me give you a simple and seemingly irrelevant example: when someone ordered a drink, I could grab a cup from one of the upside-down stacks of eight, twelve, and sixteen ounce paper cups—the bottom of the cup at the top of the tall pile—and hold it between my thumb and middle finger, tight enough that I wouldn’t drop it, but loose enough so that as I brought my hand over to the espresso machine I could flip the cup right-side up and slide it down into the palm of my hand. I adjusted my grip ever so slightly, depending on the size of the cup. A small thing in a day’s work, but it became a source of wonder. I learned to love that little trick, even though no one else ever noticed it—the sweeping motion, the movements of my arm, hand and fingers, the elementary Newtonian physics behind it all. It wouldn’t be impossible to make a machine that could do it for you, but it will always be impossible to make a machine that could enjoy it. That I could do it just so was because I’d picked up something like 250,000 or so paper cups during the three years I worked there, every single one of them requiring my body, my senses of sight and touch, and a deepening non-scientific understanding of some basic principles of mass, gravity, and air friction that lay behind my little trick.
Another example: making espresso, the capital-c of Coffee, Sweet Black Gold, The Blessed Sap. A perfect espresso ristretto is a true delicacy, an ounce and a half of liquid miracle. I am sure that it must be one of a handful of drinks that God had in mind when he invented tastebuds. The perfect espresso shot always starts with the precise amount of fresh coffee ground at just the right coarseness—too fine and it will come out tasting burnt and bitter, too coarse and it’s sour and mean, the margin between those two being very narrow—added to the hot espresso portafilter. I would tap that full portafilter on the edge of the grinder to loosely pack the grounds, one, two, three times, and then sweep my index and middle fingers back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, levelling the ground coffee, making sure there were no empty pockets and that the ground coffee was an even, loosely packed “puck.” (Could an automated, high-tech machine possibly appreciate the rich aroma of the coffee at that very moment? Could that machine ever make sense of the subtle adjustments I would make to the coarseness of the grind, depending on the time of day, whether there’s sunshine or rain, the changes in the air temperature, whether the back door in the kitchen is open or closed, whether the espresso is two days old or six days old? Could a machine ever truly “know” these things? More importantly, could it ever care?)
Next step: tamping the ground coffee. First tamp—line up the tamper in the portafilter, straighten arm and lock wrist, and lean in. Hard. Thirty-five pounds pressure is what the training manual suggested, but I know I tamped harder. My co-worker Krista told me she tested her tamp using a bathroom scale, and it was about eighty pounds of pressure. Mine was less—maybe sixty-five? Seventy? Lift the tamper, then tamp again. Lift, and tamp again, but this time it’s less about actually packing the coffee and more about “polishing” the top of the ground coffee by spinning the tamper. And it really does look polished. Not shiny, but like a water-worn stone. Beautiful.
Last step: hold the portafilter handle and with a quick flip of the wrist, toss away any loose grinds, while the tamped coffee puck remains intact. Reassemble the portafilter into the espresso machine—basically a glorified kettle—and watch the hot water work its magic. I developed a good sense of how the espresso would taste by looking at the streams as they flowed: if I’d done it right, the espresso would start with slow drips after two or three seconds, suddenly speed up into golden brown streams like burnt butter for about twenty seconds or so, and then just as the streams began to run light and thin, I’d shut the machine off. In the porcelain demitasse, you would see a layer of the thick, golden crema, flecked with auburn, floating on top of the strong, pitch-black, sweet, pure coffee. Sometimes it seemed that no matter what I did I couldn’t get my espresso shots to turn out right. But most times it would work perfectly, a satisfying conjunction of touch, sight, sound, smell, and last of all—taste.
Most of us go about our work life and everyday business without a whole lot of dreamy, philosophical contemplation of our corporeal existence. As one who so loves to read, it’s sometimes easy for me to live as though my body is an inconvenience, as though I am a mind trapped in a burdensome body, but every now and then something unusual—it could be very profound or very everyday—can spark a sense of wonder at bodies: the moments when my children were born; or seeing my brother-in-law lay a perfect course of bricks, or the feel of a sharp knife slicing through potatoes from the garden, or stepping outside at night in the biting winter, Winnipeg air, or pulling a double-shot of espresso, or reading an undertaker’s thoughts on fishing—all of these stir in me a sense of wonder and fascination at the basic fact of bodily existence. “Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical,” writes Polanyi. “Our own body is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body.”[3] Like the sweet taste of a double shot of espresso, Polanyi and Lynch help to remind me that I don’t just have a body: I am a body.
We don’t much believe in miracles anymore. Mostly we trust that science and math can offer quantifiable, rational, empirical explanations for all the things that once seemed so mysterious. Science and math, we are told, have carried us beyond the need for a miracle. I, however, have my doubts. Starbucks, I think, is science and math. Starbucks has taken the miracle of golden espresso streaming into a warm, porcelain demitasse and made it into an equation, the outcome being a predictably hot, milky beverage with caffeine and a measured squirt of some artificial, seasonally appropriate flavored sweetener—pumpkin pie or cinnamon, maybe—to mask any possible bitterness. Ordering your drink at Starbucks is easy, and you can expect your drink to be served quickly. The goal is to inspire warm, sentimental feelings, repeat customers, and brand loyalty, but only in the most unusual and exceptionally rare case could it ever inspire something like genuine love.
But great coffee—capital-c Coffee—requires sensual people, bodies that are attentive to taste, touch, and smell, fleshy human beings doing the kind of work that no machine will ever do: love. All of this strikes me as fundamentally miraculous, not just because coffee tastes so good, but because it is there at all. That good espresso exists—that anything exists—brings us into the direct glare of the fundamental miracle of being, the very thing that inspired even the curmudgeonly atheist Edward Abbey to write: “To me the most mysterious thing about the universe is not its comprehensibility but the fact that it exists. And the same mystery attaches to everything within it. The world is permeated through and through with mystery.”[4] The world is here when there might just as well have been nothing at all—no coffee plants, nobody to run the roasters, no espresso machines, no you, no me, nothing—but here it is anyways, a perfect double-shot, and here I am, enjoying the smell of it, and there you are, reading about it. Big Bang or big-c Creation, take your pick, but here we are, billions of years after the fact, and I’m sitting here with a glass of cold water and a demitasse of double-shot house espresso that my friend just served me, and judging by the smell and look of it, it’s going to be good. I call that miraculous.
Little things, of course, but then almost all of life is made up of precisely those sorts of little things, and if we spend all of our time waiting around for the big things, we’ll end up missing nearly everything. So Thank God, I say! Thank God for coffee beans, for the farmers who grow them, and the fires that roast them. Thank God for the engineers who design the grinders, and the friction that turns roasted beans into freshly ground coffee. Thank God for boiling water, gravity, taste buds, and for the ongoing miracle of long-chain carbon molecules that make that double ristretto taste so damn good.
[1]. Lynch, “Fish Stories,” 153–54.
[2]. Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 13.
[3]. Ibid., 16.
[4]. Abbey, “Watching, the Birds: The Windhover,” 51.
10
The Insufficient Self
For as long as I can remember, I have always been falling in love.
When I was four I fell in love with Carolyn, the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Her parents were good friends of my parents, so it felt like destiny that we should be together. I remember visiting them once with my