Subsume

Subsume—it pierced my mind in the wee hours of the night, when I was delirious from lack of sleep. It seems like a strange mix of “sublime” and “consume,”—two very opposite words; one frees and the other captures. In definition, subsume is akin to the latter. But it strikes me as something that has a deeper meaning than merely to be devoured.

“I am subsumed in hatred” seems to me to mean “I am utterly drowning in the infinite sea of hatred.” Not something like “a big animal called hatred is eating me.” Looking at the definition, subsume seems to be organizational, scientific—example sentences like “Red, blue, and green are subsumed in the word ‘colors’” leach all power from the word and relegate it merely to the realm of taxonomy.

I refuse to believe that the word is so innocuous. Subsume seems violent to me, an unstoppable force of nature that is underestimated in Merriam Webster.

Google tells me that the word comes from the Latin roots “sub” meaning “from below” and “sumere” meaning “to take.” This probably implies that the word should lie on a higher plane than the objects it takes, elevating the words that live below it to its level in some hierarchical sense. But what’s to stop subsume from lurking underwater, taking objects from below instead?

The subsumed objects are not being rescued—they are drowning. Somewhere in the utility of the word is the insidious power of stripping an object of all its unique qualities and letting it drown in the sea of subsummation.

Consummation has sensual overtones—it is the ringing gavel of finality. Subsummation, by contrast, is the vacuous break of waves on the beach. It belies a larger infinity, going on as long as the eye can see. Subsummation is the logical end to the act of subsuming. Below the mottled waves is a veritable treasure trove of objects snatched from a higher plane and dragged under.

Maybe subsummation isn’t all bad—sometimes the things that we crane our necks to see are too complex to understand. We need them to be dragged under the waves—we need to pigeonhole, process, synthesize, subsume these abstract or intricate or dense ideas so that we can simplify our lives and understand what’s going on around us. Sometimes we’re grateful to that unfeeling infinity for taking the complexity and making it disappear.

But—and how can there not be a but?— the inevitability of subsummation cannot mean that we are happy to see everything we truly care about lost at sea. And if we don’t rescue the things that have already been lost to the waves, sooner or later the briny green and barnacles will make these objects—once free to roam in all their complexity—indistinguishable.

We have long known, as Bruegel might say, that big fish eat little fish. But far more sinister than any marine predator is the danger of letting the tranquility of the salty sea breeze pacify us. Subsummation is the danger that we think less about. More concerned about being consumed by the big fish, we forget the threat of being subsumed by the ocean.

So remember the dangers of subsummation, and never underestimate its agent, subsume. In this seemingly innocuous word is the power to destroy all that we hold dear—to, by the power of its infinite, uncaring waves, wipe smooth the jagged faces the things that truly matter.