Count

I read somewhere (must have been another one of those self-help books) that you cannot tackle the concept of self without first considering the closest individual within your compass of observation, your own self. The second part of Randolf David’s book, which is much more informal and intimate than the first, is no exception to this generalization. In making reference to oneself, the writer of any text that tries either to help the reader understand himself or dare him to get deeper into himself so that he may make it a better person personalizes whatever sort of help he is offering. I guess every one of us is guilty of this, even if only for the advise we give to our problematic friends or the answers we compose in assignments such as this, but in so doing, we are unwittingly or deliberately claiming that each of us is worth being heard and listened to, and in general, we are all claiming that we are substantial and worthwhile, we are worth being known.

I think before we even consider whether the self is better dealt with as a project , a narrative, an artistic creation or a journey, we have to recognize that all these tools, all these metaphors being offered us, are made out of the desire to count. This word, just like the concept of self, takes on so many meanings, too many, in fact, considering it is just a word. Hereby we ought to think of it as only a name of something else bigger, something abstract and changing, dynamic yet basic. We all wish to count, as in to be defined, and to matter to someone, or something, or this world in general. We are in continuous search of who we are and the best way to cope and to thrive in this world because we want to think of ourselves as people whose lives matter, people that other people are going to wonder about when we just suddenly disappear, gossip about when we suddenly go astray, and gleefully say, “oy, kapitbahay ko yan!” or “we went to elementary school together” when we eventually get famous and successful. It is for this desire to count that we want to look good, do good, turn out good or at times fall short of our standards with impunity, and therefore mold ourselves according to the demands of the society we grew up in, especially those of the both unwitting and deliberate demands of our elders and our mentors. We are shaped by our culture not because we are deluded into believing that it is the only way to be, or that they made us, but because the members of the culture that ultimately define us are the people we want to please, the people who taught us the concept of what looks good, is good, and will turn out good, just what every individual inherently desires to be.

There is a song that goes, “how do you measure the life of a woman or a man/ in daylight, sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee/ in inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife/ in truth she learned/ or in times that he cried/ in the bridges she burned/ or the way that he died?” In this world where the only way to agree in how much or how many and what is too much and how much is enough is to define units of measurements and agree on some certain levels of size, depth, multitude and efficiency, people tend to measure their worth by numbers. In short they count the things that they have and have done, the number of things they can do, the diversity of roles they can assume, before they can measure themselves. In a world where efficiency and power is a matter of miles per second, number of house bills approved and senate bills passed and projects implemented, economic standing a matter of amount of property, number of children and hours the fathers work each day and the pesos he gets for each of it, where twice-gold-triple-platinum determines the success of a record, and books of records perpetually look for the next largest or fastest what-have-yous that will surpass the last, it is easy to get lost in the notion of scarcity, to be addicted to the idea of plentitude, overwhelmed with sheer figures that this is how people try to know themselves. So people count. But this is not a complete measure of a life. Sometimes it even gives a faulty assessment, an illusion that one has been powerful when one is unscrupulous, or that one has lived dreamless just because one tried to live humbly.

How we view the living of our lives and recognition of ourselves depend on what tools we use to measure our worth, or how we count as human beings and as members of a community. But one that is most ambitious, and regards human life the highest, I believe, and that is how I describe my own self, is looking at it as an artistic creation. Though we may be molded by society and culture, they define the reaches of the canvass and the sharpness of the chisel, the spaces between colors and the details relevant spots, no two creations, even of the same hand, no matter how limited it is, is ever the same, or predictable, or unworthy of attention. Every aspect of life of a person is pulled out of some hat that is filled by the environment but ultimately it is still the artist that chooses what to pull out of it.

Alternately, in counting and in wanting to count, we choose sometimes to blend in, sometimes to stand out. It is not at all times just a matter of vanity; sometimes it is of life and death. Sometimes we divert from an old solution because we in the walk of our lives are getting the feeling that it isn’t what we need, or it doesn’t work so well. Sometimes we stick to worn values because some people have tried it and they didn’t end up so bad, or some people, like the writers of the self-helps, actually succeeded sticking to them. Sometimes we just stay with the “tried and tested” because we have analyzed it and we like it from all angles.

What defines the self is the recognition that it has struggles. That it congenitally wants to explore new horizons as well as visit old memories but all the time there are constraints that we need to work around before we get what we want, and it is how we deal with these things, the way we struggle with the favorite color that doesn’t fit in among the other splashes of paint, the line in the song that doesn’t rhyme with anything else, the antithesis to the poem that is more powerful than the thesis. We finally decide what we want with our life, what is more important to us, the tune we are dancing to or the tempo of the blinking lights, that we become individuals. It will eventually dawn upon us that not all the words fit in the same poem, we got to let other people live the other words. Not all the colors would look good in the same canvas; we got to give up some of the brightness or intensity for other painters to use in their own paintings. So we learn to develop a taste of our own, a form of discriminate choosing forced by the limitedness of our person. But we try to assure ourselves we are not losing by un-choosing those elements we discard, but instead we are touching other people’s lives unwittingly or deliberately by giving them some allowance on how to proceed with them.

How do we cope with personal struggles? We recount. We take the time, some of us in middle age, some more others in old age, while some obsessive-compulsive or perhaps discerning few do it regularly since youth, to look back and assess how far we’ve gone and how much we’ve changed or unchanged. Life still is a journey, a journey of counting and observing and suffering and celebrating the self, and at one point we narrate it, if only to ourselves, because spoken or written out loud it might make more sense, be more understandable. In looking for an audience to these recollections we sometimes reach unwittingly or deliberately farther than we thought we could, just to assure ourselves that we still exist in this universe of ambiguity and still count. So we peddle our stories over the internet with strangers; we sigh our suffering and voice out our angst to unfeeling voice recorders, and sometimes in our loneliness and desperation to be known, because that’s all we want to have, someone who knows us, we take the time to think of gifts to distribute to people whom we want to be known to that will make them feel that individuality is still not lost in this world. We recount. And we repeat over and over the lessons that made the most impact, and relive over and over in our memories the moments that made us laugh and cry because the self is most defined during those moments of intense happiness and intense pain. When something is happening there will be something to recount, and the self works.

Still among the challenges and hindrances to the full realization of the self—that in deterring it ultimately complete it—are those insurmountable things around us, nature, politics, the state of society, our nation, the things bigger than a single self but perhaps still not more immense than a multitude of thinking, autonomous selves put together, that humble the man or the woman, put him in his place and make her realize that she alone does not make the world. There are things not in their control. Their autonomy, their sense of self counters it. Sometimes they overcome, sometimes they undercome, that is, learn to live with them—stop berating themselves in an orgy of self-blame why nature claimed all that are dear them in a flash of flood or lahar fall, and just start another life in the manner that Rudyard Kipling wrote “if you can make a heap in all your winnings/ and risk it in a game of pitch and toss/ and lose, and start again at your beginnings/ and never breathe a word about your loss”. Sometimes they do it with honor—saying no or yes to an invitation to join a fraternity, sometimes they do it with reasons besides honor—swooning over the mestizos and being on the lookout for the next whitening product, sometimes they do it for reasons so hidden, so irrational and deep that society itself refuses to negotiate and just decides to kill them off—the serial killings, the heinous crimes, the madness, the dark sides of the self that can materialize as a way of countering the boundaries of the self to make itself count.

But ultimately, ultimately—as long and as much as you believe in yourself as a separate faculty not rooted if confined by traditions and the armed sentinels of your past, the recounting of the stories of heroes that in the end do nothing but slow down or speed up the course of history that nothing but the multitude of unnamed selves can make happen, as long as there is a self in you waiting to be recognized, may it be in a university or a circle of upperclassmen with alumni pulling strings, or in the large scale a consumer in a place where capitalism comes up with brittle-crusted high-gloss solutions to the awkwardness of living such as Mother’s and Father’s Day and the spreading culture of Tamagochis and how-to manuals, we are artists with an individual genius waiting, hungering, yearning to be recognized and validated by the community we live in. We are artists both unwittingly and deliberately eager to fill up the canvas, the page in our hands with what we can bring forth. We have this innate need and penchant to attack life thinking that we count. We count our blessings and our imperfections and our achievements, the medals on our breasts and the lives we touch, we recount the stories of our wars and triumphs, of our countering the evils and inconveniences that we come upon, believing that in the long run, every little story of the self, of each self, not only contributes to the big picture, the big painting, the big artwork of humankind, but they, in themselves, mean something, are worth something, and count for something.

The song I quoted earlier asks in the end, “how about love?”