In the last blog I wrote about making my bed. Why did I want to write about these homely details in the first place? What compelled me, in this isolation, to think on and write about such simple things? Can these everyday things broaden my world? My answer is that if I look closely enough at anything and give it its due in thought or study, I’ll be off on a voyage through the world around me (or in my more professional writing, through the world I have created in my mind). For the duration of the pandemic isolation I have this apartment and what I do in it. I’m curious to know what I can learn here. The challenge given me is to face the mundane: to take a look at what’s happening in my small rooms.
There’s much to think about with a cup of coffee in your hand. The physical pleasure of holding this warm, sweet drink followed by a little jolt of vitality is enough, before all else, to raise a blessing on the tongue.
I look out the window, study the cumulus clouds ambling by on their way east and think of Jim Carrey’s morning musing: “I wake up some mornings and look out at my beautiful garden and I go, ‘Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.”
From the kitchen table, which doubles as my writing desk, a giant palm rises almost as high as the 5 stories of our apartment building. From where I sit, I can watch the ubiquitous little green parrots of Israel play in this palm and the hooded crow (corvus corone!) flutter along the trunk. The trunk of the palm is so close I could, if I wanted, take the few steps to the window and reach out to touch the jagged bark. But today, holding my coffee, I stare out the window past the palm to the street below where early risers walk toward the store, their rolling shopping carts rattling behind them. Some are in masks, some barefaced, some wear gloves, some not. Beside some, children, oblivious to the dangers in a touch or handshake, dart back and forth, giggling along an erratic path only they can see.
From the kids, Bach comes to mind. In an unusual burst of secular creativity, Bach wrote The Coffee Cantata, a little comic opera. In it a lively young woman loves coffee. Her father orders her to stop drinking it; she persists until he threatens he won’t allow her to marry unless she relinquishes coffee. She agrees, but secretly sends words to her prospective lovers that she won’t consider any one of them who doesn’t include in the marriage contract that she is allowed her 3 cups a day.
. . . .
Ah, How sweet coffee does taste,
Better than a thousand kisses,
Milder than Muscat Wine.
Coffee, coffee, I’ve got to have it;
And if someone wants to perk me up,
Oh, just give me a cup of coffee. . . .
J.S. Bach Kantate BWV211, ca. 1735
(To listen to the whole thing, go to openculture.com)
Coffee has a history of over 600 years replete with legends of its discovery, of travel, intrigue, slavery, seduction, betrayal, sainthood… much of this before it was even poured into its first cup in North America.
One legend says coffee was discovered around 850 by the Ethiopian goat herder, Kaldi, who noticed that his goats, after eating berries from a certain bush, “danced,” so he tried it himself, to the same effect. He then carried the beans to an Islamic monk in a Sufi monastery, who tasted the beans, was disgusted by their bitterness, and threw them into the fire. The aroma of the roasting beans filled the air, and the monk, in an epiphany and sudden conversion, quickly raked them out of the fire and threw them in water.
Ecco! The first cup of coffee!
Other legends say the discovery of coffee was made by a Moroccan Sufi mystic, Ghothul Akbar Noorudin Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, who saw that birds experienced an unusual vitality from eating the beans of a certain bush. Intrigued, he tried it himself. . .
And still other legends say it was his disciple, Omar, who, after being exiled to a cave in the wilderness without food, survived by chewing the beans of a nearby bush. Eventually, Omar was forgiven, brought back to town, and made a saint.
Was he made a saint because of the coffee beans? I don’t know, maybe it helped.
Whatever mix of these legends is true, the first substantive evidence of drinking or knowledge of coffee is from a Sufi monastery in Yemen. And from Yemen the news and the beans travel fast, despite bans by Islamic leaders and the Catholic Church. The ancestors of the beans that make the warm liquid so many of us hold in our hands at the breakfast table were carried from Cairo, to Mecca, and by the 16th century, throughout the Middle East, South India, Persia, Turkey, Horn of Africa, North Africa, up to the Balkans, Italy, the rest of Europe, and to SE Asia.
Today thieves steal money; in 1719, thieves with promise of rich reward from the government of French Guyana, stole coffee plants from Surinam, and coffee beans were on the road again. A few years later, eyeing the success of French Guyana’s coffee trade, the governor of the Brazilian state of Para sent his own thief, young Sergeant Franciso de Melo to French Guyana to bring back some beans.
An illegal act. What could de Melo do?
“Baby it’s you. . .you’re the one I need. . .” sings Beyonce. It could have been de Melo’s song.
The wife of the governor of French Guyana succumbed to de Melo’s charms and at the moment of their sad goodbyes the distressed wife of the governor offered de Melo a big bouquet of flowers with a coffee-bean plant tucked discreetly in the center. Anticipating his reward from the governor of Para, basking in the memory of the wife of the governor of French Guyana, and salivating in anticipation of his first cup of Brazilian coffee while sitting on his porch in the cool morning air, de Melo returns to Para, bouquet in hand.
Thus begins Brazil’s coffee industry.
It took a while from the days of the love affair to the year 1852 ,when Brazil became the world’s largest producer of coffee. In the meantime, Saint Dominique had edged in, and by use of brutal slave labor to plant, raise, harvest, and export coffee beans, was supplying one-half the world’s coffee, retaining power over the market until the Haitian Revolution.
Today, I understand that this is no simple brown liquid I hold in the cup in my hand. A thousand stories wait in every sip.
Next: Keeping the mind ramped.