A Professor’s Inner Journey

Bill Hughes

A large amount of teaching is performance: The classroom is a stage where all of us are simultaneously actors and audience.

A few years ago the evidence of that theatricality came pounding down upon me in unforeseen ways. Reaching 50, I was on tour in Latin America under the auspices of the U.S. government when, unexpectedly, I was invited by a shaman from the Colombian Amazon to participate in a religious ceremony.

It was no small deal. At the outset, the shaman advised me that, like other participants, I would need to ingest a hallucinogenic called ayahuasca. It isn’t a recreational drug, he said. “It has magical powers.” Time, as I knew it, would stop making sense for me. My body would feel alien, rough, imprisoning.

I hesitated. As an adolescent, I hadn’t been interested in psychedelic substances. Instead, I cultivated a rather bookish profile, and I have always been punctilious about what I consent to do, where I go and with whom, and what I eat. While I was raised in Mexico, my knowledge of indigenous rituals was that of an observer. My Jewish upbringing taught me much about ancestral myths and religion as a social organizer, and offered me a frame to my existential questions. But it often left me in the dark about the mystical side of belief.

So the shaman’s invitation was enticing: It was now or never.

What I went through was beyond words. I lost control of my bowels and bladder. Rather than using words to think about what was happening to me, my mind became stuck in the words themselves: I could see them dance around me, break into autonomous letters, reconfigure themselves into verbal clusters I couldn’t quite recognize. Each minute lasted a century.

I came back home disturbed, transformed. It took me weeks to recover.

At the outset, perhaps to relieve the all-consuming anxiety I was possessed by, I had told the shaman that I would probably turn my experience into a story. “Then you’ll be betraying it,” he replied, “forcing meaning out of it. As an organizer of reality, language itself, most likely, will be useless to you.”

He was right. And so was I, although in ways I never foresaw. I kept being visited by an urgent need, unlike anything I had ever felt before, to turn the episode into a one-man play.

This is because the indigenous ceremony, and I in it, felt to me supremely performative. Everyone involved — some 15 people, including the shaman’s mother, who was a curandera, the healer in charge of dispensing the ayahuasca potions — was, in my eyes, acting, and, of course, so was I. I was fully conscious I was playing the role of an aloof, conceited professor put to a test: Would he surrender his supercilious nature? Would he fully recognize that knowledge isn’t delivered from one intellect to another but through mysterious, unquantifiable channels?

The result is The Oven, a 70-minute monologue directed by Matthew Glassman of Double Edge Theatre (we call it an “anti-lecture”), where I recount the hallucinations in deceptively chronological order while my vulnerabilities — my failures — as a cultural commentator, trained in Western ways, are exposed without constraint. The only props on stage are a couple of chairs, a desk, a coat hanger, and a glass and pitcher of water. Lights and music transport the public to the Amazon jungle. The show has been performed in theaters throughout New England.

In it I also attempt to understand, etymologically, the meaning of the word “professor.” It is an agent noun derived from the Latin verb profiteri, to “lay claim to, declare.” As an honorific, it dates from 1706. After 25 years, I’m still uncomfortable when I see the word refer to me because I sense a kind of imposture, as if it were a mask — the mask of authority, behind which knowledge hides. I like a quote often misattributed to W.H. Auden: A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.

I’m not an actor by trade, but my father is; I grew up on and around the stage and I adore its possibilities. After I finished a draft of the play, Glassman asked if it would be better for a professional actor to perform it. I italicize the word because, as he uttered it, I remember thinking to myself: The suspension of belief must be only partial; in order for the fourth wall to come crumbling down, this piece needs to be performed by a — and, at least now, by this — professor himself.

I also like another quote, this one certifiably Auden’s (from The Dyer’s Hand): “Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.” In The Oven, a tension exists between a part of me that chronicles the events as an anthropologist and a part that fictionalizes them. Audiences often ask me how much of the play is true. My answer: 95 percent happened exactly as depicted … and 95 percent didn’t.

Even though both text and movements have been meticulously cued, I love the space theater allows for improvisation, a topic that fascinates me in general. I’m reminded of two of my father’s maxims, each dependent on the other. The first is that no two shows are alike. It sounds simplistic yet the sentence is pregnant with enormous possibilities. Someone in the audience might suddenly make a puzzling gesture and — ka-boom! — the entire play acquires a unique cadence. The second maxim is about personalizing each performance. Whenever he jumps onstage, my father tells me that he automatically spots a person, someone he instinctively empathizes with, and to whom he’ll dedicate that night’s effort. That is his strategy to make the play intimate. The chosen person will never notice it.

I have felt the most lasting impact of my ayahuasca experience, and the play that emerged from it, in my teaching. Now I’m interested in learning as a sum of endeavors. In particular, I’ve become attuned to the complex role of the senses. I encourage students to toy with words, to listen to them, to dismantle them, to connect ideas to sound and smell and taste, to talk about how their own memory organizes information in sensory ways, through colors, flavors, musical notes.

I’m better aware of the classroom as theater, where even a passing gesture is a statement. I recognize myself as an entertainer whose role is to bring students to knowledge in the rounded sense of the term. I listen more patiently to them. Their inner journeys matter to me as much as the ideas they shape before, and along with, me. I invite them to act, to recite, to make fools of themselves.

Faced with rigidity, I improvise. I’m not afraid to make a fool of myself, although I’m careful not to be clownish. I want students to witness, along with me, the façade authority often becomes. My purpose is not only to invite them to feel vulnerable too, but to embrace vulnerability as strength.

Maybe the quote misattributed to Auden should be: A professor is one who enters the theater of other people’s dreams.

Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest books are Quixote: The Novel and the World (Norton) and, out in June, Borges, the Jew (SUNY Press).