Airmark

Four or five years is only a long vacation to a giant tortoise, a wink to a quahog clam and a hiccup’s span to a giant sequoia tree; yet, it also stretches the whole lifetime of a guppy and spells chains of generations for some kinds of butterflies. These are some of the lifetimes that were making their own journeys as you graduates embarked on your own academic story to bring it to this point, where a line-up of supposedly wise men and women extol you to go out into the world and make your mark.

And the desire to leave a mark is something so uniquely human. We are tragically heroic beings to even desire to leave a mark because nature erases as comprehensively as it creates, through time. Given enough time in the tune of millions of years, nature does quite a clean job of making things disappear. But do not take it personally. In fact, an astonishing percentage of organisms (humans included) — 99.9 percent — vanish or will vanish without a trace. This fact bears on our knowledge now that if making a literal mark mattered to other creatures as much as it does to humans, we should see a lot of depressed animals around. 

Yet, we do not see any animal launching a campaign among its kind, urging each other to make a journal of quotable quotes to ensure their immortality. Humans are the only ones who mind that we too will eventually vanish and not even be among the .1 percent that could fossilize and be eventually found to study and archive.

The oldest human recording of a human voice was made in 1860 of a woman singing “Au Claire de la Lune” made with a technology called a “phonautograph” invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. It etched soundwaves in paper covered with soot that comes from a burning oil lamp. An audio historian, David Giovanni, was reported all over science and tech news recently to have found this recording. This find replaces Edison’s recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb in 1877. The oldest writing ever found was that of a 6,000-year-old piece of stone in Syria that translates to “here are ten goats.” I do not think that goat herder ever wanted his ability to count ten goats immortalized in stone. In Angono, our oldest artwork is found — 5,000-year-old writing on cliffs — figures of animals and symbols. I do not think they were eventually thinking of royalties in terms of remembrances of people who go to that cave to see it and marvel at it.

I am not sure how conscious these pioneers were of making a mark. If it were only a mark they wanted, they could have just said “hello” or even just mumbled unintelligently. But no, they had the voice of a woman singing a song to the clear moon and an icon of mechanical inventions singing children’s songs. It would seem to me that they themselves enjoyed the process of discovering themselves as they made those marks. When they recorded or wrote, they were seeing or listening to a playback of their own evolving humanity. They, I think, also profoundly surprised and recreated themselves.

I think that is the advice I would like this column to share with the graduates — that instead of focusing on making a glorious external mark of your existence, that you instead cultivate a path where you can surprise and recreate yourself as you grow. After you graduate, you will immediately be aware of the space of your own ignorance of the larger world of ideas, people and things. If you fence your life after graduation by what you think you know or learned from your degrees, especially those from supposedly top universities, you abandon the mastery of your own ship and where it could sail. Bragging about your degrees as your tools for life after graduation is like being armed with a fork to shake the Sierra Madre. It will not only be futile but painfully comical to those who now know, especially your potential employers.

The mark that matters is the one that you make in your own life. There is so much joy and affirmation when we see another human being do something because it is meaningful to him or her and not because he or she wants to be remembered for it. You also will never know what will really make a mark. Whether you leave a mark for others to remember by is up to them to assess or write songs or poetry about. Gratitude or remembrance I think, only counts when it was not elicited.

I have a little suggestion. The day after your graduation, plant something. It too will eventually disappear, but for now, it will infuse some fresh air to accompany the start of your fresh path to life. Breathe deeply in gratitude. That is the only mark I think that matters.

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