Yes...I have been absent lately as I have been involved in an incredibly ambitious plan to move the more than two hundred articles, poems, essays, and art from the current site of The Endicott Studio for Mythic Arts and the Journal of Mythic Arts to a new home. I want to say it will be done soon -- but it won't -- in fact, I just purchased a year's extension for the server because I realize now that I must have more time to do a credible job and make it beautiful.
But in my frenzy to get it done, I have been consuming far too much coffee for this task. Shots and shots of espresso in tiny cups. So I feel a kindred spirit in this essay by French author Honore de Balzac (one of my favorites) who was famous for consuming near lethal amounts of coffee to help expedite the writing of his novels.
The Pleasure and Pains of Coffee
By Honore de Balzac: trans. from the French by Robert Onopa
Coffee
is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic
scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires
them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more
boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are
staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more
spiritual.
But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee
sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the
digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to
engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. It is on this
last point, in particular, that I want to add my personal experience to
Brillat-Savarin's observations.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and
the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely
perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may
surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted
by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. Rossini
has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I.
"Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just
the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is
true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of
coffee can be extended.
For a while - for a week or two at most -
you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups
of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually
increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by
decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even
more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can
continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have
produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the
dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions
can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for
several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather
brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with
thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square
hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using
finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an
empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety
interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee
finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and
voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it
wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a
pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach
linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed;
sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.
From that moment on,
everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like
battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the
battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of
metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic
rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's
orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters
rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and
ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes
with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a
friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the
next day: he thought he'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he
guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning
hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mâche. There has been, on
my part, a failure of observation.
When you have reached the
point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide
that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest
ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible
sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe
drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a
sensible nature counselled me to stop at this point, seeing that
immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must
begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats:
finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the
relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired
bourgeoisie.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an
empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of
animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures
suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the
speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One
actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers
and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of
spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this
singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without
any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I
had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything,
haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my
wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the
first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its
victim.
