The Hunger of the Dark

Why you may feel that something large and terrible is, right now, trying to eat your life.

Illustration of Jack killing Cormoran from a Victorian edition of Jack, the Giant-Killer, artist unknown.

This is the second part of a foundational series to open things here at The Rose Fire, a series which began with “The Inconsolable Secret.” If you have not yet read that, beginning there may help you get the most out of this dispatch.

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“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds weight.

- Christina Rosetti, "Goblin Market."

I would like you to think for a moment about when in your life you have been really and truly happy. I ask this in a spirit of gentleness, as this may be a painful question for you to consider, and it may dredge up old sorrows. It may, on the other hand be a delight.

In any case, I am willing to bet something. I’ll bet your memory of happiness is not when you had most in your life, but of when you fit most. You felt that you belonged where you were. That you were really seen. You felt that you were useful, that your presence made things better, and that you made the world be a little bit more, just by your presence.

You are not alone in this. I have felt it too. What we felt in that period of happiness was more than happiness (you probably already suspect that). It was something much closer to joy, which is (according to the old theologians) a side effect of some kind of genuine love.

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One of the truest things about the good old fairy tales is that you cannot trust your eyes. Sure, sometimes what is ugly is really ugly. Sometimes what is lovely is really lovely. But just as often, the toad is a king’s son, or the beast is the heir to vast estates, or the hag in the wood is a lovely woman putting a soldier to the test. The reverse is true in the old tales too of course—you should not trust the inhabitants of sugared houses, the “fairest in the land” may be a murderous witch, and the best looking apple holds the poison.

The lesson the old stories are trying to teach us is that reality is not defined by appearances, and in fact can obscured by them. Everything that matters in a traditional folk story has an inside and an outside, and you often cannot tell the former by the latter. This is true in fables because it was true in our world first. The experiences of our ancestors, distilled gently for the young people around the fire, are held in these old stories (provided they are kept intact). These old stories work to preserve a vital function, preparing young minds (and reminding old ones) that to make it through the world, to “find our fortune,” is more than a matter of strength or riches. To survive and to thrive, is, when you really think about it, all about learning how to see.

In my last dispatch, we considered the wonderful old idea that all living things have a natura—an inner nature whose way of being uniquely fits into the larger web of the world. We also considered that these “kinds” of everything have a wild and irrepressible urge to reproduce, to become more. At the simplest level, the rabbits breed more rabbits, and the apple trees drop little apples. In a more complex way, the philosopher or the teacher or the artist works to share their vision of the world, to express, convince, and persuade, so that the goodness of their “shape” of being might grow a little more. Everything fits. Everything belongs. Everything is seeking its place, and seeking to grow its way of being. This seems so abstract, until you realize that it is the why behind nearly every choice and turning of your life. It is the shape of us.

This is the work of the soul, whose earthy, breathy union of body and spirit is unique to humans. This, for us people, is all working toward the tremendous potential of every individual soul, who belongs in the world as a full participant in the ongoing riot of life and beauty that is all around us. Remember that moment when you were truly happy? That’s supposed to be the way it always is. But, of course, it’s not.

I wrote:

There is a gift in you. You are the gift. It is as simple as that.

Or it would be as simple as that. Because while water may find itself unable to flow uphill, a human, metaphorically, can. We can, from a host of causes, un-nature ourselves. We can be something other than what we are. This is a source of tremendous pain and ugliness. To do so tears the fabric in which we are a thread. It mars the picture in which we are a vital, tiny pixel. And contemporary life, for all its vast promises of “self-care” and personal satisfaction, is a setting of monetized, systematic, and convenient alienation from natura.

And here is where the wolf in the old stories comes in, or the witch, or the cunning ogre, whose cave is full of traveler’s bones. Because for all the light in the world, there is dark too. And the dark is hungering, with a hunger that will never be sated, because it is an unnatural hunger, a hunger to consume the natura of other things. Love has its own hungers, and they are good. But this is a hunger of hatred.

There is great power and value in the activity of the soul. Attention, which is the engine of love, is valuable almost beyond description in our world of spirits. The same soul that can behold the jeweled dew arise out of the cold of a desert morning may exhaust itself tapping vacantly on seven-second TikTok videos. The same soul that may write or paint or speak or build or teach may find itself dissipated, afraid, and confused. It may be devoured. You remember that moment of really happiness in your life? Of real joy? That may be bled out, cheapened, chewed up, and swallowed. The soul, and its products, are nourishing and delicious. And if nature teaches us anything, it is that being made of nourishing and delicious stuff is a very dangerous thing.

What does the devouring? Those things which eat attention. There are many of them in the world. Some of them, I think, are simply evil spirits. Yes, I mean genuine-honest-to-goodness demons of the classic variety, who always hungered for attention, who always loved having little idols made of them to be petted and clucked over by the superstitious. But there are other, younger things that eat attention too. People can eat attention (we usually call them narcissists), and the more shrunken forms of religion can eat attention. Ideologies of any kind can twist in on themselves and become devourers of souls. Anything with an “inside,” with a “spirit”—whether a person, an ideology, a nation, a corporation, a philosophy, a church, you name it. It can turn and eat you. It will turn and eat you, if you let it.

And we let it. We let them. Often we pay them for the privilege of being eaten. After all, being eaten makes the meal feel very important for a few seconds. The illusion, the lie, is that it’s for us, that it’s all about us. But of course it’s not. The apple is shiny. The gingerbread house has a warm glow behind the sugarpane windows. But the inside is different. What looks like love is not love. What looks like it is for us is not for us. The offer of that food, so “pleasing to the eye,” like Eve’s original fruit, is, in fact, serving an agenda that is not to our good. It’s in all the old stories, but it is still as fresh as Eden.

You may be feeling eaten right now, or at least nibbled. In the past few decades, the advent of metastisized technology has created a virtual conveyor belt of attention, straight into the mouths of vast and hungry things. Bits of your time, love, creativity, and care have been cut off and dropped onto that belt, never to return to you. As this is your time and thought, that was a bit of your life that went away. These things are eating your life. There is no more accurate way to say it than that. Like the wolf, like the witch, like the ogre, they will eat you if you don’t watch out.

This is the warning held in the old stories, and it’s as true in the age of the iPhone as it ever was. Maybe more so. But it’s not a new problem. Today it is easier, faster, and more convenient than ever to cheapen and chop up your unique and special natura for the benefit of large hungry things which hate you. But the same rules apply that have always applied. You and I still may escape yet.

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This all may seem a bit abstract. It may seem to be overstating things (Paul, are the “soul-eating TikTok demons” in the room with us right now?) But consider your life. Do you feel eaten? Do you feel your own potential for joy and value and belonging? Does something speak to you from the old stories, something which is about your story, about how to make it through this world of wonders and horrors? Maybe I’m the wildeyed poet, who has gone a bit nuts from too-much time spent in his little woodland house. Maybe you can dismiss all of it, for whatever reason seems most convenient.

Not everything to which you may give your attention wishes to eat you. This is exceptionally important. I hope that by giving me your attention in reading this post that I am not eating you. Instead, I hope that you are feeling, in some small way, quite the opposite. You might feel nourished. Why would that be? Because I am giving you something of myself here. I am giving you a little of my life, of my thought and of my time. This reciprocity is relational. It is an act of exchange, even, perhaps, of love. It is a gift, a little portion of my gift, offered from my natura, imperfect though it may be, and out of a genuine desire to share with you. To know and to be known by you.

My wife Emily, a classically-trained oil painter, often says “true art is always generous.” What she means by this is that even if you bring to it your time and attention, you walk away feeling that you recieved more than you gave. There is that word again—more. It is really at the core of all of it. It is the same mighty cry that echoes in the Creator’s grand blessing in the oldest story: “Be fruitful, and multiply.” Creation will teach us that the only way to do that is together, to find the other who is different from the self, and to join with them to make more.

You can see the shape here. You can connect the dots. All around us are forces that seek to diminish, degrade, and devour us. That’s not an overstatement. Facebook has a thing inside it that wants to eat you. The politicized megachurch with the giant pastor on the giant screen has a thing inside it that wants to eat you. The social contagions of TikTok dances and political slogans and ideological soundbites all want to eat you. There are large, dark things moving in the woods of this world, which seek—intentionally, systematically, and strategically—to separate us from truly belonging in our own lives. They do this by lying. They lie, and seek to seed us with discontentment and distraction. They lie, and tempt us to constant participation in pointless games of competitive attention. They lie, and make us afraid. They lie, and entertain us with pretty garbage. They lie, and eat, eat, eat.

They eat minutes and hours and days and years. In aggregate, they are eating, at this moment, entire and literal centuries of human lives. Add the minutes up! Add the hours! Add, and be afraid! Add, and be angry! They eat millennia of human lives.

What of you have they eaten? How much happiness? How much relationship? How much innocence, or wisdom, or presence? Who is the you that you would be if you had not been feeding them, for years, bits of the best of you?

For this is life they are eating, in little pieces and by little scraps. It is horrifying. It should terrify us. But we do not see it. We are not used to seeing beyond appearances. We did not pay good attention to our fairy tales. We are not practiced at seeing the insides of things. We have not had, to use William Blake’s phrase in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, our “doors of perception” cleansed,

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

And because of this, because we have closed ourselves up, only the slightest light comes in through the walls of our cavern. We cannot see past appearances. We are lost.

The bad news is that very few people will find their way out of this situation on their own. The bad news is that most of the people you have ever met have given away the rich potential of their lives, through a million tiny choices and transactions that they never recognized, thus spending their rightful and generous inheritance on emptiness, on vanity, and on “the wind.” The bad news is that people all around us are devoured, eaten up for their whole lives, until what they could have been and have become is simply all gone, because the life is all gone. All spent. All eaten¹.

The good news is that this does not have to happen to you. The doors of perception may be cleansed. The cavern may crack open with light.

But that is for our next dispatch.

1. (There is real hope even for these who are all dead and eaten up inside, but it is the hope of resurrection, and that is probably a story for the better kind of priest or minister to tell to you, right about Eastertide.)