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It’s hard to write something that a drunkard has not already written.
I came across this surprising phrase a few days ago in the title of an article by the writer Luna Miguel from the newspaper El País. The idea is entirely plausible if one remembers one’s own drunken states (in my case, not too many, I confess, but enough), states in which one was able to “confess everything” without filters (precisely like children). This is complemented when we consider the texts of great drunkards such as Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, a novel that draws the entire universe in a glass of alcohol.
But the astonishment doesn’t end with the title of the article. Its first words inaugurate an entire era, I would say. Luna Miguel begins by confessing, “I’m an alcoholic,” and, with this, she brings attention to the growing possibility that a serious media outlet will publish texts by authors who are also serious (and, let’s say, better journalists – therein lies the novelty: they expose themselves without reservation, communicating from what seems to be the source of their anguish and making personal pain the real news).
Luna Miguel “confesses.” I used this word above, but I must correct myself. Although hearing someone say, “I am an alcoholic” may sound like a confession to us (something that is only told within a social group like Alcoholics Anonymous), we soon realize that it is a testimony, the account of something that Luna has witnessed (in this case, in herself). She dares to put it forward as a personal perspective reasonable enough to be exposed to the world.
Today, alcoholics can no longer be anonymous, nor the addicts, the neurodivergents, and the defectors from the binary. Today’s world demands it: the narrow diversity to which the algorithms of social networks (electronic ones, it must be clarified, because there are many others) tend to reduce human interests. It demands that those of us who are permanently exiled, who are hordes, come to the surface and speak our truths (sorry for the cheesiness) so that it is not believed that everything in life consists of the courses and products promoted on Instagram and Facebook.
I’m not talking about anything new: this is the postmodern reality, the individual and shameless expression of those who, opened by human pain, would like to see beyond guilt more profoundly and return from there with their personal truths to present them not as universal but as legitimate. (Perhaps what distinguishes us from those who speak under the influence of alcohol is precisely that: Being sober, we can return from pain with a testimony, i.e., a rational approach to what is endearing. Perhaps that is also what distinguishes Luna Miguel, who, when writing her text, had not drunk for a short eternity: 70 days).
But why do I include myself among the exiles? I am just an autodidact, someone who has learned things by myself! Trying to answer this question, I write this article, the first of a series I hope to publish little by little in this Observatory.
It will not be easy. Calling oneself self-taught comes with some shame. When someone asks me what I studied (an obligatory question in some conversations), I feel an emptiness inside; I become overwhelmed by the feeling that I would have to recount my whole life to justify the answer: “I didn’t study at all; I’m self-taught.” I look naked; I don’t know where to go. If I may be allowed an image, I seem to return to the moment when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and were suddenly plunged into utter shame.
Now, in an attempt to overcome those prohibitions, I offer here to talk about my life as an autodidact. This means not only referring to a personal method of learning but also to how life, from the beginning, exposed me to the need to educate myself, to always whisper in my ear how I should conduct myself.
Contrary to popular belief, being self-taught is not something to brag about. With one exception (those who learn a technical skill on their own), autodidacticism arises from a distrust of one’s neighbor, or at least from a severe dissatisfaction with people, and even before that, from a lack of ties that link one to human life in its social aspects.
That lack of attachments, obviously, cannot be total. Without at least one (the basic one, the one our parents weave when conceiving us), not even the body would exist, and the spirit would wander as we usually depict ghosts, suspended above material reality, trying unsuccessfully to enter it. (This image derives from a dualistic vision that, by distinguishing souls from bodies, supposes that the souls are substances seeking incarnation somewhere, leaving open the hypothesis that some of them don’t make it and that ─as my nanna used to say─ they wander around wanting to get into where they are not called). To live is, first of all, to exist from the bond of two bodies that come together (or unite, as we would say among friends with a much more eloquent word). That is why biological parents can never be forgotten.
After that union comes gestation, birth, air, and (when there are no hands to receive us) the soft or hard ground on which some fall (the fall occurs no matter how soft the reception). In any case, it is necessary to leave a body behind (our mother’s) and start to understand our own. All bodies born are biological; the human body is properly founded in the meaningful embrace of someone who welcomes us into the world.
The person who welcomes the baby makes the world; she is the whole world that has prepared the term to receive us, starting with the word “child.” Depending on the context in which we are born, there may or may not be other terms: “baby,” “my baby,” “newborn,” “product of childbirth,” and even more abstract encodings such as Z37, which means a product of birth; or Z37.0, a product of live birth; or Z37.2, both twins born alive. Some will think that this strictly technical codification has no relevance in a newborn’s life, but let’s not forget that it is a medical language that maintains continuity in the general health system, which does have relevance for us. It becomes clear when, sooner or later, we go to the “doctor,” and they call us “patient” or “diabetic,” “hypertensive,” “depressed,” “disabled,” “convalescent,” or we fall into the categories of “relative” or “dependent.” For some, this system is omnipresent. Clear examples are the chronically ill, inhabitants of the great hospital planet and many other people who orbit it. When I was a child, my house received phone calls several times a day asking for “the doctor” to the extent that all my life, almost without realizing it, I assumed myself to be the doctor’s son (as others believe themselves to be the son of the engineer, the architect, or the teacher).
Well, this is more or less what poets, philosophers, and psychoanalysts mean when they say that to be born human is to be born into a world of words.
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Words are social bonds; to begin with, they make the embrace that welcomes us to the world meaningful. That this hug has meaning is clear whether it comes from a mother who says “my baby” or a person who says “baby” with great tenderness. The word “my” (felt, thought, or spoken) gives the hug a different meaning.
Now, I’ll get down to business.
In this life, some human beings do receive that maternal “my” at birth, or they only hear it for a short time, after which it disappears. To an even smaller group of people, that “my” was accompanied by a deep pain, by a lament from the mother, which insinuated that she had difficulty holding us, that we were slipping from her arms. Those of us who were indeed let go saw that “my” recede like a luminous blue word lost in the darkness (I don’t know why I imagined it this way). Of those of us abandoned, some were lucky to be picked up by other arms who called us “baby,” and a few of us were fortunate enough to have them add, “I wish you were my baby!” (In less fortunate cases, they add, “Poor thing, you have no mother.” However, these were all saving arms in the shipwreck.)
I had (and still have) a nanny who has always loved me.
I will tell you the details of my long adventure, and I can tell you that it includes the fact that my mother’s embrace, my mother’s “my,” returned months after she left. However, it arrived a little late and undoubtedly still quite painful. Over time, I understood that my mother from childhood had suffered from an emotional fragility that seriously incapacitated her for life, indeed not prohibiting her from getting married and having children (I was the youngest of seven!) but from raising them properly. Of course, her “illness” found the strength for her to wisely put us in the hands of a loving woman who would look out for us. (“Watching over someone” is a beautiful image; it describes when we are babies and still cannot see that we need someone to look out for us: someone to see the obstacles and overcome them, to locate the bottle and bring it to us, and when the night is approaching, to shelter us).
As you can imagine, that disarticulation of the “my” and then its total absence (my mother’s fragility intensified with my birth and led her to be hospitalized for almost a year) left me vulnerable and a little exposed to the elements. Although my nana came to shelter me, as I said, and to bring me the bottle, there was always a hiatus inside me, a crack, and so, as the years went by, I had to learn to “make myself mine.” I had to learn to educate myself so that that crack became a hinge, a frame, and a door would cover it: a door that opens and closes. Today, at the dawn of my old age, I have learned to open it almost at will and to close it when I feel like it.
There is some freedom in all this. Self-taught people are also enviable in a sense. Many see us as oddballs or extraordinary heroes. Many incredulously and with admiration want to know how we have managed to survive outside the academic system (I should say university because I want to clarify that I do hold an academic degree, the very solemn and noble one of baccalaureate, which in our environment of doctorates and post-doctorates means not having studied anything and having wasted time).
Nature and delirium
How much pain in you! A horse with tangled legs, that’s what you were, mother.
FROM MY BOOK “CHRONICLE OF THE DAWN”
“In the origins of the species, human beings were self-taught.”
When I conceived this idea, I thought I should say it carefully and give ample justification. However, strangely, when I finished writing this, I had the unmistakable feeling that it was obvious: My readers and I know that Mother Nature abandoned human beings since our origins; from the beginning, we were deprived of the lessons that she provided to other species, and we always have had to rely on our own strengths and educate ourselves.
I could leave aside, then, any explanation of the above. Nevertheless, I want to offer it because it has some intriguing vertices inspired by the poetic reasoning of María Zambrano, who, in the first chapter of her book Man and the Divine, explains the primitive human condition. I will try to describe this point of view with the greatest simplicity but also with the caveat that description is inseparable from my own poetic reasoning, from my philosophical fantasy.
According to the great Spanish thinker, the very first humans (babies of the species) faced the surrounding nature as a continuous whole, a totality where things were indistinguishable from each other, where nothing offered a fissure, a minimal separation through which they could pass. On the contrary, that whole came down on them; they found it relentlessly in front of them, everywhere they turned, something complete and unfathomable.
If our mother, from whom we expect everything, does not welcome us, we are left with delirium as an option: in addition to lacking, those human beings began to feel persecuted and threatened. They lived in delirious friction with their surroundings, friction that one day, when they couldn’t take it anymore, ignited something inside them. They reversed the terms, assumed the role of the persecutor, and told themselves that it was not nature that persecuted them but the opposite. These differences from others in nature, the exclusions, served to make them oppose, to turn around and put nature in their sights, to corner it, and finally to seize and appropriate it, or at least to chase it away and take its place. Their delirium of originality, living as if they had created themselves as if they were enough, allowed them to carve out a space to live on the margins of nature, at first in opposition to it, and with the sole company of their fellow human beings (also unique, original, and self-taught), they consoled and protected themselves. They had learned to muster their own strength. They had managed to educate themselves.
Yet, it was only a delusion. Zambrano says that only when humans could discover in themselves that unfathomable reality that observed them from the outside, that divinity that had always persecuted them, could they reconcile with themselves with the outside and find peace. Caricatures of primitive humans sitting and cooking food peacefully over a campfire at the entrance to their cave represent people who have already found gods and received a reprieve.
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I have raised two children. I am an autodidact who educates his children based on what I learned for myself without the support of my mother. As for my father, I must say that in trying to educate me, he was always aware of the difficulty of pouring truth into me, who had only hands to receive it: my hands and no other containers. I also had my nanny’s humble hands and her big heart, but that wasn’t enough for me to know how to trust others, at least not beyond the always longing and almost hopeful language with which she tried to sustain me (“How I wish you were mine!”). For many years, the longing language led me to say, “How I would like to go to school, how I would like to learn from others!”
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In our overpopulated and hyper-informed world, where, in the absence of a lasting common truth, we all flaunt a personal truth, ephemeral but at least our own, we may well make an effort to make that truth correspond as much as possible to what we have seen in ourselves and to offer it to others as an authentic testimony.
In that sense, my wandering may be illustrative for some and provide variety to those who still believe from the trenches of science and pure reason that one day, it will be possible to clear up the human mystery. For my part, I believe that the mystery will continue, forcing us to be original and, in terms of learning, tirelessly self-taught.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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