On Coffee

Coffee hits us in different ways. The tip of the tongue dives into the hot deluge and tastes nothing, so it defers to the middle part, the lateral border, where we really taste coffee. We receive its bitterness, which leaves in its place a dry, papery surface that we cover with more bitterness, more dryness, and more bitterness again. We crave bitterness. The bitterer the better, for nothing sucks more than weak coffee. I allow certain objects a wide range of functionality: pocket-knifes, smartphones, printers, dashboards, luggage. Coffee has no such range. It should always achieve its fullest potential. It should be as bitter and strong and hot as can be. Airplane coffee looks like diarrhea sloshing around a Styrofoam cup. Tastes like it, too. And Motel 6 coffee is burnt, but with a glazed donut at check-in, it outshines its mile-high cousin. AA meetings always serve Folgers in dank basement kitchens. But the crapulent quorum does not give a fuck that the coffee blows, as long as they do not chug a Bud.

Coffee is never black. It’s shades of brown. But only the most officious barista will address this faux pas: “Excuse me? Americanos are burnt umber, not black. Enjoy you’re fucking drink.” (Google it now. They are burnt umber. You’re welcome.) Coca beans grow above ground. But we associate coffee grounds with soil. Each time I dip my finger into its grainy depths, I think of the earth when I dig beneath its surface. Even the word “grounds” brings what’s high down to earth and grounds it, so to speak. Coffee does not ground me, though. I have only ever tried peyote and marijuana. The former when I was 9, the latter when I was twenty-three. Both of these things drag you into the floor. You sink, you melt. Coffee makes me leap up and across. I feel alive, which is miraculous, because so much of living erodes that feeling. You know the sensation: your veins pump blood through your arms and chest faster and with more vigor. Your borders burst. You’re renascent with liquid life. Coffee unlatches gates within us. A spilling out, an expiation, a catharsis. Caffeine kenosis! You open a closet and out comes an avalanche of plungers, brooms, files, mops. They were crammed in there. Now you can organize it, make meaning and beauty. On coffee, we write faster, with more ideas and phrases than we could ever have mustered without it. Coffee empties the body and frees the mind. It releases what we have kept too long from ourselves and each other.

What would America be without coffee? Coffee is a staple of our routine. America’s economy would crash if a Colombian trade embargo denied people their daily cup of Joe. Even “Joe” implies commonness nonpareil. Everyone drinks this brown elixir. And like all class-based societies, our relationship to the same exact object manifests our unequal positions. Coffee is always coffee. But some drive through McDonald’s in their breathless break between Amazon deliveries.

Some say that coffee fueled the Enlightenment. When Immanuel Kant told Europe, “Sapere aude!” — Dare to know! — it wasn’t human reason that animated him, but the coffee that coursed through his veins. And 18th century philosophes who gathered in Paris salons never would have discovered liberty, equality, and fraternity without that brown liquid you suckle in your cubicle. But now coffee has perhaps more to do with our bondage than liberation. At the same time that it makes us come alive, coffee seems less a vehicle of self-expression than a tool of exploitation. “America runs on Dunkin” renders coffee a fuel for the machine of contemporary capitalism, where work never ends. My manager supplied unlimited amounts of coffee because he had performed a ruthless calculation: you can extract twice the labor-power from a caffeinated body as an uncaffeinated one, all for the price of a Keurig pod. The porcelain cups of coffee were an exotic thing to the philosophes. But never in their pronouncements on the Rights of Man could they see the unwaged hands in their peripheral vision, the ones that plucked coca beans in the stinging heat. In the cool parlors of Madame de Staël and Rahel Varhagen, coffee was that hinge between modernity and colonialism, a hinge that squeaks louder each day.