On Male Yearning │ #144

Pearls, opals & inceldom

Gentle Reader,

We are all yearners. So much so, in fact, that we have many great words in many cultures for different kinds of yearning.

The Portuguese saudade is described as a feeling of longing or melancholy that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament. The German Sehnsucht is a particularly wistful kind of longing, whereas Wehmut is a sad feeling when thinking about something from the past. In English, we have yearning, longing and various similar, but not identical kinds of concepts, such as nostalgia which relates to the past.

Speaking generally however, the essence of yearning, at least in Western culture, is fundamentally seen as something female.

As an idea, it is passive; it suggests a desire which cannot be brought about by action, but rather will only occur through circumstance.

Women in society and in the arts are often portrayed in poses of longing and yearning – images of fair maidens waiting to be whisked away or damsels in distress hoping to be saved or of Penelope waiting, all those years, for Odysseus to come back over the sea.

A classic ancient yearner

What about male yearning? One does not hear much about it; it is perhaps deemed unmasculine to desire without taking action, to be consumed by a burning wish which is almost paralysing in intensity.

But men are no strangers to yearning.

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Male yearning exists. It is similar to, but not the same as female yearning. Like moths and butterflies, they are close in character, but exhibit different qualities, just as butterflies evoke a sense of spring and summer, while moths bring to us the sensation of humid autumn nights,

Male yearning is usually portrayed in a heroic way, and in a way which leads to dramatic action, like Alexander The Great’s insatiable impulse for conquest. If Helen’s was a face which launched a thousand ships, then the bloodthirsty longing for power, revanchism, revenge and glory can be the violent output of a certain kind of bloody-minded male desire.

Yet there is a kind of male yearning which is more similar to how female yearning is portrayed, something bittersweet and melancholy, something that comes from a very deep place and which has an intense flavour of heartache.

Men yearn in the same way that women do in their exaggerated Renaissance portraits, and we yearn for the very same romantic things which are supposedly the preserve of women: we yearn for a partner in whose eyes we can look and feel an overwhelming loving stability, we yearn to hear the rippling laugh of a toddler and we yearn for things as simple as sunny days and solitude.

Not all male desire is engulfing, externalising, linked to power. It is sometimes intimate, internalised, and highly romantic. Let’s have a look at some of the great examples of male yearners in literary history.

James Joyce

Letter to his wife, Nora.

“Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.”

If that isn’t yearning, gentle reader, tell me what is? Yearning has a bittersweet facet which means that we can yearn for something that we already have. Joyce here is yearning for his wife, even though she is already his.

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John Keats

The soft kind of male yearning does not confine itself to the romantic domain. Here is Keats, a card-carrying yearner of the highest degree, longing for nature, for autumn, for the changing of the seasons.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

And here is Keats again, this time yearning, more traditionally, for a woman.

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days — three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

Dante

Dante is arguably the king of the yearners. His guiding love interest was Beatrice, and he recounts that the first time he ever saw her, he was nine years of age, and “from that time forward, Love quite governed my soul.”

We can see that Dante established his yearning credentials early on. But it was in The Divine Comedy that he really double down, and began to crystallise this yearning in the form of his incredible epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

It is full of beautiful quotes, but let’s go with this one, which generously I have included in the English translation underneath.

Beatrice mi guardò con li occhi pieni
di faville d’amor così divini,
che, vinta, mia virtute diè le reni,

e quasi mi perdei con li occhi chini.

(Then Beatrice looked at me with eyes so full
of sparks of love, eyes so divine that my
own force of sight was overcome, took flight,

and, eyes downcast, I almost lost my senses.)

Inceldom

We can see that yearning in history probably launched wars, but also was an impulse for love and for treasuring others. In more modern times, male yearning has been treading an even finer line. There is a kind of longing which does not see a realisation which can in some cases, particularly in the realm of romance, lead to a kind of seclusion, which in modern times we call inceldom.

A disenfranchised male in most of history would probably just be used as cannon fodder in some irrelevant meat-grinding war or would be thrown to the wolves for entertainment or he would struggle along in a way which was unfulfilled.

In the modern era, we live in a social panopticon. This means that everybody is aware what everybody else has and does not have, which evokes jealousy. While some go green with envy, many men who would previously not have been entirely happy with their lot, are now all the more acutely aware of what they are missing out on.

Of course, this happens to women too, but it does not produce the modern phenomenon of inceldom amobgst that sex (is there an equivalent?). Is inceldom then simply male yearning gone wrong, something unfulfilled?

Why can this energy not be transmuted? I don’t know. Many people in life are not fulfilled but, due to the law of energy transfer, they can still carry this vibrant power within them across the fiery chasm of bitterness, and can turn it into something beautiful.

John Keats, learning of course that he would die prematurely, felt the most profound of all yearnings, the yearning to live. Yet still, this manifested in art, in tender poetry which I will leave you here with, reader, to allow this week’s newsletter to end on a high note, dripping with hallowed language, transmuted from a beautiful desire to live. Enjoy:

When I Have Fears

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-piled books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love—then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

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