These Cups Like Hands

Written by Carmen X, one of our poetry writers, and edited by Stephanie, our editor-in-chief!

NOT WRITING IN RESTAURANTS

A few times I’ve tried writing in restaurants, in cafés. It’s such a writerly notion: the image of sitting there in a corner booth, sipping coffee, jotting into a notebook, the place mildly busy, using that buzz as energy for the page. Maybe it’s raining or it’s not. One can imagine a young Hemingway in the Paris streets, Hemingway before Hemingway, when he was Tatie then, hungry but satisfied, his feast moveable, writing, working, drinking coffee. The whole thing is easy to romanticize if you’re a literary type. But the image in one’s head, when up against reality, serves almost always a delicious dish of disappointment, and I find I just can’t do it. I get too easily distracted, or lose focus too quickly, wondering what I’m doing here, acting as if I really am One Who Writes. (And it’s just too tempting to look over at someone’s screen to see what they’re working on, and so I know someone’s doing the same to me.) Anything written under these circumstances must necessarily be titled or subtitled ‘My Life as a Fraud’. I can get distracted at home, for free, no need to pay for an overpriced coffee for all that (though good coffee is always its own justification).

SPEAKING OF

Solitude is always-already my mode of being, my default ontology, and so because I carry it everywhere I carry my head, I can work from any place (which is to say: always deluded, always daydreaming), and all this to say if you’re going for coffee feel free to invite me, yeah? I don’t know what it is about (good) coffee, outside of its own justification, as I mentioned, but a good cup tastes as good and necessary as clean air or water. And if this sounds ridiculous, try telling some middle manager or salaryman—or really any caffeinated individual—to cut back on their coffee intake and prepare for a mauling. (Thankfully my metabolism allows me appreciation, not addiction. I’ve been known to go months without the stuff, just because.) I know too many people like this, and I know you do too. Yet the underside to this (or above-side, depending how you want to look at it) is the romanticized image presented above: there is an aesthetic pleasure to a coffee, at home in its cup. Even Godard, in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967), can’t help but see entire galaxies in his cup, can’t help but film his cup and share his cup with us. And of course the actual tasting of it: that first sip is warm and focused entirely in the head, and then spreads bodily, like gentle poison. Call it magic or theology, if you’d like: a quiet moment with a coffee, cheap or overpriced, black or too-sweet, with either a book or writing-tool as another comrade or friend (for coffee is a friend), is possibly, maybe, among the few remaining things our times would nod toward and consider, perhaps without irony, as prayer. As communal as prayer. From the laborer’s hands to the barista’s hands to your hands, your head and body. Hands clasped in hands. (Note to self: You must remember this always.) Atop a distant mountain a prayer wheel spins and so prays for you while you go and do things probably worth being prayed over for; at least a physical cup on a physical table, the coffee’s taste changing as it cools in the cup, so you must mind the time, requires a certain kind of presence, a certain Being-There.—(lol)—Here I go, romanticizing again! An idealistic light illuminates my mind's café windows. For all my dialectical materialism I still stir from cutesy naïvety. All this scatterbrained talk on prayers and hands. But at this point, it’s whatever, and not even in the Houellebecqian, Extension du domaine de la lutte sense. I wrote none of these words in a restaurant or café. But if you want to find me there, feel free.

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This piece was written by one of our poetry columnists, Carmen X. Reach them at @animagebook, on Instagram!

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