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 taught me about my body and helped me learn to love being a body.
Let 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
