who identify as men. What we are tracing is a pattern in the deep structure of how these forces have been permitted, or forbidden, to relate. The bodies are the carriers. The crisis is older than any of them.

II. The Silence

There is a particular kind of silence that has been growing for years now, and those paying attention will have noticed it in the spaces where women used to perform availability. The dating apps that once held their profiles. The dinner parties where they used to arrive in the careful costume of readiness. The second dates that no longer happen. The phone calls that are not picked up.

Ask a woman in her forties or fifties why she has stepped back from intimate relationship and she will likely give you the practical answer first: the disappointment, the asymmetry, the exhaustion of emotional labour unreturned. The unexplained loneliness that the culture has told her is her childhood trauma. She may mention the specific man, the specific wound. But stay with her long enough, and something else surfaces, something older and stranger and harder to name. Not anger, exactly. Something closer to wonder. The wonder of someone who has just understood, for the first time, that the room she spent decades trying to make comfortable was never hers.

This is not a story about men’s failures, though men do fail. It is a story about a projection so deep it became a life. And it is a story about what happens when the projection finally collapses.

III. The Freight

James Hollis, writing about the Middle Passage, that seismic reckoning that strikes midlife like a second birth, unwanted, observes that no social institution carries more unconscious freight than marriage. No one speaks aloud at the altar what is actually being asked: I am counting on you to make my life meaningful. I am counting on you to read my mind and anticipate all my needs. I am counting on you to complete me, to make me a whole person, to heal my stricken soul. He notes, with the precision of a surgeon, that most marriages which end are broken by the weight of exactly these expectations, and those which persist are often badly scarred.

But here is what Hollis does not say directly, what the women stepping quietly away from intimate relationship are saying with their absence: the freight was never distributed equally. The projections were never mutual in the same way. The woman at the altar was not simply bringing her own unconscious hopes. She was also, in many cases, becoming the screen onto which a man projected his. And she had been trained, by culture, by family, by the long intergenerational transmission of survival strategy, to hold still for it.

To be the one who receives projection without dissolving. That was the deal. That was what good women did.

IV. Two Women, One Wound

There are two kinds of women in this story, and they share a single wound.

The first never built the family the culture promised her she should want. She is often described as someone who “fell through the cracks”, as though the failure were structural, a matter of bad timing or insufficient effort. But look more carefully and you find something else: a woman who intuited, however dimly, that the bargain being offered was not a bargain at all. Who felt the gravity of the expected surrender and could not make herself walk toward it. Who is now, at fifty, alternately relieved and bewildered by her own choices. Wondering whether what she protected was her life or her loneliness.

The second, stayed for years wishing she could leave, and left, or is still leaving, in the slow internal way that precedes the physical departure by a decade. She obeyed. She adapted with extraordinary skill to the desires and undertones of a culture that told her heterosexual partnership was the perfect destination - all inclusive - and she arrived, and she made it work, and in doing so she became expert at a particular form of self-erasure so complete she did not always know it was happening. Her innermost self whispered this is wrong, and she answered that whisper with another load of laundry, another dinner, another performance of ease.

When she finally left, the grief was overwhelming. Not for the loss of what she had. The grief was for the recognition. The grief that follows the discovery that you have been building a life guided by a false self, one constructed entirely around the comfort and superiority of another. That grief has the particular texture of wasted time. A search for the most pure version of yourself that long ago you left at the side of the road to attend to the prescription.

Both women are emerging now into the same strange territory. They are awakening from a deep numbing, and on this other side, they are finding each other in growing numbers, recognising one another across the table with the particular relief of those who have survived the same undeclared war. Both are learning the same startling thing: that solitude, chosen or arrived at sideways, feels less lonely than partnership with insatiable hunger did.

V. The Uninitiated

How did this happen? How does a woman arrive at forty having served, with genuine devotion, a self that was not hers?

The mechanism is projection, but not only the personal kind. The projections that women carry into intimate relationship are systemic and intergenerational. They are survival-old. They are rooted in the specific history of what it has meant to be female in a world where female bodies became territory, like land. Where a woman without a man’s protection was a woman in danger, where sexual submission was not always a choice but a negotiation with violence. She is enacting the psychology of her mother, and her mother’s mother, and the long unbroken line of women who learned that pleasing was the price of survival — heaven’s ticket, issued from hell.

V. The Uninitiated

Hollis observes that intimate relationships carry such enormous weight because they come closest to replicating the original Intimate Other, the parent. The beloved becomes the site onto which the same needs and dynamics are projected, to the degree that we are unconscious of them. For daughters, one of the most persistent inherited burdens is this: the belief, absorbed before language, that her value is located in her capacity to be needed. To fill. To soften. To repair. She arrives in adulthood carrying this instruction in her body. And so as the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan once said "We seek the teeth to match our wounds" she meets in a man the hunger she has been prepared to fill.

V. The Uninitiated

Here we must speak about the man with clarity.

Hollis, drawing on the anthropological record, describes what traditional societies understood without needing to discuss it: that growing up, in a world hanging tenuously to a whirling planet, surviving the onslaught of harsh conditions and hostile agencies of all kinds, was a matter of survival. The tribe could not afford to have children idling about in prolonged psychological infancy. And so, without a central committee sending out instructions, each civilisation independently evolved rites of passage. Six stages, consistent across cultures: forcible departure from home, not invited, not requested, but sudden and decisive. A ceremony of death, sometimes literal in its terror. A ceremony of rebirth. The teachings, the archetypal stories, the roles of adulthood, the practical tools of survival. An ordeal, often involving isolation, so that the initiate might learn to face fear and find internal resources. And finally, the return to community as a separated adult. A new person. Someone who had died to childhood and been born into accountability.

The point of all of this, and it cannot be overstated, was necessary transition. The passage from naivety and dependency to a psychology capable of sacrifice in service to something larger than the self. It worked not because it was kind but because it was real. The boy was genuinely frightened. Genuinely tested. Genuinely transformed.

When we examine contemporary Western culture, Hollis notes, we find these rites missing entirely. Instead of tools for personal strength and survival, we teach computer skills. We allow children to remain within the bosom of a protective culture indefinitely. And accordingly, we have very few truly initiated, separated, independent persons of adult sensibility. Aging alone does not do it. Playing major roles in life does not do it.

And here is the consequence no one names clearly enough: the uninitiated masculine does not simply remain childlike. It self-initiates. Badly. Messily Violently. In the absence of elders who will take the boy into the wilderness and return him transformed, he finds his own wilderness. He creates a war to prove himself in. He finds gangs. He finds the ritualised brutality of certain sports, certain corporations, certain political movements. He finds any arena where he can be tested, dominated, broken down, and, he hopes, he is rebuilt as something that finally feels like a man.

War is, among many other things, a collective attempt at initiation. A society full of uninitiated men will make war because war provides, in grotesque and catastrophic form, what the rite of passage was designed to provide in a contained and purposeful one: the confrontation with death, the ordeal, the brotherhood of shared extremity, the transformation of the boy who left into something harder and, he believes, more real. The tragedy is not only the destruction it causes. The tragedy is that it does not work. The man returns from war not initiated but traumatised. The hunger is not satisfied. The cup is not filled. He comes home and meets a woman and the cycle begins again.

This ritual, in the Western world, has all but vanished, and we are living in the wreckage of its absence. The boy grows into a man with his hunger for the mother intact and utterly unexamined. He does not know this. He would deny it fiercely. But the hunger is there, and it does not announce itself as hunger for the mother. It announces itself as desire, as need for admiration, as an appetite for a woman’s emotional labour that never seems to be satisfied, as rage when she fails to fill the insatiable. He needs her to complete him. He cannot say this. The language for it was never given to him.

She arrives in the relationship aware, in some cellular, ancestral part of herself, that she is meeting a debt collector. He is not owed by her specifically. He was owed long before she appeared. But she is here, and she is female, and in the grammar of his unconscious she is the one who pays.

Every woman he encounters must add into his cup of deprivation. Her joy is a resource. Her attention is a resource. Her body is a resource. Her capacity to absorb his unexamined fear without naming it is perhaps the most valuable resource of all. And the culture, in its advertising, its pornography, its political structures, its casual daily diminishment of women’s inner lives, endorses this transaction entirely. The debt collector does not know he is collecting. The debtor does not know she is paying. This is the true genius of the arrangement: it runs on invisibility. And what remains invisible runs us.

VI. The Erosion

What breaks the spell is not usually a single event. It is accumulation. The slow wearing away of the projection until reality shows through. One day she looks at her life and she can see, through the thinned places, what has actually been happening. She sees not the beloved but a mortal, afraid, needy person projecting heavy expectations. She sees herself not as a partner but as a function. She sees the gap between the life she has been living and the life that is hers to live. However much of it has remained.

Hollis calls this the erosion of projections, the withdrawal of the hopes and expectations they embody, and notes it is almost always painful. It is a necessary pain. The loss of hope that the outer world will save us occasions something extraordinary: the possibility that we shall have to save ourselves.

She leaves, or she distances, or she simply, quietly, without announcement, stops performing availability. And in the relief that follows, in that strange undefended space, she discovers something she was not expecting. Herself. The self that was waiting. The one that knows what it wants, that does not automatically erase its own preferences to accommodate someone else’s hunger, that can spend an evening in its own company and find it sufficient.
VII. Convalescence
The culture reads their withdrawal as symptom. As fear, or damage, or an indictment of all men, or evidence of something broken in the modern woman. It cannot read it as what it more often is: convalescence. The specific rest required after a long illness you did not know you had.

Some of them will return to intimate relationship, differently, with more of themselves intact, with a far greater intolerance for the transaction that used to pass as love. Some will not, and will find that what they called loneliness was simply the unfamiliarity of their own presence, and that this presence, once properly inhabited, is not lonely at all.

What they are all learning, is what Hollis says the Middle Passage exists to teach: that the child only passes through our bodies and our lives en route to the mystery of her own life. And equally, that we only pass through the projections of our culture en route to our own. The projection was never the destination. It was always the passage.

Life watches. It is patient. It has always been patient. It is simply waiting for us to stop confusing the vessel with the source, the debt with the love, the hunger with the man.

And what we are witnessing now, underneath all of it, is the collapse of hunger as a governing principle. An admission, forced, long overdue, arriving with the particular violence of things denied too long, that life is given by the feminine. That it was always given by the feminine. That the masculine, in its untempered extreme, in its centuries of dominion unchecked by the other half of itself, has brought the world to the precise brink on which it now stands. The shaved forests. The wars. The poisoned waters. The abused children. The 168 little girls killed in their school in one strike the first day of the attack on Iran.

This is not defeat. It is not punishment. It is what happens when any force runs long enough without its counterpart. The hunger burned and burned and called the burning civilisation. And now the world is asking, quietly, in the way that only exhausted things can ask, whether we might be willing, at last, to return to the well.

Not to take from it. But to be changed by what we may find there. To remember that life was never ours to own, only, briefly, gloriously, to receive it.

Until a time comes when a woman can walk naked amongst all men and no cell of her body feels fear, we will be going to war.


- James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (1993)