THE
SUBTEXT OF LIFE AND ITS MEANING
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August
30, 2009
© August
31, 2015
“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 now gone. 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 and not the elephant.
“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they came. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people down and leaves them untethered. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people who are 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, or some other 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 psychopathic behavior occurs because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their own lives and therefore are 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)
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, but 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 as 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 its subtext. It was not false modesty but the realization that he had 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.
Einstein was a dreamer and could see himself riding a light beam in the darkest recesses of the universe and played with that image in his mind until his thoughts rearrange themselves into his theory of relativity.
Talented people ultimately sell themselves out to the celebrity culture which always threatens to embrace them. Talented people are adored for all the wrong reasons. It is the herd mentality on display, the self-indulgent and hedonistic desiring to experience the wonders of genius, if only vicariously, by having power over that genius by their flattering attention.
Sycophants do not appreciate the talented; sycophants only appreciate basking in its reflected glory. Thus the talented unwittingly compromise their genius by failing to recognize and therefore being able to resist that symbiotic connection and sycophants’ mocking embrace.
The quest for celebrity is apparent in critics who can’t write, performers who can’t act, people with little more than good looks to be television journalists, or novelists with one idea to capture it in scores of books. The chiaroscuro of content and context pulsates with monotonous consistency as brand not brilliance reduces tastes to the lowest common denominator. Gore Vidal, for instance, is a decent enough writer whose celebrity is his angst. This finds him a guest on the couch of late night television shows. Hundreds have copied him.
It is a different problem for John Updike. Literary critic Grandville Hicks of the Saturday Review of Literature once said of him that he wrote like an angel but had nothing to say. Updike mastered a beautiful lyrical style, and became the darling of The New Yorker magazine, but was less attentive to subtext of the lives he created. He seemed satisfied to create thematic caricatures, which are apparent in “Couples” (1968) and with his “Rabbit” (1960s) series.
Updike approached the sex revolution from his Protestant Calvinistic stiffness as well as the feminine and civil rights movements on a tactile level without getting caught up in the tangled web of contradictory subtexts of American life. He had an opportunity, which he didn’t explore, of the radical abandonment of the common good for personhood by his narcissistic generation.
The accident of him jelling with The New Yorker and falling into a profession not sought goes a long way to explain the problem. 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. I prefer to think Da Vinci lived in a casual subtext. He didn’t suffer the anguish or doubt of Michelangelo. He had little time for pathos preferring to dance with ideas perceived watching men run, birds fly and fish dive to the deep. 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 for him to surface such issues and let posterity work out the details.
“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” (1952) and won the Nobel Prize 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 that drive behavior are pushed aside to celebrate the superfluous.
With the lack of restrain, without the tension to sublimate creatively but instead fell a niche, to create a brand, to make ourselves giddily rich for the effort, we have failed to produce great writers, composers, painters, and architects.
Noise has become the predicate of music, exhibitionism the art, bland glass buildings the architecture, and the shocking and bizarre popular comedic entertainment. We have become a surface disposable culture with a dull if not permanently 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 creative subtext, fads and fantasies, not transcendence. We are locked into mediocrity as if it were a plague.
Steven Jobs and Stephen 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 required none at the time as he basically had only his boldness to sell. He quickly acquired the software from another fledgling company for peanuts and was off to the races. Two decades later, because he understands the importance of subtext, he is the richest man in the world on a foundation of other people’s ideas. Understanding this about himself, he is also one of the most generous philanthropists in history.
DOUBLE-EDGED “CUT & CONTROL” HISTORY
OF HUMAN CULTURE
We have just experienced a global economic meltdown (2008) 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” (1991), some 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 texting and tweeting 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 to a new sense of reality that has no pause.
It has been a “cut and control” journey throughout man’s history with something different gained from something forever lost. The hunting and gathering period 12,000 years ago has often been depicted as a matriarchal society or a society controlled by women as there were no boundaries.
There is some evidence to suggest this. Archeological evidence and study of modern hunter-gatherers suggest that pre-agricultural humans were much more gender egalitarian than modern societies. Women live longer than men, and humans are one of the few species whose females live for quite a long time after child-bearing age. Since men might be much more likely to die young from hunting accident or skirmishes with other tribes, it would make sense for women to serve the collective memory of the tribe.
Also, pre-agricultural humans likely didn't understand how exactly sex and pregnancy are related, and even if they did, they almost certainly weren't sexually monogamous, so one's mother was the only parentage anyone could be sure of. That said even in our species' earliest days, the structure of human society could be dramatically different from place to place, so there are no universals.
Agriculture led to a patriarchal society with men giving up their nomad existence to settling down raising crops and owning property with boundaries that had to be 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 postmodern 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, the part in which the undercurrent of society is manifested with no controls. 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.
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 into the air and leaving him to die on the side of the road, 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.
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 how it is managing their existence. Friends and family don’t have the courage to remind them of this fact. There is complicity here. We never go badly alone. We have a lot of complicit contributors.
It is in the subtext that the health of the elasticity of life is lost never to be 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 their lives. 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.
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 embezzler’s 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 the armor plate as the proselytizer’s zeal the voice of salvation. A flock is formed as the proselytizer’s subtext becomes that of the converted as well. No one seems to see the folly in this.
The flock is badgered to repent or they will be damned. By whom? By God, of course, because the proselytizer is the self-anointed self-appointed 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 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 and development 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 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.
In my subtext, there is a very strong moral authority that has little room for waste or variance from effective utilization of my inherent ability. I suffer fools poorly including my own folly.
While failing to heed this moral authority many times, I have learned to live with that deficiency. I also know that my elasticity is practically gone. The little bit left I deposit in words, ideas, philosophies and projections of what I’ve learned and what I know, and what might prove useful to others as I pass on.
Do I think I am an especially kind person? No, but I’m not malicious. I get no satisfaction seeing other people being dominated, 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 cognitive, 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 of others with little give – little elasticity – displayed. The irony of this subtext is that I am more comfortable in chaos than order, more energized in confusion than in certainty.
·
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. 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.
Given this awareness of our limited elasticity, I know we all have a breaking point. Our elasticity can go from resilient to brittle to snapping without warning. It may be precipitated by “emotional exhaustion” or “hypertension” or “mental breakdown,” or some other current psychiatric labeling such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or some other “mental disease.”
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; 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 for 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.
Actively listen to what people say and channel this into the rhythm of what they do and you will be able to assess how genuine they are. You 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 through our pores to confirm or deny the content and context on display. We all become eventually what we are.
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.
My nickname is “Rube,” which is commonly translated to mean a farmer, or a rustic and unsophisticated person, in other words, a derogatory identity. I have always been delighted with the sobriquet as a source of pride.
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.”
That seemed to end the conversation.
Coming from a farm state, I must confess I’ve never actually 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 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 fertilizing, planting 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 caught in the subtext of our geography, which we carry wherever we go.
