Opinion | History Is Learned Using the Whole Body

To my future UNAM students taking the “Medieval and Renaissance Literature” course in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters

I used to say that there was no better cure for insomnia than reading The Confessions of St. Augustine; that at times when it is impossible to fall asleep, its first paragraphs guarantee you will sleep profoundly. Now, it turns out that I have agreed to participate in a chair to lead the reading of that book! Not only that, but to top it all off, I am disposed to demonstrate its great value and importance because its influence on so many contemporary philosophers (like Heidegger, Arendt, Wittgenstein, and Derrida) has become evident to me over time. I can testify through a more intimate reading about its enormous beauty, depth, and radical validity. St. Augustine not only does not put you to sleep, he helps awaken you.

This may come as a shock to many of my readers. There will be many to whom Augustine of Hippo, one of the earliest constructors of Catholicism, is an archaic relic, one more enemy of our current incipient freedom. I know it isn’t easy to make our way through the mist of the centuries to understand the depth of a human being like him who, if he fulfilled a mission in his time, questioned the hegemonic culture as much as many of us want to do today). Therefore, given this difficulty, the objective of my article is not so much to discuss him and his ideas but to reflect a little with my readers on how we can better undertake these journeys into the past and understand without the many prejudices of those who lived before. More specifically, I want to rehearse here what I will propose to the students coursing my invited chair: that we let our classes be an exercise of imagination and unlearning that brings us a little closer to the thinker of Hippo.

What comprises this exercise? Many years ago, while directing a group of friends in a play, I discovered a tip to support them in creating their characters. It was about becoming aware of something obvious. When a character is in action, he does not know precisely what he will say or how he will behave, like any of us who never fully foresee our words or actions. The actor knows his dialogue, but the character does not. For the latter, his life has no script.

Based on this simple idea, my tip for my friends was this: Play your character as if you don’t know what they’re going to say or do; that is, hide that information from yourself so you can act spontaneously. When you are on stage, unlearn the character’s lines, actions, and everything you know about the character; forget what you have learned from him, and let him act and say his lines as if it were the first time, as in real life.

The most interesting thing is that proceeding like this not only results in a natural, sincere performance but, along with that sincerity, unexpected attitudes arise in the actors, spontaneously, nuances that they did not know existed in the character, no matter how much they had studied it. Moreover, those unexpected nuances, seemingly coming from the unknown, are not arbitrary nor occurrences that go out of the spirit of the drama; on the contrary, they are perfectly coherent and aligned, giving the drama more life and adding truth. 

According to many experienced actresses and actors, these nuances come, as I say, from unknown places – unconscious, magical – to the extent that in some moments, the character seems to behave on its own, as if something were independent of the actor, or as if the character were linked to the actor by something deep and invisible, moving them both. (It is becoming increasingly apparent to me that my tip is a kind of reminiscence of one of the acting methods I studied in my adolescence, that of the famous Russian director Constantin Stanislavski, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, revolutionized theatrical art, making acting on the stages of Europe and America lose its nineteenth-century pomposity with exaggerated tears and gestures to discover naturalness, the intimate experience of the characters. Among other things, the strength of his discovery allowed the emergence of modern cinema, where the camera, color, and sound achieved an increasingly faithful portrait of reality, promoting a more human, subtle, and natural performance).

But what does all this have to do with the teaching/learning of History? It has to do with the fact that this same exercise of unlearning information can be applied to our approach. If we compare having information about the people of the past with the theater actor’s knowledge about his character, we can realize that focusing only on the knowledge about the past person or the character is similar; this will become a hindrance. If we sincerely want to understand these people, we must start by ridding many pre-established concepts about them (prejudices) and lending them – at least momentarily – our complete being, enabling them to speak and act and be reborn. This includes making theatrically available to them our bodily sensations, our entrails, as the great philosopher María Zambrano would say. To know them, we must make the people of the past endearing beings.

Isn’t it true that we generally acquire “historical knowledge” with the idea that it has nothing to do with us? Isn’t it true that we carry a lot of stereotyped information, think of “historical scenarios and characters” in the very nineteenth-century style and of “political and social actors,” and abstract information and lose contact with the humane? Isn’t it true that when we approach the people of the past, we see them as if they somehow already know what will happen to them, or rather as if they know what needs to happen to them to be correct in our history books? Thus, we analyze each of their acts or writings (if any) in the light of the facts we know happened to them; that is, we proceed scientifically (starting with the effects and looking for the causes) without realizing that in this way we miss the most important (or at least the funniest): the experience, the personal way each of them lived, how they experienced their environment and made their decisions without ever knowing, for sure, what would happen to them. Or could everything have been planned for the priest Hidalgo to become the Father of the Nation?

Therefore, to bring these people back to life, back into existence (so to speak), it is not enough to have vast “information” about them and their circumstances and contributions. If we limit ourselves to that, we will never go beyond a more or less learned caricature, a virtuous act of scientific juggling, which may be very amusing and surprising but will not allow us to understand anything truly and which will vanish in an instant into thin air. 

On the other hand, if, once the information has been collected, we “forget” it for a moment and put ourselves in the shoes of those ancestors, preparing ourselves to “act” their actions and let them inhabit our body for an instant, then we will adopt the right attitude so that (now yes!) the same information helps us understand the circumstances they faced, the people they had to live with, the words and concepts they could turn to, the decisions they could make, the feelings they were allowed or forbidden…

I remember that Antonio González Caballero, playwright and acting teacher (very important in Mexican theater but half-forgotten), had a teaching method that proposed creating the character starting with his way of walking. “How does the young and enamored Romeo walk?” he asked us, and we had to do it. It is easy to guess that the master started from the idea of “putting oneself in the shoes of the other.” Following that way of thinking, I now suggest conceiving the people of other times through the shoes they wore and slipping into them momentarily.

To learn history is to dare to be its protagonist.

Again, the most interesting thing is that – like in the theatre – our information expands from that personal experience of identity. Spontaneously (let’s say, intuitively), new nuances come to us, new truths about that person from the past. We discover the more we experience them that we have a common background, one we can call human nature, the human spirit, the collective unconscious, or whatever we want).

Without underestimating the scientific approaches that provide valuable information, we must recognize that this is only a way of “prowling” the facts and seeing them from the outside, just as it happens with the information we consciously obtain when studying a theatrical script. But the historical or poetic mystery will always be more than we can translate into words. Julius Caesar, Madame Pompadour, el Niño Artillero, and anyone mentioned in books (including members of “Multitud Anónima“) are more like us than anything texts and teachers can describe.

I personally believe that nothing human is alien to me (as the Roman playwright Terence said). Still, even if I think things are foreign to me about others, I do not understand how I could know anyone without beginning with our commonalities. Maybe there is a science that wants to study history without considering me, without my involvement, without involving everyone, but I cannot conceive this. Moreover, if I imagine it by doing an exercise in abstraction, I cannot understand its purpose or why anyone would want to teach or learn it.

Certainly, there would seem to be exceptions to all I am saying: ways of contributing to the knowledge of history that does not need this exercise of unlearning or require us to put ourselves in the shoes of another; practices and sciences that ask us to be one hundred percent objective in the face of the world. For example, this happens when we gather information about a fact or analyze and compare texts to discover data, names, dates, or words. However, for me, it is evident that even in this case, our most intimate being remains, and if we protect that information, it is because of the value and deep meaning it has for us. If we do not see ourselves reflected even in those documents, if we are not there, what is the point of recovering them, accumulating them, deciphering them, organizing them, and making them available to others? All of us, from the brainiest philologist to the most modest librarian, are guardians of our own history.

I end this article by involving St. Augustine again. In a strange and fortunate way, a single and brief excerpt of his thinking – explored by the German philosopher Hannah Arendt – allows me to exemplify everything I have said, from the need to get involved “body and soul” in what we study, to the need to put aside the information we already bring to discern its value—always considering our own experience.

It is as simple as this: We all know that it is impossible to forget our body, that we live in our skin, and that no one can tell us that any human being lives differently. However, who knows why we swallow the idea that the saints, mystics, and enlightened ones try, and sometimes succeed, to exist without their corporeality? So, we also believe the line that religion proclaims renouncing the body, and that is because, to a large extent, the religious themselves have promoted that image. However, that is information we must set aside to know the truth. It would be enough to put ourselves in the shoes of St. Augustine to assume that he, too (like any human being), could not seriously forget his body and that he would not want to do so even when he meditated or prayed intensely. (By the way, what kind of shoes did he wear? This will be a question for my students.)

Turning now to other information available, I can confirm that our thinkers always opposed those who try to know something without getting sensitively involved. He knew that exploring nature, for example, without simultaneous self-interest, was one of the most dangerous temptations. The anxiety stemming from knowing reality without involving one’s person, one’s intimacy (including one’s body) was, according to him, pure desire, that is, a desire that does not give any pleasure, and therefore something “perfectly useless,” a type of non-sensual love in which “human beings delight only in knowledge itself.” He called this form of desire a “vice of curiosity” and was implacable with it.

We have all lived that “vicious” version of knowledge. Many have been unscathed and have experienced it in small passing curiosities, such as leafing through the social pages, trying to touch one’s shoulder with one’s nose, or reading the horoscope skeptically: Sunday activities. But many have spent their lives like this. Knowing has become a meaningless compulsion, hidden under the guise of science and striving for a Truth known to be unattainable. It is the evil of our time: studying and learning, forming and training ourselves, without discovering ourselves.

However, we still have the opportunity to help many avoid this loss, starting with our young people, some of whom I will soon have the pleasure of accompanying in the study of history and St. Augustine in the UNAM chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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