Common Names: Coffee. Kahvey. Java. Crank. Bean. Joe. Go Juice. Ambition.
How taken: As a beverage, in a cup, extracted with hot water by refluxing (“percolated coffee”), by percolating (“drip coffee"), or by decoction (“campfire coffee”). Drunk in a demitasse, as espresso. With milk, as café au lait or caffe latte. With steamed milk with foam on top, as cappuccino. From a Styrofoam cup, at public meetings. From a thermos, directly. On occasion, squirted through a rubber tube and plastic syringe, as a colonic enema.
Effects: A tendency to philosophize. A tendency to repartee and wit.
History: According to legend, we learned about coffee from goats… [yes, goats!]. The first coffeehouse in the West opened in Venice in 1560; from there, coffee spread north over the next century. By 1700 there were 3000 coffeehouses in London.
[Trivia]: Voltaire drank seventy-two cups of coffee a day. He used his lover’s back as a writing desk. Balzac drank even more coffee than Voltaire –eighty to one hundred cups a day. He wrote more than one hundred novels.
The Ally: At a famous coffeehouse in Paris, The Café Foy, a journalist named Camille Desmoulins who had drunk a great deal of coffee climbed onto the table and delivered a passionate and articulate speech on freedom and the evils of monarchy. A large crowd gathered. The words were repeated and the speech was paraphrased. It was July, 1789. Two days later the Bastille fell.
[Poetics]:
When the black spirits pour inside us,
Then the spirit of God and air
And all that is wondrous within
Moves us through the night, never-ending.
-Rumi, 13th Century
