a morning coffee.

Unheimlichkeit.

That’s how you feel when you peer into the ephemeral crema dissipating into the eerie blackness of your cup. It’s 9:30. 30 minutes left. 45 minutes until your lecture starts. Around and around, the addresser can’t hear the addressed, and the falcon is gone with the wind, and the falconer caresses his receding hair with confusion. The gramophone encircles the gyre, screeching to a hay of music, desperately trying to find the needle, scrambling for the correct note. The concerto climaxes and an eruption of transitory vapours pour out of the machine’s neck into the cool, naked air.

• “Who ordered a flat white?”

A figure comes, collects their order and leaves. Stopping momentarily to switch hands, it’s too hot; they hold it by the brim where it’s cooler. Another petal falls from the tree opposite the shop, another petal stained with the soot of stolen labour fading into the early shadows of city life.

But you’re still here, aren’t you? You peel back the covers of an O’Hara anthology and bask in his conversational splendour. You permit the hacked-down scent of pulverised, pulped wood to coat your nostrils. It’s coupled with the screaming thousand Dies Irae of some incommensurable symphony of dead and dying cells. They find their way down your throat, strangling the alveoli, and thick tendrils penetrate your inner organs. They find refuge in your genomes, rearranging the base codes; you’re mutable down to your biogenetic base. You’re not fixed but constantly moving. You flick to a random page, trace the embossed letters, and your mouth mutters, “Sleeping on the Wing”. It’s an anthropocentric palimpsest; all books are if you think about. We, the human penman, ascribe the deepest thoughts and secrets onto the already discursive page – we write on a canvas of glue, pulped oak, and preservatives. We overwrite the trillion lines of codes, base pairs protein structures etc. The things that make the page, well, a page.

These oaky tendrils rise, dissipating as quickly as they formed, your chest contorts, the inter-costal muscles stretching, wheezing while the diaphragm relaxes and curls into an abused ball. Air is forced, and the tentacles vanish, leaving a lack, an absence commonly mistaken for bitterness. 9:34.

• “Iced Matcha latte”.

Another figure collects their drink, wrapping their hands around the disposable cup. It’s cold outside; they’ll have to route march if they don’t want their body to match the air. It’s that cold where your breath stains the air with a smoky residue – the kind of a child pretends to smoke with a twig, taking in long drags of cold air and slowly releasing warm air. Now you smoked for real. You’re not the child making pretend cigarettes out of twigs anymore, you’re rolling your own tobacco, carefully placing the filter in the rizla, licking the top layer and twisting. An inkling scratches your soul; it’s ingrained itself into you. Nicotine does have this imprinting effect on you. You vaguely remember something your genetics professor spoke about in college. Epi-something. Your brain racks its empty archives, desperately craving the answer like an addict would for their next high. Epigenetics. 9:35. It has taken a minute to remember that pointless piece of information. If you’re mutable to your base-code sequencing, why is your soul not equally mutable? The proteins surrounding it binds to your DNA. Winding and unwinding, the histones go round and round like a helter-skelter. Unravelling and reravelling like a snake around its prey. Therefore, is this scratch for a cigarette natural? As the great Daddy Marx said, capital is a vampire, an insatiable predator; the cigarette is a simulacrum for the unnameable thing. It’s a virus that depletes in your hand as you smoke and replicates while you breathe, spreading its ash on the street. The landscape sees more ashfall than snowfall nowadays.

Ah. You think. Flicking the tip, shuffling any excess tobacco off. A cigarette, the prototype for our post-truth world – a weaponised cylinder poised to perforate the dictatorship of the enlightenment. There is a reason its smoggy today; nothing is as it seems; cities have become cigarettes, emersed in their own carcinogenic pollution. All stacked up, ready to fall like pick-up sticks. A game for the wealthy. Just as the Tobacco weaponised “truth”, big Oil and Gas have similarly weaponised it too. Although not as successful. You notice some middle-class protesters outside screaming, “just stop oil”. They’re bound to fail,just look at this cigarette; their desire to change will dissipate as soon as the first ember touches the morning pavement. You long to join them, to be on the other side, across the street, over the hedge and into the golden pastures of a never-ending daisy-chain nostalgia.

Apart from the annoying protesters. They’re all there, bustling around, living free, tapping away, speaking away, avoiding traffic, speaking out, hitting traffic. Always going. Always stopping. But never present. Never here. But you’re still here, right? You take a sip. Slowly and laboriously, three of your yellow-stained fingernails wrap around their mug. You lift it up. Inspecting it. Careful now. Mustn’t disturb the crema. It’s your only boundary from total annihilation.

• One Oat-milk latte and an iced Frappuccino.

Two figures go to collect their product; there’s a humeorus exchange as both go to collect the same cup, then the lovely cacophony of “sorry” and “sorry”. That awkward laugh always makes you laugh, and it makes you appreciate the beauty of human interaction. It almost makes you forget what the fuck a Frappuccino is. Almost.

9:36

Time really is slogging and slouching today.

You stir it around, collecting the crema, its concentrated ephemeral colour coating the back of your spoon. Raising it up, the silver tones fade into a mixture of dull and confused vapours – one end cool, the other hot. An odd little binary. Up. Up. And up you go into your mouth. A concentrated bitterness laid on your tongue like the gritty moraines at the mouth of a glacier. This experience, at least to you, is unique; I suppose it is. You are you and nobody else is you. Right?

You’re just a. You’re just a material actant. A material actant in an immaterial phenomenological network; the Phenomenology of Coffee. It sounds pretentious enough for spec realism. Probably good enough for a college paper, but not enough for peer review. Kafka, Sartre, Abe, and Murakami all loved their coffee. What is it about coffee? You glance at your watch, not long till work. Not long till vacant faces staring at you drone on about Nabokov. 20-30 minutes. Maybe. Still, you have more time for introspective coffee-thought. YES!

That’s what you’ll make your name as. You’ll be forever cemented on the canon as the preeminent coffee power thinker. Each cup twinkled in its own nascent energy. Each bean, from child labourer to underpaid student barista, tells a story with a peculiar vibrancy. A vibrant narrative, one that is pulped, roasted and dried before being pulverised into a fine powder, ready to undergo a 200 psi procedure. Then into a disposable cup that’ll fill the earth, the coffee comes from the ground and falls from trees – it’s shipped across the world and returns to the ground, immaterially alive in the drinker’s stomach, and the residue on the disposable cup. As the cigarette methylates your DNA, the coffee becomes part of you. You’re the human-coffee cyborg.

You chuckle to yourself. Ridiculous. Of course. A fantasy, a dream, an imagined discipline. One that holds up a mirror to the now ever-broadening Posthumanities. Braidotti hopes the PostHumanities will have its own as a buffer to neoliberal late-stage capitalism. Dreams and desires fleeting like the electrons dancing in cables around you. Just as light splits in a prism, so too do the humanities. But who’s to say that that desire can’t exist all around us in nexuses of sub-atomic particles, strings, quarks etc. You can’t really remember your physics. Poor old monstrous Humbert Humbert, are his desires an imaginary fantasy of a perverted mind? That was today’s lecture’s title. You knew it was a little controversial, but so too was Nabakov; we must bask in the hazy legacy of his contentious prose.

• “Soy-milk lattee and a Macchiato”.

As you’ve probably guessed, some more figures will come to collect.

• “Soy-milk latte and a Macchiato”.

Nobody has come yet. Your head scans around the room; probably some student wearing headphones, listening to Drake.

• “Soy-milk latte and a Macchiato”.

The barista isn’t paid enough to repeat a second time, let alone a third time.

• “Shit, yes. Yeah that’s us, sorry! We forgot what we ordered”.

The coupled waits in the corner by the binds, engrossed in conversation. They’re probably in love. You rack your brain for an Auden quote on love or even a platitude from Shakespeare in Love. Sadly, all that comes to mind is “You’ve got to hide your love away”, lamenting at the Beatles’ melancholy, you return to your drink.

Zuhandenheit

A good book should always be present-to-hand, within arm’s reach, by your bedside cabinet if possible — however, not Rigout’s revolver-like book, something that has meaning to you. When you peel back the cover, expose the naked pages to harsh light; some scream, some tan, and some fade like tears in rain. However, there’s something libidinous in opening a book, peeling that front cover, stretching its binding. “Open the great ephemeral skin”. Turn the yellowed pages past the pubic fur of the embossed ink. You. Everyone. Everything is a bit like this gratifying experience of reading. Layers on layers of palimpsest codes, proteins, organs, and organ systems compose your body. Therefore, let us begin to open the body and go through its parts to find the secret. The secret is hidden in plain sight, visible but invisible to us.

9 hours later.

You’re a sack of meat hanging in an abattoir, meat hooks attached (metaphorically speaking), rusting metal spikes entering your shoulders, severing nerve endings, cutting muscle fibres, tendons in through one hole out the other. The mortician reaches above, pulling down their microphone.

⁠— “The time is 5:37 P.M., and patient, sorry, subject “Untitled” is here awaiting autopsy.”

Teeth, 28 and a half, he reads out. Three and a half are in a bag; his finger points to the filmic prisoner in a metal container on the table. Trapped in plastic, resigned to rot away, homeless. He traces his finger in the mouth, relishing in the body’s statuesque rigidity, small valleys of enamel, landslides of bacteria, calcium deposits, along with some lead deposits, and finally, a Hovis crumb, like a pebble in your shoe after a day in the beach, it’s still there lodged between two molars. You know, it’s kind of funny, it’s stayed in your body longer than you. The starch has hydrolysed, amylase unravelling its coils into gluconic hexagons. Sweet to the taste, sweeter than honey. It’s lodged in the mouth, but you can’t taste it, can you? You’re dead, but your body isn’t yet. The microcolonies of bacteria, protists, parasites from undercooked pork, virions, and fungi between your toes. Every multi-cellular, single-cellular, and non-cellular has a wake. A feast, a tribute to your body, you have become a banquet.

They removed their latex-gloved hand; three strands of saliva stretch from their glove to your mouth. Your body yearns to be free, to leave a rat on a sunk ship. They trace your face; your skull is still mainly still constructed. ⁠— “A slight crumble in the jaw.” You’re their toy to play with, but they don’t have any real agency over you. Every molecule of your body is ripe, full of boundless, energetic energy; they twinkle, celebrating in their soon-to-be decay. It sends shivers down the mortician’s spine, tiny spikes that prick but don’t bleed. Neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, an eerier liminality occurs.

9 hours earlier:

9:41.

The secret is about to be told; the congregation wait in eager silence. Open the great ephemeral code!

You’re composed of lines and lines of genetic codes, eukaryotic systems, pathways in symbiosis with the prokaryotes in your gut; histone proteins folding and unfolding, revealing your secret identity, your genes now editable; metabolic networks secretly working against you, stopping insulin production, your stomach stretches, it’s roomier your duodenum thinks; your liver is releasing ADH, alcohol dehydrogenase, glycolytic enzymes; biopathways are encouraging your existence to cry, to feel joy, to ejaculate seminal spectres of serotonin, oxytocin and dopamine; search the archive! Read the library, immunoknowledge; you’re an encyclopaedia of damaged cells, prisoners of war, synaptic networks, fibre axon terminals, and large dendritic trees.

Therefore,

You’re manipulable at the level of your biogenetic base to the extent that human nature is not fixed; it is a spatial temporal delusion.

Your existence is nothing more than a delusion. Your anthropocentric agency reigns supreme.

• “Black americano.

Good choice, you think, it’s time to go. Now. Pulling open the ancient muscles, your legs begin to walk towards the door; still deep in thought, you cross the street.

You join them. You stop traffic in a way, and it’s over, and your body is in the morgue.