touch
At the bus stop this morning, there’s a giant picture of an anonymous woman’s bra-clad torso. The lighting and computer-enhanced color tints make everything look too good to be true, which, of course, it is. Like a lot of men, even though I can offer sound moral and philosophical arguments for why a bus stop advertisement featuring a lacy bra on a faceless torso should be offensive, more than anything, I want to stare. I think of the lines from one of Wendell Berry’s poems:
How hard it is for me, who live
in the excitement of women
and have the desire for them
in my mouth like salt.[1]
When the bus pulls up, the ad on the side portrays a man and woman, both half-dressed, the two of them a tangle of limbs. They both look tired or drunk, and both of them are sweaty. Just before the bus doors open, I notice that the ad is actually for shoes, or rather a shoe company.
On the bus there are ads for hair and skin products, for natural cures with miraculous before-and-after photos, and clothing stores. There’s a confusing “safe sex” poster that seems like attempted damage control, conspicuously out of place, I muse, like a bandaid over a bullet wound, or a 1-800 gambling addiction hotline number printed on the seats at a casino.
And on the inside roof, like the advertiser’s centrepiece, is a photo of another anonymous woman from the waist up, who is looking down at the cell phone-shaped opening in her shirt that shows off a section of her bra and an ample amount of cleavage. I have seen this ad before, and I try not to stare, but the whole point of it is that I do stare, and that hopefully the curve of her breasts will entice me into buying a cell phone. When I get off the bus, I see a billboard advertising the “Naughty But Nice” sex tradeshow—no doubt a gratuitous carnival of images, fantasies, desires, and obsessions. But the allure is powerful and real. I can’t pretend I am not drawn to the images, so carefully created and displayed, and my mind starts to wander. I walk home, feeling like there’s something wrong with me.
That night, Erika and I make love.
I know her body. I know the lines and veins, the scar on her foot, the one under her chin, the one on her shin from a cut with a clamshell, the stretch-marked skin around her hips. I know the different tints and lines in her hair, the smooth curve of her neck, her soft earlobes, the pale, smooth skin on her shoulders and stomach and back. I know her teeth—some straight, some crooked—and her nose, narrow like that of a Russian princess, her pointy chin, the creases that frame her mouth, her green eyes, different from when we first fell in love—traced by deeper lines and wrinkles, signs that she is being transformed by sorrow and joy.
I’ve covered every inch of her with my eyes and fingers, thousands of times now, over and over, and still she is new, every time, new. I look for some easier way to apprehend her, some way to make her more mine, but there is nothing simple about her body. Touching her is a mystery of flesh and bone. The real presence of her body resists the smallness of my eyes, my mind, all the words I use to describe her. She is.
[1]. Berry, “Marriage,” 70.
2
Tacit Knowledge
and the Miraculous
Double Ristretto
I didn’t really develop a serious appetite for books until midway through my second year of college. I remember sitting on the stools between the library shelves in Bible school, discovering Nietzsche—who got me all worked up—and Thomas Merton—who helped calm me down—and thinking that books like these were so explosive I could hardly believe they were legal. Reading has become so much a part of my life that nowadays I panic if I’m on the bus or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and discover that I’ve forgotten to bring along at least one of the half-dozen or so books I currently have on the go. In fact, I enjoy reading so much I can even think of a few reasons why it might be better than sex: the pleasures of reading might not be as intense as the pleasures of sex, but regardless of how good a lover you might be, chances are pretty good that a good book is going to last a whole lot longer than even the best sex; it’s easy to talk to your kids about books; you can read in pretty much any public place without having to worry about getting arrested.
Not long ago I was reading from Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch, a lifelong undertaker who also writes poetry and essays. The essay I was reading was about the author and his son fishing together. After only a few paragraphs, it was obvious just how much the two of them love fishing—not just catching fish, which would seem to be the obvious goal of anyone who goes fishing, but the entire experience of fishing, the sheer physicality of it all. Writing about his son, Lynch says, “It was here the topography of the riverbed began to make sense to him. He could close his eyes and see the bottom, its undulant waterscape of runs and pools and holes and flats, the pockets of curling water, the structure of tree stumps and rock forms, the gravel beds where fish would hold, the shaded and the sunlit waters.”[1]
“He could close his eyes and see the bottom.” That is, of course, literally nonsense: close your eyes and you can’t see anything at all. But those lines suggest a very real way of knowing that has everything to do with the wonder of bodies, something Lynch ponders a great deal as he goes about his odd vocational pairing of undertaker and poet. I can picture Lynch and his son in their hip-waders, standing in a stream, their feet on the bottom, bodies balancing against the current, watching the surface of the water while feeling for the subtle movements that would begin at the fly tied to the end of the line and travel down the line floating on the river’s surface and then up to the pole and down to their hands, their fishing rods extensions of their arms. Neither of them has actually seen the bottom of this stream, but Lynch says that his son could “see” what the bottom of the stream looked like by experiencing those subtle movements.
Lynch’s description reminds me of philosopher Michael Polanyi’s description of something he calls “tacit knowledge.” Polanyi uses the metaphor of a walking stick to develop his philosophy of knowledge: “As we learn to use a probe, or to use a stick for feeling our way,” he writes, “our awareness of its impact on our hand is transformed into a sense of its point touching the objects we are exploring . . . We become aware of the feelings in our hand in terms of their meaning located at the tip of the probe or stick to which we are attending.”[2] In Lynch’s essay, the fishing rod is the probe that very nearly becomes an extension of the fisherman’s arm, and in turn, an extension of his eye, a way of seeing. His fishing rod is a tool, not just for catching fish, but for exploration. The knowledge Lynch and his son receive from their fishing rods, however, is different from a scientific knowledge based on measurements of the velocity of the current, underwater erosion, the viscosity of fluids, and the different grades of pebbles, sand, and silt that one could use to accurately describe the bottom of this streambed. It speaks of a knowing that is inseparable from physical, involved, active love, and it is as real as anything about which science can speak.
Now I’m not much of an outdoorsman, and it must be nearly twenty years since I last went fishing, and that may be why reading that essay got me thinking about coffee rather than my limited experience as an angler. I used to work at one of the top-rated coffee shops in Vancouver where I served espresso drinks for more than three years, and pulling double shots of espresso required a similar kind of knowing that involved both my body and love.
At work, we used to quietly poke fun at Starbucks coffee because everything about it seemed too easy: overcooked, pre-ground, pre-packaged beans, dispensed, dispersed, and disposed of with the push of a button labeled “PUSH” (presumably for the technically challenged). At our café, we used top of the line coffee grinders and espresso machines, and operating them well required some basic training, attention to detail, and, more than anything, tons of practice. My job taught me to pay attention to my body and my senses; to smell, touch, sight, sound, and, of course, taste, all of which were required to do the work well. The hours I spent learning to make a perfect double espresso or a perfect traditional cappuccino