THE SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING

THE SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 30, 2009

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“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is gone now. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty. We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, wounded human beings.

“Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life. One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories that we essentially ignore.

“Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite. But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.

“The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore enslaved to surface issues. It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

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THE PRICE OF A CELEBRITY CULTURE – AN AVERSION TO SUBTEXT

Great talent wastes its gifts when it loses contact with its subtext. Richard Burton was the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation but sold out to Hollywood. Norman Mailer saw himself as heir apparent to Ernest Hemingway and sold out to the false bravado and high jinx of that writer, and thus became a caricature of himself.

Albert Einstein was the exception. He had similar celebrity pressures although his most productive years were before he was thirty, and he lived into his seventies. He ignored this pull of celebrity because he was well acquainted with his subtext. It was not false modesty that he claimed to have been lucky in his discoveries. He was lucky because he got beyond the content and context of Newtonian physics to explore the subtext that was not readily apparent, a subtext that physicists for more than two hundred years had not visited because they thought the work of physics had been completed.

Talented people ultimately sell themselves out to the celebrity culture when they are adored for all the wrong reasons. The herd mentality wants the talented to appreciate it for appreciating the talented. Thus the talented form a symbiotic connection with the herd in a mock embrace.

The quest for celebrity allows critics that can’t write, personalities that can’t act, people with little more than good looks to be television journalists, and novelists with one idea captured in scores of books. The chiaroscuro of content and context pulsates with monotonous consistency. Gore Vidal is a good writer who has never been able to rise above his angst. Hundreds have copied him.

It is a different problem for John Updike. Critic Grandville Hicks of the Saturday Review of Literature said of him that he wrote like an angel but had nothing to say. Updike mastered content and context with his beautiful lyrical style, but was less attentive to subtext of the lives he created. He seemed satisfied to create thematic caricatures such as “Couples” and his “Rabbit” series.

Updike, a favorite of The New Yorker, approached the sex revolution, and the feminine and civil rights movements on a tactile level without getting caught up in the tangled web and contradictory subtext of American life that had abandoned the common good for personhood.

He first wanted to be a graphic artist, a cartoonist, where linearity of content and context is featured. He gravitated from that to studying as a painter, mastering the techniques of texture and graphic composition, but unable to grasp the subtext that makes a Picasso a Picasso, taking up his pen to write novels, short stories, and criticism of art with the fluid ease of a New England Puritan.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., from the middle of the United States, had a different problem. He lived in the subtext and tried desperately to reach an audience in content and context. The strain became the perplexity of his life. This frustration shows in his last book “Armageddon in Retrospect” (2008). There he challenged the Mona Lisa being a perfect painting. “Listen,” Vonnegut writes, “her nose is tilted to the right, OK? That means the right side of her face is a receding plane, going away from us, OK? But there is no foreshortening of her features on that side, giving the effect of three dimensions. And Leonardo could so easily have done that foreshortening. He was simply too lazy to do it.”

I don’t think so. Da Vinci lived in a casual subtext of his life. That is how he came to envision the airplane, human anatomy, the submarine, automation and other devices that rose from his subtext to breakthrough the world of content and context. It was enough to surface such issues and let posterity finish them.

“No wonder she (Mona Lisa) has such a cockeyed smile,” Vonnegut adds. But that is precisely it. She is meant to be enigmatic. The smile is a reflection of what is going on beyond the surface. It is the mystery of her that haunts us to this day. Were the painting as Vonnegut proposed, it is doubtful it would be a masterpiece.

There is a reason why the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Joyce are still read. They dealt with the subtext of their stories while telling the surface story on the popular level of content and context. Hemingway escaped all his bravado, while dealing primarily with subtext in “The Old Man and the Sea,” and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for the gamble.

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Over the last sixty years, I have seen a tectonic shift from subtext to content and context as the issues, which drive behavior and are endemic to our culture are pushed aside for the superfluous. With the lack of restrain, without the tension to sublimate creatively but instead fell a niche, we have failed to produce great writers, composers, painters, and architects. Noise has become music, exhibitionism art, glass buildings architecture, and the shocking and bizarre popular entertainment. We have become a surface disposable culture with a damaged affect.

The reader may argue what about the great electronic breakthroughs, what about them? Alas, what could be a better example of the charge!

Computers have been around for sixty years, but have been perfected and made available to support people’s lives at the content and context level as never before. We have innovation, not invention, replication, not creation, fads and fantasies, not transcendence.

Jobs and Wozniak were making electronic games when Jobs happened on the personal computer at Xerox, which management refused to fund, and so Jobs stole it. Bill Gates won the software contract with IBM by default when the wife partner of a husband-wife company wanted more assurances. Gates wanted none because he basically had nothing but his boldness to sell. He quickly acquired the software from another fledgling company for peanuts and was off to the races, two decades later the richest man in the world on a foundation of other people’s ideas.

DOUBLE-EDGED “CUT & CONTROL” HISTORY OF HUMAN CULTURE

We have just experienced a global economic meltdown that terrified advanced societies from one end of the globe to the other, a meltdown that to this moment viewed in terms of content and context with hardly a glance at the subtext of the calamity. True, mention is made of our inclination to live high now and pay for it later. That is hardly profound.

Economics has proven a faulty profession, as has management. I wrote this in “Work Without Managers” (1990), twenty years ago:

“We desperately need minds with a natural affinity for culture in the boardrooms across America, as well as in every other walk of professional life. We need poetry in commerce, government and industry. Engineers, economists, and political scientists have done about all the damage we can stand, perhaps more than we can absorb.

“Economists, for one, readily admit they are operating in a fog. From former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Arthur Burns (“The rules of economics are not working quite the way they used to.”) to Milton Friedman (“I believe that we economists in recent years have done vast harm by claiming more than we can deliver.”); from former Secretary of Treasury Michael Blumenthal (“I really think the economic profession is close to bankruptcy in understanding the situation, before or after the fact.”) to Juanita Kreps, former Secretary of Commerce, when asked if she would go back to Duke University upon leaving government (“I wouldn’t know what to teach.”). (WWMs pp 253 – 254)

Economists have always been enamored of algorithms and mathematical models, analysis at the content and context level, while management has treated people as things to be managed. Now they all have egg on their faces.

Geopolitics has also proven a faulty profession. Little time has been devoted to the subtext of why the Twin Towers of New York City were destroyed. Instead, there has been a visceral response at the content and context level of military preemptive war. This response has put the United States and its future in economic and political jeopardy without yielding cost benefit equal to the investment in life and capital.

Much talk is about the recession being behind us, but what is ahead? Inflation? The world sits on the precipice of inflation and a repeat recession/depression to this moment, which is a matter of subtext.

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We glory in instant communication where everyone has a cell phone, BlackBerry, computer, or laptop to busy him or herself with the nonsense of white noise. Electronics have become a form of addiction in this Information Age. No longer is drunk driving the only major cause of deaths on our highways and byways, but people twitting on their electronic contraptions.

No one seems to be looking at the downside of this paradigm shift, which has elevated content and context to the status of a new religion. We have cut existence away from the way it was into a new sense of reality, a reality that gained something desired – instant access and communication with others – but at the expense of something lost – personal intimacy and rational stability.

It has been a “cut and control” journey throughout man’s history. During the hunting and gathering period 12,000 years ago, matriarchal society ruled and there were no boundaries.

Agriculture followed under a patriarchal society where property and boundaries were defined and defended.

This led to an industrial society where owners ruled and cities grew. This broke up the cohesive harmony and domestic culture of life on the farm as young families flocked to the cities to work. They found themselves living in cramped unsanitary tenement houses imprisoned in blatant squalor and crushing poverty, slaves to inanimate machines.

The gap between haves and have nots grew, as society moved swiftly through the modern management class to and through the post modern era of capitalists, as managers first replaced owners, and they in turn were replaced by indifferent stockholders who valued profits above people.

This elevated finance, an industry that produces nothing but exchange rates, to the ultimate power broker of investment bankers and venture capitalists. They became the significant differentiators as power shifted from people to property to products to floating capital.

This all came down as a crushing nightmare in 2008 when the wonder of electronic transfer of complex derivatives sped out of control as capital was leveraged thousands of times greater than its capacity to honor its debt as the “cut & control” journey of 12,000 years found the subtext of life once more breaking through the content and context of existence. Man keeps pushing forward blindly and incomprehensively, and then wonders what he has done wrong.

ALL TOO HUMAN

As a person who has worked about the globe, and who has thought about such things, I have concluded the subtext of life is the controller. This is not the life presented to the public or to friends, but the one that is puppet master of each of our individual fates.

Imagine a rubber band with certain elasticity. We know a new rubber band has much more elasticity than a much-often used one. In the human psyche we don’t look at elasticity, or flexibility in terms of use or age. We think we have the moxie whatever the circumstances to find our way out. We don’t believe we have nine lives like a cat but ninety-nine lives, and of course that is where the fallacy lies.

Think of all the people who garner the headline stories, people caught in shameful acts. Now think of all the people who lie for them: parents, grandparents, siblings, relatives, and friends. Not only that, think of these same people bailing them out of their difficulty, feeling sorry for them, buying their cheap excuses for the shameful behavior, and you have the making of an emotional and psychological crippled culture.

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That person cold in the morgue killed by a hit and run driver has no sense of social justice and goes to his maker without anyone taking responsibility for his early demise.

I once knew a young man who went to the bachelor party of a friend. He didn’t drink and when the party got ruckus he chose to leave and walk the two miles home. It was eleven o’clock.

He worked his job religiously, didn’t make much money, lived alone in a modest apartment, read books, and that is how I got to know him. He read mine. He would discuss them intelligently and critically and I grew to respect him. Then one day, 42-years-of-age, he was no more.

It is assumed some drunken fool hit him, knocked him a hundred feet leaving him to die, his shoes left at the point of impact. There is a chance the person was so intoxicated that he didn’t know he hit the man. The shoes however were fifteen feet off the road. His death is a cold case now ten years old, which is unlikely to ever be reopened.

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I have no sympathy for drunks, no sympathy for people who smoke themselves to death, no sympathy for drug addicts because I have no sympathy for people who are unaware of the subtext of their lives, and friends and family don’t have the courage to remind them of this fact. There is complicity here. We don’t go bad, alone.

It is in the subtext that the health of the elasticity of life is discovered. Nor will I accept that alcoholism and drug addiction are diseases. They are choices. They are people who choose to ignore their reduced elasticity, which is apparent in the subtext of life. Through artificial stimulation they promote the illusion they have much greater flexibility and elasticity than they have. The subtext of life reminds us we are dying a little every day and therefore should make the most of our days, not hide from them.

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The subtext of life will not allow us to fool ourselves. The embezzler knows he is committing a crime but deludes himself that he will never get caught, justifying the behavior in rationalizations: his wife is dying of cancer, his sons need money for prep school, and he has the right to a better lifestyle given the many years of service in which he has been taken for granted and shown little respect.

Rationalization is the product of content and context but never the subtext of the matter, which is the fear that life in sum total amounts to nothing. The embezzlers elasticity is gone, and so he says, “Why not!”

I have no sympathy for Bernard Madoff who bilked investors and companies of billions of dollars while denying the subtext of his life. He is not a bad man but a little man with an obsessive need to please and feel important, but why? The answer is in his subtext.

Then there are people who have buried terrible deeds of their past in their subconscious. Now, they have resurrected themselves as religious fanatics feeling everyone else suffers from the same demons as they do.

What is incredible is that they convince people they do! Sin becomes their armor plate as they proselytize with zeal as the voice of salvation. A flock is formed as the proselytizer’s subtext becomes its own. No one seems to see the folly in this.

The flock is badgered to repent or it will be damned. By whom? By God, of course, because the proselytizer is the self-anointed messenger of God. The individual caught up in this charade may forget he has a right to question the messenger's legitimacy, or if there is an Almighty God or a God at all. What we cannot question is our decreasing elasticity, which limits what we can and cannot do.

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In this business of coaching, counseling, studying and dealing with people for many years from the impersonal (consulting) to the personal, my role has been to observe, assess and suggest but not carry anyone or any organization when they best carry themselves. I have refused to carry my own children once they had left the home.

The irony is that my second child, a daughter, has attempted to carry her other siblings well into their adulthood forgiving them for their improprieties, which has stunted their growth resulting in none of them becoming truly adults.

Now, when she has come into a hard patch in her life, her siblings are not there for her. They are cruel, insensitive and unsympathetic to her ordeal, angry that she has little time to listen to them now, and no longer has the wherewithal to bail them out of their self-imposed miseries.

Has this made her bitter? No. Has this made her vindictive? No. Has this found her angry? No. It has made her resilient. The subtext of her life has proven to have much greater elasticity than one would expect. It came about when she stopped denying its existence and finally said, “Hey, that is where my strength lies. Hey, that is why I am so understanding of my siblings. Hey, that is why I can tolerate my parents. Hey, that is why I am me!”

With this resilience, she discovered she could refocus and reenergize her efforts to go forward accepting this bump in the road. That is what she is now doing. She finds she is a learner not a knower, a doer not a thinker, a problem solver but in the subtext of intuition not cognitive analysis. It is working for her.

She has two beautiful children who are a projection of her. She married a person like her siblings. She is the best thing that has happened to him. He gets into one economic strafe after another. Will he ever grow up? I don’t think so. Will he ever examine the subtext of his life? Not on a bet. Will he continue to repeat the same errors? Undoubtedly. Am I being cruel and non empathetic? After more than fifteen years of observations, I don’t think so.

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In my subtext, there is a very strong moral authority that has little room for waste or variance from effective utilization of one’s inherent ability. This moral authority I have failed many times myself, but only I know and I have to live with that. I also know that my elasticity is practically gone. The little bit that I still possess I deposit into words, ideas, philosophies and projections of what I’ve learned and what I know, and what might prove helpful to others before I pass on.

Do I think I am an especially kind person? No, I’m just not malicious. I don’t get any satisfaction seeing other people being diminished or failing. Is it important for me to be liked? No, but it is important for me to be respected.

SUBTEXT UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

The content and context of my life would suggest that I’m mainly intuitive because that is what I like to project, but the subtext of my life suggests that I am analytical, critical, and conceptual. The fact that the subtext has come to the surface in the evening of my years is representative of another quality, the need to leave something of value behind.

My life has been one of being very structured, disciplined and demanding of myself as well as others with little give – little elasticity – displayed. The irony of this is that the subtext of my life suggests I am most comfortable and in control in chaos and confusion.

Item:

I was only a junior corpsman in the medical division of the flagship (USS Salem CA-139). We were having military exercises in the Mediterranean with more than one hundred American ships and some 50,000 men. The gun mount in a destroyer escort “hang fired.” The blast of the explosion torched the gun crew of thirteen men, badly burning several. They were brought to the Salem and treated in our hospital. Three of them died while we were attending them.

Doctors from other ships were brought on board. It was general chaos. None of these doctors had experience with badly burned trauma cases nor did any of the corpsmen. Some could not deal with the carnage. By default, I had to assume a senior role to fill the void and received an accommodation for it. I was twenty-three-years-old, and learned something about myself that day that I didn’t know before. Highly emotional on the surface, there is a calm in my subtext that surfaced in that crisis. It has repeatedly surfaced since.

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I am painfully aware of our limited elasticity. I know we all have a breaking point. Our elasticity can go from resilient to brittle to snapping. It may be referred to as “emotional exhaustion” or “hypertension” or “mental breakdown,” or some other psychiatric label such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or some other mental illness.

Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, author of “The Manufacture of Madness” (1970), “The Myth of Mental Illness” (1974), among other books, himself a psychiatrist, sees modern psychiatry using its ideology and insanity plea as a convenience to avoid confrontation with the hard moral conflicts and social problems of the day. Clear speech, what he calls the “second sin” is missing in the prognosis. Broadly speaking, Szasz is addressing subtext.

Of course, we all talk to ourselves; of course we all have dreams of loss, confusion and betrayal. That is part of the subtext that is the driver of behavior. Some people are made uncomfortable because they think you can read their minds. You can’t. But you can read their behavior, which is quite apparent for anyone paying attention.

You don’t do this with eye contact, which is supposed to indicate sincerity, but eyes lie. We have all become very good liars. Some people can even control their emotions to the point of passing polygraph tests with ease.

You can hear in what people say and the rhythm of what they do whether they are genuine or not. You can see in their gestures, the care of their nails, the texture of their skin whether they are or aren’t what they wish to project. Our faces are roadmaps of self-indulgence. The subtext of our lives oozes up to confirm and deny the content and context on display. We all become eventually what we are.

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There are palpable warning signs before a person commits suicide; before a person takes that first dollar out of the till that doesn’t belong to him. There is no such thing as an innocent cup of coffee between a man and a woman married to other people. All of these indicators are there and all of them are rejections of the subtext of life.

When the subtext is ignored or rejected, life becomes a lie. There is no possibility for understanding the authentic self.

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My nickname is “Rube,” which is commonly translated to mean a farmer, or a rustic and unsophisticated person, in other words, a derogatory identity.

At a dinner in New York City, someone once confronted me. “I understand your nickname is ‘Rube.’ Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Are you comfortable with that?”

“Quite, why do you ask?”

“You’re not offended?”

“No.”

“Then you’re a country bumpkin?”

“If you like.”

“That doesn’t offend you?”

“No, why should it?”

“Do you like being called ‘Rube’?”

“I love being called ‘Rube’!”

“Why is that?”

“Because it's a name associated with the most wonderful time in my life growing up in the middle of the country in the middle of the century when I was catching baseball for the Courthouse Tigers as a kid. There was no actively I loved more. I took pride in that. I would watch catchers in the Industrial League with a dreamy like concentration as Quentin Tarantino watches film. I loved putting on the ‘tools of ignorance’ (catcher’s equipment) knowing I was the best catcher around for my age. I am Rube. Rube gave me my first taste of excellence and how to achieve it.”

The irony is that I come from a farm state and I’ve never actually ever been on a farm. My people in Ireland as well as America have always been city dwellers. My da was born in Chicago as was his parents, but his mother died in childbirth and his father took off never to be seen again. He was reared in Clinton, Iowa, a small industrial city on the Mississippi River by his grandmother. My siblings and all of my children have all gravitated to metropolitan areas no farmers in our family tree.

The subtext of the connection, however, is real. I have the down-to-earth values of the farmer, a love of the seasons of the year, of the planting fertilizing and growing of ideas, the earthy norms that identify a person with a particular place and space, the sense that a man’s word is his bond, the humility that Nature knows best, and that we are all connected. We are stuck with subtext; we take our geography wherever we go.

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