On Real Life Subtext

I love subtext. It adds a richness to all art forms. I am adept at ferreting out subtext in novels, plays, and movies of all kinds. I can tell from a glance what a character on a TV show is thinking of another. I can write a scene or a poem that means more than what it says, so that other lovers of the art form can have the fun of detecting the hidden meanings. As far as fictional worlds go, I am a master of the art of subtext.

Then there is the real world.

Subtext in the real world is a fish of an entirely different feather. I had an epiphanic moment while watching Peter Jackson's King Kong. There is a scene in which the (human) hero of the movie gives the heroine a play he has written for her. She asks why he would write a play for her. He says, "It's in the subtext." It was a very clever and witty thing to say from a literary standpoint, but I found myself thinking, "She has no idea what you're talking about." It finally hit me, after all the years I've known that I try to read people like books, that I have virtually NO sense of subtext in the real world.

I have often been guilty of reading subtexts into others--assigning motivations and anticipating future actions based on the slightest "evidences." I have often been guilty of expecting people to read my subtext--seeing myself as nice and easy to understand.

The truth is, I have very little notion of what most people are thinking, and most people tell me that I am incredibly complex and confusing to them. Problem? Yes, but not the problem I used to think it was. The problem is not that nobody understands me. The problem is not that I don't understand anybody else. The problem lies in the unconscious paradigm I had set up that human beings are meant to understand each other and that it is devastating if they do not.

We can never know each other as intimately as we ourselves want to be known. We can never even fully grasp our own thoughts or motivations. Full understanding of anything is solely the provence of God, and feeling frustrated when our attempts to discern motivations fail is to have lost sight again of our place in the order of things. We tried to understand. We failed. God knows all things. Glory be to God.

Giving up the notion that we can expect to be understood by others is freeing in another way. We can stop dancing around subjects, hoping that somehow someone will catch up with what we mean. We can be direct, speaking the truth in love (always that crucial prepositional phrase!).

Giving up the relentless pursuit of subtext in real life is giving up part of the defensive armor we cling to. If we have been crucified with Christ, and if therefore it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us, we do not need to protect ourselves. In fact, protecting ourselves is often contradictory to our purpose.

God has provided all the armor we will ever need. And all the understanding, too.