Repost

Most foreign to my spirit has been the heavy use of the subtext in communication.  This was largely because I was in no position to understand the whole, in terms of social organisation in the past, but also because I was an outsider, even in my own culture.  Male culture spoke of politics whilst female culture didn't.  Women spoke of issues I know not what, since as children we were given greater latitude not to be "women" in the sense of being restricted to attending to emotional issues. Also, as has been stated numerous times before, I was not privy to the ideas and emotional packages traded in middle school in Western culture, which is when those brought up in Western cultural circumstances establish their boundaries regarding gender, hierarchy and power relationships.  My own culture was much wilder than this, and in a flux.

I now notice that, in growing up, I suffered from an inability to understand this mode of communication at the level of emotional implication, which my father insisted on, (probably because he was projecting and even his idea of the norm wasn't normal). In part, this was due to my lack of exposure to society's norms, read according to conservative belief systems. In other part, the misreadings of my original intentions had started as another's projections and have tended to continue this vein, although the misreadings have become more diversified as time went on.

Those who had been brought up to believe that there was a subtext to every form of communication were at the opposite end of the spectrum to me. In my first year of Australian high school, an migrant from South Africa sat next to me. She -- in her Western wisdom -- wrote about the meeting of two lovers. It was a story with a subtext, which she had needed to explain to me. The woman had inadvertently confessed to prostitution, causing the man to leave without further explanation. Even with the subtext explained to me, the strange development of the story made little sense to me. Why hadn't he stayed to thrash out the matter in more detail? Why the snap judgement, without getting to the real causes, which could include bad luck?

The subtle acknowledgement of the sub-text, along with the ability to furnish a subtle solution to it, were not part of my original awareness. I suspect this cultural difference was due to the way that the education one needs to live in very close quarters with others whilst perhaps not desiring to do so was at least partly absent from my experience. Instead of a life of constraint, I experienced a life of free adventure. Instead of learning the dictates of proper civilised behaviour and niceties, the adults in my near environment focused on being at war.

My country was at war and I was left to fend for myself. Therefore, I learned to enjoy and become inured of lingering in the shadowy nature of things. I understood that the reference points of my existence were not in relation to axioms of civilisation, but in terms of nature.

Such a meditative approach allows me to ask deeper questions of life than those that pertain to social expectations and common mores. By developing a tolerance for ambiguity: socially, morally, and philosophically, I am able to tackle various intellectual questions with a measured degree of emotional detachment. The answers that arrive to greet me on this basis seem to be filled with the essence of robustness and veracity.

This much explains my philosophic method but also my cultural attitudes. With regard to the social convention of the subtext, I have been a slow learner so far, but I am gradually picking up speed. I'm aware of the way that implying "subtext" in the language of another is often a form of projection of one's own fears and concerns and nothing more. At other times, when it is used more deliberately, it can be a form of subtle, socially ritualised communication.

If used as a form of projection, the attribution of the sub-text to the speech of another short-circuits necessary intellectual and experiential processes that lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of reality. This happens when we learn to respond as if social norms and conventions had an primary and immediate demand on our time and energy. At that point, it truly seems as if social conventions are the only the guiding principles of life -- worthy of determining all values and the experience of meaning.

***In all my knowledge has vastly improved of late, as I have managed to gain a lot of altitude to look down on the past and even much of present day reality.